Sunday working picnic #3 - ' Book-Based MU*s. From Choosing a Theme to Managing Player Expectations' with Nymeria

Linden Grove(#159RntJ)
[http://mush.pennmush.org/~alansz/mush/lindengrove.gif]
Although you can observe oaks, elms, maples, and walnuts, the linden is clearly the ruler of the grove. Tall ~~1~~
silver lindens stretch to dizzying heights above the other trees, and shorter, bushier "little lindens" offer a ~111~
pleasant combination of shade and sunlight beneath their many small leaves. ~1X11
A babbling brook flows on an easterly course through the grove. To the west, a dripping sound indicates its 1111~
source. The cold becomes intense as the light fades from the sky. The evening stars glitter brightly. The northwest ~111~
wind blows the snow about in freezing gusts.

Players here (+glance for short descriptions):
Logger Javelin Balerion
Nymeria Ender Tyr
Dan Jonquil Porthos
Noltar Elvira Impster
Shaggy Dog Paige Mike
Teal Raevnos Cheetah
Kaspia Judge Dredd Ian
Luke Wilco Molikai
Vadiv Diuturnal
You see Linden treehouse here.
Streets here:
North leads to Foothills
West leads to Waterfall
East leads to Lakeside
South leads to Omphalos Park
SAVE: Never go 'party crashing' with Walker again.
Balerion has reconnected.
Nymeria has reconnected.
Nymeria has partially disconnected.
Balerion has partially disconnected.
Balerion says, "sheesh."
Balerion says, "Timing."
Êlvïrå grins. Oops, "Welcome back Nym and Bal. You're on, any time you like ;)"
Hello, everyone. Balerion and I run Blood of Dragons MUSH, a game based on the best selling "A Song of Ice and Fire" fantasy series. Both of us have been MUSHing for more than ten years, and have largely played on games based on book themes. We're not familiar with games based on other media, such as TV shows, film, or comics, so we'll try to stick to what we know.
We'll be focusing on several aspects of running a game based on a novel or series of novels. First, we'll spend a little bit of time on how to determine what might be a good theme and we'll discuss getting permission from the creator(s). After that, we're going to go into some detail about the management of a themed game, for example how to manage player expectations concerning what aspects of setting and story that will be reproduced on your game and how to build and shape your player base to make your game successful.

Books with interesting settings and characters may spark a desire to roleplay in those settings, but what initially may look like a great theme for a MUSH may end up having a lot of potential problems when looked more closely at. The most important aspect to consider when determining whether something will make a good game is the scope of the game in relation to the scope of the setting. Can you get away with representing the theme well enough with, ideally, a single central location? If you need 20 different cities in 10 nations built, its probably not a good idea when you take into account that even a very popular theme that can depend on an already-existing MU* audience may not have more than a hundred players ready to play at the start.

Tied into the geographical scope of the game is the scope of the plot. For the same reasons that managing a large world is very hard, managing an epic story line is even more difficult. It takes lots of enthusiastic players and mention active staff. For the most part, we think it is a rare game that can manage to replicate an epic story line from a book or present an alternate but equally epic story. So, find a theme which has aspects you feel confident you can reproduce on your game, thinking realistically about the logistics of arranging roleplay, putting larger plots into motion, and so on.
Balerion has reconnected.
Nymeria has reconnected.
Nymeria has partially disconnected.
Balerion says, "Sorry, everyone! After months of rock solid connection, it decides to mess up now. :P"
Ender says, "Continue Mission?"
Porthos presses Yes.
Nymeria says, "Once you have a suitable theme, the next step should be to get permission to turn it into a MUSH. In this day and age, a lot of authors are on the Internet. If they find out about an unapproved game, and they don't like it, you can be shut down real fast and all your work will go down the drain. On the other hand, if you do ask and manage to get them to agree, they may even go so far as to promote your game in some limited fashion, such as by mentioning it on their webpage, which is a great way to tap into the fan base who are familiar with the series, if not with MUSHing. Who knows, they may even be willing to answer some questions and give you some exclusive information concerning the setting that'll give you something special to share on the game with the players."
Nymeria says, "If you clear that last hurdle of obtaining permission, the next thing to consider is the potential player base, as one of the most important things to bear in mind is managing player expectations. As discussed earlier, you must have a clear vision for how you wish to see the theme adapted to your MU*, and now you need to effectively communicate that vision to your players, prospective and otherwise, to keep their expectations from becoming unrealistic. They need to know roughly what sort of roleplay and what sort of story lines they can expect, whether it'll be focused on wars, politics, family drama, technological exploration, or whatever it is that you are focusing your game on."
Nymeria says, "This is particularly the case in an epic setting, where many readers are drawn in by the great battles and adventures, and expect that they can do the exact same thing as the heroes do. If you're not taking on the sizable challenge of striving for the epic, but instead are focused on certain, narrow aspects of what the setting has to offer, you're going to have to assist players in getting a grasp of what that means for them and the kind of roleplay they'll find."
Balerion says, "You will also need to consider what sort of player base you want to build up. A themed game might cater to several different types of audiences with different needs: players familiar with the setting, players familiar with MUSHing, players familiar with both, and players familiar with neither. With limited staff resources, you may find it easiest to focus your efforts on catering to some particular groups, or excluding some particular group from your considerations. You might prize familiarity with the setting over MUSHing experience, or the other way around, or you might even prefer the idea of having players unfamiliar with both because their freshness might lead to exciting developments."
Balerion says, "It may be tempting to see the built-in audience consisting of the fans of the books as nothing but an advantage, but unless you manage the situation well, it can lead to problems if you end up with a large number of eager fans of the theme with little to no roleplaying experience. We have seen one game open for a rather popular theme only to be flooded with lots of fans of the theme who had never roleplayed on a MUSH before, and who received little support or assistance in getting going. The administrators were overwhelmed, and a large portion of the players disappeared from the MUSH, and probably disappeared from MUSHing all together as they supposed it was not for them from that one experience."
Balerion has partially disconnected.
Balerion says, "One approach to building a dependable player-base in a themed setting may be to start with a limited opening, during which only players with both thematic knowledge and MUSHing experience are invited. When you feel you have a solid core of players, you can open up fully. This is not a method without its dangers, but there is real potential for advantages. The important thing when transitioning to a wider player base is to shift the administrative focus onto the newer players. The older, more established players shouldn't need as much constant staff support as the ones just starting out, and they may also be asked to provide assistance in orienting and assisting new players."
Nymeria says, "If you do allow players unexperienced with MU*s or the theme, you will almost certainly want policies that restrict them from more complex or powerful roles. You don't want to make them second class citizens, but our view is that you want to encourage them to get familiar with the source material and how players interact through roleplay before they take on such roles. We've seen games with a much more laissez-faire attitude, where whatever was roleplayed by a new person would have to be dealt with ICly, but we've found such episodes create a lot of hassles for administrators and players who are trying to keep some a sense of consistent theme and realistic behaviour (as determined by the setting) in the game."
Balerion has reconnected.
Nymeria has reconnected.
Nymeria has partially disconnected.
Nymeria says, "By avoiding putting new players in positions where they're very likely to make major errors, you save everyone a lot of headaches, and you save the player the ill-will that their unknowing errors might very well cause. Everyone makes mistakes, but you can do a lot to prevent players from making large ones by guiding them into roles where they can safely grow and learn to the point where they'll be able to make informed decisions."
Balerion says, "When it rains, it pours. :P"
Ender gets out the staple gun.
Balerion says, "One more bit and we're done. :)"
Nymeria says, "In the end, a themed game offers a lot of benefits. You can have a setting that players know and love that can draw people in. You may have a structure to how you will proceed with your game, ICly, if you follow canonical events. You can bring players up to speed more quickly on the setting and the background without having to explain everything from the start, as may be the case with an original theme game. It's definitely something to consider."
Nymeria says, "Thanks for your patience, everybody. If there's any questions, we'll try to be around for them. ;)"
Javelin claps.
Diuturnal applauds!
Balerion will be sending angry mail to the yahoos at the ISP who decided now would be a great time for substandard network connectivity.
Êlvïrå steps up to the podium, "Ok, thank you very much to Nymeria and Balerion for that, and for battling through their evil ISP's sabotage attempts..."
Kaspia woots!
Nymeria says, "Its a conspiracy, I tell you. ;)"
Êlvïrå says, "We're now open for discussion so if anyone has got any questions which directly relate to this talk or to the subject of book-based games and managng player expectations in general, then feel free to stick your hand up!"
Êlvïrå says, "Just a quick reminder though..."
Javelin sticks up his hand (after the reminder). Time keeps on slippin' slippin' slippin'...
Êlvïrå says, "We'll be back in the same place, same time next week with a fantastic talk by Javelin!!!!!! His talk's title is 'Good to Great For MUSH' and personally, I'm very excited about it. Anyway, discussion is now open."
Jonquil raises his hand as well.
Êlvïrå steps down and let's Javelin speak. And then Jonquil.
Javelin says, "I'm trying to reconcile your advice - which seem sound - about not spreading across a huge world, epic, etc. with the couple of book-based games I've played on, which did that, and seemed to be the better for it."
Javelin says, "Do you think there's identifiable factors that can make a larger-scale world work vs. not?"
Balerion says, "We're coming it from the perspective of the developments we've seen over the last thirteen years. The big, sprawling games we started on worked well to begin with, but the attrition level has been very high on these sorts of games."
Javelin nods.
Nymeria says, "I suppose access to travel between areas is one factor. For fantasy games, fast travel usually isn't available, unless it is by magic means. And then its often limited to some types of characters."
Nymeria says, "The Wheel of Time games we have played tried to to connect up areas more closely by making travel by magical or semi-magical means more common than it thematically was, and to some degree it helped. But not a lot, I think."
Javelin nods, just musing. Glances at Jonquil (nice name).
Balerion says, "One of the most successful genres of MU*s, I suspect, are the World of Darkness games. I'd guess that a factor in that is that most of them concentrate everything in just one city, but that's speculative. Jonquil? :)"
Balerion has partially disconnected.
Jonquil says, "First, thank you very much. Excellent advice! I have more of a comment than a question. I disagree that epic scope is fundamentally difficult to manage. I think it's an issue of system, the problem being that very few RPG systems have a subsystem for dealing with long term conflicts. They tend to be be focused on action or scene level resolutions, not larger ones. If you had no system for resolving individual actions they could become similarly painful to manage for players and staff as well.."
Balerion says, "I know of at least one game that has done a very interesting long-term conflict resolution system, but it's rather new (at least to my knowledge) and I couldn't say where it'll end up; I do hope they succeed, because it sounds cool. :) That said, even with a system in place, you still need people maintaining the system and keeping everything going. I think a lot of time, conflict tends to move towards entropy -- it peters out without outside stimulus (generally from staff) -- and when you're trying to run a game on a sprawling backdrop, with players all over the place, the amount of work needed starts to pile up."
Balerion says, "An epic game within a limited setting might work quite well. It's not a book, but games influenced by Battlestar Galactica certainly have room to combine the epic scope of the flight of the refugees within a smaller space (the fleet, or the battlestar itself)."
Jonquil says, "As an aside: I am not advocating for a large area, I think the two are related but not strongly so."
Jonquil says, "Right - that's what I was getting at."
Jonquil says, "The system for long term/larger scale conflict exists partially to general 'real' RP."
Nymeria says, "I think it can be genre-dependant, too. If your genre is one where prophecy, destiny etc plays a large part in the canon storyline, you'll need to be very creative to do something similar on a MU*, when you need to fit players into predetermined things without necessarily telling them exactly what to do."
Jonquil says, "And partially to satisify the folks who want to do more strategic gaming."
Impster has reconnected.
Balerion says, "I will say that I've found that suggesting any sort of meta-game that helps players determine the backdrop for your game can meet some surprising resistance. At least in my experience. This may relate to the fact that we did start with a core of experienced players, many from a particular game, who have certain concepts regarding play ingrained and aren't keen to try something new."
Jonquil says, "Yeah, I wasn't really considering integrating things like prophecy into such a system, beyond as aspects of color with no mechanical value."
Javelin has dealt with prescience. :)
Jonquil is a big fan of a meta-plot.
Jonquil says, "Or maybe story arc is a better term. Meta gets tossed around so much these days it seems. :-("
Nymeria says, "Its a big part of Wheel of Time games, so we've seen some approaches to it. It can be made to work, but I do think it takes quite a bit of skill to put something together that won't make the players groan a lot. ;)"
SAVE: The DB mutters. What did it just vow never to do again?
The meta sails in, and hits Jonquil in the head.
Kaspia says, "Meta-game and meta-plot are problem words sometimes because their definitions vary from player to player."
Balerion says, "On our own game, we have a specific framework of events. We know (and the players know, if they've read the series our game is based on) what some of the major upcoming events will be. So we've got an arc that we can work with, and fill in the gaps. Players seem to like that just fine."
Jonquil grins.
Judge Dredd nods to Kaspia. And sometimes, they don't mean anything at all.
Jonquil says, "And yes, avoiding widespread groaning is always good."
Kaspia says, "I'm one of those players who scratches her head when she hears them, but I won't stop you today. I think I know what you mean."
Kaspia nods to Judge.
Balerion says, "But we've found players resistant to system-based approaches to resolving broad, long-term conflicts. There's where you have to work on the culture of the MUSH, and convince people to come along for the same ride as you envision."
Javelin prefers a smart guiding hand behind the scenes to a system to resolve long-term conflict. But I don't mind being on the losing side of a good epic.
Balerion says, "Yes, that's where most players are. It's kind of curious that they prefer a potentially arbitrary decision by staff to do this or that, as opposed to a purely gamed-out thing where everyone had equal knowledge and equal opportunity to determine what was going to happen."
Impster goes home.
Impster has left.
Kaspia finds that interesting.
Jonquil says, "Indeed! I generally hate the +request and wait on a quasi-black box that is 'staff' to churn out something."
Nymeria says, "Though I think the reason that many of them prefer staff to run things is that they don't think they'll be the ones losing. ;)"
Javelin is playing for the story, not for the board game.
Jonquil says, "Are they looking at my stats? Considering how I would use them? *fret* *fret* ;-)"
Balerion says, "Personally, I'm very interested in indie RPGs which focus on narrative and give players a large amount of narrative control via their systems."
Kaspia nods. "I am, too."
Jonquil says, "Yeah, me too. I am more a fan of scene level resolutions and then get back to the RP itself."
Balerion says, "But at the same time, as Javelin says, some might feel it turns it into a board game, and they're not interested. It's like our rumor system, which we've introduced. It's based on a system from a WoD game we played once, which made the code available. We took it a step further and have influence points directly tied into the system -- you can spend it, you can attack the influence of others with it, and so on. But we have players who just don't like that tactical aspect of rumors."
Nymeria says, "I think you also have one group of players (I tend to fall in it myself, anyway, but I suppose it could be a group of one ;) who like the story arc mainly as a backdrop to react to, rather than something to be more closely tangled up on. A totally static backdrop can certainly be very depressing."
Kaspia glances at Jonquil. "Ours will do something like that, too."
Kaspia says, "I don't think I have any questions tonight. It was a really interesting topic though. Good job."
Jonquil says, "Yeah, basically. And I worry about that 'board' vs 'RP' game too."
Jonquil says, "Unh, missing an 'aspect' in there. ;-)"
Balerion says, "Are the players on your game used to these sorts of systems, either from other MU*s or from tabletop?"
Jonquil grins, "We have no players yet, not open yet."
Balerion says, "The game I was speaking of earlier that seemed interesting to me is ... uh, the new Amber game, the name escapes me. With one or more of the guys from Evil Hat (yay, FATE) involved."
Kaspia says, "When it comes to players, I guess you can't have 'em all. A lot of players don't want to read more than a paragraph in a news entry or help file, so it just becomes one of those things. Even if you have an epic game and you have an awesome system to support it, they may not be interested in breaking away from what they are used to. Or they might just be lazy. As per the genre for our game, most of the player base is used to submitting +request and going through plots where X+Y=Z all the time."
Kaspia says, "Road to Amber."
Javelin says, "Road to Amber, IIRC?"
Balerion says, "There you go."
Javelin murmurs, "Kaspia's typing speed FTW"
Kaspia grins.
Kaspia says, "I know players went to Road to Amber, and they saw the system there and went 'Whoa.' For most, and I'm no exception to this, it took over a month to get the hang of it."
Kaspia starts to add something then forgets where she was going with it. Pfft.
Jonquil chuckles.
Balerion says, "There's definitely a give and take when it comes to systems. Too much of a learning curve can limit your potential playerbase, if they're not keen on that up-front investment. Too little learning curve, and people who want more structure stay away because they've seen what can happen in games with poor or little structure."
Nymeria says, "A lot of MU*ers are creatures of habit. We had a fair bit of initial resistance to our character database system too, and it still confuses new players some. Though systems that tie into roleplay are the ones people find hardest to swallow. Even though we've always tried to communicate its roleplay first, system second. It seems a hard mix to swallow for a lot of people."
Paige (OOC) says, "What I miss?"
Jonquil says, "Yeah, one nice thing, as I see it, about RtA is that you can ignore to some extent the epic systems and focus on the aspects of the system you're more used to and then jump into the other stuff later."
Kaspia nods in agreement to all of this.
Balerion says, "Having a certain modularity to the systems is certainly a good idea. Rules should be consistent across systems -- sub-systems, really -- and players should be able to opt out of some facets of what you offer unless their chosen role makes it vital for them to make use of said system."
Jonquil also knows he has some very impressive coder shoes to fill and at times wishes Helix could be tucked into suspended animation so he could have a chance to catch up. ;-)
Jonquil says, "Agreed, whole-heartedly."
Javelin has to leave for the night, and is going to be taking Logger with him, so anyone else who wants to log further should do so?
Jonquil has a complete log if it's needed.
Nymeria says, "Okay, thanks for the heads-up, Javelin. :)"
Balerion says, "Like, I don't know, a house head in one of the Dune games who'd want nothing to do with the resource system would probably be awkward."
Javelin waves. Thx for the picnic.
Nymeria says, "Thanks for coming. :)"
Jonquil hopes he doesn't jinx his connection. ;-)
Diuturnal cheers for picnic, even if she didn't get to bum any booze off of anyone.
Javelin has disconnected.
Êlvïrå says, "Thank you everyone for coming :)"
Thank you for visiting.

Please return soon.