Bandari

[chipotle]

Allrighty, then. Bandari isn’t dead, but it’s on life support, and I’m trying to make a credible diagnosis. Most of it boils down to: I fucked up.

I may have built a stage people have shown interest in, but I did very little “writing and direction” afterward, hoping a couple active roleplayers who showed up around March and June would push things along mostly on their own. I can ascribe that lunacy to the general funk that I’ve been in for the past few months, but this doesn’t absolve me of blame. What happened, of course, is that said initial group of active roleplayers were essentially there ahead of the curve, and didn’t get enough feedback to stick around consistently. So, by August, the pattern things are still in had been set: 3-5 people connected most of the time, mostly standing around and fidgeting.

A few people have attempted to get plots going, to be sure. But they’ve mostly foundered. One was basically constructed to hang around the shoulders of another player who stopped showing up because he thought the premise of the MUCK was being violated when someone could be a giant and a shaman—a “problem” he didn’t communicate until a couple months after that plot ground to a halt.

While I think that particular player overstated his case and handled things in the worst possible way, his worry was legitimate. As much as I’d like it to be otherwise, there’s a tension between the setting’s focus on social roleplaying and what a lot of people like to do with giants: engage in wildly disproportionate power plays. I’m not talking about this strictly in the fetish sense, although of course that plays into it. The problem is that a substantial subset of the macrophile crowd has a “no such thing as too much” attitude. If ninety feet tall is good, two hundred feet tall is better. No, wait, magic control of your size is better! No, wait, magic control of everyone else’s size is better! No, wait, I can shift shape! Shift genders! Be both at once! Add a third! Shoot jets of fire! Be big enough to destroy cities with a single step! Level cities entirely with the power of my mind! EAT WHOLE PLANETS ARRRRRR cough cough—

Puzzlebox has the only workable solution to allowing this sort of character, I suspect: make everyone that sort of character. If anyone can do anything they want because that’s just the way the world works, the entire concept of “disrupting balance” gets all but thrown out the window. There are really only a handful of other ways to deal with this:

• The “See No Evil” approach: a generic setting—think Tapestries and FurryMUCK—with no enforcement of rules from a thematic standpoint. The resulting hodgepodge tends to work very well for scenes, but very poorly for plots. In a scene, two or three characters can figure out what they want to do and who’s in charge very quickly—and, yes, the BDSM overtone of that statement is intentional. The upshot is that people tend to come up with characters who are always in charge or never in charge in a given situation. When the fallen angel, the trickster god and the reality-warping psionic girl meet up, there’s only player negotiation to let them decide who trumps who. Sometimes that works but a lot of times it ain’t pretty.
• The “By the Numbers” approach: a system in which powers are essentially “bought” the way they are in more traditional roleplaying games. In theory, this can work really well. It’s my feeling that in practice this approach commits you to developing at least a rudimentary game mechanic system for conflict resolution. This isn’t a bad thing. Nor is it a good thing. It’s just a thing thing. It is, however, a thing that’s not as easy to do as you might imagine. I was a right bastard some years ago in criticizing a MUCK with a number-based character generation system, but the flaws were real. (I’m given to understand the approach they took was modified over several iterations.) I’m not opposed to investigating this further but I have a feeling that with Bandari it would be quite a trick, for the same reason that it’s difficult to have a pen-and-paper game system that handles both superheroes and “normals” with equal effectiveness.
• The “Just Trust Us” approach: try and describe a strict setting to begin with and try to approve only characters who fit that setting. Obviously, this is the approach that I took with Bandari. In theory, this can also work really well. In practice, though, it has two pitfalls. First, unless your character approval person is a real tough cookie, there will be a temptation to let characters through who probably really shouldn’t be approved—the biggest problem I’ve found in this regard is characters who simply aren’t very well thought out beyond the description. (And despite my description of myself above as a right bastard, I’m really not that tough a cookie.) Second, there’s no mechanism, beyond implicit trust, that prevents characters from going off into la-la land once they’ve been established.

So. A few characters did go off into la-la land, and a few characters who maybe shouldn’t have been approved were approved anyway. The latter one was directly my fault, obviously, although I suspect if I restructure the character request form in a way that forces people to think about their character history, why they’re in Bandari, and other things beyond the physical description it’ll reduce future similar problems. The former problem…well, that’s also my fault, in that it largely came from attempts to get roleplaying going.

So. While I came pretty quickly to the you can’t do everything yourself point in setting the MUCK up, I’m circling back to the you’ve gotta do a lot more yourself, kid point, and damn any perception of arrogance this might cause. I’ve been using “you don’t want people to look at it as your personal fiefdom” as an excuse not to get out there online and start pushing, and damn, that was pretty stupid, wasn’t it?

I’m working out a VDPA (“vaguely-defined plan of action”) for going forward.

1. Look at the way Puzzlebox has separated out its wiki and its LiveJournal (i.e., what’s used for what), and see about creating a Bandari community here if it seems to make sense—to discuss where we are and where we might be going in terms of plots.
2. Get a harassment policy in place. I wish it wasn’t necessary, but—and I’m sure this is something all MUCK wizards learn quickly—a couple bad apples can drive a greater number of “good apples” out of the barrel.
3. Start working out a few plot ideas myself. I’d be curious hearing how people—particularly Puzzleboxians (?)—work out bigger plots, assuming they do that kind of planning. In my ideal world, everyone would have a character who has their own agenda and acts based on how they want to reach their particular goal, but in practice, I’m concluding a lot of players—even ones who can be pretty good in RP—need to be shoved out on stage.

Point #2 is causing me some current personal angst, because of the few active players, a couple seem to be unable to even grit their teeth and be in the same room with another character. MUCKs with two dozen locations and only one central meeting area don’t have the luxury of “no contact orders,” and while the bad apple in this case has definitely been irritating, I’m distinctly unhappy at the feeling of being backed into a corner over this. (While I know Asperger’s Disorder is the fashionable malady to claim among fandom, my suspicion is that said “bad apple” may actually suffer from it, as his social skills aren’t lacking in the crabby unsocialized fannish fashion but rather in a kind of spooky “I don’t understand the difference between compliments and criticism” fashion. Of course, as my ex-roommate tacit observed long ago about another student at New College, understanding why someone irritates you doesn’t make them less irritating.)

As some concluding rambling thoughts, if there’s a lesson I should have drawn from the Giants’ Club on FurryMUCK, it’s that if I accept that I can’t please everyone all the time, I have a better chance of pleasing a number of people most of the time. If I manage to move forward and put in the effort I should have been putting in to meet people halfway, things can probably be put back on the rails.

Of course, that requires that a sufficient number of players meet me at the halfway point, too, and that’s going to mean getting people to be a little more willing to check in and see how things are going. I suspect an LJ community can help with that, presuming it becomes active. (It is, in fact, created now, albeit empty: bandarimuck.)

Comments

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Additional randomnesses. (I had too much caffeine tonight and this tab was still open in the browser.)

The flavor of the other comments here suggests that Bandari may be intended to have its stories fairly wiz-controlled. References to GMs, and giving out characters "crucial to a plot". People referring to RP-heavy mucks always tend to talk about GMs.

Puzzlebox doesn't have anyone in that role. At all. There was one person who left in a bit of a huff whose RP style seemed to be that (though it was never explicitly stated) and it really didn't synch with the place. This wasn't the entire reason for his departure, but I think it may have been a factor. Puzzlebox is an anarchy.

From what I hear involving other RP-heavy mucks, Puzzlebox is the exception; every other RP-heavy and story-favoring mu* seems to have explicit GMs. We just all improv at each other (http://greenlightwiki.com/improv/TheImprovWiki). (ovon linked to that improv wiki a while back on our wiki, and I find that most of the scenes that worked well were unconsciously applying some of the principles set forth there!) I don't know; I've never been attacted to "RP-heavy" GM'ed mucks, due both to being a narrative anarchist at heart and to most GMed mucks being set in pen-and-paper RPG worlds or in a TV show.

The longer plots I've been involved with do not have any set end conditions. There are beginnings, and there are places we'd like to go, but there are not planned endings.

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The 'staff actors' thing works. There's nobody officially assigned to this task, but I, and other people, have had periods of doing this - hanging out in a public place and being willing to try and give quality, IC interaction. It can really alter the path of a new character to ask a properly innocent question...

I don't know if an explicit role of 'staff actor' would work; the culture of Puzzlebox has evolved such that it's simply the Done Thing to try to interact with a new character, despite the pull of more familiar stories. Especially if the player turns out to be new to the muck, as well!

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I seem to recall that things didn't really start to get moving in terms of regular narrative until there tended to be 10 or more people connected at a time, with most of them in places that showed up on WA.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

As a quick response, since I'm running late for work myself now: You've pretty much nailed what I'd like to see. Bandari and Puzzlebox may have absolutely nothing in common setting-wise, but that's the philosophy I'd like to apply, even though it may prove much easier said than done in Bandari's case. :)

I don't really want to be a GM; that's not the way I've roleplayed myself for years. I think the friend of mine who's done the most driving of plots on Bandari so far is a lot more used to the idea of having "roleplaying wizards" who do precisely that, though, so there's been a bit of unintended tension lately as I've metaphorically woken up and started trying to puzzle through what I'd like to see.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

More late night pondering:

In some respects, there are GMs on Puzzlebox. Sort of.

In any particular continuing story, there's a character or two who's central to it. And the player of that central character has a certain extra degree of authority. Each character's player is the final arbiter of how much they'll change, and one mark of the main character of a story is that they go through changes.

Example: Both of the stories involving my character Charlotte-Sophia and her strange relationship with her medical prosthetic had a few points where there were sticky narrative choices that were deferred to me, without any real discussion.

Example: The long-running story of Amanita's rise and fall. My character Twin is an important figure in it, and a lot of the important narrative moments are private scenes between the two characters, but Amanita's the one most likely to introduce a new twist. It's about where she wants to go, for the most part.

Example: Sosael|Atazael|Inhatti and Meliaam. I'm the former. Amanita's player is the latter. So far, I've been the one driving this plot; most of the narrative drive comes from what I do, and she's a ready accomplice. Where do I want to go with this?

Much of the time, if anyone spoofs background characters, it will be the pseudo-GM-of-the-moment. The person with a plot idea and the energy to push it along.

In a long-term story, they're the one who keeps narrative coherency by spreading rumors of what's going on, or just being willing to show up here and there outside of the ongoing story and do non-narrative interaction that establishes their new story status and drops hints as to the whole affair. When Atazael suddenly changed to Inhatti, it was my responsibility to show Inhatti around the Mess a bit, introducing her to other characters/players, and summarizing her recent plot twist. Even alts not involved in a story I'm telling might mention it in passing: rumor is ever the stuff of idle conversation!

If you have a story idea on Puzzlebox, you are sort of a GM until the story ends. And you are an actor in it. If it's clear that you have some narrative drive, other players will be glad to help it along, with the expectation that when one of your characters is caught up in a story worming its way through their head, you'll return the favor.

(None of these are hard and fast rules. I've definitely worn the scene-scale GM hat in scenes that're part of plots I don't consider myself the real 'owner' of. It's a power role, and shifting power roles is a hallmark of Puzzlebox!)

Puzzlebox, though, is a very self-healing environment. It's really, really hard to make a major change in it. A random night's play isn't going to end up with half the setting destroyed. Well, not permanantly, at least. Twin, the sentient multi-galactic-mass black hole says that one of the reasons (she) lives in Puzzlebox is that the Puzzlebox can recover if (she) loses control and eats a huge chunk. I don't think Bandari can heal from a giant and a Venusian war machine having a running battle through the town.

I don't know how much of Puzzlebox's lack of GMs is because of the highly creative player-base (I suspect most of us could be a GM elsemu* if we were willing to spend the political/managerial energy in addition to the creative energy), and how much is due to the unusual setting. Perhaps even the inexperience helps: a lot of good players there say it's their first heavy-RP muck (including myself), or even their first muck, period.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Fuck, that's a lot longer than it looked in the comments form!