The title says it all, let's keep it civil, posting in others threads creates resentment, especially if it's random and not adding to the conversation. There have been problems with it before.
Please no posting on people's threads with useless crap
(16 posts) (7 voices)-
Please speak for yourself. I guarantee that folks posting in my game thread or the game threads of my players need fear no resentment from me, provided that their comments are civil, relatively infrequent (less frequent than my own posts, say), and at least mildly amusing. I consider the occasional two bits from a bystander one of the perks of running the game over a forum rather than through a more private medium like email.
Tue Aug 21 2007 5:45 am # -
JohnA1nut
MemberSome people here get really anal about little things, like Out Of Character posts and whatnot. Other people don't mind so much. Probably the smartest thing to do is ask permission if you are going to post on someone else's thread. I don't know about Kyler (my current referee) but it doesn't bother me much, as long as the post doesn't tell me what to do, or tell me I'm doing something wrong. I mean this is MY character's life I'm controlling. What is the right choice for you might not be the right choice for me. If you just want to tell me I'm playing marvelously, more power to you.
Tue Aug 21 2007 9:27 am # -
Ryan Young
MemberWhen Multiverser is played live, it flows differently from most tabletops I've played. One of the most obvious differences is that the characters are usually not in the same place or the same time, so the referee can only be attentive to one at a time. If you have a full table of players, what this amounts to is the entire group focussing on one person at a time as play cycles around the table. It can be very fun to watch how a player decides to act in a specific situation, or to make quirky comments about the encountered characters or settings. All of the players get involved with all of the characters, even though their own characters aren't interacting.
I feel that this interaction is stymied on the forums. You still have the feeling of "Hey, I didn't really play my own character much tonight," and you still get the benefit of experiencing all of the games that are being played if you choose to read their threads, but there isn't as much cross-thread interaction as there would have been in a live game.
Some people get upset when other people post in their thread. What they don't understand is that it really doesn't make a difference to their play; so long as they make their game post, that is all their GM will count for their character. Even if the thread gets temporarily hijacked, it's really easy to just go back, copy the last action, and paste it as the newest post. It's a lot harder to get back on track at a live game when these hijacks happen (and trust me, they do).
Multiverser is a mature game, for mature audiences and players. That doesn't mean it has adult content; it just means you need to keep a measure of decency and understanding for the other players at the table. We're all just gamers playing a game. The minute you start defining rules and boundaries about things that shouldn't matter, you are opening the door for immature behavior. Sometimes the punishment creates the crime, hmm?
Tue Aug 21 2007 11:29 am # -
JohnA1nut
MemberThat sounds like it could be quite confusing for an inexperienced referee, to run multiple table-players at once. MJ ran a live Multiverser game for myself and a friend of mine 2 years ago. I could not understand how he kept us both separated once we both left NagaWorld. Of course, he's the creator and most experienced Multiverser referee in the world, so it should not have been surprising at all. However, not everyone has MJ's talents, so I could easily see how that could get out of hand quickly if the referee didn't know what they were doing. I've ran informal demonstration games for friends. (No dice rolls or anything, just giving them the idea of how it is played) and I could never do that for more than one person at a time, and I wasn't even going full-throttle with it. I guess it is a mature game for mature people.
Tue Aug 21 2007 2:45 pm # -
Tadeusz
MemberRanzou,
Making explicit the implicit rules=creating opportunity for immature behavior= immature in itself. I'm not sure I'm buying this.
However, it is interesting your description of prevalent tabletalk in a Multiverser game. I've run a lot of Multiverser at tables and did not have this, but Multiverser might find it useful since you need to have something for the currently non-playing players to do.
Interesting.
Tue Aug 21 2007 4:33 pm # -
John,
It's certainly not a game for the inexperienced referee. I bought the game over five years ago, but I had to shelve it for a while - I just wasn't up to running it at the age of fourteen.
My model and mentor, the illustrious Shaun Horton, delighted in splitting up his players in any table-top RPG we played; he seemed to have a knack for breaking us apart near the beginning of a scenario and pulling us back together in the end, all the while without leaving anyone feeling that he was being left out of the limelight. (Half the time, he even rigged it so that splitting up was our own idea.)
I've done that myself (counting my infrequent live sessions of Multiverser), but I've never tried it with more than three players, and even with two it's surprisingly difficult. If you can pull it off, it's definitely worth it. It comes down to practice and experience.
It's interesting to me that a game so demanding of its referee is so easy and welcoming for new and inexperienced players. It's like it's custom made for veteran roleplayers to induct new blood into the hobby.
Tue Aug 21 2007 7:09 pm # -
JohnA1nut
MemberInteresting notion Scott. Not counting that one live session with MJ, and maybe a half-dozen sessions of Twilight 2000, you have been witness to all of my gaming experience. Those demo games I was running weren't even really games. The people "playing" had never played an RPG before. I was just giving a demo of the way Multiverser would be played. I'm hoping to get a copy of the Referee's Rules here shortly.
I like this much better than Twilight 2000. In that, I was playing a marine. I'm not a marine, so how should I know what to do? I kept getting chided by the other players because I didn't know how a marine would act. In this game, I'm playing myself, and I do know how I would act in a given situation. Makes it much easier to think about what to do, and no one can chide me for doing it wrong hahaha.
Tue Aug 21 2007 8:25 pm # -
Adam, I'm not sure I understand this negative attitude toward extraneous posts you and John (I) seem to have. I'm afraid that I think (from posts elsewhere) that it is the rather petty desire not to be bumped "out of line". That means to some degree I created the problem by attending to posts in the order they appear on the forums.
Since that seems to be the argument against such posts, and I definitely and absolutely wish to encourage such social interaction in the midst of play, I am reassessing my approach to the forums. In convention play, of course, I always give preference to the new players, because convention play exists for the purpose of introducing new players. Kyler, the first experienced player to play at a convention, can tell you that the way it is supposed to work is the experienced player plays when no one else is there to catch the attention of others and let people know that there is a game here, not just a couple of people sitting waiting for players, but that as soon as there are new players the experienced ones are there to help run the game for others, not to play. John never seemed to catch on to this, and got very resentful at one convention that I was "ignoring" him in favor of the people for whom I was actually running the game.
The forum is different, as the games here exist to educate people in how to run them. Even so, an argument can be made for doing the least experienced first. Maybe that's just my way of thinking. I always serve dinner to the youngest child first, and to new guests before long-term guests, despite being the oldest child in my own family. I also make lists in reverse alphabetical order, because I hated being always at the end of the lists growing up. But perhaps the rule should be that I start with the newest player first and do the players with the most experience last. That would give this order, if I have it aright:
- Richard Long, who assures me he is returning but has just been busy.
- Steven Zolkov, who has disappeared without comment but might have been locked out by a technical problem.
- John Oakmaster, apparently too busy at the moment but not abandoning us.
- Ed Carroll, who kept running into technical glitches on the other forum and might not know we're back.
- Scott Horton, who is also running more games than anyone other than I at this time and place.
- John Cross, who was the first of the new crop of players.
- Adam Keller, who started at Ubercon (3 or 4 maybe?).
- Donna Smith, who was here just before he was.
- Shawn Kelley, who came over from the Christian Gamers Guild some years back.
- Graeme Comyn, who along with Eric Ashley and David Marcoe was among that first batch of players here.
- John Walker, who started in playtest before the rules were published.
- Kyler Young, who was one of five players in my first playtest group in 1995.
- Ryan Young, whose character started with mine in 1992 in Ed's game and was ported over to mine when Ed left the area in 1997.
--M. J. Young
Tue Aug 21 2007 9:29 pm # -
My error--I am not currently running John Cross, so there should be only twelve names on that list.
Your point about playing yourself is interesting, John. Ryan was saying just the other day that he thought Multiverser was a better entry game than Dungeons & Dragons, precisely because new players know how to play themselves.
--M. J. Young
Tue Aug 21 2007 9:32 pm # -
Oh--something else I was going to say on this subject that I think is very relevant:
I have only ever once seen someone post to someone else's thread with the specific purpose of bumping the thread later in the game. It was at the time a joke, and I and nearly everyone else knew it was a joke, but I reprimanded the poster for it at that time and it never happened again. I have seen posts made in threads that are funny, helpful, insightful, encouraging, informative, advisory, and completely off-topic, but they were all made with good motive. I have seen bad reactions to good posts, and I can only think that this is because of that "place in line" thing. Thus if I am not persuaded either that this "resentment" is going to stop or that it actually stems from something other than losing that "place in line" (in which case I will have to address the real cause without discouraging such desirable interactive posts) I will probably have to go to a fixed turn order, and we will go around the table the way I set the table from now on.
Also, Adam and John Walker, remind me to talk to you about the futures of your games when we meet on Friday.
--M. J. Young
Tue Aug 21 2007 9:40 pm # -
Jhiaxus
MemberActually caring about posting order hasn't been an issue, actually hasn't been an issue for quite awhile, ever since I got a look on what goes on on the books so to speak. It's just something called respect, which is in short supply here on the boards. I will leave it at that.
Tue Aug 21 2007 11:28 pm # -
david3565
MemberIf the "lack of respect" your referring to is the occasional heated debate that we have, that all I can say is that's only a clash of opinions. When ever someone has crossed a line around here, they've apologized (including myself). If your referring to something else, they I have to admit that I'm not sure what you're talking about. If these forums, in general, are your idea of a "lack of respect," then you have have no idea just how vitriolic people can get when sitting at a keyboard.
Wed Aug 22 2007 4:10 am #
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