More MUCK Musings

Increasingly, I'm feeling like running a tabletop game online is an exercise in futility. Schedules are somehow always harder to coordinate with people scattered all over than a local circle of friends. Normal RPG rules churn online (without heavily coded support, at least). And when everyone scatters at the end of the night, they go back to their lives and don't think about it for a week (or whatever interval) more often then not. Even with regular MUCK play, I enjoyed things most when I felt interested and involved enough to trade a few emails about things during the day or whatnot.

So this applies currently to a World of Darkness game that's been going weekly and the Star Wars game I've been doing every other week (except for missing several windows now for various reasons). I'm not sure at the moment what's worth the effort, when I'm scrambling up to game time feeling unprepared.

And as far as MUCK gaming itself goes, I've been thinking some things, too...

I had some thoughts recently, and I've been trying to sort them out. One of the great things about roleplaying on a MUCK is the diverse people and points of view it can bring that you'd never get in a tabletop game. Unfortunately, that's also one of the great difficulties, since desires and expectations will differ. You can't please everyone all the time, after all...

Some link through Deviantart led me to a little RPG in beta called Anima Prime (not to be confused with Anima). Skimming through it, I started to think how great it would be for a MUCK system. Philosophically, the design seems like it should really work, as it gives players a notable degree of creative control without neutering the GM. Then I got to the actual dice mechanics and changed my mind. Shuffling dice between pools may look good on paper (literally), but it sounds unwieldy to track in online text. This got me thinking about just what I would and wouldn't want to see in a MUCK's mechanic system.

First off, I think I should say a bit about not having one. I think freeform RP is wonderful for a MUCK - in a perfect world. But the world isn't perfect. In a small group of players familiar with each other, this is probably the funnest and easiest way to go. When you get more people together, though, egos start to clash. Without some way to officially resolve conflicts, people bicker or refuse to "lose," no matter what the situation. The internet makes it far to easy to be an asshole, and that's the basic reason why I believe a MUCK should have some means of conflict resolution beyond whatever the players say.

The Game Master and Scene Setting
Having one person to set the scene and manage the NPCs is a staple of tabletop games. Some games move away from that, but even though it's easy to run PC-only scenes on a MUCK, I usually see one person slipping into the GM role anyway. Typically, I think that's fine and good. I feel an RP system should be able to settle things without a GM by having rules that cover conflicts, but it should still support having a GM if there is one.
So my point of view rules out things like Amber Diceless RPG, which basically rely on a GM judgement call when everything is said and done. But it also leaves the primary power of the scene - describing surroundings and such - with whoever is acting as a GM. I actually like Anima Prime's approach to this which seems to let the GM set the scene and veto things if necessary, but encourages PCs to describe/add things that might be appropriate - passer-bys on a city street, a horse and wagon on a farm, etc.
From what I've seen in Fox Magic, I feel the GM position is a little too trivialized and wrangling tempo (control of the scene) is probably too awkward for MUCK use.

Character Creation
This one's highly setting-dependent. There should be some variety in what players can choose to play, how much all depends. I don't mind some complexities at this stage, but you don't want things so arcane as to drive people away. And a point-based system usually seems best, as random rolls are "unfair" and may simply encourage repeated use of the RNG until an acceptable result is acquired anyway.
I have never cared for systems that use "creative words" or systems where you choose your own skills and such. There's just too much leeway there when one person may choose Broad Swords as a skill, while another chooses Swordsmanship, and another Melee Weapons. I feel traits and skills (or whatever) should be defined so as to avoid that sort of benefit from being vague.
In a game where there are baseline PCs (humans, near-humans, whatever) and then there are NPC "monsters" (or aliens, etc.), they do not have to use the same scale/list of powers or skills. But if they don't, that needs to be clean, and you need to watch out for crossover. If monster traits are allowed to supercede PC traits in upper numbers or efficiency of design, you create problems if you allow PCs to start taking monster abilities. A monster might have the conditional ability to destroy the world, thus motivating people to stop it, but if you give that to a PC you'd better be prepared to kiss the setting good bye. It's better to just keep them separate.

Character Advancement
I'll be honest. I have yet to see any system in place for this that I've been completely happy with.
If you give XP by real life time that goes by, you don't reward the people who are active and doing things. If you give XP by time logged in, you still may be benefitting people who only idle or don't really play. If you give XP by votes, you run a very serious risk of starting a popularity contest. If you grant XP by participation in official events, you get good turnout for those, but there's no incentive to do other things and run the risk of looking biased. I guess that some hybrid system works best, but there are flaws any way you go.
One problem outside that which I have seen, however, is how easy it becomes to give too much XP. In a tabletop game, you have a relatively small, consistant group that you can scale the game with. On a MUCK, you might have characters run for three to five years standing next to someone fresh out of character creation. You want to allow characters to advance, but if the difference in existing and new characters is an insurmountable gulf, you seriously turn off people from starting new characters. Plus, if you're not careful, you end up with characters that are virtually gods - that's okay in a setting where it fits, but it tends to break many games.
I think MMORPGs might be doing something right with level/skill caps. As much as I feel character advancement is part of the RPG experience, I don't feel it's out of line to assign a "human maximum" or whatever that PCs cannot exceed. If someone plays a character long enough to max out their stats, they're probably attached enough to that character to keep playing them without the incentive of further improvement. You do, however, still have to make certain the game works as designed at that level. If a maximized character can jump to the moon and shatter mountains with a punch, the maximums need to be set lower - unless that sort of action fits the game, of course.
And for the love of all that is holy, any maximum that is set should meet the definition. It should not be exceeded by special permission, or bypassed by doing X, Y, and Z.

PC Death
Another thing I saw in Anima Prime that seemed to fit well was the rule that only a player can kill his/her PC. Now... this is a little controvertial. I like this approach, but even I don't always agree with it. Some endeavors are so foolishly suicidal that characters shouldn't survive them. I suppose my ideal would be a hybrid of these two where any such things would be call for the GM to step in and say "If your character does that, they will die. Are you sure you want to do that?" I feel character death because of being in a bar fight may be realistic, but it's not very much fun. Defeat, wounding, capture - those can all lead to more play. Death is rather final, so a player should have some say
Or at least it should be. It'll depend on the setting, but I typically don't like seeing people come back from the dead. Even two or three times, and the threat of death is so trivialized it may not be in the game to begin with. And it sure makes those heroic sacrifices seem silly after the fact.

Rolls
Dice have long been the "random factor" in RPGs. I'm fine with that and they're familiar to me. Whatever the actual system called for, it really needs to be simple to use.
This is not the same thing as being simple. If you have a complex system that references multiple traits on various sheets and so on, that's fine - as long as it's easy for the user. Code can cover a lot of things. Videogames accept a button press or click, crunch numbers, and give you the results. All the hard stuff is hidden behind the scenes. But if the player had to compare numbers and/or charts and remember what deals with what, it gets unwieldy and people get discouraged.
This is one point that makes Anima Prime unusable for a MUCK in my book. There's tracking of multiple dice pools that increase and decrease as an encounter goes on, and while this could be coded to appear in a MUD-style prompt, or something, it seems far too difficult and awkward to me.

Changes to the System
They are, perhaps, inevitable or necessary. They're also bad.
MMORPGs are patched all the time, and often enough the changes affect character type balance. This upsets people, because you're taking the game your players know (and enjoy enough to play) and changing it. Sometimes, this is simply necessary to fix something that's ruining the game for people. Sometimes, it's just a really bad idea (see Star Wars Galaxies).
In my opinion, such changes need to be:
- Well thought-out. You don't want to patch one hole and tear a bigger one. Discussing it with several people for multiple viewpoints is usually a good way to get an idea what the repercussions will be.
- Communicated. If only three people on the MUCK know a change is coming, you're doing it wrong.
- Infrequent. The more things are changed, the less confidence players will have in anything that's in place.
It's almost always better to take the time and make sure a change will make things work better than to push it through quickly.