We all got older.

We started careers.  Had kids.  Got a lot more tired.  We lost a lot of our energy.  We can’t stay up from 6 pm till 4 am anymore, RPing scenes.  And the kids who can still do that are all starting MU*s in themes we maybe can’t really get behind, because they appeal to younger audiences.

Yet many MUSH conventions and Ways of Doing Things still run on the assumption that we are all still 18 years old, living at university or with our parents, and in possession of biological clocks that allow us to be around pretty much…well.  Always.  For example, take our perception of “an active MUSH player.”  People on MU*s get status if they are “really active.”  If they attend all the events.  Are always out and about RPing.  We give less weight to people who RP one or two scenes a week.  They are not active.  They aren’t in step, in the loop, being movers and shakers…and they feel that.

What if we valued those people more?  What if, in fact, we slowed the pace of our MU*s a bit so that those sorts of people could have fun too?

Take scheduling plot scenes.  We have gotten into a habit of wanting or needing specific people for our plot scenes.  Sometimes that’s not really avoidable.  Sometimes, though, it might be better if we just did impromptu shout outs.  Let whomever just show up.  And to design plots that makes that possible.

Take our plots.  Plots that take a week are sometimes more feasible for the older crowd than long, drawn out, involved tiny plots with lots and lots and LOTS of details.

Take consent.  The old way was to try to extrapolate ICC from one scene out to its bitter end when negotiating events.  Maybe we just need to say that consent lasts for a single scene, as the Road to Amber MUSH did.  If you want to do more to the character you have to negotiate a new scene.  That way, you can just come online and relax instead of worrying and waiting and fretting about whether your character is going to be playable.  After all, you’re running on a limited amount of time and energy.  The old way was ICC=ICA because there were a lot of idiots running around.  We idiots have grown up.  The new way should maybe be: you know what, we both have 4 hours tonight. How can we make 4 hours really fun?

I think a lot of the time players come onto the game with specific fantasies about how they’d like to interact with that world, and if they can’t get those fantasies met they tend to drift on until they find a place that clicks better for them.  Or, if they feel hostility from the staff and players because they can’t be around more than two or three times a week–they move on.   Maybe we can find better ways to help players sketch out the scenes they saw in their head when they said, “Let’s try playing here.”  Maybe we can find ways to be more tolerant of people’s schedules and lives.  Maybe we can rethink what the MUSH hobby means.

I’m not saying my solutions are the best ones, necessarily.  Anyone who starts tilting their game towards that older demographic is actually breaking new ground.  MUSHing won’t die if we let it evolve with us.  It will die, however, if that new ground does not get broken.

• A Wiki demonstrates that this a thriving community that has a lot going on.  It does this even if people aren’t posting a lot of logs.  I actually don’t believe many people read logs when they are shopping for a MU*.  It’s an in medias res introduction to a bunch of people you don’t know yet doing things you don’t care about yet.  But a character page with a picture, some cool information about the character, and a bunch of relationships tells people that RP is happening.  Relationships are being built.  The community–the game community as a whole–is actively involved in making this MUSH a better place.
• All of the information is indexed and easy to find.  Livejournal, for example, can give you that active community feeling too–but finding anything is a beast and the format isn’t that attractive.  A static web page can of course be attractive, but it lacks the irreplacable element of community involvement.

What Should Be On Your Wiki?

I like pictures, rule guides and newsfiles, and easy reference guides to factions ad cultures (particularly for MUSH’s with very in-depth, involved themes).  I also like maps, timelines, events, logs, and links to other helpful pages.  Most of all I like Wikis that help me understand exactly how I’m going to get to fit into the roleplay on that particular game, which should be your goal if you are in charge of designing the Wiki for your RPG.

Wikis also rank pretty well in Google because they get updated a lot and tend to have a good keyword mix.  Sure,people are browsing around on the MUD Connector, but even a hobbyist site like a MUSH needs to think about SEO these days.  Some people are just typing: “Theme MUSH” to get where they need to go.  (I know, because I keep typing Dragon Age MUSH and Codex Alera MUSH in the hopes of finding one).  If you go and type “Dresden MUSH” or “Dresden Files MUSH” into Google, my MUSH, Soulfire, comes up at position #3.   I don’t credit that to our mad SEO skills.  I credit that to having a Wiki that is getting uploaded constantly.  I also think the Wiki is the primary reason why we get a lot of people who aren’t super-familiar with the theme.  The urban fantasy setting is part of it–if nothing else we all know how to play city dwellers in the 2000s–but I think the amount of information we’ve made available is also a factor.

A smaller MUSH?  Most Wizards, if you polled them, would tell you that they wanted to build the largest possible MUSH.  75 a night. 100 a night.  Those are indicators of success to most of the MUSHing world.  And, as in so many other things, bigger is not always better.  Let’s examine why.

Bigger means the staff is managing drama, not RPing or running stories.

An RPing staff is a staff who is in touch.  They know what’s going on with the grid, and they’re committed to creating RP.  They want you here so they can play with you and you can play with them.  On a bigger MUSH, there are 75 people, 25 of them are being idiots at any given moment, and the staff is running around on an endless stream of “handle problem, “handle problem,” “approve application,” “deny application”, “handle problem.”  Out of a sheer sense of attrition they retreat to playing with their own friends in their own rooms, if at all, and including people in plots almost ends up being out of the question–where they have energy for plots at all.  Stress and politics run high.

Now take the smaller game.  The staffers are able to get to know the station, disposition, and skills of most every player on the game.  They can write plots with that in mind.  They can ask players to help them brainstorm plots.  They can weave a story–after all, a smaller group is like the manageable cast of a book.  The drama is low, and, if making the MUSH bigger isn’t that much of a priority, they’re free to give the drama queens and trouble makers short shrift.  That means the drama queens and trouble makers leave and the rest of the group continues roleplaying happily along.

Bigger Can Mean People Are More Intimidated

I have been on a MUSH who grew so big that they got to that mythical 75 players a night figure.  The WHO looked as healthy as it is possible for a MUSH to look.  But it’s not just about the WHO; it is about the +where.

The +where, night after night, showed 75 people in 75 individual MUSH rooms.  People weren’t meeting.  Events weren’t happening.  Even the fabled, nasty, pernicious, bogged down “Bar Room RP” scenes weren’t happening.  The MUSH swiftly died in spite of a popular theme.

You’d think, with 74 other people to page for RP, at least 1 person would have done so.  But even experienced gamers felt very intimidated staring at 74 possibilities.  It’s tough to sort out where the opportunity is in a situation like that.

It’s not numbers that make a good MUSH.

Good RP makes a good MUSH.  Friendship and a sense of camaraderie make a good MUSH.  A staff that is fair, kind, and consistent makes a good MUSH.  A hundred players just makes a big MUSH.

The reason we get hung up on “big” is that we assume that if the MUSH is so great everyone would flock to play it, but that’s not really how things go.  You could have a great MUSH with a theme that’s not the most popular ever.  You could have a great MUSH whose leaders just don’t bother advertising that much for all of the reasons I have outlined.  You might have a great MUSH who has a player base full of PST people, which means the EST people are all in bed before things get rocking.  There are a number of reasons why a MUSH player base stays small, and when you factor in the high-drama people who ultimately walk you start to get a clearer picture.

If you want a bigger game, more power to you.  Right now both of the games I love are small.  Plots are rocking, there’s room for everyone to get their slice of story and “specialness,” and the staff enjoys themselves.  I’ll take mine over the Megagames any day.

You need good NPCs.

• NPCs help flesh out the people around your PC, so that you don’t have to be an orphan.
• NPCs help move plots forward by dropping information, being villains, and being victims.  Nobody’s feelings get hurt (mostly!) when ICC happens to these NPCs.  That means you can kill them (mostly) without arguing with anyone over consent.
• NPCs help flesh out all the roles that should be filled in the game but that just aren’t for whatever reasons.  You can’t get any normal humans?  Time to make a bunch of memorable normal human NPCs then so that people don’t start snarking that the city is filled with nothing but supers, even though there are 18 players RPing in a city of 4.3 million people.
• NPCs help your players feel like they’re in a vibrant world that goes on around them–that things happen that they don’t directly see and influence.  This makes the world more believable and fun.

Of course, all of this applies when you do NPCs right.  Basic Redshirt #5 evokes no emotion.  The guy we’ve all known and loved and laughed at for years does.   So how do you TRULY do good NPCs?

• Give your NPC a first name and a last name.
• When you pose the NPC add physical characteristics, dress, everything that will help players really visualize this guy.
• When you pose the NPC use quirks, speech patterns, slang, and expressions that are unique to the NPC.  In other words emit your NPC the same way you’d play a character.  Believably and with attention.
• Have the NPC in question occasionally seek scenes with the player base the same way you would do with a PC.  Be available to play these NPCs should they be requested.  Have them show up in the places they belong (like where they work) again and again.  Let them interact with people and form friendships. (A downfall here is that you might end up playing your NPCs more than your PCs and feeling grouchy about that.  I have, and that’s why I now set a note on my @doing to let people know when I’m ready and willing to play NPCs and when I want to play my own characters, thank you very much).
• Allow the NPCs to help forward the story but NEVER treat the NPC as nothing more than story fodder.
• Don’t stat any NPC until some character declares an intention to fight and/or kill said NPC.

You know you’ve put together a good NPC when:

• People’s characters reference the NPC in conversation the same way they do a PC.
• You get physically mauled or tomato’d should you so much as breathe the suggestion that you plan to kill off someone’s favorite NPC
• You get tears and pages of NOOOOOOOO! when you do kill off someone’s favorite NPC
• People ask for RP with the NPC
• Many people on the playerbase know who that NPC is.

In short it’s like running a bunch of other characters, only not as regularly and not as in-depth, but with the illusion that you’re doing just that.  It does take a lot of work, to be sure.  However, if you begin to think of yourself as a storyteller participating in a collaborative story, rather than as just a player out for your own adventures and enjoyment, then this process becomes one of world weaving and you have a lot more fun with it.

But background writing is an art, especially when it comes to avoiding things that make admin eyes bleed.  It’s easy to avoid Mary-Sue in a description.  Avoid purple eyes, gorgeous breasts, winning smiles, bouncing blonde hair, waifish frames and head turning beauty.  Right?  And for the partner Stu, avoid looking like Captain America Meets Colgate Commercial.  But in truth, you can play someone with purple eyes and not be annoying, and you can play Captain Colgate without being annoying, if all other things are equal.  If something else is going on between your character’s ears besides invitations for the world to Love You.

Few people set out to write a normal background. I’m not sure why this is.  Do they fear that a normal background will be denied?  Unlikely.  So many people step out to try to be abnormal that a normal, reasonably happy life in a background comes across as a breath of fresh air, really.  Normal, of course, within the context of the world.  If magic is normal for the world than magic in a background is normal.  If magic is not normal in the world then magic in a background is a denied application, or at least a highly scrutinized one if magic is possible but very rare.  So they set out to be special, tragic, or unusual.

Sometimes people do this because they think a tragic or unusual background will lead to more RP.  They are, they think, filling it full of “hooks.”  But as discussed, unless you yourself plan to use those hooks to draw other characters into RP revolving around those hooks, this isn’t really going to get you RP.  The admin aren’t going to go WOW COOL BACKGROUND CAN’T WAIT TO RUN FOR YOU DUDE.  Unless you’ve managed to work your background into the existing story so well that they can’t help but integrate it, you’re screwed on that angle.  Some backgrounds don’t even have the hope of good RP going for them.  They’re filled with child abuse, rape, murder, famine, and folly and the overall “vibe” of the background is “hug me, for I am woe,” without ever a hint that you want to examine the deeper implications of all of this nastiness.

Sad to say, too, that good writing counts.  If you’re a lousy writer and you’re going on about murder and child abuse to people who don’t know you, you come across as disturbed.  People start to wonder if there’s some sort of serial killer applying to RP on their site.   If you aren’t naturally a very good writer that’s fine, but just be aware.  Ditto backgrounds that seem to have an unhealthy relish in all the miasma of pain and hate.   In reality, the first six tinyplots you’re in will likely be adventure based, meaning they’ll have enough pathos for any sane person’s lifetime.

The attitude behind the background really counts.  It comes through the writing.  You don’t realize it does, but it does.  If you’re one of those players who feels like he or she does not count unless his character is the best thing since sliced awesome, then we’ll know.  If you’re one of those players who wants to be cuddled, hugged, and told how wonderful he or she is, we’ll know.

In truth MUSHers often comprise a lot of cool, confident people, but we get our share of people whose real lives have never gone very well.  They try to gain the esteem they don’t have for themselves through their character.  Then things get BAD.  And after 15 years of MUSHing, I can spot this scenario a mile away.  It usually involves over-doing it.  You can be insanely talented and do it well–if you’re willing to acknowledge the negatives of it.  You can do almost anything well. The question is whether or not you have the skill to do it well, without pissing off the game.  (Hint: The skill lies in using that to foster OTHER PEOPLE’S FUN and not just yours. OPF.  It’s the key).  If you’re doing it for your own purposes, such as bolstering faltering self-esteem, it’s not going to work.  At all.

That’s not to say you can’t ever have these things.  Just be careful how you treat them.  You can also consider other things.  People are always murdered but never dying of cancer.  People always have their fortunes stolen by conniving family members (who murder someone) but almost never by the much more likely devastating lawsuit with poor asset protection strategy.    The demon that attacks and kills your family doesn’t always have to be sent by someone if these events are common (though you can do interesting things with the fact that your character decides, wrongly, that they were).  Not everyone who grows up poor dodges jail.  It takes a bit of work to go beyond the stereotypes, and often that’s all it is–Television stereotypes, and that comes through loud and clear.  Your past as a tortured lab experiment won’t help you get RP if all you do is sit in the OOC room anyway.  If you look likely to spill every angle of your angsty past at the first player you see, you don’t come across as genuine.  Do you air every dirty tragedy in your life when you first meet someone at the coffee shop?  I hope not.

Most lives are a mix of good and bad, and few are simply, “Life-was-great-until…”  Life is great for awhile, then it sucks for awhile. It’s okay for awhile, then it’s blah for awhile.  Life is varied.  You could have trouble with the IRS, which is enough stress to last anyone a lifetime, but far more people think it’s better to have trouble with that MUSH’s version of Cobra Commander.

That’s not to say your background can’t be interesting, or a good story, or a great read.  Just recognize that the Admin have forgotten about it five seconds after approving it. It’s a tool to help them understand that you understand what you’re doing on their game.  It’s a tool to help you understand who and what you are playing and what some of the motivations of your character may be.  All of the television tropes can make it in there and still be done well, but if you’re not confident of your ability to write them well, in a way that doesn’t scream Melodrama, then it might just be a good time to have arrived in the city to make a fresh start after your divorce instead of arriving in the city to enact revenge on the people that cut off your best friend’s head.

You see, because Mary Sue begins at the background, but RP happens at the moment of RP.  RP is as interesting or as boring as you make it.

I’ll make a confession. One of my characters has a nasty, dramatic background.  I’d like to think I wrote it well, but I did it for no other reason than that is how she appeared in my head, fully loaded with enough baggage to make anyone want to blow their own head out.  The three biggest character building scenes for her, the ones that have impacted her the most, were:

• An argument with her boyfriend about her putting her crusade over him
• An argument with one of her dearest friends over a choice another character had made, that made her realize that her own choices weren’t that different
• A long discussion about philosophy with a punk kid in a sandwich shop.

No guns, much as I like them, no tinyplot, much as I love them.  Three character-to-character interactions.  That’s taught me something, I think.

Another factor you need to consider is whether or not you’re willing to live with the consequences of that background. Admin can tell.  We can tell if it is a hug-me Sue tool or if it’s something you’re really exploring in the character.  My character panicked and committed what was, essentially, a vigilante murder outside of the bounds of the law.  It ruined her life, her career, her reputation.  She stayed out of jail, but at the price of putting her destiny in the hands of a shadowy organization.  I have made sure that every cop on the game knows it, too, to the point where another cop’s decision that her decision was not the wrong one meant that cop being painted with her same brush.  Not to mention the nightmares, the PTSD, the emotional distance, the issues, the inability to simply smile and “be nice” the way most MUSH chars are, which sometimes means less ability to just sit back and be social with just anyone who hits the grid.  She doesn’t like to talk about the story and when pressed hardly ever tells the whole story.  I’m not a perfect RPer or anything, it’s just that I have this example to share.  A background like this demands impact, and that impact sometimes requires negative ICC for your character.  If you aren’t willing to bring that ICC into play then, again, you need to be dealing with a new job in a new city after five years of unemployment and not the after effects of the cybernetic implant you received after your sixth alien abduction.

How long should a background be?  3-5 paragraphs. Ideally.  Some MU*s may like a lot more screen crunch, but for my part?  I don’t have the time to read a novel.  I want to make sure you’re not doing anything screwy.  I want to make sure you’re not being unthematic.  I want to understand what you’re going for.  I want to make sure your background isn’t stuffed with weird, disturbing porn (it has happened).  I want to get a sense of what you’re going for.  I want to make sure that you aren’t playing a trailer park kid who didn’t pass 12th grade only to put Ancient Greek at 50 on your character sheet.  After that?  I want to hit +approve and forget about you.

So what are the take-aways?

• Consider normal–problems you yourself have encountered in your daily life.  You can RP them better anyway because you understand the emotion behind them.
• Abnormal, dramatic, soap-opera or unusual aren’t bad–if you are a good writer, have good attitude behind them, aren’t Going Sue by contrasting these things against your utter moral and personal purity, and if you have other people’s fun at heart
• 3-5 Paragraphs is plenty there, Tolstoy
• Your RP happens at the point of RP, and if you get active you’ll have enough “unusual” in your life to satisfy the worst masochist, or at least you will if your game runs plots at all.
• Backgrounds should be a mix of good and bad, light and dark, happy and sad, and explain a mix of hints at the character’s motivations and skills.

Hopefully that helps you kick your next character off the ground!

However, whether you’re a staffer or a player, there are some things to remember about being the GM.

Players will rarely approach you.

Players are bad about reading @mail, writing @mail, reading bbposts and responding to them.  You might send out a post asking who is interested in this or that, get zero responses, run it anyway, and have 15 people show up.  MUSHers, for whatever reason, don’t want to commit, and if they get RP or get to chatting with their friends right away the last thing most of them want to do is @Mail bookkeeping.  It’s staffers who like @mail, bbposts, and listservers–and they have their place.  But players seem to treat them like necessary evils.

You may wonder why, if you’re running this rocking plot, players won’t be all over talking to you about it and trying to RP on it.  Here are some reasons.

1. They’re afraid to bug you.  They think you’re too busy or they think you’ll get mad and stop running the plot.  They’re content to wait on you to tell them when you are willing to run, but don’t want to impose.  They’re just trying to be polite.
2. They weren’t trained in a tabletop environment, so they have no idea that they’re supposed to take an action now.  They don’t realize that they need to approach you about researching that lead.  They think you’re just going to give it to them on your own time.
3. They’re very used to people showing up, starting plots, and dropping those plots midstream.  Therefore, they don’t have high hopes about yours and don’t want to get too invested.  They want to keep multiple options open for their characters so they don’t get caught in a story that it would make no character sense for them to abandon, thus leaving their character at completely loose ends if you drop the ball.
4. They’re just really passive people.  They want to RP but their idea of being available is to hang out in a public spot, hoping you or someone else will see them and want to RP with them and then wondering why it never seems to work.

You’ll get one player out of every 10 who is proactive enough to forward your story and approach you for more scenes about it.  That’s it.  Most of the time they will be staff alts because staff gets to be staff by being proactive.   For either politeness’ sake, passive sake, fear of being disappointed or ignorance, people are generally not going to approach you.  If you want to run your story anyway, and play in it, and enjoy the kudos and the opportunities that come along with it, you have to take the bull by the horns.

It’s the GM’s responsibility to schedule tabletop sessions and its no different on MUSH.  You have to make the bbpost, you have to put it on +events, you have to page people and ask them if they’d like the next plot scene, you have to keep talking to your players, you have to keep asking them what they’ll do.  Eventually you might train them to get proactive, but even then they’re going to politely wait for you to lead.

And that’s really the crux of it.  The GM’s position, or Storyteller’s position, or Tinyplot Coordinator’s position is a position of leadership.  People are expecting you to lead.  If you don’t lead, the plot is going to fall apart.  On the flip side, if you do get the rare gem of a player who is proactive, don’t make this mistake:

Don’t turn them down again, and again, and again for the plot related RP they are asking for.

Don’t tell them you’re waiting for a player who hasn’t shown up in 2 weeks.

Otherwise your proactive people are going to get frustrated.  They’re going to find something else to do.  They’re going to dry up, shrivel away, and blow out in the wind.  And when they leave, the MUSH follows, because the bulk of the action always swirls, ta’verenlike, around the people who get out there and make RP happen whether a GM is forwarding the action or not.

Today I want to talk about a method of character creation that most people almost do–but they don’t quite do.  It’s called Creating a Character through creating that character’s central problem.  In fiction this central problem would be described as:

“What does my character want more than anything in the world, what is stopping him from getting it, what happens if the character doesn’t get it, what is the character afraid of happening or not happening if the character doesn’t get it, and what is the character willing to do (and what will the character never do) to accomplish this goal?”

Most MUSHers don’t start with this.  They start with the character’s profession and powers.  They start with profession because they believe, sometimes accurately and sometimes mistakenly, that the character’s profession will create RP.  Sometimes it will, sometimes it won’t.  The problem with profession-based RP is it often requires someone else to create that RP.  Let’s take a defense lawyer.  Theoretically you could get some really cool, interesting RP by finding a player who is accused of something and taking their case.  But this requires a character to break the law or be accused of breaking it, someone to play or NPC the prosecution and the judge, a jury to get gathered, and whatnot.  Someone might write that plot for you.  It might spring up out of the day to day course of RP.  If things just don’t work out that way though, your law career is going to be little more than the background and you’ll have to find other things to drive your char.  When you don’t have a central problem, all you’ve got at that point is socialization.  It has it’s place, but if your character has no central problem that socialization can begin to resemble cold, dirty dishwater that used to have fluffy suds in it but now doesn’t even have that.  ”Klah sipping,” as it’s often called, and background sharing have their places–but they cannot provide a satisfying RP experience if they’re all you’re getting.

Some people try to build hooks through their backgrounds or their powers.  They’ll write in interesting enemies, hoping against hope some staffer will be intruiged enough to offer to NPC that interesting enemy, because that is how it works in tabletop.  If you write a nice background and fill it with interesting enemies in tabletop, a good GM will leap on that like white on rice, and they will soon play that enemy for you.  On a MUSH the chances of this happening are 1 in 100.  The staff has their own plot plans. They don’t know you yet and are not, for example, going to waste their time cooking up enemies for people who may or may not be one-liners, twinks, or drama queens.  It is only after a long, positive association with staff that the odds of them offering to take that enemy go up some–and then your chances are still only 30 in 100.  If you put an interesting enemy in your background, the high liklehood is that you’re going to take it yourself, play it yourself, knock your own character out of commission and let your Friends and Family on the MUSH knock him around for you.  This is awesome stuff, and shouldn’t be underestimated–it certainly adds to the MU* community!–but it might not get YOU the interesting story that you are looking for for YOUR character.  Don’t let anybody tell you that you don’t have the right to have this.

Some people will just get heavy on the powers side or the weird background side, figuring if they’re the lost son of the Baron d’ Awesome with the Sekrit Power to Sprout Unicorn Wings and Develop Obsidian Eyes that their character will not only be so interesting to all the other characters that they’ll instantly stand out and become popular, but they’ll be able to dominate every combat scene and thus be hailed as The Hero, too.  Bzzzzt.  Wrong again.  This is a strategy that usually just leaves people rolling their eyes even if your character makes it through the approval process.  It’s another hold over from tabletop, where the GM has only 3-5 other people to deal with and so can indulge your character’s Specialness with all of the attention it, um. Deserves.  On a MU* there are 78 characters or more to deal with, and all of them would like a little piece of being special, being admired, or getting a story.  Nobody wants to compete with something so over the top, especially as the people who try to play these things are often such complete goobers that you wouldn’t want to stay in a room with them for more than 5 minutes anyway.

The problem with the most common character methods is that they focus on external factors.  Not only are external factors often annoying and unlikly to be used, but they don’t help drive the best RP.  The best MUSH RP, the best story, sometimes does not happen, at all, from the preplanned tinyplots that MUSH admin and proactive players put together to make sure people have stuff to do.

It comes from the natural progression of consequences.

Observe.

Let’s say Eve and Betsy, two MUSH characters, are chatting.  During that conversation they reveal they are both madly in love with Jerome, character #3.  They start having a little jealous spat, but they agree not to let this man get between them.  They both agree it’s all “Hands off” and they’ll neither one of them date Jerome.

But then, only Betsy holds true to her word.  Eve and Jerome end up in a scene where they have a long chat at the coffee shop.  They share deep, soulful things (perhaps that painful background Jerome wrote up hoping that it would get him some RP) and at the end of the night they share a kiss.  Player #4, Lucy, sees the kiss and tells Betsy all about it.

Betsy then starts plotting Eve’s humiliation and begins spreading rumors all over the RP circles of something or another bad about Eve.

As high school as that example is, it does show how one scene can spark 4 other very interesting scenes that actually do have stakes for the characters involved, with nary a plot application or GM in sight.  You can almost never create these sorts of scenes with external hooks and motivations.

The central character problem is an internal hook.  And because it is an internal hook, it drives what your character does, what she says, how she speaks, who she speaks to, and why she speaks.  It drives why she acts, what plots she gets involved in, and what things she sets into motion.  It creates secrets that other characters can try to find out about her, still allows for the possibility of writing plots or emitting blasts from the past, and in general keeps the RP moving on a reasonably effortless flow, simply by virtue of the fact that your character wants and needs things and has to reach out to other PCs to get it.

Central problems can also grow, change, and evolve as the game grows, changes, and evolves.  As your character RPs he will meet people, have new experiences.  His priorities will grow, shift, expand, or change.  His central problem will change with it. For example:  ”My character is under the Doom of Damocles, so she desperately wants to prove herself as a wizard and as a healer to redeem her past, but she has control and confidence issues,” can become, “My character is under the Doom of Damocles, so she desperately wants to prove herself as a wizard and as a healer to redeem her past.  She’s also involved with the local Warden, and she wants to make him happy above anything else.  She’s got control and confidence issues, and lots of people are trying to kill her.  She’s reclaimed her religious roots and is trying to get in touch with her spirituality at a time where people are in town persecuting members of her faith.”

Or, “My character is struggling with poverty and a failing business after Hurricane Katrina.  He made a bad deal once and is now in debt for about $90000 which he can’t pay off, so he’s been doing local prize fights to try to get some money and coming home hurt nightly,” can become, “My character is struggling with poverty and a failing business after Hurricane Katrina.  He made a bad deal once and is now in debt for about $90000 which he can’t pay off, and the mob boss who he owes has decided he’s useful for doing tasks, so he’s got that held over his head.  In addition he’s fallen in love with a girl who has mountains of money, but has trouble developing the relationship for fear of taking advantage of her or letting her down.”

On the surface those look like external problems, but when you break them down you realize they’re internal.

The apprentice wants validation and redemption.  She also wants security.

She’s being stopped by the fact that there are those who will always see a warlock when they look at her, by her own inexperience, and by the danger that surrounds her.  She’s also stopped by her love’s own internal conflicts, which keep him in a perpetual state of depression that threatens her own sense of security as much as it becomes an issue of honest love and worry for him.

She is afraid of being hated, seen as evil, hurt, harmed, killed, tortured, enslaved, or left alone.  She’s also afraid of herself–of letting the dark seed she planted in her own soul sprout and grow, thus betraying everyone’s trust, herself, and those who she’d hurt in the future.  Though she’s often cheerful, everything that drives her ties into these fears somehow.

She’s willing to study hard, be sweet, act as a servant, offer first aid to anyone who will let her, and stand by her convictions in the face of danger.  She is not willing to nurture combat abilities to full potential or to fight with intent to kill for fear of these things. She’s also not ever willing to betray those she loves–though in part this doesn’t count because betraying those she loves would run counter to her purposes anyway.

Or let’s take the poverty striken guy.  He wants his martial arts school back on stable ground and to take care of his father whose health is secretly failing after a nasty divorce.  He also wants to prove he’s worth it to his girl.  The fact that she requires no such proof is immaterial–he requires such proof.

He’s being stopped by the fact that $90K is really steep for anyone. He’s just a guy, unwittingly in a world full of stronger, tougher supernaturals.  He only heals as fast as anyone who is just a guy does and he can’t afford to keep getting the crap beat out of him.  His own hospital bills are running counter to his purposes because he’s ended up digging one hole to attempt to fix the other.  He’s also being stopped by the fact that he’s not really the brightest bulb in the box and can’t think of the most innovative solutions ever.

He’s afraid of living in his father’s spare room forever (which he calls his basement) without ever proving he’s a man.  He’s afraid the martial arts school that has been a part of his life and his only solid career prospect since he was 10 years old failing and leaving him with no options beyond paper hat jobs.  He’s afraid of what he’s seen himself as already being willing to do to prevent these thigns and afraid that he’ll cross a line some day that he can’t uncross.

He’s willing to work hard, market his school, and teach long hours.  He’s also willing to do illegal prize fights, run errands for the mob boss that don’t involve hurting or killing anybody, and to lie to those nearest and dearest to him to shield them from his problems–including his father and his girlfriend.  He’s not willing to hurt anyone outside of a fair fight or to kill anyone…a fact that might get him into some deep shit one of these days.

Do you see how such problems might drive RP?  The apprentice will befriend anyone she can and take off bigger bites than she can chew.  The martial artist will do nearly anything for money…but only nearly anything.  Wave the scent of a big enough sum of money in his face and he’s listening–but not because he’s a greedy bastard.  Just because he’s in a hell of a lot of trouble and he’s got no idea how to get back out of it again.

Those are things I can bring into every single scene that I play.  It doesn’t require a specific story line.  It allows me to react to the story lines that I find and to locate and participate in scenes that allow me to create more story simply by staring at life through the lenses of these character realities, realities that go way beyond: “I was born the bastard son of a prince on a dark Scottish Moor and the prince hates me and I shoot lightning bolts but I went on to a thriving career in Defense Law.”  My martial artist would still have plenty of issues even if nobody on the game ever wanted to RP out a karate lesson, for example.  My apprentice has plenty to carry her well outside of formal lesson scenes.  Etc.  Because what makes a story is the problems inside of the character, not the implied problems or bad-tv-scrip difficulties slapped into the background at the character generation phase.

So the next time you create a character, don’t start with race, class, description, height, weight, gender, powers, or career.  This stuff might pop into your head, but try to figure out a central problem that you’d enjoy playing first.  There’s just two rules:

1. The central problem must be capable of driving RP without you ever having to have anybody emit anybody, and without you having to emit anybody yourself

2. The central problem may be fed by your characters skills but must not rely upon your character skills.  That is especially true if the skill in question is a power that is not widely available to other players.  So it can revolve around magic if magic is available to a lot of the populace, but may not revolve around magic if you are the only person on the grid that does magic (and if you are why the Hell did the wizards allow THAT?  But that’s another post for another day).

Hopefully this will help you generate richer characters and better RP experiences.  Note that exterior RP hooks are not at ALL verboten–they can help you meet people, find scenes, and locate things to do–just that they can’t be the sole basis upon which your character is built.

The first thing you should do on any new MUSH is read the following:

News

The BBs

The Wiki/Webpage/FAQ

And you should also take a scan of the helpfiles, pausing to read any files in particular that have to do with what you’ll need immediately, such as chargen.

You should do all of this before opening your mouth to ask an admin anything. Nothing is more annoying for admin than working up hours and hours of documentation, only to be asked questions they’ve already addressed.  And addressed.  And addressed.

You want to play a text based game, so why is reading such a hardship?  The entire medium revolves around reading!

Reading and writing.  If you hate to do, or can’t do, either one of those things then this just isn’t your hobby.

Similarly, you should have some basics down.  Nobody expects you to spell every word perfectly.  However:

The beginnings of sentances start with capital letters.  The word “I” is always capitolized.  Names are always capitalized.  I don’t care if you think you’re on the internet.  That sort of stuff doesn’t fly on MUSH.  You can forget a comma, misuse a parenthesis, screw up a semi-colon, but don’t neglect periods, question marks, or exclamation points.   A lack of subject-verb agreement might be appropriate in dialogue, but only in the dialogue of someone who isn’t educated enough to understand subject-verb agreement.

If we can’t read it, we can’t RP with it.

This is also true for things you page to us, say on public channels, or say OOCly. It is rarely acceptable to toss out illegible crap.

Furthermore, you need to do what the Romans do.

If this is a MUSH where everybody one lines, then you need to cut your poses.  More often, though, what you see is some lone Ranger trying to use netspeak oneliners with no punctuation in a room full of paragraph long poses with good punctuation and decent grammar.  If you don’t think every MUSHer in the room is freaking annoyed with the maverick you are muchly mistaken.  If you have a legitimate reason such as, “I’m at work and the best I can manage is 1-2 lines,” then you OOC that so people understand why you’re not giving them very much to work with.

Finally, you may not be coming across the way you think you are.

We can’t hear your tone.  We can’t see your body language.  And since most people don’t emote either into a pose, OOC, or channel discussion, we have to guess for ourselves what you mean.

Therefore, you should be careful what you say, because you could be coming across as:

• Critical of the game, before you’ve even so much as gone through chargen
• Arrogant, rude, or unpleasant
• Uneducated, foolish, or crude
• As a lemming who is likely to try to shove his or her way in uninvited

None of these that are impressions that are likely to make you friends, and no, I’m really not just talking about the admin.  They may find you tiresome, but on a Drama-free MUSH the admin have a commitment to work with you and your bull anyway, in as nice and fair away as is humanly possible, usually by sticking to the “rule of law,” (otherwise known as following their own rules).

We’re actually talking about the other players, who are watching the behaviour of a newbie just as hard and just as much as the Admin are.  They’re mentally making decisions about whether they’re going to page you for RP, try to include you in a story line, or attempt to get to know you at all.

People complain about cliques on MUSH, but the flip side is, if you come on and do the MUSH equivalents of picking your nose, farting at the dinner table, and wiping your mouth on the sleeve it’s just likely you won’t get invited to the parties.  The admin can’t force the players to invite you to their parties, and furthermore the admin are not required to pull you into their personal RP either.  The admin are only required to make sure there are enough interesting public RP events that everyone can come to and is invited to regardless of any other factor to keep the MUSH running well.  They, and all the other players, have to put up with you there, because those are the rules.

Occasionally an admin might try to teach you how to do it better so you aren’t alienating the rest of the sandbox.  You should listen and adopt the suggestions instead of getting offended, because:

• The fact that the admin isn’t simply ignoring you tells you that the admin sees some potential in you worth cultivating
• When the admin says, “You will not fit in here unless you adapt to this or that style” they really mean it, and they mean the players, and they’re speaking from a position of knowing their players
• Your decision to get huffy and ignore the suggestion just means the admin writes you off, and starts waiting for you to make trouble.

The sad part about this post is I’m hoping people who don’t read anything else will somehow have a change of heart and begin reading.  In truth, the only people who are likely to read this are the converted.   But maybe I’ll get lucky–maybe someone who hasn’t MUSHed very long will read it anyway, recognize what they’re doing wrong, and change their ways.

In the mean time, the new philosophy of me and my staff is finding the most polite ways we can to say, “RTFM.”  All questions that we’ve already adequately answered in the documentation are being answered by pointing the questioner straight back at the appropriate documentation.

If only to train them in the idea that this is a text based medium.

Unfortunately, this can’t really happen on a MUSH.  Unless wizards are really talented or really flexible, it can’t even get close to happening.  And nothing is more frustrating for any character, bad, good, or in between, then constantly failing, being thwarted, and looking in competent.  It’s one thing to do it when you’re GMing and running NPCs, but if you want to play the character, it gets annoying, fast.  Then the bad guy players start accusing the wizards of being too focused on the good guys.  The wizards, understanding what it takes to keep the game from going downhill fast, can only sigh. And bang their heads a lot.  And make some lame comments about how it happens in stories.

So before we start talking about some alternative motivations for villains we should talk about the necessary tension between Ultimate Goals that makes a MUSH go.

The Ultimate Goal of the good guys can’t ever happen either.  Their UG is a peaceful world where nothing bad ever happens.  True good guys are idealists at heart, which is why they throw themselves in front of horribly dangerous circumstances again and again to try to keep other people safe.  True good guys aren’t even out to just protect their own family or friends,though those people act as strong motivators.  They want people they don’t even know and have never even met to be able to live in peace, without pain, and without fear.  When you take this into account you realize the good guys never really win either.

The really bad supervillain style badguys that happen either as a result of theme or literary convention tend to want everyone under their control.  They want their enemies–99% of the MUSH, usually–rounded up, killed, imprisoned, coerced, controlled, and afraid.

It’s easy to see where EITHER success would completely kill RP on your MUSH.  If the good guys win you rather run out of tinyplot fodder quickly.  If the badguys win you murder your entire playerbase, drive them away, piss them off, and depress them.  So the wizard constantly has to allow victories on both sides, erring on the side of 99% of the MUSH–the good guys.

So if you want to play a bad guy and the idea of failing all the time pisses you off, there’s only one answer.

Quit trying to be THE bad guy. THE take over the world bad guy.  Be a different sort of bad guy with different sorts of motivations.

This post was inspired by one of my new players, who wrote for herself a villain’s motivation that, while not so original that I’d never seen it for, was still original enough for MUSH to be commented on.  It’s also inspired by the character Fidelius, from Jim Butcher’s “Codex Alera” series.   So we’ll start with their motivations first.  Note that all motivations aren’t appropriate for all games or all themes.

To reclaim the glory days: The villain could give two shits about ruling anything, but she wants to be young and beautiful again.  Or she wants to be immortal before she turns old and ugly.  Or he was once a big shot in sports, the business world, or some other highly competitive arena–and he or she will do ANYTHING to reclaim that former glory, including things that other people would find reprehensible.

To do the “right” thing: Politics is a messy business, and if you’re not standing in a very simplistic theme where one side is always evil and the other side is always good, it could be very easy to have a character that does all the things the good guys do–just for the side the good guys hate.  This person, for whatever reason, has decided the unpopular “evil” side of the game is on to something.  Believes that working with them is necessary to save (whatever).  This also means that his goals and the heroic goals sometimes coincide closely enough that he’s forced to work with them, as politics can “make strange bedfellows.”  It also means he may spend more time manipulating and convincing heroes to do things than he will maiming and killing them.

Money: Why money is never a motivator on MU*s will always escape me, because greed is surely a huge motivator anywhere else you go.  Maybe it’s cause most MUSHers are good people at heart and just can’t fathom doing anything bad for anything less than world domination.  That said, for most of us, having $1 million at our disposal or more would be just as good as world domination and without all the silly responsibility to boot.  Even rich people can be greedy and want to get richer, especially since I understand that sometmes those fortune 500 guys can get very fierce and very personal in their competition with one another.

Vengeance: Someone wronged you, hurt you, hurt someone you loved, killed someone you love, took away the most important thing or things to you in the whole of the world.  Justice didn’t get served through the proper channels.  You’re mad as hell and you’re not going to take it anymore–and to hell with the “rules” or anyone YOU might hurt along the way.   Nothing will stop you until you’ve exacted the revenge you’ve planned against those you’ve planned it for, in whatever methods, big or small, you intend to pull this revenge off.

Unrequited: Sometimes there is nothing more painful than being the scorned lover.  Sometimes this drives people to do some pretty insane, hurtful things.  The stalker.  The villain who creates problems for the heroine just so he can ride to her rescue.  The villain who knows its hopeless so turns his attention to hurting the one who spurned him or the one who got the lover he so desperately wanted–or both.  The villain who came to hate an entire class of people because of this unrequited love and works hard at taking advantage of it.

The status quo: For some supernatural organizations it’s important to constantly be able to display your power.  Being able to stretch out your hand and hurt someone is more a matter of displaying that you can still do it and so deserve to be followed than any overarching scheme.

Sadism: Some people are just psychotic bastards that like to hurt and murder other people.   This is very hard to do well and it’s very hard to sustain; in my opinion it is easier to pull off as an NPC.  PCs who play this concept need to be extremely good, well respected, established RPers.  They need to be patient and slow, and have a knack for being that guy nobody would ever suspect, until it’s too late.

In the name of science: Or knowledge.  Or magical power.  These villains are a little bit detached and off their rocker.  They want to KNOW things, and to them people who whine about a little pain, torture, death, or mutation when they are clearly serving the greater cause of Science are petty, lesser individuals.  Of course they’d never volunteer themselves–they have the brains so they have to be safe and unharmed to DO the experiments. Aren’t you listening?

Survival: Some people turn to crime and bad guy actions because they’re not real long on choices.  Perhaps the Family has roped them into it.  Perhaps they don’t have a way to get a legitimate job and so commit crimes because they need to eat.  Perhaps they’ve been blackmailed into it and their own self-interest outweighs what they might have to do to others.  Perhaps they’re forced by politics, social obligation, or even fear of bigger, badder bad guys.  Perhaps when they got turned into a supernatural bad thing the only thing they could do was turn to the other supernatural bad things for help and support, and that means obligations to help and support their community in turn.

All around self-centered: This villain doesn’t have overarching motivations–he just wants whatever he perceives as being best for him at the moment.  He’ll do whatever it takes to get it.  If he can do it by nice, normal, conventional means he will. If not, he’ll take the other routes.  He’s got nothing against other people, he just loves himself more than he loves anyone else.

Attainable ambition: In the real world, Ruling the World just doesn’t happen.  There are too many forces and factions just as powerful ready to smack anyone down who tries it.  That said, there are plenty of more attainable positions that require plotting, scheming, and evil to pull off.  The corporate CEO position can be just as appealing to many villains as World Dominators.  So can Mayor, who doesn’t have absolute power but has enough power that the villain can call his pushy, shallow family and take some pride in his title (motivations should be complex and human too–people’s families, people’s opinions,lovers, and friends factor heavily into most people’s decisions.  Villains shouldn’t be much different–playing the AHAHAHAHAA guy who hates and holds everyone in contempt gets OLD, especially on a social exercise like a MUSH).

Just professional, nothing personal: If your character is an assassin it’s not particularly personal to be trying to kill someone.  It’s just the job.  Assassin isn’t a great MUSH role unless you’re fully happy with killing way more NPCs than PCs and in having less than a 100% success rate.  This is also a good motivation for mercenaries, agents of rival factions, etc.

Feels humiliated: Something someone said or did has left this person feeling humiliated and hateful.  They’re not going to rest until the person or faction who humiliated them has been brought down or humiliated in turn.  This can also work if they feel abandoned by said person or faction–they won’t rest until they’ve returned the hurt.  This is kind of a vengeance motivation–only a lot less extreme.

Addicted: People who are addicted to anything–drugs, sex, that special rush of dark magic–have to feed that addiction until they die of it or that addiction is broken.  Addictions don’t lead themselves to high ambitions usually.  What they lead to is a lot of death and destruction.

Proving myself: If you’re the kid who always got sand kicked in his face you might get a little unhinged, enough to be intent on proving that you’re the bad ass now.

Your motivations are outweighing the greater reality: Sometimes villains are villains cause they’re focused on all the wrong things at all the wrong times.  The unrequited guy bursts in with a gun to yell, “Why won’t you love me, Lenora!” when what really needs to be happening to save everyone from the monster attack is that the heroes need to get Lenora to the site of the magic nest so she can do her Cleric Prodigy Glowy thing.  This kind of villain can be just as deadly as the other kind.

It all just got out of control. This guy did something bad once, made a terrible choice.  He killed his lover in a fit of jealous rage and instantly regretted it.  Or he embezzled a million dollars to save his home and the next thing he knew he was having to perform darker and darker deeds to cover up that embezzlement.  Or politics forced him to betray the person he loved and he’s found himself drawn in deeper and deeper ever since.  He may even desperately want to be a decent guy again–and tries to be whenever he can.  It’s just that the web of his own actions keeps trapping him and drawing tighter and tighter around him until one day he looks in the mirror and even he doesn’t know what he’s seeing anymore.

Now if you’ve sat here thinking, “Oh shit, some of this could easily happen with heroes too,” good.  Because these aren’t just “bad guy things,” they’re human things.  Often what separates one from the other is only a matter of results and degrees.

* Poverty: Poverty’s pretty overlooked in MU* land because everyone wants to be upper-middle-class to rich. Consider having next to no money and see what RP you can grow out of that scenario.

* Over 50: Older characters don’t move as fast and they aren’t as hip but they do have wisdom and knowledge. They also stand out in a sea of young faces. * Bad Sight, Bad Hearing: These perception issues can cause your character major problems on adventures as well as set you apart from the norm.

* Fat, Overweight, Plus Sized: The only place the obesity epidemic never hit was MU* land. Concerned you won’t be able to find actors? Don’t be–there are plenty of plus sized actors.

* Sensitive to Pain: Most MU* characters seem to be able to get shot 50 times and hit with a sledge hammer and act like everything is fine so long as they still have 1 last hitpoint. Consider playing a character with a low pain tolerance who curls up in a haze of stunned moaning when shot just once. (Hint: that’s what most normal people do).

* One arm, one eye, one hand, one leg: Usually we just scar up our characters, but if your character is a battle veteran it’s very conceivable he is missing something.

* For guys, ridiculously skinny: Yeah girls do it all the time. Guys in MU* land are usually buff. But how about playing a really skinny guy who isn’t quite so tough?

* Absent-minded

* Addictions

* Ill-tempered

* Bully

* Bound by STRICT code of honor or duty, even unto death, even unto betraying friends if it means following the code

* Gulliable/Honest to a Fault

* Meatheaded/Airheaded: (Note some MU* players achieve this even though they think they’re being smart. They come off a arrogant AND dumb then. We mean people who are smart in RL and who play meatheads on purpose). This doesn’t always mean stupid–sometimes an air headed person just isn’t thinking.

* Compulsions

* Cowardly

* Dyslexic

* Fanatic

* Gluttonous

* Greedy

* Impulsive

* Mouthy–but only if you’re willing to take the consequences

* Educational deficiency (didn’t get higher than 5th grade, illiterate, GED)

* Jealousy — both over women/men but also you can’t stand to see someone do better than you

* Lazy

* Miserly

* Self-conscious/low self esteem–to the point of being defensive about it or to the point of refusing to do things the character is perfectly capable of doing

* Overconfident

* Pacifist: Hard to pull off on games with high combat but trust me, you can be a pacifist and still be useful if you know what you’re doing

* Paranoid

* Severe phobias

* Notable strong dislikes

* Casually cruel

* Unlucky

* Hyperactive

* Talks too much–even to the point of letting details slip that shouldn’t slip: rarely happens because people want to avoid the ICC

* Weak willed/easily intimidated/easily frightened/wimpy: rarely happens because people think it is a reflection on THEM

* Dependents or followers who get in the way more than they help

* Secrets that are really and truly capable of destroying your character should they get out

* Horrible reputation

* Terminally ill

* Trouble magnet/weirdness magnet (okay so this one’s common). But if you’re creative enough to emit trouble for OTHERS around it, the flaw works out.

* Generous to a fault

* Overspends/in serious debt

* Carouser

* Curiosity (the type that kills cats)

* Cursed

* Flashbacks

* Glory Hound: as in you can’t stand letting a press opportunity pass you by, you’ll stop to pose for photographs, give autographs, you will ICly insist on the limelight and be pissed when others have it, you will try to take credit for other people’s work

* Neat freak

* Obsessive

* Incompetent: (Now there’s one we NEVER see!!)

* Jinxed–a jinxed character has bad luck and spreads it to EVERYONE ELSE too if they happen to be near her.

* Depression/Bi Polar/Manic: Please don’t play these if you can’t avoid being an idiot about them as you’ll just come across as angsty/boring/in need of therapy OOCly. Ditto for being Certifiable in any other fashion.

* Highly anxious/worrier

* No sense of humor

* On the edge: This character sometimes fails to care if he or she lives or dies and so will attack an entire gang in the back alley with a toothbrush if they are on the wrong side of their edge.

* Cheesy: Some people just say or do cheesy things that render them UnCool.

* Trademarks (the thief who always has to leave a flower)

* Hard headed: Most chars are stubborn. Hard headed characters can have EVERY EVIDENCE they are doing something REALLY STUPID and KEEP DOING IT ANYWAY.

* Vain

* Abrasive or socially unacceptable

* Self-centered/self-focused/stuck on self

* Secretive: This isn’t having secrets so much as refusing to give out information for no other reason than it might be more advantageous not to.

*Poor judgment: Managing to make worse and worse decisions that all “seemed like good ideas at the time.”

Do I use these? Well–I try. I’ll see what I can pull out for my current characters.

My character Del is/has: sensitive to pain, airheaded, gluttonous, impulsive, mouthy, educational deficiency, jealous, a pacifist, paranoid, hyperactive, talks too much, easily frightened, a neat freak, an incompetent combatant, and highly anxious.

My character Amanda is/has: poverty, addictions, ill tempered, bully, strict code of duty, fanatic, low self esteem, casually cruel, horrible reputation, weirdness magnet, has post traumatic stress syndrome, is on the edge, hard headed, abrasive, and secretive.

My character Carter is/has: poverty, meathead, gulliable, overconfident, unlucky, cheesy, and has bad judgment.

But other than that they’re awesome people! ;D