@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:

The problem I’ve run into is that players don’t necessarily feel that it connects back to the metaplot if there aren’t changes to the homebase region or overall story. Is that just out of the scope for your game?

Can’t speak to LB’s game, but that’s how it was on BSGU. Folks could run missions of their own whenever they wanted. (Also other plots connected to the war, though folks rarely did so.) But they couldn’t affect the overall trajectory of the war without staff approval and coordination. This was spelled out in the game policies, so if that was a deal-breaker for someone, they could decide that before playing.

@Jennkryst said in Game Development: Modern Gothic Storypath System:

crossed with Everworld but never had the energy to get it done.

Every so often I have this intense memory of reading Everworld but can’t remember wtf the series is named, so I go on this crazy google hunt trying to remember and finally figure it out. And anyway this is to say please do this? Thanks.

I think staff should be able to play or not play as it pleases them. If they’re open about it, so the people who shit themselves if staff does/doesn’t play (and I’ve seen it go both ways) can make an informed decision.

Staff should also feel free to remove and boot any player who can’t shut up about that. I’m a big fan of staff getting noisy people who can’t accept the policies of the game but for whatever reason can’t leave TO leave so they don’t wreck the environment for others.

Twenty years ago, I often got pretty enraged when I saw staff member PCs (and I agree with Faraday that sorry guys, everyone’s going to know who they are even if you don’t put a tag on it, that’s the way things are) “hogging all the spotlight,” Now, honestly, I’ve gotten to the stage that I just don’t care. If there are things going on that I can participate in, then I will stay and participate until I don’t feel like it anymore. If nothing is available to me but lookyloo, usually I’ll leave sooner. Not with animosity, but just because it’s boring, and I don’t have control over it anymore. I have found that the last case seldom happens, honestly. I’m not in the proper geographic area for prime time for more places, but I can almost always find people to enjoy who at least enjoy me enough to RP with me.

I wish I was better at dual wielding (playing and STing). I could do it pretty well when I was younger, but honestly I just find it super hard to focus that way now for a variety of reasons. So if I ever do do my little glorified tabletop thing, I won’t be having my own “pc” because I’ll have my hands full running STed scenes which involve keeping track of multiple characters even if they aren’t as fleshed out as a PC, and that will max me out. I never assume I am unique in the hobby, so I think that’s why some people also don’t like to have PCs on games that they run (or if they do they are pure flavor side pieces with friends, for funsies).

I think that it’s a good idea for all alts on a game to be public, for avoidance purposes. I don’t think this should have to include all alts in the hobby ever. To some degree there’s some trust involved. I am shit for remembering people’s alts usually. But If I find out that there’s someone who has expressed negative things about me in the past, while I won’t avoid them on another game in the sense of flouncing off on public scenes or crying to friends about how they too should not play with that person (luckily my friends in the hobby would kick my ass if I behaved that shittily, unless the person was a creeper/abuser, but those are rare and usually my friends will spot them before I do), I also don’t seek them out. I also don’t lie if someone asks who I am. I just don’t like broadcasting because I do have two consistent stalkers still in the hobby that will OOCly seek to interact with me if I am publicly known on a game (but they’re both kind of weird and tend to get removed eventually). I wouldn’t be upset if I even interacted with them wittingly on a game (they don’t tend to disclose who they are). I just don’t want the OOC interaction.

@MisterBoring said in Consensus on Roster vs OC vs Mix:

I sort of want to see a game that daringly chooses to eschew both rosters and OCs and go for a new alternative: purely random generation.

I am now imagining a web-based chargen where it’s all fill-in-the-blank or pick-one,. Starts off with a concept ala’ Chaosium CoC, ‘Professor’, ‘Dilettante’ which gives you the basic sheet, you have points to customise with. But any place you didn’t pick/didn’t fill in the blanks/left points unassigned it fills in randomly.

@Trashcan said in Blocking Players:

If people genuinely never want to see a word Bigmouth Joe ever says for the rest of time, I guess that’s fair,

That was the requested feature, yes. I understand that someone may only want to suppress notifications rather than block completely, but I think differentiating those would entail too much complexity on both the player/command side and the code side.

@Kestrel said in Good things in Mushing:

Actually has a known history of much more serious permutations of this behaviour on other games

Haven’t been active on a game in awhile, but my hope is that this has or will become more normalized. Like, as a staffer, it’s one thing if you get one report (which is probably the last straw after 27 different incidents) and you have to wade through a “they said/they said” situation. It’s quite another when you’ve got a half-dozen people all reporting uncomfortable situations.

I vaguely recall someone asking a game to fully delete every scene that they had participated in from their history and just rewrite the story as if those events never occurred when they got bored and quit.

This was maybe a decade ago and I can only remember the game was sci-fi in theme, maybe a cyberpunk style game.

People are silly sometimes.

@Faraday said in Writing character diversity - resources:

because humans have differing experiences

Nuh uh! All sub-categories of people are monoliths, and each individual is an exemplar.

The London one is open now if anyone wants to check it out.

https://towersmux.net/

I’m going to start writing a setting document soon.<tm> Proooobably going to use Cairhien as the quote-unquote hub. Though with Traveling being a thing, people will be able to go wherever pretty much.

IN PROGRESS.

The game has been running for a while now and while new games tend to fizzle out and die I’d just like to give kudos to Silent Heaven for going strong and continuing to mature.

In particular I think the gamerunner has done a lot of work addressing and removing negative influences, and the community has never been such a welcoming and chill place to be.

Good game. Very positive environment. I enjoy running plots again.

@somasatori said in Installing Arxcode?:

If I recall @Jumpscare did something with Evennia that has a good crafting system. I didn’t roll a crafter on Silent Heaven when I did (Simon was a disgraced med student), but it looked super cool. Maybe that might be compatible?

I could pull out my crafting code and allow you all to shred it to bits.

I’m mired in to-dos, but remind me in about a week and I’ll look into it.

@MisterBoring Whether or not that’s better, I don’t know if it’s practicable. And there are folks that really like that down time between episodes (I like some, just I would prefer that it be a couple of weeks compared to a month or three, again, I know people who prefer the downtime to the episodes, so YMMV).

I think that the only way you could possible get anywhere near even just a couple of weeks between episodes is to have two Storyteller Staffs, because there’s going to be some cooldown time and some administrative ramp-up time on either end of an episode. Even then, I think it would entirely depend on the setting/theme of the game whether the shortest possible downtime is the best option, a medium length, or a long downtime. I think that if you have intense episodes without much time for the players or characters to catch their breath, you’re going to want a medium-long amount of downtime; if you have episodes that meander and have time to catch your breath in the midst, then I think you would want shorter amounts of downtime.

I could see, say, a WWII game that has people at the front (or on alert at the airbase or whatever), needing a month or so between campaigns, to let the characters (and players) breathe and find their new status quo. But I could see a murder mystery game needing much less time between cases (because you’re probably going to get a little bit of investigation time and some breathing room in there, and it isn’t likely to be as life or death all the time as a combat game.

@Raeras said in The Lost Realms Discussion:

@tighearna
Genuinely curious question. I’m not extremely familiar with Hobbit/LotR lore and I know it’s not D&D so

I can understand on some level why your policies say to keep romantic rp between the same species but is this primarily aimed at the physical aspect?

Or is this just across the board because it’s not thing at all in the lore? (Again, I can see other reasoning for wanting to keep things separated on the physical aspect)

This is the one at least a few people are going to deliberately flaunt in private scenes, guaranteed, lol.

It’s a problem created by the nature of a MU.

In a work of fiction, the protagonists, deuteragonists, and antagonists are, a lot of the time, people whose circumstances are somehow special. In settings in which things like cross-species reproduction is rare but possible, that’s an easy way of making a “special person”.

In a tabletop game or a small group, your characters are the protagonists of the story, so them being special is not a big deal; you can play a half-elf because, despite being vanishingly rare (which automatically makes you special) there’s a lot more control over who can and can’t be that specific version of special, as there are only about 3-6 protagonists.

MUs, unfortunately, break this by catering to a much, much larger playerbase. Suddenly, if one out of every five characters is a half-elf, then being a half-elf isn’t special because it ceases to be vanishingly rare.

Do I agree with this policy? Ehn, not really. I think once the characters hit the grid they should be able to fall in love and have the lives they choose (if they are rosters, they should probably be played by the same person for a long-enough period of time before they can do things like get pregnant or married or whatever, just to avoid people doing that and then bailing on the character).

This is especially true given that the game has a policy of one character per player, which means the pool wherein you can find someone to play a romantic storyline with is extremely limited. Even aiming high and saying that you’ve got 50 players, lets say you’re playing a Hobbit… but most people are playing Humans or Elves, there’s maybe at BEST another 9 Hobbits on the game. Let’s say your character is bisexual/biromantic, that’s 9 people – once you start eliminating through schedule, chemistry, RP preferences… yeah.

I personally would bend a little and let interspecies relationships just be more common, but that’s just my take. Clearly @tighearna has their own vision for their game, which is how it should be.

Wait, you all read the books?

@Artemis There’s a group of us that’s adapting DnD rules into a post Second Reckoning campaign. One friend is doing a small module to apply to Arx and I’m creating a longer campiagn that’ll probably take place five years after putting Azazel back into his box.

Will it be the same? Nah.

Will it be fun? Probably.

I have transferred the grid and theme stuff to Atharia on Ares and fiddled code (mostly my awesome coder did the fiddling when she had time).

CG has been tested and people can now make characters. How I am currently handling character stuff:

While I am in the middle of transferring characters from PennMUSH Atharia to Ares Atharia players who wish to transfer their character (even returning people), or new characters, can go beyond the limitations in CG. I am not restricting how much beyond the CG points limits people can go as long as they are being reasonable about it. Once people stop being reasonable, I will start restricting.

The character transfer process will be:

Roster characters Retired characters Active Characters who are not being done by a player.

Basically, if you want to reach for the stars in your CG stuff, as a returning, new, or current player, now is a good time. I am not concerned about people being overpowered as long as they make sure to let others shine.

The website: https://atharia.net

@Warma-Sheen said in On PvP and permanent injuries:

The problem is people.

It’s true. My code always works until people start touching it.