I don’t see anything at all wrong with players only RPing with other players that they explicitly like – unless they’re hoarding plot in doing so. I think it’s an entirely healthy reaction to want to prioritize RP with those whose RP you explicitly enjoy.

However, I do agree with those who have said that it’s better for the health of the game (and usually the character too) if you expand that pool to at least try RPing with folks you don’t know, or have neutral feelings toward sometimes. Sure, you might find some people you have absolutely zero interest in RPing with again, but you might also find some people that you’d like to add to the list of folks you’re interested in RPing with regularly. Beyond that, it allows stories and plot to spread from group to group across the MU*, connecting play groups in organic ways so that it’s not a setting with a half dozen scattered and separate plots going on, but a world with interconnected stories taking place in it.

@MisterBoring Peanut Butter-filled Pretzels from Coscto.

Sometimes also one of the kid’s string cheeses. But mostly the PB Pretzels.

@Pavel First w in the English manner, second w in the German manner, at least for me, when I steal it shamelessly.

@sao I was trying to come up with a situation too, but I couldn’t. I did want to leave the door open, because there are very few things I want to be an absolutist about.

I could imagine something like the delirium situation @MisterBoring mentioned, or it being a month or two in between creating a character you never played and creating a new character because you forgot about the first one, or getting so excited about the concept that you forgot that there were no alts allowed and submitted a new character.

But the response to Staff going, “Um… hold on a sec” would be very telling, and would decide if I went scorched earth or just nuked all but one character and gave them a warning.

@Roz Agreed. If there is some particular reason that you think they accidentally made an alt (I can’t even think of a reason that might happen, but who knows…), wipe all but one character and tell them that they just got their one and only warning. Otherwise, it’s a flagrant violation of a clear-cut rule: ban, explain, and move on.

@Gashlycrumb I think that there’s a place for that, certainly, but I also don’t want to take away the ability of players to create something truly unique – so long as it fits well within the setting and themes of the game. If everyone on a Clone Wars game played Clone Troopers and no one played the Jedi or the Mandalorian trainers or the stuck-up-soon-to-be-Imperials, it would be a much less exciting game.

But I would love it if there was some way to teach people to use their unique ingredients to make something tasty, rather than inedible glop, as @labsunlimited put it.

@Gashlycrumb said in Numetal/Retromux:

It might be more clear to say don’t be a bore. It’s okay to be boring sometimes. Or even to play a character who is largely static and stock.

I feel like this is a very important point. I love to play “stock” characters like Stormtroopers, Clone Troopers, Children of the Light, Academy-fresh pilots, and other “boring” characters, and then not playing them as bores.

On the other hand, I’ve met players who can take an absolute special snowflake of a character, but the way that they play them is utterly boring and uninteresting.

@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:

At this point, I think there’s value in being able to use GenAI to enhance what you do for as long as you can do it. If you’re a technical writer, use AI to make you a better technical writer so that you can stay working longer than other technical writers who ignore it and do not increase in quality or production.

If you’re a good technical writer, GenAI isn’t going to help you become a better one, it’s only going to help you become a faster one. Of course, in doing so, it’s going to introduce errors into your work that you won’t notice if you’re going fast enough.

Same thing goes for those using GenAI to get the tone right in emails, or to fill in the background of an image, or prototype code, or summarize law briefs, or all of the other relatively reasonable uses of GenAI that I’ve heard of. It doesn’t make you better, it makes you faster.

And when GenAI makes a professional faster, it allows the company to reduce staffing, like you mentioned, but it also introduces errors that slipped through because the now-overstretched staff has to go fast with GenAI to keep up with demand.

So maybe we can’t put the GenAI genie back in the bottle, but we can, and I posit, we should still mock the crap out of companies that can afford it when they use it, and chastise them for taking shortcuts that hurt their workers and are unethical and environmentally unsustainable. At the same time, our higher education and businesses should be working to find out what GenAI is actually good at, and what it can be trained to do (relatively) ethical and environmentally-sustainable methods.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

I just think that on a game where a core theme of the setting is conflict between factions, making that conflict between players meaningless or even impossible for no IC logical reason makes the game setting just as pointless and boring.

You can have conflict between characters without having PvP. Even if the rule is “you can’t directly harm another PC” there’s a whole lot you can still do to play out conflict. Your lack of imagination is your problem, not a problem of PvE games.

It’s like making a game set in the marvel cinematic universe but no one is allowed to play as the heroes or villains, they can only play normal people doing normal things.

Um… no it’s not. It’s like making a game set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but no one is allowed to play as villains, just heroes – oh wait, that’s pretty much most comic book MU*s out there.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

Putting everyone on the same team means staff takes on the burden of being everyone else in the world.

This is actually almost universally true, unlike most of what you’ve said. A PvE game does require more Staff effort to create all of the antagonists and their actions to frustrate the PCs – but it requires less Staff effort to deal with assholes who are just out to grief other players by killing their characters.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

When the games started being about protecting the feelings of bad actors who instigated trouble then ran to staff for protection it all went to shit.

You have this backwards. Yes, there are some people who do bad things and then complain when they get consequences for those bad things, but those players exist on PvE games too, and they still try to weasel out of consequences. But by closely monitoring or eliminated PvP, you stop allowing the bad actors who instigated trouble by killing characters for OOC reasons – or just to grief the other players. The people who “make it their life goal to ruin things for everyone” aren’t the people asking that their characters not be killed off for no reason, it’s the people killing off other characters for no reason.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

What is happening now isn’t working. What people did then was working. Back in the day there were hundreds of active players on at a time. Now you’re lucky to see five.

Huh… sounds like you’re not on the games that are successful right now. Sure, they may not have 100 players at a time, but they’re perfectly happy with 30. It’s almost like MU*ing is an outdated technological medium whose primary players grew up and are now adults with jobs and lives and families rather than being high school or collect students who time on their hands.

Your issues sound like a you problem.

I’m a big fan of each room having an RP purpose. Maybe it says something particularly cogent about the setting (there’s a monument about a past incident or historical personage), maybe it’s a “critical” RP location (the mess hall on a military game), or maybe it’s a place I think could host RP even if it’s not typical (a dingy alley in a Steampunk game).

But I believe that each and every room should have 2-3 RP Hooks in it. So you’ve got a laundromat, because people like RPing talking to strangers while their undies tumble – why not note that one of the driers sometimes chews up clothing, or that there’s a phone number written inside the door of one of the washers in permanent marker, or there’s a camera in one corner with a screen showing that everyone in the laundromat is being recorded. Little things that people can integrate into their RP and use to spark IC discussion or action.

Whether you’re Grid-based (like most MU*s used to be) or Locations-based (like Ares), this style works, and can turn what could just be vague names that could be drawn out of a hat to run scenes in into something that can help inspire RP.

I feel like, as others have said above, there’s a difference between Player vs Player conflict and Character vs Character conflict. Yes, sometimes people get frustrated or upset and CvC becomes PvP, but most of the stress and toxicity I’ve seen from games on which competition of that sort was encouraged comes from PvP, where the egos of the players get involved and it’s less about losing the character (sometimes it is) and more about just losing.

I have no interest in high-stakes Player vs Player conflict. If I did, I would play PvP video games or play competitive chess or try to become a professional poker player. I love high-stakes Character vs Character conflict, when done with a player who you trust in search of a better story for all involved. I find it elevates the heart-rate almost as much as high-stakes PvP, and has a much better chance of a positive outcome.

I wish that there were more games that were open to CvC conflict (alongside PvE) but whose staff came down hard on any attempts to turn CvC into PvP. And if I had more time in my life, I would absolutely run the one I’ve designed.

Depending on what type of Mech combat you want, FS3 will work brilliantly or not at all. I’ve worked on two different ways to handle Mech combat in FS3, with varying degrees of success.

1. Just use them as vehicles. This works best for 30-40 footers that are effectively giant armor or walking tanks. It’s simple, it’s straightforward, and it’s going to be very clean and easy.

2. Multi-part mechs. This works best for a Pacific Rim scale, alongside kaiju or something like it. You have separate ‘vehicles’ for each of the limbs, so that they can each take damage separately and you don’t get lucky one-hit KOs. It’s definitely more complex – both for GMs and for players – but absolutely doable.

If you’re interested in making FS3 work for mechs, I’m always up for talking about implementation of unintended systems into FS3.

I have a folder of faces and associated names – when I see an interesting face in a movie or show, I note down the name, look them up on Pinterest, try to wade through all of the BS AI fakes to find a good picture, and then slip that pic with their name into the folder.

I currently have 374 actors listed in there, across a wide variety of ages, colorings, ethnicities, genders, and pretty much everything else. So the first place I go when I want a PB is there.

Then again, I often get an idea for a character while watching a show, and then I already have a PB in mind (because I saw them in a similar role already). Then I just have to make sure that they don’t become an outright expy.

@Pavel Totally agree that it’s better to have an elegant reason why nuking the other side doesn’t work baked into the setting. But I also don’t really think that it should be necessary to tell players “No, you can’t end the war game’s war in a single stroke” in the lore. We did approach the player with lore reasons why it wouldn’t work first, but the player kept chasing the idea, and so we ended up saying “We’ve given you IC reasons, here’s the OOC reason: we want the war and don’t want to end it at a stroke.” They didn’t take it so well.

@KarmaBum said in World Tone / Feeling:

@Roadspike Those are good conceptual examples. Can you share any specific examples from the perspective of you, as a player?

Most of those were just generalized versions of specific examples. Here are – as best as I remember – the specific examples.

On BSGU, we ran into a Cylon snake, and my character made a quippy remark giving it a nickname. I don’t remember what it was, but as I recall, a GM-run NPC later used that nickname in a briefing (perhaps reluctantly, or with a sigh, or something, it’s been a decade, I don’t remember for sure). That made me feel like I was having an impact on the world.

On Realms Adventurous, Staff there was really good about putting out posts about the actions of players, and of mentioning them ICly in scenes. I remember a skirmish before a tournament and the herald or one of the marshals or something mentioned it, calling out the knights by name who had participated.

Oh! Here’s an even better one because it wasn’t all positive: on Steel & Stone, my character intervened in single combat to save his cousin from a death (it was like my second week on the game, and I didn’t want to be responsible for the death of another PC), and I heard about it for months from GM-run NPCs, including my character’s cousin and liege lord when the crew returned from the Iron Isles. But it came up in scenes where I wasn’t even playing, so it definitely felt like it had an effect.

As for the last concept, I’ve seen it happen enough times that I don’t know that I can come up with a specific great example, but the hypotheticals I mentioned before (a GM NPC mentions that they came in on a ship that the PCs saved from pirates or the zeppelin) should hopefully be concrete enough examples to be examples.

I don’t need my characters to change to metaplot or the setting wildly, I just want the actions of PCs as a whole to impact the game, I want my efforts to be recognized. One of my love languages is Words of Affirmation, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s how that happens in MUSHes.

@Pavel – I think that the distinction between the desires of the characters and the player is a fantastic one. Characters should want to win, players should want the game to continue to be fun for them and those around them. It’s the same way I think that players should approach PvP (at least when it’s OOCly friendly) – yeah, your character wants to win, but you as a player, you want to tell the best possible story with your fellow players.

I do think that it’s important to come up with ways to short-circuit attempts to end the setting/metaplot, but I also think that it’s fair game to OOCly tell someone “doing that would fundamentally change the game in ways that we’re not comfortable with, we’re happy to provide IC rationalization on why your character can’t succeed with this, but please don’t continue down this path as a player.”

@Gashlycrumb The whole idea of share points might work for some games, but it feels like it is absolutely rife with the possibility of the perception of bias. Like, “X told me that it only cost them 3 share points to get spotlighted at a plot, but it cost me 5” or “how does Y always have so many share points?” or even just “I never get into a plot, even when I have share points, Staff must be manipulating event signups.”

Even if none of that is actually true, the perception can destroy trust in a game.

@Faraday said in World Tone / Feeling:
Yet there are always players who want to civilize a Wild West game, create a superweapon that will defeat the Cylons in a Battlestar game, cure the zombie virus in a zombie game, etc.

Having had to deal with players wanting to wipe out the adversary in a world(s)-at-war game with an asteroid strike… I don’t get it either. The only thing that I can think is that some people just want to “win” the game, not realizing or not caring that if someone “wins” a MUSH, then the MUSH that exists is fundamentally over. Sure, something like it may be able to continue on, but it won’t be the same game that brought people to it.

@KarmaBum For me, “touch the world” means seeing my actions (or the results of them) spread through the IC world. Whether that’s something as simple as some slang that I created spreading to Staff-run NPCs, having the First Minister mention the brave, heroic actions of a group of knights who saved a puppy (“Hey, that was me!”), or having a Staff-run plot integrate something that I did as a player GM (the zeppelin that I had PCs defending just showed up in the midst of this big fight and saved the day!).

I want to know that what I’m doing has an impact on those around me, PCs and NPC, because if I’m not able to impact what others are experiencing, why am I playing a multiplayer storytelling experience/game?

@MisterBoring We did something like this on The Savage Skies: each adventure, we had a list of area hooks, common antagonists, common allies, current plots, and any specific resources (like Staff Notes that were of particular use for the adventure) to help player-GMs find their footing. It worked okay, we had a few people run some stuff based on that information. We definitely could have provided more of the “what,” “why,” and “how” for the antagonists along with the “who.”

I too am on the Grimbright or Nobledark train – if the world is dark, I want to be able to make positive change (even if it’s small); if the world is bright, I want there to be a little grittiness to it as well.

I want my characters to succeed somewhere between 51% and 70% of the time – if they succeed all the time, it doesn’t feel like the stakes are really there, and if they fail more than half the time, it gets frustrating.

In the last decade or so, the world has been grimdark enough, if the setting is going to be either grim or dark, I want to be able to punch it in the face.