Someone wrote this on the former board, and I’m sorry that I don’t know who it’s credited to. The topic was what you expect to do as a GM. It covers Metaplot, as well as the plots surrounding it, so I think it’s useful in seeing how the Metaplot interacts with everything else.

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How many people are you able to sustain GMing for? What are you going to do if your game gets 3-5x that? What are you going to do if the inverse happens and you get 3-5x less?

Metaplot: The background high-level long-term plot that plods along that provides a Background Reason for your other plots; the plot that creates the plots you actually run; the ‘history’, behind the scenes, what REALLY happened; the Big Picture – this is the glue that holds your stories together that you don’t interact with very much – the Antediluvian sleeping under your city, the origin of the Hellmouth, the fact that it’s actually the strain of grain that they’re being fed on the space station that’s giving everybody these powers…this is the story behind the story.

Chapter/Season Plots: These are the active day to day staff run “what is happening on this game” that your players can and should be able to directly impact. They should have a start, a middle, and an end. They should have LOTS of hooks for people to run PRPs from. They should give people stuff to RP about. So when you’re deciding on your chapter/season plot, you REALLY need to consider beyond the story itself:

what are my hooks for PRPs?
what will people RP about, in relation to this plot?
what RP will this plot create when I am not around?
What impacts will this plot have on peoples’ day to day RP?
Where are the pain points? What can I do about them? What will stall people’s RP about this?
DO NOT SEPARATE YOUR PLAYERBASE IN YOUR CHAPTER PLOT – THEY TAKE TOO LONG TO RESOLVE

Episodic Plots: This is what makes the game go round. This is all the little things that get run weekly, from parties to monster of the week to scheduled events that feed into the above types. They are typically self contained, and keep people entertained while the Chapter/Season gives them things to RP about. You want to make these REALLY easy to run – give people LOTS of easy hooks into your Chapter, and plenty of info with which to run them. You ALSO want to make sure it’s really clear what they CAN’T do, because people always have an easier time when they know what their boundaries are.

It might be helpful to think of what kind of role you see yourself or other staffers filling, since that can kind of suggest the game you want. A head storyteller, where you are creating plot everyone can join in? An arbiter, where people are all making their own stories and you help curate them? And so on.

I think trying to think of how you want to spend your time running your game can help shape the game you want to create and how it plays.

Whenever I share stories about Silent Heaven, it feels like I’m always doing something different, and yet it works for the game.

In this case, we have a policy for a right to OOC privacy. That is, nobody is required to share their OOC identity, but you can share privately with people you trust.

Staff are marked as staff in the Discord chat, and they, too, don’t have to reveal who they play. I also strongly enforce a rule that staff cannot be on their staff account at the same time they’re on their alt, which eliminates a lot of mischief that could happen. They also have to mark other characters that they interact with frequently on a “conflict of interest” list, which codedly hides all information, notes, jobs, and requests of those characters. This makes it so they specifically give the most RP to the characters they play the least with.

I can’t imagine this would work for every game, but it works exceptionally well for us.

@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

That said, I have met people in this hobby who purposefully write a long background so that they can sneak story elements into the game that the staff may specifically be avoiding. I guess some people choose to take advantage of the fact that staff often don’t read the whole thing.

I’ve staffed on games where we have a background MAXIMUM and people have still tried to go over and at least once the person was like “I know that it’s over the limit but it’s important” and we just went NOPE EDIT IT DOWN.

I made the background field a single line. Once you press enter, that’s it. Your background is over.

And I’ve still seen backgrounds that fill my entire screen. An entire brick of text. Even then, I do read them and enjoy the stories people come up with.

Side-tangent: I do sometimes get people who submit troll backgrounds, like someone’s dark secret is that they killed the dinosaurs, or that they accidentally crashed a car into a furry convention and swapped lives with one of the costumers. Those are less fun to read

Cyborg is the only darkish theme I found that also has dark quote boxes.

I can typically identify descs written by AI by how they’re surprisingly un-specific to the reality of what they’re supposed to be describing.

Yes, her eyes may harken back to bygone timeless memories hidden within pools of mystery, but what color are they?

Consider me a total bystander. Based on the posts here, I got the impression that the game was slowly dying.

According to their reported numbers, the population practically doubled just a few days ago.

https://iberia.jdai.pt/mudstats/mud/star_wars_age_of_alliances

I’m just curious what happened.

I found this while researching a reported player the other day.

https://forums.untold-dawn.com/t/banned-amorcinocera-cameron-a-tall-tanned-man/280

To summarize, Amor RPs something he regrets, gets bullied about it incessantly by another player (Nine) IC, and wishes it would stop so he could have fun playing the game again. Amor goes to staff (Rune) to find a resolution.

If it were me handling this, the easiest solution would be to cancel that storyline and reach out to the character who’s doing the bullying to remind them to check-in OOC to see if other players are having fun with the teasing. Matter resolved. Make a note of it for future reference.

That’s not at all what happened in this circumstance. I don’t even know how to fully explain it. Amor was talked down to by Rune to the point that Amor seemingly regretted even bringing it up. Nine was banned later on, and Rune saw Amor improving afterwards. However, Amor still felt unappreciated. He seemingly let it bleed into RP in a pair of THINKs, and then realized that the best choice was to take a break. So he did, and Rune banned him on his way out.

We don’t have the full story from the logs, but I certainly wouldn’t feel appreciated if the only positivity I received from staff was when I agreed to stay quiet about the issue that was preventing me from enjoying the game.

In my experience as staff, when someone is coming to you with a problem about another player that’s affecting their ability to play, they’re most often taking a huge leap of faith that you’ll find some way to help them find enjoyment again. I say it’s a leap of faith, because plenty of players have been burned by conversations like this one that make reaching out to staff an anxiety-inducing affair.

People are going to make mistakes in their RP that make them uncomfortable OOC. We don’t need to force players to live with those mistakes.

Just yesterday I said I was impressed that Liberation was going strong after its rough start.

The recent alarm seems like the general slowness that happens this time of year. To compare, I only ran about 3 events during the entire holiday season on Silent Heaven, when I usually do at least 2 per week. I suspect things will gradually pick up as the solstice grows further behind us.

@Kestrel

The moment where you realize, “oh, you’re not playing a character; this is actually you.”

@ten said in MU Peeves Thread:

Ares games feel like those magic slate drawing pads.

You shake them too hard and your creative work disappears?

Let’s all get together for an escape room and come up with hilarious ways to roleplay our way out.

I used to check BMD daily because there were so many problems in the hobby that there would inevitably be new fireworks going off each week. I’ve always seen this place as a valuable resource to warn and discuss.

But for most of 2024, there have barely been any red flags anywhere.

Did we do it? Is it truly a brand mu day?

It feels nice.

@Buttercup if you’re comfortable RPing with a phone, the built-in speech to text is pretty reliable there!

@Jennkryst said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@Zephyr NOT ONLY THAT, but there used to be a secret vendor with crazy mark-up prices… so that you could buy, say… 10 personal scanners for 2,000 each, then sell them for 25,000 each. Or some similar crazy markup.

Who needs to abuse the trading system, when you can abuse the vendor code, instead?

That seems like a lot of effort just to set money = 9999999.

A ChatGPT app can’t even come close to the appreciation I have for the person who apped into a modern-day horror game with a character whose dark backstory is that he killed the dinosaurs.

@somasatori said in Installing Arxcode?:

If I recall @Jumpscare did something with Evennia that has a good crafting system. I didn’t roll a crafter on Silent Heaven when I did (Simon was a disgraced med student), but it looked super cool. Maybe that might be compatible?

I could pull out my crafting code and allow you all to shred it to bits.

I’m mired in to-dos, but remind me in about a week and I’ll look into it.

@SpilledBeanz

I found the stats here:
https://iberia.jdai.pt/mudstats/

I’m proud of all of you for not even attempting to log in.

There was one person who joined Silent Heaven to play a Korean vtuber who spoke in broken English. And not the kind of English one would pick up naturally, but the stereotypically offensive caricature of broken English.

I messaged her player, letting them know that being immersed in English for months should show an improvement in her language, and that she needs to have a better, less stereotypical grasp on English now, with improvements over the coming weeks. They agreed to that.

They stopped logging in shortly after the talk.

@Redbird On the Discord server, yes, I ask that you don’t reveal your character name there, or spoil current events. You’re allowed to do it anywhere else, including on BMD, and you can even create your own private or public groups of people you enjoy talking to – and that’s the main point. It’s so you only talk to the people you want to talk to. I want players to be absolutely comfortable with someone new they’re playing with before they decide whether they want to give permission to share OOC contact information.

The reason privacy is mandatory is to prevent the feeling of peer pressure from multiple players revealing their characters. Even if you personally don’t feel that pressure, I’ve heard enough stories from players who have.

It’s also to encourage RP. One gripe I’ve seen repeated in the MU Peeves Threads is how people share IC goings-on over OOC channels to the point that it saps away RP opportunities. Subtle references and memes are completely fine, and the community is really good about realizing when they’re dipping too far into spoiler territory. You’re more than welcome to say you had a blast at a recent event, or that you were confused by a certain something happening, as long as it’s kept relatively vague. For example, “I didn’t understand how characters got plot items in the last event.” or “The event last night was amazing. You’re all so talented!” Things like that are perfectly fine.

Overall, yes, while these rules stifle handfuls of discussions, I feel that it’s an overall improvement to safety and privacy, as well as providing a significant increase to the amount of RP that happens in-game. Players almost always find RP when they want to RP, and they chill on the server when they want to chat OOC. I wouldn’t say this setup works for all games. But for a game like Silent Heaven with lots of secrets and mysteries, it keeps the game world bustling with activity, and it provides a clear separation between what’s IC and what’s OOC.