@bear_necessities I toyed with the idea of both current-day-ish and 1930’s – somebody set up a portal so they can go see Billie Holiday. But its a theme where it’s already very easy to get PCs spread apart. I figured to base it around New York, grid for a bit of Brooklyn, the Flatiron and Greenwich Village, Brakebills. Ya gotta go adventuring to end up on other worlds, like Fillory, but it’s also gotta happen.

@MisterBoring Yeah. I read the first novel when it was first published and was really in love with it, it’s the first fantasy I’d read in decades that really enchanted me. But a lot of friends dropped it about when you did, feeling ‘who cares and the main character is an annoying wanker’. I think I’m just the right kind of annoying wanker to relate.

@bear_necessities I like. My own druthers would be to set it in the 1930’s or 1960’s, but I bet the appeal of that is too narrow. I’m pretty much against cannon characters as PCs and want every PC to be original. Roster PCs created for the game and played by someone who didn’t create them are great, but the characters from the shows and books, naw.

@helvetica Same. I think magic school can be fun, but don’t want the boarding school kids (Harry Potter/Wednesday/The Wolves of Willoughby Chase etc) YA subgenre to be a big theme-element. I thought the show largely eliminated that, which was good. I’d figure to mix-and-match book and show elements and have thought about having a Brakebills with both graduate and undergraduate levels, but I have enough RL dealings with young undergraduates these days. It sounded more fun when I wasn’t teaching.

@helvetica @Roz

Thanks. I remember reading that thread for a while and losing interest 'cause it seemed to be all gamerunner being a fuckwad rather than theme issues.

Now I wonder, though, how did they handle the character ages?

In the novels Brakebills is an undegraduate program that takes five years. The characters are 17-18 when they start. It has a bunch of those ‘school novel’ tropes, Grossman lampshades them with Quentin wondering why the hell it’s like a prep-school.

The show made it three-year graduate program. And changed the name from ‘Brakebills College’ to ‘Brakebills University’ because people think that grad-programs make it a uni? I dunno. But the students are in their mid-twenties. Which seems like a better choice for a MU, especially if you are wanting to avoid the more squicky interpretations of “It’s Adult Harry Potter!”

I don’t really want to do the ‘School Novel’ stuff, and yeah, it wasn’t really that big a part of the IP. I think of The Magicians more as Mage minus WoD, plus extra queerness, plus neurodiversity, plus subverted Narnia tropes. (I’m all for magical talking animals who are assholes, sweary-fairies, and the like.)

I know there have been two such games, but I only saw the one, and when I checked it out I went, eehhh, not for me and didn’t app.

I wonder what happened? Partly 'cause, hey, spill the tea, but also 'cause I keep wanting to make a The Magicians MU and it’s good to know The Perils.

@bear_necessities said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

@Gashlycrumb I do but it has made for an awful MUSH every time

@bear_necessities said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

@NotSanni said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

I think about The Magicians as a setting for a TTRPG quite a bit - but I also think that the most people who say they want a setting like the Magicians really just mean they want a slice-of-life urban fantasy game.

I think most people who want a Magicians game want a magic school game and … again, that’s not really what the Magicians is about. I agree with everything else you said, and I think the dark interpersonal social drama of the Magicians makes it not a great theme for a MUSH.

Haha, I wondered if the magic school part should even be on-camera for a MU.

@Faraday The time and exercise of professional skill you’ve put into the hobby is probably above next level to the kind of thing I’m talking about.

@Pavel Valid, but I guess I didn’t exactly consider it to not be in my own service. I wanted a game with theme-x, and more players than just me, there were things I needed to do to make that happen.

But I’m making a distinction of degree. No matter anyway, I think we can agree with Faraday above saying that voliunteering doesn’t exempt one from accountability, and Pavel’s point about still being responsible to do what you agreed to do. (Which is true for showing up at tabletop RPGs and baseball practice and the bird-count and many other only-a-game/hobby things.)

@Pavel The difference I’m getting at is more that when you volunteer at the trauma helpline, it’s because you want to dedicate part of your time in service to fellow human beings. The work may be engaging and it may benefit you professionally, spiritually and otherwise, but it’s probably not fun, and it’s certainly not a game.

I don’t feel like I was doing volunteer work by running a MUSH when I did. I was doing a hobby. It was a role where other people would be annoyed if I didn’t do what I agreed to do and some of it was more work-like than play-like, and it benefited a little community of people and I didn’t get paid, and I felt I had a level of responsibility to not let it be emotionally hazardous and to avoid destroying people’s fun, but. Hobby. Game.

Not really relevant, but still, Maturin’s face.

I wonder if anyone still cares about The Magicians.

@Faraday Eh, analogies. The better one is, I think, that of an actual tabletop RPG. It has a host who either reserved the table somewhere or is holding the game at their home, and a GM who is probably the same person but not always. Both roles must be filled or there’s no game this week. But normally any other person can be away for a session or two.

The hosts of my tt sometimes GM and sometimes don’t, and provide tables and chairs and battlemats and minis and dice the computer that the people who play remotely appear on, and keep your character sheet for you if you’re prone to forgetting it. And serve a meal. We are very appreciative, our little ten-person community, and they assure us that they do this because they enjoy it.

@Warma-Sheen Naw. I think I can appreciate and value GMs and gamerunners, and I do, without thinking that those roles should be characterised as ‘volunteering their time for the community’. It’s not really untrue but it’s the wrong framework, I thinks.

@MisterBoring

Yep. I dislike the sphere system because (among other things) it makes it super easy to let this happen. Frankly, it regularly happens within spheres anyway – the magical tank vs phone call thing really happened, though my character was actually taking a forty-five minute bus ride, not making a phone call. The tank-builder was in the same sphere as I, same GM, it was just, eh, indifference to the issue, or favouritism. It was not actually as frustrating as spending five RL weeks waiting for twenty IC minutes to pass while the staffer I needed to tell me what happened in those twenty minutes was having weekly adventure and daily sphere-baRP with their PC.

It kinda blows me away that gamerunners don’t all acknowledge the timeliness problem and have a stated course of action to deal with it. In my long experience, if you want to lose friends over an RPG the easiest way is to SKIP SOMEBODY’S TURN A LOT. That’s pretty much the simplest way to be a shitty GM. (If you want to really guarantee that friendships’ death, skip their turn a lot and then have a hissy fit when they point out how unfair and shitty it is.)

An aside, I wish we’d all get over the idea that MU staffing is volunteerism. Yeah, sure, it’s voluntary. But volunteerism implies community service. And okay, yeah, sort of, technically, but also, no. GMs are players playing a different role in the game. Yeah, we need them or we can’t play, but. Weellllll. You need a pitcher to play baseball, but you can play without a left fielder if you must. This does not make the pitcher a volunteer whose services you must constantly applaud and the left fielder a mere player who owes the pitcher. (For the same reason, gamerunners and players should all remember that GMs are players too, and they, too, should be having fun.)

@Solstice said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:

and there’s no way to square the drastic differences in player power without extensive homebrewing.

If differences in PC power were really an issue, MUs would give everybody the same amount of XP and new PCs would be expected to spend, in chargen, an amount equivalent to what the oldest (and thus all) PCs have spent.

Having PCs at different power levels is fun. Unless the GMs don’t make any effort to give them all stuff to do that they can do and that more powerful PCs won’t or can’t take over.

@MisterBoring said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:

I think preventing the “all other spheres must die” thing is on the staff to prevent but at the same time, you can’t hold to theme for some of the WoD (especially OWoD) spheres if they’re expected to be buddy buddy because some major magical aura is preventing it.

I agree that the ‘powerful rituals from before the game’s start forbid the conflict’ is answer is lazy.

So is the whole “all other spheres must die,” idea. The WoD sourcebooks themselves repeatedly make exceptions. Yeah, yeah, werewolves hate vampires and kill them whenever they can, except how the urban tribes of werewolves sometimes work with vampires and the rural vampires sometimes work with werewolves, and the core books let you buy stats representing NPC allies from spheres that yours supposedly hates. Often there is a major magical aura preventing MU PCs from the different splats from interacting; it’s the OOC howling of, “OMG SUPERFRIENDS SO LAME”.

@Roz said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:

I think it’s best to have all your staffers capable of supporting all your spheres with a reasonable level of comfort.

This is probably the origin. Running multi-sphere WoD games as separate games on the same MUSH has been a tradition since the first, and to do this if you rather must discourage the groups from interacting outside of simple conflicts. So emphasise that the spheres hate each other, characterise cross-sphere connections as SUPERFRIENDS SO LAME.

All superfriends all the time does indeed kinda suck. My take is that it sucks less than never being able to cooperate or interact without murder no matter what evar. Milage may vary.

I think it’s not only best to have GMs capable of supporting all the splats, but to actually have them do so. One major point of suckage about ‘spheres’ being kept separate and having separate GMs is that the timeline/order of events tends to go stupid. Abelard builds a magical tank in his garage in less time than it takes Brigid to make a telephone call to her mentor, because Abelard’s staffer was quick and Brigid’s was away this weekend. It’s pretty typical for GMs not to triage for IC timeliness even within their own sphere.

@Muscle-Car It really was funny to me, and honestly, I thought that Nymeria bitching about GoB was good advertising for GoB and smiled when it happened. I had a lot of fun running GoB. It certainly had its flaws, but it was a good time, we had a lot of laughs, I don’t think anybody got seriously hurt, and I’m proud. And was quite surprised that a handful of people contacted me when House of the Dragon came out to nostalgia about it.

@Roz I dunno if GoB was bigger or if it just got on their radar because of their stalkery-ish ways – my memory for the details is crap, but I think there were at least a couple of players who openly said ‘Screw you boring bullies I’m gonna play this other GoT MU,’ to BoD staff.

@Roz said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

I did staff on a GoT game for a while (Steel & Stone), and we didn’t actually get any botherings from their direction. I’m not sure if they’d given up on it by that point, if we just got lucky, or if those particular rumors were exaggerated. Based on other behavior from Nymeria I witnessed more directly, I absolutely wouldn’t have been surprised at those rumors being accurate, though.

It happened. They threatened to ban, and probably did ban, people from Blood of Dragons for talking anywhere about the existence of Game of Bones, which was the one I ran. They threatened to ban anybody who was discovered to be playing on GoB. They stalked me across GoT fan discussion groups and MU discussion groups, evidently just to tell me and everyone who happened upon it, “If GRRM wasn’t so busy, he’d give Gashlycrumb such a smack.”

Their reasoning is that since GRRM gave their game his official approval, that meant he officially forbade all other ASoIaF MUs (Seeming thus to reveal that this couple who keep claiming to be scholars of fantasy literature have never read T. H. White.) and it is a horrible disrespect to him to play or even think about one that isn’t Blood of Dragons.

Some point during the years GoB ran, they stopped. I like to think it’s because I and GoB’s players kept laughing at them.

@Pavel said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

That in combination with the swift evacuation of Game of Thrones from the public consciousness after that disastrous final season is probably why we don’t see many, if any, games from that universe.

This. During its run, GoB had predictable influxes of new players coorelating with season premiers, season finales, and particularly exciting episodes of Game of Thrones. By the end of season six, this phenomenon had stopped.

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.