The 3-Month Players

Pavel

How do you provide an experience for 60 people that is so good at the beginning that it will hook some amount of players even after everyone who came to check out the new hotness has gone on to the next hotness?

You don’t. You provide the experience you can, and that’ll either appeal or it won’t. Losing a vast swathe of players is going to sting, losing a vast swathe of players while you’re burnt out and struggling is going to sting while you’re burning.

Roz

Am I alone in kind of enjoying the bubble? I’ve always found it kind of exciting and energizing.

I do think, from a staff perspective, than you just…honestly don’t have to worry about providing personalized plot service to everyone. You do what you need to do to process approvals and character stuff, but when it comes to kicking off plot and bigger RP things, one of the benefits to the bubble IMO is that people are actively doing a much better job of entertaining each other. The new game energy means they’re excited to meet each other and play together. This sort of energy won’t last, but I do think that you don’t have to worry too much about plotting for each and every person.

Ominous

@MisterBoring I have also been wondering about this recently. This thread and my partner watching a lot of reality TV series like the Bachelor(ette), the Mole, Million Dollar Secret, and also a bit of Bridgerton have combined with me recently playing Fire Emblem and Unicorn Overlord with their harem anime elements and my constant desire to run a lord and ladies game, resulting in the crazy idea of doing a parody lord and ladies MU*.

At first I was going to call it Pretty Princess Simulator, but maybe The Courtship of the Crown Prince might be better. Basically every season will start with that generation’s crown prince having his debut and all the eligible noblewomen of the land coming to try to woo him into marriage, using their wits, wiles, political connections, etc. to do so. At the end of the season, the best noblewoman (or nobleman, maybe we will have a gay crown prince or a crown princess every so many seasons to mix things up) will win. All of the kingdom’s politics, wars, natural disasters, regime changes, economic swings, etc. will take place in the background during the intervening years. Every season will have a crown prince with a different personality, tastes, hobbies, etc and the noblewomen will need to figure them out and try to use them to their advantage to snag the future queenship. Hopefully the time skips between seasons changing the world would be enough of a change to bring the bubble players back to try again with a new season.

Artemis

@Ominous I support this

KarmaBum

@Ominous this idea sounds neat but what will people RP?

Pavel

@KarmaBum The same thing we RP every night! Sex and bar-related things!

Hobbie

This is probably my cynicism talking, but the games that keep a sizeable number of players post-Bubble usually have one of two things:

Inventory/econ/XP/gimme shiny gamified rewards that tickle the MMO brain.
Sex as a basic premise.

Pavel

@Hobbie That maybe so, but what is a “sizeable population” and why is that our default metric for success? I’d much rather play on a game with two dozen committed, skilled writers who are enjoying themselves with an event every other week than a high-octane game of five hundred people all trying to compete in who can come up with the most confusing name for their genitals.

Ominous

@KarmaBum said in The 3-Month Players:

@Ominous this idea sounds neat but what will people RP?

Blatantly ripping off @Roadspike 's template:

Woo the crown prince of the kingdom with wits, wiles, or wyrdings in this fantasy setting. Characters will be trying to find out what they can about the prince, use that to their advantage, and try to thwart the efforts of others in getting closer to the prince. They will attend balls, gossip amongst themselves, participate in duels, attend events to showcase their brilliance to the royal family, and plot against one another.

Pretty Princess Simulator is a game of romantic intrigue and politicking in a fantasy renaissance setting. Players might be eligible noblewomen trying to win the future queenship, the family members of those noblewomen working to help them, servants of those noblewomen or of the royal palace, or a small cadre of the prince’s friends, tutors, and personal staff who hold the secrets to the prince’s heart.

All characters will belong to one of the many noble families of the kingdom or their servants. You will be endeavoring to get your one of the eligible noblewomen in your house selected as the bride to the crown prince or you will be one of the prince’s inner circle working to achieve a personal secret agenda. The first month will be the arrival of the eligible noblewomen to the royal palace leading up to the crown prince’s debut. The next few months will be filled with varying events to attend and make oneself known, leading up to the crown prince’s final selection and marriage.

But yeah probably a lot of BarP. Unless the royal family goes full reality show and has the eligible noblewomen participating in ridiculous contests. And, since this idea started as a parody of L&L, that might actually be the route to go in.

Hobbie

@Pavel if I have to read seven hundred different linguistic interpretations of “globes” again it’ll be too soon.

Honestly in regards to “sizeable” I was thinking something like a few dozen. I wouldn’t call it a metric of “success” so much as “a lot of people passed the three-month mark”. Quantifying success objectively is risky territory in this highly subjective hobby.

KarmaBum

@Ominous said in The 3-Month Players:

But yeah probably a lot of BarP.

Buried the lede a bit.

Ominous

@KarmaBum Eh. I know how it is. You can run an event every hour, 24 hours a day, and some people will still only do BarP for all their interactions while complaining that there is nothing to do.

KarmaBum

@Ominous I realize we’re talking about a game that doesn’t exist. And I’m not saying it’s a bad thing for staff to facilitate social fluff.

Just that 4/5 of these sound like the L&L equivalent of Bar RP: “attend balls, gossip amongst themselves, participate in duels, attend events to showcase their brilliance to the royal family, and plot against one another”

MisterBoring

I wonder how players would respond to a game where the entire grid was just a bar, and no options for anything else. Just a weird bar full of weird characters floating in a void in time and space.

All plot through BarP. All BarP in plot locales.

chorus

@MisterBoring Last Call of Cthulhu

Ominous

@KarmaBum That’s kind of the entirety of what lords & ladies involves. If you watch Bridgerton, that’s what they do and not much more. The moment the lords and ladies start going out on missions to slay dragons, exorcise bad spirits from villages, quest for magic swords, etc, you’re doing the fantasy adventure genre instead of L&L, and the adventurers just happen to be nobility. About the only thing you can add to L&L that’s crunchy would be heavier political intrigue, army logistics, economic systems, etc, but that would require a game longer than the short time frame being aimed for. I guess one could do L&L in the midst of a very short war that has already started, but I am not sure how to do that as recurring seasons. It’s going to get odd that the wars these nobles have only seem to only last 3 to 6 months.

Or maybe that’s how they do things in that setting. Short wars to settle disputes. I guess that could work.

MisterBoring

@Ominous said in The 3-Month Players:

Short wars to settle disputes. I guess that could work.

What if wars weren’t fought with armies but with duels? The Lords and Ladies involved appoint a champion and they fight a quick single combat. The monarch that doles out the feudal nations witnesses the duel and the winner gets the spoils.

Ominous

@MisterBoring Duels were called out as being BarP, and we are trying to answer the question of what people will RP that isn’t BarP.

KarmaBum

@Ominous Duels were the one thing on the list that didn’t strike me as “Bar RP” (social fluff).

attend balls
gossip amongst themselves
participate in duels
attend events to showcase their brilliance to the royal family
and plot against one another

Just strikes me as more of a case in point as to how difficult it can be to actually come up with what will people DO.

I think we’re talking about different things at this point. What counts as Bar RP in an L&L setting is not the discussion I was trying to have.

Raistlin

I know I might be in the minority, but I genuinely enjoy games that focus primarily on social interactions and “bar RP.” In fact, I’ve participated in private games where that was the main activity, and found them incredibly fulfilling.

Don’t misunderstand—I appreciate well-crafted plots and would certainly join global events. However, my personal focus tends toward developing character relationships and running private storylines with my RP partners. For me, having the tools and space to tell these intimate stories matters more than participating in numerous public scenes or global plot arcs.

I find the most enjoyment in those smaller moments between characters: the conversations that reveal backstories, the gradual building of trust, and the organic development of relationships (whether friendly, romantic, or antagonistic). These interactions often create the most memorable RP experiences for me.