@Ominous Be careful about crowdsourcing too much - people have a way of killing enthusiasm for new games and new ideas because they tend to focus on all the ways it WON’T work. It can be hugely discouraging, but it’s just the nature of the kind of critique you’re going to get in this format.

Solicit ideas by all means, but one of the strongest markers of a successful game, I’ve found, is the passion of the creator and their willingness to put in the work to build enthusiasm of actual players. Decide the game YOU want to run, the game that’s worth it to you to do the work on, bring on a small group of people whose vision strongly aligns with yours, and go for it.

I would argue that games need “stakes” for investment, and a game that doesn’t have a way to keep tension and suspense is at risk for stagnation.

However, character death and the risk thereof is only one kind of stake. One that will appeal to a specific subset of the gaming population but not everyone. More, I suspect it’s a stake that has fallen out of style for a reason. What was appealing when the playerbase was largely teen and twenties students who could be on a lot, at weird hours, and whip up three characters like they were nothing may not have the same appeal to 40+ players who are trying to fit in a couple of hours for a scene a couple of times a week between a full time job, full time family, and other friends and hobbies. For a lot more of us, “I could die at any moment” is just less of an enticement at this stage. Maybe because we’re starting to worry about that in our real life!

But I definitely recommend that anyone who thinks there still IS an audience for the hardcore PvP-style of MU* go ahead and make one! More games are good, and having choice helps keep people engaged. Going back to the idea of the three-month player, I think having a wide variety of games in different genres (and subgenres) helps keep the overwhelming surge of people desperate for SOME game down a bit.

Nothing will reduce the spice level of scenes except one player or the other saying “no” – and, honestly, it should probably be outright policy for staff playing the CO not to TS any PCs.

I like the idea of transparency, but I’d suggest doing updates on a more regular basis than just the end of the season. It doesn’t have to be logs, it could be “court gossip” posts that summarize some IC events that are pushing the needle in one way or the other:

• At Lady Corkscrew’s musicale, the accomplished Lady Tandoori’s ode dedicated to Crown Prince’s triumphant hunt of the Blue Six-Legged Dire Cat clearly pleased the Prince and he was later seen inviting Lady Tandoori to join him in his private box at the Opera.

• Society is awash with delicious scandal as Lady Hippityhoppity is noted to have caused great offense when she wore the same dress as the Empress…and some whisper that she wore it better. The Crown Prince shunned her entirely in the dancing, proving his filial piety but dealing a blow to Hippityhoppity’s chances to capture his heart.

Maybe once a month or something. So people have a good idea what’s happening and why, and can also intuit some of the Prince(ss)'s preferences and pain points based on what s/he’s seen as shunning or embracing.

I actually love the first idea for a political romance game, especially if the Crown Prince(ss) remains played by staff and is flighty as fuck.

As for a game I myself would love? The parliamentarian or conclave game would be my jam. I acknowledge that they would be more difficult - I designed a political game that had parliamentary shenanigans as a big part of its theme, and it’s tough to hash out the methods of influence and getting bills passed that would materially improve your lands/family status (or hurt others). It allows you to bring in more than hereditary nobility, though - guilds, mercenary groups, etc. could all have formal positions (or informal pressures they could bring to bear).

Would the typical MU* player GO for a serious political parliament game? Maybe not. But I can dream.

@Snackness God. I’m so sorry for you and your family.

@Faraday said in The 3-Month Players:

@Trashcan said in The 3-Month Players:

I also don’t agree that all players want to stick on a game but the game fails them, and I don’t agree that you can make the game so shiny that these people will stick when they would have otherwise gone off to the new shiny thing. Some people are 3Ms and that’s just the way they are. You can make the greatest, most inclusive, most content-having, most relationship-building game anyone has ever seen, and they will still wander off to check the next up and coming game.

Just because the game isn’t meeting their needs, that doesn’t mean that the game failed them. There’s no conceivable way that a game can appeal to every single MUSHer out there, because many of us want different things out of a game.

There are many reasons folks move on from a game. I’ve just seen zero evidence that there’s some kind of ticking 3-month clock (where they’ll move on just because of “novelty” if the game is otherwise a good fit for them) built into the majority of MUSHers. YMMV.

I agree with this.

I think the “Bubble” is basically just what happens when a whole bunch of people try something out. Think about any sort of “trial” or “demo” program you’ve ever been involved with - if there’s something ‘hooky’ about it, then you’ll absolutely get a lot of people who initially show up to try it out–but the majority of them are always likely to find that it’s just not right for them.

That can be for a myriad of reasons: some element of the theme/plot is offputting, the active times aren’t when they can play, their friends aren’t interested in playing, maybe the first few scenes they had didn’t go well, or maybe the character they made doesn’t really “fit” either them or the game but they don’t have the energy/investment to make a new one, or heck, life gets busy/stressful and you miss a week of that New Game Activity and you come back and it’s like…well now I don’t know what’s going on and you just don’t have the energy to try and find out.

Your initial rush of players are “freebies” in some ways, because they will try out EVERY game that’s vaguely in line with their interests. But you won’t keep most of them, even if you offer to send them ice cream or something. What you can do to try and control what parts of that attrition that you can control is a) be ready for that rush as much as possible so that people who MIGHT stay don’t feel neglected or like they can’t be seen among the throng, and b) have an answer for what happens when you lose 60% of that initial rush, including a lot of people who were enthusiastically participating in things.

Things like the Search rotation mentioned above, or what Arx did with its chapters and broad areas of entry can help sustain a steady influx of people as long as staff can sustain the work involved in those and people can feel like they can have a nice balance of Plot RP and Personal RP.

The big thing for me is a persistent world that I can log onto on almost any schedule and find some synchronized RP with a wide variety of people. I do like the logging and wiki sort of features, but I don’t need them.

It scratches an itch that nothing else quite does.

@Flitcraft OMG EDDIE. It’s good to see you again! I was Thomas at Darkwater. Not playing anywhere now, but glad to hear you’re doing well!

Another random thought:

PCs should not be at the highest levels of power. There are a few reasons for this, mostly related to the nature of players.

1. The people who most want to be “in charge” of other PCs are generally not the people you actually want to have that power. And often, they want it as an achievement…and once they get it, they disappear.
2. If your game relies on themes (like, say, conflict between factions or internal societal tensions) then you should not rely on PCs to enforce those as leaders. Most players won’t enforce theme, and the ones who do often end up burning out and miserable because they’re thrust in a position of “fun police” that isn’t actually very fun (ask me how I know).
3. “Good” leadership is actually not great for the game part of the game. Leaders who try to make friends, decrease tensions, and set up long-term successes push things towards stagnation. PC leaders who lean into creating thematically-appropriate conflict often catch whole loads of shit from other players. NPC leaders only have to make decisions that are aimed at making the game fun/exciting/tense for everyone - PC leaders often make decisions based on what they feel will make other players like them, or just get off their back.
4. Likewise, absent or rapidly rotating leadership makes it hard for players to have continuity of play, and PC leadership positions usually exist in a state of either functionally absent or flipping through PC leaders like a rolodex as new people show up, burn out, leave.

I am not going to live up to @Roz 's praise of me, but I do have thoughts. So many thoughts. I will not share them all.

But I will say that I absolutely agree with what was up above - you need to distinguish what matters to you about a L&L game. I want a political game, and my biases are towards systems that promote and perpetuate a political game. The degree to which lords, ladies, fancy balls, or fashion are involved is very irrelevant to me. In fact, one of my never-gonna-happen “would love” MU* games is a political game centered around a free city with power split between elected citizens, powerful merchants often from outside the city, crafting guilds, and the mercenary forces the city needs to keep from getting eaten by outside powers. Balls and parties would probably still be involved, but they’re not the draw to me, even though I know that they are the primary draw to a lot of other folk. The Prince/ss fantasy is real and valid!

That said, my other bias is systemic - I absolutely think you need a mechanized system for political play so that people can risk actual (in game) resources on their goals, and gain or lose those resources. But if you’re looking to make a sustainable system, it also has to be cyclical and avoid either the death spiral where a character can lose everything and have no way of getting it back, or the dominance spiral where someone can amass enough power that they effectively will never be able to lose enough power to fall off the top spot. Players are going to naturally try to accumulate all the power and influence they can in a game, and while some folk absolutely do play “for the story” and will set themselves up for major losses or reversals, those folk are not a large enough segment of the population to keep a power structure from stagnating.

There are a lot of different ways to build a system - dice are easy, but it doesn’t HAVE to involve dice. But my three principles for it are:

• There has to be meaningful in game stakes involved that PCs have influence over. (Maybe not sole influence, but PCs need agency.)
• There has to be scarcity in resources so that no one PC or group of PCs can be self-contained.
• There has to be mechanics to resolve meaningful conflicts and the loss/gain of resources.
• There should be mechanics built into the system that make it hard to maintain dominance or be stuck in perpetual failure. Floating somewhere in the middle should be relatively easy for those players who really want to just play fantasy rich people and hang out.

The specifics of what those things LOOK like? There’s five million ways to do it, you just have to think about what conflicts you want to promote and what resources you want players to focus on.

My preference is one + empowered mortals (can be supernatural, can just be political/police power in a setting where that has teeth and matters), but a small, selective duo or trio of spheres can be fine if you genuinely have support for those spheres.

I don’t know the system, but I’d definitely be interested. Modern Gothic horror/fantasy is quite relevant to my interests!

@TNP I’m so sorry.

@TNP My condolences. It’s so hard to lose your furry buddies, especially to something like cancer.

I will say I have returned to A Place after doing A Thing, and I take back the ‘not as dark’ comment. It can definitely bring the dark.

NEVERMIND. Spoiler does not actually spoiler. Bah.

I’m playing it! I’m enjoying it quite a bit - love the characters, enjoy the combat, and the plot is a Dragon Age plot: perfectly serviceable but don’t look too closely at the gaps.

I think there’s still plenty darkness in the setting, but definitely overall the writing and focus is on a lighter, more hopeful tone. There are times I have to remember that IC time and location has progressed quite a bit from Origins, or even Inquisition (“wait, everyone knows the differences between spirits and demons and is cool with the former?” - sure, years after stories about the Inquisition has made the rounds, and in places like Nevarra and Tevinter where these things were always seen a bit differently. It does remind me that Ferelden is, let’s face it, the depressed Bible Belt of Thedas.)

I’m gonna smooch the necromancer. IT WILL HAPPEN.

I absolutely got scared away from doing an application to adopt a cat because the application wanted a lot of info I wasn’t comfortable giving out (my income, etc.) and they wanted to do a walkthrough of my apartment as a second phase. Just not comfortable.

Luckily, the Cat Distribution System provided.

@Snackness But there’s no use crying over it.

@RightMeow said in Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent:

I know this is a first world problem and people have it way way way worse but…

I am over my current career. However, the idea of changing it makes me tired. The idea of finding a new job is annoying because I’m at a certain pay range that I don’t really want to lose. I don’t hate it, but I’m burned out in it. I feel too old to start something else (and probably too tired now). I just feel stuck.

Like I said, not the worst vent to have but it’s where I am.

Kind of in the same place.

I’m not exactly over my current career, but the workplace has changed to where we’ve lost our big contracts that were meaning we weren’t having to do the funding scramble, and I hate the funding scramble. I want something with a bit more stability, and I want to leave on my terms before the funding runs out and I have no other options.

But I absolutely despite the job search, I also don’t want to lose my decent salary, or my progress towards student loan forgiveness. And I don’t feel like I can be as adventurous as I might otherwise be because my elderly father lives with me and I pay all the bills.

Also, I’m generally lonely and crushingly sad about various things, including the utter failure of my writing, so it’s just like every day is stumbling blindly, hoping not to get hit by any disasters but never really being happy.

Just a gentle reminder to everyone that while the discussion about a fight over political discussions on another game is fine, we’d rather not see it become a way for people to have a political discussion by proxy here. People have been good about this so far, it’s not a ding on anyone, but just keep it in mind since things tend to drift the longer a discussion goes on.

On the other hand, fight over Lex Luthor’s presidential policies all you want.