GM:? Okay, you're locked in a basement, hung by your toenails, naked and looking at a very upset Mafia don, "Knuckles" Mahoney.

PC:? Oh, it's cool.? I know him.

GM: ...wha?

PC:? Oh yeah.? Childhood friends.? I saved him and his hot sister from a burning building while I was stealing a magical emerald out of the Renraku arcology.

GM: ...

PC: Oh, and I tapped his sister too.? She can't get enough of me.? Something about that blessing from the leader of the Salish tribe to make me more virile.

GM:? ...I don't recall any of that being written down anywhere.

PC:? It wasn't.? I did my three paragraphs on "How I got my cyber", "How I'm a ninja", and "How awesome I am at basket weaving".? They said that was sufficient to explain my +sheet, so I was approved.

GM:? You don't think any of this stuff was worth mentioning before?

PC:? Nobody asked.

GM:? ...you know what?? The don's not there.? He sent his bruiser, a Force 8 death spirit, freshly arrived from the Elemental Plane of Suffering.

PC:? Oh, it's cool, I know him.

Hehehe.

-CM

P.S. You guys don't keep track of contacts on +sheets, huh?? Our GM always makes us spend BPs on them.? But then again, he's always been a stickler for the rules.

Nevermore, the correct answer to "Oh it's cool. I know him." is "No you don't, dolt." (after looking at character's +sheet and seeing only a level 1 fixer and a level 1 mechanic, both with loyalty 1, and neither of them named "Knuckles" Mahoney).

For the record, from my MUX experience from 1994 to present, as player, ph helper and rp staffer, a character's background was not once - let me stress this - NOT ONCE - used in a staff plot. These backgrounds are database dead weight.

You know, if we lived in an ideal world, where the staffers would know every player as well as a gamemaster knows his players in table top, backgrounds could be really handy and useful.

"Ah, George has spent his childhood in a Catholic school. I bet if I make this ghoul NPC a priest, he's going to have some interesting moral dilemmas." - this thought could happen in the head of a gamemaster who has carefully read every PC's background in the group. It will never happen on a MUSH. Why?

Too. Much. Information.

As a staffer, you try to organize a team together, they do legwork... they start getting some clues... you read their backgrounds, if you're that anal, and try to custom tailor your plot to their personalities...then out of 6 players on the big day 3 people show up. And if you had everything custom tailored to this one guy, or that one guy, or two guys, and if the guy's not there, too bad. No plot for all, let's try again next week. Fun?

At best, for this reason alone, we're going to have plots that are generic enough for anyone to do them.

The other reason is how huge those backgrounds are. As a staffer, reading 1d6+1 people's worth of +whining for stats and skills just to give them a one-nighter milk run... that's plain unreasonable. And to give them a custom tailored month-long adventure? You're gonna run into trouble with key people missing out and the story going screwy. If George is not there and the players cap the ghoul they were supposed to save, oh well, hand out karma and all the work you've done to make a plot special George's plot turned into nothing.

Then there's the matter of initiations and awakenings and such, when the player writes a second (and a third, and a fourth) novel, then practically shoves down the staffer's throat to get the approval, and if god forbid the staffer has to roleplay a mentor spirit or some such... ugh. It's not pretty. Most often what happens is the player ends up roleplaying with himself, and the staffer just sort of "oh okay, here you go, you're grade 1, feel free to roleplay that with yourself, go away now. Sorry, gotta go." Not in those exact words but, basically. You know what roleplaying with yourself is like? I'll just leave that to your imagination.

Pervert.

Ok, to address this point I will remind people:

We've already posted elsewhere what we look for in the bg.

We've already stated that bgs would be less rigorous during the beta game. One page will probably do it, as long as there's a real personality there and a plausible story.

Awww, you're ruining everyone's fun!  We were having this big party arguing a moot point, beating a dead horse's carcass into pulp, and along comes the voice of reason

Let... me.... at it!
*struggles to kick the dead horse in the mouth one more time*

Considering the horse now closely resembles the contents of a can of spam, I'd say we've had enough fun though, wouldn't you say?

The only dead horse laying around is the silly stab at elitism that has plagued the online Shadowrun Mush world for entirely too long.  And enacting policies that end up turning away perfectly good players, likewise, invokes a scent that roughly parallels a dead horse.

-CM

Considering the herculean amount of work invested in creating, maintaining and running a mush, especially one as ambitious as SrS, some quality control and expectation that the players put forth a modicum of effort to present their character as an entire entity and not a collection of numbers to be filled in at that player's leisure, is understandable and warranted.? What you might call elitism, I call expecting a potential player to show that they care about this place but a fraction as much as those who are responsible for its very existence.?

Nobody is entitled to play here, and I'd rather have fifteen people who are competent and capable, knowledgable of canon and able to fit themselves into the theme and setting from the onset, than fifty people who continually need to be corrected and coached because their paradigm is completely unacceptable and is revealed only in bits as their 'background' bleeds out piecemeal whenever it might be considered advantageous.?

A "perfectly good player" can drop a few paragraphs to explain what their about.? A player that can't be bothered to think their character through at least that much disrespects those that do make the effort to flesh out their place in the world:? most often, GMs and their vanguard.? Considering all they do for you, don't complain that they ask for a bit up front.? You want a place in this world?? Show them how.

I'm still going to call that approach elitism.

Instead of teaching the noobs, you prefer to brand them as 'unacceptable' and keep them out. You don't even give them a chance to learn.

I believe in the hands on approach: throw the blind newborn kittens into a bucket of water and let Darwin sort them out.

And I plan on helping that Darwin guy by playing a rude opportunistic bastard. It's the best and fastest way to teach and to learn.

Back in the good old days, whenever you made a wrong step, they'd throw your ass back in the chargen faster than you can say, "I didn't mean that mr. Oyabun!" You die a dozen times and you enjoy learning the game from the inside.

Over the years it changed. We built heaps of rules upon rules of regulations, intitutionalized whining, approvals, retcons, policies, etc etc. that made killing someone a royal pain in the ass. Consider the same Oyabun who instead of snapping his fingers at his goons lets a blood insult slide just because he doesn't want to bother writing up a novel to justify homicide, backed up by logs and whatever else the admin might request before he says, "yeah, really, that noob has made a mistake and oughta pay for it". Even though there won't be any orgs now, the point is still valid. By heaping rules on people we let OOC reasons to dictate their IC behavior. Because where there's +whining, there's director's cut and a jury and retcons etc etc.

The game is more elegant, eloquent and beautiful, when it is simple: the kiss principle at work.

The world of Shadowrun isn't supposed to be pretty. Let it be cruel enough to be interesting. Let's do all the paperwork in real life. Not in the game!

I'm not opposed to teaching.? If they are noobs, that makes a background even more vital, so that the stafflies can see that this person needs some help getting into the groove and the theme of the game.? Better to get those issues out in the open from the getgo before they're in a position that will require the dreaded retcons.? And having a bare minimum of ability isn't bad.? Nobody's asking for War and Peace.? So if I'm elitist for saying that we shouldn't put absolutely everyone on the grid that peeks their head in, asking for naught but some numbers, then yes, I'm elitist.? I'm comfy with that.

As an aside, I consider player death a completely different issue.? One that I agree with CommieKeebler about...people who do something in PvE that rates getting splattered, should get splattered.? But if the implication is that we should let the players with incorrect assumptions and a lack of understanding of SR learn by tossing them on the grid and exploiting them, I myself can't see how stopping them in chargen and saying 'hey, in Shadowrun, trolls don't regenerate, so you can't really talk about how your arms grew back after fighting with that wookie.? Also, about wookies...' would piss off a higher percentage of prospective players than letting them do something stupid ingame with the smug and incorrect assumption that he'll get back what he lost in a couple hours, and laughing at him as he realizes his mistake.? "Haw.? Betcha won't make that mistake again."? Bet he won't.? Bet he'll be gone first.?

You aren't gonna please everyone.? Best you can do is follow the procedure that minimizes actual damage from those faux pas that are part of bringing a newcomer into the fold.

The game is about roleplaying. You know, two people meet in the street/bar/hallway, chit-chat, argue, fall in love, break up, stalk, maim, kill, whatever. Interaction. And of course, shadowrun.

For rp-staff, our "gamemasters" it's about telling stories, providing challenges. Again, it's about interaction.

This is what we consider "fun" in the game: two or more people in the room roleplaying out a scene of a gritty world. Everything else builds on top of this.

Writing and reading prose (a.k.a. roleplaying with yourself) is not fun, it's drudgery for most roleplayers. And it's drudgery for staff who have to wade through it. We all log in to experience fun, not paperwork.

So I'm all for skipping the papertrails to the fun part.

If you must make sure the person knows enough about the world, throw twenty questions at them - "Do trolls regenerate arms?" "What's the difference between a sasquatch and a wookie?" and make them pass/fail that. And if they fail, dump them in a room which has a crapload of theme primers they'd go through before they take the test again. Could make the questions random. Could make them multiple-choice. "What would your character do if a troll walked up to you in a bar and said "Hey, youse sittin' on me stool! Move it, smoothie." ? A) "Eat shit and die. *BLAM BLAM BLAM*"  B) "Here you go, trog." C) "Hey Bubba! Long time no see, how's the kids?" D) "Uh, sorry sir, won't happen again, sir." And so on...

So long as zero admin/ph help time is spent on every noob in chargen! Because we don't want anyone to deal with stress and make mushing become "work" instead of "fun".

Players log in to play, Staff log in to run plots. Not paperwork. Not queues. Not retcons, whining and so on.

So why don't we just let them?

Just to clarify a few things... This is wrong.  If something is wrong, we don't say 'You're stupid, get out.'  We say, that can't happen because of this reason because it works like this <enter thing here>.  There are a lot of chances to learn the game in chargen, either through talking with staff and other players, or just reading what is available.  A hell of a lot of people who are new to the game have to be walked through the process of picking numbers, not to mention the actual theme. 



No queues = no legwork about the plot, no special ammo for said plot, no getting better 'ware after said plot.


Uhm...  so what is roleplay if not reading and writing prose?

Are you familiar with the term "Non-shadowrun MUX material?"

@mail legwork to the staffer who runs the plot. Ammo and ware and such in an ideal world would/should be (eventually) automated. These are trivial things that shouldn't require human input. Roll, wait, receive package.

Well, we both know the difference between human interaction in real time, typing at each other, also known as "chatting", and taking a week to write a 54 page background, do we? Now granted, some roleplayers out there spent 30 minutes to make a pose that stretches down two screens of spam about them sipping their drink, but hey, everyone roleplays at their own pace. It just has to be a little faster than a week per input, you know what I'm saying?

Well, considering how the poll is turning out, I'd say that there isn't a lot of support for CK's idea, even if there is a lot of good hearted enthusiasm behind it.