I would leave that game so fast. As a completely uninvolved person, if that was policy, I'd just be out.

@arkandel said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

For example let's say you have a Far West game. The setting is supposed to showcase certain discriminating themes (racism, sexism, etc) but every player you run into plays a liberal character yet NPCs stay on the age-appropriate side of the political fence.

There comes a point where, unless staff takes exceptional efforts to inject theme with regular doses of the aforementioned -isms, the NPCs' views won't make an impact; PC-to-PC interactions vastly outnumber every other, and if most characters' superiors and employers are typically tolerant and progressive then the game can easily end up in this bipolar state where something is supposed to be happening, people IC refer to it happening but aside from the occasional PrP no one actually experiences it.

Which can also be frustrating for someone who is playing a supposed target for the -ism.

See also: you chargen a poor struggling character who finds herself having to resort to shady work to make ends meet, and within five minutes of hitting the grid some slumming billionaire is throwing wads of cash at you and buying you a gold-plated scooter.

A recent study that's going around predictably shows that women in NYC spend a few hundred dollars more than men, per year, on public transportation. Guess why.

You can look into other studies on things like the social and professional costs of avoiding sexual assault and harassment. Or just listen. Women know already. You are not conveying any new information. You are not helping. Given that society is already steeped in the idea that it's women's fault to get themselves in risky situations, that statement is, at best, the equivalent of "I told you so".

@Ghost said in TS - Danger zone:

I've wondered sometimes (and never asked, perhaps I should have) if the "you" was because they were knowingly trying to put me, the player, as the target of an action or if they were honestly trying to write scenes from a 2nd person perspective for the reader to absorb.

Three or four paragraphs of "She grabs her boob" get super confusing.

That is all.

That is the entirety of it.

Assuming two people of the same gender. And I don't even want to imagine what it would read like for two or more non-binary they/them partners.

I mean, it's doable, but.

PS: And by that, I mean, I think I'd need both hands, at least, to count the times I've had to interrupt a scene to ask: OOC Wait, whose boob? My charname's boob?

If everyone is a Great House, no one is.

More seriously, some of us would have liked to play in a barony, once upon a time. Poor crummy noble house sounds like fun. The roof on the castle is leaking and your horses are kind of sad looking. It's a different experience, and that's the whole point. Everyone doesn't want the same things.

But then, I never could get into the coded resources game part of the game, and I often felt my character was too rich, too fast. I liked it better when I had my 500 per week or so and had to save up for stuff. I did enjoy having fancy diamondplate swords, of course! But, really, I didn't enjoy getting them nearly as much as when my character was first able to afford a really nice high quality steel weapon, or a silk velvet doublet, or something like that.

@faraday said in Historical MUSHes:

What about something that just flat-out didn't exist, such as a female soldier serving openly (i.e. without disguising herself as a man) in a front-line regular unit of the Union Army?

This cuts both ways. If you have female soldiers serving openly in front-line regular units of the Union Army, I can't play a female soldier disguised as a man. Not really.

I feel like this game would be worth it for the Played-By pictures at the very least.

You could have a game entirely staffed and played by people who did their PhDs on that particular time and place and it still wouldn't be historically accurate to anyone's satisfaction. Especially their own. Which they'd let each other know, vigorously!

Beyond that, you do have people who go "well, this was pretty uncommon, so it's historically inaccurate" and people who go "well, this happened once, so it's historically accurate" and people who go "we have no evidence this was impossible, so it's historically accurate". And, of course, "well, this sticks it to the libs, so it's historically accurate".

But even if everything is historically inaccurate, some things are more historically inaccurate than others, and in different directions. So staff would still need to decide what exactly they're going with, what their specific vision for the setting is and how rigidly they want to enforce it, regardless of whether they call themselves historically accurate or a medieaeval fantasie.

@thenomain said in What does Immersion mean to you in MUs?:

Immersion on Mu*s to me is the same as Immersion in tabletop play: If I think the character as something with its own life, the world as something with consistent rules even if they're different from reality, if I can imagine the game as existing in its own right.

This is pretty much it for me too. It's not so much about the code as it is about some kind of verisimilitude (even if this is genre-dependent) and the feeling that the world makes sense.

Now, code can be useful to have because sometimes it helps streamline things like communication and sharing information, and because the usual OOC commands can be clunky. So special IC commands can be more useful, but I don't know if it's a matter of immersion.

In fact, taking Arx as an example, sometimes the IC messenger system is kinda... not immersive at all, if I take it at face value. How is this baby badger running back and forth across the city at the speed of light to deliver messages and suits of armor? (I am sorry if anyone has a badger messenger, this isn't aimed at any one adorable animal messenger in particular!) So I don't take it at face value, I have to ignore it or mentally substitute the coded reality for something that actually makes sense. It's just more practical than mail, and helps separate mostly-IC from mostly-OOC communication. And I say mostly because a lot of IC messages include things like: 'OOC: Clarification on that thing I mentioned'.

As someone who'd probably play on a cowboys MU* to RP tragically dying of tuberculosis as much as to disarm bandits with amazing trick shots, it feels like there are two separate issues here, and there's an enormous excluded middle somewhere out there.

One issue is the setting, and how much do you remove discrimination and awfulness from the setting at large. Do you allow women to openly serve in the local cavalry soldiers fort? Will a black character be elected sheriff without anyone batting an eye?

Another thing are the PCs, how bigoted they are allowed to be, and whether you let them express that bigotry or not. Can you play a fire and brimstone preacher who refuses to marry Joe and Tex? Or characters of different races? Can the barmaid insult other people's masculinity by way of homophobia, even if you don't care that Joe and Tex are confirmed bachelors happily living together?

You can have a Lovecraftian game set in the 20s and 30s without allowing PCs with 'enormous racist' as a main personality trait. Once you've decided that (I am all for it), do you allow the white heiress who'll happily adventure alongside POC while enthusiastically believing they are a credit to their race? Do you have evil racist NPCs?

Why would I want to play a sexist/racist/etc character? I am not making a character who will be throwing slurs around. But I probably wouldn't like to play an enlightened 21st century progressive gunslinger in a 19th century that's amazingly better than our own time, either. These things aren't an on-off switch, people can be kinda racist, and kinda sexist, and kinda homophobic, etc. Most people are.

After all, I would probably like people to react to my character having fought for the Union in disguise as a man (I am very much ready for this hypothetical cowboy MU*), and not by saying, "I can't believe they still won't let women serve openly in combat roles."

These are so good!

@HelloProject said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

(I've literally never seen someone play a butch lesbian in MUSHing in my entire life, which is a perfectly valid concern)

I mean, I only have so much free time on my hands, and PBs are a headache, but I think I'd need both hands to count them on my fingers.

I prefer 1:1 (though 1:2 or 2:3 or whatever is fine too, for some games). However, I can kinda see the appeal of a slower game for very specific settings and premises, too! I don't think I've ever played on a game like it, but I can see it being doable.

@bear_necessities said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@Alamias Yes, Gray Harbor is my game which I made specifically because of the lack of those kinds of games My point still stands, and the popularity that both Spirit Lake and my game have seen are a result of a lack of games in those categories.

I will say, and this is not meant as a dig at Gray Harbor, at all, which I had a lot of fun on, is that one reason I fizzled out and couldn't get back into it (besides being a horrible flake) was that things got a bit Dream-centered and heavy on the magical realism for me. I loved reading about it but I couldn't relate to playing on it, in a way, precisely because I was hoping for something more lowkey there. There's a lot of room for different ways of approaching a modern or modern-ish setting, so it's not like the niche is full at all.

@Macha said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

@peasoupling I will confess. I didn't know you could peel beans. But I don't make a lot of soup, etc. I know you have to soak dried beans, and that's about it.

You can. But it's insane, which is why no one's made that soup since my grandma died.

@Kestrel said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

But honestly, who peels beans???

My grandma would agree with you, in that she was not given to innovating when it came to food. Or most things.

On the other hand, she might ask what kind of gritty garbage is this if presented with bean soup (with mashed or pureed beans) made with unpeeled beans.

Having only played ME3 after they (apparently?) fixed the ending, it was fine. It was dumb, but fine.

So, that's my advice for games! Aggressively ignore it, don't get spoiled, play it years later when it's better.

For some reason, I want to play a post-apocalyptic setting, so I can pretend I am actually competent and not dead after the collapse of civilization. Any system's good!

I've seen people make a distinction between items that merely replace or mimic ordinary human function and stuff that specifically augments it or replaces it with something unusual, which seems marginally less ableist except for having to define a normal baseline, I guess?

It's a lovely time of year to be on immunosuppressants!