@Ominous said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

If I am doing novella stuff, which I call collaborative writing and I haven’t done in decades because I’m picky and it has an even smaller population than MUs do, it HAS to be async. Someone (I’m not scrolling up to see who) was poo-poo-ing on this style, suggesting that such a framework focuses on the writing aspect at the expense of collaboration. That is incorrect. I would actually argue that MU*ing is much less collaborative as everyone in a scene tends to be looking out for number one with number one being their character. It’s a different mindset.

I think we’re maybe talking about different things. The long-form async style I’ve seen in venues like Storium and forum play still has the one-character-per-player hallmarks of MUs, only the poses are way way longer. Due to the length of time between everyone’s poses, it’s basically impossible to have a meaningful conversation or to coordinate actions with one another. Mostly folks either just do their own things separately (resulting in less collaboration) or are forced to go off-game to collaborate more directly in discord/google docs/whatever.

@Yam No - in Storium you mostly just control your own character. They’re a little more tolerant of power-posing someone else in the interests of expediency, but most of the moves I’ve seen are just one character.

I would be unlikely to join a pay for play game. If it was run by someone I know and trusted, I might if my budget allowed it.

In theory, if I did not have a job, wasn’t burnt out, and thought it might work; I’d consider running some sort of pay-me-to-GM for you scheme. But it would have to have strict rules on what the money was exchanging hands for. And that is … something I don’t even know where I’d start with the rules. I also wouldn’t be comfortable doing it while working a full time job, because I’d want to provide something professional that was worth the money I was receiving for it, and that then becomes a case of “would this even be enough to pay my bills” type of question.

All of that theory aside, I rarely ask anything of other people that I’m not willing to do myself. So, if I’m not willing to pay for someone to GM for me… It would feel bad to me to be willing to be paid to GM for someone else.

I think there are ways that it could work for the people who have the funds for it-- like people who pay for D&D. But it wouldn’t be something for me personally.

@Pavel said in Web-based CharGen or in-game CharGen:

@hellfrog said in Web-based CharGen or in-game CharGen:

yeah applications are to tell you about the player more than the character, I think. "Name a non-fictional woman that is smarter than you’ would be a perfect application prompt.

Faraday and Cobalt. Next question.

you’re in, buddy!

Oh, it’s a troublesome character even if you remove the ableism.

Deep in my little black heart I have this desire to app a comics game as the demon Baytor, a sort of tube with teeth that shouts “I AM BAYTOR!” a lot and does little else.

Baytor yelling "I AM BAYTOR!!: in someone's face

This is a bad, bad idea, obviously bad. It might be okay if I made sure Baytor could only be found where it’s found in the comics, working as a bartender at a certain pub, completely easy to avoid, and treated it as a sort of NPC I depict while playing a reasonbly PC-written-PC primarily.

This is a community-building issue.

Okay, yeah, probably you can never have outright let’s-murder-each-other-on-sight factions and have it work. But why would you want to? If they only interact to fight, there is no reason for the opposing group to be PCs.

But stuff like “Green apple Fossoways hate red apple Fossoways and they’re each trying to be the ruling branch of the house,” and the deal where everybody’s trying to steal the McGuffin from whoever has it right now, can be fine fun.

It needs a supportive community to be fine, though. It works on private games because everybody there thinks everybody else’s feelings count and actively wants every other player to have a good time. When this trust is broken things crumble.

Which is no surprise. There are big differences between:

Dracula: “Well shit.”

Van Helsing: “Yeah, the dice were cruel to you! But that was great, loved the way you played it out, I had a blast.And you’ll get yours once you climb out of that hoiy-water-contaminated well.”

And:

Dracula: “Well shit.”

Van Helsing: “I understand that you’re very upset. In this essay I will explain how you are wrong and a problem…”

And:

Dracula: “Well shit.”

Van Helsing: “It sucks to suck.”

Also, yeah. There’s gonna be drama. There’s just gonna be drama. Making some space for the dramas of RPG-related fee-fees is part of gaming. Gamerunners and players can draw a line about how much space and what kind of expression of ye feels. But “never express any kind of upset about the game or your interactions with others on it” isn’t reasonable. Games nobody cares are not good games. You want players to be invested. Passions will rise. Characters don’t have to die for passions to rise.

Players in general and game runners in particular really ought to try to avoid drawing that line at who’s drama rather than what kind of drama. 

Drawing the line at a who is how you get bullshit like it not being ‘drama’ when Abelard raises a “Bridget refuses to compromise in RP!,” fuss, but when Bridget replies, “You refused to turn off your camera, you were obviously bluffing, I’m more afraid of proposed-betrayee I am of your threat, and I don’t even have the information you were trying to blackmail me to get,” somehow Bridget is the drama-creating problem.

@Pavel said in Minigames in MUSHes:

@Muse said in Minigames in MUSHes:

@Pavel Or maybe a self limiting factor, like clues know how long since the last clue and will stay in hiding until it’s time again.

Just let me have my slap-upside-head tool okay. 😞

Fiiiiiine, but only because I’m a sucker for a sad face.

@Jenn if this was discord I’d respond with a laughing emoji. Holy shit my brain is rotted

I need enough people to have variety, and to also have nice soft buffers from people I don’t mesh with. (Not necessarily bad actors, but people who just don’t like me or I don’t like them.)

@Polk Well, at least one of the major difficulties has been made pretty publicly apparent on the boards in very recent memory.