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

[rheoryn.livejournal.com]

Don't think everything Puzzlebox worked perfectly, there have been a few fallouts, unfortunate incidents and people like me who just don't fit in that well.

I have a feeling they just had a larger audience to pull from (And thus a larger collection of ideas) in the first place, and that helped a great great deal.

On the other hand, I think I got more plotting with Puzzlebox in 1 week (Or at least plans of future plots) than I have the entire time of Bandari :/

[twentythoughts.livejournal.com]

An LJ community might help, yeah. Again, though, the best solution is getting more people who are willing to roleplay. Which, again, would be done by making the MUCK more attractive. Which requires more players. Fun :)

On a different note, it's rather fun to have a power and have one's character prefer -not- to use it.

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

Will you be at FurCon? I'm terrible at organizing my thoughts out-of-context, but I'd love to sit down with you and try to figure out what we did right on Puzzlebox by mistake. :)

One bit of advice off the top of my head, something that might have given me a good perspective for how to run rules-free RP, is to look at some of the old messaged-based RP boards. There was a MUCH larger power gap between the most and least powerful characters on the Past and Future Inn where I cut my roleplaying teeth, and at least for the time I was there, things seemed to be pretty peaceful.

As for how we negotiatie plots, ovon has an excellent post-mortem (http://www.puzzleboxmuck.org/wiki/index.cgi?The_Care_And_Feeding_Of_Plots) of one of our own heavy plots that collapses in on itself. I have some more notes jotted down somewhere for a more formal guide to plotting, and when I finally get them posted to the wiki, I'll make sure to let you know!

[samila.livejournal.com]

I was interested.

I made a character there.

I never played her.

I need to either get back on the ball with that character, or make something entirely new and start from scratch.

Either way, I'm willing to try to help you out.

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

I'm certainly a guilty party in all of this (no really, I do have a desc coming someday!), but I've also got a few scattered thoughts in the matter. Mostly, I'm not really convinced that you can actually construct a plot-oriented (as opposed to scene-oriented) MUCK experience without a fair amount of GMing going on at one level or another -- it is IMHO unreasonable to expect plots to develop from nothing more than player interaction. If nothing else, some set of players has to be willing to explicitly dedicate themselves to plot advancement and new plot generation, with other people's individual scenes weaving in and out of the plot as appropriate. This is a personal opinion, of course, but I think it would be a good idea to do a lot more thinking about how to create plots, rather than expecting them to be created by simply good setting and good character.

[jadedfox.livejournal.com]

I'll speak with you privately on a couple issues you've mentioned. One i see is directly talking about me.

[cetasdolphin.livejournal.com]

I know I used to come on a bit in the beginning and at least try to interact with others with my character but as time went by I fell out of the loop as it were and I tended to notice a lot of the folk were just gathered at the bar and the rest of the MUCK seemed to be forgetten. Another thing is that my creativity fell flat shortly after I joined in and I couldn't think of anything to do that didn't seem to fit the canon of the MUCK. Nevermind the fact that I am soso friends with the percieved person that you mentioned in your post. Eh it matters not for me anyway, I can't access it even I wanted to at the moment. My recent LJ entry says why.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

With so few people, you probably want to have a regular weekly campaign with a GM. That works pretty well in my experience, as long as you can get people together at the appropriate times.

[kareem.livejournal.com]

I read a book once, called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0099450259/qid=1102382072/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/026-0943416-0998033) The main character and narrator of the story has Asperger's. If your apple is anything like that, well. Y'know.

As for getting people on the MUCK, why not advertise? The electronic equivalent of flyer bombing could work. It's crude, but it'll certainly get peoples attention. If you've got an appropriate web-space, or forum where yout think that would be possible, I don't see the harm in using it. There's no worry of quality, since the advertising can be your torrent and the character validation your sieve.

[lhuhikwdwoo.livejournal.com]

Odd ball idea to came to me about how to handle the issue of getting ic conflicts going, minimal maintainance on the part of the wizzes, and insure any new comers have something to interact with. Identify a potential conflict, like say the french agents vs german agents vs bandari colonial administration, or two rival groups of shamans, or one to three pirate vessels vs the bandari colonial administration, or two to three rival underworld power mongers, or british military vs the martians, etc. then identify the poles of the conflict, aiming for two sides, but allowing for three to four sides if needed.

Each side would then be handled by three players. I favor three as this maximizes the likelyhood there is a manageable level of tension in each pole, but that that tension can be fixed if it gets out hand. It also reduces the chance of redundancy or peer pressure kicking in. When a conflict is resolved or becomes irrelevant, the poles of the conflict that are no longer a factor to the greater roleplay are dissolved.

Thus for example, in the rival shaman groups conflict, the struggle goes on for some time, each side getting allies among the spirits and the pool of general characters. Finally, one group gains an irrevocable upper hand with regards to allied spirits, thus winning. The shaman group then unopposed goes off to do whatever they had been working towards. The rival groups to it are likely permanantly dissolved rather than dealing with the messy aftermath, and the winning group heads back to their homeground. Those who favored either side or were shamans that were only marginally involved would still be playable afterwords and have a bit more history to their characters, but for the duration would end up having an active rp to jump into.

This also ensures that if enough people want to play some particular types of characters, regardless of power level, they can do so with a reduced chance of causing problems or monopolizing the focus of the role play on the muck.

[baroquevertigo.livejournal.com]

Most of my plot planning on Puzzlebox is pretty emergent. It comes from the characters, from their drives and their brokennesses. It comes from weird places inside.

Typically, an arc sprouts from an impromptu scene. I have a Neat Idea, or someone I scene with regularly has a Neat Idea, and we play it out. Once the scene comes to a close (sometimes with OOC calls of 'Curtain!' or "Cut!') there's a period of OOC discussion. A scene may have consequences, may not, and if they look like fun to play out, there will be agreement that we need to do it soon.

Thus, a plot happens. It's as simple as that, and as complex.

If the scenes that make up a plot are done in public, they become broader: two characters to three or four or more. Beyond five it becomes unwieldy, as players have different schedules...

There have not been world-shaking plots that I know of. There have not been any with a single guiding hand. Stuff just happens.

Some stories have a beginning and an end. Some don't. Most of the ones I've been involved in on Puzzlebox don't come out of a specific goal I have for a character; they emerge from one of my characters rubbing up against another one. Sometimes the rubbing is sexual, sometimes it's more metaphorical.

---

Puzzlebox was already going at a decent pace when the wiki was put up.

---

I do find myself wondering if the overlap between 'literate people capable of telling a coherent story' and 'macrophiles' is large enough to have critical storytelling mass on Bandari. The stereotypical macro, to me, is just a shrill insistence on being The Tallest Thing In The Room. It seems as likely to pull a muck out of the Giant's Club regulars as it is to pull one out of the denizens of the Herm Haven.

What would make Bandari attractive to someone who isn't interested in playing a giant or a squish-toy? Have you sought these people by advertising outside of the Giant's Club, the Macrophile boards, and your LJ?

Obviously you can't kick-start it by yourself; you need other people to bounce off of to make Good RP.

(Does Bandari have an OOC command? That's something I've found surprisingly effective on Puzzlebox. You get the occasional discussion about Whatever, and the occasional side comment on a scene in progress, but it's clearly marked as OOC, making it harder to laze into chatting about the shitty editing of whatever bad Japanese cartoon just showed up on Adult Swim. There's a big screaming [OOC] in front of every OOC say/pose, and you get poked by other players if you don't use it for OOCness.)

[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.

---

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!

---

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.