The 100: The Mush
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Truthfully I think a lot of my hanging around was this was one of the only non WoD places that had something going on. The lack of non supernatural/WoD environments with activity means you're willing to expand your tolerance of ham in order to be able to play something.
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@BobGoblin said in The 100: The Mush:
Truthfully I think a lot of my hanging around was this was one of the only non WoD places that had something going on. The lack of non supernatural/WoD environments with activity means you're willing to expand your tolerance of ham in order to be able to play something.
That's so depressing, yet true. People are willing to take punishment or humor some self-centered staffer's bullshit because the game provides them with an outlet. In this I'm pretty sure sometimes MUing is a good description of what it's like dating Charlie Sheen.
He called me names
He slapped me around
He probably gave me HIV
...but I got to drive his Porsche on ThursdaysDelete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
It was fun. There was a lot happening (often too quickly, especially to start), lots of RP, good players. Having played on 5W, I knew they ran a fun game. I was also expecting this, though admittedly not quite so quickly, as it's much like what happened on 5W.
They're a married couple, they run the place themselves, and don't have other staffers at all except for code. At the constant, nearly frenetic pace they start out, it's guaranteed they're going to get burned out especially with a very young child thrown into the mix. It was fun while it lasted and that's all I can expect.
Assuming the theme was something I liked, I'd almost certainly play on another game that they ran. And I'll expect that one to be fun, busy, and eventually close when it doesn't turn out how they wanted and/or they burn out. It's more like a tabletop module than a long term campaign.
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@Miss-Demeanor said in The 100: The Mush:
And now, to all those that nay-sayed me when I said this is exactly what was going on, and was told I was overreacting and that things were fine and it was just me (waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back before Grounder PCs were even allowed!)....
I TOLD YOU SO!
Ahhhhhhhhh, that feels better.
It feels good to be so right, doesn't it?
I do have sympathy for the people who stuck around on the game but hopefully this is their opportunity to find something new and wonderful to experience without the dynamic duo nonsense to ruin it.
I've heard good things about Dystopia. Fallcoast is huge and you can probably easily find a clique to play with. Arx seems to be popping and is a safe haven for Firan refugees.
There's plenty of RP opportunities out there for 'The 100' ex-pats.
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@Ghost said in The 100: The Mush:
@BobGoblin said in The 100: The Mush:
Truthfully I think a lot of my hanging around was this was one of the only non WoD places that had something going on. The lack of non supernatural/WoD environments with activity means you're willing to expand your tolerance of ham in order to be able to play something.
That's so depressing, yet true. People are willing to take punishment or humor some self-centered staffer's bullshit because the game provides them with an outlet. In this I'm pretty sure sometimes MUing is a good description of what it's like dating Charlie Sheen.
He called me names
He slapped me around
He probably gave me HIV
...but I got to drive his Porsche on ThursdaysI mean it sounds like people were also having fun on this game. They weren't enduring a grinding boot heel in the back of their necks just to cradle a few poses between dirty paws that the staff chars dropped from their table.
MU players are so goddamned dramatic. I guess that's not really surprising.
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Like @TNP said, it was fun. I have a history of being considered a "difficult" player that I've been trying to change, and they were both kind to me and willing to assist me in that effort. Even when I disagreed with them, they both gave the impression of listening, and took the time to explain themselves. I'd certainly consider playing with them again, though I might consider what kind of support system has been set up prior to playing on a game that they run if it's just the two of them. And yeah, as I've mentioned above, they were kind to me, and kindness goes pretty far for me in general, but doubly so in MUSH experience, where I've literally had occasion where on a game after telling a staffer I was being harrassed, the response was, "what do you want me to do about it?"
This is my first experience with them as storytellers or their established pattern of game-running, but I will say this: I observed some behavior from other players ranging from passive-aggressive to outright hostile toward staff. I saw scene and plot events they'd constructed which having been scheduled for days, get suddenly picked apart by people literally hours before go time. And while I will emphasize NO, I am not dismissing A&O's responsibility or pattern of behavior, I will say if I were them, some of the flak they got from people who seemed more inclined to simply complain about problems rather than offer solutions, I'd probably have opted to bail out and say Fuck This Noise myself.
The bold emphasis mine, because I have the feeling that the first response to this will be to accuse me of being their patsy.
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They singled you out and treated you nicely because they wanted to be able to prop you up and say 'See? This person likes us! We can't be doing wrong!' They picked you to help be their enabler. I'm sorry, Cupcake, but they very much are making you their patsy.
VASpider has/had the same modus operandi and just about everyone on this board who dealt with her can verify that statement.
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It's like I'm psychic or something.
Like I said, this is my first experience with them as gamerunners, and I'm not excusing their neglect - I may understand an element of it, but I don't excuse it.
I'm already on to other games, and have the means to communicate with the players I developed good relationships with that I'm eager to rp with again.
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@Admiral said in The 100: The Mush:
@Miss-Demeanor said in The 100: The Mush:
And now, to all those that nay-sayed me when I said this is exactly what was going on, and was told I was overreacting and that things were fine and it was just me (waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back before Grounder PCs were even allowed!)....
I TOLD YOU SO!
Ahhhhhhhhh, that feels better.
It feels good to be so right, doesn't it?
I do have sympathy for the people who stuck around on the game but hopefully this is their opportunity to find something new and wonderful to experience without the dynamic duo nonsense to ruin it.
I've heard good things about Dystopia. Fallcoast is huge and you can probably easily find a clique to play with. Arx seems to be popping and is a safe haven for Firan refugees.
There's plenty of RP opportunities out there for 'The 100' ex-pats.
I play on both Dystopia (Elizabeth) and Arx (Lou) right now and I'm enjoying both. They're a sort of breath of fresh air because neither is a rehashing of the 'same' I've been dealing with for a while.
I like this couple, as people. I like to RP with them. However, I don't think they should run a game. A TT? Sure. ST on a game? Maybe.
Some people just probably shouldn't run a game and married couples shouldn't do so solo / with the one token person to go 'see? we've got someone to keep us balanced.'
![😕](http://musoapbox.net/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f615.png?v=4vfms5ns7sl ":\")
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I'm glad I didn't invest any time into the game. I mean, I tried, but one of the staffers asking me to take things out of my background because it had never been seen on the show. Eventually it got down to like four lines and given the thumbs up, only to the have the 'other one' come in and deny the character because my background was too short. Eventually, I got the feeling the only character that would work for them both was a background character to fill time and space for more important PCs - nobody special, who has never done anything significant, and had the potential to stand out, yet had never done so at any point in his life despite being older than almost everyone around him.
I'm okay with having dodged the bullet there. Like most people say, they seem like good enough people (though I've always preferred the husband to the wife), but when on staff they tend to leave a trail of dashed hopes in their wake. I've played on games they've staffed and on games they were players. I greatly prefer them as players.
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They are nice people that are bad at running games long term, from what I could tell. I bailed a while ago. They made some really bad design decisions for the resources they had available (just them). They pushed themselves at a rate initially that simply isn't possible to sustain long-term, people got used to it, and then it killed things when they scaled back to something more reasonable.
They tried. It was a good shot, and I hope they learned about pacing for their next project, if they have one. I'd play under them again, provided they demonstrated that lessons were learned.
I'm a little uncomfortable with how much focus and spotlight the two of them both had around their own characters and stories, but it never crossed into intolerable for me. Cost of doing business with that type of game.
ETA: In my opinion, the problem was incompetence, not any maliciousness.
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@Admiral Its nice to finally have my initial predictions and warnings validated.
@Sunny The breakneck pace that was implemented in the start was because Wife of the duo wanted SO BAD to have her Grounder PC that everything got shoehorned and railroaded towards getting the Grounders open. They claimed it 'could have gone either way'... but it was really more like TR's 'there's a chance the apocalypse will happen!' in that things would have had to go WAY south for it to happen that way, despite many of the PC's at the time being all for hunting down and raiding the Grounders and wanting revenge or retribution for so and so being captured or hurt by the Grounders. I'm betting it was relatively the same thing for Adult PC's and Mountain Men (if they got that far).
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@Sunny said in The 100: The Mush:
They tried. It was a good shot, and I hope they learned about pacing for their next project, if they have one. I'd play under them again, provided they demonstrated that lessons were learned.
This is about how I feel. I can understand the urge to open a game in the theme you want to play (there's no other way to play in some themes), but even in my super-brief time on The 100 I couldn't figure how this could run with just two staffers (married or otherwise). I think they'd benefit from another pair of eyes and hands on anything they do in the future, mostly just for the sake of sustainability but in part because of the focus-on-your-own-PCs thing people have mentioned. I wouldn't compare these folks to Brooke/Brice, though, and I wouldn't avoid their future projects.
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Yeah. They really ought to collaborate on future projects. For extra benefit, it would help balance out the rush-to-what-I-want. I can see what @Miss-Demeanor is saying, and I agree there was some of that going on... I just think again, it boils down to needing an outside voice and someone to help check that shit and a lack of understanding one's own biases and how they impact things. I really do think they genuinely meant well.
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I genuinely didn't see any of these problems, and I was far from a star player. I tend to be shy as a player when it comes to putting myself out there and I was peripheral at best, completely forgettable at worst.
I'm not going "EVERYTHING WAS PERFECT" because I'm sure there was loads of stuff I wasn't privy to, but for me, I'm just bummed at losing a place where I was finally starting to feel comfortable putting myself out there and getting involved.
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@Miss-Demeanor said in The 100: The Mush:
@Admiral Its nice to finally have my initial predictions and warnings validated.
They claimed it 'could have gone either way'... but it was really more like TR's 'there's a chance the apocalypse will happen!' in that things would have had to go WAY south for it to happen that way
I didn't play there so I can't say this is the case, but I've noticed staff on a lot of games have their heart set on a particular outcome and they throw out 'anything could happen' when they really, really don't mean that. I think that unless you really don't have a dog in the race and are okay with GMing every possible outcome, it's a bad idea to say that and get player expectations worked up. I usually don't have any preference myself, and I think staff not having PCs as anything more than story catalysts, fonts exposition, or clue dispensers etc really helps.
some fucking idiot who people only like because he's good at taking credit for the work of everyone under him, just like every other fucking L&L headwiz.
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I agree that it shouldn't be said that anything is possible when it isn't, but I vehemently disagree with a premise that staff characters shouldn't be played as characters. Staff are players, too. If that's their preference that's one thing, but there are MANY MANY benefits to having your staff play alongside everyone else. It is a bad premise.
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@Apos I would agree. As much as I hate to say it because it sounds terrible... more and more I'm coming back to the idea that staff really shouldn't play in the sphere they staff for. Or in the case of The 100, they shouldn't have placed so much emphasis on their own PC's.
Over and over again, these days I keep running into staff that are now more involved and interested in what their own PC's are doing over what they're supposed to be doing as staff. Plots, jobs, even answers to time sensitive questions will get put on hold while they give themselves a new shiny for their PC.
I won't say it's all staffers, because it isn't. But it's enough of them that it's getting almost... expected wherever I go now, that staff will be more interested in their own story than helping to further anyone else's. There's relatively little point to playing a character in a sphere (especially a supernatural/post-apoc/whatever type of sphere that is outside the usual) if all you're ever going to get is 'slice of life' RP.
And yes, before anyone says it, yes, there ARE prp's... which can only go so far without staff approval. If staff is neglecting jobs for their own fun, however, that means that approval isn't happening anytime soon. And that means more 'slice of life' RP while you wait.
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The flipside Demeanor however is how long can a staffer 'Enjoy' the environment if they can't participate in it. Everytime I find myself 'pitching in' interest starts to wane. I'm a very strict if I'm playing on a game I don't allow my characters to really do too much because I want to heavily avoid the perception of self-favoritism etc. So the social RP goes for awhile but I do find burnout comes faster when I'm not able to push characters. I know it sounds weird but I'm a person that likes goals and growht for a character; which is doable without being a snowflake. But I don't want to do it for myself either because that's weird and people often take the perspective that if you're staff, you can just do it for yourself.
Honestly it's a no win situation. Staff and play a character that can do things, and be judged. Or staff and player a character that doesn't do things, and be bored.
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I do agree that Staff should get to play their own characters, but featuring them in the midst of everything... yeahno.
I know a Staffer who I used to praise for keeping their characters more on the sidelines, but over the past few months... they began putting one of their PCs as the lynchpin in scenes more and more. And it's been kind of depressing to see.
When your PC (if you're Staff and especially if you're HeadStaff or the main Plot person) is doing things no one else's can possibly think to do (either by way of skills/stats, plot involvement, etc.)... You may need to take a couple steps back.
Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
