Posts made by L. B. Heuschkel

@Pacha Old, but good.

I’m still waiting to wake up and realise that this was a nightmare.

@Buttercup I know we have a couple of sight impaired folks on Keys who use various devices. Unfortunately, I don’t know which devices.

But if you want to pop by and talk to them, look for Rhia and Araminta (character names, not player names).

@RightMeow If you ever feel like just ranting at somebody and venting, you know where to find me. Anytime.

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.

Come back and visit us on Keys sometime, Jin.

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.

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.

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.

@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.

@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.

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.

@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.

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.

@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!

@GF https://artisans.coop/ ?

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.

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.

@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.

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.