So there's this player who created her own character, and decided to create this problem for her character. And then she decided she wanted her character to overcome that problem, and put in an @action to be able to figure out how, officially and outside of her own personal sandbox, to fix it.

So I wrote up a response for her. A poem that encompassed a quest for a magical tea to cure the ailment.

And she took this poem, and spent a year of RP to get people involved, to go places, to explore, to research, to learn. She used this thing that she created for herself, wove a compelling story, turned it into a thing, included a metric fuckton of people, and made this wonderful story arc for her character and everyone who interacted with her.

I am so happy about this. The arc concluded today, and it was so much more satisfying because of how much RP she's put into it. I can't wait to see what she does next. I think it'll be great. It's not always about the MacGuffin - but the rich story you can create on the journey? That's where the magic lies.

@biggles - So here's the long answer I was going to write first:

It's hard to be in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't, and also damned if you compromise" scenario.

I could eschew live-GMing entirely, which is one of the main reasons I became a GM in the first place. It goes against the grain for me to respond to so many things with an @action response, even though they can be beautiful and poignant and amazing - even though sometimes scenes aren't really needed. But I try to live-GM as much as I can because I find it beautiful and fun and collaborative. Despite my sometimes crankypants attitude on MSB, I really enjoy the time I spend GMing for people.

I could just GM for, say - half the people in a crisis who take actions. But then how does one choose? There are people I could GM for every single night. There are others I don't want to GM for even twice a year. But if I pick - do I just pick the people I really like, and leave the others (or the unknowns) out? That's a quick path to cries of GM favoritism, cliques, and the sort of really toxic environment I watched tear Firan apart.

I could GM for everyone, one at a time and either it would take a month where I did nothing in my spare time but GM, or it would take six months. I am sick, I've always been sick, and I need my gym time and my fighter practices and my art to help keep my health (mental and physical) from confining me to a bed (as used to be the case). So the first won't work. But we also don't want to spend 6 months on a single piece of a metaplot arc either.

I could GM for everyone, but then sometimes I miss things, and sometimes I don't respond as quickly as I would if I were single-scening.

So I choose the last, while we bring more storytellers on board. It's a slow process, and a careful one. To tell metaplot stories means you have to have a great deal more information than players have about the metaplot and things that go bump in the night. One scene I'm passing off for example involves unicorns. To an average player, unicorns are beautiful magical creatures that need to be protected for... reasons. To the storyteller, she has to know things like - why are unicorns invisible during the day? What are the things around their horns? How do they function? What's the purpose of attacking the unicorns in the first place? What's the overall aim here? WHY is this happening? Also, what is being sent? What are its powers? From a mechanical standpoint, how is combat run? What level of risk is acceptable?

I'll probably spend more time working through all this than it would take to run the scene - and when you're looking at 35+ scenes to schedule, that's a daunting thing. More than that though, it IS important to bring more storytellers on if we can find ones that fit the rigorous criteria KQ mentioned earlier, because live GMing is fun and it really adds a lot (in my opinion) to a MUSH. Not just in actions - but also when NPCs can walk the grid and engage with players, show up at the occasional event, bring a bit of magic in here and there. It's fun and immersive and that's one of the things we all really enjoy, but it's hard to do that when there are a bunch of actions outstanding and such.

So that's the long answer - there aren't any good answers but there are less-bad answers. I'm not afraid to tell people no. I do it all the time. But in this case I chose the path where the most people could get something special and fun. And these are highly risky actions. Three PCs (and lots of NPCs) have died so far in this crisis. If people are risking actual character death, I try to make sure they have a scene where they can at least have choices and get a good story out of it.

At the end of the day, I'm sorry to hear your friends would rather bitch about it to you than actually talk to me and say something like "hey, I feel like you're not really present here - should we just reschedule?" I'm not sure what night it was that it happened - I'm not sure if it was the night before you posted what you did, or any night in the past two weeks - I've been doing lots of scenes in those times, some singular, others not. Some of them have been linked scenes, and those I've really enjoyed though - where people are close enough to hear what's going on with the other scene in snippets, and I can weave things so that what happens in one scene affects the other, and vice versa.

So now I'm left wondering - is it one of those that made people mad? Are they not enjoying that weaving of a coherent story together, those plot hooks that give them people to talk to about what happened and what will happen? Or is this one of the single-setting ones that was lackluster? There were a couple where I was just feeling uninspired for it not from being overworked, but the chemistry of the people involved was off, and people were going in multiple directions at once - was it one of those?

And who are you? You won't say. Are you the person I suspect you are, who I've spent plenty of time writing story for, who I've worked with on NPCs, and responded to actions, and talked down from ledges? I hope not. Who are your friends? I don't know that either, only that they were so unhappy they just paged their friends about how much the GM event sucked.

So. That's my thought process. It's a glib response to say "better to not have actions at all than to have my friends page me all upset because they are having a shitty time." It's equally glib to say "hire more staff!" Unless you know the details of what we do and how we do it and why, that's not a helpful solution either.

So here we are. I didn't deserve it but it's what was said. I'll be a long time forgetting, because it's particularly hurtful when you're giving of yourself to try to do nice things for other people and the response is "well, but no one really likes it they're just telling you that they do, and I'm here to tell you that you're doing a shitty job and hurting more than you're helping." Kicks in the face like that take a while to heal.

I hope your friends read this and find a little compassion in their hearts for me. If they're really that upset they can always page me and we'll work through it and if I missed something we can certainly talk about how to incorporate that moving forward or a way to make things right. I'm sorrier than I can tell you that they had a miserable time.

So - apology accepted. It doesn't really fix anything, but I appreciate the apology.

Professional behavior and professional committment are two separate things.

When I am staffing, you should absolutely expect me to not be unethical, to handle things in a timely manner, etc. That's behaving professionally.

When I am staffing, I am not going to feel bad for taking a 2 week vacation (it was glorious), for not logging on 5 days a week, or for not spending all night every night doing jobs and making stories for other people. Some nights I log in and play. Some nights I don't log in at all. Some days I do a bunch of jobs, some days I don't do any. When you start looking at my efficiency and a quota and I have to start making project plans for stories and I have to do X amount of work I don't like before I am allowed to do Y amount of work I DO like, then we have a disconnect.

That is also a reason I quit games. Don't make the game feel like my job.

When a problem player who walked on the edge of banning actually turns it around and becomes a decent member of the community and fun to GM for.

Sometimes it's nice to be wrong.

@Wizz said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

Or even worse, putting YOURSELF through that mindfuck, especially if you're inebriated or have mental health issues?

Which is exactly what happened to you on Arx, since pretty much everything you think was going on wasn't actually going on. The only differential among what staffers can and can't do is that Tehom and NV lock down some of the delete permissions really hard, to prevent staffers like me from inadvertently deleting critical things that force them to revert to backups. But that has nothing to do with view permissions. Oh. And all staffers know who other staffers play and what is an NPC and a PC. Also as a player, if you @sheet char and nothing comes up? It's an NPC. And the PCs you think were staffbits really, really weren't.

I hope that gets you to a healthier place, because the last few days have been weird with you and I'll admit I'm a bit worried. Take care of yourself, wherever you decide to play next.

@Derp

I've avoided responding to things that do not require my attention from players who have been so abusive to me that I would ban them except that their behavior has been limited directly and specifically to me. If staff as a whole have discussed player behavior, and staff as a whole does not ban someone, but I am pretty much done with their accusations and bullshit and madness? Someone else can answer their actions and handle their jobs. Could I do it? Absolutely. But why would I? That's part of why no GM is an island, right?

Regarding equal access to NPCs and such...

My reward as a staffer is getting to tell the stories I want to tell. Those stories still center around players, not my NPCs - but I will continue to tell them with the people I enjoy. It goes in cycles - I'll tell stories for this group, and then I'll tell stories for a different, non-overlapping group when that arc is done, and so on. That's what I do for relaxation. (Other than spend a lot of non-computer time in armor)

Everyone should have equal access to the main plot. That doesn't mean I can't tell stories in my off time. They're like PrPs, but as a staffer I have access enough to metaplot and secrets that it can feel like it's super super super hella important even if it doesn't affect the whole of the game. Sorrynotsorry, I'm not going to stop using my relaxation time to tell stories, and I don't always want to find a different game that will let me tell PrPs as a non-staffer.

If I give a game, say - 30 hours a week of staff time (this is an incredibly low estimate of how much time I spend staffing on Arx) and I want to spend 3 hours telling a story that's basically just lore and a PC's personal story and collaborative RP? I'm going to do it, and I'm not going to feel bad for not inviting Fred Who Makes Every Scene An Exhausting Drag to join it. I'll probably have already resolved Fred's action anyway.

@saosmash You don't owe anyone your story. It's perfectly okay to just sit there and lurk and know that you're not alone in struggling to be whoever you are.

When someone just goes ALL FUCKING OUT on a particular course of action, and it results in a beautiful thing that happens, deep and rich and meaningful - and then you wake up in the morning inspired to write a bunch of lore and things because of it, and something awesome comes into being RIGHT THERE because someone was awesome and cool and brilliant.

Goddamn.

I'd tag him but as god is my witness, I thought turkeys could... no wait... as god is my witness I cannot remember like 90% of the names-to-characters here. W/e.

He knows what he did.

That moment when you're GMing a scene, and the characters are talking about various clues and metaplot things and pieces of information they've found from RP interactions and pulled together into a cohesive story - and then someone adds in a piece of lore you wrote that you loved so much, tying it into what's being currently done and using it to carve a new path in the middle of the scene that you hadn't expected at all. And the whole group plays off it and goes with it and it turns a scene into this haunting, collaborative, beautiful story with depth and meaning and gravitas.

That moment right there. That's the one.

Last night, between two players and me, in a large-scale plot that brought to a conclusion the first part of a major metaplot arc:

Player A made a choice utterly consistent with his character.
Player B also made a choice utterly consistent with his character.

Me, to Player A: You realize that if you do this, your character will die.
Player A: Well, I'd hoped not, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
Me, to Player A: Well. I'm going to give him a goddamn heroic death then.
Player A: <cracks knuckles> Let's go make MUSH magic.

Me, to Player B: You realize that if you do this, your character will die.
Player B: That's what he'd do. I'm okay with this.
Me, to Player B: Okay. Let's do this. Here we go.

It was glorious. It was heroic. They saved other people's PCs. They saved NPCs. And in the end, when the time came and I dealt them both the damage they would have received? They succeeded their checks to stay alive through crazy damage, and managed to make it out looking like the badass heroes they are.

Last night was magic. People in pubchan were glued to the log, frantically refreshing to see what was going to happen. People in the scene were hoping. The poses were epic, the story fantastic, and all because of players who let the moment infect them, and inspire them, and weren't afraid to look certain death in the face and just go all in anyway.

You know who else gets credit for that?

There was one character who was going to have to make a similar choice. She made her pose and waited. And then these first two players moved in and distracted the bad guy, and she.... let them. She didn't struggle. She didn't force it into trying to make him deal with all of them. She had her moment. She did some heroic things. And then she let them save her, letting their potential sacrifice take the spotlight.

So - MU Things I Love - people who will go all in on a story, will risk death not because they want to take all the spotlight or the story, but because that's what their character will do, and who are willing to share the glory with others. That kind of collaboration makes greatness. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

@bananerz said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (:

I'd be very happy if someone is being a dick that it pretty much lowers the difficulty in finding them for the other person. I still think if someone OOCly is being a dick and wrecking a character, get them the hell off the game. But good idea!

I still don't think you understand. We have 400 active characters. On a given evening, we have 200+ unique accounts logged in.

Now, suppose you do something that even HALF the game doesn't like. Take it down further, even a QUARTER of them.

Now suppose they all take a moment to either condemn (if we still had it) or send you an anonymous messenger.

Now you have to what - spend your AP to find out who those 100 anonymous messengers were sent by, and have 100 scenes of "why do you hate my character" or also "you have no goddamn idea what I'm actually doing what the actual fuck"? Or alternately, just be shit on anonymously by 100 people for making a decision that isn't the most popular thing and doesn't make everyone universally happy.

Keep in mind that we (GMs) deliberately make it so that choices have to be made, and especially as a leader it's unlikely that you're going to have a lot of "please-everyone" choices to make about major events.

As @Sunny says, it's not the fringe cases we care much about - we can just boot and ban people if it's a one-time thing. But having 100 conversations with 100 people about "hey, maybe think that yes your character wouldn't like someone but also how fun is it for a character in a positive to make hard choices to also have 100 anonymous people telling them they suck day after day after day" is exhausting. And yes, we can make a news post but no one ever thinks it applies TO THEM. Because of course, they totally have a super important REASON. IC IS IC.

Yes, IC is IC. But leader positions already are hard. Let's not also make it filled with a shitton of negativity you realistically have no way to respond to in any meaningful way.

Sidenote: If you want to send an anonymous message? Put in an action for it. Then the person can get it anonymously, we know what's going on, there's a track of it, and if someone investigates who sent it, we can adjudicate whether you were stealthy enough for it to really be anonymous. It's a valid use of an @action.

If it's not that important to you? Then maybe it's not really that necessary.

@Roz said in Arx Alts:

@Darinelle @mail clears out when PCs hit the roster. (Messenger doesn't.)

THEN WHY DID I GET ORAZIO WITH 300 FUCKING @MAILS?! <SOBS>

I'm Puffin. And Sapphire. And Leona (though she's gone for now). And a few others. Oy. So many others. All the Marin'alfar, though I suspect that will change at some point and I'll just play Ayllish and Rhaine and Venteri.

But I'm not Orazio any more (and I apologize for the state of the @mail, I received it that way and never went through and deleted)!

@dvoraen said in MU Things I Love:

If this (below) isn't the result of it, you and I are going to have words!

You're taunting the woman who put the murderclown shardhaven in Arx?

Scheduling A Thing that has a bunch of really fun players on it, and only afterwards realizing that I've scheduled their highly risky thing for 31 October.

Guess this thing just got even weirder.

MWUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA.

I totally jumped to the wrong conclusion about what this thread is about and I immediately came here to post:

If someone rejects me, even if it's my best effort, I view it as a sign that I should definitely not spend my time with that person and sigh in relief because I don't need to add people to my schedule.

But after reading.... the same response is mostly applicable. If I apply as a character that I want to play and it just doesn't fit theme, or it's too over the top, or the staffers don't know me well enough to know that I'm not going to go FULL SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE on them then that's a sign to me that what I want to do isn't going to be right for the game and I appreciate that in advance.

As a staffer? It's harder, because I swear some people make trolly applications just to troll.

@tek said in L&L Options?:

@Caryatid Okay, so now I'm dying to know the drama that has you rejecting both Arx and Ithir.

I don't know about ithir, but if she's story-starved in Arx it's probably because we're WAY behind on actions and so everything metaplotty is on hold while we catch up. Slowly. Though I can't speak for her and there might be some horrible drama that I've totally missed during my shithole summer. But there is no overlap of staff between the two games.

Random message from player I haven't interacted with and a character my favorite NPC doesn't know?

Wince.

Cross fingers.

Hope for the best.

And the best is -awesome-. The scene was SO FUN.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

RIP Rutger Hauer. Thank you for Ladyhawke, one of the few 80's movies that actually stands the test of time (minus the soundtrack, KQ, I KNOW).

There's a particular type of character and RP I really, really enjoy. It doesn't fit in Arx even remotely, so it's a really big deal for me to have a character now that not only gets to be that TYPE of character, but to engage in some of the quirks and foibles of that arc that just make me happy as a person.

Also - random scenes that could have been stilted, awkward, and basic turned into a really great introduction to two characters, with two RPers who added depth and found a lovely balance between "we just met" and "we're best friends" that resulted in me wanting to see those characters again to learn more, but not feeling like a slog between two people determined to run that gamut in one marathon session.

ALSO ALSO to people who know how to end a scene without belaboring it because they just can't let go. (Which is a love from both Arx and Gray Harbor)

BLEHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

I hope she was the most qualified but if she WAS the most qualified and you DO hire her I do not envy the conversation you'll have to have with whoever that idiot was.