@mietze said in Investing Yourself into your MU* Chars:

I don’t care how well you write. If you harm people or treat them like shit, I have no interest.

Abusive behavior should never be tolerated.

That said, I’ve met plenty of RPers through the years who were perfectly nice people, but their RP was just boring because they didn’t know how to write. I’m not talking about spelling and punctuation; I’m talking about the art of making a compelling character and writing an interesting story.

MU RP exists at a crossroads between writing, improv, and gaming. Different games and/or players may value these things to different degrees, but they’re all essential IMHO. (and as with any activity involving other humans, basic social skills matter too)

Two things I want to comment on - players making the ‘wrong’ choice ICly (when they know what the right choice should be OOCly) and incorporating player choices into the story.

There’s a LARP principle that we talk about at the start of every game during our opening workshops that I see a lot of MUSH players take to heart, which is don’t be afraid to make good mistakes - if you are faced with a choice, sometimes making the choice you know is the wrong choice OOCly leads to more fun RP than if you were to make the right choice ICly.

I think if you come from a perspective where winning = the thing, then yes, not being able to do what you want when you want it can be frustrating. If you come from a perspective where the journey = the thing, then sometimes it doesn’t matter.

I have a very firm storytelling principle when I run a scene or a plot which is that if a player comes up with a clever move that I didn’t anticipate, I don’t no sell it. Even if it undoes the entire plot, and shifts to an entirely different resolution. Because ultimately, the players are not the NPCs in a story that I am writing, they are the PLAYERS and I am putting up a scenario for them. Even if it means that somehow the really cool dragon I was looking forward to them fighting never shows its face because they find a way to defeat the big bad WITHOUT having to get the MacGuffin hiding in the dragon’s hoard, well, good on them.

I can always find a way to use that dragon later, right?

Tom Wilkinson. 😞

I was holiday-ing, but it looks like the wonderful Terminus has replaced the stolen writing with a placeholder in my absence.

To confirm, this is an OC, and the character has yet to be submitted for approval or anything, but if this desc makes its way back, even with tweaks, the app will be declined with explanation.

If you’d like, @Roz, I can forward this player your rates for autographs 🙂

Godzilla Minus One was the live-action Grave of the Fireflies/Kaiju film mashup I never knew I needed in life.

It’s wonderful but also a gut punch.

I was thinking about this earlier today (literal shower thoughts), or a little bit in parallel. About what characterized the games I’ve felt the most success on. Disregarding basic things like “I need there to be people around to RP with whose RP styles and schedules generally mesh with mine” and “I need staff to not be creepers and not allow creepers” – those will go without saying. But I realized that one of the biggest things for me in the DNA of a game is:

A sense of discovery.

This is achieved on a small scale with just characters getting to know each other, because that’s two people on a lifelong discovery of new details about each other. But what really thrills my brain is when there are mysteries and unknowns to the world on some level, and part of playing on that particular game is figuring out more about those.

@sonata The Grand Opening for Ascension Sojournes is December 8th! Now accepting group applications. Some bonus chargen dots will be given to each person applying in the group. This offer ends on December 8th!

I have three more invites, please hit me up if interested.

I had fun adding this, so I thought I’d share!

I am working on player/thing descriptions. The avatar isn’t required but spices the interface up a little. I want to address a few more commands; then, I have to decide if I want to start adding Cyberpunk Red elements. 🙂

screen shot

@KDraygo said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

So PvP games may work best on games with short episodes, where characters are “wiped” or killed off in each episode, without consequences that are long lasting. If you lose or die, it’s fine because in a month or two, the slate is wiped clean and a new story is created.

This is our hope, because our theme cycles through PCs by time jumping generations every six months. This is part of the design because we feel it will give players the “freedom” to go big and do heroic things and not feel FOMO by no longer having their epic character anymore because “anymore” might be a couple of months at best.

Like supporting PC on PC conflict, we anticipate that this will cause some self-selection among players who don’t want to invest time in a character that has a 6 month or 12 month shelf life.

But hopefully it will draw in players who do embrace the idea of playing a character’s arc until it ends and then starting over with a new one.

We’ll see how it works in practice.

Game’s good, would recommend.

I’ve already thrown enough of my soul at it that I am already burning out!

I’ve used this one for the past 3 years now. The paper is nice and thick, and I use the lined undated paper in the back to keep journal and notes. I use fountain pens, and generally there’s no ink bleed.

@Jennkryst said in As a PLAYER, how many staff would be ideal in a game?:

I want more staff than players, so when the player nagging inevitably burns someone out, there are plenty of replacements available until the burn-out fully recuperates.

I now know I want staffers who are allowed to have player bits, so it’s not like pulling teeth to recruit new staffers when breaks happen.