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Pyrephox

For me, it’s all about…matching energy.

I’m typically an enthusiastic player. I’ll be out there, approaching people, trying to set up scenes, I’ve got ideas for small scenes or PrPs, and my character has goals and things they want to accomplish.

But that takes energy, which I get back from feeling other people’s enthusiasm coming back to me. In poses, in reaching out with ideas or wanting scenes, in responses from staff, in plotty scenes that seem to accomplish something.

If the energy is off balance, especially if I’m bleeding out more than I’m getting back, then I’m going to end up drifting away. Usually, I realize I’m done with a game when I haven’t logged on in 3-5 days and I realize…I don’t regret it.

But it’s all about the energy exchange, not really about the completeness of the story or the structure of the game itself. When I log on, do I feel like my excitement is matched by other players/staff? If yes? I’m locked in for whatever is going on. If no? I’ll drift away.

Tez

Some stuff on grid vs web scenes forked into it’s own thread here: https://brandmu.day/topic/644/grid-vs-web-scenes/10

Tez

@Trashcan said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

TEZ, THIS IS OFF TOPIC, fork me if you want.

fork u

(from https://brandmu.day/topic/643/rp-safari-pacing-styles/80)

Pyrephox

I’m probably unusual in that, in theory, I would be happy to pay for playing in a MU* on some sort of subscription model. I’ve kicked in for tabletop games before, so contributing to someone taking the time and energy to make entertainment for me isn’t a hard ask!

In practice, though, it would raise my standards for what I expected in return to the point where I’d want a professional product, as opposed to the hobbyist arrangements we have now. And I doubt that’s sustainable with a persistent online world on a price point where I’d feel comfortable signing up. (It works fine in tabletop, because you schedule your time, you outline what the parameters are going to be, etc. But with a persistent setting, you need to guarantee, for example, that a player in the UK or China is going to get the same quality of experience as one on the East Coast of the US, which means GMs guaranteed to run relevant plots at those times, etc. And MUDs probably have an advantage because many/most systems are automated.)

But…I dunno. I think it would depend a lot on the experience and value that was offered, how trustworthy I considered the person offering it, and what the cost was.

Pyrephox

Man, I wish. I would play the heck out of that game. All the players can be the quirky townsfolk with our own farms, and the Harvest Festival is this MASSIVELY OVERWROUGHT thing that nobody in the surrounding towns understands and thinks is kinda weird, but you know what, it means we somehow manage to grow bizarre and magical variations of all sorts of fruits and veggies, so they just…let us do our thing and buy our food.

Meanwhile, we’re all gearing up and marching into magical wildernesses to try and find the Perfect Turnip Seed and grow it in our special soil made from dragon manure, the soil beneath a dark cult’s sacrificial altar, and shards of sunlight taken from the peak of a frozen mountain.

And if our Perfect Turnip weighs even an ounce less than our Rival’s we will throw the biggest tantrum in the county.

Pyrephox

@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!

Pyrephox

@Roadspike said in Tips for GMs:

@Pavel Agreed. And there’s nothing wrong with calling for some Wits checks and then just providing them with the necessary information if they can’t figure it out based on your clues. Maybe your clues aren’t as brilliant as you thought they were, maybe the players just had a bad day and aren’t braining well, or maybe they’re shy of putting an idea forward for fear of being wrong. There’s no shame in either just giving them the information they need, or going the Brindlewood Bay method of “whatever solution the PCs come up with was the correct one, so long as their rolls were good enough.”

My life became a lot better, as a GM, when I really understood that the things I thought were So Clear as clues were only clear because I knew what the plot was. Expecting players to read my mind to understand what I was hoping they’d get was really just frustrating everyone.

Besides, I have come to believe that it’s rarely the process of getting information that is the most exciting–it’s seeing what players do with information once they have it. (Which isn’t to say I don’t love a good research or questioning scene, but I try to focus on ‘failure means consequences, not a shutdown’ as much as I can. (Which isn’t always as much as I want–a tired brain drags us all down, on occasion.)

Pyrephox

I got my only accusation of racism as a school counselor over schedule changes, and upon investigation, realized where it came from. I was denying schedule changes according to the written policy, but certain students (mostly wealthy and white) appealed over my head to a vice principal who made the schedule changes they requested, so it very much looked like some students were receiving favorable treatment (which they were, just not from me).

Unfortunately, there was no denying that the school and district had issues with systemic racism, which made it understandable that parents would become frustrated.

Pyrephox

I prefer web-based, but echo what people have said about anything being fine so long as it’s clear and well-documented.

Tez

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