It depends on what the staff is going for, I'd imagine.

I know that a concept I try to keep in mind when gaming is the Fun Tax.

The essence of the Fun Tax idea is that gamers and game designers tend to bake in assumptions in their games and then cling to them stubbornly as 'genre appropriate' or 'historically correct'. Never mind the game has magic swords, dragons or zombies. Nope, that doesn't stretch the imagination as much as people not being assholes towards black folks, women, Jews and queer folks.

This means that those of us who aren't your typical gamer have to pay a higher buy-in to the game and put up with more insulting and/or disturbing stuff than the average cis/white/straight dude. And that's not fair.

So I ask my players what they want. And if they don't want to deal with discrimination in the game, we don't. Screw genre fidelity when it gets in the way of fun. And again, dragons, zombies, magic. If those don't stretch credibility, neither should somebody's hardboiled lesbian PI or black wizard.

With respect, I think having the default setting as a prequel is a bit of a mistake, for two reasons.

First, if you remove earthers from the equation, you make the game harder for casuals to really sink their teeth into it. It's easier to imagine Indiana Jones with a ray gun or Sam Spade in space than it is playing a prince of the Arboreans. Yeah, you definitely can do that, especially with a roster, but with a setting that is so niche, setting the narrative buy-in low is probably a better way to get people with character generation and out on the grid.

Yes, that takes a little fudging, but hey, maybe Mongo settled into a 'counter-earth' orbit or something.

Second, I'd suggest saying that Flash bought it. He took a ray gun blast or just went missing and other heroes from both worlds have stepped up to fight Ming and his forces. That lets the PCs be heroes, without the players knowing, from the start, that their stories are less important than the official one.

@tnp said in FCs on Comic MUs:

And if Wolverine and Hercules can get it on in canon, it's time to just stop worrying about whether an FC has been 'turned gay'. Just consider it an Alt U version and get over it. It's not like there's a ton of gay, lesbian, trans, etc FCs to choose from to begin with.

I have to admit, I wish I had the guts to just go ahead and app some characters I love as being bi or gay. As you say, there aren't a ton of choices and I always feel a little weird playing straight when I'm not for a couple of different reasons.

Firstly, I worry about making it too broad and stupid (rawr, football and boobs!)

Secondly, I've tried playing characters who have canon hetero relationships in comics and people just will not take 'my version of Spidey is focused on school and webslinging, he's not looking for love' for an answer.

On the other hand, I feel like if I app, say, Nightwing or Red Hood as being into dudes, I'm going to have to wade through a mountain of assumptions about what I'm actually doing on the game. And if I don't include that in the app and I do end up in romantic RP, then I feel like I've lied by omission to the staff, who might not be cool with Dick being into dicks.

This is just my two cents, but hey, I'm not shy.

We're all here because we love MUs and MUing. Or at least that's the healthiest reason to be here. So fostering an environment where we can have constructive, positive discussions about the thing we love is a good thing.

The Hog Pit and general nerd negativity is, well, it's a nasty side effect of nerd culture. Not pleasant, but not exactly without use, either. I rather like the approach of having a board that is generally expected to be constructive and thoughtful and being able to commute to Mos Eisley for my daily dose of scum and villainy.

What can I say? I read BBC World News and TMZ and I think there is a place under the same banner for both ends of the spectrum.

My thought is moderate the rest of MSB to the same degree as any nerd-focused fansite. Not quite to professional standards, but not anarchy either and let the Hog Pit be. And stop worrying about precedents and bylaws and pleasing a bunch of grumbling gamers. Because it's not going to happen. Make common sense rulings, rather than iron-clad rules, let context be key and ignore people who demand a pseudo-legal system for a site where we talk about pretending to be sexy undead teenagers with rainbow hair.

@tempest said in Mutant Genesis (X-Men):

As long as the other players aren't actual jerks about the "ICly being mad over a breakup" kind of stuff, I think it could be fun.

Greetings, strange visitor from another continuum. I take it you've never met MU* players before?

@tempest said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

IDK how people RP on phone.

Usually slowly, badly and with an 'oh, well' attitude towards being bad.

But that's a gripe for another thread.

@faraday said in Mutant Genesis (X-Men):

The new player knew what they were getting into when they apped the character. If they didn't want to be married, there are other characters they could have taken. Encouraging new players to take a wrecking ball to existing relationships on a whim just seems... kinda cheesy to me. But it's not the red flag that retcon was, for sure.

Do you play a lot of superhero games? Because the continuity builds up fast and thick. Saying that a new player 'knew what they were getting into' isn't really fair or accurate in a lot of cases. First, the 'canon' relationships are iffy and more often than not, the last player went another way with the character. Sometimes a radically different way.

I've apped on games where the first thing I get when somebody sees the name in the who list is a page like: 'Hey, characters X and Y were in a poly relationship with the guy you're applying for, how do you want to handle that'? And I stay away from the serious TS magnet characters, like the Teen Titans.

Sometimes you don't want to deal with somebody else's past fuckbuddies. You just want to play Spider-Man.

@thatguythere said in Regarding administration on MSB:

@roz said in Regarding administration on MSB:

@thatguythere So I think it's really about the fact that the community exists but you personally don't engage with

Isn't that pretty much the same as my initial statement of "to me this place is not a community". You all can have all the community you want just don't expect me to call it that or care about that aspect.

Something I came across when preparing a On Stranger Tides based home campaign a few years back:

https://sexselvesandsociety.wordpress.com/2014/03/24/all-about-the-booty-sodomy-in-the-golden-age-of-piracy-1718-1723/

I'm thinking queer pirates would fit right in, with the proviso that some people (mostly Calvinists) have a stick up their butt over it. And with a player understanding that 'gay' is a 20th century social construct and nobody would identify that way, verbally.

@ganymede

And when I asked if people were willing to put a notice like that in theme, the reply was variations on 'No'.

But fuck it, apparently I'm annoying people by continuing to talk about this, so I'll shut up.

If nothing else it's been instructive about whose games I'd be a bad fit for.

@faraday

It's the same thing, though, isn't it? If Player A has the right and expectation that her character can be a racist asshole to Player B's character and player B doesn't have the expectation that they can play without it, then Player B is being hit with unpleasant but realistic IC situations over which they have no control with a basis in 'this is history'.

So, following that logic, it would seem to me that Player A should also have the chance of that kind of situation being dropped on them. Because, you know, history.

@auspice I am not trying to stir shit. I am, I will admit, disagreeing with the majority of the people I'm talking to here on this topic.

If that's a problem and unwelcome, I will be happy to close my user account here and go away.

I had rather assumed that this wasn't the old WORA and that constructive conversation is allowed and welcomed, even when people don't (and won't) agree. If not, obviously I'm in the wrong place.

@rebekahse

Nope. Please don't put words in my mouth.

I didn't say 'bad things happening' equals a fun tax. Bad things happen to my characters all the time and that's fine. That's plot. BUT this specific category of bad thing, that the majority of players don't have to deal with shouldn't be an extra hurdle to my fun.

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

That seems kind of extreme. Just because I, as staff, wouldn't inflict Random Typhoid or Random Fires or Random Murder or Random Racism on somebody doesn't mean that typhoid and fires and murder and racism don't exist in the theme.

Okay, so why is bigotry different in that a player should have to put up with it on a non-consensual basis? If your character can't get sick without consent, or can't have their IC house burn down without consent, what makes it okay for the players of those characters to have to sit through abusive language and situations based on race, orientation, etc?

@rebekahse

I didn't say it should be a huge chance. But it should be there. If the historically accurate misery is going to rain, it should rain on everybody, right?

@lithium Nowhere did I say I was attempting to enforce anything. Anywhere.

@lithium

Am I correct in understanding that you basically believe that if minority or queer people don't want to deal with abuse, they shouldn't play any game they don't run?

I am still not arguing that those story lines shouldn't exist. And I'm still not even engaging in the terrible troubles of imaginary minorities.

As always, my point is, was and probably always will be that players should be allowed to opt out of dealing with slurs and abuse when they hit too close to home.

I did however, expand that point to suggest that you're using historical realism as an excuse to allow abuse, it's not actually ethical to do so unless you insure that every character is hit by awful stuff out of player control and preferably randomly.

That's pretty much it on my part.

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

So if that's the consensus, and modern/sci-fi themes don't generally have the historical baggage of dumb laws that have since been overturned (women can't own property, interracial marriages are illegal, etc.) ... what exactly are the problems you're seeing in WoD/modern settings?

My problems with WoD games aside (and that's a mountain off to the side), I notice a fairly solid helping of casual isms that get shrugged off by staff and players, routinely. Hell, even in this discussion, it was dismissed as not a problem compared to X, where X is something only tangentially or marginally related.

Let me be upfront about my biases here. I'm an old queer. Not stonewall old, but I lost friends to AIDS when it was still a scary unknown. I even have the so cliched that nobody would use it backstory about being gay and coming from a religious, conservative family. So when I say that I've had a bellyful of hearing anti-gay slurs and such, please believe that's not some social justice warrior posturing. I've bled while people hurled those words. Literally.

I don't find it unreasonable to ask to NOT see them while I'm pretending to be a werewolf or something.

And in historic settings, what do you suggest? Just handwaving completely and having nobody be allowed to bat an eye at a female gunslinger or an African American sheriff, even in eras where, say, iRL women weren't allowed to wear pants and slavery was still a thing?

Hey, if everybody is going to be equally miserable, sure. So put in that random disease dropper that tells a random character every so often that their character is dying of typhoid or tuberculosis or syphilis. Bring on the weather effects that knock down a player's IC business or farm, completely at random.

But if you're not going to do that, singling out players for a fun tax on their play in the name of realism isn't realistic. Or rather, it's applying your 'realism' in such a way that you are making a statement about who is or isn't welcome on your game, even if you don't mean to make it.