Song of Avaria

[Kestrel]

Some pros:

• Terrific original setting, immersive world-building.
• Staff obviously care a lot about curating a healthy community, and don’t hesitate to show the door if someone’s a bad culture fit.
• Staff are communicative, creative, well-meaning and approachable.
• The community is an eclectic mix of chill players who all by and large approach the game with a healthy, story-driven mindset.
• One of the best and most extensive emote systems I’ve seen on any game to facilitate layered, nuanced RP. Notably there’s a system for lying and hiding things in your poses, where the “tells” will only be visible to anyone who passes the equivalent of a perception check.
• Expansive story system that incentivises players to think about long-term arcs rather than only their moment-to-moment social scenes. Progressing through this is the primary method of earning XP, and rewards quality RP over quantity. You don’t need to log in every day, you just need to be putting thought into what your character’s trying to accomplish when you do have the time.

Some cons:

• All content creation is heavily gated behind staff approval. If you want to play a musician, you submit a performance for approval before you can execute it; you can’t just pick up a guitar and start strumming.* The crafting system is IRE-style, meaning if you want your character to own an old pair of shoes, you still need to have a tailor PC make them for you after submitting the design for approval.
• PrPs are not incentivised, rather you must pay for the privilege to submit them for staff approval.
• Although I mostly like the story system, I feel that to some degree it rewards a more self-absorbed way of thinking about “my character”, “my story” etc., as it doesn’t necessarily reward caring about other characters’ arcs and goals. The MO is very “you’re the main character of your own story” rather than ensemble-focused/collaborative.

EDIT: The bit about performances needing staff approval was incorrect, my bad.

In sum: I think this is a very good and originally crafted game, best suited for players who are less interested in content creation, who enjoy having more staff oversight for their stories, and have a simulationist approach to developing their own character’s rich inner world.

[Testament]

@Kestrel said in Song of Avaria:

Some cons:

• All content creation is heavily gated behind staff approval. If you want to play a musician, you submit a performance for approval before you can execute it; you can’t just pick up a guitar and start strumming. The crafting system is IRE-style, meaning if you want your character to own an old pair of shoes, you still need to have a tailor PC make them for you after submitting the design for approval.

This sounds like a lot of hoop jumping to an almost really weird degree.

• PrPs are not incentivised, rather you must pay for the privilege to submit them for staff approval.

‘Pay’? Pay as in how? Though some kind of request system or even paying with in-game resources of some kind?

• Although I mostly like the story system, I feel that to some degree it rewards a more self-absorbed way of thinking about “my character”, “my story” etc., as it doesn’t necessarily reward caring about other characters’ arcs and goals. The MO is very “you’re the main character of your own story” rather than ensemble-focused/collaborative.

I foresee a lot of potential future issues with something like this unless it’s not mitigated already when the initial system was put into place.

It’ll be interesting to see where things go once applications open back up.

[Kestrel]

@Testament said in Song of Avaria:

@Kestrel said in Song of Avaria:

• PrPs are not incentivised, rather you must pay for the privilege to submit them for staff approval.

‘Pay’? Pay as in how? Though some kind of request system or even paying with in-game resources of some kind?

OOC in-game resource, which your account accrues over time as an active player. The thing is you have a fair number of other options for investing that resource, which from a selfish perspective are much better value.

I think if I were making a game, content creation is the #1 thing I’d want to incentivise. I’d want players to take an active part in worldbuilding, plot-running etc. As staff I wouldn’t want sole responsibility, both because it’s a lot of work and it’s frankly less interesting. I do think it’s a little backwards to make players earn that instead of rewarding it.

However, this is not the dominant approach on a lot of games. I think staff on this game have a strong creative vision they want to deliver on for their playerbase. The amount of lore they’ve crafted is both gargantuan and genuinely very good. I can understand wanting to protect that creative vision. So, whether this is the right game for you depends on what kind of itch you’re looking to scratch.

[Third Eye]

@Kestrel
How MUD-like is the overall experience? The game definitely intrigues me but reading the site I can’t quite tell how much freedom to…write there is, if that makes sense? Like, are there character limits on emotes, which is the primary thing I remember from my MUD days?

[Kestrel]

@Third-Eye said in Song of Avaria:

The game definitely intrigues me but reading the site I can’t quite tell how much freedom to…write there is, if that makes sense? Like, are there character limits on emotes, which is the primary thing I remember from my MUD days?

Currently no, but staff have indicated they’re considering it. I hope they don’t because ngl, I’d be out the door the second that happens. The playerbase is a good healthy mix. Some gravitate towards one-liners, some favour paragraphs. I’ve personally enjoyed having the opportunity to exercise both of those techniques. You should (currently) be able to find players who are on the same wavelength no matter your style.

@Third-Eye said in Song of Avaria:

How MUD-like is the overall experience?

I’m separating this question because I think the answer is more nuanced. It’s on the one hand very MUD-like. A lot reminds me of IRE, and I hate IRE. It’s definitely not a MUSH. But on the other hand it’s very RP & story-focused, not at all hack-and-slashy. Combat is so unimportant you can happily get away with not taking any combat skills at all; a combat character is just another sort of character archetype like any other, and not mandatory for conflict resolution. In this regard it’s worlds apart for me from most MUDs. In fact I would say the game has made me reconsider some of my previously held beliefs that more mechanics = less RP. The mechanics exist to support rather than supplant RP, notably in the aforementioned emote system.

[Third Eye]

@Kestrel
Yeah, a lot of the more game-y elements actually interest me (I’ve enjoyed the fishing code updates). I’m not opposed to more coded experiences, even if it’s different than the narratavist games I tend to gravitate to. But I think emote character limits would be my hard no line for me and the news files are unclear about them.

[Apos]

@Kestrel said in Song of Avaria:

In this regard it’s worlds apart for me from most MUDs. In fact I would say the game has made me reconsider some of my previously held beliefs that more mechanics = less RP. The mechanics exist to support rather than supplant RP, notably in the aforementioned emote system.

I’m pretty curious. I’ve been leaning into being more mechanically heavy in design to support RP, and it sounds like a different direction than I was planning on going but still the same philosophical bent.

[Kestrel]

@Third-Eye said in Song of Avaria:

@Kestrel
How MUD-like is the overall experience? The game definitely intrigues me but reading the site I can’t quite tell how much freedom to…write there is, if that makes sense? Like, are there character limits on emotes, which is the primary thing I remember from my MUD days?

So as an update on this: this question was recently discussed on the SoA forums, and the answer from staff was explicitly that SoA is not meant to be a MUSH-like MUD. Moreover, staff expressed disdain for paragraph RP, and for “collaborative writing” as a concept. They consider it bad form to make a scene partner wait “minutes” for a response; they want the focus of scenes to be less on creative writing, and more on rapid, real-time scene action. They feel that overemphasising written skills as opposed to quick, naturalistic in-character communication creates unwanted obstacles to interaction.

I think the ingenuity of the code, the lore and various design choices deserves a lot of respect, but that the game is likely to be a hostile fit for anyone seeking an outlet for creative writing.

You can find this discussion on pages 2, 3 & 4 of this thread. Notably the story admin’s statement, which is the first post on page 3.

[Faraday]

@Kestrel That’s very interesting. I only skimmed the thread, so maybe I missed something, but I wouldn’t consider their attitude “disdain” so much as a different emphasis.

We want people to be able to emote with each other while focusing on one thing at a time, not doing that awkward thing that plagues MUSHes where you end up addressing five people in a single emote and having five conversations at the same time.
…
What we’re trying to do here is provide an immersive atmosphere for a playstyle that resembles improv acting more than collaborative writing. It’s difficult and jarring to immersion when these two styles clash.

Much as I enjoy MU RP, they’ve got a valid point, don’t they? I’ve literally had 1-on-1 MU scenes where there are three different conversation threads going simultaneously between the same two characters. Traditional MU paragraph style resembles neither organic character interaction nor normal creative writing.

TGG, for instance, had shorter poses during action scenes by the necessity of the code. Storytelling still occurred within those constraints.

Like they said, these are styles. Neither intrinsically better or worse than the other, but each having pros and cons. At least they’re up front about it and setting expectations about what they’re going for.

[Roz]

Yeah, agree with Faraday here; the discussion on the forum doesn’t seem hostile at all, just a discussion of how to set game culture effectively. But I’m someone who tends to think of MUSH style RP as written improv too, moreso than collaborative writing.

Idk the discussion all seemed really reasonable to me.

[Third Eye]

@Kestrel Thanks for the update. I found the thread a pretty interesting read. I think staff there is ultimately correct that a game needs to decide what it wants to be and state that plainly. I end up frustrated with environments that try to be an ‘all things to all people’ game, it does become really unclear and you end up with players enforcing ‘norms’ among themselves that aren’t actually stated rules anywhere, and a lot of bad feels from what are fundamentally culture clashes. They’ve clearly ended up with players from pretty differently backgrounds (the end of Arx has to be driving some of it), so doing expectation setting now rather than later seems smart.

[Pavel]

@Roz said in Song of Avaria:

the discussion on the forum doesn’t seem hostile at all

Not to put words in her mouth, but I think @Kestrel meant it in a more poetic sense, in that the style they’re going for and the style we’re used to are wholly incompatible.

Though it might meet with hostility because people are weird and gross.

[Tez]

Man, this is a fascinating thread read. Thanks for linking. (I followed it over to their follow-up thread, even: https://songofavaria.com/forum/suggestions/topics/228/ )

I think the admin are doing the absolute right thing for them in developing the game that they want. It would be a huuuuge culture clash for me to step in there, but I am fascinated by what they are doing. It seems challenging, but honestly it might be really fun?

I remember doing RP with @sao where we explicitly set up our poses so that we could interrupt each other, but obviously it required more OOC cooperation with each other. It was a fun experiment!

I ALSO remember the bad ol’ days when I was a baby RPer on Harper’s Tale and I was so proud of myself keeping those five conversation threads ongoing in giant paragraph RP. WHY DID WE EVER THINK THAT WAS REASONABLE. I can 200% understand what the admin are trying to build to avoid.

It seems like the admin are coming from a really good place here. Some players feel hurt and are reacting on that, but the admin seem very respectful. Honestly, it just makes me wish I’d tried it. Even if it turns out that this place Isn’t For Me, and it’s too much of a culture mishmash, it seems like a wild change of pace. In a good way.

[Third Eye]

@Faraday said in Song of Avaria:

TGG, for instance, had shorter poses during action scenes by the necessity of the code. Storytelling still occurred within those constraints.

TGG remains one of my favorite MU experiences and one I think back on a lot, because I don’t think I’ll ever have anything like it again. What was interesting about it is, you had pretty typical MUSH-style paragraph RP in the non-combat scenes, and more MUD-style one-liners in combat because of the speed the code needed to move at, player types who’d come from both environments, and it felt like both adapted to the other (or at least, those who couldn’t switch to some degree didn’t stick). I’m still not entirely sure why it worked, except that EUBanana was a genius (and sorely missed).

@Tez Man I try not to do the ‘respond to five different tangents in a pose’ thing but that thread isn’t wrong that it’s a hard MUSH habit to get away from. When I catch myself doing it, it’s unfortunately a lot of the time for OOC reasons rather than writing habits (I also don’t think it’s good writing, the split between writing and improv aside). I think too many of us have had the experience of someone flipping out OOC because their name didn’t ping in someone’s pose. So sometimes I kinda do it out of clunky etiquette even if it makes the writing flow weird.

Anyway, the way this game’s being created continues to look really thoughtful even if what it shapes up to be ultimately isn’t my thing or even if some stuff ultimately doesn’t work.

[GF]

@Faraday said in Song of Avaria:

Much as I enjoy MU RP, they’ve got a valid point, don’t they? I’ve literally had 1-on-1 MU scenes where there are three different conversation threads going simultaneously between the same two characters. Traditional MU paragraph style resembles neither organic character interaction nor normal creative writing.

thiiiiiiiiiiiis

It drove me crazy that people write their characters’ dialogue like the monologues preceding a pro wrestling grudge match rather than like two people talking to each other. Made me want to start writing my poses to include theme music, spotlights, and crowd cheers.

[hellfrog]

TBF I also find Paragraphs Style to be unnatural, and it requires a bit of mental geometry in my brain to keep it immersive. Sometimes a paragraph is called for! A lot of the time…it isn’t. Having to edit yourself down to make impact with fewer words is also a creative writing skill.

[MisterBoring]

@GF said in Song of Avaria:

Made me want to start writing my poses to include theme music, spotlights, and crowd cheers.

I kind of want to see a game where this is required. Would be fun in the right setting.

[Rinel]

This thread is doing such wonders to my imposter syndrome re: my general terseness in my poses

[Roz]

@hellfrog said in Song of Avaria:

TBF I also find Paragraphs Style to be unnatural, and it requires a bit of mental geometry in my brain to keep it immersive. Sometimes a paragraph is called for! A lot of the time…it isn’t. Having to edit yourself down to make impact with fewer words is also a creative writing skill.

“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”

[GF]

@Rinel If it helps at all, I remember feeling like long poses with paragraphs of monologue are actually pretty rude; a form of power-posing, as if my character would just stand still and mute until the two minutes of talking is done.