It really feels like Ganymede has just decided to let Derp drive it into the ground out of some need to avoid losing face from reversing a decision.

Well, I’m reducing my MSB activity to lurking now. Gany just basically said that the only person who needed to be apologized to on MSB for what happened was Derp.

I get two things from reading stuff from this thread.

1. That I definitely am not the target audience for Lords & Ladies roleplay.

2. That Arx, even with all of it’s trouble throughout its history, is a pretty good example of ‘doing it right’ in our hobby.

Congrats to all you Arx players and staff for doing cool stuff.

Starting a new thread, for a new year.

First up, and this one hit me hard, David Lynch, legendary director of such weirdness as Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, and the original 1980s version of Dune.

@hobos

Please stop. If you actually care, stop, step away, and come back in a few days or even a week or two. You’re making yourself look bad with each new post.

Bring back Victorian era drug problems!

I want a post apocalyptic game surrounding the events at one of the last settlements in the world struggling to survive against all manner of obstacles and threats.

@Jennkryst

I’m gonna have to run a one shot of the MMPR RPG in his honor.

Well, after that interaction with Ghost and some other odd shit I’ve seen today, I added MSB to my firewall block list. I don’t need that shit in my life anymore.

@Roz Totally. I’m all for people trying to repair relationships, but deception is not the way to make that happen.

Now, if someone came to me and was like, I want to rebuild the bridge and move on from this and in the process offered to make a new character to help push some plot I was trying to push, I’d probably see that as an olive branch.

@STD Ah, then I’m curious as to what their numbers looked like through the various seasons. Might help to answer some questions about the 3 month thing.

@Ominous Have there been any games previously that ran on a seasonal format? If not, it might be something to take a chance on. If nothing else, it gives the people who are going to stay around more things to be interested in as time goes on.

@Ominous What if they were duels to the death and always included PCs? Are they BarP then?

@Ominous said in The 3-Month Players:

Short wars to settle disputes. I guess that could work.

What if wars weren’t fought with armies but with duels? The Lords and Ladies involved appoint a champion and they fight a quick single combat. The monarch that doles out the feudal nations witnesses the duel and the winner gets the spoils.

I wonder how players would respond to a game where the entire grid was just a bar, and no options for anything else. Just a weird bar full of weird characters floating in a void in time and space.

All plot through BarP. All BarP in plot locales.

@Ashkuri said in The 3-Month Players:

I don’t think anyone is trying to keep all 60 players that come in The Bubble. They’re trying to keep the 25 that really would find the game a good fit.

I agree with this, and it brings up another aspect of the 3 month Bubble. Even if the staff of a game is trying to keep the 25 that best fit the game, dropping over half your players at the 4 month mark is still demoralizing, even if it’s not the intention.

This can be tempered with a staff having a plan going in, and having a realistic idea of how many people they actually want for the duration vs what they expect the Bubble to produce.

I totally agree with that idea about game runners needing a clear plan before the game opens. The alternative seems to be a game that has shiny new stuff to play with, but since there’s no plan, it quickly devolves into social RP and a few PRPs that don’t really lead anywhere and then everybody starts to leave when they realize there’s nothing more than that.

I’ve been putting a lot of thought into running a MU that’s a tightly scheduled short form game that runs for 3-4 months, akin to a Mini Series on TV.

There would be an advertising period prior to the start of the game, followed by a character building period, and then 3-4 months of intense regular staff run events pushing a specific plot.

It would be highly unusual compared to the average MU because there would be hard limits on the number of Active PCs, uniform advancement across all PCs (i.e. everybody earns the same XP at the same rate), and a hard rule against players running full plot lines alongside the main story (as the game’s intent is a focus on a single specific story line).

If it used a fairly generic system, it could be a single server that used the same MU framework to rotate through mini-series over time.

@L-B-Heuschkel Speaking of Raph Koster, I’ve been meaning to read A Theory of Fun for a bit now. It’s in my pile of unread books.

Is three months the sweet spot for a MU?

Like, if enterprising people were to build a MU for a very specific story, and plan to try and tell the entire story from start to finish in 3 months (give or take a week or two), would it be a success?