I’m going to go on a little rant here but stick with me, I promise it is on topic.

DarkMetal was the most well designed WoD MUSH to ever exist. Wanna fight about it? Here we go!

The reason your players are burning out after 3 months is that there are no stakes in your game.
I hate to sound like one of /those/ people but… game devs today are too soft on their players.
It practically takes an act of God to kill off someone’s character so they get stuck with the same character for long periods of time, or they make alts and that results in burn out just as quick because they can never find in-depth character development with their focus divided between multiple alts.

Dark Metal got a few things right that no one else did.

1. Anyone could die at any time.
2. There were safe zones for each sphere if you wanted to just do soft RP. You never needed to be in danger as long as you stayed in your zone.
3. Making a new character was fast and easy! If you died it wasn’t a big deal.
4. Staff didn’t give a s*** what you played, as long as you played, so approval was automated.

On Dark Metal you had to fight tooth and nail to survive long enough to get to a point you could walk in the mixed spaces without being in danger of being made into someone’s midnight snack and you were never fully safe.

You had to struggle to become enough of a bad-ass not to have to live in fear all the time. I can not emphasize enough how important that feeling of progression is to the health of a game.

People want their actions and choices to matter.
When they don’t, people get bored and they wander off.
It’s the same reason people add stakes and drama to TV shows. If nothing changes, there is no point.

If you want your game to survive, learn to crush your players hopes and dreams. Learn to let players kill each other off.

Character churn will save your game from player churn.

I am but a week away from getting a computer capable of running baldur’s gate 3. Once I make sure the machine is actually going to work I’m going to buy it on steam. I cannot wait to play this game. I’m old and about to die so I’m going to spend the last few years of my life acting like I’m 14.

@somasatori said in Dies Irae:

The power levels of characters in Dies Irae are at a low to medium level …

@somasatori said in Dies Irae:

Mage: the Ascension and Changeling: the Dreaming as its core rulesets …

One of these two statements must be untrue.

Today I got the itch to WoD again. I tried out LiberationMUSH but the part of creating a character I always hated the most was the formating of the +selfstat nonsense so I thought I would try ChatGPT and see if it would do the work for me.

It was surprisingly good. It formatted everything nicely and even gave me helpful suggestions. Out of curiosity I asked it if it knew about LiberationMUSH specifically and it said it did. I started asking it questions to test how much it knew.

I asked it to summarize what people had posted online about LiberationMUSH and the answer I got was… interesting.

It told me that the game was most well known for the vampire sex parties, Polk (One of the administrators) wildly abusing the rules for their own benefit, and a debate about the number of nipples a person has influencing the amount of gnosis they have.

The last statement included a link to this forum which is how I found you all.

So the next time you are thinking about trying out a new game, ask ChatGPT about it. You might find something interesting.

@Roz said in The 3-Month Players:

For many people, knowing that your character could die at any moment will mean they’ll invest less in their character; after all, what’s the point if they can lose all that effort in a moment’s whim?

That’s why every DM faction had a safe zone. You could log in every day and play all day long in the forest or the reclaimed suburban sprawl next to Forest and never leave the protection of the werewolf zone.

If you wanted to be a boring person who stays home and does laundry while occasionally banging your werewolf boyfriend in his crinos form you were able to do that.

That’s why I’m saying Dark Metal was a very well designed game. It had something for every kind of player. Modern games lack that variety. The range of danger that you could be in at any moment is much more limited and more vaguely defined.

Most games don’t have a safe zone for their factions that is larger than one building or a few rooms deep in an isolated location.

One of the things that Dark Metal did properly was creating an entire distinct environment for each faction that you could play in and never run out of things to do ICly.

@GF said in TV series, news, recommendations:

Hazbin Hotel

Can’t recommend enough! 10 out of 10.

@Faraday said in The 3-Month Players:
te core players)

There are plenty of successful TV shows that avoid the Game of Thrones style of knocking off main characters left and right.

There is no one-size-fits-all game.

Yet, few shows were as successful or as well known as GoT. The stories where your favorite characters might be lost at any moment are the ones people become most invested in. Investment is what we are looking for.

It’s like playing a video game where you only get one life and then you have to start all over. You will be very careful in that video game to try to stay alive with your one life but if you have three lives he will be less careful and less invested. If you have infinite lives and lose nothing when you die the game becomes less fun because you can just rush headlong in without needing to think or plan.

Knowing that death doesn’t matter or that you are not going to die unless you choose to means you will invest less energy and effort into your character. It’s less challenging if you aren’t afraid of death.

@Buttercup
I can’t imagine many world darkness games would not be roster games if you asked. I’m sure staff has a long list of NPCs that they would like someone to take up and flesh out the world with. It’s probably just a matter of asking.

@Jennkryst I haven’t seen the series, yet. I’m planning on watching it because you guys give it such a good review. But my point was that ecological issues are a very popular and well trodden foundation for a story’s conflict.

@Jumpscare
Yes, they are kind of a problem. It’s like if everybody gathered for a soccer game but several other players decided that instead of playing soccer they were going to fly kites.

Sure, they aren’t actively hurting anything by standing in the middle of the field flying kites while people try to play soccer around them but it’s very rude and a waste of everyone’s time who came to see a soccer match.

It goes back to the idea that actions should have consequences and events should have a lingering effect on the story. If you’re just there to sit in a bar and chat like a chat bot with no intentions of ever become involved in anything deeper or more complicated than smacking your imaginary meat bits together, you are purposefully wasting people’s time and offering nothing in return.

Limiting your RP to pointless bar chatter or one-night stands for your own gratification is selfish and bad for the life of the game.

I thank you it’s a matter of playing a game to build a story with someone else versus being in a game for other people to entertain you.

If your RP is so limited that you won’t leave the bar or engage in anything deeper than a vagina, then you’re not there to forge a cooperative story. You are there to have people cater to your desires until you get your fix of attention and log off. It’s practically narcissistic.

@Pavel said in The 3-Month Players:

@KarmaBum The same thing we RP every night! Sex and bar-related things!

The kind of people who log in to a world of darkness game just to sit in a bar and make small talk are baffling to me.

Just go join a discord or a forum.

The same thing is true of people who hang out in bars just to hook up for TS. Why are you on a roleplay game with a complicated combat and stat system when you could just go to one of many games where you can literally be anything and bang anything you can imagine.

Both of these kinds of players seem to be achieving their goal only with many extra steps getting in the way.

I can’t imagine it’s very satisfying having to work for hours to set up a happy conclusion to your encounters because of the fact you’re playing the roleplay game instead of a game or chat room that is intended for the exact goal you are striving for and allows you to get directly to the point.

I think my question would be, why are you making it harder on yourself when there are much better options?

@Roz said in The 3-Month Players:

For many people, knowing that your character could die at any moment will mean they’ll invest less in their character; after all, what’s the point if they can lose all that effort in a moment’s whim?

That’s why every DM faction had a safe zone. You could log in every day and play all day long in the forest or the reclaimed suburban sprawl next to Forest and never leave the protection of the werewolf zone.

If you wanted to be a boring person who stays home and does laundry while occasionally banging your werewolf boyfriend in his crinos form you were able to do that.

That’s why I’m saying Dark Metal was a very well designed game. It had something for every kind of player. Modern games lack that variety. The range of danger that you could be in at any moment is much more limited and more vaguely defined.

Most games don’t have a safe zone for their factions that is larger than one building or a few rooms deep in an isolated location.

One of the things that Dark Metal did properly was creating an entire distinct environment for each faction that you could play in and never run out of things to do ICly.

I am but a week away from getting a computer capable of running baldur’s gate 3. Once I make sure the machine is actually going to work I’m going to buy it on steam. I cannot wait to play this game. I’m old and about to die so I’m going to spend the last few years of my life acting like I’m 14.

@Buttercup
I can’t imagine many world darkness games would not be roster games if you asked. I’m sure staff has a long list of NPCs that they would like someone to take up and flesh out the world with. It’s probably just a matter of asking.

@Jennkryst said in TV series, news, recommendations:

I include ‘not enough Andor’ as a problem they are doing.

It makes me a terrible Star Wars nerd, but I have not seen Andor. Most of the Disney Plus Star wars content appeared to be the equivalent of AI slop generated only for cheap profits when I saw the ads for them.

@Jennkryst ecoterrorism being good is the foundational idea of the world of darkness: werewolf game. It’s always been fashionable to fight back against the elite. Besides, clean air and water benefits everyone except all the dead people you had to make to get it.

@GF said in TV series, news, recommendations:

Hazbin Hotel

Can’t recommend enough! 10 out of 10.

@Wizz which so do you mean is politically charged? Lower decks? Strange new worlds?

I’m normally not a “wokeness killed this show” kind of person but there was a TV show called Y: The last man. If you ever want to see an example of what not to do, this is the show for you.

It starts off with a mysterious event that kills all the males of every species on Earth except for one guy and his pet monkey. That guy turns out to be the Son of the woman who became president because of all the people in the line of succession dying.

The TV show becomes a story about him and some weird secret agent chick trying to get a geneticist to a place where she can figure out why he survived before the first generation of male babies are born and exposed to whatever killed all the men.

You would think time would be of the essence! But no, the secret agent purposefully crashes their helicopter and travels on foot or via stolen vehicle to get to the Geneticists who they discover they need to get to San Francisco in order to do the testing.

Yet this secret agent refuses to contact the government and just wants to do everything herself. So who knows how many male children will be born and die soon after because she has trust issues.

But the worst part of the show is the two subplots. One being a bunch of conservative women wanting to try to take over from the liberal president and the sister of the main character getting involved with a crazy cult of want to be Amazons who want to hunt down the last men on Earth because men treated them poorly before the end of the world.