WOD players are you guys okay??

@Faraday said in When is the last time you played?:

The possibly vain hope that someday life will settle down enough that I actually have the time and spoons to play again.

What would you want to play, if those conditions were achieved?

@Roz You aren’t even in the several years category GET OUT OF HERE lolol

For those who haven’t RP’d in several years, what keeps you checking in/weighing in on the forum? I’m referring here to the forum parts specifically about MUSHing and RP, not the social/ooc parts like RL support, pets, books, dead people, etc.

Back on FORT BLOODSHED (of ‘staff sent wild animals to ruin my canoodling’ fame) table talk was routed to a channel staff could see, and the staff characters would show up and accost you if you were saying something they didn’t like. That was about 10,000 years ago and I’m still wary of table talk.

But more genuinely, I think there’s pros and cons. It allows a smaller conversation during a giant scene, but rare are the games these days in which such giant scenes still occur. It can create some drama when you get left out of a tabletalk or someone poses to the room “Wow look at Ashkuri he is such an expired salami lol lmao” and then goes “oh sorry that was meant for my table!”

I think for Ares games, whose logging features do not mesh well with tabletalk as it was known in other formats, the “side scene” is better: spinning up another scene where you and your friend(s) have that small conversation from the party in the smaller group.

I’m glad to see Cujo took some action here. Those people cannot be allowed in any communities. They needed to be banned, they should be banned, they were banned.

However

I feel like it’s worth noting here that during my time on AOA Cujo did approve things like barely-legal characters with sex-slave backgrounds, as well as underage characters around 14/15 years old. @Zephyr pointed these things out to him and he didn’t really care (justification being that Jedi/Naboo queens/whatever “start young”) until she pressed him to speak to the players and make them age their characters up. As a player running into it on the grid you feel like “that can’t be right?? this person must have lied to staff. I will report it.” No, Cujo knew.

We greatly appreciate all evidence of bad behavior turned in to staff, and encourage the community helping to police the actions happening around the game. Please never fear submitting +rquests for help, or to provide the administration with helpful information on such matters

This is just idk. An insane thing for AOA to post, and there’s like 1300 posts expounding on that. Shit’s ridiculous.

The most difficult lesson I learned (hopefully learned lol) on my last staffing venture was what I said earlier and what everyone in the thread is saying: people just leave. You won’t always know why. They don’t even always know why. As hard as it is to swallow it, you can’t make a game so good and effort so perfect and a story so great that they stay. There is no amount of correct staff behavior that makes people stay, though there’s quite a lot of incorrect staff behavior that can make them leave.

At this point I just plan that the ending of the next game will be me and like 7 people and that’s alright.

People like what is new and struggle to keep fresh what has become familiar. There’s always a new game to check out. People’s rp partners/ships leave and make them less invested on their own, RL happens and then people struggle to re-engage, there’s all sorts of reasons. Also some games don’t have an end to stay to, they just wither out.

As both staff and player I am a Stay-er but I’ve come to understand it’s an aberration, lol. MUSH is a transient medium.

@xCroaker said in MU Peeves Thread:

Real question: What is staff overworked with in most games?

For me, it’s the labor of making sure plot/story is happening fast enough, that it’s happening often enough, that it’s accessible to everyone, that it’s still interesting and fun to people, that all the dots are being connected in an at least sort of sensible way, that it’s not too opaque and confusing and not too simple and boring, that it’s kept summarized and with reminders so people stay apprised of what’s happening…

Even with all that effort, people naturally lose interest in the game/story over time. Very few people are stay to the end people, which is the nature of the medium. I think persevering through the fatigue of “does anyone even care?” is another kind of staff work, perhaps one that doesn’t get talked about a lot.

IMO:

Async rp is not my first choice

Players doing async rp, reading real-time logs, and then incorporating that log knowledge into their “past” async scene as apparently prescient knowledge is unacceptable

Async events are hell. Everyone needs to take a turn before the action can resume and waiting 3 days for someone to say “I pursue the pickpocket” is awful

Speedy rp is kind of slept on as a fun option. Not every pose needs to be a Pulitzer Prize winner or to be 4 hours of real-time writing long. “Text” scenes, for themes that support them, can be a fun way to get rp done in a short amount of time.

I would not pay and I would not accept pay. I’m an unpaid martyr okay I’ve spent 28 years making this a core part of my personality

More seriously, I am just tired of paying for things.

One of the more key things for me (and mentioned by BN up there too) is

p a c i n g

And in particular, understanding that certain things take more time than other things. Asking PCs to brainstorm their own solutions, asking PCs to choose between a variety of options that may have good or poor outcomes, puzzle solving, talking to NPCs, resolving in-group disagreements as to approach, these all take way more RL time to accomplish than you’d sometimes think.

It’s important to keep it moving, it’s important not to get the players stuck on decision points or hurdles that won’t ultimately matter. Understanding for yourself how much time combat in your system generally takes (and how to keep it flowing relatively quickly) is important. And knowing which things are slow is important. It doesn’t mean you can’t do them, but if the PCs need to talk extensively with multiple NPCs and then have a fight, those may need to be separate sessions.

Back in the day I think events could be very long chunks of time and now you’re probably lucky to get 2-3 hours, because everyone including the GM is busy and has kids and has work in the morning. Pacing is key to get the most out of limited time chunks available.

@Jupiter said in Brainstorming Game Ideas:

I would like to make a game, but, I don’t want to put in hundreds of hours in development hell just to have it stall on release or have a player base of 3.

I don’t think there’s any way around this. There is no guarantee for what will be popular. Sometimes games with a dumb premise do really well for a long time, and sometimes games with a great, extremely popular premise go from boom to bust in 6 weeks.

IMO you can’t build for “what people want.” You can’t even build for what your friends might like, because even the closest of us don’t always like the same things. You can only build what you personally love, and that personal enthusiasm makes the work less “hell.”

If you like original setting vampires, do original setting vampires. People will come or they won’t, but if you’re excited about it and you/your team put genuine care and effort into it, I do think that players notice and appreciate.

What tips would you give a new (or even established) GM/ST to make MUSH events/scenes enjoyable? Perhaps from your perspective as a player, perhaps from your perspective as a GM, perhaps both.

There are some lengthy guides out there already, but let’s keep responses shorter form as posts here, rather than links.

@Yam I like anything that doesn’t make me do too much math

@bear_necessities said in Other People:

I think there is something to be said about having your own fun in order to make fun for other people.

There is, but for the purposes of this thread, we’re assuming you already checked that first box, “I am having fun to begin with.” Then the fun for other people can come in, which is the discussion I’m most interested here.

@bear_necessities said in Other People:

I’m a yes-and person. I do my best to be engaging …

Like so!

For the purposes of discussion in this specific thread I’m taking it as a given that the player is having fun, and I am interested in investigating how that player then makes sure others are also having fun as well, and shows interest in their experience.

“The player is not having fun to begin with” is kind of a different barrel of fish to shoot.

Gently steering this back on track

What do you do in your MU RP to make it fun for other people?

@Roo said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

even got to play with Hex and company, and it was great.

Aw, haha. I was a casualty of Cujo’s spree when all this went down (whole crew got banned), but if you had good experiences with us I’m very glad for that. The game is unfortunately not a good place to be, though.