I’ve been on games that had some kind of quiz as part of charges. I get where they’re coming from, but it was a real turn-off.

I would feel the same way about an automated tutorial quest type thing. I appreciate the sentiment, but I don’t MUSH for quests and NPC bots. That would almost certainly have me saying “this is clearly not the right game for me”.

What I try to do is have easy access for new players to get involved. Whether that’s a personal pointer in their approval: “Hey I notice you’ve got the BG skill of surfing, John does a lot of surfing RP…” or a general “how to find RP” guide, or frequent open plots where they can dive in.

@Tat said in Session Zero & M*s:

The tension with how much there is to read, to catch up on, to get into the game, is real.
How to effectively communicate this stuff is a puzzle I have not yet solved.

It’s definitely hard. In my last few games I tried experimenting with a layered approach to the stuff folks have to read. Keep the basics short and sweet, and then have links to expanded articles if they want/need more detail.

@Tat said in What stops you from running a game?:

I see lots of people with cool ideas or themes they’d love to play in.

What are the things that keep you from actually running a game? What are the barriers?

Code and time.

People want a certain amount of stuff coded to play on a game. Coding that stuff takes time. I don’t have it.

I was coding my own engine to be able to launch a game, but I ran out of time when I inherited Liberation Mage. 🙂

I agree with @Mourne that at its most basic, a successful game is an enjoyable one.

Getting into more detail, I like a lot of what @Tat and @Pyrephox and @L-B-Heuschkel said. To me, a successful game is one with a cohesive theme and setting, where I can get enjoyable RP 1-3 times per week and can have an impact on the setting (even if it’s tiny).

I want the enjoyable RP because, well, that’s why we do this, right? I want to be able to have an impact on the setting because that’s what I find most enjoyable. I want a cohesive theme and setting because I like a game that makes sense, and without that cohesion, I get stuck putting in inputs and getting outputs that don’t make sense to me.

@jujube said in oWoD 20th MU* being setup:

I’m not anti-apprentice/anti-newblet. I’m anti-idiot.

I’m anti-people that won’t read their damned sourcebook.

Not every book in the set. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to at least know where to find the information they need to play.

@farfalla I’ve never thought about that. The few times I’ve done RP via Gdocs, it’s always been because of the varying time differences, either because of geographic location or the fact that people operate on different work/sleep cycles.

But now that I have thought about, makes me wonder how many times the other person would watch me type, stop, then furiously delete whatever I had been typing.

@Tat

That makes sense! Thank you.

@Meg Sorta! 😄 😄 😄

I bought the domain in…gosh, mid to late 90s. It started as a joke from channel talk (hence the whole ‘Where the Deity Complex and Insanity Meet.’ thing) and then just kinda grew, haha. There were so many great people that offered links/articles that it ended up more serious than joke-y.

I kept the domain for years after Pern, because I parked a lot of personal stuff/pictures there. The renewal came up and I was like, naaaaah.

BUT ME ALWAYS WRITING GUIDES

@crawfish It is not stolen if given out of respect!

@SleepyGrump While I am not a blind user I am familiar with programming with blind and V/I users in mind (for apps) and I do want to throw something down here.

Screen readers can be configured to ignore certain combinations of characters so that you don’t have to listen to, you know, “PLUS EQUALS PLUS EQUALS PLUS EQUALS” when you look at a room and the game is set up to have its room name format all
+=+=+=+=+=+=| The Big Dick Saloon | +=+=+=+=+=+=

But you still have to configure it to do that so getting used to a new MUSH theoretically would require you to make adjustments to add to the list of “repeating characters to ignore” (I’ve never spoken to a blind MUSH user, I am basing this off of my familiarity as an SWE making an app accessible).

Therefore, you may want to put an option available to your players to make a @nameformat or its equivalent simply be the name of the room you’re in.

There’s some commands that are nice to include for people:

A command that lists out a specific stat, like “+stat strength” so we don’t have to listen to a whole shitload of entries. A command that only shows the latest comment on a +job so that you don’t have to tab through and/or listen to the whole fukken job. A command that lists out a specific sheet section in case you need to be reminded of something not as granular as a single stat but also don’t want to listen to the whole sheet. A flag or attribute to put on yourself that instructs the MUSH to be brief with its room descriptions. In Penn, this is terse: Flag: TERSE (players, things) When an object is set TERSE, it does not see the descriptions, or success and failure messages in rooms. This is a useful flag if you're on a slow connection or you're moving through a familiar area and don't want to see tons of text.

So that when you’re cruisin’, you don’t have to listen to a room description over and over. You can still see descriptions, they’re just not dropped in your lap when you navigate, whether that’s literally cruising the map, or navigating through the backscroll to re-listen. I don’t want to have to shift tab 5 billion times through the map exploration I did to catch up to something I want to re-read.

ETA -
You also want to steer clear of using color as your only means of conveying information. For example, think of a WHO list where there’s use of color to convey whether someone is approved, not approved, idle, or whatever. Find a secondary way to convey information that isn’t color-based.

You want to try to make sure your website is as accessible as possible as well. I honestly am certain my website is not accessible 🤦 but if you’re interested I can rant at you about WCAG compliance.

At the bare minimum -

Do not style your website in px, use rem, for fucking everything, so if somebody has to increase the text size through their browser (V/I doesn’t always mean "use a screen reader) the website scales proportionally. Make sure your colors in your website meet a contrast ratio requirement for the visually impaired and just people whose eyes aren’t what they used to be because 40 hit them like a freight train.

If it’s text to be read, the contrast ratio should be 4.5 to 1 or greater. If it’s an interactive element, like a checkbox, the contrast ratio should be 3 to 1 or greater.

The way you’d want to do this is by taking the CSS values you want to use over to a color contrast checker like WebAim.