@Faraday said in "My Guy Syndrome":

But a lot of those things aren’t inherently bad. If your character wouldn’t think the planet is safe, and it’s really important to you to honor that, I don’t think it’s a cardinal sin to politely sit a scene out. Same for RPing out an IC grudge, or some of the other things you listed.

And sometimes this goes all the way around to what @Muscle-Car described as weaponizing my-guyness. “Hey, I’m sorry I blew up your character’s car that she got from her grandfather and rebuilt with her own hands, that’s just what my guy would do. Wait, why are you being such a My-Guy jerk and holding a grudge about it? Why can’t we just go back to being friends? You’re not being a very good collaborative roleplayer.”

Acting and reacting in-character isn’t binary, and, like a lot of things, it’s good up to a point and bad when taken too far. Of course, not everyone agrees on what constitutes “too far,” and that’s kind of the root of the problem. Some things are almost always not OK (the thief who murders everybody else in the party and steals all the loot because “that’s what my character would do” – but even this might be fine if the expectations are set appropriately). Some things are almost always OK (holding a grudge against whoever murdered your character’s best friend – but this can still be taken too far and become not-OK). Lots and lots and lots of things fall into a gray area where some people think they’re fine and other people think they’re not.

Communication helps, but even then you sometimes run into disagreements between players. What to one person feels like raising a reasonable concern over what someone else’s character might be contemplating, might from the other side feel like inadequate player-character separation (“gosh, she’s getting really upset over something that’s happening to her character”).

There’re just an awful lot of ways to misunderstand what’s going on in someone else’s head, and many (most?) of us aren’t really that good at putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes. I don’t think there is a single solution here other than to try to listen to what people are saying even when they aren’t saying it out loud, and that’s a really hard skill to learn.

@catzilla said in Long or Short? Application Process!:

Do you prefer lengthy/intensive application process? Or a shorter one where you get into play quicker?

I don’t have a single answer to this; both long and short processes have worked for me in the sense of “I got a memorable character and some good RP out of this”, and both have been failures in the same sense.

I think that the length of an application process should be informed by the kind of game being run. A game where everyone is a World War 1 soldier in the Battle of the Somme and it’s expected that characters will die in droves will benefit from making it as fast and easy as possible to get back into play. Similarly with a no-holds-barred PvP-encouraged type of game.

At the other extreme, a game where you’re expected to hold onto the same character for years and build up an extensive in-game history and character relationships doesn’t have to have a lengthy application process, but it’s more tolerable to me since I know I’m not likely to have to do it again any time soon.

People have mentioned the desire that information provided in an app be used in play by staff, which is also vanishingly rare in my experience. I also appreciate getting some indication that my work was actually read during the application process. If I spent hours putting the writeup together, it’s nice if the feedback touches on some of the stuff I wrote about in terms of “we liked this, it fits well with the game” or “this isn’t a great fit, but what about this?” instead of just “your stat math is off, fix it.”

I strongly agree with @Pavel (and others) that if a game has requirements then they ought to be explicitly set out - ideally somewhere that’s as front and center to the players as possible so that it’s difficult to miss. And while I don’t usually write my backgrounds in bullet point format, I do find “here’s the bullet points we’d like your background to cover” super helpful in making sure I cover everything that staff wants to see, and not too much that they don’t.

At the risk of sounding like I’m victim blaming, we also have to be willing to take “yes” for an answer. If staff explicitly say something like “If your background is more then N words, you’re probably going into more detail than we really need,” and I proceed to write a background that’s 5N words in length … that’s not something staff can fix.

@somasatori said in Numetal/Retromux:

That said, PVP is a difficult one. On one hand, if you explicitly prohibit PVP in a WoD environment, it takes some of the bite out of inter-sphere relations. On the other hand, allowing for a no-holds-barred environment will make the game – from examples I’ve seen – into a tedious free-for-all. I’m not sure if it’s just my perception based on the people I talk to, but I feel like interest in PVP has dropped off in the last little while.

I would agree on both counts. Very little turns me off a game faster than players who think threatening murder is an appropriate first response … but there are some things that ought to get you killed in a WoD game. If there’s no downside for a vampire who feels like rolling up onto the heart of the local werewolf caern, then vampires who feel like it are going to do that, and there are a non-zero number of vampires who will feel like it.

On the gripping hand, there isn’t always clear agreement on what those things are. I’ve met people who felt that “I think you might have figured out that I belong to splat X” falls into the “warrants death” category, and people who felt that executing characters from a different splat did not fall into that category. Unsurprisingly, people tend to have separate standards for when they should be allowed to murder someone and when someone else should be allowed to murder them.

“Don’t PVP someone unless staff agrees with you that they have done something galactically stupid” is a little unsatisfying, and prone to the usual complaints about staff favoring one party over the other, but I find I still prefer it to either of the other two extremes.

No single answer, but:

• I’ll tolerate more if the differences are clearly laid out before I invest time into the game. I’ll tolerate less if the game keeps changing the rules midstream, or hides changes until you run into them in play, or especially if it does both.

• I’ll tolerate more if the changes seem to be grounded in a desire to do things I’m in sympathy with (say, to make an otherwise awkward system work more smoothly). I’ll tolerate less if they seem to stem from a desire to do things I don’t care for.

• I’ll tolerate more if the game is otherwise well-run and engaging. If I can get involved and have fun with it, I am less concerned that, say, the Ventrue don’t exist, or that Werewolf characters don’t have rank, or whatever.

@MisterBoring said in Numetal/Retromux:

I think this is a whole different conversation, because looking at the documentation for all of the active WoD games out there, at least a couple of them have house ruled too much.

At one end of the spectrum, Changeling has so many unclear and sometimes self-contradictory rules that it’s difficult to avoid ending up with a lot of house rules, even if most of them are essentially just “and this is the interpretation we’re going with.”

At the other end is “We don’t like the way Vampire Disciplines work by the book and so we’re going to introduce a completely new set of rules for them.”

My extremely cold take is that if you’re advertising your game as using such and such system, you should probably make an effort to stick to the rules of game system as much as possible, and that the fewer differences your players have to learn, the better. But then again, two different people may have wildly different ideas about how that looks in practice for any given game system.

Today! I’m still trying to work myself back into the frame of mind where daily RP is the norm, and it can sometimes be something of a challenge. But I’m still having fun, and while this might just be unwarranted optimism I feel like that won’t change any time soon.

@Gashlycrumb said in Numetal/Retromux:

b) restrain your model-world building at least to the point where you do not need to assign plot-armour to PCs, ‘fudge’ rules to save them from their mistakes, or put up with them being rude, because losing them would lay waste to the setting

At this point I tend to assume that any game with a PC vampire Prince, werewolf sept alpha, changeling overlord of the whole area covered by the game, etc., is guilty until proven innocent.

@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

This might be a little controversial or whatever but this thread has made me wonder if our pacing style has changed/evolved just due to how we MUSH now. It’s only semi-recently (like the past 5 years-ish) that I’ve been able to have multiple scenes going at once, which has in fact affected my pace. And because other people have multiple scenes going at once, that means they are posing at a different pace, which has in turn affected my pace.

So anecdotes are not data, but I have logfiles from a single game that date from 1994 through 2005, then from a second game with the same theme and significant playerbase continuity that date from 2007 through 2012, and then some additional snapshots of my own RP (albeit in different-themed games and with different player groups) since then. Just looking at these in isolation, an evolution in pacing style is clearly visible over time.

• The early logs are almost all short, rapid-fire, and highly reactive – often just one sentence at time, with very little variance from the basic say/pose format.

• By 2004, there was still some of that, but individual poses were starting to run longer, have better narrative flow, and show evidence of more reflection than reactivity.

• By 2007-2008 the stylistic transition from reactive to reflexive has mostly completed and the use of @emit in place of than pose/say is starting to crop up occasionally, but it’s still pretty unusual and the average pose length is still only ~3-4 lines.

• By 2012 we’re getting up to 5-6 lines per pose and seeing the occasional embedded paragraph break along with more regular use of @emit.

Past 2012 the evolution is mostly in terms of gradually increasing average pose length, steadily increasing use of formatting, and a gradual abandonment of say/pose entirely, with @emit almost completely replacing both of them.

I think for me the major inflection point happened around ~2006-2008 – it gradually became less improv and more writing. I stopped trying to react as the character and started trying to craft a narrative. Poses I wrote in 2010 read not too differently from poses I write today, except for being shorter and brisker; poses I wrote in 1998 are from a completely different mindset and only share the occasional telltale quirk of vocabulary or phrasing.

@Jihgfed said in Intro to MU*ing Event:

How the heck do you pronounce “MU*s”, anyway? “Moos”? “Myoo-stars”?

“MOO” was/possibly still is also a server family, standing for “MUD, Object-Oriented.” So I wouldn’t go with that one, just to minimize the possibility of confusion.

@Cobalt I’m sorry to say mine is not, but I’ll keep my fingers crossed. My partner’s been job-hunting for way too long to be comfortable, and it sucks.

If well-wishes can do anything, you have mine!

@mietze said in Factions:

I can’t really put my finger on it, because it wasn’t that the game was swarmed by evil people or anything weird like that. I am thinking perhaps it’s easier to mind small burps before they turn into catastrophic spew with a small number of players?

At the risk of overreading my experiences, I’m not sure it takes much more than a small handful of people who treat faction conflict as OOCly competitive rather than cooperative. Someone decides they’re going to get a definitive win over the enemy by leveraging their superior game stats to permanently eliminate someone on the other team, and now everyone’s thinking about that possibility.

People who are competitive by nature have something to point to to rationalize pushing their own stats further (and once you have that hammer, you start to look for nails). People who aren’t suddenly realize that their investment in the character is at risk from people with more system mastery, and become less willing to engage outside their comfort zone. And so on.

I agree with both of you! I enjoy not knowing everything OOC about other characters so I can discover it in play, and I enjoy knowing enough OOC about other characters to make RP happen.

If I’m playing in the Vampire sphere, I find it useful to know who the other vampire characters are, so I know who to look for if I want to talk IC about vampire stuff without a lot of hemming and hawing to make sure we’re not breaking the IC Masquerade by doing so. On the other hand, I don’t want to know what their sheets look like or what their backstories are because I enjoy that mystery.

But I’m also pretty sure everyone draws the line dividing “things they like to know about OOC” from “things they like to not know about OOC” in a different place. OOC Masq is a spectrum.

@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:

A PVP game would definitely need all these things, but I don’t think we should throw away the narrative aspects as well.

A major element of why no one is running a WoD game that does these things – aside from the fact that a lot of people who are capable of running them don’t want to, for whatever reason – is probably that it would be really hard, and would by its very nature make getting into the game more difficult for new players.

Just running a WoD game at all, by the books (as much as running WoD “by the books” is even possible, considering the number of things that are unclear, left out, or outright contradictory), is not an easy task. To make an PvP-focused WoD game that has fast and easy cgen, good game balance, and straightforward combat would add to that the need to radically rewrite and rebalance the whole WoD game system.

That’s a massive level of effort, and what you’d end up with is likely to be something that’s just enough like the WoD that potential players already know to be confusing and frustrating. (“What do you mean, Celerity doesn’t add additional actions?”). You’d basically be asking players to learn an entire new game system that’s kind of like WoD, but different enough that they can’t rely on their pre-existing knowledge of it. And at that point, why not just start with a game system that’s better at what you want it to do than WoD is?

High-stakes competitive PvP isn’t really my thing, but I can see how it could be appealing if it were done in a way that made it easy to jump in, easy to come back after a character gets killed, easy to resolve conflicts between characters without needing staff intervention, and that had pretty even game balance so that the PvP fights were actually challenging rather than just one-sided gankfests, and so that no single character or group of characters remained “safe” for very long.

And WoD just seems like a really counterintuitive choice for something like that.

• It has complex and convoluted rules that often differ significantly between spheres and that are a frequent source of arguments among players.
• Character generation is complex and time-consuming.
• WoD game balance is legendarily poor, both between splats and even between individual characters in the same splat.
• WoD puts a heavy focus on personal storytelling, so players tend to get more invested in their individual characters, and losing them feels like more of a hit.

Some of these things could be fixed! You could trim down the number of available options into a much smaller set that were reasonably balanced against one another and that reduced the time needed for character creation and the need for significant staff oversight. You could excise or rewrite some of things that make combat time-consuming and complex. You could throw out the idea of personal storytelling entirely and approve or deny characters strictly on the basis of whether their math adds up. You could, in short, make the process of getting into the game, participating into the game, and getting back into the game a lot more like popular PvP video games.

I have never played Fortnite, but I really doubt that it (or any other popular PvP game) makes you sit out for several hours working on a new character when you get killed. When death is a frequent occurrence, then the amount of investment that death costs a player needs to be smaller. The more common it is, the easier it has to be to get back into things. WoD is the opposite of that.

Single-splat games have a lot of benefits. They’re easier to run, especially because they tend to be smaller. Smaller size and tighter focus can make for more personal storytelling and more individual attention for the player base. (Not that they always do, but they can.) And you can have a bit more freedom in terms of how you construct your game world – if you want your Werewolf game to have vampire bad guys who aren’t really like the Camarilla and also aren’t really like the Sabbat, it’s an awful lot easier to do that when you don’t have to totally rearchitect a PC Vampire sphere in order to do that.

Kitchen-sink games are harder to build and run. But they do have an advantage in that all-important “engagement” factor: because they tend to be larger, it’s usually easier to find someone to RP with when you feel like playing. Even if it’s someone from a different, possibly hostile sphere who you can’t talk shop with, there’s a lot to be said for making it easier to get to the “roleplaying” part. And while yes you could have a single-sphere game that has that level of engagement, I think it’s easier with kitchen-sink games just because you’re maximizing the number of people who your elevator pitch will grab onto.

While I might say I prefer the former, and I’ve had a good time on some single-sphere games, according to my revealed preferences I value being able to find RP easily more than I value the potentially more personalized and more individualized experience of a single-splat game.

@Pacha said in MU Peeves Thread:

I think it is nice that games are a lot more chill these days, but I think it probably speaks volumes about the general state of WoD games that my most comfortable state is to be completely under the staff’s radar because staff on a WoD game paying close attention to what you’re doing is almost universally bad.

This is more or less how I feel, also; I can’t think of more than one or two times in mumble years when being noticed by staff on a WoD game has led to something positive. Usually it’s at best going back to status quo ante.

So … suggestions for how could staff members behave that wouldn’t lead people to dread getting noticed by them? Other than “interact with players for reasons that aren’t taking things they enjoy away from them”?

@Roz said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

I actually think it’s hugely common that players do not have an entirely accurate read on how chill they are with consequences.

Most of us are really bad about putting ourselves in other people’s shoes, and what someone else thinks is a reasonable consequence may not even show up on our radar as a possible reaction.

@Cobalt #teamShadowheart

1. When running a game, please pick a game system that you actually want to run and are more or less happy with as written. Why aggravate yourself and your players by trying to houserule Dungeons and Dragons into feeling like Everway? Wouldn’t everyone be happier if you just used Everway to start with?

2. Because it’s basically inevitable that there’ll be some aspects of your chosen game system you’re unhappy with, try to identify them and houserule them away before you open the floodgates to the world.

3. If there’s something you missed in steps one and two and you don’t notice it until the game’s been open for a while, consider just leaving it alone, even if it irks you. If it hasn’t come to your attention by now, it might not actually be as much of a problem as you think.

4. If you are absolutely certain that the thing you missed for several years is a problem worth houseruling away, at least try to set out all your new houserules at once and ideally include some things that will make players happy along with them.

I get it. Some game systems are kind of broken. Some things don’t start to become problematic until a game’s been going for a while. It happens, and I support fixing problems that really need to be fixed. I just don’t want to play Calvinball, you know?