@Admiral I'm not a lawyer, but that's bullshit. And they are horrible bosses.
Best posts made by Arkandel
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RE: RL Anger
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RE: Plots for Spheres
From a ST's point of view:
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Proactive players. Your PC isn't in this, it needs to be fun as well. If I need to do all this work and have to also drag people to play, figure out timezones on my own, bug them to act on their own investigations then that's not fun.
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I don't expect players to know what they want (although it happens). I do expect them to give me some feedback afterwards though so I know if what they were served worked for them, and what I could do to make it better. Don't give thanks (although sure, that's good too), give comments.
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Staff. I can't always get help but at the very minimum I'd like them to be out of the way unless they absolutely positively need to be there. Make it clear how much leeway I have and what I shouldn't do and we'll be fine - but don't second guess me after the fact if I tried to work with them.
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PC knowledge. If you want the spotlight on your PC for something you need to speak up; would you like a big one-on-one fight for your moment of glory? Say so, I won't assume you'd love it. Are you a superb medic and would like to save the day? Can do, but I can't always know every character in my schenes. Do you have a tie from your char's childhood I can abuse? I can't read minds, read it to me. But don't let me drag it out of you, and realize what I'll do might not be exactly how you envisioned it in your head.
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Whatever you do, be a little grateful afterwards. I don't expect eternal gratitude and constructive criticism is welcome, but don't act like you hated every moment for a screen's worth of pages then follow it with a quick "... but I had fun, I didn't mean to imply otherwise!" at the very end.
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Roleplaying writing styles
I'd like to remind everyone this is not the Hogpit. Please let's not insult each other here, as I think it might be good to discuss this here in some length.
What's your favorite 'roleplaying writing style'? Do you have any biases either way? Do you consider yourself an elitist?
For example - and I will be honest here - on the MUD I first roleplayed on we heavily favored longer posting styles and ever since then I've been favoring that style heavily; I love writing in detail, and my favorite partners have always been ones able to return this. So giving me ambience about their character, turning their poses more colorful by essentially assuming minor storytelling duties and making the scene's environment come to life with sounds and scents, all those things will make me appreciate them a great deal.
On the contrary I've learned to associate brevity with subpar roleplay. It's largely a bias, I'll freely admit it, and there are definitely players who can pull it off. @Coin, for all he's a blight on this world, can make every word count but most people can't get away with it. There's also a stigma about it being a sign of distraction such as when someone's playing on multiple scenes and just churns out a quick pose once in a while.
What I can't stand is too many typos or spelling errors. Come on, it's 2017, get a spellchecker!
Anyway, there are other quirks I encounter occasionally and I wonder how others feel about it. A common one is plugging wiki tags in poses - I don't have strong feelings about that either way personally but this being MSB that might vary. The use of linefeeds and tabs is also pretty varied.
There are also players who plug OOC bits into their poses. I've seen it be fairly innocuous ("Bob has been silent for a few minutes. That's because his player was AFK letting his dog out. He looks up and...") and way less acceptable ("Bob sits down and stays silent. He hates that bitch Jane and hopes she dies in a fire.").
So, how do you like to pose? What's your preferred style in your partners?
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RE: RL Anger
I think a lot of women understand why I feel a little sick. And if you're ever tempted to see an "old flame" who was the "most beautiful girl I'd ever met" and is the most wonderful memory all these years...sometimes it's kind of scary when you say that after all those other actions.
A lot of men should understand as well.
That said, whatever happened to sending someone a nice, complimentary letter? In the age of e-mail, it's so much easier to do, and substantially less threatening.
Yeah, send a damn Facebook request like the rest of us, buddy! It's a whole lot less creepy than showing up at someone's workplace asking to see them after 15 years.
You know what the weird part is? Something like @mietze's story would could easily be a Hollywood romcom plot. Guy pines for that girl he met when he was a teenager after a streak of failed relationships and decides to reconnect with her? Aww, that's adorable, right? Right? Many of those movies if realistically examined involve a hell of a lot of stalking, not taking 'no' for an answer ("I'll never give up on you!"), showing up at unexpected times with big dramatic public gestures of affection and so on.
So not only are we not being taught to think there's something wrong with this kind of thing, we're actually being raised to think it's great. This guy may not even consider what he's doing is really bizarre and someone could be easily threatened by it, he probably thinks it's romantic and cute.
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RE: Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning
@Meg said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
That has not been my experience. Not regarding @lordbelh or you in particular, but Thrax as a whole has been weirdly exclusive in a number of ways that were just-- odd? Making Donrai's funeral private and secretive is the thing that comes to mind right off the top of my head, but there were a number of incidents. I don't know if it was the culture that was built or not, or whatever. But I don't think the players in Thrax have been particularly helpful of the Thrax vs the world mentality by their actions.
Now, I can't answer to things that happened before my time - Donrai's funeral, for instance - but I can address the situation you're describing itself.
I play Castiel. In the portrayal of a traditional (even a self-proclaimed progressive one) who's in favor of keeping thralls because that's their way of life, it's natural that I'm also playing something of a villain - or at least antihero; it's hard to come across as the good guy when your character supports taking slaves in battle. I get that.
However I'd like to think that's part of the challenge, and the fun, of playing flawed characters. They're not supposed to be nice, that's the point; and yet after any given contentious scene I have made sure to page people (something I don't do often) and basically let them know I enjoyed it, that it was only roleplay, and that I'd like to see more of it happen. Sometimes this was met with the same spirit it was offered, and I've had a lot of good scenes come out of it; other times - well, I could be wrong of course but I got the equivalent of an OOC wall. Eh.
But the majority of my RP has been well outside of the estate. It's easy for an entrenched situation to create the impression of a us-versus-them mentality but it doesn't have to. We're all just playing characters on a game - and at least some of the players I've interacted within Thrax have seemed quite reasonable. I personally don't give a damn if my character 'wins' any more than I think he's 'right'; either of those words don't really have a place in what I'm doing.
Having said that, Thrax is the odd-House out. What I'm saying is what you might be perceiving goes the other way around, too.
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RE: Where's your RP at?
@mietze said in Where's your RP at?:
Except for no one has said those games shouldn't be allowed--but there has been lots of ZOMG IF U DON'T LIKE DEATH AT ANY MOMENT THEN U HATE RISK!
Yeah, I wanted to say.
My initial objection in this thread was "I wouldn't want to play a high-turnover game where your PC's death was basically guaranteed", and it somehow got turned around to "oh, so you never want your character to die or even face any setbacks?"
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RE: Tulpas or Roleplaying?
@Kanye-Qwest The internet is dark and full of ponies.
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RE: What do you play most?
I like to compare metaplot to what TV series do.
There's an overall seasonal arc, and then there are episodic mini-arcs. So the Flash might be preparing for his final showdown with Zoom, that's the big thing, but in the mean time he deals with breaches from different Earths, the occasional villain of the week, etc.
Then at the end of the season... a new season begins with a new overall arc.
I think it's a good model for MU*. There shouldn't be just one Big Thing everyone's working on forever or newbies will be eventually rendered irrelevant as they come in too late, and older players feel like they've been doing this same old and dance forever because they have been.
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RE: RL things I love
@Thenomain Now and then I am even reminded of how few people even online, even MUSHing, know of MSB. Not are on MSB... who have been playing MU* for a long time and don't even know what this place is.
For some reason that's reassuring to me. Not sure why.
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RE: Course Corrections
@Ghost said in Course Corrections:
So, you mean to tell me your character with ZERO dice in investigation OR computer would think to browse fucking Tor of all things to get instructions on homemade espionage tools?
Two friends of mine were in a table-top campaign where one of them (who's a sound engineer iRL) was playing a barbarian stuck in a dungeon without any light or blind fighting skills. He claimed he could use the echoes of his own sound waves to ping the location of his enemies so he could hit them, and then also use the dungeon's accoustics to navigate its tunnels.
I don't know what bullshit stinks the most, that this would be a plausible plan at all ("you can totally do it, that's how sound works!") or that his illiterate barbarian from some shitty village would possess sound engineering skills to fight his way out of total darkness.
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RE: RL things I love
After a really 'meh' day full of nothing working the way it was supposed to and going to bed pretty bummed, I woke up and don't feel as bad.
That's something. Things might still not work the way they are supposed to work but hey.
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RE: A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like
@Paris said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:
Abuse thrives in silence.
Abuse thrives on inaction.
There are plenty of people for whom there have been plenty of complaints, logs, incidents... and none of them satisfy staff 'enough'. They are too circumstantial, the offending player hasn't done anything on that one game yet, or enough apologists are coming up to muddle the waters and make it sound like it's a he-said she-said affair even when it's really not.
If staff are willing to sit on the fence then they walk away unscathed. There's a long list of games where exactly that has happened - or, worse, where the people who stepped up were left out to dry afterwards and faced the consequences of speaking up as staff looked the other way as hard as they could due to reasons.
Where there is no will there is no way.
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RE: MU and Alternate Channels
@Tinuviel said in MU and Alternate Channels:
@surreality The problem with having to enforce good behaviour elsewhere is that it can be a slippery slope. I think I'm using that phrase correctly.
You and I are talking. I go onto another game to talk shit about you to a mutually known person. Is that staff's responsibility?
What about here? We talk shit about people all the time. Is posting all the vile things X person has done not harassment? Does the game's staff have to respond?I agree with you that using alternative platforms to cheat is bad and should be dealt with as such - but the terminus of that situation happens on the game. The cheating happens on the game itself, even if the arrangements are made elsewhere.
It's not really a slippery slope if what's happening is actionable. Think of the effect, not the cause, and usually you'll be on the right track; metagaming is a problem, and whether you're doing it over pages or on Hangouts is just a matter of semantics. Sexual harassment is a big deal, and whether I'm stalking you in pages on the game or it started on Google Docs and if I now suddenly create alts to follow you around from sphere to sphere it changes nothing.
Not liking someone isn't actionable. If you tell @surreality "you know, I fucking hate Arkandel" it's the same regardless of the medium; if you spread lies "you know, Arkandel was in prison for starting a dog-fighting ring" then that's a problem no matter where you said it.
There's no new slope to slide down here.
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RE: How Do I Headwiz?
@HelloProject The best piece of advice I have is unfortunately not actionable.
Have a thick skin.
That's it. But it's not something you can do, it's just ... developed over time. I hope for the sake of anyone staffing at all, let alone running a game, that they have it because it's an often thankless job and an endless grind which starts at 100% inspiration and creativity but ends up being 10% of that (... if you're lucky) and 90% work, maintenance, and handling people.
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RE: RL things I love
I'm Christian. I hate the things some Christians say or do by justifying them in a way which sounds like they represent everyone else in the group, too.
I think these days what I hate the most is organized religion, regardless of which one it is. Although the new Pope sounds like a cool dude.
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RE: Races in fantasy settings
@pyrephox And, just like in sci-fi, discussing tribalism in a completely different context can be interesting (at least in my opinion) not to reflect existing real world issues but to examine them from a different point of view.
For instance portraying a patronizing long-lived race whose numbers are dwindling down can lead to some genuinely intriguing encounters. Do they value their life more than a human's since it's so much more of a rare commodity?
Or examining what it means to transition from one group to another - something we cannot do in the real world. You become a vampire and your existence spans into centuries rather than decades; how long before you start counting yourself a member of another group? How does it affect your thinking? Is the human mind even able to stretch without going insane, can our memories last that long?
I think it's when players play these completely different races exactly the way they'd do a human, except they have long ears or whatever, that this breaks down.