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.

Lemon Fox

@KarmaBum said in World Tone / Feeling:

People seem to be saying this a lot, so I’m kinda curious what “touch the world” mean in terms of MUSH gameplay.

Can you share some concrete examples from a player perspective of what this looks like on a MUSH?

Recently on Star Wars: Age of Alliances, my derpy Space Captain stumbled across the really rather grimdark tone-shift on Chandrila. Like, full-on fascist hellscape with military police on every street corner and history being dramatically rewritten to favor the Sith Empire. It really broke her heart, because as a noble-born Coruscanti girl, she had visited Chandrila as a child before the Sith rose to power in the wake of the First Order’s destruction.

This character was also very friendly with several suspected or known rebels because for her the war wasn’t personal. She had a shiny uniform that never got dirty while standing on the bridge of a Star Destroyer. People were always worried about the Empire building a new superweapon, but really, what were the odds of that happening? The idea of killing a whole planet (or star system) was just cartoonishly evil, and no one would really do that. Right? After it had failed… how many times?

But Chandrila changed that. Suddenly the idea that these people would murder an entire planet, not just once but many times over, became terribly real. And all the rumors, the speculation, the inaction of the Jedi, nobody really doing anything to go after this one big problem all came crashing down on her head.

And I decided that she wasn’t going to stand for it. So I started working with Empire players, Rebel players, and staff on how to bring about a change. What might kickstart a renewed effort to stop these things before they get deployed? (Nevermind that at this point I didn’t know the planet killers HAD been deployed before at least once.)

Eventually we settled on a two step plan: Step One: Defect to the Rebellion. Step Two: Take the planetkiller schematics with her. Quitting in style, basically.

Well, no plan ever goes that smoothly, and it ended up with my poor Captain in a locker room, struggling against computer checks three times what she could reasonably crack. She had Black Widowed her way into getting security codes, then further Black Widowed her way into arranging a brief window where she could be alone with specific a code cylinder, an uplink point, and a datapad. But it wasn’t going well. I had failed too many rolls, and if she wanted to get out, she needed to move. Now.

But this was important to her. More important than anything else had been because the idea of little frozen bodies floating in space amidst the rubble of a dead world was too much for her to bear. If she ran and that happened? That was on her now. So she stayed, blew through the last firewall that she could, and uploaded the data. She didn’t get the schematics–but she did find out where they were, who the project director was, who the lead engineer was, and where they had originally been built. It had to be enough as the security team broke in and stunned her. Game over.

But, luckily for her, Captain Derp had made a lot of friends, and in something between Mass Effect and Doom, lightsabers and blasters and some really, really lucky rolls got my character out. And she got exfiltrated to the Rebellion! She lost everything–wealth, status, a luxurious private shuttle, and command of a Star Destroyer. But, because of her, knowledge of the planet killers was out in the wild. And that made me really happy. I had poked the world and made an indelible mark on it.

And that felt a lot better than any mountain of credits, gear, or rare junk I could have gotten my hands on.

Juniper

One day I’ll get my gritty survival post-apocalypse game where it really does feel like there’s danger around every corner that’ll get me if I slip up for a moment. And hopefully it won’t immediately devolve into hot tub weed party time, because a shocking number of players who sign up for a horror / struggle bus experience don’t respect that theme even though there are already countless games where you can party all day.

On the other hand, a lot of “harsh survival” games feature permadeath and that’s not my jam. It makes people risk avoidant and boring. I’m okay with my character getting hurt, getting knocked out, getting trapped somewhere. I just don’t want to slip on a banana peel and be unceremoniously deleted without so much as a story beat.

Warma Sheen

@Juniper I hear you. I do. But… a game where there’s danger around every corner that’ll get you if you slip up for a moment SHOULD make characters risk avoidant. The problem is that most games don’t provide a reward that is worth characters overcoming that risk avoidance. The flip side is the player that constantly throws caution to the wind because there’s never an outcome bad enough to stop them. Solo attack 20 ninjas? Sure. Why not? Oh no, I lost. But I just got knocked out. Oh well. Wake up and try it again tomorrow!

One of the things I’ve noticed is that when the above is true on a MU*, it negates a very strong reason for people to RP with other people. If you need others to accomplish goals it fuels RP and discussions and planning and IC collaboration. But if you can get everything on your own, why bother wasting your time with people outside your play group that might not be a perfect fit for what you want when you can get it on your own anyway if you just try it enough times???

A big difficulty with theme that gets overlooked is what is the MU* even about? Is it a game? Is it collaborative storytelling? Something in between? I’ve mentioned it before, but so many people show up to a MU* with their own notions of what this hobby is or what it should be or what it is supposed to be and most of those different ideas are conflicting.

So one person shows up for a game, another person shows up for collaborative storytelling experience and the MU* hasn’t been explicit and concrete in what it is supposed to be so when these two players encounter each other, they clash and problems begin between players instead of characters because the other person is a <insert insult here>. When really they just showed up to the same space for very different experiences. And these experiences range from game mechanic die-hards to the artistic wannabe novelists.

One type of player is there to play a game and they crunched the numbers and the game mechanics to perfectly engineer their character’s sheet to their liking and the dice rolls just ARE what they ARE and if someone dies, then they just DIE, even if its in the prep to a scene, instead of the actual scene. Too bad so sad. Go chargen again.

The other type wants full autonomy of their character and their writing and is insulted if you don’t understand that their writing is works of art and their IP and you need their permission to even look at it and only they dictate if anything bad ever happens to their characters. Ultimately, they just end up using the MU* to write fanfic for their characters and conning other people into reading it by pretending to MU*.

Obviously most people are not on these extremes, but most seem to be on one side or the other. And if you have both of these types on your MU* with no direction or expectation of what that site is supposed to be, there will be continuous clashes that fracture the stability of the player base on the MU*. We’ve all seen it multiple times before, I’m sure. A lot of it just comes down to setting expectations at the start.

So when it comes to the World Tone / Feeling, it is about more than just describing what you want. You have to set the expectations for players in multiple areas (theme, plots, mechanics, descriptions, HRs, policies, etc.) in a way that guides everything back to what the tone / feeling is supposed to be so that the way the MU* actually plays out organically stops players from hijacking that tone / feeling for their own purposes to make it what they want for themselves (intentionally or unintentionally). Pretty much every WoD MU* is a perfect example of how this goes wrong consistently.

Pavel

If there’s danger around every corner that’ll get you if you slip up for even a moment, your CG needs to take ten minutes and approval even less.

Faraday

@Pavel said in World Tone / Feeling:

If there’s danger around every corner that’ll get you if you slip up for even a moment, your CG needs to take ten minutes and approval even less.

It’s certainly possible to do so. TGG had a high PC fatality rate and zippy fast chargen (I don’t think there was even an approval step).

@Warma-Sheen said in World Tone / Feeling:

a game where there’s danger around every corner that’ll get you if you slip up for a moment SHOULD make characters risk avoidant. The problem is that most games don’t provide a reward that is worth characters overcoming that risk avoidance.

There are certainly players who enjoy a high-risk environment, though my experience is they’re a small minority. For the rest, I’m skeptical that there’s any manner of reward that would get players to risk their characters to death at the drop of a hat. Most MU players don’t want to play the “you have died of dysentery” version of a Wild West game—they want outlaws, gamblers, and high adventure on the frontier. A real post-apocalyptic world would involve a lot of people making gardens, filtering water, and dying from small cuts and poor sanitation. Sane people in such an environment take risks to survive, but how do you model that in a game environment without forcing a MUD-like level of survival mechanics?

STD

@Faraday said in World Tone / Feeling:

@Warma-Sheen said in World Tone / Feeling:

a game where there’s danger around every corner that’ll get you if you slip up for a moment SHOULD make characters risk avoidant. The problem is that most games don’t provide a reward that is worth characters overcoming that risk avoidance.

I’m skeptical that there’s any manner of reward that would get players to risk their characters to death at the drop of a hat.

In my experience, most people don’t mind losing big – even going as far as character death – as long as it’s cool. No one wants to die just from slipping on a banana peel or even just randomly getting shot in the head by an outlaw. They want to go down in a blaze of glory, or with some amazingly funny Rube Goldbergesque series of coincidences, or through something that exudes pathos.

No one wants to die like a scrub.

@Warma-Sheen’s description of the crunch-storytelling continuum seems pretty apt. I know I definitely prefer the storytelling aspect of that; I find combat systems and dice throwing to be supremely boring and I’ve hated nearly every single combat scene I’ve ever been a part of.

Though I think this might be more of a scene-by-scene thing than an overall tone. I don’t see why a MU* can’t have room for both worldviews as long as everyone knows beforehand what a specific scene is expecting. The hard part would be quantifying where, exactly, on the crunch-storytelling continuum a scene lies.

Pavel

@Faraday said in World Tone / Feeling:

It’s certainly possible to do so. TGG had a high PC fatality rate and zippy fast chargen (I don’t think there was even an approval step).

Oh I definitely agree, I played there exceptionally briefly (Russian front, obviously).

I think it’s one of those things that must be considered if one wants omnipresent danger while also having players feeling free to take risks. If one invests a lot of time into making a character, one is less predisposed to disposing of said character on a whim, generally speaking.

Faraday

@STD said in World Tone / Feeling:

In my experience, most people don’t mind losing big – even going as far as character death – as long as it’s cool.

YMMV. Over the span of about 2 decades, I ran many different games with opt-in character death. You PC could be incapacitated, but would never(*) die without your consent. In that time, I can think of maybe two? three? players who chose to kill off their PCs voluntarily. These were high-stakes settings. Loads of gunfights, plenty of opportunities to write yourself out as a Big Darn Hero. The overwhelming majority of players I’ve encountered (both online and in offline TTRPGs) don’t want to lose their characters. Even if you ignore the XP loss, there’s an investment in relationships, story, development there that you can’t quantify.

(*) Barring extreme “you’ve painted us into a corner with your monumentally boneheaded actions” situations.

DrQuinn

Decades ago, Tenebrae put something in place where you would basically rate your plot before people signed up. I think it was like ‘Risk of Death’ ‘Risk of Maiming/Weapon Sundering’ and then just ‘No Risk.’

It worked for the most part. People who signed up for the risk of death scenes knew that it was possible their PCs could die and they were usually Big Plots where it was cool if they did. Did that stop some players from still being super mad about it when it happened? Nope. In a big Save the World scene I remember a staffer had a monster with an insta-death ray that would kill anyone with a bad fort save. So he made sure it targeted the PC in the scene with the best fort score and thus the best chance of nothing happening. Like I specifically remember the conversation on the staff channel where a bunch of us weighed in on who it should target because while it was high stakes we didn’t really want to kill anyone.

The PC then rolled a 1 and accused the staffer of doing it on purpose and declared the whole scene had been set up just so they would die and it was a whole thing.

real_mirage

I certainly want a grounded game where there can be death and consequences.

On the topic of death and consequences. I feel like the best way to have non-consent death in a game is MUD style where there is cold hard code making that decision and not necessarily GMed rolls. Only MUSH game that I have seen do that was Firan.

You also have to have a game big enough to survive the inevitable blow ups that will happen with players quitting.