I’ve been on games that had some kind of quiz as part of charges. I get where they’re coming from, but it was a real turn-off.

I would feel the same way about an automated tutorial quest type thing. I appreciate the sentiment, but I don’t MUSH for quests and NPC bots. That would almost certainly have me saying “this is clearly not the right game for me”.

What I try to do is have easy access for new players to get involved. Whether that’s a personal pointer in their approval: “Hey I notice you’ve got the BG skill of surfing, John does a lot of surfing RP…” or a general “how to find RP” guide, or frequent open plots where they can dive in.

@Tat said in Session Zero & M*s:

The tension with how much there is to read, to catch up on, to get into the game, is real.
How to effectively communicate this stuff is a puzzle I have not yet solved.

It’s definitely hard. In my last few games I tried experimenting with a layered approach to the stuff folks have to read. Keep the basics short and sweet, and then have links to expanded articles if they want/need more detail.

@Jumpscare Yes please! I’m really interested in what you’ve been doing.

@farfalla I’ve never thought about that. The few times I’ve done RP via Gdocs, it’s always been because of the varying time differences, either because of geographic location or the fact that people operate on different work/sleep cycles.

But now that I have thought about, makes me wonder how many times the other person would watch me type, stop, then furiously delete whatever I had been typing.

@Tat said in What stops you from running a game?:

I see lots of people with cool ideas or themes they’d love to play in.

What are the things that keep you from actually running a game? What are the barriers?

Code and time.

People want a certain amount of stuff coded to play on a game. Coding that stuff takes time. I don’t have it.

I was coding my own engine to be able to launch a game, but I ran out of time when I inherited Liberation Mage. 🙂