rpanons | if ur breath were baited, it would smell fishy

if ur breath were baited, it would smell fishy

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yeah, i think the only constants are horror and cuddle/intimacy games. everything else tends to cycle.

it's part of why it's irritating to see anons here trying to philosophize about All the Things MR Did Wrong, when effectively, they didn't update a comment and their tdm is exactly what other successful games are doing, just not hitting the current application pool's particular brand of ymmv.

i'm all for being picky and going to a game that genuinely interests you, because apping then dropping has a bigger chance of destabilizing a game than only starting with a small playerbase that grows organically. but if people get too comfortable and overly picky when the game feast looks aplenty, we rusk running back into famine if none of these games launch.

for me I'm fine with being picky and apping where your heart takes you but I think that can be done without making a huge drama about what the mods of the place that didn't work for you did wrong. that's how we take prospective mods out of the game. if people try to make and run a game and it flops, no big deal, maybe they can try again later. but they're way less likely to try later if people act like the game flopping was all their fault because the tdm wasn't perfect by some esoteric metric, you know?

we need to cut the mods of games and potential games some slack even when they fail. some failures need to be acknowledged as ok. it's not like a game not getting enough traction is remotely the same thing as mods doing things we should actually worry about, you know?

it really boils down to the idea that some people have where "things that i like = good" and "things that i don't like = bad"

there's hardly ever an acknowledgement that it's just something that doesn't work for them personally, it always has to be someone else's fault for it being "bad" in some way

I find that frustrating! like I've seen 3 western themed games pop up in the past few months and westerns are a genre I simply do not like...but that just means I don't look at those games and wish them well in a neutral way! even though they aren't my thing plenty of people like them and I'm happy they have them.

Their tdm is NOT what other games do because their entire idea was to do a unique tdm. And some of us think it was great! I did. I love a lot of plot and lore to work with I play in plot heavy games and dense TDMs don't put me off at all.

I could not get into this one. It was too dense and the prompts were not great (mostly go here and do maintenance or explore a ship with no power) or you could handwave months of CR and exploratory time. Maybe those prompts were more interesting but I don't want to handwave 3 whole months of my character being in the setting especially if my character has never been in space? It's too much to handwave. I felt like the mods put so much love and detail into the setting and the planets and if you aren't using that part of the tdm at all you aren't left with much.

I loved the setting and loved the creativity but I had to pass because the tdm wasn't fun and I wasn't even getting any responses. MR mods want a 10 comment sample and with a slow TDM it's not happening.

I think they were banking on people actually interacting with exploration more and doing things they didn't set prompts for, having read the set up. DWRP isn't interactive like that outside of the murder game crowd, though.

anon, i'm begging you: check out abraxas and deer tdms. they are dense to the extreme. i've been on both in the past, so i'll sum them up for you: the abraxas one is basically a variation of 'here is a bunch of setting and locations lore, now do your own thing,' and the deer one is an immensity of lore-linked prompts, some actionable, some still requiring player proactivity. these are both very well attended games.

density, prompts that need proactivity and setting lore are not default problems. they're not what will sink a game. what does sink a game is people giving up early (in this case, because they have better options) and not tagging around. i'm going to assume you tagged around a lot, and the size of the tdm meant you got no bites or threads were dropped fast - that's the problem here. unsustained hype, basically, and people moving on too quickly.

honestly, this is why i keep saying, even though we suddenly have a lot more games popping up, i'm not sure how many of them will survive. because there's this appearance of 'a lot of games,' everyone gives up much more easily if a tdm doesn't have 500 comments by day 1, and then you can't repick momentum. i really hope i'm proven wrong and MR is just the outlier, but i've got a han solo feeling about this.

(deleted comment)

what are the other things, though?

i've listed the three i could identify (maybe i'm missing some) in a comment higher in the thread, of which two are not really linked to MR.

i've got no skin in this game, because i'm not really feeling sci-fi. which, like i said, i think is part of it: we're collectively not into sci-fi as much, and a major sci-fi game that is well regarded and established (ximilia) was having its tdm around the same period, attracting more attention. but it still boils down to our combined attention span, if you think about it.

(deleted comment)

sure, but why are these two items not holding back the games i listed, if they're what's wrong here?

i don't think it's attacking anyone to admit, we (feel we) can afford to be pickier this instant, so if a game doesn't meet 90% of our expectations, we're more prone to move on to the next tdm. whereas if this were same time last year, when we only had three games and a prayer, we'd have sucked it up and played in a high-density, lore-rich tdm with prompts that need proactivity.

i mean, look at the ximilia tdm too (i just did, for curiosity). the prompts of that definitely need proactivity, because the mods don't give you pretty much any kind of indication of how to find the orb that the entire tdm tasks you to locate. you have to take ownership of that entire scenario. people are still doing it.

idk about anyone else but i'm totally burned out on sci-fi and horror at this point and won't even look at those genres of games anymore because i've already played in so many of them and i want something different for a change.

i took a look at the game when it was first announced and saw that it was a sci-fi setting and went "nah."

I want horror, but I want true survival horror. I am with the anon who mentioned it... in this post? In the previous one? Mechanics driven games like Snowblind were a blessing, but I can only imagine they're heavy on the mod's side.

Tbh, I'd pay for a re-do of the Pleaseantville-like game that had everyone paired up and with children in the 'perfect' city and stuff got weirder from there. Gods, I can't remember the name.

mayfield?

YES. THAT WAS THE NAME!

Thb I barely remember it and I was only part of it for a while so I probably see it with rose tinted glasses (I don't even know how it ended), but I've been itching for something Pleaseantville inspired for a while because I love that movie and... I guess that nostalgia hit me?

i like horror but i'm tired of body horror/torture porn horror, i want some good psychological horror where the actual horrible happenings are fewer and further between and the fear comes from the anxiety of what MIGHT happen/the setting messing with characters' heads. it feels like every single horror game we get is either body horror like ryslig or "terrible things happen on a regular basis and your characters get to react to them" and that's just not my jam. i want something more along the lines of silent hill or fatal frame in terms of atmosphere.

I would also play in this. I would prefer less big events and more subtle tension building because it's tiring when your character figures out how jam jars work (not explicitly but in the "everything happens each month" type deal)

I would sell my soul for a Fatal Frame inspired game.

ooh yes

psychological horror would be awesome too, but i can't even find any games with good torture horror anymore. i miss games that had truly horrifying settings and evil organizations inflicting awful experiments on our characters. games with events like "randomly sorted groups must decide who gets put in the saw trap" or "everyone wakes up to find that some awful modification was made on them".

every horror game these days seems like a spooky atmospheric town with standard jamjar events that have some optional horror twists. anything actually horrific will be crouched in either alternative non-horror prompts or the option to play a much less horrific version of the same thing. they end up being 90% spooky slice of life with 10% horror.

(not that opt-outs are bad, but ime a lot of games nowadays even beyond the horror genre feel less like "[genre] game where you can opt-out of stuff you don't like" and more like "generic jamjar where you can opt-in to [genre]" if that makes any sense)

i tried to put together a game like this but i'm an lj fossil so i got shot down for having a too detailed setting and too bare bones events that depend on player initiative and that vibe of calm with random bits of horror hitting you in between... i don't know how to create a game for the current climate when the last game i enjoyed was ten years ago but i would live and die for one like that

I want a game set in a world like mad max where characters have to make hard choices about if they're gonna kill someone for a can of gasoline

ayrt

I am literally in one of those games.

It wasn't ONLY density. It was density AND a lot of effort was concentrated on a section of the tdm that also required me to handwave the actual RP. I want to RP in the setting not think about what my character was doing for 3 months. The first 3 months for me in a game is critical to setting the whole trajectory of what I want to do with a character because I'm engaging with the setting from the ground up and the CR around them drastically changes the experience for me. This is good! I didn't want to miss out on it. Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff for people on the other crew are maintenance task prompts or fighting pirates or exploring a dead space station (again, pirates and maintenance). It would've been better if they had axed the whole dead space station bit and let the crews all end up on the planet somehow and co-mingle that way or hold off on the planet and open in media res with the space station battle and have the pacifist crew have been trying to deal with it for 3 days or a week or something. That would've made things neat and tidy and you could add some aftermath prompts for chill "getting to know you while we fix the space station" threads.

Then there was a second tdm that was the POLL tdm. It's too much because it spreads a small group of potentially interested people out to the point that it's hard to keep interesting threads going. If you want people to explore and want lore and density, that's great! Test drives are more successful, imo, when there are fewer prompts or at least ones that encourage or force interactions instead of isolating small groups of characters doing menial tasks.

I really, really liked that the mods tried something different with this tdm. I think it was a great attempt but it could have been executed better.

(deleted comment)

yeah, i'd rather people try new things sometimes than always do the same thing. even if it doesn't work out

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