Numetal/Retromux

Pavel

@Pavel You have to enforce it, yes.

That’s the bare minimum interpretation of what I said, yes.

Hobbie

I reckon two to three characters is good, even if three is pushing it. Five is right out. Similar reasons to @Juniper but I err on allowing people to have a bit of flexibility with character ideas. I’ve seen games where twenty-five connections were all the same person, and artificial WHO inflation grates on me.

I’m also big on alt transparency, to the point where it’s not only a rule, but it’s code-enforced on games I build (but not run, because none of them ever launch because I have scope creep issues lol). Alts get an entry in everyone’s +finger that cannot be hidden. I’ve seen people attempt to abuse alt obfuscation too many times to think anything other than “this is public for everyone else’s sake”.

EDIT: The above goes for staff as well.

Probably worth forking this discussion into its own thread as well.

Muscle Car

@Juniper I feel this in my fossils. Watching people take over a Mage plot with their Werewolf alts is something I’ll never forget. Lots of points of failure led to it but it was universally avoidable if any one of the balances had worked. So to the other point, unenforced policy is possibly worse than no policy.

Pavel

@Muscle-Car said in Numetal/Retromux:

Watching people take over a Mage plot with their Werewolf alts is something I’ll never forget.

It’s so often the opposite that it’s basically a meme – not that either direction makes it okay.

If it happens frequently enough, or has historically done so, that we can all think of a different example perhaps rethinking the whole “massively multi-sphere” approach to WoD MUing should be a serious consideration for the future.

Gashlycrumb

@Hobbie Yes. Artificial WHO inflation grates on me. I usually want to play just one character per game. But a lot of people do fine with it, I think.

I’d like to see an alt system that has you rank them – you have one ‘Main’ PC and any alts are ‘Supporting’ or ‘Extra’. (Quark is a main character. Rom is a supporting, mostly he just does shit for Quark but once in a while it’s about him. Morn is an extra, but sure, he has whole life of his own off-camera, he’s important to plot once in six years.) But this does not seem to be a popular idea.

Pavel

@Gashlycrumb I quite like the idea, at least in the abstract. It might be a bit clunky in practice unless it’s taken as read to be an approximation, and can change relatively easily. Like that whole bit where Rom becomes Negus, that might warrant a switchup.

And +who could just list mains, with a little + next to the name if they have alts on as well, and you could do +who/all to list everyone.

Jenn

@Juniper said in Numetal/Retromux:

I forgot 7.

It’s kind of lame

We rehashed this way up higher in the thread. Gently requested, could we please try to not? Thank you!

Gashlycrumb

@Pavel It’s pretty difficult to find a firm line between ‘Main’ and ‘Supporting’ etc. (Cirroc Lofton appeared as a “main cast” member on the opening credits every episode but was in a lot fewer episodes than others, and Jake Sisko was not very important compared to a number of “Special Guests” like Garak.)

You would have to be able to change it easily, bit not frequently – You can’t just switch your “Main” from Sven the Sorcerer to Dennis the Dung Gatherer the minute the big sorcerer plot-line wraps up and the dung-gatherer plotline launches, etc.

I think when Rom becomes Nagus he becomes a “Special Guest Star” if he’s like Zek – he’s powerful, and when he’s there it’s likely to be all about him, but he’s mostly not there. (This doesn’t change your point, just an observation.)

The objection is that if you go around telling players they can have a main character they’ll act ‘entitled’ and think their character should have main-character opportunities. I think that they actually should, and that situations where one person is playing three characters who all have major roles while other players are wallflowering are bad, so.

Pavel

@Gashlycrumb Requiem for Kingsmouth had a thing where you’d have to specifically “apply” for tiers of characters. Political, Support, and probably another two tiers I don’t quite recall. Others will likely be able to remember the specifics better, but Political were the “all risks, all rewards” type (you could get killed, could get certain titles, etc, etc), support less so, extras even less, and so forth.

You could combine that idea with yours: You get one “political” character who gets to do all the fancy whiz-bang story stuff and get all the rewards. You get two “support” characters who get to help out with plots occasionally but don’t get the full breadth of opportunities, and then you’ve got extras. They don’t get plot stuff at all, or only very rarely? Idk beyond here.

ETA: Take all thoughts and ideas with a grain of salt, I’m on a decent amount of pain management medication at the moment.

MisterBoring

So assuming a game has a “no-alts” policy, what’s the ideal response for when a player breaks that rule? I had two ideas, one harsh and one not.

The harsh policy would simply be that violations of the no alt rule will not be tolerated and result in the termination of all characters owned by the player in question, and a site ban for the player.

The not harsh policy would be that the first time the player was caught in ownership of multiple characters, a conversation with that player would be held and the player would be allowed to choose the PC they wanted to keep. All others would be removed from the game. Strike 2 - The player would lose all characters in total, and be allowed to create and app a new character afterwards. Strike 3 - Begone foul demon. All characters deleted, player site banned.

Roz

@MisterBoring Absolutely don’t do a three strike system for blatant, overt, and purposeful flouting of rules like that. Like, at most give the player one single warning.

But the real answer is the first option: ban them. There’s absolutely no need to entertain that sort of OOC sneakery.

Roadspike

@Roz Agreed. If there is some particular reason that you think they accidentally made an alt (I can’t even think of a reason that might happen, but who knows…), wipe all but one character and tell them that they just got their one and only warning. Otherwise, it’s a flagrant violation of a clear-cut rule: ban, explain, and move on.

Pyrephox

@MisterBoring If someone chooses to break a game’s rules, they are uninvited from the game. It’s not hard.

Jumpscare

@Muscle-Car said in Numetal/Retromux:

Lots of points of failure led to it but it was universally avoidable if any one of the balances had worked.

I feel like this sentence describes the world we’re living in.

Pavel

Naturally, make sure the player is actually breaking the rule first. Perhaps make mention of some mechanism for people living in the same house to have that fact (and the characters they play) registered somewhere so that all the staff know that any IP similarities have already been accounted for.

I imagine it’s fairly obvious when that mechanism is being misused.

@Roadspike said in Numetal/Retromux:

If there is some particular reason that you think they accidentally made an alt (I can’t even think of a reason that might happen, but who knows…)

The only reason I can think of is if you create a character, get into CG, and get distracted by something shiny and forget about it. Then you come back some time later and don’t recall you’ve ever been there, and make another character. In this instance it should be easy to tell, the other character is old and still in CG.

Gashlycrumb

@Pavel said in Numetal/Retromux:

@Gashlycrumb Requiem for Kingsmouth had a thing where you’d have to specifically “apply” for tiers of characters

Yeah. You could have people apply, you could require that they have a trusted existing player as a ‘sponsor’ to get a ‘Main’ character.

It might be a good solution to go with your population-control idea – if you open with a hard limit on how many PCs, then you’re likely to end up with only 1/3 that number in three months and it’ll be hard to recover 'cause the ones who got turned away are not terribly likely to come back. If you have a hard limit on ‘Main’ characters you can upgrade ‘Supporting’ ones and probably have less of a crash problem.

@MisterBoring said in Numetal/Retromux:

So assuming a game has a “no-alts” policy, what’s the ideal response for when a player breaks that rule? I had two ideas, one harsh and one not.

Just ban them.

There’s nothing harsh about it, really. “One character per player” is not a rule that’s open to interpretation.

I am regularly bemused about clear violations of clear rules being repeatedly tolerated, or people getting endless ‘strikes’ after said rule has been clarified. I’ve seen a player continue for a year with a habit of changing the subject any time somebody rolls to eavesdrop on their IC conversation, with other players calling staff and Cheaty-Cheaty Bang-Bang getting the lecture, and then doing it again a week later. I’ve had a staffer tell me they gave an insufferably rude player The Lecture, problem solved, and then just ignore it when I replied that rude player was doing it again right as staffer was assuring me that it wouldn’t happen again. It’s not harsh to stop people who make a habit of breaking the rules or ignore really clear and plain rules.

In over thirty years of playing these damn things I have been banned once, and it was, as far as I could tell, for asking another player for their contact info and explaining that I was gonna quit since Staffer had made clear their intention to exclude me indefinitely. I’ve been threatened with banning for telling a staffer that it “felt railroady” to not be allowed to attempt a con that NPCs were already doing. The recent actual banning that had me raising eyebrows was for the hideous crime of paging people asking for RP when those people wanted to avoid the pager but did not want to go so far as to ask the pager not to contact them. That shit is harsh.

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