What Do You Want Out of a MU?
-
@Gashlycrumb said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:
Everybody has to carve time out in their schedule for hobbies, and most people have unpredictable schedules, but I guess I feel the opposite effect – it’s a lot easier to carve out that time if I have a general idea about when it will be.
But again, not everyone has that luxury. It’s all well and good to say that I’ll do Purple Block plots in 16-20 Tuesday, Thursday, and 11-13 Saturday, but if I’m not available in those timeslots for a whole month because of life - I haven’t helped anything. Similarly, setting up the expectation of fixed timeslots like that might discourage players who might otherwise find ways to get involved. I’d rather catch (and create) RP when I can.
If your life circumstances permit a block system and you want to tell stories that way - go for it. I just don’t think it’s an improvement for everyone.
-
I don’t thin blocks need to be ‘carved out’ for people. Putting effort into /trying/ to make time, without screwing yourself over, for people in timezones not yours goes a long way. Effort to help them feel involved can make someone feel involved because you are caring enough to /try/ and help them get involved. Trust a player with a small bit of your game plot that can connect to everything else going on, use asynch type stuff like Ares and Arxcode (Evennia in general?) has, set up scene loggers in a temp room or a room where people can go see previous poses and add their responses to what is going on. There are a lot of things that can be done to help someone feel apart, timezone availability is just another one.
-
Currently willing to sell non-existant firstborn to game Gentry able to provide a Changeling the Lost game. Even more so if it’s multisphere in some fashion or another.
Seriously, I need an outlet for my “I want to play a candle/dragon/book/avatar of murder/troll/mirror” etc shenanigans.
I need my Changeling hit!Also I know I’m not alone, you’re guaranteed to have a super popular game on your hands.
-
@Faraday said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:
I just don’t think it’s an improvement for everyone.
Alas I think that may be the fundamental point of this whole exercise, or indeed any “how do I make a game” thoughts. You won’t be able to please everyone, no matter what you do.
-
@Pavel said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:
For me, at least, it’s not really a matter of carving out time (as in changing anything else) but finding already carved time. I can’t alter my work schedule
Well, yeah. I expect pretty much everybody has some stuff that they cannot rearrange, like work-schedules and certain appointments, and some stuff that they could rearrange but it’s higher priority than gaming, but also some stuff that’s more or less the same priority as MUing. Do I take a stroll down to the pub, read the latest Stephen King, indulge in my hobby of defacing antique furniture with imitation milk paint and ‘live, laugh, love’ decals, or MU? If I don’t ‘carve out’ the time for these things, I might end up letting co-workers talk me into Trivia Night.
@Faraday said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:
if I’m not available in those timeslots for a whole month because of life - I haven’t helped anything. Similarly, setting up the expectation of fixed timeslots like that might discourage players who might otherwise find ways to get involved. I’d rather catch (and create) RP when I can.
That month you’d schedule with the Purple Block playgroup same as you do now? Clearly I need to figure a way to arrange it that doesn’t give people a ball-and-chain feel about it. The idea is to facilitate forming playgroups with compatible schedules, and to leverage that compatability by making some block of shared available time slightly special – I leave the furniture alone for another day because it’s Tuesday, and others in the group make similar decisions.
One thing I want out of a MU is synchronous RP, regularly available without a lot of hanging about trying to hunt it up.
"This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"
– A. Bertram Chandler -
@Gashlycrumb said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:
I leave the furniture alone for another day because it’s Tuesday, and others in the group make similar decisions.
Except if you have an unpredictable work schedule, or kids, or a chronic illness, or any number of other life situations that make such routine decisions impractical. Then it’s not just one month that you’re rearranging Purple Block, it’s any month, or every month, and it kinda defeats the whole purpose of the system.
But again, I’m not saying it’s bad for everyone, any more than having a TTRPG group that always meets on Sunday. It’s a perfectly fine idea for some people. I’m just pushing back against the notion that it’s somehow trivial for everyone to carve out time for a routine schedule like that.
-
@Gashlycrumb said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:
One thing I want out of a MU is synchronous RP, regularly available without a lot of hanging about trying to hunt it up.
Well now who’s being unreasonable?
-
@Gashlycrumb said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:
Eh, “I want a prominant place in the story, while playing at a time offset from the rest of the group by seventeen hours,”
I don’t think that this is what @Pavel is saying. It’s certainly not what I was saying when I made a similar comment. What I would like is to not be a Zeppo if I can’t make Prime Time Events (whatever time that might be for a given game). Or if I’m going to be a Zeppo, I want to be a Zeppo whose impact (even if it’s minor) is recognized. Gimme an announcement post about the thing that I did, have it get mentioned by an NPC (or a PC) in a Prime Time Event. Acknowledge that there are people playing the game and doing things even if they can’t make Prime Time Events.
-
@Roadspike said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:
@Gashlycrumb said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:
Eh, “I want a prominant place in the story, while playing at a time offset from the rest of the group by seventeen hours,”
I don’t think that this is what @Pavel is saying. It’s certainly not what I was saying when I made a similar comment. What I would like is to not be a Zeppo if I can’t make Prime Time Events (whatever time that might be for a given game). Or if I’m going to be a Zeppo, I want to be a Zeppo whose impact (even if it’s minor) is recognized. Gimme an announcement post about the thing that I did, have it get mentioned by an NPC (or a PC) in a Prime Time Event. Acknowledge that there are people playing the game and doing things even if they can’t make Prime Time Events.
This is one of the things that we’re really trying to achieve in the game I run and I hope we do, when we try to do big things.
What I’ll usually do is I’ll divide a big event into three sectors: LIVE, ASYNC, and VIGNETTE. People who can make the live event get to have their live scene, people who can’t go to the async scene, and the people who want to be involved, but won’t be able to be active enough for an async scene (or don’t like async but can’t make it to the life scene) can drop short vignettes (even with other people, like mini scenes) of what they’ve done during the events of that story.
It’s not perfect; a LOT of people often just ignore it if they can’t make the scenes, not bothering to touch the vignette. But it’s there.
-
I want a MU* that plays with the format a little, because I find that really fun in theory and I don’t know that I’ve ever really seen more than a few in my time.
think sorta like, the Network/Horror MUX. gimme a game where the rosters are a core personality jumping from physical host to host, or the main physical setting is always changing while the characters remain the same (like a game about immortals!), or maybe a location unstuck in time where characters from different periods can move between them and make things really screwy.
I’m sure those would be paperwork nightmares all in their own uniquely horrible ways, lol, but I just wanna try it dammit!!*
*usual disclaimer applies, I literally do not have the time/spoons rn to make it. maybe someday.
-
@Faraday said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:
I’m just pushing back against the notion that it’s somehow trivial for everyone to carve out time for a routine schedule like that.
Looking back, I see where I came across as trivializing. I apologize.
It’s a serious social problem. I seldom think of it much in terms of gaming, but it comes up professionally regularly. I swear some of the employers around here watch the community college schedule and change people’s work schedules the week after drop date, so the students lose their tuition money as well as their time and are solidly discouraged from completing their degrees.
MU-wise, my own experience (not with @Faraday, who’s always been emminently reliable) is that events all over the clock mean I can’t make enough of them. Also that many people who manage to be thoroughly involved but also ‘catch as can’ are usually pretty obviously and in their OOC chat even openly, capable of a schedule, and even keep to one for the most part, just refuse to commit. That’s different from what Faraday’s talking about, though – I’m thinking of people who won’t /schedule/ a thing, but instead expect everybody to just wait for them to log on.
@Pavel said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:
Well now who’s being unreasonable?
Because I live in the middle time-zone of the set for the Americas and MU during ‘prime time’ I don’t really have too much trouble finding a game where I can get into a scene within a few minutes of logging on most of the time. There’s just not so much variety of 'em as once was.@Roadspike said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:
@Gashlycrumb said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:
Eh, “I want a prominant place in the story, while playing at a time offset from the rest of the group by seventeen hours,”
I don’t think that this is what @Pavel is saying. It’s certainly not what I was saying when I made a similar comment.
I don’t think so either. I thought what he meant was more like my second paraphrase – “I want a game that is played when I can attend." Same thing everybody wants,
dead things, extra teetha game that’s active when they want to play. -
@Wizz said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:
I want a MU* that plays with the format a little, because I find that really fun in theory and I don’t know that I’ve ever really seen more than a few in my time.
think sorta like, the Network/Horror MUX. gimme a game where the rosters are a core personality jumping from physical host to host, or the main physical setting is always changing while the characters remain the same (like a game about immortals!), or maybe a location unstuck in time where characters from different periods can move between them and make things really screwy.
It’d never fly, but I have long wanted to do One Hundred Years of Solitude MUSH. Every eight months or so everything advances 20 years or so, you must either age your character or make another, hopefully a descendant of the first. You could go back to the first character after a couple of cycles, too, and have a PC who first appears as a charming young scamp and next shows up sixty years later when the family remembers that disused back bedroom and finds an old man in there licking spots on the walls.
"This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"
– A. Bertram Chandler -
@Gashlycrumb said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:
@Wizz said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:
It’d never fly, but I have long wanted to do One Hundred Years of Solitude MUSH.It’d never fly, but it’d be dope as hell if it did.
-
@imstillhere That’s how I feel about Victorian Mage but I’m going to try it anyway
-
@Gashlycrumb said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:
@Wizz said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:
I have long wanted to do One Hundred Years of Solitude MUSH.I would absolutely play here. It would be me and the other handful of pretentious lit nerds (which I think includes you, Wizz!) but it would be glorious.
they/them
-
This post is deleted! -
Coward!
-
OMG WOW I was just saying I am a pretentious nerd but @Gashlycrumb was technically the one who made the reference but then I was like oh wait @somasatori knows and was just being nice and now I look like a gd FOOL
thanks pal, loool
-
@Wizz said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:
OMG WOW I was just saying I am a pretentious nerd but @Gashlycrumb was technically the one who made the reference but then I was like oh wait @somasatori knows and was just being nice and now I look like a gd FOOL
thanks pal, loool
-
On the play time window** thing , another tactic which can work (and worked well for me back when I was active) is if you have a climax or a major meta plot running, break it out into multiple components. The three ring circus narrative like you get pretty commonly, but is executed really well in Return of the Jedi.
You have the attack on the forest moon to disable the shields so the ships can attack, and of course you have the climactic battle in the Throne Room. Reproduced well in The Phantom Menace as well.
Break up whatever your “climax” is into multiple components and have those stories get divvied up in different time zones.
It’s not always going to be perfect either because you are shoehorning players into a scene based around their playing time window instead of natural compatibilities, but you can absolutely structure things in that way - have a plan of attack that requires some other critical task occur before hand, schedule that during the “prime play” window of the folks who tend to play in the Australia/Asian window (12 hours or so ahead of US), and then another for Europe, etc.
And then, if you want to be really ambitious, make all of those critical components RPed live to the conclusion, and play that one async (or as Coin suggested, throw up a vignette scene for everything to write their own aftermath conclusion).
I had some good success with that in the past, but it does require having someone willing to ST in each of those time periods, or letting players free from on their own (which I am not generally opposed to either.)
**It’s not precisely timezone because you may have someone who works overnight in THEIR timezome so aligns better with another timezone.
