Best posts made by Arkandel

@mietze said in Open Sheets?:

Unfortunately what I think is much more likely to happen (at least this has been my experience) in heavy pvp with little to no staff attention is that people tend to hunt for the weakest looking person when they get bored and want to amuse themselves by pkill Or, they make sure their incoming friends (or their new pc) is built specifically to take out the person they have an ooc grudge hard on for.

Yes. People are cowards.

On HM - where XP accumulated endlessly and there was a real dino problem if I ever saw one - it happened all the time; oldbies would not only never target other oldbies, they would in fact d never even target people who had been around for a little while. Sure, the chances a 300 XP guy would take out your 800 XP one is small but if RNG goes the wrong way it could happen so fuck that; they bullied newbies instead.

If not they would get a few of their friends over to intimidate the fuck out of that person or, of course, send in pages to tell them in a 'friendly' OOC way what a big mistake it would be to oppose them, you know, as a courtesy. We wouldn't want anything bad to happen, would we.

@Roz said in Intersectional MU* Community:

@Arkandel said in Intersectional MU* Community:

@Tempest You earned that upvote.

This is not a GREAT look for you in the Ad section with the current rules.

You are right. I'll fix it. My bad.

@ArmedCarp said in 2016-2017 Basketball Thread:

I hope to be pleasantly surprised by the Knicks. As far as starters go, they're as strong as anyone.

I dunno. I watched yesterday's game and they were a mess; Carmelo stops the ball, DRose wants to run with the ball. Porzingod isn't being fed enough (and the other two stars will need to seriously sacrifice some ego to do it). Their defense was okay.

They're a marginal playoffs team unless they gel during the season.

@thenomain said in Mudkraft:

What is this?

I can't but echo the sentiment. Wtf is this?

@surreality said in Sexuality: IC and OOC:

I'm describing guys I have personally known who talk about their wokefulness, how they are 'not like all those other guys', and how they play a lesbian 'right'.

Spoiler alert: they don't.

Personally I don't even care just how right (or wrong) they are portrayed since... well,lots of things are roleplayed badly. Unless it's really offensive I wouldn't care since it's none of my business.

What is my business is how they are likely to respond when things don't go their way, when not enough attention is catered for whatever their agenda is supposed to serve or of course when bad things happen to their characters and they choose to see a narrative that wasn't there.

@Lisse24 I hope your nephew/niece pulls through. It sounds like there's quite some fight left in the lil' one's tank.

But yes, fuck people who make an agenda item out of your life.

@rucket I don't see the reason as it stands. Just talk about something other than @magee101 instead and it'll be fine.

@Auspice said in Intersectional MU* Community - Discussion:

@surreality said in Intersectional MU* Community - Discussion:
Well, I mean, I tried to ask a question in good faith as to how they'll judge whether or not someone is a good enough staffer to be able to 'run' their game channel on the Discord and I was wholly ignored.

Because I fear it would be based on personal feelings/opinions and clash of personalities as opposed to 'this person did actually treat people of minorities poorly.'

To be fair, the moment you ask a question like "who is a good enough staffer" then of course the answer is going to become really subjective. Unless that person is really horrible at it all you have to work with is anecdotal evidence, hearsay and unreliable third party opinions.

It's not leadership or rules that I suspect will be their biggest challenge, it's the echoing chamber effect.

@Auspice It also might not be, y'know, a choice. Not everyone can afford a nice house with a big yard.

I didn't want to derail a different thread with this and it's been a while since we had a good ol' fashioned general discussion about MUSH related elements so let's see...

I consider player buy-in for games to be extremely important. Lacking it can damage the culture early or even make certain 'different' game concepts impossible to pull off; examples include gritty post-apocalyptic MU* played like the Flintstones instead, paranoid political settings turning into combat or dating simulations, historical setups ignoring built-in faction tensions to the point characters just get along, and so on.

My two questions are:

1. Do you agree with that premise? Is buy-in that important or doesn't it matter as much, and why?

2. How do you get that buy-in from players to treat your game unlike others that may kind of look similar at a glance? What can you do to induce the kind of culture you want, from all kinds of perspectives; game mechanics, policies, roster or rank systems, etc.

Discuss.

@Tinuviel And that's intentional.

My Fitbit's Dashboard highlights the last week's "worst day" in shameful, sad red.

... There's always going to be a least active day in a week dammit! Even if you're an athlete who runs 40km a day, one day you'll run 39 - boom, shame! Unless I guess I make sure to take the exact same number of steps on seven consecutive days, in which case the entire week was bad I guess.

@thenomain said in Player buy-in:

Nor can I go to an Elf-Only Inn RP channel as Spock. This is not a lack of “buy-in”, this is outright disrespect to the game.

I think the typical case here isn't so visible and I don't think it's malicious; it might be as simple as people just trying to play what they know.

For example maybe I liked my party-going vampire from the last generic MUSH, and when you create your post-apocalyptic game... I create the same thing, with nearly no changes to his behavior. He still wants to meet chicks, arrange bar crawls and drink blud, which means I treat elements of your theme as obstacles and route around them. It's not malicious but... I recreate whatever doesn't already exist, including creating a bar, brewing my own beer, etc.

Here's the thing. A lot of this on paper can be as creative or even fun as anything else... or it might not be. I mean maybe I just buy Crafts 3 with a specialty, put in a +job ("Hey, I wanna run a bar, kk?") and otherwise I play my new Vampire exactly the same as my previous Vampire. Or maybe I do a whole storyline out of this and put some work into it.

Either way that may still not be the game you wanted to run, or the things you hoped your players want to be doing. Maybe you hoped they'd turn a suspicious eye on each other, wondering who'll steal their supplies, develop tightly knit groups stealing resources from other groups... and instead you have folks running a bar.

In that case they didn't do anything bad, it's not like they should be banned for it... but you failed to get them to buy into your vision. That's the kind of thing I'm referring to in this context.

You can also luck out and not have this be a game-closing problem. A solid player base will help you overcome many obstacles.

Yeah, all of these issues - I feel - can be resolved if you get lucky with your player base, especially at first. For example getting a couple of solid roleplayers people recognize placed into strategic positions (which isn't the same thing as ranks, mind you) to act as theme anchors might be good bait for others to follow their example and get a self-sustainable situation going.

@Roz So you're like a mutant, unlike the rest of us who had to be bitten by radioactive nerdy spiders.

@Luna My wife got me a Surge which is great but perhaps overkill for my current activities. Maybe once the weather gets better and I start cycling it'll be handy though - plus I hadn't actually worn a watch since I started carrying cellphones around, so that's cool.

And it can handle being on an elliptical, for which @EmmahSue hates and despises me forever.

@coin said in Potential Buffy Game:

It would come with an actual compendium of demons and other monsters; it comes with lore; it comes with an actual system (the cinematic unisystem) that is built to simulate play in a "cinematic" fashion so you can do shit like what happened in the show.

I suppose what made Buffy special to me (perhaps due to my own age when I first watched it) is that everything was placed at a school and the characters were figuring their shit out - supernatural, dating, sexuality, family, career - at the same time... all while monsters tried to eat them.

I'm not saying it can't be done with older characters, just that it'd probably feel very similar to other kinds of Hunter-y games then. Different setting, sure, and the lore could make all the difference, but it'd still be quite a lot like those.

Misplaced posts moved over from the Ad thread.

@Insomnia said in RL Anger:

So, can someone explain to me why if she won the popular vote, she didn't win?

One of the main reasons is to safeguard a system against the tyranny of the majority - it would take too much power out of the hands of minorities, allow large urban centres too much sway over the whole, etc.

Essentially it would also mean politicians could target and focus on benefiting the largest States more than smaller ones since that's where most of the voters are - and chances are a web developer in San Francisco has different priorities than a cattle farmer in Wyoming, but you really don't want to screw the latter over just because there's fewer of them around.

@zombiegenesis Not that I want a game to be delayed but come on man, if you have the option of launching this right on Halloween then g'dammit, you take it.

If done right, the consequences are built-in. You claim to control too much of a limited pool? Others want it. Others need it. So if you don't have the political/physical ability to defend it they'll figure out a way to take it from you.

It's dangerous to overreach, and it ought ot be.