@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?

@Faraday Did Storium happen to inspire Ares at all?

@Faraday said in Why MUSH?:

That’s also what’s kept me from getting into PBP and Storium RP.

I too gave Storium a try and didn’t make it past setting up my first game before I gave up, and I Kickstarted it way back when.

@dvoraen said in Why MUSH?:

To try and prove I can write.

I don’t think that’s a selfish reason at all. Trying to write in any format is often a scary thing for people attempting it, so finding a format and venue in which you feel comfortable enough to actually let words flow to page or screen is nothing to be ashamed of.

For me it’s mostly being able to play RPGs in a way that my schedule can allow. The stereotypical gamer curse of never being able to get a group to meet on the same day at the same time seems to affect me more than most.

The odd part about this is that I cannot do asynchronous RP at all. As much as asynch is definitely for people who don’t have a stable schedule, it causes me anxiety that I still don’t really understand.

@Raistlin Totally does. Very cool. If I have free time (which is a luxury these days) I’ll be sure and check it out when it opens.

@Raistlin said in Game Development: Modern Gothic Storypath System:

Stranger Stuff

The TinyD6 Stranger Stuff game? That’s neat. What adjustments are you making to it to adapt it to the MU format? From when I read it last, I recall it’s meant for one shots and doesn’t really seem like it would adapt without a lot of changes.

This is my favorite Val Kilmer performance.

@Roadspike said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

Agree with @MisterBoring’s note that some people will complain even if you reach out and ask them directly to intervene… and you’re never going to please those people.

Those people are probably my second biggest pet peeve in the entire MU hobby after the multitude of sex pests and other creepers.

@Roadspike said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

People who “should” have been involved in the plot not hearing about it.

There’s a subgroup of these people that are another interconnected issue:

• People who “should” have been involved in the plot, but choose to avoid the plot like the plague and end up complaining when the plot changes the world in a way that disturbs their roleplay.

Using the previous example, if a group of PCs find out about the zombie coyotes and are informed they will endanger the tavern that they prefer for all of their RP, but they still take no actions, then when the zombie coyotes overrun and destroy the tavern they do the majority of your RP at, they’re not allowed to complain that the results aren’t agreeable.

Other than that, I totally agree with everything you said.

What about plots with invisible timers for this particular conundrum?

Example:

A horde of zombie llamas is coming down from the mountain pass and threatens the noble kingdom of Kinwoodie because they are attracted to the location of the legendary Golden Interspace Toothbrush. Lord Hampsterplanet and Lady Puremanse discover the horde and become the first players to interface with the plot. The staff keeps an eye on their activity to check for a few things, namely whether they are spreading the news among the players, and also what activities they are taking to thwart the raving hordes. If they immediately offer some solution to the staff that would effectively thwart the horde, well, alright. That can happen. It doesn’t mean they didn’t want to share the plot necessarily, just that they, as their characters decided immediate action was necessary. Can’t hold that against them. If they shuffle off and tell the other PCs about the horde, that’s great! Then the PCs can work together to discover that llamas of the zombie variety can be particularly thwarted by a healthy application of Whizzo Butter. Plot gets to the majority of players that want to see plots, and everyone is happy. If they do the naughty thing and conceal the plot from other players on purpose and don’t go with the “immediate danger needs immediate responses” option, staff waits a specific amount of time and then has NPCs inject the plot as random serfs and peasants come screaming into Kinwoodie yelling about llamas and potentially also the blancmange that ate their children after challenging them to a table tennis match.