I was excited to hear about a new sin, but I really do wonder how the killer will handle this one in the remake of Se7en, which will have to be called Ei8ht.

@MisterBoring said in Metaplot: What and How:

Metaplots are interesting in MUs because a significant number of players on MUs don’t pay attention to them (which can have interesting results when the metaplot touches them).

This is probably because metaplots, very often, “touch all the PCs” but it is far, far less common for all the PCs to be able to touch the metaplot.

@MisterBoring Oh, yeah. It’s up to hosts to ask people to leave. If they won’t, ugh, and you’re right.

Making a new character and trying to pass yourself off as a different person because you’ve annoyed people and they don’t want to play with you is a Bad Idea even when it’s as innocent as that can be.

@Juniper It’s probably pretty much impossible to be fair in judging what ‘justifies’ a stat. When you’re doing it for hundreds or scores of characters, anyway.

@MisterBoring said in Staff and playable pcs:

Also, if it becomes obvious that character X’s player is a bad actor, knowing who their alts are makes it easier for the playerbase to just stop playing with all of their PCs, which can help get them to leave.

When it becomes obvious that Player is a bad actor, what you do is borrow the courage of a bunny and tell them they are no longer welcome and now must leave. Don’t fucking torment them or the rest of the players.

However, one very good reason for alt transparency is that indeed, nobody should have to play with someone they don’t want to play with. Letting people try to work their way in with another alt disrespects that. Let Abelard avoid playing with Bridget, and do not make him have to work out that Camille, Dante, Eliphias and Grimwood are all Bridget-player too. How many crap times should the poor bastard have to endure before he’s done dealing with Bridget? And please don’t put him in a situation where he can’t say, “Bridget won’t leave me alone,” because he’s not supposed to know that Camille is the same player and will get in trouble for “breaking the OOC Masque” by figuring it out.

@Faraday said in Staff and playable pcs:

I think we’re on close to the same page. It’s just that in the first paragraph you say you don’t think they “should” like there’s some kind of moral or ethical problem with doing so.

Naw, I’m talking best-practices for a fun game. The only ethical problem I see with this sort of thing is doing it but hiding the fact. That’s a bait-and-switch for players.

I had a lot of fun on Anomaly TrekMUX. The overarching grand big plot was all centered on the gamerunner’s PC, a Chosen One who would save the universe. I did not like this, but I knew it before I apped. I also knew there was Lesser Plot stuff to do, and so.

This didn’t mean that I and other players didn’t roll our eyes and bitch about that plotting-choice all the time. But I don’t/didn’t feel jerked around or fucked with like I do when I’ve been playing a while and am invested and find out it’s The Staff PC Show.

Thing:

You’re GMing. You have friends. Staff teams are often groups of friends. You chat with your friends more than you do with everybody else. You chat about the game. Storylines that suit your friends’ characters occur to you more readily because of this. This is just how it is.

If alts are secret it’s eaasier to just proceed with those storylines that occur to you without thinking about how far you are falling into The GM’s Friends’ Show territory. Just having it be game-wide knowledge encourages you to adapt your idea to less-familiar PCs, or invent something else so you can space things out a little more.

Making staff, but not everyone else, disclose alts, sounds rubbish.

@Faraday

Erm, as I said:

@Gashlycrumb said in Staff and playable pcs:

from time to time, let their PCs be stars, same as (I wish) every PC

I don’t think staff should GM themselves to get to have fun on their own games. They should get to actually be Big Damn Heroes in proper RPG fashion.

Though, yeah, if as you say, nobody will ever organize a plot to further your PC’s development, well, that does suck and I wouldn’t hold it against you of you do a plot to showcase your own PC. I have seen this happen and be done well, and also done good-enough.

It is yet another not-all-the-time thing. I’d also make a distinction between, “This is a plot to explore and develop my PC” is different from a “This looks like a job for my PC!” story where it’s simply written so that your PCs’ abilities are the ones needed and everybody else’s role is to learn that they can’t do it.

But even that is a matter of taste. I’ve seen games where pretty much every plotline resolved with a staff PC/NPC saving the day but people still enjoyed themselves.

I would not want to attempt to ban staffers from doing either, and I really don’t think players will mind even quite egregious ‘only the secrets of basketweaving can unlock the curse and staff-alt is the only basketweaver’ stories if there is not a pattern of that, or the pattern is closer to five percent of the time than fifty. Or whatever it is they personally find reasonable.

@Roadspike said in Staff and playable pcs:

I also think that a staffer’s PC should never be “out in front” of a story.

Never? That’s harsh.

I think that they should not be at the front of their own stories. Writing a “this looks like a job for my PC!” plotline is not a great look.

I think they should avoid being at the front of stories run by other GMs most of the time. But from time to time, let their PCs be stars, same as (I wish) every PC who wants to. I’m also all for Sadie Hawkins events where regular players run stuff to star the staff’s PCs.

One thing about alt-transparency is that it lets players judge how much is too much. Or if they even care. Without it being some surprise when somebody spills the beans about the identities of staff PCs, which is bound to happen anyway.

@chorus said in Staff and playable pcs:

B: Everyone who plays on any game should be able to expect a level of privacy, which includes not having to disclose to the general population who their alt characters might be.

Why? MUing is so anonymous that you can easily keep secret not just your medicals, financials, shorts-size, diet and the contents of That Drawer, but also what continent you live on. What benefit is there in having a level of privacy such that you’ve all that and are also able to pretend to be several different people?

@BloodAngel

Staff should be allowed PCs.

Everyone should be required to disclose their alts.

The frequency and harmfulness of the fuckery that is immediately squashed by requiring and enforcing alt-registration is great.

@MisterBoring said in Consensus on Roster vs OC vs Mix:

I sort of want to see a game that daringly chooses to eschew both rosters and OCs and go for a new alternative: purely random generation.

I am now imagining a web-based chargen where it’s all fill-in-the-blank or pick-one,. Starts off with a concept ala’ Chaosium CoC, ‘Professor’, ‘Dilettante’ which gives you the basic sheet, you have points to customise with. But any place you didn’t pick/didn’t fill in the blanks/left points unassigned it fills in randomly.

@STD One of my favourite stories about this is the one where students learning about Skinner’s work in a lecture class applied it to the professor. Their reenforcer was to look attentive. It didn’t take them very long to have the professor consistently lecture from the location the students had chosen and in a pose they’d chosen. The funny bit is that the professor was enormously pissed off when they told him they’d done this, rather than delighted.

When I was young and hot I used to shape behavior in aquaintances, like the foul-tempered bus driver on the route I had to take, by smiling at them.

Edited to add: Karen Pryor is much more fun to read than Skinner. Don’t Shoot the Dog is a dumb title, but it’s a great book. The thing where you do clickerr-training on other humans as a parlour game is hilarious fun. And the whole business is good for your head, because you end up having to constatantly look for and attend to behaviors you want, you’re always focused on positive shit.

@Pavel Naw, he’d just take three minutes to train a pigeon to kick your ass.

@Raistlin I think a lot of games could benefit from having something like that. Grab-and-go PCs.

I dunno if it comes up now, but people used to say that an effort-intensive process to create an OC or claim a roster would improve player-retention – the player had to be invested in the game to do all that.

My experience was that in reality, people are just as likely to drop the game after doing five hours of work chargenning as those who spent twenty minutes, and the real key to getting them to connect again is to get them into a fun scene as soon as you possibly can. Ask B.F. Skinner about it.

@MisterBoring I’m down with it. That would work really well for my ‘Call of Cthulhu on a Cruise Ship’ idea…

I like descs. I like writing them. I like reading them. I hate it when it’s a link to a picture.

But as a staffer I wasn’t looking for writing quality in your character desc or your BG. I just wanted them to show that your character belonged in the game world.

I don’t think you can do Chekhov’s Gun on a MU, you never know what will become relevant. Or what major super obvious thing you’ve been pointing at with your whole character-concept will somehow, against all the odds and the conventions of fiction, never matter.

@bear_necessities said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Jumpscare said in MU Peeves Thread:

Yes, her eyes may harken back to bygone timeless memories hidden within pools of mystery, but what color are they?

IDK about you but eyes harken back to bygone timeless memories isn’t an automatic AI flag to me. I’ve seen descs like this since the late 90s?

Yeah. Back in the early '90’s there was a WORA thread challenging to people to spoof this – write the most unweildy, long, screen-scrolling purple desc you can write, without it including any basic information. Hair colour, eye colour, skin colour, height, weight, age, and if you were really good at it, appearant gender, all obscure. Actually I doubt ChatGPT could do it so well.

I don’t care what it looks like, but is there a skin where the page-up/page-down button does not cover up the drop-down to edit or delete your post when your post is the last one?

Edited to add that this is fixed, perhaps by magic.

I have toyed with an idea much like the ‘echelons.’

But my thought was more about players than characters.

Say, you can set your character-type as “main” “supporting” or “extra.” Each player gets one main character. Plots center on main characters. Your other characters are supporting cast or local colour. You can switch their roles, but not all the time or often.

I often like to play those ‘supporting cast’ parts. But I hate being shoved into the background if I want and have expressed a desire for some main-character action.

And it really annoys me when there’s MU full of people pleading for GM attention and it turns out Player Bob is not only playing Snake, the BIG STAR of the Motorcycle Gang Faction, he’s also playing Kyle, the BIG STAR of the Rodeo Cowboys Faction, and Roscoe, the BIG STAR of the Cops Faction…

@Taika It seems like Sun has made effort not to tell the game what’s happening, so maybe you want to edit that? I certainly hope people don’t bring it up with her, given that.

And, yeah. Whatever the reason, jobs don’t get vetted for timeline.

@STD said in Liberation Drama!?:

Is Liberation the one where all plots have to come top down? And there’s only predetermined characters allowed in every sphere?

Not entirely, re: plots, but in the practical, seems so.

Not sure what you mean about characters. They’re not pre-made characters, nor is there any sort of list of specific concepts that are the only ones allowed.

That sort of top-down play went out in the 90s because it’s completely unworkable in MU*.

Over here at the hyperbolic cynic’s bench:

The current state of WoD MUs is somebody who wasn’t playing in the '90s running a game in a very '90s sort of way, as an attempt to solve problems they had with what they think of as ‘traditional’ WoD games. The problem is that the ‘tradition’ was once an innovation to solve the problems created by the methods they’ve reinvented to solve the problems they see with the ‘tradition.’

@Warma-Sheen I am pretty sure everyone there knows that everyone there is going a bit nuts about just what the post says. I don’t think taking it down is at all the thing to do, but I had a very different style.