@mietze
@Coin has some excellent practical tips above.

no matter how hard one tries to be “fair” though there are always going to be people saying it’s not good enough.

This is true. It’s also okay.

Probably part one of the trick is to accept that not everybody will like everything you do as a game runner. In fact. probably every person will find something you’ve done that they dislike. Sometimes people will mention it. That’s okay. Sometimes people will lose their tempers about it and yell at you rudely. That’s not really okay, but it is a sure thing that it’ll happen, so you must try to be okay with it.

Another part is that RPGs are never moment-by-moment ‘fair’. It’s just not how they work. Sometimes you may end up in situations where you ought to say, “I’m sorry, player, I know that my call on this has left you with the short and sticky end of the stick. Thank you for takin’ one for the team, I will try to make it up to you.” Yes, this is tantamount to admitting you made an unfair decision. But it’s also a whole lot kinder and more human – “I’m doing my best as an imperfect person in an inperfect world,” is a lot easier to take than, “Your feelings are invalid, there’s no reason you should think this end is short and sticky.”

Yet another part is to accept that you, yes you, are going to make mistakes. That’s okay too. Don’t lie about them. Don’t hinge your ego on being perfect. Don’t try to hide your mistakes in the belief that players won’t trust you if they know you make them. Honesty counts for a lot. So does honest self-examination – if you can’t accept that you might have screwed up, then you can’t really accurately judge your choices. A lot of games that seem otherwise awesome turn out to be utter crap because of "I am a fair person, so my calls are fair’ type thinking obscuring facts and leading to “player said my call was unfair, so they’re insulting me by calling me an unfair person” interpersonal weirdness.

I tried very hard to discourage people from thinking of me as an authority figure. I am not the greatest, or even a great, GM. I am not a leading egg-spurt on the theme or even the mechanics. I am a middle-aged geek just like everybody else here and I’m not the gamerunner because of any merit other than my willingness to do it.

@Coin said in MU Peeves Thread:

I mean, how important an aspect of running a game and its success is, is subjective.

Well, yeah. By what metrics may we judge a MU successful is another thread. I think GoB was successful because it had as many players as I wanted, or three times as many, but a much lower player-to-incident-of-OOC-drama ratio than most, and because it had two time-blocks in which there were always, every day, scenes going on, and people reported that they were having fun. And because when ‘House of the Dragon’ premiered, like five years later, former GoB players (some of whom I barely remember, I’m embarassed to say) popped emails of GoB nostalgia to me.

But definitely an invididual thing, too – GoB’s popularity was firmly linked to that of Game of Thrones and most other MUs don’t see a burst of new apps every season premier and finale of a television show, or have people lose enthusiasm when the show’s quality falls.

You don’t have a fever nor are you throwing up.
Sorry sweetheart, OFF TO SCHOOL.

Having a meh week. Coming home. Sitting down (that in itself is a win) and then having furry critters on you. One snuggled in and one purring because they missed you.

@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.

Getting yelled at by a 7 year old just minutes after they woke up is apparently a huge trigger for me. Who knew?

Random observation: The telnet access is what makes Ares accessible to visually impaired players. Which of course doesn’t rule out having the coolest web portal ever.

Watching players dive hard into not just exploring plot stuff, but also running stuff in order to tie into metaplot you’re real excited about is so fucking fun.

In almost ten years at my company, I have only ever gotten one bad review – one! out of almost twenty! – from a person who was my manager for all of two months. It was from someone who not only didn’t understand what my job was, but who regularly gave conflicting instructions in the same day, would ignore when I pointed this out to her, and then wondered why I couldn’t do both of these things that were in direct opposition to one another. This manager then proceeded to be mean to me for the next two years straight, all the way up until I moved to a different subdivision, and still tries to pull my current boss into almost everything I work on that she’s involved in.

Today she was forced to acknowledge that my work is fast, thoughtful, and high quality despite being related to a request that is urgent, complex, and so confusing to convey to our audience that we need spreadsheets of who gets what messaging, when, and from whom.

And she had to say the nice thing in front of an entire committee.

Including my boss.

win

@helvetica

that’s stellar dog content, thank you.

I would like to offer a image of my cypurr-punk cats.

IMG_0267.jpeg

edit: now with 💯 more puns.

@Alveraxus There’s always room for grave dancing. I mean, I’m still starting the morning with a little jig thanks to Kissinger riding the one way tramway to hell.

@Cobalt OKAY. WILL WE START FROM SCRATCH? Also I have Enshrouded too.

@Cobalt I could offer some recommendations there! Not for games, exactly, but for what sorts of games, in my experience, makes the difference between fun, impulsive editing, and editing where footage needs to be meticulously outlined.

IMG_0818.jpeg

@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.

The current story line we’re doing is finding a kingdom and having an ‘enemy’ starting to get really active. A special request for people to play the ‘bad guys’ is given with reward things for it. The post:

~~

Staff Special Request Minerva
Recruitment (5/2) Wed Apr 03, 2024 8:45am

~~

The next major plot point for Atharia is to reveal Ren to be a villain. He is likely a part of the Council of the Devoted. I repeatedly say that I don’t really hide what is intended to happen, even if I don’t give all the details. What happens to Ren will depend on players (kill him, convert him, save him, etc).

I explained all that for a reason. My semi-plan is that Ren is the current leader of the Council of the Devoted. What I would like is a couple people willing to play members of the Council, publicly known as such. This means the character will be a villain and likely temporary, though, I am not against the character becoming permanent if people end up enjoying the story line for the character, which will likely be a redemption arch to where they ‘become Good’ (or at least an anti-hero type) since sometimes people have issues with getting into scenes with villains.

You can totally be part of the Council on a current character that gets exposed along with Ren or before him. IF you’re worried your character concept won’t work, we can figure it out to make it happen.

[[[Council of the Devoted]]] (https://atharia.net/wiki/council_of_the_devoted) for more details on the Council.

My ideal would be at least 1 sub-leader and 2 or 3 ‘general members’.

As this will be a temporary character (unless you decide otherwise), 50% of any XP you earn on the character can be transferred to an alt, if you desire. If you don’t care about the XP we can discuss alternative ideas for a ‘reward’ for playing a character that is destined to be ‘dealt with’ in some form. Rewards can be anything, within reason. It can be you can ask for a plot line that is strictly geared for your character, work out an angle of getting a position you would like for your alt, you can add some specific details to theme files that you feel would add to the game (subject to review and possible modifications if it is to off theme), etc. If it works for the game IC or OOC, I’m willing to talk it over. You can play more than 1 Council member but the ‘reward’ only applies once. So, if you play 5 characters the reward will be once over all not once for each character.

Contact me if interested.
~~
(1) Minerva replied on Sat Apr 06, 2024 8:03am
These temporary characters can absolutely be Children of Gods but it needs to fit with the alts rules. That is to say, if you have a Child of Gods PC already, the temporary one can not be one. This is so that if you decide you enjoy playing the character’s story you don’t need to give up either character unless you want too.

~~

The ability to go beyond available CG points is no longer a thing. We’ve transferred everything over.

@L-B-Heuschkel if I get time. Things are intense with PhD. X

@Prototart said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:

(the LAST char i made, he gave a glowing approval for as a concept pitch & then rejected outright and told me i was trash when i very lightly pushed back on something he said during review)

Damn, is he my thesis advisor lmao 😢

@Nynrose Oh no, I’m so sorry to hear this! Thanks for sharing - and wishes for good results in your upcoming treatment.