Numetal/Retromux

MisterBoring

yam’s point is that there is necessary work that must be done to make different spheres work together on MU.

I’m not disagreeing with that. I’m saying that there are games claiming to be WoD games that have house ruled their mechanics and the overall WoD plot so much that they aren’t WoD anymore.

It’d be like if I claimed to run a baseball league, but baseball in my league involved driving modified cars down a quarter mile track.

Autumn

@MisterBoring said in Numetal/Retromux:

I think this is a whole different conversation, because looking at the documentation for all of the active WoD games out there, at least a couple of them have house ruled too much.

At one end of the spectrum, Changeling has so many unclear and sometimes self-contradictory rules that it’s difficult to avoid ending up with a lot of house rules, even if most of them are essentially just “and this is the interpretation we’re going with.”

At the other end is “We don’t like the way Vampire Disciplines work by the book and so we’re going to introduce a completely new set of rules for them.”

My extremely cold take is that if you’re advertising your game as using such and such system, you should probably make an effort to stick to the rules of game system as much as possible, and that the fewer differences your players have to learn, the better. But then again, two different people may have wildly different ideas about how that looks in practice for any given game system.

Livia

@Yam I think it’s as simple as because in WoD you play as ‘The Monster’ in some various way. Like you can play as a bad criminal guy or whatever in Star Wars and probably Star Trek too, or ‘bad people’ in Lords & Ladies etc etc. But they all still start with the premise that you’re a person just like any other in your particular situation.

WoD positions the players as monsters and oWoD even does things like having different morality as part of the systems of play and somehow I think that extra step removed from being a ‘normal person’, even a bad person, gives people that extra edge (heh!) to be horrible.

Prototart

I totally disagree with the idea that WOD places are the most dysfunctional games or attract the worst people. Like, sure, the blowups tend to be super public on them, but I’ve never been on any that were as poisonous as a bad superhero game.

Gashlycrumb

@Ashkuri said in Numetal/Retromux:

WOD was never designed for vampire and werewolf at the same table, much less Mage and everything else.

It’s not balanced for it

That’s not relevant on a MU unless you want to keep it short-lived enough that nobody can gain enough XP to be significantly more powerful than a new PC build.

Pavel

@Yam said in Numetal/Retromux:

I do not think saying you generally have your work cut out for you when running a game with very, very dated social mores is lazy and reductive.

I was, perhaps, unclear. What I meant was that people (usually shitty staff) allow negative behaviour and then cover it up with the excuse that the genre is at fault. Which is, or at least has been, a common thing.

Evilgrayson

My own experience is that WoD is a special sort of disaster.

But Lords & Ladies is also a special sort of disaster.
Original theme is a special sort of disaster, too.
Comic books, star wars, star trek, urban fantasy, even bloody neanderthals are their own special sorts of disasters as well, and don’t get me started on Pern.

The theme of any given game tends to suggest the sorts of disasters you’ll get there. Some are pretty universal - sex pests are everywhere, as are the power-hungry who believe that might makes right - but some themes lend themselves to certain behaviours.

I’ve seen as many horrific abuses of staff power in Original Themes as I have in Urban Fantasy; having The Character Who Is The Focus Of The Story lends itself to certain behaviours, whether that character’s actually on grid or not. Unwarranted OOC viciousness? Lords and Ladies wins there, hands down, because people who just have to be the prettiest princess can’t all be the prettiest princess, and if you don’t fall over yourself to worship the one right in front of you some of them will get very upset and think it’s perfectly justified to try and destroy you whether you’re a rival or some poor sod caught in the crossfire. Still, several of the other genres aren’t that far behind. It’s just that WoD is the thread that most of us have in common and WoD is where these boards started, so WoD is the shared understanding and the shared scars.

Apos

I think the most challenging thing you can do in a the MU format is run a game that allows open pvp between players that dislike one another, are encouraged to do so because of theme, and not have it turn into an environment where players despise one another. This is compounded by staffers who do not see a point in trying, and players who enjoy the game exactly because of the environment it produces rather than in spite of it.

Yam

It all seems to come back to PVP. <<;

somasatori

Someone once told me (paraphrased) that the primary difference between maintaining OOC respect for your fellow players after a PVP/tense situation at a LARP and maintaining OOC respect and kindness towards your fellow MUSHers in the same situation is that MUSHers are not obligated to sit in a booth with each other at IHOP at 2am after we’ve finished our scenes.

Anonymity can be a real motivator in being a serious asshole towards others – which is interesting, because I’m fairly certain we’ve all known each other (or of each other) for the better part of a decade (which is perhaps also what leads to PVP situations).

That said, PVP is a difficult one. On one hand, if you explicitly prohibit PVP in a WoD environment, it takes some of the bite out of inter-sphere relations. On the other hand, allowing for a no-holds-barred environment will make the game – from examples I’ve seen – into a tedious free-for-all. I’m not sure if it’s just my perception based on the people I talk to, but I feel like interest in PVP has dropped off in the last little while.

Autumn

@somasatori said in Numetal/Retromux:

That said, PVP is a difficult one. On one hand, if you explicitly prohibit PVP in a WoD environment, it takes some of the bite out of inter-sphere relations. On the other hand, allowing for a no-holds-barred environment will make the game – from examples I’ve seen – into a tedious free-for-all. I’m not sure if it’s just my perception based on the people I talk to, but I feel like interest in PVP has dropped off in the last little while.

I would agree on both counts. Very little turns me off a game faster than players who think threatening murder is an appropriate first response … but there are some things that ought to get you killed in a WoD game. If there’s no downside for a vampire who feels like rolling up onto the heart of the local werewolf caern, then vampires who feel like it are going to do that, and there are a non-zero number of vampires who will feel like it.

On the gripping hand, there isn’t always clear agreement on what those things are. I’ve met people who felt that “I think you might have figured out that I belong to splat X” falls into the “warrants death” category, and people who felt that executing characters from a different splat did not fall into that category. Unsurprisingly, people tend to have separate standards for when they should be allowed to murder someone and when someone else should be allowed to murder them.

“Don’t PVP someone unless staff agrees with you that they have done something galactically stupid” is a little unsatisfying, and prone to the usual complaints about staff favoring one party over the other, but I find I still prefer it to either of the other two extremes.

KDraygo

@somasatori said in Numetal/Retromux:

That said, PVP is a difficult one. On one hand, if you explicitly prohibit PVP in a WoD environment, it takes some of the bite out of inter-sphere relations. On the other hand, allowing for a no-holds-barred environment will make the game – from examples I’ve seen – into a tedious free-for-all. I’m not sure if it’s just my perception based on the people I talk to, but I feel like interest in PVP has dropped off in the last little while.

I have not played WoD before but another issue with PvP or even RP that is PvP adjacent player interests clash, even with staff resolution, there may be claims that staff favoritism is involved or that they are part of the popular clique, that is why they ‘won’. PvP is extremely difficult to do properly in cooperative RP.