I’ve been in scenes that run the gamut from “this is a team effort and my actions and decisions matter” to “I’m an NPC here to watch the GMPC look cool”. Since I much prefer the former to the latter, the main thing I learned as a GM and what I try to impart to new GMs is “it isn’t about us, it’s about them”.

To present a scene with a good story that is also a good-but-not-insurmountable challenge, it’s really hard, and there are so many GMs (in this thread, in fact!) that make it look effortless. It requires investment of time and energy and the ability to improvise or sometimes completely throw the plot out and start writing on the fly because Barry just dropped a live grenade into the server cluster. But seeing players visibly having a great time and coming up with really cool ideas and witnessing those little hits of dopamine when they get to indulge in those ideas? It’s better than any drug.

So yeah tl;dr I guess the only real tip I have for GMs is, once again, “it isn’t about us, it’s about them”. As long as your first thought is on the players, the rest comes as easy as it can be.

@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!

Well, fine, I guess I’m finally going to have to build my VtR in Victorian London game I keep threatening to do.

@Solstice said in Memorable Scenes:

@kalakh GarouMUSH, when an entire hive of giant hornets were corrupted and rampaging, and the only way to get them to stop was to kill the queen and smuggle out the uncorrupted queen larva, and my coward of a ragabash stealthing through the entire complex tunnel system, grabbong the queen larva and bolted like he was carrying a football and running for his life while being trailed by hornets while all the fighty types kicked ass outside of the hive.

I have the log of this posted, lol The world’s deadliest werewolf relay race.

RedwallMUCK, the entire earthquake event, rallying together with survivors to try to make sense of the disaster and plan what was going to happen next, with a bunch of people who really didn’t hang out together living in close refugee quarters, and the ensuing squabbles.

This is 100% my pick for RedwallMUCK too, particularly the winter. It was just an incredible amount of really fun RP that tumbled into an organic storyline that lasted for, uh. A few years, I think.

I’ve also used it as an example for when sometimes it’s really good to shake up the status quo of a game by just pulling the rug out from under it. Not always, not often, but when it works, it works really well.

I thought I had some specific ones for both GarouMUSH and Arx, but sitting and thinking about it, it’s hard to settle on just a few. I really enjoyed the character arc of what turned out to be my longest played character on GarouMUSH, a permanently base strength newly minted fostern Glass Walker metis who showed up in town answering the werewolf equivalent of a help wanted ad, discovered she was somehow the highest ranking person there, and was then told in no uncertain terms that if she was staying she was leading. Thus a wild, decade long rollercoaster where she effectively pig-headed her way from ‘bad at being elder of this crazy tribe’ to ‘not so bad at being elder of this crazy tribe’. When I put in a request for a Willpower learn, all I provided as a reason was ‘Is Glass Walker Elder’. I was told there could be no better justification.

I cannot possibly choose even a small number of stand out scenes from Arx, I had more fun RPing on that game than I have anywhere else. So I’m going with character arc again. Shard started as a mouthy, bitter little shit obsessed with getting revenge who hated every last little thing about Arx and the Compact. She was only a sellsword because she followed Audric, and she hated that too. I figured she was probably also going to follow Audric right into Team Evil as a means to an end, and thaaat…is not what happened. Instead she tripped from the wrong crowd into the right crowd when Audric told her to go ask Aleksei and/or Aislin about her mystery talisman.

Mouthy bitter murdering secret werewolf thief who wanted nothing to do with anyone ended up a reluctantly-royal werewolf leading the Red Wardens, who didn’t necessarily like most people but who was pretty dedicated to protecting them. I mean, she also kicked off the end of the world, so her definition of protecting people might not always align with everyone else’s.

@Pavel said in Web-based CharGen or in-game CharGen:

@hellfrog said in Web-based CharGen or in-game CharGen:

yeah applications are to tell you about the player more than the character, I think. "Name a non-fictional woman that is smarter than you’ would be a perfect application prompt.

Faraday and Cobalt. Next question.

you’re in, buddy!

@Meg said in Discussion: On Dragon Wings:

i grabbed t’mas off the roster. he looked fun. anyone who wants to play adjacent to me, hmu. (as a child?? or a wingrider?)

One of his kids IS on the roster. 👀

@howyadoin said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:

@MisterBoring Silent Heaven already exists

ETA: joke

You joke, but Silent Heaven players will 100% sign up for all of that and have a great time. The first event I ran that was tagged “risk of character death” had 31 characters sign up for it. I’m impressed by their ability to find brief moments of IC fun, relief and happiness for their characters, even in the direst situations.

@Yam said in Other People:

I was def curious about how often most RPers even consider Other People’s fun.

I’m so worried about other people’s fun and happiness that my therapist wishes I would just be a selfish asshole once a month.

firan. i had never even heard of MUs.

a man is holding a statue of a bride and groom with a laurel wreath behind them

finding the creative spoons to gm a little story in my little mu* corner

While I’m sure there are some recent articles that touch on the darker side of MU*, I always look to this one (written by Julian Dibbell) outlining an atrocious event that happened on LambdaMOO:

TW: sexual assault - http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle_vv.html

I’m terrible at summarizing so I won’t really try, but it does a fine job of sharing a terrible event, how it affected people, and the changes that happened after. It also touches on what it means to make a society and shape a culture in this shared hobby; for as terrible as the event is, it’s also heartening to see how things can grow and change through player influence.

@somasatori In game is good!

@MisterBoring I could be wrong, but there’s no indication in the forum post that it was continuing after the initial ban.

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@Pavel Agreed. Self care and boundaries are important for game runners and staff too. In my experience this doesn’t get supported enough.

@Superbia I don’t recognize the username, and basic attempts to check their post history did not work, so shrug

I’m a person who often joins and becomes invested in a game on a whim - I can’t tell what the formula is, but if a game is hoping to attract people like me who just hop in without knowing someone, at least some percentage of the playerbase needs to feel open to interacting with, chatting with, getting excited about new characters and new people. Not every game has to be that - I don’t mind the existence of games that are built with a network-only approach and are meant for people who already have connections to have a good time together.

But as a new player approaching an open game, seeing people only rping with one or two others a lot sets off yellow flags that a game isn’t a place where people have the time or energy to open their circles to me. I don’t mind reaching out a lot when I’m in the shiny new excitement phase, but in order to feel welcome, it helps to see signs that it’ll be reciprocated.

I don’t think activity checks or a quota on interactions with people outside of your circle are meaningful solutions, because activity requirements can’t generate enthusiasm.I’ve roleplayed in forums like Dreamwidth where gamerunners often have monthly activity rules. The rules don’t actually stop a game from slowing down, or dying, or becoming a playground for one group. But I think the urge to implement them comes from the wish to have a particular game environment. Two people playing alone in a corner aren’t hurting anybody - but the more people who are doing that, the harder it is for new people to jump in and have a good time, and a lot of games want, at least in theory, new people to have an easy time joining, to buff up the population as people need to slow down or leave for various reasons.

And on a personal level, I find its important to my RP enjoyment to be open to new connections, because sometimes my old connections can’t RP any more! And it’s so much easier not to be bitter and discouraged if I’m not rebuilding my character’s network from scratch.

As I said elsewhere – if I had a single spoon to spare from Keys, I’d be over here, rolling up an arrogant Alphatian nobleman. Prince Haldemar, move over, there’d be a new explorer in town.

@InkGolem People like me but older and somehow worse.