Come back and visit us on Keys sometime, Jin.
Posts made by L. B. Heuschkel
-
RE: MU Peeves Thread
I prefer live scenes where the immersion is 110% and the speed is breakneck for four hours straight. It’s just – health, age, and real-life geography make that pretty much a utopic fantasy most of the time. Sounds like I’m not the only one, either.
So to me, Async (and Glacial, the ultra-slow asyncs) is the lifesaver – I can do those or I can step away entirely. I balked some at first, I’ll admit – but I have also come to appreciate, as a writer, that having more time sometimes also means being able to provide a more interesting narrative.
I advise against large asyncs, though. Passing the speaker token around between six people like that is… well, little short of torture. Three to four seems to work, with room for an extra if enough of the three to four are faster.
-
RE: MU Peeves Thread
Async is my staple and I don’t mind Glacial (those that take more than a week) either – but it’s important to be clear about what a scene is before firing it up. Otherwise, half the people in it are going to be frustrated and the other half stressed.
-
RE: Royal Paynes
Ah, Shamash, yes. We had that experience briefly as well. Didn’t ban him – he got into a fight with another player and they both left.
-
RE: Cookie's parade of goofs!
@saiiwolf said in Saiiwolf’s parade of goofs!:
Don’t forget liberal dashes of wish fulfillment!
It’s not that I want to have sex with my PBs. I want to be them.
-
RE: MU Peeves Thread
@RightMeow That’s pretty much me too. I reach out to a dozen people but then I forget who I already talked to and really, the safest way to catch me is to ping me and be like, ‘you there, make a thing happen’.
That said, ping me anytime you visit.
-
RE: Investment, or: How smart players do dumb things
Most of what I think has already been said so I’m just going to chip in one thing: The more options players have to make things happen themselves instead of waiting for a story teller to do things for them, the more likely they stick around, too.
-
RE: Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants
@GF No, power has nothing to do with it unless you count knowledge and connections as power (which it admittedly can be). I just like really immersing myself in a character and seeing how they are affected by living their life, so to speak. I’m perfectly happy for them to stay at the bottom of the command ladder, that’s not the point.
@alveraxus To be honest – if the rest of the game appeals to me, I’ll adapt to however it’s being run, whether there are time jumps or not. But if I get a choice I’ll stick to linear time and progress naturally (where, again, progression does not have to equate accumulating power).
I can definitely see the charm, though, in doing jumps ahead and working out how the character has changed from twenty to forty to eighty years old, too. That does spark some very interesting mind theatre opportunities.
-
RE: Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants
Flat no from me. I enjoy playing the same character for years and years, taking my sweet time to develop their life path and experience them changing as the world changes around them.
However, I fully understand that others do get bored playing that way – and that my character will be experiencing a continuous coming and going of friends and enemies over time. That’s fine. I’m perfectly happy to be the neighbourhood sage archetype whom the young hotshots come to for lore.
-
RE: Games we want, but will almost certainly never have
@SpaceKhomeini I don’t want to toot my own horn too much but, that paragraph was very close to Keys’ intro lines:
“Want to fight Nazis in occupied France? Ride with Cortez? Plunder Egyptian tombs, whether in 2000 BC or the 1920s? Visit an Earth where the Roman Empire never fell or European settlers never made it to the Americas? It’s all true — somewhere, somewhen.”
Anyhow, there is definitely a market for what-if and yes-but storylines. Go forth and make it happen!
-
RE: As a gamerunner, what is the ideal number of players you aim for?
3-5.
Those were the numbers Keys was made for – us three admins and a couple of buddies. As it turns out, more people have turned up and we’re delighted with that – but we’re still not aiming to support hundreds.
We love making new RP friends – but ultimately, we are aware that the requirement to be somewhat self-sustaining also turns a number of people away.
It’s okay. No game should be for everyone. You can please some of the people all the time etc.
So I guess our ideal is whatever works – whatever achieves that fine balance where people have something to do and friends to play with, but we’re not burning through staff like charcoal in a polar winter. And that’s very difficult to put into numbers because with the right people, you can support a lot of other people – and without them, you can’t.
-
RE: IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance
Personally, my experience is that people are willing to accept amazing and terrifying amounts of consequences, even very negative such, as long as they feel that it matters.
No one wants their character to lose a leg and no one cares. But if losing a leg means the villain gets outed and everyone goes around all ‘thank you for your sacrifice’, then it’s juuuuuust fine.
People want to matter.
-
RE: Staff Capacity
@Tez said in Staff Capacity:
The ratio of PCs per staffer is also going to vary based on how much administrative overhead there is. Obvious statement, maybe, but with something like Keys you can get by with a lot fewer staff than something like Arx.
Very much so. The more complex keeping track of plot and faction becomes, the more people you need to do it – and the more people to keep track of that.
@Pavel said in Staff Capacity:
@hellfrog Player limits and knowing your own limits. It’s super important that a game runner has the ability to take a break without having to worry about their game burning down while they’re gone.
Not going to lie, I was worried when I was offline for three weeks this summer due to illness and hospitalisation. But there are three of us and the most dramatic that came out of it all was the care package some of the sweet, sweet players sent me.
-
RE: Staff Capacity
Documentation, whether of admin stuff like player so and so did this thing to player so and so, or of plot points that GMs have to know is the lifeblood of a game in my not all that humble opinion.
A strong centralised GM can keep the show running story-wise until they burn out. Some people don’t burn out.
Once players get the feeling that they can take advantage of the system by sucking up to Admin A who will then do favours without telling Admin B – the game is done for. Players who can’t trust staff vote with their feet. I’ve seen several games crash and burn this way.
And that’s why we document on Keys to the point of anal compulsive. Every little change warrants a request so that later on, that player’s name can be searched on in the jobs archive and their entire history with staff can be revisited.
I’d never staff with people I don’t trust – but I have trusted and been wrong before.
-
RE: Staff Capacity
@Tat Seeing as that you are a far better coder than I am, Tat, I’m going to point at you and say, listen to her, she knows her shit.
-
RE: Staff Capacity
@Pan said in Staff Capacity:
Sounds like we need a community project to get a couple of good working WoD plugins (if that’s what it’s called on Ares) going for cWoD 20th, and maybe nWoD 2e. Then games potentially could move to the codebase and thrive?
It’s my impression that a decently skilled coder (i.e., not me) can whip up the required plugins without breaking too much of a sweat – at least not when compared to building up an entire codebase.
It’s also my impression, though, that the main issue with WoD and other tabletop-to-mu* games is the oversight needed to keep the story on track. Tabletop games are designed to be 5-6 people against the world. It’s a lot to oversee when it’s actually 5-6 groups of 5-6 people – or more.
-
RE: Staff Capacity
@Tez said in Staff Capacity:
OH MY GOD YOU WHAT?! I think this might contribute more to your lower staff overhead than anything else. Many games keep a fairly tight leash on who can be storytellers. The fact that you made the decision to open it so widely is – in the context of other games – wild.
Is it the way your game is set up and your theme is laid out that allows you to do this? Compare to a game like Arx where staff are bogged down for years in answering story requests for someone because it is something where it is impossible for just anyone to GM, for example.
That bogging down is exactly what we wanted to avoid. The way Keys works is that we have a prime reality – the one where the game is set in – that players aren’t allowed to make more than superficial changes to without staff approval. You don’t go shoot the mayor or blow up Chincoteague’s Main Street.
But beyond that, we have infinite realities that people can access with magical keys that players can learn the spell to make. This means that any player can design a reality where things works exactly the way they want and they themselves are the judge of how the story goes. They don’t need to wait on staff requests and verdicts because they are the designing power of that reality.
This takes the onus away from us to moderate campaigns and it lets players participate in more than one storyline at a time. The last part is very handy when some GMs are slower movers while others respond with lightning speed.
-
RE: Staff Capacity
@Polk said in Staff Capacity:
Liberation fundamentally had a harder time than most hiring storytellers because game policy required you to give up all related PCs.
I’ve had that situation on another game in the past. It leads to fast staff burn-out. After all, this is volunteer work and taking away the things the volunteers enjoy tends to go to a bad ending.
-
RE: Staff Capacity
@Tez said in Staff Capacity:
I know that Keys tends to move more asynch than live. Does that reduce request overhead? How many requests are you usually getting? How much time is staff spending GMing?
First off, async is not a requirement on Keys. If you want to run live scenes, that’s fine. It’s just that the majority of our playerbase are people who for various reasons aren’t able to sit down all night in US prime time and play.
We really don’t get a lot of requests. I’m talking 2-4 a week, most of which are along the lines of can I change my PB or would it be okay to replace that spell with this one since I never used it, and similar. Occasionally, there is an admin issue – a player conflict or somebody who needs to be politely asked to not do that thing. It’s not bad at all.
A major part of the reason for this, obviously, is that we are in no fashion whatsoever PVP. There is nothing to compete from – whether in terms of boons in the game or from sucking up to staff or IC leaders. I think this is a big part of why many WoD and similar games struggle at times – there is something to be earned for your character by steamrolling others, whether it’s IC power or experience or titles, you name it.
Another part we don’t feel quite so overburdened is that we don’t have story telling staff.
Wait, what? It’s true. We have a frame plot – this is the island, this is the reason you’re on it, this is what’s going on, yadda yadda – but beyond that, anyone who wants to be a GM is a GM. Every player can create their own realities and settings and take people on adventures there. Some of the player created realities and campaigns in those realities are very complex and long-running (and as staff, it’s a delight to be able to participate on equal footing).
We basically set all of Ares’ story teller commands to the regular player role and told people to have a party. It’s my experience from many past online games – muds, mushes, you name it – that the GM role tends to be viewed by many players as a ‘final’ level, the ultimate achievement. Whether you get taken on as a story teller or a junior wizard or whatever the local term is – a lot of these people are then never seen again. They’ve accomplished all there is to be accomplished and now they get bored. That’s what we wanted to avoid.
Personally, I am usually GM-ing 3-4 scenes at a time which means I have to write poses as a GM about 3-4 times a day.