Honestly, I don’t think the vast majority of people care where someone’s PB comes from so long as it’s a reasonable image of the supposed character…and it’s hot enough to want to fuck, let’s be real.

I don’t think less of anyone who uses a Midjourney PB, and I’m pretty irritated that such a cool tool has been set up in a way that fucks over a lot of artists instead of licensing material or paying royalties or something. I don’t see it as a Big Ethical Question–I just wish the companies in question would be forced to pay the artists for the training data they’re profiting off of.

I wish that I could use AI and feel good about it - I love the idea of being able to craft a character’s face that really goes with what I want to describe, instead of always having to be “close enough” by searching google images for a public figure who kinda-sorta-maybe is close to the description I ACTUALLY want to have.

But, AI being what it is, I don’t feel comfortable doing that anymore. So back into the search engine mines it is.

@Snackness My deepest condolences for you and your family. It’s so hard, even when it’s something you know is a possibility.

@bear_necessities said in World Tone / Feeling:

@MisterBoring said in World Tone / Feeling:

Like my idea for a post-apocalyptic game where the remaining people on the world live in and around a huge metal tower. The people who have all the power live above the smog clouds choking the world below, and have access to the remaining places above the clouds, including the last bits of fertile land and potable water. The rest of the people live below, in claustrophobic spaces where their survival is only guaranteed by toiling to get access to resupply of the filters that keep the smog out of their cramped quarters. The lower class use power armor suits to try and clean the world, much like the Chernobyl liquidators, while the upper class vie for control of the remaining clean resources and do what they can to keep the lower class from climbing the tower and destroying everything.

I had a similar idea for an anthology game I was thinking of creating. Basically you are in the tower and the only way to climb is to participate in virtual reality “simulations” where your goal was to amuse the people in the upper floors, kinda Hunger Game-y except you were a different character in each sim. The purpose was to die, repeatedly and violently and epically. I just couldn’t figure out what people would do when they were killed off and waiting for everyone else.

If I were doing this, I’d say once you die you get to take a character bit of one of the upper floor people and have decadent betting/backstabbing fellow richies/interfering with the poorer masses. Garbage fire on both ends.

I wonder if a shift in expectations is also in order. Big, multi-scene plots that have a lot of people involved are exhausting. Sometimes the fun outweighs the effort, but it still IS a lot of effort and so many of us are at a point in our lives where we’ve got other things to do.

I wonder if there’s a way to encourage and promote people doing player-run-scenes first, and then for those who discover they enjoy it, build up into longer plots. But really, just having self-contained scenes that have a bit of excitement or plotty goodness to them can do a lot to excite people. And they might be less intimidating.

I want a complex, consistent world with a lot of meaningful conflict that isn’t always Good vs Evil. I probably lean a bit towards the darker end of the setting, but I ultimately want the PCs to have a sense of humanity to them. PvE and PvP are both fine (although these days I lean away from PvP not because I don’t enjoy it when it works but because of player issues).

I want a setting with real problems that characters have to live with and carve out their own kinds of happiness within it. I like striving for something better, but I want it to be a long road with some wins along the way, but also some setbacks. Tragedy and joy in the right proportions.

And some room for fun, over-the-top coolness or big, splashy actions along the way, sure.

Perfect Paz permabanned.

Perfect Paz also banned, for obvious reasons.

@Prototart said in General Video Game Thread:

citizen sleeper and citizen sleeper 2 are both amazing

A thousand times this. Beautiful games - and nicely bitesized, too.

@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.