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[IronyOwl]

Well going to give one last shot innMagnus arm. Otherwise posting other things. And yes my mind just scattered so it's multiples at once.

Flavor and big pictures are important, but you might want to start narrowing down what the basic gameplay loops would look like. Even for Infernum, where you had a billion different stats mapped out, I didn't feel like I was getting a good sense of what the game would be like to watch or play.

Oh, man, NUKE. There's a name I haven't heard in a long time. Is this the first sign of the return of countless prominent old Bay12ers? A grand comeback tour of all the greats? I don't even remember who I'm talking about, that's how long it's been!

[/Kenobi Voice]

[Funk]

Im thinking of running an army race type game but setting it post ww2.
To be different and avoid every thing to be invented here syndrome, each country gets a sponsor in the form of NATO or the Warsaw pact which gives them new designs from time to time.

Two sides, Borduria the communist dictatorship armed by the Warsaw pact.
And Syldavia the well none communist dictatorship armed by NATO.
Any one have any ideas to add?

[RoseHeart]

Is it wrong I'd like to see a crossover between Seaside Ghost and Drider? Am I going to hell? Will there be Demons 2?

[Fniff]

Is it wrong I'd like to see a crossover between Seaside Ghost and Drider? Am I going to hell?

Not necessarily, though I am curious as to what a crossover would look like.

[Tyrant Leviathan]

Im thinking of running an army race type game but setting it post ww2.
To be different and avoid every thing to be invented here syndrome, each country gets a sponsor in the form of NATO or the Warsaw pact which gives them new designs from time to time.

Two sides, Borduria the communist dictatorship armed by the Warsaw pact.
And Syldavia the well none communist dictatorship armed by NATO.
Any one have any ideas to add?

I like it. Where your sponsor gives you designs to test out as opposed to making up your own stuff.


As for Inferum: I gave units stats as my players complained of lack of and random dice deciding wins. Though I will post examples of how my stuff goes on.

And Inferum is the only army game to have stat blocks. Given Conquest will take Rogue play route here and Kingdom/ Onslaught do not have stats.

Value in Onslaught ht is by how many tech branches of branch tree equals to value in production and arming. Kingdom? By what you pick. No stats. No tech tree. Just flavor.

[GiglameshDespair]

Aonslsught

The only thing slaughtered here seems to be spelling.

[Funk]

I like it. Where your sponsor gives you designs to test out as opposed to making up your own stuff.

The idea to get away from me haveing to design anything, the two sides do that.
But with the sponsor if a sides says "we want some mig15 or some m16s" it gives the players choices and the game a bit more of a cold war feel.

[RoseHeart]

Forum Runner

I'm looking to assemble a championship of sorts that is in very much in the sense of a crossover and I need willing and interested GM's to participate to make this happen :)

[Funk]

The army race games up here

[Chiefwaffles]

So.
I'm at a loss on how to properly "engage" people to actually post in my FGs. I've posted about this before in the same thread and have gotten some fairly helpful advice, but I still am unable to "fix" the issue after a pretty long time.

My FGs (like Prints and Lone Galaxy) all feel to me like they have the problem of lacking an actual "trail" for people to follow and can't signal the possible actions. As a consequence, people won't post out of a lack of motivation or ideas to the given problem, even if they read or enjoy the FG otherwise. (And yes, I know Prints & Lone Galaxy are too recent to be judging like this, but this post is more about all my FGs as a whole and I feel Prints & Lone Galaxy are fairly representative of that.)
At least, that's my theory based on my own deductions and some comments from when I last asked this a year or so ago.

I don't want to do the equivalent of "You can do: Thing A, Thing B, Thing C, or something else" but I don't think I can sufficiently "hint" at the possible solutions. I just can't create a problem for the players to solve that has enough possible ways of fixing it that people can come up with, and instead I usually end up creating something similar to click & point games where the solutions may be obvious to the creator, but is extremely obscure to anyone else.
And I do sometimes manage to "pull it off". Galaxy Rise, an older FG of mine, was pretty successful in terms of participation, but I don't know why. Multiple old games are mine are like this. Some I've "rebooted" due to my own liking of running the game, and they haven't reached the same success. Watcher AI, a fairly recent but informally-on-hiatus FG I ran/run, is on that informal hiatus in part because I sometimes just find it hard to summon the motivation to continue a game when it feels like only two people participate.

TL;DR: What's wrong with most of my FGs leading to little player participation?

[My Name is Immaterial]

That's the question for the ages. I don't have a solution, but I'll be following this discussion very closely.

[RoseHeart]

I would say focus on what the cool thing that is new and interesting that you're wanting to try to do.

Then look at one of the most interesting forum games you enjoy here and and see if you can apply that idea to that system that is working really well here.

That new thing will be fun and perhaps it will help you do a thing after it that is even closer to your goal.


For video game example I remember some people not too long ago made some really high-quality Sonic fan games. They were really popular. Later on the team made their own game that had its own unique self created characters that used their own ideas to do new things.

[AoshimaMichio]

Without actually looking your games I'll answer this on general scale.

Players need a personal attachment. A hook that connects them individually into the game. In usual multiplayer forum RPGs it's the player character. Of course, having a character is not enough, there needs to be activity to come back for, a decision to make. Providing that activity is the most challenging task. How to do that? Well, I'm not entirely sure. You need to provide two goals; short term tangible goal that players can reasonably archieve in relatively short time frame, perhaps within ten turns. Perhaps make it possible for players to visualize future short term goals. "If I can do this, then afterwards I can do this and that." Short term goals string together into path to long term goal that has major impact into the game or game world.

This is what I did with my RTD that somehow ended up in RTD Hall of Fame. Of course I wasn't aware I was doing it at the time, but in retrospect it is clear. The end goal of the game was crystal clear. Each player could easily see individual steps required to reach that goal and plan accordingly. All I needed to do was to throw some randomness into their plans and open new alternative paths. Sometimes those new paths were used, sometimes they were ignored. Once the ball started rolling, it pretty much rolled by itself and all I had to do was to punish my keyboard. It was great, but also very exhausting.




For suggestion games this is doubly more important because players do not have their own character. Short term goals and long term goals is far more troubling because those tend to be goals of the character rather than player's. I have ran only one suggestion game, and comparing it to more succesfull ones I have reached this conclusion: The hook must be personal interaction. If GM doesn't address unused suggestions it will leave players without connection. By addressing those, answering them individually from context of the character, even if they are not used, you provide players the connection.

I have one suggestion game roughly planned (which I will never run) to make players as voices in the character's head, so I can answer each individually from context of the game. For example:

Murder them all!!

No god damn way, I'm not a murderer! I won't give in to the dark side!

And few turns later:

I told you to kill them. You wouldn't be in this trouble if you did.

LALALALALAA! I'M NOT LISTENING!

Without trying this I can't be certain if it really works, if that's enough to give people the personal connection and desire to keep posting suggestions, but currently I'd like to think so.

[Chiefwaffles]

I would say focus on what the cool thing that is new and interesting that you're wanting to try to do.

Then look at one of the most interesting forum games you enjoy here and and see if you can apply that idea to that system that is working really well here.

That new thing will be fun and perhaps it will help you do a thing after it that is even closer to your goal.


For video game example I remember some people not too long ago made some really high-quality Sonic fan games. They were really popular. Later on the team made their own game that had its own unique self created characters that used their own ideas to do new things.

Eeh. That feels like it eliminates the point of making FGs for me. I like coming up with the systems and the ideas and just about everything else. Besides, there's not even many systems to use - if it's a suggestion game (which most of my FGs are), it's a SG. Not much else for it to be.

Snipped stuff

I actually think the goals thing backfired for me in a way in Prints. The intent was/is for a very sandbox-y game. Long term goals in the form of a list of people that you were supposed to get revenge on, and the idea was that this would provide a reason to the sandbox - get rich through crime/whatever to get closer to the goal. However, so far (though not that far), the player character has moved exclusively towards said goals instead of doing any sandbox-type things.
I don't like telling players what they're supposed to do (this post totally doesn't count!) because that just feels counteractive to forum games, but I personally feel like people are in a way just missing the point and meat of the game.
Lone Galaxy also has a goal, but it's straight-forward and not really the center of any problems there I feel.

Goals are easy, but having them being visibly reachable is the hard part. Sure, I can say "go kill this guy because he murdered your family twice", but how do I make that a tangible goal with a visible set of paths? For Prints, I considered giving people the status of their targets off the back. So instead of just a name, people get a description similar to "Person A now lives in a personal castle with a private army surrounding him." In the end, though, I decided that this could be instead through information gathering. It seems like this could be part of the reason why the goals in Prints backfired - people essentially have to devote too much time and effort to finding about their targets.


And about the personal interaction, it definitely seems valid, but it is hard to do when there are no suggestions to consider. In Lone Galaxy and Prints, I usually get 2-3 (1-3 for Prints) posts per update, and they're generally either unrelated valid actions that can all be acted on, tangential thoughts that don't work as actions, or just agreement on a single action. I don't really get many opportunities to address actions which wouldn't "go through" otherwise.

[Shoruke]

Goals are easy, but having them being visibly reachable is the hard part.

Well, there's the MGSV-style gametelling. A support character tells the protagonist, "Okay so there's your goal over there. You can totally go do that thing by doing all the things on that checklist I gave you.

BUT ALSO

Here's a horse, a bag of empty gun clips, a noisemaker, some cardboard boxes and posters, and some freakishly efficient balloons. I'm sure you can figure something out, and remember to keep an eye out for blueprints, materials, and stray goats."