@Jeshin said in Emotional bleed:

Integrity of the story, not individual integrity. The shared suspension of disbelief. Obviously people have feelings and one of the reasons there's such a culture of don't do it finger wagging (I think) is because of the final question.

Mmm. I would not describe it as 'integrity' but there's a thing.

For shared suspension of disbelief, we need all the players to understand the game-world consistently with one another. We also tend to like a consistent emotional tone to the game. We call the mix 'theme', right? Pop fiction IPs work great because lots of people will already know what the game's universe is like, and also things like where the overall comedy/action/angst/coziness levels can be expected to lie.

What the hobby doesn't seem to have done is find a consistent way to communicate the OOC version of this. 'Community theme'? A "we're a serious bunch trying to tell a grim and complex story, and this tale holds priority" makes a very different MU from "We're goofing off and if we make a great story that's awesome but everybody having a good time is priority." Plus a lot of points in between, plus, "Core players having a good time telling their cool and complex story is priority, we'll fuck up that story to cater to their feelings, but not yours."

What your game is like in this community-thing regard probably makes a huge difference as to what bleed even is, as well as how to handle it.

@theznar said in Is this a really dumb theme?:

Is the Savage Skies a tt game?

Savage Skies is an Ares game (https://savageskies.aresmush.com/). It stopped being active sometime around September-ish.

I thought for supers there were already Fate rules set up for /superhero/ games? There have been Fate Mu*'s in the past. Would that make something like this more /doable/?

@ThoughtBubble I have heard plenty of people say his has happened to them. It seems so common that I actually made an explicit rule against it -- "you don't have to play with anyone you don't want to play with, but don't try to convince other people not to play with them" or something like hat.

You have observed something important and quite relevant -- many, many MUers have the brain cooties. Some types of brain cooties get along well with other types of brain cooties but conflict harshly with still other types, and most of them make people idiosyncratically abrasive and idiosyncratically sensitive, so communities with high levels of endemic brain cooties get weird even without anybody being an actual asshole.

@Kanye-Qwest yeah, that's why it isn't advertised. They're in process

@Wretched said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

@Tinuviel Dices

Deese.

I will say that every time I have interacted with DarkSouls, they have been perfectly pleasant and polite. They seem to work through jobs efficiently and are enthusiastic about running scenes and stories.

They do have a habit of making statements on the game discord that I would say are somewhat ill-judged in tone, and I know those have irritated people (myself included) but nothing that I would describe as VASpider worthy.

Of course, there might be problematic behaviour that I am entirely missing, but I just thought I would give my personal experience.

@Tinuviel said in Euphoria - Feedback:

@Auspice said in Euphoria - Feedback:

I'm not sure what the special sauce is to get people to generate their own RP vs only engaging when there's staff-run plots happening. It works on some games and not others.

Often, and this isn't necessarily relevant for Euphoria, it's because staff-run plots 'count' whereas other RP doesn't. Anything that isn't run by staff is social RP, and that doesn't count towards... whatever it is people keep score of.

That is, simply put, dumb. Not your take on it. People who behave this way.

Because many staff pick up stuff from the flow of social rp to run with. Because players are sometimes handed plot by staff that will impact the world / metaplot (I have had this on multiple occasions over the years and it has been advertised as 'this event pertains to metaplot' and people still don't show up').

It's just this....need....to have a Staffer at the helm. Like people need to perform for them. And I think it burns out staffers and hurts games.

But this isn't euphoria feedback and it's me feeling frustrated because I enjoy euphoria. I want to be able to jump back in once I'm over my current burnout but I'm afraid to run prps if no one is gonna care just because I'm not staff.

And even I could follow along that time.

@Arkandel I guess in hindsight I should have more clearly logged the changes I made. Some of them were pretty minor at the time or just editorial adjustments. I sat down and started really cutting and snipping pieces here and there to pull out fluff and move things around so they made a bit more sense.

I saw a message through Facebook that seems appropriate:

Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.

@somasatori said in Vietnam War MUSH:

@Kestrel said in Vietnam War MUSH:

@somasatori said in Vietnam War MUSH:

As an aside, I'm an anarcho-communist

Wanna break Bread?

A Kropotkin reference on this, our MSB?! I should have talked politics many years ago, it seems.

Hello, do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior, Eugene V. Debs?

A thousand years later, but I stumbled on this post (excruciatingly slow work from home morning) and just had to give it a try.

Ida (I wish there was a way to age them - she does not look 40 enough so some gray hair instead!)
ida1.png

Gwenna
gwenna1.png

@Pyrephox very much agree with setting boundaries in particular. I have seen it (rarely) done well, and it was amazing the difference it made in the behavior of /everyone/ on the game and how they treated each other--even if they'd played together for years on other games. And how quickly things really devolved into the usual when boundaries started to slip as far as their reinforcement.

It's very hard and taxing work though, especially over the long haul. People often mistake being a hardass for being good at boundary enforcement. ("I'll kick people who do that off my game if they show signs of tantruming/being weird or mean on channel!" while they ignore the people they know or excuse them having a "Bad day" on a consistent basis.) Holding respectful boundaries in any org, online or otherwise is a lot more work than a lot of people give credit for!

@TiredEwok Oh yeah. The Paragon was just a proof of concept attempt to see if it worked and if people liked it. There'd be 8 total archetypes I think.

I can't say why yet, but soon it'll be a great time to make an M&M based MU*. One of the books I worked on would be greatly useful for a superhero MU*ing environment, I just literally can't explain why until it's out >__<.

I think it's better long term for staff/runners to determine what sort of environment they enjoy moderating, and then let players sort themselves out as to who wants to play in that environment, rather than trying to think a system and rules is going to somehow make everyone comfortable with progression. It's just not going to happen. IMO.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a person who wants big dice and optimized chance at one shotting whatever obstacle comes in their way. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being a person who neglects spending points at all because it crosses their mind so infrequently, or who like to build a sheet not with a specific roll in mind but to reflect what they've been doing in RP, even if they'll never use most of those skills. IMO neither is better, and I've met plenty of amazing AND horrific RPers that fit into either category and everywhere inbetween.

If you want a game with big dice, then you're going to have to deal with the older players complaining about expanded XP awards to bring incoming people up to speed. If you want slow progression then you may still have to do that if you keep adding people to the game; or you may need to put level caps on periodically until most people catch up. If you want diceless, then you're going to have to deal with the fact that some people will determine that people will always be out to get them and never let them do anything because icky poo consent. And you're going to have to deal with abusers of that system who are the reasons for some people feeling that way!

How you handle player disappointment (both of your older players who feel threatened or resentful of encroachers, as well as newer folks integrating into an established game) is a really crucial thing that I don't think has enough time spent on it usually. You will make some people happy by throwing points at them to "progress", especially if they really enjoy sheet building and numbers, but I don't think that really solves issues of resentment/feeling of investment in the game itself.

@mietze said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

My youngest child came home with a pilgrims and Indians themes project in kindergarten this year school year in WA state. Which was horrifying to me on many levels.

Public school instruction in the US is extremely fractured, not only state by state but district by district and school by school. (My older kids' elementary school would have NEVER done that, and also at the time was the main site for a native american students and families group for the district, and those parents very generously shared resources with the teachers, students, and other families about PacNW history and current culture!!)

There is such a strange deviation in how we teach people on a state-by-state basis. I spent my pre-teen through high school period on Maui, wherein we did explicitly discuss American colonialism and the annexation's effects on the modern day. That said, we absolutely did not discuss anything in lengthy detail that solely affected the mainland. This made it surprisingly frank, like in US history the teacher said "The Civil War was about slavery," and that was that. When I was in early elementary school, I lived in Georgia in which the textbook used was like "here are the reasons why states' rights are important..." so you can imagine how much unlearning happened in middle & high school there.

@GreenFlashlight

I'll get out the Song of Songs again stg