I agree with all the comments on the OOC transparency, I think that’s the key. For all the issues the vampire sphere had on Fear and Loathing back in the day, it was a pretty PVP heavy space and it was run on a lot of transparency. I remember a ghoul doing some daytime snooping of my vampire’s haven to get back at me for something I did and they put the job in to spy on me, and staff just added me to the job and said ‘she’s made these rolls so she finds out this much, tell her what she learns’. And I did.

The information never really ended up getting used against me sadly, but every time I’ve engaged in any sort of PVP, being able to check in with each other, make sure we’re enjoying everything etc really just makes it a lot better.

For me I think it depends on the reason for the house rules more than the rules themselves.

@Yam I think it’s as simple as because in WoD you play as ‘The Monster’ in some various way. Like you can play as a bad criminal guy or whatever in Star Wars and probably Star Trek too, or ‘bad people’ in Lords & Ladies etc etc. But they all still start with the premise that you’re a person just like any other in your particular situation.

WoD positions the players as monsters and oWoD even does things like having different morality as part of the systems of play and somehow I think that extra step removed from being a ‘normal person’, even a bad person, gives people that extra edge (heh!) to be horrible.

Technically it’s only been a few months since I wrote a pose at a game, though it was the first time in about 4 months prior to that so I picked around the 6 month mark. I tried that Retromux place for a bit but it didn’t really stick with me.

For me it’s also the lack of games that are really grabbing my interest.

Dragonlance Mush! I started here because I always had a love of fantasy settings and Dragonlance in particular. I also found Ashirion: The Broken Sphere which was a homebrew fantasy setting from the game runner, which was probably not a great introduction to MU*ing but it was fun times.

I ended up on Dragonlance: Age of Mortals (the 3.5e D&D game) and that lead me to a group to go play on Haunted Memories. That’s right, while I’m pretty much just a WoD player nowdays, it took some time before I really found that setting, and I’m one of the few people with every little original World of Darkness experience!

I agree it does depend on what exactly is being consented to. I’ve had one PK that I sort of consented to back in the day? A player I had known IC tension with pinged me wanting to RP, I said sure, we met up, there was an OOC warning that ‘this might turn violent if they dont’ like what they hear’.

And AFTER I said ‘sure, that’s fine, I’m good with whatever’, their werewolf buddy suddenly joined the scene and itg quickly became apparent that this was an assassination, not a ‘might turn violent’ thing. Dunno if that counts as me consenting to PC death. I guess it kinda does.

@Jennkryst said in PyReach:

One of the NOLA games did this, too. Everyone could tell everyone else was a super, and there were Accords to keep cross-sphere from going ballistic. It was neat.

This has been a bit of a running trend in CofD games lately. There’s always been an agreement, an accords, an oath, a pact or something between the supernaturals of the game that let them interact and be aware of each other to some level in probably the last three games I was on.

I like it, mostly. I especially like that it lets Mortal+ types truly get involved. If they can sign the paperwork/get ‘accorded’ or whatever, then they’re not Masquerade breaches or whatever.

Were these the ones that had the blood magic to help make the babies? Because it’s silly enough I approve.

Yeah that’s one of the options haha. There’s a few different ways it can all happen. Including the old standard V:tR way of ‘I dunno, Vitae is weird and sometimes THINGS just happen!’

I’ve always thought though, that sometimes running single sphere games would be the way to go rather than worrying about all the crossover. It either becomes a lot of hiding or a lot of sharing. Both of which are fine I guess, depending on what you want.

Sometimes I want to take the cross sphere to the next level, I had the idea once of running a changeling + vampire game but treat it as basically just a single sphere game, and the vampires like they’re an extra court. So you’d have the usual Changeling courts and the vampires would be the … night court, or something. But this mostly came about because of the Oaths of Night and Day merit in the Dark Eras book that let a Notary notarize an oath with a Changeling and I thought that was interesting.

Any Vampire game I made these days though would be allowing the Dhampir template from Half-Damned as an option. I think this would be a good thing to see as it would allow people to get that ‘dip’ into vampire with the partial template like a Wolf-blooded or Fae-touched, without needing to do the whole blood-slavery thing that comes with being a ghoul. Though I’d still allow ghouls too.

I’d probably do something like Vampire/Changeling/Deviant? Maybe throw werewolf in too. The truth is there’s too much of CofD that I like and want to see represented. I always thought it would also be neat to allow the Absent as a mortal+ option, the ghost template from Geist that could be used for PCs.

I do agree with being generally sad about the pledge system in Lost 2e. That and there’s a few statemtns that the idea that a promise is ‘part of the changeling forever, even if broken’ and stuff that always makes people hesitant to actually promise things. And yeah, I agree that Lost can and should often be cagey with their words, actually making deals and agreements should also be something they shouldn’t be so hesitant to do maybe.

Gosh, this whole thing is exciting. I dunno why CofD games are out of fashion at the moment but I’m also in that space of ‘if I had the time I’d totally do one’. I’d love a Vampire The Requiem game out there. (I do prefer the 2nd edition for basically all of CofD tbh).

Anyway this isn’t really that much of a contribution I’m just excited for chatter about cofd games hurray.

@MisterBoring said in Numetal/Retromux:

@xCroaker said in Numetal/Retromux:

You are forced to deal with a player/character like Eddie

Could he potentially have alts in all of the spheres?

They did, but well, not anymore. Player was fully banned today it seems.

@Cygnus I mean I guess I don’t specifically NEED private communication, just being able to chat on channels etc would probably be enough, but I also don’t really see how limiting it is beneficial. I know some people really like it though.

I guess I can’t see how, in a system as complex and full of niche interactions as World of Darkness or Chronicles of Darkness (and others), you can really take away OOC communications. Even if we’re just RPing in a room and some conflict arises at some point I’m going to have to explain ‘I’m using X power with Y modifiers due to this merit and that clan bonus.’ Because I can’t imagine you can (or want to) automate absolutely every niche interaction in these rules systems.

Paging people as a way to get RP happening is also pretty standard in my experience, and you don’t always want to broadcast that on public channels for a lot of reasons. But I could probably make do with just public channels and the like if the game was interesting enough.

@mietze To be fair, I didn’t really do a lot of the OOC discussion stuff really either back in the day, at least not to begin with, but I would have moments of it. I played some pretty antagonistic characters that I thought should’ve ended up dead or whatever but no one really seemd to want to because I guess it was more interesting to be threatened/attacked by a street ganger than yet another bar scene? idk really haha, but I do remember my Haunted Memories days having a lot of people coming to me and my antagonsitc character for combat tutorials and the like. I do miss the thrill of that sort of non-consent place too, but I also do remember losing a PC unexpected to IC conflict and it wasn’t that fun at all to just have my story be over now. So in the end so IDK. I like conflict and understand that sometimes it ends in PC death but I try to avoid actually ending PCs in the end, maybe I’m just too soft after all.

Generally, I enjoy conflict with other characters. I tend to shy away from the use of the term ‘pvp’ because when it’s done well it’s just the same as any other collaborative storytelling effort we do on these games, and while your characters may be in conflict the players aren’t. I’m with @Pyrephox’s points above. Having OOC communication available for these sorts of things heightens the experience for me.

I’d probably join a WoD game with a lot of ‘pvp’ in it just fine, but the idea presented earlier of having no OOC discussions at all would really turn me off. Half the appeal of being on a MU* for me in general is the OOC community, the chatter, and all of that. If all my games were just log on, role play, log off, then I wouldn’t have this cool group of online friends I’ve made over the decades, and I think that’d be unfortunate.

I know some people really like that entire OOC disconnect, that’s great but it’s certainly not for me, though I don’t tend to shy away from the confict with other PCs that much.

@MisterBoring said in AI PBs:

• Use stock photos or other art published online for free under a Creative-Commons (or similar) license.

I actually did this once, way back when in the Haunted Memories days for a character. Though it was less an ethical reasoning and more that I just happened to find some stock photos that were so perfect for what I envisioned that I had to use them, so I paid a few dollars to remove the stock image watermark. It did feel kinda good though.

I did the AI thing when Midjourney first came around and before I knew better (I didn’t really look into anything around it I just went ‘oh cool AI images’ like so many people). I wouldn’t touch that sort of thing now.

I’m kinda in the same boat as some others have echoed, I kinda dislike PBs in general. Most of the time it’s the last step on the process and I rarely find something that truly matches what I was thinking of.

@Pavel Ahh, but ideas come easier when you know who wants to be involved. ‘Who wants to have a scene at X’ might make people who don’t want to go to X just never say anything.

I don’t put the onus on others – I just wait and see who I’m working with before figuring out what to do.

@bear_necessities

Yeah I’m not sure, and as with most things one persons forever is someone elses ‘oh man I didn’t get enough time to touch base with everyone I wanted to!’

I feel like we got 2 weeks on HorrorMu? Mostly? I admit it’s been a minute and I can’t remember, but it seemed about that. Network I never really played through a hiatus as I have kept on drifting away from the game unfortunately.

I recall from conversations with The Director on early days of HorrorMu* that the plan originally was to just tell short horror stories. Then everyone makes a new character for the next one, with no real connection between them at all.

But she figured people would like some sort of consistent flowthrough of the story from one to the next, so that’s how the whole facility and the ‘archetype characters’ like The Penitent and The Bravo and so forth were created.

I think I agree with Roz, the downtime between the episodes, and to explore having memories of being different people, personally I found that fun.

@Cobalt Come baaaack!

@Tez Hee.

All the CoD stuff have spaces for creepy folks to hide behind ‘I’m just acting IC!’ unfortunately. I’m sure a lot of game systems might. I don’t think I saw it in Mage more than anywhere else, but it’s been ages since Mage was allowed in a lot of these games.

@RedJellyBean I think you’re thinking of Jeurg (Juerg? I can’t remember the spelling) from Haunted Memories who I think got a reputation for that kinda weirdness. No idea if it’s the same player though.

Mastigos and Mind Magic seems to be one of the common IC creeper covers. They’re meant to be confrontational and do awful things to make you think! Which can be a fine concept if handled properly oocly but I feel like a lot of weird folk have hidden behind it over the years.