I’m going to go on a little rant here but stick with me, I promise it is on topic.

DarkMetal was the most well designed WoD MUSH to ever exist. Wanna fight about it? Here we go!

The reason your players are burning out after 3 months is that there are no stakes in your game.
I hate to sound like one of /those/ people but… game devs today are too soft on their players.
It practically takes an act of God to kill off someone’s character so they get stuck with the same character for long periods of time, or they make alts and that results in burn out just as quick because they can never find in-depth character development with their focus divided between multiple alts.

Dark Metal got a few things right that no one else did.

1. Anyone could die at any time.
2. There were safe zones for each sphere if you wanted to just do soft RP. You never needed to be in danger as long as you stayed in your zone.
3. Making a new character was fast and easy! If you died it wasn’t a big deal.
4. Staff didn’t give a s*** what you played, as long as you played, so approval was automated.

On Dark Metal you had to fight tooth and nail to survive long enough to get to a point you could walk in the mixed spaces without being in danger of being made into someone’s midnight snack and you were never fully safe.

You had to struggle to become enough of a bad-ass not to have to live in fear all the time. I can not emphasize enough how important that feeling of progression is to the health of a game.

People want their actions and choices to matter.
When they don’t, people get bored and they wander off.
It’s the same reason people add stakes and drama to TV shows. If nothing changes, there is no point.

If you want your game to survive, learn to crush your players hopes and dreams. Learn to let players kill each other off.

Character churn will save your game from player churn.

I am but a week away from getting a computer capable of running baldur’s gate 3. Once I make sure the machine is actually going to work I’m going to buy it on steam. I cannot wait to play this game. I’m old and about to die so I’m going to spend the last few years of my life acting like I’m 14.

@somasatori said in Dies Irae:

The power levels of characters in Dies Irae are at a low to medium level …

@somasatori said in Dies Irae:

Mage: the Ascension and Changeling: the Dreaming as its core rulesets …

One of these two statements must be untrue.

Today I got the itch to WoD again. I tried out LiberationMUSH but the part of creating a character I always hated the most was the formating of the +selfstat nonsense so I thought I would try ChatGPT and see if it would do the work for me.

It was surprisingly good. It formatted everything nicely and even gave me helpful suggestions. Out of curiosity I asked it if it knew about LiberationMUSH specifically and it said it did. I started asking it questions to test how much it knew.

I asked it to summarize what people had posted online about LiberationMUSH and the answer I got was… interesting.

It told me that the game was most well known for the vampire sex parties, Polk (One of the administrators) wildly abusing the rules for their own benefit, and a debate about the number of nipples a person has influencing the amount of gnosis they have.

The last statement included a link to this forum which is how I found you all.

So the next time you are thinking about trying out a new game, ask ChatGPT about it. You might find something interesting.

@Roz said in The 3-Month Players:

For many people, knowing that your character could die at any moment will mean they’ll invest less in their character; after all, what’s the point if they can lose all that effort in a moment’s whim?

That’s why every DM faction had a safe zone. You could log in every day and play all day long in the forest or the reclaimed suburban sprawl next to Forest and never leave the protection of the werewolf zone.

If you wanted to be a boring person who stays home and does laundry while occasionally banging your werewolf boyfriend in his crinos form you were able to do that.

That’s why I’m saying Dark Metal was a very well designed game. It had something for every kind of player. Modern games lack that variety. The range of danger that you could be in at any moment is much more limited and more vaguely defined.

Most games don’t have a safe zone for their factions that is larger than one building or a few rooms deep in an isolated location.

One of the things that Dark Metal did properly was creating an entire distinct environment for each faction that you could play in and never run out of things to do ICly.

@GF said in TV series, news, recommendations:

Hazbin Hotel

Can’t recommend enough! 10 out of 10.

@Faraday said in The 3-Month Players:
te core players)

There are plenty of successful TV shows that avoid the Game of Thrones style of knocking off main characters left and right.

There is no one-size-fits-all game.

Yet, few shows were as successful or as well known as GoT. The stories where your favorite characters might be lost at any moment are the ones people become most invested in. Investment is what we are looking for.

It’s like playing a video game where you only get one life and then you have to start all over. You will be very careful in that video game to try to stay alive with your one life but if you have three lives he will be less careful and less invested. If you have infinite lives and lose nothing when you die the game becomes less fun because you can just rush headlong in without needing to think or plan.

Knowing that death doesn’t matter or that you are not going to die unless you choose to means you will invest less energy and effort into your character. It’s less challenging if you aren’t afraid of death.

@Buttercup
I can’t imagine many world darkness games would not be roster games if you asked. I’m sure staff has a long list of NPCs that they would like someone to take up and flesh out the world with. It’s probably just a matter of asking.