@helvetica said in Wyrdhold Discusion:

@Serafine Logs are publicly available, their placement on the site just isn’t in a very obvious location.

I think their custom portal has a bug actually, because the “Recent” view on scene logs was initially blank for me. Once I switched it to “all” and back to “recent” it behaved itself. That might lead one to honestly believe there were no public logs.

But it’s oh-so-pretty. Seriously. Kudos for the aesthetics.

@Roz said in Wyrdhold Discusion:

@Serafine said in Wyrdhold Discusion:

True to its name, I’ve seen nothing but war and strife from ARES.

I mean, Ares is just a codebase, it doesn’t really have any influence on whether or not there’s drama on a MU*.

Whatever do you mean? I’m quite certain it’s the first and only MU codebase to ever see drama. I designed it special that way.

@tsar said in Los Angeles 2043: A Blade Runner MUSH - Discussion:

Man, thank you. Because this vague insinuation that Director bailed and crushed all these people’s hopes and dreams of stories really started to get my blood pressure up. He’s a really cool dude, who is engaging, funny, and a great time.

I don’t know Director from Adam, but even if they did completely bail, so what?

Staff are volunteers, and players are not entitled to anything from them that they are unwilling to give.

If they open a game and close it the very next day because some horrible experience caused them to reconsider the whole thing? That’s their prerogative. If they open a game and close it the very next week because RL got too hard? That’s their business.

Yes, it’s disappointing when games close. But guess what - even running YOUR OWN GAME doesn’t mean you’ll get a chance to finish the stories you imagined telling. Enjoy it while it lasts.

@GF said in New Concept:

if you can’t suspend your disbelief for less prejudice but can for God being a space squid who hates you, then maybe sit with that and really think about it.

If it’s a fictional setting? I absolutely can suspend my disbelief for that. But history is established. Someone (sorry can’t find the quote) mentioned “it’s just the 1920s but without discrimination.”

I don’t know what that means.

I’m not being snarky. I hate discrimination with a burning passion in RL, and I fully respect someone not wanting to deal with that in their pretendy funtimes.

The problem is that discrimination is so deeply baked into societal systems that it’s just not as simple to me as snapping your fingers and saying it doesn’t exist.

Everyone always points to Wild West settings and says: “If you can imagine a world where the PCs don’t die of dysentery, why can’t you imagine a world without discrimination?”

Easy. You’re not pretending dysentery doesn’t exist, you’re just saying the PCs are lucky enough to not contract it, or to contract it and survive – both of which actually happened.

“A world without discrimination” is just not the same thing. How did it get that way? Let’s start from that Wild West setting…if racism isn’t a thing, then logically slavery wouldn’t have been. There wouldn’t have been a Civil War (or it would have gone very differently). Heck, the entire economic basis of the south would probably be dramatically different. Oh and would America even exist at all if not for the genocide against the native peoples? How far back do we go with this?

If you want to do alt-history, that’s cool. That’s what Savage Skies did. They picked a divergence point (something about “when dragons appeared” IIRC) and then wrote the history from that point forward to explain why their imaginary world is different from our real world. It’s a bunch more work, but it addresses the issue cleanly.

Less clean is “racism exists but we don’t want stories about it here” because of systemic discrimination. What about the laws of the land? What about PCs who have discrimination in their backstories? It gets thorny.

I’m not telling people how they should RP. I just wish people would stop ascribing evil motivations to those of us who just have a hard time imagining a historical setting as an egalitarian utopia.

@De-Villefort said in But Why:

I’ve been thinking about it and maybe I’m just mad because the Lords and Ladies type games are glorifying some of the worst kinds of people to have ever existed on the face of the earth.

There have been Star Wars MUs where people play members/supporters of the literal fascist Empire; Wild West games where people play racists, outlaws, and robber barons; supernatural games where people play vampires and werewolves; and modern-day games where, indeed, people play super-rich elites.

This fixation that fantasy settings are bad and other genres are good seems weirdly out of step with what people actually do in those other settings.

People point to the staff tools and FS3 design in Ares as like: “This enables folks to run games with fewer staff,” and while that’s true, it’s backwards. Ares and FS3 were designed the way they are because games, including my own, were having trouble finding and keeping staff.

I personally experienced too many cases of staff blowups or abandonment through the years, some of which harmed relationships with friends. So for the last decade or so, I run games myself. That means not only do I need tools to support that (see: Ares and FS3), I need game design to support that. So generally I stick to single-sphere, PVE, narrowly-focused games. ETA: Also with de-centralized storytelling like @L-B-Heuschkel described.

@doodletilidie Be aware that if you allow players under 18 you’re subjecting yourself to the COPAA laws. Additionally, you may be opening yourself up to liability if you allow R-rated content on a wiki that is geared towards 13-year-olds (per your NSFW policy) or by allowing mature RP at all without the players involved having any means to verify the age of the people they’re playing with. Big can of worms. Don’t recommend.

ETA: COPAA is specifically for under-13 but other regional laws may still apply for under-18s, especially European players. Still don’t recommend.

@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.

@Pyrephox said in D&D Licensing Agreement:

I don’t begrudge Hasbro making money off of D&D. There’s a lot of the merchandising and expansion of the IP that I love. I know it’s only there because it’s profitable, but as long as it’s fun, it’s good. However, I don’t like the way this thing has been played…

That’s where I land. D&D is their product and they’re entitled to stop letting other people make money off it without getting a cut. But their terms are utterly ridiculous.

It would be like me saying that not only was AresMUSH no longer free, but if you use it you have to send me all your game’s wiki/css/etc. that I can use for whatever I want without paying you a cent. That’s just absurd.

Some players will roll with things - I love that. But I’ve had some players quit over what I considered natural (non character-ending) consequences of their PCs’ actions, and others throw gigantic fits over the smallest of setbacks.

PC death is my personal hot-button because it ends the story and makes you start over from scratch. That’s not fun for me, so I don’t play (or run) games like that.

@SpaceKhomeini said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

I usually operate under the assumption that the character I’m helming is largely an idiot and does idiot things that will result in idiotic self-owns.

Sometimes I forget that I haven’t communicated this loudly enough with everyone around me and they get kind of cagey when I do stupid shit IC.

The fact that this needs to be communicated at all is kind of emblematic of the core issue. Most players in my experience don’t want their character to come off looking bad (in their opinion) because they think it makes them look bad. There’s such an over-investment in IC success, glory, and coolness that if someone is actively trying to embrace natural consequences or have their character do something stupid, it’s looked upon with suspicion or disdain.

@RedRocket said in The 3-Month Players:

You had to struggle to become enough of a bad-ass not to have to live in fear all the time. I can not emphasize enough how important that feeling of progression is to the health of a game.

Many players enjoyed DarkMetal.

Many other players wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole because that style of gameplay holds no appeal to them.

TGG was a game with permadeath, trivially easy chargen, XP-based progression, stakes, drama, rotating “seasons” to keep things fresh, and the some of the most impressive immersive code systems I’ve ever seen. It still had a lot of player turnover. (and about 10 very passionate core players)

People want their actions and choices to matter. … It’s the same reason people add stakes and drama to TV shows. If nothing changes, there is no point.

This I agree with, but routinely killing your PCs off is not the only way to accomplish this. There are plenty of successful TV shows that avoid the Game of Thrones style of knocking off main characters left and right.

There is no one-size-fits-all game.

@STD said in World Tone / Feeling:

In my experience, most people don’t mind losing big – even going as far as character death – as long as it’s cool.

YMMV. Over the span of about 2 decades, I ran many different games with opt-in character death. You PC could be incapacitated, but would never(*) die without your consent. In that time, I can think of maybe two? three? players who chose to kill off their PCs voluntarily. These were high-stakes settings. Loads of gunfights, plenty of opportunities to write yourself out as a Big Darn Hero. The overwhelming majority of players I’ve encountered (both online and in offline TTRPGs) don’t want to lose their characters. Even if you ignore the XP loss, there’s an investment in relationships, story, development there that you can’t quantify.

(*) Barring extreme “you’ve painted us into a corner with your monumentally boneheaded actions” situations.

@Pavel said in World Tone / Feeling:

If there’s danger around every corner that’ll get you if you slip up for even a moment, your CG needs to take ten minutes and approval even less.

It’s certainly possible to do so. TGG had a high PC fatality rate and zippy fast chargen (I don’t think there was even an approval step).

@Warma-Sheen said in World Tone / Feeling:

a game where there’s danger around every corner that’ll get you if you slip up for a moment SHOULD make characters risk avoidant. The problem is that most games don’t provide a reward that is worth characters overcoming that risk avoidance.

There are certainly players who enjoy a high-risk environment, though my experience is they’re a small minority. For the rest, I’m skeptical that there’s any manner of reward that would get players to risk their characters to death at the drop of a hat. Most MU players don’t want to play the “you have died of dysentery” version of a Wild West game—they want outlaws, gamblers, and high adventure on the frontier. A real post-apocalyptic world would involve a lot of people making gardens, filtering water, and dying from small cuts and poor sanitation. Sane people in such an environment take risks to survive, but how do you model that in a game environment without forcing a MUD-like level of survival mechanics?

@Pavel said in Player Ratios:

Otherwise you fall foul of Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

Related to this, I think folks are vastly underestimating the level of toxic behavior that can result when players don’t get the points they feel they deserve, or don’t have the points to do what they want. Just look at why +vote/+nom systems fell out of favor. I even stopped using the completely useless (nothing but a public ‘attaboy’) +cookies on my games because of the complaints about so-and-so always getting all the scenes, or cookie-voting circles, or people feeling bad that they never made the leaderboard, or whatever. (There’s a reason they’re a plugin on Ares and not standard in the core code.)

Like @Jenn said - if someone wants to make a game like that and feels they can make it work, knock yourself out. I just don’t think it’s a good idea, and a game with systems like that would be a hard pass for me.

@Roadspike said in World Tone / Feeling:

But I also don’t really think that it should be necessary to tell players “No, you can’t end the war game’s war in a single stroke” in the lore.

This. I’ve had players who were like: “I know they’re gonna fail but my PC would try it…” and I’m totally on board with that. It’s the ones who don’t seem to comprehend why they can’t turn the game’s theme inside-out who frustrate me.

But back on topic - both as player and staff, I just focus on telling a fun and interesting story. Sometimes that might leave a permanent or temporary mark on the grid, or generate an IC news story, or lead to the PCs being recognized as Big Darn Heroes. Sometimes it all happens behind the scenes and nobody’s the wiser. I don’t need to change anything to enjoy the game.

@Pavel said in Player Ratios:

That goes double for taking things that are typically “free” (staff attention, entrance into plots, add your own example here) and making them require points. The EA or Ubisoft approach to staffing.

Yeah that’s why these kinds of systems always felt icky to me. We’re all here to tell stories. I’m not going to bribe you to do it, and I don’t want to be coerced to do things I wouldn’t already do just because you racked up some kind of brownie points.

@Tez said in Player Ratios:

You’re right, though. People love points go up, and having a visible badge. (Achievement unlocked.)

The thing about OOC reward systems is that you have to find rewards that people care about enough to incentivize the behavior you want, without incentivizing negative behaviors (like ticking boxes to get points, grinding points, getting bent out of shape when the thing you want to do requires points you don’t have, etc.) It’s the same set of issues core to all of these vote/nom/etc. systems. It’s very easy to do it poorly and very hard to do it well.

@KarmaBum said in World Tone / Feeling:

People seem to be saying this a lot, so I’m kinda curious what “touch the world” mean in terms of MUSH gameplay.

That’s something that’s always confused me as a game runner. If I’m playing a game, it’s because I like the setting. The idea of fundamentally changing the setting has always felt weird to me. Yet there are always players who want to civilize a Wild West game, create a superweapon that will defeat the Cylons in a Battlestar game, cure the zombie virus in a zombie game, etc.

Folks don’t seem to be satisfied by the more modest victories that don’t upend the theme: finding a supply cache, winning a battle, opening a store. To me, these are all things that touch the world, just in non-game-breaking ways.

@STD said in Player Ratios:

It was mostly just a way to prejudge storytellers so that constant permission wouldn’t be necessary. The whole “fits your game vision” is the problematic bit; someone who has run a few dozen smaller scenes can just go ahead with whatever big idea they have without having to bother staff.

Well I can only speak for myself, but I don’t care how good of a storyteller you’ve been in the past. Anything that has the potential to knock the game off its axis should go through staff first.

I’m also more lenient than most, though, in what you can run without any staff permission, so YMMV.

@STD said in Player Ratios:

What about cashing in the tokens to be able to make plots that actively change the world without having to go through ten layers of bureaucracy?

If somebody has a cool idea to change the world in a way that fits with your game vision, why would you require them to have OOC tokens to do so?

Conversely, if somebody has a terrible idea to change the game world in a way that wrecks the game, who cares how many tokens they have? It’s still not something you want.

@Tez said in Player Ratios:

How do you deal with maintaining a good ratio of people who can tell story to people who want story? What are some things that have worked? What are some things that have not?

I don’t. I expect players to make the majority of their own fun, and I enable them with tools and freedom to do so. A MU isn’t a TTRPG, and unless you have an entire fleet of storytellers, I don’t think it’s feasible to entertain everyone to the degree they wish to be entertained.

Of course I’ve also run stories on my games, but that’s as much for my own fun as anyone else’s. It’s never been intended to be the primary way to keep people involved.