@Tez said in Player Ratios:

I’ve also considered the angle of giving people tokens for running story which they can cash in for Insert Incentive Here. I’ve toyed with the idea of the incentive being staff attention, but I very, very, very much want to kill the idea that staff attention is better than player attention.

I’ve tried this, and a surprising thing happened: the people who ran stuff almost never asked for their tokens (I was using FS3 luck, which had a pretty wide variety of benefits you could spend it on). Not //never// asked, but it was far more rare than you’d think.

I don’t think that’s really what motivates people to run stories, honestly. I still like it as a way to offer something to people who do, but I don’t think anyone ever said ‘I’m gonna run a thing to earn me some luck’. I think the actual rewards are things like seeing their friends have fun, making a real impact in people’s stories, seeing the stuff they do matter.

I think the most effective thing in getting people to run things lies in two things: making it easy and making it matter.

Making it easy is NOT about ‘do whatever you want.’ In fact, I think that often makes it harder, because people are uncertain about what’s feasible. It’s more about building support.

• Have different levels of ‘running things’ available. GMs have to walk before they can fly - even experienced GMs need to practice with the basics of a new system. Have a way to run basic, repetitive encounters that add spice to RP, the sort that require almost no rules or guidelines beyond using the system. If you do ‘plot in a box’ type things, make sure some of them are really basic ‘smash x’ or whatever your theme’s equivalent is. Something you can run in a single evening.

• Build a community where people are polite and supportive of GMs even when they kind of suck. At least in public. No groaning about dice, everyone says thank you, and if you’re frustrated or annoyed, do it in private. Make it safe to try stuff.

• Have different types of running things available. Some people will never run combat, but they do a killer party or make up really cool holiday traditions.

• Support people doing bigger stories. When they want to run one, get them on a private channel with STs, or a go-to ST, so they can ask questions. Be proactive about talking through their plan. Tell them it sounds great but they might need an extra day for everything they have planned, or did they think about involving NPC X because that might be a cool tie-in to meta plot. Be a partner. It’s still less work than running something yourself, and next time they’ll need LESS help.

Making it matter is mostly about taking the stuff they do into account - but the last bullet about being a partner to player-GMs can help a lot, too. Honest to god, sometimes we were able to straight up let players GM a thing we were struggling to find time to do, because we could slide certain things so easily into their plans and they were usually pretty excited (I think!) to be allowed to do it. BY ALL MEANS run that scouting scene we know we need but don’t have the spoons to run. SURE, pass on this useful info! ABSOLUTELY make up a town and let it get destroyed by the enemies we want to feel scary.

I don’t have great concrete thoughts about ratio of STs to players because I think that has a lot of variables about activity and game type and and and, but I apparently have many thoughts on building a game where people GM stuff.

@Faraday Yeah, I’ve never tried it with vehicles, I do think that’d complicate matters.

@Roadspike Not if you have a command to just… change the type on the fly. combat/type, one might call it. If one had ever done such a thing.

@Buttercup said in Any website builders?:

@Pavel

Unfortunately there is no rental plugin that I have seen. With rentals you have to do a calendar function. Where I can rent at two pm and for one day and it locks the vehicle out until two the next day from availability. That rate is a daily rate. Then incorporate weekly rates, monthly rates etc. and adjust the cost and calendar tied to it accordingly with reservations.

Take a look at this.

I use SquareSpace professionally to build sites for customers to maintain, and it’s pretty user friendly. I’m unfamiliar with the Booqable plugin, but I think it’s worth a look if you want something you can manage easily.

Most likely what you’ll want is to find a booking service that works well for physical rentals that has an embeddable component. Those can be pretty easily plugged into a site regardless of where you end up building it.

In fact, just building a site through something like this may do what you need.

Watching players dive hard into not just exploring plot stuff, but also running stuff in order to tie into metaplot you’re real excited about is so fucking fun.

@Nynrose Oh no, I’m so sorry to hear this! Thanks for sharing - and wishes for good results in your upcoming treatment.

I can handle this.

My personal sweet spot is 20-35, though I tend to go a little higher than that at times because I also dislike a stagnating playerbase.

There are tiers of activity, and usually 40ish players is 25 pretty active players, 8-10 semi-active players, and 5-7 barely-there players.

Fewer than ~15 active players and people can’t keep themselves busy. Staff work can actually go UP because less story happens organically, socially. 18-25 active players is a really, really good sweet spot for social RP providing enough drive to keep things rolling when plot is on a cool down, IME. It’s also big enough to provide lots of player GMs without anyone having to run constantly.

The top limit, though, is not actually about staff capacity. I would not raise it if I had more hands (in fact, I have a lot of hands!), because it’s not about how many people I can get on plots or provide story for.

It’s about the reasonable size of a community that functions well together, develops healthy norms, and builds interconnected personal relationships that contribute to a cooperative play space.

This is important to me for all kinds of reasons, including maintaining the trust for folks to feel comfortable reporting problems, paying enough attention that I can often be alert to their presence even before a report bubbles up, the ability to keep an eye on how story is spread, and generally just… having a feel for stuff.

Even with help, I can’t do that at more than 35-40 players (and it’s a big part of why I count by player and not character).

I’m not perfect at it by any means, but I know I get much, much worse at it when there start to be so many people on the game that I don’t actually know a good portion of them.

And I tend to think that a community where folks know each other is a more pleasant place to play for lots of other reasons, too. Players are more cognizant of much work their fellow players put in to GM for them. They know who’s having a tough time in RL or that weekends are rough for that person they’d love to catch . THEY are aware when something feels ‘off’, and are more likely to let staff know.

@Warma-Sheen said in Staff Capacity:

I think the root of all of this is a lack of trust between players and staff and STs on either side. A lack of trust makes it hard to feel confident to engage. Am I gonna set someone off? Am I gonna offend someone? Are these people gonna snark about me and my RP or PRP to everyone behind my back or on staff chan and kill any credibility or reputation I have built for other players to trust me? Those things. So building (or rebuilding) that trust is hard because of so many bad experiences people have had from both sides. And that’s something I don’t know how to fix.

This is true, but it’s also not unfixable. Not in the least. It’s not a problem unique to M*s, either.

Which means there is a lot of research (and anecdotal stories) about how to build trust with teams, and about how to do it as a leader. There are blog posts, books, and articles on the topic.

If someone is really interested in game running, I think some real curiosity aimed in that direction can teach lots of valuable things. Running a game is, for better or worse, leadership, and if you want to be good at it, there are lots of ways to learn that skill.

@Tez said in Staff Capacity:

I heard someone say nice things about Shattered plot documentation recently. CALLING ON @Tat and whoever else does that IDK. TAT WHO DOES THAT.

I don’t know what exactly they’re referring to, honestly. We use the built in Ares plot functionality (kind of poorly, if I’m honest), try to keep a very basic ‘high points of the plot’ Story So Far page somewhat up to date, and have pages for One-Shot Adventures that folks can run as well as a page outlining what types of plots need to be fuller PRPs and how to get one approved.

The two former are aimed at helping new folks know what the big points of story are.

The last two are aimed at enabling player GMs.

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Staff Capacity:

It’s my impression that a decently skilled coder (i.e., not me) can whip up the required plugins without breaking too much of a sweat – at least not when compared to building up an entire codebase.

I would not say this is true. I’d think even someone who knows Ares and how to code in it would have months of work to get a WoD plugin working - maybe MANY months, depending on what exactly they’re doing.

I’d say that to do it well, you probably have quite a bit of work that’s literally just figuring out what you want to code/support and how it’s going to fit into how Ares does things.

@dvoraen There are a couple threads:

https://brandmuday.mythicus.net/topic/316/would-you-roleplay-with-ai

https://brandmuday.mythicus.net/topic/355/ai-megathread/

I’m p interested to hear what people think about AI-generated text in games, so I totally hope folks take the more general discussion over to one.

@Jumpscare There are days, maybe even weeks, when running a game is more stress than fun. Sometimes there’s a span of time when it feels like So Much, and sometimes even Too Much.

But mostly? It’s really great. The people are great, the stories are great, the folks who sign up to do work for free with me are great, the community is great, and it’s all super rewarding.

I’m glad your game running experience is being awesome!

@Kay I was going to suggest taking a look at Ares games. They are, IMO, going to be much more newbie friendly than something pure telnet.

The commands are pretty similar, so the places you’d be on not-familiar turf is more about additional functionality than not knowing the commands.

@shit-piss-love said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Cobalt said in MU Peeves Thread:

@shit-piss-love Run something invite only or semi-invite only.

That’s not a bad idea. I keep out of OOC circles in the community but I like the people here well enough. Maybe I’d open it up to people here to start and let y’all refer others.

I just want to be the brief voice of dissent:

There are people I don’t particularly want on my game for various reasons, and who I have banned or ‘disinvited’ before they finished applying.

But they are not the majority, and I cannot overstate the joys of running a public game and meeting people who never would have made it there if we were on an invite-only system. The absolute magic of finding a whole group of players who have amazing chemistry, who are delightful OOC, who build story and theme in a way you never could’ve imagined - who you had NO IDEA existed despite decades of doing this - is truly fantastic. It’s a big part of why I build and run games.

My experience on invite-only games is that you’ll still have player problems. People who get along with A won’t get along with C just because B is friends with both. Invites don’t prevent them, IME.

It does take some thick skin and the willingness to have some hard conversations and close doors to run a game - public or private. But that’s honestly, for me at least, such a small, small part of it. The joys are really immense, too.

@helvetica said in Neitherlands:

@Tributary yeah, haha, I had magic systems and Ares “explained” to me quite a bit. good times

@Faraday said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

There is no one universal definition, but FWIW I use the technical definition of async, which merely means “not an immediate response”. So any situation where you have more than what your typical RPer would tolerate from “hey it’s your turn to pose”, IMHO, is async RP. Whether that scene is allowed to linger for a few hours or a few weeks is entirely up to the people involved and when they agree to call “cut”.

I know there’s not, but there’s also no ‘typical RPer’ time tolerated between poses anymore. You can’t define async by a standard that doesn’t exist, because people are assuming VASTLY different ‘typical time between poses’.

I’ve seen people turn open scenes into async scenes just by disappearing for a day and then coming back and going ‘sorry, got distracted’ without a word of discussion with their RP partner. More than once!

Async-primary isn’t my style of play, but I see its place and I’m happy it works for some people. But I’ve seen some real rudeness take place from people who assume that a scene can be taken async at any time by any person, and that makes me crazy. Async isn’t the problem here, obviously, the lack of communication is.

I think it’s probably increasingly important for games to clearly label what the ‘default assumption’ is for scene pacing, to define its terms, to state what general pace the game aims for, and to be clear about what sorts of scenes should require clarification with your RP partners.

I also see a lot more of this in RP requests - people asking for distracted or work slow, etc. specifically - so I think we’re getting there.

@Faraday

I think people use ‘async’ differently here and some definitions might be helpful.

To me, async is a scene that’s lasting 3+ days (usually more like a week) with hours or even days between poses.

Starting a scene and pausing it to pick up the next day, with the expectation that you’ll finish that same day, isn’t async.

RPing a scene over the course of a workday with 30 minutes between poses and the occasional hour+ long pause for lunch, meeting, commute, etc isn’t async.

I’d call those things ‘paused’ and ‘distracted’, respectively. I think a lot of people who don’t like async are fine with those sorts of slower-paced RP, and for me at least, Ares makes them possible because I can pick up and put down the scene with ease.

I want a scene to fit within my internal consistent timeline, which usually means ending within 24 hours of starting, with the occasional exception. I’m much less ‘synchronous’ in terms of a 3 hour dedicated stretch than I used to be - but I still don’t enjoy async scenes.

@Pavel said in Ares: Client or Portal?:

One solitary thing I’d change on the portal? When I get a notification (either the pop up or in the notification feed section), I’d like to be able to click it to be taken to wherever that notification points to.

That’s what the eye icon next to the notification does. If you hover over it, it says ‘view’.

@Cobalt said in Why is Pack closing?:

Lileas – Player was snarky at me because I originally didn’t allow otters or seals on the game, because they felt too “fae” for me. And while I agreed there was a good point that I allowed cats and foxes, the way they presented the argument was really troll-ish, so I asked them to leave. In hindsight, I’d probably just tell them to be less sarcastic and let them play. But I got really tired of the “lolol, you allow were-foxes but noooo all seals are selkies” responses.

You super don’t need my permission or anything , but man-- if you’re feeling guilty over this one, I wouldn’t.

Being a jerk in the way you approach thematic questions or disagreements is in my opinion a super bannable offense. It won’t be the last time they make someone feel bad for disagreeing - and they will make your life harder. IME, these are the sorts of folks who drain a gamerunner’s energy until it’s dry.