I was holiday-ing, but it looks like the wonderful Terminus has replaced the stolen writing with a placeholder in my absence.

To confirm, this is an OC, and the character has yet to be submitted for approval or anything, but if this desc makes its way back, even with tweaks, the app will be declined with explanation.

If you’d like, @Roz, I can forward this player your rates for autographs 🙂

I was thinking about this earlier today (literal shower thoughts), or a little bit in parallel. About what characterized the games I’ve felt the most success on. Disregarding basic things like “I need there to be people around to RP with whose RP styles and schedules generally mesh with mine” and “I need staff to not be creepers and not allow creepers” – those will go without saying. But I realized that one of the biggest things for me in the DNA of a game is:

A sense of discovery.

This is achieved on a small scale with just characters getting to know each other, because that’s two people on a lifelong discovery of new details about each other. But what really thrills my brain is when there are mysteries and unknowns to the world on some level, and part of playing on that particular game is figuring out more about those.

I had fun adding this, so I thought I’d share!

I am working on player/thing descriptions. The avatar isn’t required but spices the interface up a little. I want to address a few more commands; then, I have to decide if I want to start adding Cyberpunk Red elements. 🙂

screen shot

@KDraygo said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

So PvP games may work best on games with short episodes, where characters are “wiped” or killed off in each episode, without consequences that are long lasting. If you lose or die, it’s fine because in a month or two, the slate is wiped clean and a new story is created.

This is our hope, because our theme cycles through PCs by time jumping generations every six months. This is part of the design because we feel it will give players the “freedom” to go big and do heroic things and not feel FOMO by no longer having their epic character anymore because “anymore” might be a couple of months at best.

Like supporting PC on PC conflict, we anticipate that this will cause some self-selection among players who don’t want to invest time in a character that has a 6 month or 12 month shelf life.

But hopefully it will draw in players who do embrace the idea of playing a character’s arc until it ends and then starting over with a new one.

We’ll see how it works in practice.

Game’s good, would recommend.

I’ve already thrown enough of my soul at it that I am already burning out!

@Jennkryst said in As a PLAYER, how many staff would be ideal in a game?:

I want more staff than players, so when the player nagging inevitably burns someone out, there are plenty of replacements available until the burn-out fully recuperates.

I now know I want staffers who are allowed to have player bits, so it’s not like pulling teeth to recruit new staffers when breaks happen.

I need enough people to have variety, and to also have nice soft buffers from people I don’t mesh with. (Not necessarily bad actors, but people who just don’t like me or I don’t like them.)

@Polk Well, at least one of the major difficulties has been made pretty publicly apparent on the boards in very recent memory.

@Zz Me!

@Meg said in City of Shadows - Discussion:

@GF lol, I have been ragging on this post all night in my head. Thank you for joining in because it is so ridiculous.

Also like, uwu I am an all powerful goddess but man, I don’t know how to create a world so maybe you can help me? And then we can rule it together? Despite the story clearly stating that the dark goddess of dark things forever and ever has already created other worlds! That she could go rule on her own.

Please give us the motivation for why the dark goddess herself who rules over all the land the dark touches just wants to chill and rule half of a world?

Going by the theme setup and that everyone can do it with everyone (regardless of age)… The dark goddess is willing to co-rule because the ‘pervy girl’ is putting out often enough and with a lot of creativity.

@Faraday said in Staff Capacity:

Most players come to be entertained.

While I agree with the sentiment, I want to change the wording of this just a tiny bit.

Most players come to have fun. And that should absolutely include staff. It’s a game, after all, being on it should be fun. And that’s where a lot of this talk about staff capacity and limits etc, falls flat: it seems to forget that rather obvious point.

If you, game runner/player/staffer/whateverer, are not having an appreciable amount of fun then something needs to change. Fun is the whole idea.

ETA: To keep the thrust of this back with the ‘STrP vs Prp’ discussion: IF something isn’t fun, players won’t do it. Some players just always find running things fun, some players need encouragement for it to be fun, and some players will never find it fun. If you, as a game runner, can find a way to make the first two categories of player happy then you’ll get more stuff run by players.

@Kestrel said in Getting and Staying Connected on New Games:

@imstillhere said in Getting and Staying Connected on New Games:

@Kestrel said in Getting and Staying Connected on New Games:

like there’s an established pecking order and I have something to prove.

Can you elaborate on that some? I’m not sure I track what this means.

This is a difficult one to elaborate on beyond saying it’s a “vibe” and you’ll know it when you feel it, but I’ll try.

Games tend to fall into these natural social hierarchies, which and of itself, I don’t have a criticism of. It’s normal to have friends and favourites, and I honestly don’t expect people to pretend they don’t. But typically it’s staff at the very top, “staff clique” one rung below, staff clique’s clique & TS partners slightly lower, and at the very bottom people who’ve already started stepping on toes and are one shady page away from being shown the door.

If the game has a skewed gender ratio, then playing characters whose gender’s in higher demand confers a slight social advantage as well. This is especially true if you write well, but honestly, I’ve seen pretty abysmal personalities given a social pass to be abysmal on account of gender ratios despite that.

Where it becomes a problem for me is when, as a newer player or unknown personality, you start to feel like you’re constantly being tested, other people are waiting for you to fuck up, and are more interested in protecting their pecking order than being inclusive. There’s a constant vibe of mild hostility & jealousy where some established players will act like they’re being charitable for taking you under their wing and because they’ve been here longer, your gratitude should be propping them up and mostly staying out of their way. This isn’t everyone everywhere, but … it’s a thing.

A memorable instance for me involved being invited to join a private yet meaningful scene with people who were fairly well-known/established on a game. It had the potential to be a lot of fun, and I was in fact flattered they’d asked at all. But in all honesty I didn’t think that the person running it was super clear on the details of what exactly we were supposed to be doing, and I made a few missteps in interpreting instructions and/or following the expected conventions of how to roll or use my skills. They could’ve simply clarified and said “no worries” when I apologised, but instead the OOC vibe turned hostile, temperamental and shamey. They were pretty upfront about expressing open frustration with me. I fucked up, but I still think this was unreasonable when it was an honest mistake that I was immediately apologising for and could’ve been easily corrected. It just felt like being put in my place by a scolding teacher who still wanted me in their classroom, but with my head bent.

After the scene, I apologised again, then ghosted.

I’ve noticed that, for me, this is more difficult when I’m trying to integrate into an older game with a lot of players who’ve been around for a while. Also, whenever I’m transitioning back into MUSHing after a long period of time I feel more apprehensive about asking people I don’t know to RP.

@Faraday said in Getting and Staying Connected on New Games:

@Coin said in Getting and Staying Connected on New Games:

Nothing makes a game feel more dead than constant and consistently quiet OOC channels.

This is the case for me as well, but that is admittedly personal preference rather than a value judgment.

I don’t see this as something that has to be either/or for a game, though. You can create separate OOC channels that people can opt into or not as they desire. Though that does require staff to nudge convos to the right channels (so someone doesn’t feel obliged to stay tuned to the OOC chatter channel for fear of missing Important Stuff).

Also seconding this. I’ve left my bit connected to games where no one’s said a word on an OOC channel in days. That’s the extreme, though. If people are occasionally chatting on OOC channels, it feels like a more lived-in space. If not, it’s sort of like playing Skyrim or Starfield and expecting an MMO. Vast swathes of emptiness and potential.

And now I have more than thirty seconds.

As Pyrephox said above, Keys is pretty casual-friendly. Most scenes run async or are pausable as the players agree on. There is ‘live’ roleplay, pick-up roleplay happening in the spur of the moment, but a lot of things are geared towards people with busy real lives, people with chronic illnesses, and people not in US timezones – or all three of the above.

We’re urban fantasy though not your ‘classic’ vampires, werewolves, and fae running around downtown. Everyone’s human now – but not everyone started out that way. We have been called the ultimate fanfic game by some and that’s honestly not quite wrong when you’re travelling in and out of infinite realities where everything is possible somewhere.

Anyhoot, feel free to come give us a peek if that sounds like something that might be worth your time. 🙂

@Shelbeast Hey, welcome back! CoD pickings are slight at the moment. You can check out a decent list of active games at https://mustard.mythicus.net/ (also linked at the top of the page, with the little curled page icon), but there’s not much to choose from, alas.

My previous post is made even more sad by my discovery of current events via finally logging into the Wyrdhold site.

sad minion

@messyshiloh No etiquette issues, I got got distraction-squirreled.

I was trying to get an FFG code based up in Evennia, but it kept throwing errors and I should maybe get back to trying to figure it out, buuuuuuut there is a Battletech kickstarter that has been eating up all my attention while I try to sort out what paints go where.

@Polk amazing thank you so much !!!

Link related

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/08/ai-powered-grocery-bot-suggests-recipe-for-toxic-gas-poison-bread-sandwich/

@Kumakun
Actually you might wanna rethink that sockets.io thing.

Following up on Polk here, I did indeed integrate Evennia’s webclient… with my Thermite project over at https://github.com/volundmush/thermite

I just put this into use for DBAT but the goal is to keep refining it to be useful for all mu* stuff

I got the idea of it from Evennia’s portal - thermite handles all of the user facing networking and hosts the webclient.

It’s written in Rust and thus very reliable and low cost to run.

This allowed me to dramatically simplify the networking that the game code handles, and super-simply reboot-without-disconnect (hotboot/ copyover).