@Pavel said in The 3-Month Players:

WWIII with Aliens and Zombies is plot, sure, but so is Gilmore Girls, and the latter would generally be considered social RP.

There are gray areas, sure, but in most dramas (like GG) some storylines are given more prominence and feel more like Plot than others. It doesn’t have to be action-packed, just impactful.

As an example - in the pilot episode from ER, some of the major plotlines are a building collapse, a new medical student’s first day, and a doctor deciding whether to leave the ER for a quieter specialty. Those I would call Plot. In-between are various scenes that don’t affect the overall story but promote character development, like one doctor turning up drunk and sleeping it off in an exam room. Those feel more like Social RP.

TV shows and novels don’t tend to have much (if any) BarRP, because they don’t have time to waste on random meetings between strangers or small talk that serves no other narrative purpose. But MUs generally aren’t as heavily plotted as those other mediums. People don’t meet because the plot demands it, they meet because they happen to be on at the same time and decide to have a scene.

ETA: I’m not claiming that these definitions are an infallible or universal classification scheme or anything. They’re just useful for me in terms of evaluating what kinds of RP I enjoy, and what’s going on in a game.

@Tapewyrm said in The 3-Month Players:

The question I would have is: why are you turning the lights out?

Games end for all kinds of reason. Burnout, goals being met, RL disruptions, running out of story ideas, and yes - to your point - losing enough critical mass of RP to the point where people stop showing up.

@Buttercup I’ve thought about an L5R type roster game, but I’d want to use the 5e ruleset with the fancy FFG dice, so getting it coded is tricksier than usual.

@L-B-Heuschkel Funnily enough, I worked with Raph for years when I worked at SOE, and he was doing Star Wars Galaxies. He’s a smart cookie. Knows his shit backwards and forwards.

@Raistlin Totally does. Very cool. If I have free time (which is a luxury these days) I’ll be sure and check it out when it opens.

@Ominous said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

@Rucket Could you elaborate on what you mean by “basic House development”?

Apologies at the insane delay I don’t check this place daily. Anyway I liked the basic concept that Arx had of domains and I would enjoy seeing projects people in the house could work on to improve areas of their domain over time. I don’t know that I have any super specific things in mind off the top of my head right now.

@Floof said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

I have no idea how it’d work but I’ve always kind of wanted a game inspired by Ark: Survival Evolved/Ascended

If you want dinosaurs, go play a WoD game.

a man playing drums with the word travis behind him

@MisterBoring said in The Magicians:

As far as magic school subgenre of stuff, there are examples of that I do enjoy. Most recently the anime / manga series Mashle. I’ve just never been able to get into the Magicians for whatever reason.

I love Mashle so gd much

@Pavel & @Prototart

There is a game for that particular group:
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@Coin I was not aware of that. Definitely something to look at next time I peruse Ares games.

I don’t think this person posts here (Cayric? You out there?), but if they are… ❤ ❤

I’m having one of those nice moments as a storyteller where something I just randomly dropped in a scene on a whim has ballooned into a wee plot, and one of the players swept up in the story happily surprised me and tied the whole thing back into the metaplot in such a way that it even filled in a plothole for me. 🙂

@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:

How often did you get players running things?

I don’t remember off-hand, but I’d say it was probably somewhere around 75-25 Staff-run and player-run for straight up combat scenes. But this could also be because I had just fallen in love with the FS3 combat system and was running a ton of scenes.

Seeding plot points to PrPs has to be done carefully, and if I’m being blunt, only with trusted plot-runners. On The Savage Skies we had a few player-run-plots that went off the rails and had to be reined back in via minor retcons. I would only provide metaplot seeds to plot-runners who have demonstrated a good handle on the basic setting, and only then after having an explicit back-and-forth conversation so that they knew what they were introducing and at least some of why they were introducing it.

@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:

Did you get a feel from players or any feedback as to how the political side worked for them?

There were certainly players who were chasing that side of things pretty hard. Interestingly, it was particularly the players who were on the side gaining power who were chasing after it, because they knew they weren’t doing anything, and yet their side was still gaining power and influence and they wanted to know who was doing it and why. Knowing players in general, I expect that they would have found the person who was gathering the power and done their best to shut them down – and I think they would have succeeded, but it would have caused a power vacuum in the Crown Council that would have caused short-term chaos in the war effort (but probably would have come out ahead in the long term).

@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:

TWOP definition

I had only tangentially heard of this source (Television Without Pity?). I think that my definitions came from working in gaming companies (tabletop and video) where there are some things that are immutable or relatively immutable (setting) and some things that can change with the story being told (metaplot). Looking at the wikipedia definition of metaplot, I don’t think that I disagree with the first two sentences at all:

The metaplot (also, metastory) is the overarching storyline that binds together events in the official continuity of a published role-playing game campaign setting, also defined as an “evolving history of a given fictional universe”. Major official story events that change the world, or simply move important non-player characters from one place to another, are part of the metaplot for a game.

I definitely think that that’s talking about metaplot – the events taking place in the setting that connect all the various storylines going on at once – rather than setting – the details of the world where the action is taking place – by my definitions.

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.

@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.

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.