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!

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

in the majority of cases

Perhaps so, but this does not mean that the problem I mention does not happen frequently.

I never hear people complain about staffers having PCs in general, They complain about staffers cheating for their PCs or other staffers’ PCs, or staffers making all plots the Staff-Alt Story.

Hell, there is such a taboo (and likely a justified one) against +where stalking that if a player is waiting for a five minute reply to a +request and happens to see the staffer online 15 out of 16 days and they appears to be spending 5+ hours each day actively RPing their alt with Abelard and Bridget or GMing scenes for Abelard and Bridget, the player still won’t say anything. This is probably for the best, but it doesn’t mean that players don’t know, and lying to them about how busy and thinly spread staff is doesn’t entertain.

@Pavel Vaguely? O.o

Anyways. It’s a chill place, but the admins have very busy lives. But if someone wanted to show up and run their own stories - as long as it makes sense for the time period (9BBY) it would be extremely welcome.

a man in a tuxedo is scratching his head with his hand

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

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.

The strange delight I feel when students suffer from autocorrect.

This week, there were a lot of nasty analyses and nasty generalisations.

@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!

@tsar I am replying here to get your attention for no reason related to past posts in this thread.

I just want to say I both appreciate and 😄 over the 🐌 facts I see when I peek at Crimson Compass’s site.

Hello fellow old! Arashi/Alexis/Julianne/Energy Lass (and…well…yeah…Oracle) from Crucible City here! Just rediscovered my hundreds of Crucible City logs in a backup drive and was poking around the net curiously. Figured I’d pop in to say hi! 😄

IMG_0525.jpg

@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.

a man in a suit is making a funny face and saying oh no !

@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.

@Roz obvs so nothing dethrones the AoA thread post count.

Chud