@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).

@shit-piss-love said in But Why:

@STD My experience was more that if you are playing a character whose goals run at odds with the norm, and you’re trying to do it in a way that respects the consent of others, your situation is that you will succeed at nothing unless those others consent to lose.

My take is that in a setting/theme where there’s a clear-ish line between villains and heroes, choosing to take a villain role means you consent to lose. The aggrievating bit for me hasn’t been losing but having ex machina stuff keep my long-simmering thoughtful villainous schemes to a low challenge-rating so heroes could thoughtlessly foil them between tea-parties. And that’s actually something I feel like a villain’s player consents to, just not every time.

More relevant to the thread is the disturbing experience of playing a nuanced villain and finding the heroes are all just as horrible, but the narrative never acknowledges it.

@mietze said in But Why:

My experience with most “I’m the Villian” people (but certainly not all) was that they tended to be ready to accuse people oocly of being not as great/hardcore a RPer at them, not wanting good stories, ect when rolls or RP didn’t go their way. Just like a lot of people who aren’t villains, but there was a lot more just…personal attacks.

I associate that with the themes where everybody’s morally ambiguous at best, and players who don’t identify their PC as a villain, but want to play a ‘dark hero’ and are all cheesed off that people aren’t playing along with a fantasy of being both intimidating and admired.

@Tez Yeah I’ll poke it!

Six seasons and a movie.

@Griatch Cool, thanks for the explanation. Yeah, I haven’t really come across any need for that in the kinds of games Ares is geared towards (more freeform, less immersive), but I can see where that could come in handy in other game types. Even in Ares, you could do it with some custom code in the desc plugin to dynamically adjust descs based on dynamic criteria, it’s just not built in.

@Istus said in Seeking Wyrdhold Family:

@Cobalt I’ve never played a game as a member of a family. How do you reconcile things like time zones/play times?

Well, I’d need to know your timezone first to figure out how we’d reconcile it. I’m a chronic insomniac so if you’re not US timezone there’s a good chance we’d be able to RP either early morning my time or late night my time.

But as @mietze and @sao mentioned we’d want to have open OOC communication. Which is super easy because pages don’t go away on an ares game (well I mean eventually probably, but a backlog is kept for a while), and we’d want to talk about the thoughts and cultures we have in mind for the family.

@Anhedonia Very glad to hear that you are okay! Burnout is super real and can hit any time for any reason. I really enjoyed the stories I got to tell there and plot I got to help move along. If you ever decide to reopen it or even you start a different project I am absolutely in.

@Starr-Saphyre said in Newbie friendly games for someone who’s never played MUs?:

@L-B-Heuschkel I sent a friend your way a couple months back who was new to Mushing, but their concern was that they couldn’t figure out how to engage. No one talked to them, and as a newbie, they couldn’t figure how to get involved with the story. This is probably on them as much or more than anything, but I know it specifically related to Keys and someone being new to the hobby.

(To clarify, this is not me trying to slam Keys or LB, both of whom/which I think are awesome. Just thought it might be relevant. I think a lot of us forget what it’s like to be that true newb and flailing around trying to figure out how to mine for fish.)

I don’t feel slammed, no worries. Getting to the new folks – particularly the shy ones – is a challenge all games face, all the time. We try our best to be accessible and have readable and sane helpfiles, but there are always some that are going to fall through.

I am of course happy to take any feedback that might help catch the next one that might otherwise fall through!

@Faraday Thank you for the clarity! I knew of one instance, but I did suspect that it wasn’t something regularly occurring.

@Faraday said in Requring Character Connections at Chargen:

So there was this one TV show where the main characters had each been (independently) kidnapped and then wake up in a strange town with no idea why.

I absolutely loved that show. So bummed that it was only one season…

@Pavel said in Requring Character Connections at Chargen:

My main thought process with any rule or policy like this is “why?”

If I can get a good reason why, even though the rule is off-putting to me, I can take some satisfaction in knowing it was actually considered rather than just some arbitrary thing that was decided.

The idea was supposed to be that new players would have people they could go to for RP rather than start out not having any connections and wandering around unable to get hooked into RP and plots. If they already knew each other, they would have at least someone and something to talk about to get the RP ball rolling.

It didn’t work that way in practice, but that was the theory. They explained it often since a lot of people had the same questions you guys have.

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@Cobalt I will have to check hers out. The focus of so many that I have read being abuse is kinda putting me off the omegaverse stuff. I like that gender, typically, is not a big factor.

I just wanted to drop another note here thanking everyone for their insights on this and @STD for starting the discussion. I am a ‘worst case scenario’ kind of person and wasn’t really expecting anyone (or very few people) to join ND but we have 17 registered bits (including myself and 1 alt) and people are really running with the idea and creating things to make it their own.

And I really don’t think that would be happening if I still had the Handle policy in place. So thank you 😊