I’m probably unusual in that, in theory, I would be happy to pay for playing in a MU* on some sort of subscription model. I’ve kicked in for tabletop games before, so contributing to someone taking the time and energy to make entertainment for me isn’t a hard ask!

In practice, though, it would raise my standards for what I expected in return to the point where I’d want a professional product, as opposed to the hobbyist arrangements we have now. And I doubt that’s sustainable with a persistent online world on a price point where I’d feel comfortable signing up. (It works fine in tabletop, because you schedule your time, you outline what the parameters are going to be, etc. But with a persistent setting, you need to guarantee, for example, that a player in the UK or China is going to get the same quality of experience as one on the East Coast of the US, which means GMs guaranteed to run relevant plots at those times, etc. And MUDs probably have an advantage because many/most systems are automated.)

But…I dunno. I think it would depend a lot on the experience and value that was offered, how trustworthy I considered the person offering it, and what the cost was.

Man, I wish. I would play the heck out of that game. All the players can be the quirky townsfolk with our own farms, and the Harvest Festival is this MASSIVELY OVERWROUGHT thing that nobody in the surrounding towns understands and thinks is kinda weird, but you know what, it means we somehow manage to grow bizarre and magical variations of all sorts of fruits and veggies, so they just…let us do our thing and buy our food.

Meanwhile, we’re all gearing up and marching into magical wildernesses to try and find the Perfect Turnip Seed and grow it in our special soil made from dragon manure, the soil beneath a dark cult’s sacrificial altar, and shards of sunlight taken from the peak of a frozen mountain.

And if our Perfect Turnip weighs even an ounce less than our Rival’s we will throw the biggest tantrum in the county.

@tsar said in Brainstorming Game Ideas:

I think the biggest pull for a game, more than theme, is how excited the game runner is to be there. If you’re connected, if you’re putting in the energy-- you’ll get someone. You might not get dozens and dozens of people, that’s rare these days anyway. But frankly you can run a very successful game with a core group of players who are excited with you.

This.

A game creator who has a strong vision for their game and is excited about the things they want to do with the game will hook me in if the game is even vaguely in my thematic wheelhouse. It might not KEEP me, for various reasons, but if a GM can talk with great enthusiasm about their farming fantasy MU* where everyone is trying to grow the best crops for the Harvest Festival in Autumn, going out to track down rare seeds, magical fertilizers, and whatever? I’d be drawn in!

@Roadspike said in Tips for GMs:

@Pavel Agreed. And there’s nothing wrong with calling for some Wits checks and then just providing them with the necessary information if they can’t figure it out based on your clues. Maybe your clues aren’t as brilliant as you thought they were, maybe the players just had a bad day and aren’t braining well, or maybe they’re shy of putting an idea forward for fear of being wrong. There’s no shame in either just giving them the information they need, or going the Brindlewood Bay method of “whatever solution the PCs come up with was the correct one, so long as their rolls were good enough.”

My life became a lot better, as a GM, when I really understood that the things I thought were So Clear as clues were only clear because I knew what the plot was. Expecting players to read my mind to understand what I was hoping they’d get was really just frustrating everyone.

Besides, I have come to believe that it’s rarely the process of getting information that is the most exciting–it’s seeing what players do with information once they have it. (Which isn’t to say I don’t love a good research or questioning scene, but I try to focus on ‘failure means consequences, not a shutdown’ as much as I can. (Which isn’t always as much as I want–a tired brain drags us all down, on occasion.)

I got my only accusation of racism as a school counselor over schedule changes, and upon investigation, realized where it came from. I was denying schedule changes according to the written policy, but certain students (mostly wealthy and white) appealed over my head to a vice principal who made the schedule changes they requested, so it very much looked like some students were receiving favorable treatment (which they were, just not from me).

Unfortunately, there was no denying that the school and district had issues with systemic racism, which made it understandable that parents would become frustrated.

I prefer web-based, but echo what people have said about anything being fine so long as it’s clear and well-documented.

Breaking prohibitions against politics, and being a bigoted piece of shit. No Nazi bars here, thanks. We’ll be deleting their posts.

@Lain-Iwakura You’re pretty behind the times, then. Plenty of MUDs still exist - you might find r/MUD more to your preferences. This forum doesn’t generally talk much about them because they’re different audiences and different design philosophies.

But there’s plenty of discussion on r/MUD, and MUDs are still being made!

I try to do a couple of different things, some of which have already been mentioned:

1. Try to read up on available plot hooks and backgrounds on other characters to find out what other players are interested in working with. (Sometimes this backfires, because people don’t necessarily always want the RP they put in their plot hooks/backgrounds - especially things like police/detective backgrounds.)

2. Seek people out. Don’t be afraid to say “Hey, I saw X on your RP Hooks, or that you’re involved in Y organization–my character is interested in that,” and see where it goes.

3. Listen! Pay attention to what people are throwing out in scenes, and respond to it. Give them a chance to talk about the things that excite their characters, do things their characters are good at doing.

4. Ask them for help in their characters’ areas of specialty. Sure, you can PROBABLY do whatever it is by yourself with a little prep, but it’s so much more fun to say, “Hey, I could use a face/muscle for this thing I want to do and I hear you’re good at that.”

5. React. Don’t be determined to be “too cool for school” about other characters’ weirdnesses. They were built that way for a reason - be grossed out, scared, weirded out, whatever. Go ahead and show a little emotion about other characters’ schitcks.

6. Reciprocity. If someone asks you for help IC, or gives you a bone–do the same in return. People notice, and in my experience, they’re so excited to have a real back and forth.

@somasatori I think the big thing is that I’m not running a controlled intervention to see if someone can handle bad IC events - I’m just observing what happens naturally. And I’ve never really see someone who, for example, throws a sulking fit when they have a couple of bad dice rolls, who can also handle a big loss with grace and mutual fun.

I’m sure they exist! And people have bad days, where one small event is just the grimy cheese on the shit sandwich and you are just done. Which is why I try not to judge people too harshly for one bad reaction.

But if, over time, I notice someone who melts down regularly about the small stuff, I’m definitely not going to even hang around for the big stuff. It’s not worth my time or my hobby joy, and I don’t really care if it’s trauma, or a multitude of bad days, or whatever.

@Nonsense said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:

Yeah, absolutely destroy my characters. I love the writing and the play that comes from difficult situations, poor outcomes, and otherwise “bad things” that affect a PC. Especially when it creates further story and RP opportunities in the aftermath. Of course there are limits, but these are also situations and lines that are already a hard ‘no’ in any game I’m going to play - and, as has also been mentioned a few times in this thread - trust is an important factor.

I’m generally very much of the opinion that failure is more thematically interesting than success. I love a failed roll, I love a failed mission, I love the drama. That has been where I’ve found my best success as a player and learned the most about the character.

I admit, here’s the flipside of the question (and this is not aimed at you specifically - I don’t think we’ve ever played together):

I don’t necessarily trust when a player says this, either to me-as-player or me-as-GM because often they do not mean it, so I am absolutely reluctant to actually pull the trigger on negative consequences because it is exhausting to deal with a lot of people after you do, and perhaps even more so the people who are very vocal about “Oh yeah, destroy my life, I can take it!”

And you can never know whether a person genuinely means it and is totally fine with things actually going south, or not.

The only real way, I’ve found, to know is to see how people handle small failures in play, before trying to work through the big setbacks with them.

I ended up putting Other, because yes, I like bad things to happen to my character, but as always there are caveats.

1. Proportionality. I like bad things to happen to my character - I don’t like ONLY bad things to happen to my character. Trauma conga isn’t all that entertaining, give me time to breathe, recover, and let the character have things worth fighting for when the bad things happen.

2. Trust. I’m a fairly trusting player, to be honest, and I’ll roll with what a GM throws unless I have a specific reason not to trust them, but once that trust is lost, it doesn’t come back.

3. Sexual assault/mind control. These are not entirely “no go” bad things to have happen, but they are things where I would need a larger than normal amount of trust, and where I want to be brought in OOC to ensure that it remains a fun game for me.

A somewhat silly one:

I am a solitary person. The reasons for that are not all good nor all bad, but the results have been that I rarely ever invite people back to my house for anything, or really initiate hangouts (largely because I have a crippling fear that if people say yes, it’s only because they pity me and are good enough people to put up with the boring person for a little while).

A few weeks ago, I invited my gaming group to a dinner at my house. They came! I cooked + they brought sides, and…a good time was had by all.

As stupid as it sounds, it’s really the first time I’ve invited a group of friends over to my house for a dinner/hangout since high school (which was quite a while ago). I’m very happy that it went well.

@Ashkuri Yeah, agreed.

I strongly suggest not crowdsourcing this. It’s a good way to get every petty grudge for twenty years crawling out of the woodwork. Consider who you’re uncomfortable with, if anyone, by personal experience or reputation as shown on forums like this (but be careful with that).

@Tez To keep you humble in your great and terrible power over the userbase.

@bear_necessities said in Prove Tez Wrong:

@Pyrephox you’ve gone mad with power, I called it

I prefer to think of it as “gleeful with power”. I’m not mad about it at all.

@Yam said in Prove Tez Wrong:

@helvetica Lmfao ahahaha

ETA: TO BE CLEAR to everyone Tez abuses me with love, don’t worry. She’s not a forum despot.

No, I’m the forum despot.

@bear_necessities said in Empire Discussion Thread:

@Ominous said in Empire Discussion Thread:

one clearly has power over the other

No they don’t. Let’s not be super ridiculous here. That’d be like saying Pyre has power over us because they are mods of the forum

And while we’re on the topic of being super ridiculous, we’re going off a log that was clearly copy-pasted instead of screen shotted so we have no idea what happened. Literally everything could be editted.

There’s a degree of power that, realistically, I have. It is small and stupid and very easily revoked, but it exists. But, conversely, everyone on this forum has the power say “fuck off, Pyre” and demand I be removed from modstaff or they leave to make a new forum. Which is how we got here!

So, yes, a staff member has the power to make a game experience suck, but in this case, I think with a game with a single gamerunner, that GM recognizes that someone is going to be a Problem early on and just removing them is a pretty good decision. If Ada removes a lot of people, or removes people who aren’t, uh, pretty well already established as being Problems across several games, then the game will die and the problem will self-correct.

For the record, I had a case where I didn’t receive a response for an action for a while, and I added a polite (I hope) ooc message to the action asking what my next step was, and Ada simply pointed out that I had an outstanding roll to do and I hadn’t noticed. Problem solved, nobody got banned, and I didn’t feel “some kind of way” about it.

That looks amazing! Great work!

@MisterBoring said in Empire Discussion Thread:

@somasatori I totally agree with this. Each character in the roster could have a set of links to the important world lore that drives their character to help people find what they need to know.

Looks like this has been done! It’s pretty helpful - there’s a nice in-web-site glossary now that lets you get immediate information on what certain things are.