@MisterBoring

Suddenly Always Knew That

My father lived in Rome for about eight months once, but he’ll complain at restaurants if the pasta is not overcooked.

@Trashcan said in MU Peeves Thread:

The point of XP is to reward players for playing. As long as the system does not punish players who are playing, then it’s probably working just fine.

But it’s not. The point of XP is to allow character advancement.

Playing is its own reward. Extra XP to reward participating in events has always struck me as daft – you get a bowl of ice cream (the gaming session) and then you get a treat (XP) for doing such a great job eating it.

One of my many unpopular opinions is that MUs can and should be very like tabletop, but this is one area where that doesn’t fit – if everybody in my gaming group participates one session except Phil, who stares at his phone for five hours instead, and I give everybody but Phil XP, good. Everybody on the MU can’t participate, though, only a limited number can join the event, and then I give those lucky ones extra XP? Meh.

Cooldowns/“learning times” (wasn’t the learning time the time it took to gain the XP?) and bank-caps suck. What sucks even more is those “You can’t increase your firearms skill above level 1 without using it on-camera in a GM-run scene” rules when coupled with a lack of opportunities to join such scenes, effectively creating a stat-cap for characters who are not favourite. Pretty soon you’ve got a huge bank of XP that you can’t spend without first successfully begging staff to create and run a scene for you that’ll give you a chance to roll.

@InkGolem I’d have to read through it again to tell you, though. Noooo!

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

To find out how the story resolves? Just because everyone knows all the details of a setting doesn’t mean they know how it plays out.

Quite. If the PCs have agency you can’t know how the story will resolve because you don’t know what they will do.

It’s not a ‘I don’t care because I already how will things play out’ issue, it’s a potential-cheating issue. Like how we had to make up new monsters for our HS D&D campaign because one player would read the Monstrous Compendium and then somehow his character knew the weaknesses of every monster.

If the PCs don’t have agency and are just watching NPCs and weather cause events to unfold, then yeah, they will lose interest if they know what’s going to happen by reading the game lore pages. But they will probably lose interest without reading the lore pages, too, because they probably think reading novels is a lot less frustrating than RPing as a character who is utterly incapable of affecting the world, and that if all you can do is watch, most published novelists produce better stories than most MUSH STs.

The Major Oak né the Cockpen Tree.

Edited to Add:

Historian Carlo Ginzburg.

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

not incentivizing people to do it but finding a way to make the stories told by players agree with, or more troublesomely, feel on par with the metaplot/GM stories.

If staff alone may touch the Myth Arc and PRPs must all be Monster of the Week episodes, then players will never see them as on par, because they aren’t.

You can make them agree by doing this:

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

3. Work with me to figure out HOW it will change the world. Don’t just stick the results in the memory hole, OR make all the consequences bad ones. I’m not going to run things if “change the world” always means “screw over the PCs or make the world worse”.
4. Honestly, just…work with me. I’d love to have staff to talk with plots about, brainstorm with, or just have an idea of things they’d like to see PCs have opportunities to do.

Also add deliberate continuity creep by including elements from the PRPs in other stories.

Most of the time it seems like PRPs are intended to take the pressure off staff by giving people who are clamouring for something to do something to do, while the staffer spends their time and energy GMing the Myth Arc. That tends to mean that the staffer is not going to work with @Pyrephox.

I’ve really enjoyed acting as Arc Welder/Continuity Bastard/Keeper of the Concordance/Plot Approver and Overseer and would totally run a game that way. Not exactly running plots myself but having an outline and working with plot-runners to drop the long-haul story plot-points into their stuff, I mean.

@bear_necessities Probably people would play more, too, if they thought that people would tell stories with them instead of having to convince somebody to tell stories for them.

Jane Yolen

https://cirquemaceo.com/

See this if you get a chance, it’s pretty awesome fun.

Marjane Satrapi

@RightMeow Never! It was before Firan, I think. When did that place open?

@RightMeow said in MU Peeves Thread:

I use to write these five paragraph purple prose descs to try and get on that page. I was successful once. Now I’m like: It’s a tree or It’s a costume - yay.

The real contest was to try to write a desc that would scroll anyone’s screen, contained as many treasured cliches like ‘sparkling orbs gaze into your soul’ as you could pack in, yet did not tell the reader anything about what the character actually looks like.

Eyes: Sparkling, soulful and impid, but of undetermined colour. Hair: Luscious and cascading, but of no particular colour or length. Skin: Flawless. Height: Graceful. Shape: Exquisite and touchable. Age: Blooming.

@RedJellyBean said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Prototart Didn’t she run a game? I vaguely remember all that. She’d post on WORA, pitching a fit at anyone that posted her description making fun of her.

That desc was on WORA itself, in the ‘Tasteless Descs’ subforum. The player did threaten to sue, repeatedly, which disturbed the server owner, and is why WORA was hosted in Malaysia for a while.

She still runs a game, it’s Blood of Dragons. George R. R. Martin did indeed give her and her spouse permission to make and run one. They have claimed that this means that any other one is specifically not allowed. So when I was running a Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire MUSH she had posted on hers that mine was such a criminal disrespect to GRRM that any Blood of Dragons player found to be playing Game of Bones, or even talking about it, would be banned from BoD, and possibly driven naked through the streets.

GRRM does not care, trust me.

She and her spouse co-wrote The World of Ice and Fire and you can tell which bits are hers.

She’s a bit of an embarassment to the fandom, having spent the entire run of the Game of Thrones teevee series bitching about the casting of any actor who wasn’t white. And for a while was going around telling people who disagreed to “eat n**** balls,” and then claiming it wasn’t racist because she’s Swedish and that’s the direct translation of the Swedish name for a kind of chocolate confection that people in Sweden long ago renamed to “chocolate balls” like one would expect.

Probably the real underlying situation with this couple and GRRM is that GRRM started writing this 5000+ page epic and did not make himself a concordance. But those two and the BoD players made A Wiki of Ice and Fire, and GRRM uses it.

@MisterBoring Hah. Yeah, I’ve scheduled events where nobody shows up, but I’ve never felt like it made me a nuisance. Usually it just means that the game’s been dragging, I am trying to help it pick up, but player enthusiasm has waned severely.

I do feel like it’s different with +events stuff – I put up a +event, you sign up but you don’t show up? No biggie. I send a personal invitation specifically to you and you RSVP yes, but then don’t show up? Still not really a biggie, but it’s gettin’ towards a mediumie.

ETA: I mean I think it’s fine to sign up for +events you’re not really sure you can make. Maybe you want the updates just in case you can, and just want to express interest. “Don’t sign up if you are not sure you can make it and join on time/within x period,” would be something the organiser would specify if need be.

@MisterBoring I recollect a staffer doing this, with five people waiting around for the scene said staffer had scheduled themself, with all the players evidently too afraid to page, me doing so and getting “I will not be doing that tonight,” as a response to me, and evidently complaints to others about my horrible soul-sucking behavior.

@Ashkuri said in "My Guy Syndrome":

The My-Guyer’s actions

Such a person shall henceforth be called MyGuyver.

@Kestrel said in Numetal/Retromux:

Maybe they end up with fewer interested, but much higher-investment players, and they like it that way.

An aside: Almost certainly not.

That was the stated reason for arduous chargens in the past. But my observation is that the quicker a player gets into RP, the more likely they are to stay. 30 minutes to chargen, fast approval and you get into a fun scene right off? You will connect again. A few fun scenes in as many visits? You’re hooked and likely to play for a pretty long time. Six hours of work to chargen, days waiting for approval? That’s where you get the people who stop logging in before they even know they got approved. It seems counter-intuitive that they’d not be invested after all that time, but ask B.F. Skinner.

@MisterBoring Not at all.