Best posts made by Arkandel

@Botulism said in Things I've Learned Running Horror Mu:

I really wish others would try new things like this. I'd play the shit out of a game with revolving stories and themes, where stats regularly reset so everyone is equal, where everyone gets a chance at being in leadership instead of calcified groups running factions or areas. It's why I made one.

And it was successful, and lots of people have had a lot of fun.

But I think what you may be missing is that what's fun for you isn't a universal goal across the board. For instance many players like the idea of a persistant character they can sink time into for long periods of time, or MU* where that can support power imbalances, or where the theme is set to something specific they can learn and sink their teeth in rather than have it periodically revolve.

Variety is a great thing - if I wished for anything in this regard it's just more types of games promoting different styles of play rather than copy the template (and in some cases, the exact code and general setup) of the last several MU* as a way to 'go live' as soon and with as little effort as possible.

If there is one thing we're missing from the hobby sometimes it's passion projects. Yours is one, and you should be applauded for it.

@Derp said in Carnival Row:

@Ghost said in Carnival Row:

There's a lot of "Racism isn't fun, oppression isnt fun, I want my game experience to be fun", and I dont think that you can have Carnival Row be Carnival Row without some of these elements.

Then they can play in a different game in a different setting where those elements don't exist. Why would they be interested in this setting in the first place if they find those things so offensive? It seems like they'd be put off by the IP in general.

Protip: If you want to have fun on a game where there are elements that you find distasteful, don't play on that game, or learn to ignore those elements. It's very unlikely that the entirety of the game is going to change to suit your social mores.

I completely agree.

And look, I get it. People directly, personally affected by discrimination can be triggered or made uncomfortable even by 'fantasy' variations of such themes.

But that doesn't mean games including them should not exist. It does mean staff need to ensure it doesn't get too far, to the point of glorifying those thematic elements or even letting them leak on the OOC level, but we can/should not apply modern-day liberal values to every aspect of every MU*. The struggle against unjust authority, dealing with propaganda, being the underdog often depend on the existence of such elements.

And they indeed are not for everyone. That's okay.

I personally wouldn't want to play on Carnival Row where pixie and humans are happily united against a greater threat. That's not the fucking point. Theme might eventually get there in season 3 for the show or after a certain point due to RP on a game, but that's a separate conversation - and essentially a different game.

@Roz You did, you are on MSB.

@derp said in GMs and Players:

IIRC there was a game set in St. Petersburg that suffered from the same issue, though that one was shorter-lived.

I was in a Cabal with her at the time. When she found out my character wasn't meant to be romantically involved with hers... it did not go well.

I went to staff to complain. They did nothing. Staff designated to look into the issue literally came to the room we were both in and exchanged pleasantries and hugs with her.

So I left that MUSH. Following the incident when I tried to talk about it to people I knew their answer was "I don't want to get involved, you're both friends". Well, thanks I guess.

It's what it is. Years later everyone was up in arms about it, but at the time if you got in the way you were isolated and ignored - or at least that was my personal experience.

"Hey, anyone want to do something?"
"Sure! You wanna meet at $place?"
<silence>
...

"I'm so bored, someone run something for me."
"Alright, what would you like ran?"
"I dunno."
"How about $thing?"
"No, it doesn't fit me exactly right."
...

"Hey, I noticed you guys were playing, want one more?"
"Sure, come over!"
<comes over and starts chatting OOC about their day, poses once every half hour>
...

And so on.

I suspect people might disagree with me here but in case it's useful.

For games neither based on the real world or an existing work of fiction (a novel series, TV show etc) I'd really somehow like to get a feel not for the IC culture. How does it 'feel' to be in the streets of a city? How corrupt is the average lawmaker or magistrate? What about the rural areas, how far does the rule of order reach as we move away from the centre of power? How does the populace at large at each region feel about their own nation, are they proud and patriotic, cynical and subdued, resentful and boiling?

When I run plot I need to be comfortable that my interpretation is more or less consistent with everyone else's; it feels - to me, maybe to others - like a challenge to the suspendion of disbelief if one plot calls for hunger riots by gap-toothed peasants during civil unrest but the other person's has clean, orderly streets and shocked, cultured civilians closer to what you'd expect for Victorian London.

Suggestions:

• Some 'look and feel' pages letting us know about these things in the most popular parts of the game. Make sure to include TL;DR tidbits about the relations between major Houses, the Crown, etc. Basically an IC primer sorted by geography and association.

• When PrPs are allowed/encouraged (last I saw Apostate said it was going to happen after the MU* opened officially, maybe I remember wrong though) perhaps either assign STs with geographical areas in which they have a greater degree of leeway - obviously with some oversight to make sure no one goes too far off the reservation - to expand on. You know how idle characters end up on the roster and others can play them? Do the same for geography, slowly expanding the world through the creative efforts of others - that way you also move away from an echo chamber of only staff members contributing to the game's overall atmosphere, and 'zones' will feel more diverse.

• Keep things moving. PCs when left to their own devices tend to move toward greater stability since there is a finate - often small - number of them and it might be no one wants to rock the boat too much. So rock it for them, but document it clearly - not in a long-ass History Of The World wall of text no one but a handful of players will ever go through but a short index which includes only IC events since the game started. It can double as a visible way for influential characters to leave their mark on the game since look, that's your name right up there!

Just some ideas.

Don't have policies you can't enforce.

Don't turn personal peeves into policy.

Don't institutionalize nepotism by making it into policy.

But also this: The OP didn't ask so feel free to disregard, but above all else I want good word of mouth: If staff is shitty it doesn't matter what the policies are, or what they say, since they'll do whatever they want anyway.

Weird-ass people in your PrPs coming up with uh, solutions to problems.

How do they open this locked door? Clearly they need to pick one one of them up and use his head as a battering ram to break through.

And they had the nerve to ask me if they could try it! Motherfuckers, once you brought it up I wouldn't have it any other way.

@FiranSurvivor said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Pondscum said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I'll say it again, it's being staffed by people that staffed on Firan. Why anyone expected anything different to the mentality that prevailed there, I have no idea.

Having suffered at the hands of those loons before, I do not see the same mentality from Firan in Arx.

Did you disagree with staff though? I don't know if you have, I'm just saying that in the most extreme cases of drama I've seen in my years MUSHing there are always people saying "well, I didn't see anything", which happened to be because they were - by design or otherwise - on the right side. It's easy to escape unscathed if there's nothing to go after you about.

In that way my experience of Arx is about the same as in most MU* I've played in the last few years; since I'm not an active participant in the work being put in I have relatively few if any demands from the MU* itself; that means I don't pitch things too hard or follow up on my suggestions; I propose changes, some of them are adopted, some are not, but I don't try too hard to convince staff about them. So I haven't had to see what happens if I dissent because frankly... I don't care enough. I play a character. That's it.

For full disclosure though it does bother me that a friend is banned from a game I play. Not only did I trust @lordbelh to be a good player to the point where I rolled a character in his House but it casts doubts on the House's viability overall. For those who might be unfamiliar with House Thrax, it's... a bit different than the others, thematically. IC it takes thralls (who are similar to slaves) and it's pretty patriarchal in nature - traditionally only men find themselves in leadership positions. This wasn't a player choice, it's how it was created by staff, but given how much of a trigger issue this sort of thing has been for Hellfrog in the past it casts the whole notion in doubt - if playing the game as intended can land players in hot waters why was it put like that to begin with?

I've had talks with Victus over time. Not many - I avoid talking about RP OOC too much as opposed to simply... roleplaying - but enough to know he was discontent to no greater extent than most people do about their MU*. That is, he wasn't furious or raging, he was frustrated about things he sounded like he thought could be changed. And whether that happened to be true or not, regardless of whether staff was amiable to listening to one of their players, being banned for it sounds like a disproportionate knee-jerk reaction. "Dude, shut up about this already, I don't want to hear about it again" is quite reasonable. But banning him? That's the nuclear option.

I'm not convinced it was justified.

@Shayd said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Here's some things that are dichotomies that must be accepted on the game that I have questions about. Please note: my conclusions or even statements may well be incorrect, poor, or stupid. But I feel uncomfortable even bringing them up in-game:

Everything else aside, if we just kept this one thought, it's already showing something's very wrong. Wtf, it's a game. People shouldn't feel uncomfortable asking about things OOC.

Thralldom:
a) PvP is highly discouraged.
b) Thrax holds thralls, which are indentured servants who are oft kept by increasing debts.
c) Opposing Thrax seems to be a bad idea and only doable politically, and at great risk.
d) Opposing Thrax regarding thralls from within seems to be a problem as well (I have no personal experience, just anecdotes).
e) Most anyone who isn't Thrax is instilled societally with a definitive dislike for the concept of thralldom.

So playing a character who would do something about it as-written, it appears as if you're throttled both whether you want to work in the system to fix it , or outside the system to topple it.

Again, from the point of view of a Thrax player.... PvP is discouraged, but politics are not. We're in a political game! That's kind of the point. You can respond in different ways than stabbing a guy in the eye, you know what I mean?

Now, whether it's a bad idea to oppose one of the Greater Houses is basically a point of view. What I don't understand (and I don't mean that rhetorically, I really don't get it) is thinking there is some great risk, or that it's a problem in some way; what are you referring to?

What I think works, in either case, is to not look at thralldom as a problem to be solved. Perhaps look at it as an opportunity for roleplay instead. In other words don't focus so overly much of these things as obstacles but as props meant to facilitate RP; if they weren't there the game wouldn't be better, it would be poorer, since there would be fewer things to roleplay about.

If anyone within Thrax or otherwise tries to OOC dissuade you from playing, makes threats even in a hah-hah-no-but-really fashion or tries to keep you from participating in scenes - say, by omitting you specifically from meetings you should have had access to - then they are assholes. It's pretty much as simple as that.

My offer stands; if you have any issues whatsoever getting RP with Thrax, talk to me in-game.

I'll add to the last bit, if it matters: While I have in the past, it's been many years since I myself pursued TS, and I don't seek it out (I was pursuing romance, not sex). Further, I can't really imagine any society that prostitution in one form or another wouldn't happen. There's always going to be someone who wants a different sort of sex that they cannot easily find or negotiate for free, and there's always going to be someone willing to sell or trade that.

I will be very frank here: I have tried very hard to say nothing in-game about any of these issues - sexuality, prostitution, language - on any public channels, since it's known to trigger Hellfrog hard. Make of that what you will.

On MSB I have no such issues; it's dumb. It's catering to a specific person's political agenda served through a game. I won't do it on the MU* but it makes no sense to me.

In conclusion: frankly, I'd be happier with a game where there was a flat-out statement: We don't want to touch on human sexuality here because people have many varied and different opinions and expressions thereof, so please don't play here if that's what you want.

To be fair they've basically said that in almost those words.

@yourmamasayswhat said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Reading about the bans and the logs, especially with the former being so, as someone stated 'nuclear' as far as a reaction, my fear is that it's going to make players more afraid of staff than willing to reach out to them, as it has done with me. I'm legit //terrified// of saying //anything// in OOC, be they pages or public channels, that it will be taken the wrong way, presented to staff, and then held against me at some later date, no matter how great my reputation for being a helpful player is.

At some point it's conceivable the only people reaching out to staff are those who're prepared to agree 100% with them, unless this culture changes. Maybe they are satisfied with it - I don't know - but they are shooting themselves in the foot.

They are basically antagonizing their own players.

A recent debate prompted me to create a new tangent to avoid derailing it.

One of the issues plaguing this hobby since its inception has to do with perceived unfairness - usually by staff. Someone succeeds because of favoritism. another is defeated because one person cheated to get ahead.

Even though these types of allegations will likely never go away, it strikes me that one of their underlying causes is that IC failure is often perceived as OOC failure, too. And I wanted to see if - and how - we can do better systemically to better distinguish between the two and ultimately incentivize conflict more than its resolution.

To get things started I don't think we (as a community) can really rely on "people being mature". Some will be, some won't be, but it's a social problem that neither code nor staff can really solve. I wouldn't spend much time debating that - but y'all can, of course.

Perhaps more interestingly though, why is IC failure so bad? Let's see:

• You want an IC position. If you don't get it, you don't get the perks of the position.
• You are in combat. If you don't win your character dies, is maimed, etc so your ability to RP them is similarly hobbled or even removed.
• You strive for an IC ruling that would affect the game's theme. If your side doesn't prevail you are barred from certain RP directions which are no longer on the table.
• Your IC opponent(s) succeed in task(s) which offer them access to perks or RP not available to you.

I expect there are more items this list could include but just as some starting questions:

1. Are any of these issues valid? In other words are these problems to be solved in the first place?
2. Assuming the answer to (1) is 'yes' for any of those items, how would you - systemically, in a game - address them so that the impact of failure is mitigated, and players don't mind losing as much?

Note that I suspect the OOC ego hit will always be there. But there may be steps to be taken to at least soften the blow if not actively reward good IC 'losers' as much as games naturally incentivize 'winners'.

What do you think?

@seraphim73 said in Earning stuff:

I think that works great for the people who play 3 nights a week (which is about what I can manage at my best), but for those people who play 5-6 nights a week? That's somewhere just shy of one crazy-awesome thing each week. That means they're in every plot, which in turn means that one less person can join those plots. These are also that same vocal minority that has to be involved in everything, so if they're asked to sit out a plot or two, it's clearly the most awesome plot ever that they're missing, and they're hated because Staff wanted someone besides them involved and WOOOOOE IS MEEEEE.

That's a very common thing in MUSHing. It's not the exception since it happens often.

Look, it might be the hobby or online gaming online but there are some players who simply get to invest way more time than average into it. And it's only human nature for them to expect a return for that investment even where none is owed.

This leads to all kinds of issues both for them and the game in general. It's why activity has to be one of the first things for staff to cap in terms of rewarding, and I don't simply mean by limiting XP, else it will get out of hand. Fast.

@thenomain said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

(eta: Admin, consider this another request from me to move the Hog Pit back into the Hog Pit. Thanks.)

We'll do better than that, soon.

In the mean time I'll lock this one. It started out pretty promising and I enjoyed participating in the discussion, so I'd rather it didn't degrade any further into Hog Pit bait. We surely have enough threads where people can prove they can be assholes to each other.

@misadventure said in Make MSB great again!:

A wiki to store the same old fight summaries, played by lists, MU* lists.

Who would write the summaries? Would it be objective? Does it work for late comers who might want to debate things others happen to have seen before?

A link off any advertisement to a thread where people can go wild. I'd like to be able to find both the ad content and updates with ease, and make it easy to find the discussion about the given ad poster or place.

Alright, how about this then: Please feel free to create offshoots of advertisement threads in the Constrictive and/or Hogpit sections, and I'll edit the original posts as needed to include those links so it's easy to jump back and forth. That way you can choose the level of content you want:

• The advertisement thread is just 101 'what is this game about' with rather basic information primarily aimed to hype a MU* up, which I'll frown at anyone being more than slightly critical of,
• The Constructive thread where suggestions are meant to be made, and where you can be as critical as you want as long as you attack ideas and not people,
• The Hogpit thread where the gloves can come off.

Does that work?

A reminder that phrasing things in the form of accusations, and not questions pretty much guarantees that your discussion is going no where.

Although that's possible, at some point it'll become condescending as fuck.

@faraday That's what I mean. Sheets, to me, mean numbers and not backgrounds.

Sometimes I write here about being able to tell when a game is a labor of love, and not just something put together for its own sake.

The Eighth Sea, from what I've seen and discussed so far, is a labor of love.

The Rules Of Engagement

The Mildly Constructive section of the forum is meant for meaningful discussion on any given topic. Conversation, even while critical, ought to remain civil and personal insults must be avoided.

You can call out an idea for being stupid, but not the person who came up with it. Do not make this personal.

Please feel free to flag any posts which violate this principle or to call out posters who violate it.

@thenomain Also if you are making any kind of profit from Blizzard's copyrights, you are not likely to have a very good time in the near future.

@demiurge said in Dreamwalk MUSH:

However, are inappropriate sexual fantasies the proper limit for a stream of consciousness Jungian cacophony? People are into some bizarre shit, man.

The answer is entirely yours since this is your game. What you should consider though is that if this is allowed you can expect it to take over, or make a pretty good attempt at it, and then you will find out exactly what kind of bizarre shit some people are into.

This can have no effect on your game, or it can turn anyone who's not as eager to participate in a 24/7 sexual orgy away from it, or it can draw players because of it. Either way it's your call to say what's inappropriate and what isn't.

A collective unconscious, minus potentially upsetting content, isn't really an unconscious. To me, it cheapens it, quite a bit. I don't want to go to your game, and break your rules, but I'm not inclined to impose these rules right now myself.

Then don't. You have the power! ... You also get to deal with the fallout.

As for your personal recourse, you can CHANNEL/MUTE COL to make it go away. Is that helpful?

That's probably the worst approach you can take for any public medium on your game. It takes all of the responsibility away from predators ("you can turn it off if you don't want to hear it!") and places it squarely on those they creep out. But which kind of player would you rather came to play and stayed?

Am I the only person here who thinks that in the context of a game like this, being a goddamn dirty mutie overrides pretty much anything regarding their sexual orientation, race, etc?

They are already freaking out about you existing at all, you abomination. They fear and hate you. What more can they do if you're also fucking the wrong gender?