It really feels like Ganymede has just decided to let Derp drive it into the ground out of some need to avoid losing face from reversing a decision.

Well, I’m reducing my MSB activity to lurking now. Gany just basically said that the only person who needed to be apologized to on MSB for what happened was Derp.

I get two things from reading stuff from this thread.

1. That I definitely am not the target audience for Lords & Ladies roleplay.

2. That Arx, even with all of it’s trouble throughout its history, is a pretty good example of ‘doing it right’ in our hobby.

Congrats to all you Arx players and staff for doing cool stuff.

Starting a new thread, for a new year.

First up, and this one hit me hard, David Lynch, legendary director of such weirdness as Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, and the original 1980s version of Dune.

@hobos

Please stop. If you actually care, stop, step away, and come back in a few days or even a week or two. You’re making yourself look bad with each new post.

Bring back Victorian era drug problems!

I want a post apocalyptic game surrounding the events at one of the last settlements in the world struggling to survive against all manner of obstacles and threats.

@Jennkryst

I’m gonna have to run a one shot of the MMPR RPG in his honor.

Well, after that interaction with Ghost and some other odd shit I’ve seen today, I added MSB to my firewall block list. I don’t need that shit in my life anymore.

@Roz Totally. I’m all for people trying to repair relationships, but deception is not the way to make that happen.

Now, if someone came to me and was like, I want to rebuild the bridge and move on from this and in the process offered to make a new character to help push some plot I was trying to push, I’d probably see that as an olive branch.

@Faraday said in Player Ratios:

Now if someone’s waiting 6 weeks and never gets their scene with the NPC, that might be excessive. But so what? Staffers are human, they’re volunteers, and they’re entitled to have fun too. If they’re not doing a satisfactory job by your estimation, that’s a good reason to find another game. But if all the staff burn themselves out because the demand exceeds their spoons? Then nobody’s jobs get done because there isn’t a game.

This is why having a constantly updating conversation about staff availability is important to the life of a game. Nobody wants to submit a job and have it go untouched because staff is taking a much needed break, and I believe that most staffers don’t really intend to abandon portions of the player base just because Player A’s one request will require more thought and work than the 7 simple ones that Player B submitted in the same 6 week period.

I think giving players mechanical agency over their potential bad stuff happening is a good thing. One of the GMs I have tabletop groups with has cribbed a Fate Point system out of… I think it was Zweihander, into every game he runs. Each player gets a pool of Fate points that replenish 1 point per session, up to a maximum of 3. You can spend one at any time to reroll a failure, or negate some minor negative thing, for example from our last session, our elemental summoning wizard suddenly found he had lost control of his fire elemental, and he spent a fate point to immediately retake control. On the other hand, if something majorly bad happens, such as a loss of a limb, or outright death, you have to burn a fate point to ignore those effects, and effectively remove yourself from the scene or combat in question. If you burn one, you effectively reduce your maximum by 1 for the life of the character, and if something majorly bad happens after you’ve run down to 0, then you just take whatever fate hands you.

In our tabletop group, having that mechanical agency over it has emboldened some of our usually more risk-adverse players into doing things that make the story more exciting and actually threaten their PCs well being.

@bear_necessities I promise I am that one finger. I enjoy stories where my character loses just as much as I enjoy wins.

@bear_necessities said in World Tone / Feeling:

I’ve always felt that while people say they want consequences in their RP, a vast majority of people don’t really want it. At least not permanent consequences.

I always get weird reactions when I tell people that I’m totally okay with my characters losing limbs, being disfigured, having their livelihood ruined, or straight up dying as long as it’s entertaining.

I want so many hyper-specific games that I won’t actually get them barring starting games myself, and I can’t honestly be sure that they would even get enough players to be runnable.

Like my idea for a post-apocalyptic game where the remaining people on the world live in and around a huge metal tower. The people who have all the power live above the smog clouds choking the world below, and have access to the remaining places above the clouds, including the last bits of fertile land and potable water. The rest of the people live below, in claustrophobic spaces where their survival is only guaranteed by toiling to get access to resupply of the filters that keep the smog out of their cramped quarters. The lower class use power armor suits to try and clean the world, much like the Chernobyl liquidators, while the upper class vie for control of the remaining clean resources and do what they can to keep the lower class from climbing the tower and destroying everything.

@Roz That’s very very cool. It’s always impressive when a game really comes together on that level and produces that kind of story structure between PRP improvisation and the “metaplot” produced by staff.

@Roadspike said in Player Ratios:

One incentive that I think can help get people interested in running PrPs is to have Staff weave references to the actions in their PrPs into larger metaplot scenes.

Another idea that Staff could do in this regard is build frameworks for PrPs for common events that PCs would likely try to intervene in. For a generic D&D style fantasy game, maybe the area the game takes place in is known for regular bands of bandits preying on the towns because of the machinations of some evil arcanist, so the staff builds a framework for how bandit incursions look in the fiction of the world, and provide some ideas on how to put spins on them.

For me, I think it comes down to the intention of the staff from the start. If the staff intend to ensure that every PC has a moment or two in the spotlight and want to run big specific plots, then I would hope the radio of plot-running people to players skews a bit more toward the plot-runners. On the other hand, if the staff are really only building a set for people to play in, and not worried about having an arching plot throughout the life of the game, then the ratio can skew toward the players.

@Hobbie said in World Tone / Feeling:

I tend to chafe if the tone is too rigid, flexibility lets me be creative.

I agree with this. Rigid tone is stagnation. At the same time, too much flexibility and you lose the original intent of the game in the sauce. If I were to join a post apocalyptic game of community building and the struggle to survive, the sudden addition of a Dragonball Z style combat scene would be too jarring.

@Jenn said in World Tone / Feeling:

The Appalachian-set Curseborne game I’m bullying y’all into building.

Curseborne? Where?