Hey, I have more time now so I'm going to retreat back along the thread quite a bit.
@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:
Do many MUSHers have an aversion to conflict-based RP
In short, yes, and it's for reasons further removed from my "code vs. cooperation" distinction from Mud to Mush, though I and other people have touched on this enough that it's probably been sufficiently answered, but I want to dig further into this. You (Kestrel) have even answered some of it.
Conflict in a lot of RPG Mushes means combat which means death. A lot of people in the World of Darkness games see this as the primary conflict resolution. Killing means no more problem, and only a hit to a stat which is not tied into any other stat and therefore the consequences can easily be ignored so it is and was, systematically, consequence-free.
This created an OOC culture of people who were paranoid that people were killing for, well, OOC reasons. Because a lot of people were. You may think that the concept of an "online troll" is new, but it really isn't; being a dick because you can and it's funny to watch people get upset has been around for a long, long time. Well, in the WoD Mush community, the backlash to this was mighty. Staffers were draconian against people who even thought about doing this, because they were often victims to it themselves, so they started or became staff on games and were going to "fix everything".
Who groaned? Yes, if you've ever been in a company with a new manager who immediately decides to "fix everything" that normally means headaches all around as everything is changed regardless of what works. And because these staffers are trying to be good and righteous, and are also kind of paranoid, they created some of the very worst Staffer-vs-Player schisms.
Incidentally, birthing Wora (the precursor to Soapbox). This history is about a decade old. Maybe more; I can't remember.
The other thing you can do as staffer is get all the cool things that previous games would never get you. So you had some staffers doing bad things for good reasons, and others doing bad things for no reason, and you end up with a bunch of players who are poisoned by distrust, and legitimately so. These players become staffers, and the cycle continues.
This is only half of it.
The other half is what we've all been talking about. Players like to own their character, because it can take a long time to create it, and longer to get into it, and the emotional investment is both good (they want to see what happens next) and bad (they don't want to feel their effort is meaningless).
So what we ended up with was:
- A game about (not) killing people.
- Distrust of the staff/game arbiters.
- Investment in our work.
We have, I will admit, gotten over a lot of these issues. A lot of that is because we killed OOC Masquerade (things players aren't allowed to know about your character, even if they know them). We killed it dead. We killed it because if we can create an enjoyable game out of trust, then being antagonistic becomes acceptable. e.g., I know you're slighting me because your character can't stand mine, not because you have it out for me, not because your character is going to kill mine. With respect for the player, we can do more with the characters.
That can go too far. Like Political Correctness, if you slide that slippery slope to the ultimate conclusion, this means that if you're not super-nice or super-careful with other characters, then we can easily return to the bad old days.
I think this slippery slope is point-missing, myself, but it's a logical conclusion. The wrong conclusion to have, but logical all the same.
In one of the most enjoyable scenes I had on Fallcoast (WoD Mux), my homeless character was shamed by a grandma who was just taking her granddaughter out to get icecream, and dirty stinky hobo ruined it. It was NPCd by someone, and they were worried that they were pushing me out of the scene, and I said no, no, that was awesome, when can we play again. It was engaging, and my part in the scene didn't go on longer than it had to by, e.g., my character scoffing and mocking the woman. I could have played it that way, but I enjoy playing someone who is not Always The Hero Of Their Own Story. Certainly someone with human emotions, who can be mocked and shamed for their faults. We need more of this. We need more world-building imagination, not just "I must win against all against me" which leads to the "kill" mentality.
Incidentally, if you NPC'd that grandma, please PM me and tell me when we can scene again!
I feel like I have a kindred spirit in that regard, @Kestrel, which is part of why I wanted to dive into that one point. Also, to wrap up some history, and some conversation in this thread which really directly answered your question.
Ta, again.