@Warma-Sheen said in Re: Dies Irae:

without the right people there (as opposed to: anyone who is who is willing to do the job)

This is also the reason that the large WoD LARP clubs are dying. They keep flooding their staff with people whose only reason to take the job is to prevent the game from closing, and then those people end up burning out in 3-6 months at best.

@Warma-Sheen said in Re: Dies Irae:

Of course, there could also have been major drama that wasn’t made public to players or other staff.

I vaguely remember a WOD MU in the late 2000s that just shut off randomly and later people found out that it was because the head staff and the Vampire lead met for dinner and drinks after they found out they lived close to each other, and ended up getting into a fist fight by the end of the night.

@Yam I think a lot of Vampire games end up with feeding minigames before too long because trying to schedule feeding scenes for whatever number of players you have eventually will eat all of your time.

That said, if you want crazy minigame fu coded for your game (or just a good coder in general), I would talk to @LeeRoyBatty. They’re absolutely chock full of ideas about how games can be run. (Ask them about +horatio).

I just totally remembered something from my past. A LARP I played in years and years ago (all of the LARP near me is dead now, so much for keeping up that aspect of the RP hobby) had a thing where if you posted an IC story of your characters activities between games, you’d get an extra few XP before the next game. I technically have done solo RP before, but it was within the bounds of a larger non-solo game.

@somasatori said in Strike Systems:

No one is changing their ideological opinions based on an Internet conversation.

I really feel like the majority of people (in the US at least) are locked into their opinions (ideological or not) up until the point something happens to them that flies in the face of those opinions or beliefs. A guy I went to high school with was very right-wing leaning in ideology, had a lot of family in agriculture, and mostly voted Republican across the board (he regularly votes for legalization of marijuana, so there have been exceptions).

That all changed this year when a big part of his family suddenly defaulted on a bunch of their farm loans because of government shenanigans and now his aunt and uncle are living on his couch. He changed his registered party and is now willing to hear any arguments that aren’t Republican ones and vote based on that. He also started noticing a lot of stuff people have been pointing out to him for decades and realizing it’s true.

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Strike Systems:

those people who do learn and reform also tend to keep very quiet about it, in order to leave the past well buried.

I think honestly that’s probably for the best, as constantly going “Remember when I was a total asshole 2 years ago and I took some time to myself and fixed it?” isn’t a good flex in it’s own right.

I have a few friends that regularly play Solo RPs that use IC journaling as a method of play, and they get together every month or so and read each other’s character journals. Through a few bundles online, I’ve acquired a small amount of books for these type of games, and they are definitely intriguing.

One of the most interesting examples of a Solo RP game is VOID 1630 AM. You play by recording an hour of radio on your computer or phone, in character as a DJ. The game provides a method of generating song prompts and callers, and you make up what you’re saying as a DJ, and what you play on the air, in response to that. The coolest part about it is that you can submit those sound clips and your song list to the creator of the game, and he will play it on his ACTUAL AM RADIO STATION and add it to his Youtube. Example below:

https://www.youtube.com/live/IC5bv6lql0k

@catzilla

Yeah, staff churn & burn seems high on the list of reasons games die. Even if we eliminate staff churn caused by toxic behavior, I still believe it’s high on the list. I’ve seen plenty of games with no major toxic issues die to burnout.

@Babs FATE dice are funny.

@Yam said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

I can also sign up for enforced engagement (I think?) but the reasoning intrigues me.

I think the reasoning for some level of required player engagement comes out of home RPG games, or small group games. For example, you run a Star Trek game and invite 6 people to play. When it’s time to play you begin to tell a story of the crew of a Federation diplomacy vessel making headway into the Delta Quadrant. Five of your players engage with the story and the setting, while the sixth immediately walks into your den and starts talking about how his character is a Klingon warrior uncovering dishonorable criminals in the First City on Qo’noS. He isn’t technically hurting anything by doing so, but he is a distraction.

@Faraday said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

If you’re going to expect players to somehow guess at your intent in creating a game, I think that’s inherently misguided.

I would never have them guess. In any future game I run, my intent will be documented in the game’s documentation, and pointed out on the front page of the game or in the initial room upon connection.

@Yam said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

And if what you’re truly talking about is Wrong Fit… I mean, that’s it’s own discussion!

I think that’s absolutely what’s being discussed.

The players who choose to play with only one or two others and ignore the entire game that’s going on around them are often a Wrong Fit for a game in my experience.

People who suffer from social anxiety type stuff (HI! I’m one of those people.) that often struggle to expand their regular RP circle can still contribute to a game in wonderful ways.

@Faraday said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

Why do we need to wrongfun them for being less social?

Some people build games with specific expectations for players, specifically that they play socially with the rest of the players on the game (with exceptions for no-contact list people), and someone joining a game to play Uno in the basement with their BFF has either missed the cue that the game owner is trying to build a more social storytelling experience, or noticed the intent of the game owners and willfully chose to ignore it.

The people who miss that cue can sometimes be brought around to recognize that the intent isn’t to just let people do whatever (as with a lot of sandbox games) and aren’t wrong, they’re just out of place, or misdirected, which can be remedied with a casual conversation between them and staff.

The people who willingly ignore the intent of the game (to be a focused social plot driven story) are being rude to the staff and rest of the players, and definitely are wrong.

In any case, I think the point is that it’s perfectly acceptable for Staff to set expectations for play on their games. It’s perfectly acceptable for a player to look at Staff’s expectations, go “This isn’t for me” and leave. It’s also perfectly acceptable for Staff on a game to see players who aren’t meeting their expectations, and approach them politely and discuss the matter, and if they’re not able to reach an understanding, ask them to leave.

The big problem in my experience happens when Staff has expectations that they run with, players come in operating with no regard for that, and Staff doesn’t have the confidence to have that polite conversation. Then eventually you end up with a lot of players operating outside Staff expectations, Staff getting more and more frustrated by players not playing the game they’re trying to run, and it leads to rapid staff burnout and game closure.

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

CoH opening Mummy (that’s right, its back baby!)

My love for Mummy doesn’t outweigh my disinterest in CoH, sadly.

@SockMonkey said in Strike Systems:

“If you wouldn’t invite them into your living room why would you invite them into your game?”

I can also think of people that I regularly invite to my living room that I would never invite to a MU I was running. They’re wonderful people, but tend to try and hog the spotlight in RP.

@Juniper Some games have (usually around 5-6) rooms just off of the OOC area that aren’t desced and can be used to act as places that aren’t necessarily built into the grid. I have a personal dislike of RPing in those because they lack the feel of the game world the rest of the grid has.

@Jenn

You must have stopped reading when I mentioned “often times become hostile when asked to join RP / plot”. I have politely approached a duo like this and asked them if they’d like to come join a plot, as they were nominally part of the same faction as myself, and received a rather angry response. I’ve seen staffers on other games politely send a duo like this an invitation to a plot event and get told very plainly to get bent for trying to force them to play the game the staff intended to run. I’ve also witnessed these people throw tantrums when they were suddenly touched by plot they refused to be a part of.

@Jumpscare said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

If they’re not bothering anyone and they’re not taking up ST resources, let them play.

My personal game running / staffing philosophy is such that I would rather all of the players connecting to my game interact with either the plots my staff is running, or with PRPs (that ideally include a cross-section of the players on the game). I see it as a trade. My end of the bargain is the server, the game itself and the plots I and my staff devise, and the players end is their RP with the game at large and whatever PrPs they choose to run for the rest of the players. This is also part of why the next game I run won’t have Generic RP rooms. I’ve seen too many toxic groups form around RPing only in Generic RP Rooms to let that happen in any game I might try to run in the future.

@Faraday said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

You’re making a leap from “prefers to play with their friends” to “never responds to the goings-on of the game.”

You misread my example then. I was specifically referring to pairs of people who join a game only to play in a single grid room, never interact with plot, often times become hostile when asked to join RP / plot, and usually get upset if plot events ever effect them. I’ve run into it a few times in my 20+ years of hobby, and it’s possible that they are the same two people each time (as every time I’ve encountered this phenomenon, it’s gone down almost identically to the others).

@Cygnus said in Numetal/Retromux:

This doesn’t happen on RetroMUX because certain staffers are part of the clique itself; they dole out plots to people the popular kids club approve of, so they’re feeding into the non-community aspect of a game.

Do you think, based on your knowledge of the game, you could identify the members of the clique in question?

My preference is a single warning followed by a permanent ban, unless the harm is incredibly wrongbad (like most sex pests), then just straight to goodbye.

@Faraday said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

I cannot fathom how people having fun with each other telling stories and generating scenes would be considered “inactivity” by any sensible MU metric.

If they never respond to the goings-on of the game, and never leave a single grid square, are they really active? What structure are they using?