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[Transcendant]

I've run what I thought would be good forum games here, but for some reason they all seem to fold up and die (though the last one was my health as a problem):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=149463.0
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=149879.msg6141289#msg6141289
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=151766.0

I tried to make fun games, but they just seem to putter out on this board for some reason. How could these be improved?

I was particularly proud of the detail put into the zombie survival game's text area layouts, but I'm not sure they took. I thought the greater degree of customization, and detailed battle scenes in Bronze Age Peasant would play well, but.... Finally, the Dwarf Game was incredibly forum appropriate and had an incredible amount of flexibility and pretty detailed maps, but that had a hard time taking off even before my health dropped.

I made detailed names (with family lines), detailed locations (sometimes with pictures on grids), made things pretty open ended for a text game (always leaving open other options in suggestion games), let people craft things, etc. I even made detailed multi layered, multi area maps.

Question, what gives?

Am I not getting something? I mean, I thought people wanted a large degree of customization, and ability to set up their own situation with a detailed world. I thought I was giving them that, but for some reason, the games never seem to take off. I even invited people by PM but somehow, nothing.

Can I make some kind of game, maybe a suggestion one, on this forum that will take off and be fun for everyone? I want to try again, but ... if it just doesn't take off, then what?

[FallacyofUrist]

...
you've overdone it.

Really complicated games scare people away. As do absurd levels of graphics.

Take a look at the roll to dodge subforum.

Or if you want complexity, run a game of Mafia.

[Transcendant]

Hum. Thought people would like that. Guess not. Alright, I guess the question is what to toss out and what to keep then.

I mean I still want something interesting with details enough to give people choices, but how to simplify?

Thanks for the insight.

[cerapa]

Mostly games work on the basis of "less is more". When people have too many choices then they prefer not to make any.

Basically figure out what's important in your game, what it's based on, and then concentrate on making that particular bit fun. You can always introduce more systems later.

[Flying Dice]

Hoo boy, yeah. You don't need to build a full system from scratch or fill posts with thousands of words of information. Most good quests get by with something as simple as a single d20 or d100 roll for meaningful actions. If it's focused around managing an individual, you'll probably have some sort of character sheet plotting out notable skills and progress in them. If it's centered around base-building or resource management in some sense, same thing, except with infrastructure and resources instead of skills and exp. The only good games I can think of which have complex systems are ones which are literally using an extant tabletop system to model the character and world. General rule of thumb would be that if you're running on a homebrew/ad hoc system and you're using more words than are in this post to describe the character's skills or crunch regarding their surroundings, you're in too deep. That's part of it.

Another part is your ability as a writer. Technical competence is necessary, of course, but you also need to be able to tell a good yarn. Mechanically relaying data isn't interesting, and well-crafted prose is. Unless you're going pure idiot-minimalist, you've got to remember that you're telling a story more than you're acting as a biological computer for a simple video game, it's just that the audience gets to chose where the story goes.

The third part is in devising a premise with plenty of interesting content and a good hook. Keys here can include: using an existing universe as your setting, using an existing character or template (e.g. Planeswalker) as the protagonist, use an existing system to model the character and/or world (CK2 is a popular one, as are several different tabletop games) &c. I'll be honest with you here, I looked at each of those threads you linked, and here's my initial impression of them in order: Dull, unoriginal, and overcomplicated; overcomplicated with no clear places to develop to; uninspired writing and bog-standard opening.

Here are some examples of good quests that you might be able to learn something from.
Hollow Quest Redux
Magical Girl Noir Quest
Heir of the Bruce, Battletech Dynasty Quest
There is no GATE; we did not fight there.
From Exclusion to Fantastic Zones
Green Sun, Black Shadows
A Man's Dream Never Dies: A One Piece Quest

I'll note some things they all have in common:
1. Good writers. The prose is high-quality, almost entirely free of errors, and interesting to read. There's also a lot more prose than there are statblocks.

2. Use of pre-existing settings, in order: Bleach, PMMM, Battletech, GATE, STALKER/GATE, Code Geass/Exalted, One Piece.

3. Use of either existing game systems (#4 is CK2, #6 is Exalted) or fairly simple homebrew (#s 1, 2, 5, 7). The only one which has statblocks near as large as the ones you used was the Battletech one... and that is after close to nine months of regular updates, and it covers the entirety of the character's personal knowledge, skills, political capital, special traits, friends and family (all of this being in relation to a planetary ruler who is also the player character)... in about the same space you took to tell your players nothing of value about a bunch of identical apartment blocks that they had no reason to care about.

4. Solid hooks. This relates to 2. In every one of those games I could immediately identify things I would be interested in reading about or paths I'd be interested in convincing the rest of the players to take. None of them left me with the initial impression of vague emptiness in the way your prompts did. Gotta make them interesting with some sort of unique appeal; nobody cares about Generic Zombie Survival #7537 or Wake Up With Two Lines of Text Knowing Nothing #FUCKING GOD KNOWS HOW MANY.

And those aren't cherry-picked, that's literally just a slice of games from the bookmark folder I use to keep tabs on games that need to update. Because if anything is boring and doesn't catch my interest within the first two or three game posts, I typically drop it.

Finally, one last pointer: Don't overcomplicate the system for your own sake. It will almost always make you lose interest if you need to spend hours on what should be relatively minor updates because you have to crunch a bunch of numbers or double-check thirty things in your notes. Here's an example of that in action. I scraped together a pretty simple homebrew PvP strategy game from what I remembered of an old DOS game, and people liked it. Easy-to-remember rules, cutthroat competition, backstabbing and freeform diplomacy, and a serviceable and maybe slightly pretty map that updated every turn. But it was such a miserable fucking slog to update despite myself and the players enjoying it that when one player had to drop and some real-life stuff came up, I took the excuse to be a shit GM and drop it.

So yeah. tl;dr: More story than crunch, KISS on the rules and statblock, avoid homebrew settings because nobody gives two shits about 99% of them.

[Transcendant]

Wow. Um, actually thank you overall. I mean that was a little direct but still.

Could you maybe give me an outline of some tips, because I'm looking at those and not seeing it. Maybe that's just me, but I'm having trouble isolating what I should be doing and not.

I don't know. Maybe I need to go over those threads again some more, and I will, but some guidance would be much appreciated.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, apologies if it came off too harsh, but I generally subscribe to the school of thought that says you learn more from honest criticism than from softballing. If I thought that you were useless and would never make a good game, I wouldn't bother responding. 

Okay. Hm. I'll try to break it down a bit more. Keep in mind that I've got closer ties to the /tg/ and Spacebattles style of forum game, which is (to be fair) generally more narrative-oriented than a lot of what you find here, which tends to be a pretty sharp split between games with a lot of rollplaying and lulz, and "games" which are pretty much just an excuse for roleplaying, with relatively few "quest" style games. It also matters whether you're wanting to do a general forum game or an RTD, since RTDs by their nature are usually pretty simple mechanically, meaning that the popular ones tend to break down into minimalistic ones and really narrative-heavy ones.

But, ah, here we go:

1. The Hook
This is your one shot at getting people interested in your game. Your first post should be straightforward, be easy to parse, and effectively convey what your premise is. Don't bog it down with paragraphs of information that people won't care about until they're invested in the game. This is one place where there's a lot to be said for the Quest model: generally players are presented with a fairly simple hook, usually consisting of the setting (this is why established settings are good: people are familiar with them without needing pages of description, and people who like the work the setting is from are more likely to stick around) and a set of choices to establish who the character is and what their basic traits are. You can tack on additional information after you've got people invested enough to care, typically because they've already helped decide on a character and been fed the first choices in the plot.

2. The Setting
As I've said repeatedly, established settings are good, both for the reasons above, and because they drastically decrease the workload on you. An established setting already has a world full of places and people, as well as an audience that cares about it. All you need to do is examine it to determine where and when your players might like to start their story, then present a selection of a few of those. As you progress, all you need to do is factcheck rather than establish every detail yourself. This saves time and helps restrain player griping, as the blame for stupid things in the setting isn't on your head (and you can, of course, trim that sort of fat from it if you wish).

Original settings are tricky. Not just because of how much work they take to do right and because nobody initially cares about them, but because the vast majority of such premises have already been done to death. If you've seen something like it on a forum games board in the past two months, it's probably not going to catch a lot of attention. If it's an extremely generic setting with nothing to catch player interest (as before, Zombie Apocalypse and Amnesiac are very, very common), it'll die from inactivity. The trick isn't necessarily to come up with something wholly original, but to at least put enough of an original spin on something that isn't too overplayed that people will get interested long enough for you to secure their attention with good writing and an interesting plot.

3. The Plot
Yes, you need one. Or rather, you need events which occur independently of player action. There's a reason that the concept of a dungeon consisting solely of a string of unrelated rooms with irrational populations of monsters and treasure is so maligned: it's boring, generic, and doesn't make sense. Just about the only exception is when you're running a base-building style of game where you manage a community or installation of some sort in RTS style, and even there you need to have things happen without player prompting. Giving people a series of places to visit and events to trigger when they arrive at them isn't enough. Even if you don't go full-on storycrafting mode with your players (hopefully because they don't really want that), don't just line up a series of loot/exp pinatas either.

4. The System
Again, KISS. If you can't come up with a good reason to model something or show players a statblock for it, don't. If you're doing an RTD, all you really need is a d6. Maybe a simple attribute or skill system if you want to get fancy. For other games, the same sort of simple exp/skill deal is usually good enough. If you want something more comprehensive, crib from an extant system that approximates the style of game you want to run.

5. Graphics/Illustrations: Should I or Shouldn't I?
It depends on how fast you are, and how much you enjoy drawing on a computer. If you've got a tablet you use to draw, it's super easy. Otherwise generally I'd recommend staying away from hand-drawn stuff; it isn't strictly necessary, even if players are often attracted by shiny pictures.

I'll leave an example that I've got personal knowledge of.
Here's a game I ran briefly a couple years ago before succumbing to my usual apathy and prioritization of real-world shit. I'll break it down based on what I've just said.

1. This is pretty standard for B12 style suggestion games. I opened with a brief, evocative description of the PC's location and some hints of how they got there, the intent being to grab player interest quickly and reveal information about the setting over time. Note the character sheet, such that it is: all it tells players is that they're not hurt and that they don't have any stuff. That's all you really need for this sort of game. Obviously I had more in my notes, but there's no point overloading people with stuff that's not relevant to them.

On the downside: I had a bit of a map fetish back then. I still do. It's a nice thing for players, but doing it right is a lot more work than it should be, and can serve as a crutch for poor descriptions. I also didn't frame the player choices very well; that's part of why I like the quest system of offering a couple more obvious choices and possibly a write-in option, because leaving things purely open-ended can make people hesitant sometimes.

2. It is an original setting. Breaking my own rules, heh. 'Course, that's more related to my own problems: I'm pretty good at working out original settings, but I'm inevitably tempted to drop them into games that I abandon after a month or three, never really exploring them much. This wasn't a particularly good one, though, just not-quite-totally-generic fantasy, with the interesting element being the fairly unique magic system I brewed up for it.

3. Yep. There's a solid plot behind what's happening. I knew exactly how and why the PC was in that situation, what the larger-scale geopolitical implications were, and how various player choices might impact the world. Never got that far, natch, because I'm a lazy bad GM that abandons games.

4. I lost the notes for the magic system a couple years back, but from what I remember of designing it, it was intended to be elegantly straightforward. Other than that, all I used was a simple d6 scale akin to what you'd find in a RTD for success/failure of actions. Not the best for modeling progress, of course.

5. As above: map helps with visualization. Images help immerse players in the game. Maps or images that measurably take away from planning/writing or cause the lazy GM to lose interest are not worth it.

Generally...
The Good: Mostly narrative, just enough information and stats for players to know what's going on. A setting and plot that operate independent of what the player does. A simple system for the mechanics. Restriction of knowledge to purely things that the character would actually know.

The Bad: Inconsistent mechanics in the voting. I realized that the open-ended stuff was shit early on and changed it. Limited modeling of action and growth due to the d6 system. Too much restriction of knowledge; once players got out of the immediate situation they had no idea what to do, because I was too heavyhanded with the metaphorical This Way signs, unwilling to railroad, and didn't set things up so that they could immediately twig onto the larger plot. When I realized that I had messed up, I used a lazy plot device.

If there's one positive lesson to learn, it's that more raw data isn't better, and can't substitute for prose. If there's one negative lesson to learn, it's that you should make sure to have even the little details planned out, and if you don't should take time to work them out consistently rather than improvising if you're not very good at it. Or possibly that if you're going to run games you should make sure that you're not a lazy unmotivated asshole like me. 

An addendum on choice: Choice is good. Choice is also bad. If you give players too much freedom of choice, they're going to be confused, lost, or do stupid random shit. If you give them too much freedom in character design, they'll give you overpowered demigods and fetishistic Mary Sues. If you don't ever squash impossible or idiotic decisions, the game might be driven into the ground. If you give players too little freedom of choice, they'll chafe, complain (rightfully) about railroading, and often do their utmost to derail the game out of spite. If you always stop players from doing anything that isn't exactly what you want them to do, you are the cancer that kills cooperative/collaborative gaming.

The key is to provide enough structure that the players don't have any trouble determining what potential routes you're offering, but leave things open-ended enough that a creative player-designed choice is still possible and encouraged in the right circumstances. Some choices might be too restricted by circumstances to allow write-in responses, while others might be so complex that you don't offer any choices and force players to come up with their own solution.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

From someone who's tried a couple of times and just couldn't force myself to continue for whatever reason: Keep it simple.

[March]

Have fun. If you're not having fun with it you're going to want to stop doing it plain and simple.

Limit the options of the player. Yes even forum games can have invisible walls, as much as it might seem counterintuitive limit the options you give out. (This from the creator of a forum game about being locking in a room with literally nothing, probably the most engaging one I've ever made to be honest.)

Practice. You'll never get anywhere by sitting on your hands; write, draw, storyboard until you got something and throw it out there. Unless it's a tasteless wall of text that doesn't even contain sentences someone will look at it and consider playing along at least.

Mix up the topic, if you make several _____ games and they don't do good maybe try making a different game type.

[IronyOwl]

In general:

You have to believe in and enjoy your game. If a game "fails to take off," part of that is usually because you can't or won't make the game work regardless of how many players you get or what they decide to do. If you're going into a game thinking "Well this'll be awesome if people like it," you're probably missing that boundless enthusiasm that makes for really good games and instead just trying to please people. The former carries over in a lot more ways than you'd expect, while the latter tends to be on the soulless and poorly designed side.

As a specific side example, suppose I'm running a quest, and intend to give the main character a sidekick. Do you think the sidekick will turn out better if I have an awesome idea for them and can't wait to get them into the game, or if I become sort of puzzled and aren't sure what to do when the players don't seem interested in gaining a sidekick? That's the difference between wanting to do something and trying to give players what they want. The latter's a noble goal, but ultimately what they want is usually for the GM's ruthless enthusiasm to rain presents upon them like a deranged Santa Claus, not to walk into a gift requisition center that has been designed to suit their needs as determined by the analysis of an awkward Human Approximation Device.


Specifically:

I feel like you might have kind of an overbearing, slightly stuffy approach. The "don't argue I'm the GM" thing in your zombie game strikes me as a big red I'M A BIT OF A JACKASS sign, the formalized voting procedure in the same comes off as neurotic, telling some guy to complete his vote and "everyone" to vote in the dwarf game feels... off, as does explaining what's going to happen in the same. I feel like that second post of yours with the bolded vote appeal kind of exemplifies a game that feels more like an automated Interactive Narrative Construct than a proper game you're having fun with.

Speaking of, I think the others hit it on the nose when they say you're being too technical and not flavorful enough. The peasant game has not just a simple hook, but a fairly dull one; it describes the overall situation, but doesn't give a good idea of what the game is going to be like or why I should care.

Conversely, there's an absolute ton of information about useless peasant shacks that doesn't really affect anything. That effort probably would have been better spent establishing the tone of the world, the main character's personality, the village's personality, or other less mechanical but more interesting features.

[Transcendant]

OK, a little direct but I asked for comments....

I really do not get what you mean when you say I have to believe in and enjoy my game. I did. That's why I put a lot of time into it. As far as making the game work no matter what the players do, they didn't really vote or play.... I'm really not sure how to manage that, because it takes both players and GM to make it work. To manage what the players do, there has to be something being done.

So even if players do something (vote/play) using the sidekick example thing.... Ok, whatever the thing is you want to give the players, I was thinking they'd like it as an additional resource (and many times multiple players voted on building/getting a resource/building/room). Even without that, I dunno, every game I've played as worked on players wanting things, and they have to want something. Fancy new weapons, land/title, something.

Basically what the heck do people reasonably want? I thought a forum full of Dwarf Fortress players might wanna build a Dwarven Fortress and be dwarves building whatever they want if they can figure out a way to build it. I thought, the whole zombie or adventurer thing was popular and they wanted to do that? No? They don't want to own/run things and pick out / make their own stuff? I thought open world games were all the rage now, and one on a sandbox game forum like DF would take off. No? What am I missing here?

[NJW2000]

No clue about that, tbh, but try simple stuff first.

   I do RTDs, so not quite like what you do, and am now wishing that I'd done some minimalist and simple and basic shortterm stuff before I started bigger, more complex ones. Just to get a feel for it, which I think would have stopped me nearly killing my games with various errors (not ones applicable to you; ones like lack of information, forgetting what I can and can't roll for, etc).

So do something small, random and simple, possibly lasting no more than a week; not a long term committment.

Also, thinking about it, games with more text that isn't just flowery description also have less choice; as the playerbase can't make shit up. Of course, if you make a huge open world thing, there is a lot of choice in what you've made, just that striking a balance between the two is important.

tl;dr: you are putting a lot of effort in, I don't know what's going wrong fully, but doing small short term things will help, most well known GMs starting like that.

[Transcendant]

Is there a simple, easy to use way to make maps using just letters and symbols? I figure people from DF forum would know about it if there was.

[Tawa]

Maps?

First off, I strongly recommend against screwing with actual image files without a program or website made specifically for the task. If you're anything like me they take forever for too little payoff; getting images of grids and filling them in in Photoshop or Gimp, or using tilesets and the like, tends to discourage me from updating due to taking forever to make.

I know a guy who made maps using pictures of colored spreadsheets, that might work for you; that has the minor disadvantage of the maps looking sort of weirdly squished like some kind of roguelike where there's twenty spaces between the tiles.

I, personally, use either [ code ] tags or [ tt ] tags and make the maps using roguelike-esque ASCII in the posts themselves. [ code ] lets you use advanced Code Page 437 ASCII like Dwarf Fortress, but [ tt ] lets you color them in. I'm a sucker for fancy ASCII so I usually use [ code ] tags.
What FD said is all valid in my experience, although I disagree with the "original settings" bit a little (although admittedly a lot of my own "original settings" are heavily inspired by my own likes and preoccupations at the time); the setting is a staging area for the plot. If your plot is good enough the necessity of a high quality of setting is diminished somewhat. Generic fantasy can be perfectly fine if the plot is interesting enough.

I can see that you've put a lot of work into this stuff, though. It's really quite impressive; my latest idea for a forum game is an MGS knockoff run in d20 Modern, whereas you designed a zombie survival game from scratch.

But I see one major problem I don't think others have commented on much yet.

So even if players do something (vote/play) using the sidekick example thing.... Ok, whatever the thing is you want to give the players, I was thinking they'd like it as an additional resource (and many times multiple players voted on building/getting a resource/building/room). Even without that, I dunno, every game I've played as worked on players wanting things, and they have to want something. Fancy new weapons, land/title, something.

Basically what the heck do people reasonably want? I thought a forum full of Dwarf Fortress players might wanna build a Dwarven Fortress and be dwarves building whatever they want if they can figure out a way to build it. I thought, the whole zombie or adventurer thing was popular and they wanted to do that? No? They don't want to own/run things and pick out / make their own stuff? I thought open world games were all the rage now, and one on a sandbox game forum like DF would take off. No? What am I missing here?

A forum of dwarf fortress players would like to

build a Dwarven Fortress and be dwarves building whatever they want if they can figure out a way to build it

And the

whole zombie or adventurer thing was popular

However, what they don't want, what isn't popular, is to have to memorize three full-length forum posts of crunch, written like a textbook on assembly language, before they start playing. They don't want to have to reaffirm their suggestions for the game like the GM is an early 90s Sierra game that doesn't recognize "take" or "say" and requires you to say "get" and "tell" instead.

This is your first problem. The Law of Conservation of Detail; you provide loads of irrelevant (at the time) information at the very start of the game. It seems that you want to try and emulate video games by providing the player with all the information they could need. However, doing all this at once is dull and tiresome, as it implies to the reader they need to read all of it in order to play competently.

Let's start with your problems in this area in your zombie game.

In your zombie game, Anton Chekhov became a zombie after committing suicide with his gun.

For example, this was the description of the area the player started in.

Bedroom 1: Bed, dresser, closet, end tables, blankets, pillows.
- 20 Business Suits (7 black, 7 dark blue, 5 gray, 1 white)
- 12 pairs of jeans (10 blue, 2 black)
-50 Tee Shirts (14 plain white, 7 gray, 15 Nirvana (band), 4 Green Day (Band), 7 GAP tee shirts, 3 red shirts.
- 60 pairs of socks (30 white, 30 black)
-1 Winter Gloves
-1 baseball cap (Camdin Crusaders 1991 Champions!)
- 1 Brown Leather Jacket

That's not even counting your overly-detailed description of the character's entire apartment. It would've been much easier on yourself and the players to do something like this:

You're in your bedroom. It's a pretty standard bedroom--bed, tables, dresser, closet. There's a door leading to your living room and a door leading to your bathroom. The sunlight shines through your window, eerily at odds with your current situation.

Next time, wait until your players say "look through your closet and dresser" before teling them they own fifteen Nirvana T-shirts, unless the Nirvana T-shirts are made out of det-cord and are about to blow up your apartment.

Or in your peasant game. After posting the basic character sheet format, you went on to describe in excessive detail the buildings in the town and the exact layout of every public building in town. It would've been better to give a prosey description of the village, something like

"The town of Cadrea is a rather large town, whose circumference is an entire day's walk around. There's plazas for merchants and homes, a huge wood stockpile, and the town's bustling center, where the inn, town hall, and mayor's mansion are."

and telling the players their current situation. Perhaps make a map of some sort to show what's outside the town.

In short: would you rather learn a language by being told starter vocabulary and carrying on a conversation with a native speaker, or being given a dictionary and told "memorize this and then give a three-minute speech on Thursday"?

Say you're making a sort of forum Dwarf Fortress-style game. Don't tell the player everything in the first three posts and have them refer back to that whenever it comes up. Give them a menu to choose options from after they pick a site or something and the game starts. Give a menu of things they can do--build, dig, scavenge, etc. Give each one a brief description, and make sure you advise your players on what to start out doing. When they pick a menu option, give them a sub-menu of specific things. Dig what? Mine a straight hole? Dig a channel? Dig a shaft straight down? With the build thing, for example, you could then give them a sub-menu of building types, then have them pick one building.

Otherwise, you risk a sort of analysis paralysis where they have too many options; they don't have the energy or interest to read every option in this forum game that started ten minutes ago and go check on Warrens of Oric the Awesome or Fire Emblem On Forums or what have you that they know how to play already. By slowly introducing them to their choices, you prevent this and keep them interested long enough to learn the ropes and make it past the tutorial.

Your second problem isn't quite as evident but is still an issue; it's that your way of updating and taking suggestions and actions is very mechanical and methodical. While this isn't a bad thing, per se, players like flexibility in how they can make suggestions and input commands; they expect the ability to do this because they're working with a human, not a machine. Additionally, people on this forum like to include banter and jokes in their suggestions; being denied that removes some of the fun. When I run ISGs, I individually read the suggestions the players make and take either the most popular suggestion, the suggestion that will be the most interesting or funny, or the suggestion that is least likely to get the main character killed, and often would interpret suggestions strangely for humor or intrigue. If you demand that the players phrase their posts the same way every time, it denies them some of the freedom they get from participating in a forum game.
 
tl;dr You're not a computer. Don't act like one.

And yes, I recognize the vague hypocrisy in using this extensive post format to make a point about giving too much information, but it's the best way I could formulate my ideas.

[IronyOwl]

OK, a little direct but I asked for comments....

I could be more diplomatic if you'd like, but I figured you were more interested in what was going wrong than in the exact phrasing of the thing.

I really do not get what you mean when you say I have to believe in and enjoy my game. I did. That's why I put a lot of time into it. As far as making the game work no matter what the players do, they didn't really vote or play.... I'm really not sure how to manage that, because it takes both players and GM to make it work. To manage what the players do, there has to be something being done.

Yeah, I was referring more to your current quest to find "what people want" and some of your "come on guys get in here and vote" stuff. I realize that if nobody's posting then there's only so much you can do with that, and it's understandable to want more votes/players, especially when you've got very few and/or there's little/no consensus. But the vibe I got from some of it is this sort of "I'm gonna make a game shit why isn't it popular" type thing, rather than "I'm gonna make a game teehee this is awesome."

Ironically, you can see why I keep pushing the latter from the former. It sucks when nobody seems interested in your game. It's awesome when everybody loves your game. That applies at least as well to the players also; if it seems like you really like and are enjoying running your game, they'll like it more too. If it seems otherwise, they won't be as enthusiastic.


As another, hopefully better example: Suppose I assure you that Star Wars is really popular now, so what you should do is make a Star Wars suggestion game. Would you do so? I would argue that answering yes is probably a mistake, unless you coincidentally happen to want to do that anyway. It'd be "popular," but without a GM that actually wants to run that kind of game, it wouldn't be of very high quality and would probably begin to peter out relatively quickly. It doesn't mean that it wouldn't do that anyway for different reasons, but it's an important step.

So even if players do something (vote/play) using the sidekick example thing.... Ok, whatever the thing is you want to give the players, I was thinking they'd like it as an additional resource (and many times multiple players voted on building/getting a resource/building/room). Even without that, I dunno, every game I've played as worked on players wanting things, and they have to want something. Fancy new weapons, land/title, something.

I wasn't trying to talk about giving players things, I was trying to illustrate the difference between "I have an idea this is the best idea" and "I think players want this." There's nothing wrong with letting players pursue what they want, but as mentioned above you want to be enjoying it also.

This is also related to some probably more practical advice: Remember that players are coming to your game for a good game, and it's your job to provide it for them. This probably sounds like strangely obvious advice until you, say, get players voting for dumb/trivial actions, waffling around not being sure of what to do next, lurking without voting, etc. That's when this really kicks in, because as a GM you need to be able to make a good game out of poor/few actions.

Again, at the very bottom of the barrel there's not a lot you can do, but you want to make sure you're not just doing what players want done, but rather making sure the game/story is moving forward even when the players seem lost or imprecise. Otherwise you'll tend to wind up with lull spots where players make bad decisions, encounter bland or poor results, and then idle unsure of what to do next, resulting in a slowed or dead game.

I say this is related to enjoying your own game because if you're having fun with a particular action, making the activity meaningful or entertaining will usually come naturally to you. If you're not, it can devolve into "I dunno what they were thinking, but I guess this happens" or "This is dumb, let's get it over with so they can do something smart." I'm not sure how much that' been afflicting you, but it's a common ailment.

Basically what the heck do people reasonably want? I thought a forum full of Dwarf Fortress players might wanna build a Dwarven Fortress and be dwarves building whatever they want if they can figure out a way to build it. I thought, the whole zombie or adventurer thing was popular and they wanted to do that? No? They don't want to own/run things and pick out / make their own stuff? I thought open world games were all the rage now, and one on a sandbox game forum like DF would take off. No? What am I missing here?

Skimming your zombie game, you seemed awfully desperate for players, which throws people off. Your dwarf game seemed pretty awesome; notably, you weren't skimping on flavor nearly as much as I thought you'd be. I haven't read it in detail, but from what I can gather it almost assuredly didn't take off because it was too wordy and complex; players are lazy creatures by nature, and needing to read through a wall of text to vote on three different things at once can discourage them. Note as usual that you may have had far more readers interested than you had players involved enough to slog through everything and form a useful opinion.

So I think a lot of your issue is accessibility/barrier to entry. Dwarf game evidence: A lot of your actions appeared to be a single player voting on stuff, followed by a handful of "yeah, what that guy said." There's a few different reasons for that kind of behavior, but him being the only/best one willing to parse everything and formulate a plan is one of them.

So for ultra-practical advice, consider making games for a lazier audience. Maybe make the updates slightly shorter, definitely try to make the voting options more approachable; maybe not so many categories, maybe fewer/broader options in each one. Part of this is cutting down on the effort a player needs to expend, part of it is just avoiding scaring them off with what looks like effort or hard decisions. Some walls of text are very engaging to read, for instance, but can scare players away from really starting them just by looking intimidating.

Reading more of your stuff in detail, I think you do make "good games." I just think they're too complicated and wordy to grab a functioning audience right away.