Best posts made by Alveraxus

I think we can all agree that the following is horrible and should never be used except on your worst enemies:

You paged: Hi, can we talk?
<silence>

We are excited to announce that Alveraxus is opening up for players who wish to join during our Alpha stage.

You can visit us at https://alveraxus.com or connect via alveraxus.com port 4201

What is Alveraxus, you ask? Great question! In short, we are a grimdark fantasy AresMUSH that incorporates dynamics of Lords & Ladies, political scheming, and a diabolical metaplot.

An Empire has risen uniting several disparate lands - the sibling kingdoms of Volaren and Ibarta ruled by complex political maneuvering, the mountainous clans of Storr which laugh at the games their southern neighbors play, and the island nations of Kikari who do their best to do their own thing. Every 18 years, the Empire faces assault from a legion of monstrous, deadly insects. And every 18 years, the balance of power shifts.

During the Alpha, we will be actively running plots and events as we work to test out the two mechanics that we think make us fairly unique - generational time jumps and succession.

Rather than staying fixed in time, we will be fast forwarding 18 IC years after the invasion, tentatively planned to occur every RL year (although the Alpha will be a shorter time frame). This means that characters that survive the invasion may elect to age up or retire, but the children of those characters come to life as characters. You can truly see the merits of that carefully arranged political marriage as the children of that union become playable characters.

We also have a Succession system set up that allows for PCs to aspire to leadership roles, and provides a system for replacing existing leaders. We will be thoroughly testing this during the Alpha, and ultimately want a game where all of the major leaders are PCs, and it is the PCs whose actions dictate who take and retain those positions.

If you don’t want to dive into the politics and backstabbing, but still want to play in a Lords & Ladies or grim fantasy world with a solid metaplot, engaging theme, and active storytellers, there are regions such as Storr that do not engage in that nonsense. We included this so that players can choose the experience they want.

If you are interested in joining us, please visit us at https://alveraxus.com or alveraxus.com port 4201

Thank you!

Two things I want to comment on - players making the ‘wrong’ choice ICly (when they know what the right choice should be OOCly) and incorporating player choices into the story.

There’s a LARP principle that we talk about at the start of every game during our opening workshops that I see a lot of MUSH players take to heart, which is don’t be afraid to make good mistakes - if you are faced with a choice, sometimes making the choice you know is the wrong choice OOCly leads to more fun RP than if you were to make the right choice ICly.

I think if you come from a perspective where winning = the thing, then yes, not being able to do what you want when you want it can be frustrating. If you come from a perspective where the journey = the thing, then sometimes it doesn’t matter.

I have a very firm storytelling principle when I run a scene or a plot which is that if a player comes up with a clever move that I didn’t anticipate, I don’t no sell it. Even if it undoes the entire plot, and shifts to an entirely different resolution. Because ultimately, the players are not the NPCs in a story that I am writing, they are the PLAYERS and I am putting up a scenario for them. Even if it means that somehow the really cool dragon I was looking forward to them fighting never shows its face because they find a way to defeat the big bad WITHOUT having to get the MacGuffin hiding in the dragon’s hoard, well, good on them.

I can always find a way to use that dragon later, right?

@Juniper said in MU Peeves Thread:

My least favourite encounter in stories/plots is the Main Character Syndrome player.

I’m dealing with one in the current game I’m playing and I’m so fucking done with it. A decent amount of plot licking means they’re somehow constantly in the center of everything and there’s very little to do that doesn’t require going through them in some way. And they have a history of OOC aggression towards people trying to get involved in plots they’ve already licked.

When this is allowed to run rampant, it’s one of the fastest ways to get me to disengage with a game. I don’t feel the need to win as my character (I actually prefer losing more often than not as it leads to better character arcs IMO), but if the same person or few people are the ones always doing everything and I feel like my character is just a side character in their story, and staff lets that happen? Yeah, I’ll take my time and energy and go elsewhere.

The issue I find is it happens more often than not. I’d say that most of the places I’ve played in the past year or so, if you were to do a straw poll of players and asked, "Who seems like the ‘main character’ of this game?', you’d see a vast number of players answering the same person or people. That’s a problem.

Staff needs to be cognizant of these things and while it’s hard to tell a player “please don’t get involved in this plot”, there are ways that you can urge things in other directions and not get into a confrontation about it.

But as a player? If you don’t want to share your ball, I’ll go find another sandbox to play in. There are plenty of them out there, and none of them are SO GOOD that they are worth the mental energy of fighting with bad players over it.

@Third-Eye said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

There’s an audience for PvP. I am not in it, but it’s definitely there.

I would like whatever PvP games exist to be really upfront about what they are so people can self-select in or out.

That really was the catalyst of our idea, honestly. A lot of games try to be everything to everybody to have the broadest appeal possible, so we wanted to go the opposite route - be as clear as possible what we are aiming for, realizing that will limit our audience. But hopefully, those players will embrace it and might be thirsting for this type of atmosphere. There are plenty of good games out there, but we wanted to try something different.

We THINK there will be an audience for this, and if there is not, oh well. Great thing about Ares is that the barrier for entry is so low thanks to how easy Faraday makes it that if it doesn’t take off, it’s not like we’ll have thrown away a year of our lives.

@Jenn said in MU Peeves Thread:

But to have Players have to be responsible for needing to scene with people who have shown bad faith and intentional fuckery in the past? It’s not going to end well for anyone, and it’s very possible that many plots will just dead end before they’ve even gotten started.

Yeah. I don’t mean to derail this thread with too much talk about our game which is not yet open (haha, you all can trash us fully once we’re open, we’re bracing for it ), but this is 100% our belief and Roz called out how it’s a staff obligation above. We have that as a guiding principle, and what we’re really trying to call out with our “policy” is staff obligation to find a way to work other players into things they want to be in WITHOUT having to rely upon players RPing with anyone they don’t want to RP with. We have this listed above everything else on the gatekeeping page:

Prime Directive: We do not, and will not, compel anyone to RP with anyone that they do not want to RP with. Period.

The onus is on US, as Staff and Storytellers, to get Player A to where they want to go if Players B, C, and D don’t want to actively engage with them to get them there.

Then they can stare vacantly across the empty pond at each other and not interact, but each dip their toes in happily.

Or something like that, anyway.

(Unless they are really dirty enough to pollute the entire pond with their toe, and then we’ll be right there with you tossing them out.)

One of the truly foundational pieces of our game is:

“We will let you attempt to do anything that you want to do, and deliver the justifiable consequences as a result.”

I’ve always enjoyed playing characters that make the wrong IC decision because I think it OOC leads to better story telling, and that’s been a great source of fun for me. Sometimes a frustration for a ST that expects a story to go on rails, and I just kindly see myself out of those games if it happens too often.

On ours? “Oh, you want to murder the King? OK, tell me how.”

And that, kids, is How I Buried Your King.

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Alveraxus said in MU Peeves Thread:

it does give flexibility for things like radical IC world changes to support the vision that you have

That has to be one of my least favourite parts of all this nonsense Beta-maxing. Obviously, it’s not my game, not my vision, and YMMV, but if you’re going to radically change the IC world to match your “vision,” you should do that before you open, not when people are actively playing your game for months.

Having the flexibility to do something and the wisdom sometimes not to are two different things.

@imstillhere said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

@Alveraxus good luck lol

Thanks.

We’re really hoping that it’s more antagonistic scheming and jockeying for positions and influence, and not character on character violence, because there will be (ideally) ICly consequences among “society” that would stop people from shanking others in the street.

But we’re also fully prepared for this to catastrophically implode if the experiment doesn’t work.

@YetiBeard said in MU Peeves Thread:

@helvetica I realize I’m the outlier but spreadsheets play a weirdly big role in my pretendy fun time. I had some great spell / xp tracking sheets for Spirit Lake and then again when helping plan Shattered.

When building out rosters, I use a spreadsheet with concatenate to populate the command lines to build the characters so all I have to do is populate the cells with the info I want (demographics, backgrounds, description, etc) and then I can copy and paste the resulting cells into the client and POOF it can generate a character far faster than going through any other method.

Was also super helpful for building a bunch of channels when we first launched, etc.

@Jenn said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:

@Alveraxus

To clarify, it wouldn’t matter very much to me how long each character exists in between time-jumps to move forward to new arcs and generations. The part that would be make or break for me is how much time and advanced notice there would be prior to those time-jumps happening. As long as characters have time and warning to wrap up their stories in satisfying ways, I think that’s what would be the most impactful piece of enjoyment for me in such a theme.

It would be fully articulated, and this is a great point that I should have mentioned in the original post.

The time jumps would be on a set IC and OOC schedule (I drew some inspiration from the BSG episode 33 on this), so literally the CHARACTERS know that “every 18 years” something happens, and the PLAYERS know that the generation they are playing will timejump on April 1st every year, for example.

So the characters are building up to THE IC THING and the players have full time to prep.

@SpaceKhomeini said in MU Peeves Thread:

You’re talking about an entire business culture that is descended (at least on the English-speaking side of things — who else would say “do the needful”) from Victorian British colonialism. You don’t emerge from that without some…recognizable quirks.

I’ve found that being polite and direct (at least in my time working at HCL and Microsoft) at the first given opportunity, i.e. “how can I help you? I’m engaged in something right now but have a few minutes” tends to be an effective shortcut.

Oh, I know. Honestly, I find it very pleasant generally speaking, and really enjoy working with my non-US colleagues (other than scheduling meetings during cross-over timezones). I just find it amusing to contrast that with the more, shall we say, assertive and abrupt nature of people from Philly and surrounding areas.

I think that LinkedIn article was super interesting, and it’s definitely reframed a bit of how I think.

And, I have to say - I have grown accustomed to “doing the needful”, and it just warms my heart now. I have no idea how that became the idiom, but it just works for me.

I guess no real reason to be cagey about the theme. Although some details may be shifting before we fully open:

The Kingdoms spend 18 years preparing for an invasion that history has shown happens every 18 years (for Reasons that will be researchable ICly as part of the meta-plot), and each “generation” of the MUSH would play out the final 6 months or so leading up to that invasion, the immediate aftermath (it’s generally devastating so great opportunity for characters to go out with heroic death) and then picking up the pieces to sort out who is replacing nobles and leaders who die in the struggle.

And then we would fast forward 18 years in the future to the final preparations for the invasion again.

Players whose characters didn’t die would have a choice of whether to age them up or write up what happens to them in the intervening 18 years, and so on and so forth.

Another inspiration is Raymond Feist’s Riftwar saga, where seemingly at the end of every book various people get promoted, heirs take over, etc.

@Pacha said in MU Peeves Thread:

So, the only real grey area is quite rare cases, such as an unmarried couple, a female character who wants to be single mum, or a same-sex couple who wants to have a child by surrogacy, as examples. From playing other Lords and Ladies-style games, all of these seem to be vanishingly rare in the genre.

I’m not sure if you mean that support for same-sex families is vanishingly rare or not, but when we stood up our L&L game we made it very explicit and purposeful that there is no discrimination or social mores against same-sex relationships, and children either adopted or born from one partner biologically but not the other are treated the same as children born biologically, etc. It was extremely important to us to create a safe space where people of all genders and inclinations could play the way that they wanted.

For the record, we handle IC pregnancy (which as a game that does generation fast forwards is actually rather important as the game BY DESIGN would allow for those children to potentially be played within a relatively short OOC time span) as simply as possible - the player(s) involved indicate consent in a job, boom. No one is going to care either way. (And yes, while we have not had that request, if a player wanted to be a single parent OR become pregnant with a character not played by a PC, we would allow for that too.)

So unfinished business. That is definitely going to be a theme, because there will be long-term desires/goals of the various families/duchies/kingdoms that will not be able to be accomplished in a single generation. So there is that sense of building up to a legacy, that I hope is not too grand.

We’re planning on trying to tie things together in interesting ways with secrets and the like. And part of will definitely be uncovering a mystery in stages. The “antagonists” that invade every 18 years will eventually need to be defeated, but there are several keys along the way to ensuring they don’t come back, and it will, in some cases, be left to later generations to finish the work of the formers. At least, that is kind of the vibe we are aiming for.

I appreciate everyone’s comments and feedback so far, and the questions. It’s given us a lot to think about, but it feels from the overall vibe of the thread that some people really like this idea (which is what we hoped) and some people are thinking that this is not for them. Which is also fine, because we’re not necessarily chasing every player. I feel like games that try to cater to everyone ultimately cater to no one to any great extreme when all is said and done.

I also appreciate the encourage. We’ll keep working away, and I’ll monitor this for other thoughts, but hopefully take some of this feedback in house as we are thinking through some of these mechanics. Thanks!

@Pacha said in MU Peeves Thread:

What I was saying is that in my (personal, subjective) experience of the genre, I see/have seen very few examples of it actually happening, whether the support is there or not.

AH, that makes sense. I’m not sure how the trends are going. Based around “active” characters, we’ve got 3 NB characters (and one about to come out of chargen) versus about 80 binary. I obviously am not tracking orientation. But that does seem low, even though we offer it and encourage players to play as they would like.

Thank you for running an inclusive game. I think all games should be.

I agree, and to be fair, I think a lot of games are. We’re not alone in making a specific and emphatic statement about inclusivity, but I also know other games may not have it written as a policy but do encourage a community of that. I think generally MUSHers (and of course we have outliers) are a more accepting group in general as a population. I’d like to think so, anyway.

@Third-Eye said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:

Have ‘secrets’ been mentioned by the OP or is this just a port idea from Arx?

Genuine question, I engaged in some skimming.

Answering here because it came up a few times - I did mention secrets, but as others noted, it’s really more about house/duchy/kingdom secrets and not character secrets. So not really a port from anywhere. Just literally things like, “This duchy and that duchy, despite being in rival kingdoms, have a secret alliance” and “The son of the Duke of this place is really the son of the Duke of THAT place” and bits of drama and plot.

PLAYERS are free to come up with clever secrets to their background if they want them (including adding a secret to a roster character if they claim them), but no, we’re not handing out secrets to everybody. The last thing we want is to someone to claim a character they really like from the roster and then have some sort of “twist” that they hate, but ties into something so they are stuck with it.

We want to empower players to come up with their own ideas. Like, if they want to decide that they secretly went against their own brother in succession 15 years ago, go for it.

Yeah, point taken. Wasn’t my intent, just thought it was an interesting discussion on a topic relevant to my interests, but I see how it could be taken that way looking back at the comments. My apologies.

Tis funny. I was coming here to actually post a question along these lines for something I am working on, and saw this topic and wanted to weigh in.

I can tell you that I have definitely been impacted enough to shed tears when reading a pose. Or when writing a pose. Characters can just really get to you.

Or their pets, too.

I think as long as you maintain a healthy hold on bleed and alibi (how much of your character comes into your real life and how much of your real life comes into your character) and can avoid letting it really effect you, it can be a sign of good storytelling and a good bit of catharsis.

But I am also the sort of person who started crying watching Home Alone yesterday, so I may not be the best example. (I’m a bit of a softie.)

Can we post ones we don’t mourn or regret?

Dodi : Suppose I could deliver you a star so big that little children in the crap-infested streets of Calcutta know his name.

Peter Dragon : Dodi, I’m eating spring rolls.

Dodi : Sorry. But suppose I could deliver this huge star, I mean, a guy better known than Tom Hanks, and you’d only have to pay him scale?

Peter Dragon : Who is it?

Dodi : Well, he’s a very complicated client.

Peter Dragon : Who is?

Dodi : I can’t tell you.

Peter Dragon : Can you give me a hint?

Dodi : Eh, he had some legal problems.

Peter Dragon : Drugs? Is it Robert Downey Jr.?

Dodi : No, Pete, my man’s clean. Straight-arrow, strong, healthy.

Peter Dragon : Can you give me a bigger hint?

Dodi : Well… he was falsely accused of a double murder.

[pause as Peter looks at him]

Dodi : Now, because of the potential P.R. problems, my agency can’t officially

[makes air quotes]

Dodi : represent him.

Peter Dragon : You’re pitching me O.J. Simpson.

Dodi : Yes, I am. Pete, little children in Calcutta know his face.

Peter Dragon : Yes, they know to run away from it.

Dodi : The name is more recognizable than Tom Hanks.

Peter Dragon : Okay. But, you know what, Tom Hanks refuses to go that extra mile and hack his WIFE to death!

Dodi : He was acquitted, man! Pete, with all due respect, someone’s gonna put him in something, and people are gonna want to see him. Sure, at first, as a curiosity, but I think they’re going to be pleasantly surprised with his acting chops. Now, he’s been studying with a coach- I recently saw him do a monologue from “Raisin in the Sun”.

Peter Dragon : Really? How was that?

Dodi : Truthfully? It was very moving.

Peter Dragon : Dodi?

Dodi : Yeah?

Peter Dragon : Get out!

Dodi : How about a villain? He’ll play a villain. Come on, who’s scarier?

[mimes stabbing]

Peter Dragon : YOU’RE scarier! God!

Dodi : Come on, Peter, just the shock value sells a million tickets, and he’s going at bargain-basement rates. Hey Pete, do you play golf?

Peter Dragon : You know what? I think I just threw up, like, inside my throat? Get out, please.

[shuts the door on him]

Dodi : [from outside] Okay, but just a word of warning: The guys at Fox are all over him!