@hellfrog and me 😞

@Third-Eye said in Paid Role-Playing:

The idea of dealing with players who think they’re a paying ‘customer’ always gets a legit, IRL, full-body shudder out of me when this comes up.

Yeah. I think we have problems with players and staff viewing the games as transactional when are meant to be reciprocal, and making them literally transactional would make it worse.

@Faraday CUTE!!

Michael Hague

Go back in memory, back to the children’s library, and you’ll remember him.

I got to meet him at story-times a couple of times as a kid, he was a nice man and his hair was very very shiny in the '80s.

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@Ashkuri
There is no war in Ba Sing Se and there are no sex pests on AoA.
Any belief to the contrary is against the way of things.
Self-report, then self-deport.
/s

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Because this is topical for me today with the final part of Wind and Truth coming out (yay, finally, I can start it!) …

Cannot possibly recommend the company Graphic Audio enough as an audiobook experience. It was my gateway drug back into reading after an embarrassingly long stretch of fractured attention span. Their tagline is ‘A Movie in Your Mind’, which it pretty well succeeds at. They make everything a full Radio Play experience, with sound effects and music and a sprawling cast of voice actors for each book.

The only downside is that they do tend to retain the same voice talent, so if you bounce around between some series, you’ll be like, “Hey wait, why’s Wit here? Oh, no, he’s not. Just the same voice.”

Either way, cannot recommend it highly enough. The actors really swing for the fences, and when it lands, it lands so well.

Auto clicker

According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly.
Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground.
The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible.
Yellow, black. Yellow, black. Yellow, black. Yellow, black.
Ooh, black and yellow!
Let’s shake it up a little.
Barry! Breakfast is ready…

My mentality is “I’m here for a good time and maybe a long time.” If I’m not interested in what’s happening, I just kinda…wander off. Or, if I really like the place, I’ll try to make my own fun right up until someone tells me “I’m doing it wrong.” Which is basically what happened with AoA and Cujo. 😛 Right now I’m between games and just waiting to see if one pops up that looks more interesting than just booting up the PlayStation.

I don’t really feel any drive to ride a game into the sun.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Gashlycrumb I think there’s honestly a lot of nuance and discussion to be had on job queues all together

Yeah. The original AnomalyJobs came with the coder as the headwiz yelling at people for using it wrongly and establishing by force of virtual lung-power, a standard for single-topic +requests and what sorts of things you could page about without being told it needed to be a +request, etc, and rode herd on the rest of staff about that, probably unpleasantly. As a gamerunner I had a vetting process for them that was meant to keep pacing more fair but would not have been robust enough for a game with the level of GM involvement and plot complexity I wish for lately.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

some people just absolutely cannot explain what they’re actually asking for in a job request for whatever reason that is

I know I’ve been that guy. Well, my hyperbolic joke about it is that there are those staffers where you ask if your PC can have a housecat and they tell you that a talking green ridable tiger isn’t themely, and you try to explain housecat until they get sharp and you feel anxious and bad about it and still don’t know if your PC can get a kitten. But of course in actuality it’s nothing simple like a kitten, it’s some complicated scheme that I’m explaining badly.

@Clarion It’s more about the grid feeling like a virtual location where Ares / web scenes just have a flatness to them that I can’t get out of my brain (even though I know they’re both just scrolling walls of text).

Resolved now. Posting somewhere about it always solves a problem before anyone has a chance to find out what’s really wrong.

Updated.

@Cobalt said in Tips for GMs:

@bear_necessities said in Tips for GMs:

@KDraygo said in Tips for GMs:

Try to keep the scene moving,

Please. Please keep things moving. I’ve been in GM’d scenes where we haven’t even finished “posing in” and have already hit the 1 hour mark.

I know this is a few days ago, but this irks me so bad. It is why in the last few years that I was GMing for people, I instituted a rule that if you had not posed after 5-10 minutes when it was your run and not responded OOC your turn would be skipped.

But scenes moving so slowly that I’d lose all focus on them, is a big reason why I stopped GMing and RPing altogether.

To help with that, I try to make sure the beginning of a major event is “on rails,” like a guided tour. That is, everyone has 10 - 15 minutes to post before the next thing happens (NPC does a thing, everyone move to the next room, etc.). Everyone sticks together until the beginning is finished, and then you’re set free to go wherever you’d like, RP about the situation, take actions, etc.

Having a beginning prepared in advance helps to strike a balance between player agency and moving things along.

Unrelated: if someone wants to do something that’s beyond what you’re capable of handling, such as using everyday household objects to make war crime weapons in your My Little Pony game, you’re allowed to say, “I’m sorry, we don’t have support for handling that type of RP in this game. It’s outside the scope of the game’s theme.”

Somewhat related: Be prepared for mediating players’ interpersonal issues in a calm and helpful manner. That includes banning, if necessary. Unless you have a positive reputation from past games, you need to understand that players are usually entering your game with zero trust of staff. The odds that a player has been burned by staff in the past is very high. So be keenly aware that you are the one who needs to earn their trust. Not the other way around.

Also unrelated: Give your players things to do in their downtime. PRPs, RP about current events, take actions leading up to the next event, and optional scenes that produce tangible results are great for player engagement. Things like, “Make some clothes for the donation bin; we’re low on shoes,” or “The cows can be milked once a month to improve our town’s reputation,” or “The camp needs 20 pounds of wood to repair structures and 20 pounds of boar meat to survive the month in a healthy state,” can motivate players to do optional scenes in between major events.

And it helps to fill in the four levels of player engagement:

Metaplot: The reason why everything is happening. You’ll barely touch this, but it’s important to write down. You can drop little lore nuggets at the end of every chapter as a reward, but your players won’t directly interact with the metaplot.

Chapter / season plot: These are the major plots that take months to resolve. They’re the backdrop to what’s happening in the story right now. These are the ones that are resolved over the course of multiple major scenes, as well as player actions over time. When a chapter plot resolves, it should usually cause a major dynamic shift in how the players RP, and what they RP about. For example, the PCs successfully opened the door to Twinkle Town, and now scenes are possible there, but it’s a very dangerous place to explore. The next season may be about making Twinkle Town a safe place to live as their homes on the Tiny Islands collapse.

Episodic plot: Your “monster of the week” plot. These are the small steps forward in the Chapter Plot. They could also be unrelated to the chapter plot, too. Not everything that happens needs to end with a TV displaying Moriarty’s laughing face.

Day-to-day plots: These are the things your players will be doing during their downtime, which I explained above. This is the most common type of RP that happens, so it’s really important to facilitate it however the players wish. They should be instantly accessible, either through guidelines or through automation (pre-written rules about rolling dice, adding code if that’s an option, etc.).

Write down the metaplot, at least 3 chapter plots, at least 3 episodic plots per chapter, and at least 5 day-to-day plots. Now you’ve got a plan for keeping your players engaged for at least a year.

Building a game is the easy part. Keeping it going for years is the real challenge.

And on that note, it’s okay to have an ending in mind! You don’t have to run your game forever. A satisfying conclusion will be far more memorable than a game that just fizzles out due to lack of engagement. And, as a counter-point, it’s also okay to say that the game isn’t going in a direction you can handle, and wrap it up for the players. Sometimes experiments don’t work out, and that’s okay.

One time @Roz’s character unironically played Wonderwall to my character on an acoustic guitar.

@hellfrog This. Exactly this. I want players to do things and be rewarded, not be rewarded for logging in.

The system I have in my mind may not work at all. But it can be changed. I just don’t want to continue doing the same thing, over and over, and expecting different results.

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