World Tone / Feeling

KarmaBum

But we did make some pretty big changes over the years, both in regards to regaining magic in the setting and in pretty notable cultural shifts, such as restoring the Lost Gods to the Faith and all the plots surrounding thralldom in the Mourning Isles.

I’m curious if you can share any specific examples of player actions driving this. (NB: I don’t know if you were staff on Arx. I think no? But I am looking for player perspectives if people have them.) Was this something players started and staff facilitated? Was it part of the metaplot plan all along and waiting for players to engage with it? Genuinely curious.

@Tez Thanks for the examples. I love the idea of the visual look of the game matching the story and the temporary room descs.

@Roadspike Those are good conceptual examples. Can you share any specific examples from the perspective of you, as a player?

@Jumpscare Also thanks! I appreciate the examples. I’d be really curious to hear about it from the player side - not “they” but “us.”

Admittedly, as a player, this isn’t something that drives my RP (I don’t want my character to be the star of a plot; it makes me feel uncomfortable), but I do have an example to share of how I think it was done well.

On Horror 2, everything we did affected the apartment complex. We were really in charge of the scenery (other than Brett doing his Kool-Aid Man charge through the wall, but that just set the stage imo). Doors remained locked or unlocked, monsters directly responded to PC actions, and the tension of the story was at least partially predicated on the worry that the fellow PCs would do something dumb and get us all killed.

To bring this long post full circle: this is the world tone/feeling that I also prefer. I thrive in D A R K settings where the world seems bleak and the last glimmer of hope is dying right before our eyes… but it’s ultimately about a setting that creates a good backdrop for character interactions.

I want a world where I can have my Bar RP without actually having to set foot in a bar. We can talk about what happened in the last scene (“Me and @Pyrephox’s PC got into a fight 'cause that’s how we ROLL.”) while moving into the next one (…KB explains while painting a smiley on the ICBM she plans to use to retaliate.) without ever having to stop for exposition.

tl;dr thank you for the examples! Please keep them coming!

Pavel

@Roadspike said in World Tone / Feeling:

The only thing that I can think is that some people just want to “win” the game

I was watching a video with Brennan Lee Mulligan, and he put it better than I could, but I don’t have a perfect memory, so the following is paraphrasing: My character wants the shortest road from where they are to where they need or want to get to. I as the player want that road to take as long as it can.

So if I’m in a game with a war, for instance, my character probably wants that war to end – preferably with his side “winning.” That’s his goal, to do whatever he must/can to see the war ends. But it’s up to me as a player and, to a greater extent perhaps, up to the game (via other players, staff, story building, etc, etc, etc) to put those rails up to make reaching that goal hard but with meaningful steps. If we win a battle, make that count for something just as much as if we lost it.

Naturally, this is a big part of the collaboration between player and game, and some players just don’t get it. But if you have a game where there’s an optimal or ideal result for the player characters (war end, Cylon peace, no more cholera or zombies or cholera-zombies), then in the planning stages you have to come up with how you’re going to railroad people around those goals.

Roadspike

@KarmaBum said in World Tone / Feeling:

@Roadspike Those are good conceptual examples. Can you share any specific examples from the perspective of you, as a player?

Most of those were just generalized versions of specific examples. Here are – as best as I remember – the specific examples.

On BSGU, we ran into a Cylon snake, and my character made a quippy remark giving it a nickname. I don’t remember what it was, but as I recall, a GM-run NPC later used that nickname in a briefing (perhaps reluctantly, or with a sigh, or something, it’s been a decade, I don’t remember for sure). That made me feel like I was having an impact on the world.

On Realms Adventurous, Staff there was really good about putting out posts about the actions of players, and of mentioning them ICly in scenes. I remember a skirmish before a tournament and the herald or one of the marshals or something mentioned it, calling out the knights by name who had participated.

Oh! Here’s an even better one because it wasn’t all positive: on Steel & Stone, my character intervened in single combat to save his cousin from a death (it was like my second week on the game, and I didn’t want to be responsible for the death of another PC), and I heard about it for months from GM-run NPCs, including my character’s cousin and liege lord when the crew returned from the Iron Isles. But it came up in scenes where I wasn’t even playing, so it definitely felt like it had an effect.

As for the last concept, I’ve seen it happen enough times that I don’t know that I can come up with a specific great example, but the hypotheticals I mentioned before (a GM NPC mentions that they came in on a ship that the PCs saved from pirates or the zeppelin) should hopefully be concrete enough examples to be examples.

I don’t need my characters to change to metaplot or the setting wildly, I just want the actions of PCs as a whole to impact the game, I want my efforts to be recognized. One of my love languages is Words of Affirmation, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s how that happens in MUSHes.

@Pavel – I think that the distinction between the desires of the characters and the player is a fantastic one. Characters should want to win, players should want the game to continue to be fun for them and those around them. It’s the same way I think that players should approach PvP (at least when it’s OOCly friendly) – yeah, your character wants to win, but you as a player, you want to tell the best possible story with your fellow players.

I do think that it’s important to come up with ways to short-circuit attempts to end the setting/metaplot, but I also think that it’s fair game to OOCly tell someone “doing that would fundamentally change the game in ways that we’re not comfortable with, we’re happy to provide IC rationalization on why your character can’t succeed with this, but please don’t continue down this path as a player.”

Pavel

@Roadspike said in World Tone / Feeling:

“doing that would fundamentally change the game in ways that we’re not comfortable with, we’re happy to provide IC rationalization on why your character can’t succeed with this, but please don’t continue down this path as a player.”

I agree that this is fair game, but I do rather want it to be done so elegantly and be built-in to the game at the start that one needn’t actually say it at all. But that’s what I’m good at, coming up with thoughts and ideas and then making other people do all the work, that’s why I’m a therapist rather than a mentally healthy individual.

Roz

@KarmaBum said in World Tone / Feeling:

@Roz said in World Tone / Feeling:

But we did make some pretty big changes over the years, both in regards to regaining magic in the setting and in pretty notable cultural shifts, such as restoring the Lost Gods to the Faith and all the plots surrounding thralldom in the Mourning Isles.

I’m curious if you can share any specific examples of player actions driving this. (NB: I don’t know if you were staff on Arx. I think no? But I am looking for player perspectives if people have them.) Was this something players started and staff facilitated? Was it part of the metaplot plan all along and waiting for players to engage with it? Genuinely curious.

I wasn’t staff on Arx, nope! So all of my perspective is as a player. Various members of the Arx staff have spoken many times about planned vs unplanned content, and my impression is that the vast majority of all of it was entirely unplanned, and that the things that players ended up pursuing were almost always unexpected.

The lore of Arx was incredibly dense, so there was a ton of secret history, and I’m sure there was a lot that wasn’t exactly planned for specific metaplot reasons, but just details that never got unearthed. There was a lot of strictness when it came to the history of the world and the rules of how the world worked, but how the world developed was very player-driven.

My experience is that the plot on Arx was hugely reactive to what players pursued. Some examples:

At the very start of the game, evil forces were manipulating humans to try and trick them into thinking a certain race of dark elves were their enemies. Staff expected it’d be likely that the players would end up killing these dark elves. Instead, with many bumps along the way, the players eventually managed to eventually make a new alliance and treaty with these elves, and as a result, they featured in the game in various ways for all the years to come.
The “Big Bad” of the first major metaplot arc was originally just a throwaway NPC. He was meant to be one of many people corrupted by the evil force of that arc. But players kept pursuing researching him, and eventually staff decided to give him more power and importance until he was the main big bad to defeat.
The King was originally an NPC and the very start of the metaplot kicked off with him being put into a magical coma. Staff did not expect him to survive, but players were very determined and pursued it and were able to figure out how to first get his soul back, and then how to heal it.
There were three gods of the setting’s pantheon whose names and identities had been forgotten over the years. Characters discovered their identities early on and pursued not just learning about them, but reintegrating them into the setting’s dominant/primary religion (which they hadn’t been a part of even historically when their identities were known).
This one comes to the closest to a fundamental shift of setting: out of the five primary houses making up the setting, one of them had a form of slavery/indentured servitude. It was illegal everywhere else in the kingdom. Thematically, the other regions didn’t like it, but it was important to the ruling nobles to not open doors of “people from entirely different lands can criticize how you run your own house.” The criticism and pursuit of abolition of the practice was entirely player-based, and also connected back to #3 – because one of the gods newly-integrated into the dominant religion was the god of freedom. (This also had very big impacts in terms of resulting in a civil war in the region.)

Arx had the benefit of having a really expansive setting with a lot of areas you could impact without fundamentally altering the setting itself. I would say that the most core metaplot story that was planned was: dark magical beings stole humanity’s knowledge of magic and its own history, and the characters slowly learn about this and learn how to magic again. That’s the thread that I do think was planned, it was there from the start until the very end, and the finale of the game involved finally defeating the evil being responsible. Otherwise, I think a lot of plot threads were planned, but in the sense of “there are a LOT of powers out there in the world, and we know what their status is and what they’re up to at the start of the story, but how things actually play out depends on what people do.”

So there were fundamental shifts, but there also weren’t: no one solved feudalism. No one solved class divide. No one solved poverty. The basic foundations of the setting’s structure remained largely intact.

MisterBoring

@Roz That’s very very cool. It’s always impressive when a game really comes together on that level and produces that kind of story structure between PRP improvisation and the “metaplot” produced by staff.

Roz

@MisterBoring It was very cool and all you have to do is grind your staff into dust for years trying to keep up with players

ETA: Also relevant that one of Arx’s big struggles was in how to structure and allow for PRPs to exist in an impactful way, because of how dense the lore was, and how much of it was locked behind mystery. So my examples were all very staff-handled in response to actions players undertook and submitted to staff in various ways. It was a huge amount of work all centered on staff and absolutely unsustainable.

Ominous

@Tez said in World Tone / Feeling:

Everyone loves to see their actions reflected in game-wide updates and announcements. Firan and Arx both featured that to greater or lesser degrees. It’s cooler still in my opinion to see an actual shift of culture or laws. I’ve been working on my long-dreamed generational game where the ability to shift an in-game culture is a mechanic, somewhat modeled off Crusader Kings.

@Pyrephox and I are both hankering for a city-state setting centered around the politicking of the various guilds, noble families, what have you. This sounds like it would work well with those mechanics.

I like temporary room descriptions that can be updated on public spaces to reflect events that have happened, but sometimes people forget and it loses its impact. Still, I like that as an idea: a grid that updates to reflect actions people have taken.

I have recently taken up looking into the FutureMUD Engine, because I have found that I am more of an RPI guy than a MUSH guy. Anyways, in the engine Creator’s YouTube Video on room building, he talks about how the engine has overlays for zones that are basically different instances of the same zone. While people are playing in one, you can building in the other. Then when you want to switch which one is publicly accessible, it’s just a toggle. In the example he gives, he talks about one zone having an after a disaster overlays that they switched on to replace the normal zone to represent all of the damage down to the area by the disaster. Such a system seems like a great way to manage updates over time that reflect the effects of the PCs actions

Roadspike

@Pavel Totally agree that it’s better to have an elegant reason why nuking the other side doesn’t work baked into the setting. But I also don’t really think that it should be necessary to tell players “No, you can’t end the war game’s war in a single stroke” in the lore. We did approach the player with lore reasons why it wouldn’t work first, but the player kept chasing the idea, and so we ended up saying “We’ve given you IC reasons, here’s the OOC reason: we want the war and don’t want to end it at a stroke.” They didn’t take it so well.

Faraday

@Roadspike said in World Tone / Feeling:

But I also don’t really think that it should be necessary to tell players “No, you can’t end the war game’s war in a single stroke” in the lore.

This. I’ve had players who were like: “I know they’re gonna fail but my PC would try it…” and I’m totally on board with that. It’s the ones who don’t seem to comprehend why they can’t turn the game’s theme inside-out who frustrate me.

But back on topic - both as player and staff, I just focus on telling a fun and interesting story. Sometimes that might leave a permanent or temporary mark on the grid, or generate an IC news story, or lead to the PCs being recognized as Big Darn Heroes. Sometimes it all happens behind the scenes and nobody’s the wiser. I don’t need to change anything to enjoy the game.