@Superbia I don’t recognize the username, and basic attempts to check their post history did not work, so shrug

I’m a person who often joins and becomes invested in a game on a whim - I can’t tell what the formula is, but if a game is hoping to attract people like me who just hop in without knowing someone, at least some percentage of the playerbase needs to feel open to interacting with, chatting with, getting excited about new characters and new people. Not every game has to be that - I don’t mind the existence of games that are built with a network-only approach and are meant for people who already have connections to have a good time together.

But as a new player approaching an open game, seeing people only rping with one or two others a lot sets off yellow flags that a game isn’t a place where people have the time or energy to open their circles to me. I don’t mind reaching out a lot when I’m in the shiny new excitement phase, but in order to feel welcome, it helps to see signs that it’ll be reciprocated.

I don’t think activity checks or a quota on interactions with people outside of your circle are meaningful solutions, because activity requirements can’t generate enthusiasm.I’ve roleplayed in forums like Dreamwidth where gamerunners often have monthly activity rules. The rules don’t actually stop a game from slowing down, or dying, or becoming a playground for one group. But I think the urge to implement them comes from the wish to have a particular game environment. Two people playing alone in a corner aren’t hurting anybody - but the more people who are doing that, the harder it is for new people to jump in and have a good time, and a lot of games want, at least in theory, new people to have an easy time joining, to buff up the population as people need to slow down or leave for various reasons.

And on a personal level, I find its important to my RP enjoyment to be open to new connections, because sometimes my old connections can’t RP any more! And it’s so much easier not to be bitter and discouraged if I’m not rebuilding my character’s network from scratch.

@Tez was pointed out to me that you probably meant you need their email. Anyways, i asked and theyre all set but good to know!

@Superbia 🥳

As I said elsewhere – if I had a single spoon to spare from Keys, I’d be over here, rolling up an arrogant Alphatian nobleman. Prince Haldemar, move over, there’d be a new explorer in town.

replying to add that official launch is October 31st

I think we all know where we should go

edit: wow that’s a big image

cce338b8-5151-4c7a-8554-d33a8821852e-cf005f61a6ab6105d4ee7f38b0ca8f127ce0d22ae0f860ed7edd51eaf0cacbf4.jpeg

@InkGolem People like me but older and somehow worse.

@somasatori said in Everworld of Darkness:

I don’t really know enough about Demon to figure that one out.

God Machine divided by Zero and that basically nuked the Gauntlet, Demons are trying to build Infrastructure to re-stabilize things.

@somasatori said in Everworld of Darkness:

Sin-Eaters

… and Mummies, who also need the Underworld/Duat… but due to the shattered nature of reality, they are temporally locked to now, solving their time-travel shenanigans.

@somasatori said in Everworld of Darkness:

Stuff about Poles

Something something Exalted Creation something.

@somasatori said in Everworld of Darkness:

Prometheans

Always gotta do something about them tainting the land and drawing in people to kill them. It’s just the way of the MU world.

@somasatori said in Multisphere pressure:

@Warma-Sheen said in Multisphere pressure:

I suspect… that some of them are looking for a “specific” type of RP.

The other meaning of the acronym “CBT”

a man with a mustache and a sweater that says i mean that 's nuts

Also contractually obligated to make that joke.

@catzilla

91fa71ba-f07c-4ad8-a602-5cd4b92a4cf4-image.png

But in all seriousness, I could elaborate on it. I just vastly prefer the theme of nWoD changeling to oWoD changeling and think it fits the mould of a pet project of mine… which is kind of a small-town Americana murder/mystery thing. I could actually read nWoD werewolf, but I don’t wanna and I like Apocalypse more!

I long for being able to finish that game. It’s very beautiful and the story is great, I just had such trouble parrying and dodging on account of having to play it with the sound off on a Steam Deck.

i think you’ve got three dials: game size, nuance/specificity, and staff involvement. Cranking any of these up or down is going to affect the others. You can (and should! if you want!) make a game that is highly specific in a historical or fictional setting, but doing so is going to turn down max players and probably increase staff involvement in direct relation. You can turn down staff involvement and let your players mostly self-police if the guardrails are broad and high enough, until that player size gets to a certain limit.

I think you can pull off most any kind of niche or historical setting if you are willing to accept and spend your time curating a small and like minded player base.

More to add after doing a little strolling down memory lane:

Descent MUX (a NWOD post-apoc game)
Jason
Dume
Casamir
Zoe

@Jumpscare

Egelman et al. (2020) and Ferreira et al. (2021) both report that negative interpersonal interactions—ranging from subtle pushback to overt incivility—can provoke frustration, stress, and defensive reactions. Both highlight the role of code review processes, organisational policies, and power imbalances in shaping negative experiences. Ferreira et al. (2021) provides detailed evidence of uncivil behaviours, including name-calling, impatience, and personal attacks, with 66.66% of non-technical emails in their sample exhibiting such features.

Behroozi et al. (2019) finds that technical interviews are perceived as arbitrary, high-pressure, and disconnected from real-world work, with systemic biases favouring younger candidates and those with more leisure time. They also report that candidates experience dismissive attitudes, lack of empathy, and adversarial interviewer behaviour, leading to feelings of humiliation and offence.

So it seems, at least in corpo-professional contexts, that process design, power dynamics, and communication styles are the primary drivers of cynical interpersonal behaviours, rather than individual predisposition. But this is just based on a very brief skim of the literature, more research must be done, etc, etc, etc.

ETA: tl;dr people=shit and if you treat coders like shit they’ll not be happy, I guess.

References:

Spoiler

Egelman, C. D., Murphy-Hill, E., Kammer, E., Hodges, M. M., Green, C., Jaspan, C., & Lin, J. (2020). Predicting developers’ negative feelings about code review. Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering, 174–185. https://doi.org/10.1145/3377811.3380414

Ferreira, I., Cheng, J., & Adams, B. (2021). The “Shut the f**k up” Phenomenon: Characterizing Incivility in Open Source Code Review Discussions. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW2), 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1145/3479497

Behroozi, M., Parnin, C., & Barik, T. (2019). Hiring is Broken: What Do Developers Say About Technical Interviews? 2019 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1109/vlhcc.2019.8818836

This is a community-building issue.

Okay, yeah, probably you can never have outright let’s-murder-each-other-on-sight factions and have it work. But why would you want to? If they only interact to fight, there is no reason for the opposing group to be PCs.

But stuff like “Green apple Fossoways hate red apple Fossoways and they’re each trying to be the ruling branch of the house,” and the deal where everybody’s trying to steal the McGuffin from whoever has it right now, can be fine fun.

It needs a supportive community to be fine, though. It works on private games because everybody there thinks everybody else’s feelings count and actively wants every other player to have a good time. When this trust is broken things crumble.

Which is no surprise. There are big differences between:

Dracula: “Well shit.”

Van Helsing: “Yeah, the dice were cruel to you! But that was great, loved the way you played it out, I had a blast.And you’ll get yours once you climb out of that hoiy-water-contaminated well.”

And:

Dracula: “Well shit.”

Van Helsing: “I understand that you’re very upset. In this essay I will explain how you are wrong and a problem…”

And:

Dracula: “Well shit.”

Van Helsing: “It sucks to suck.”

Also, yeah. There’s gonna be drama. There’s just gonna be drama. Making some space for the dramas of RPG-related fee-fees is part of gaming. Gamerunners and players can draw a line about how much space and what kind of expression of ye feels. But “never express any kind of upset about the game or your interactions with others on it” isn’t reasonable. Games nobody cares are not good games. You want players to be invested. Passions will rise. Characters don’t have to die for passions to rise.

Players in general and game runners in particular really ought to try to avoid drawing that line at who’s drama rather than what kind of drama. 

Drawing the line at a who is how you get bullshit like it not being ‘drama’ when Abelard raises a “Bridget refuses to compromise in RP!,” fuss, but when Bridget replies, “You refused to turn off your camera, you were obviously bluffing, I’m more afraid of proposed-betrayee I am of your threat, and I don’t even have the information you were trying to blackmail me to get,” somehow Bridget is the drama-creating problem.

@Jennkryst said in Character Death:

Taking a moment to think about it and remember that the L5R 20 questions includes ‘how should your character die’ because the idea of death is always in the back of their minds… Im wondering if that is a factor in the L5R MUs I’ve seen not doing terribly great for too long, or if addressing this and everyone going into it knowing there is supposed to be an almost romanticized view on a good/noble death… if that will somehow help it out? I dunno.

three cartoon characters are chained to a wall with the word death written on the bottom

@MisterBoring said in FAT BEAR WEEK 2025:

Chunk is the winner. Also, I found out he’s got a broken jaw, so the injured contender story probably pushed a lot of votes his way.

“His face looks sad and that makes me sad” versus “his belly is very round and that makes me happy” definitely came into play in a few of my votes for Chunk. The broken jaw is going to be a permanent issue for him, so I hope he continues to have several more years of being a very fat bear despite it.