@misadventure One third of this place's administration is handled robotically, so.
Best posts made by Arkandel
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RE: Regarding administration on MSB
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RE: Welcome to Fallen World MUX!
@Warma-Sheen said in Welcome to Fallen World MUX!:
Seems like that place is already fading and people are already moving on to Reno, the new hotness, staff included.
Same as always. New game opens, players flow from one container to the other hoping for more activity, new fresh roles, etc. Also two spheres are more than one so it covers more niche interests while Mage's more complex mechanics aren't a hit with everyone.
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RE: Celebrities that are Dead To Us
@saosmash said in Celebrities that are Dead To Us:
Franken really bums me out too. I'm so bummed. And George Takei?! I'm really et tu brute about all this.
My understanding is nothing's been proven and Takei has vehemently denied it. I still expect to see more than an accusation before I cross someone off my list.
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RE: [Request] Policy Template
@faraday said in [Request] Policy Template:
I think lightweight policies are best.
There's an additional advantage in those, too, in that players are less likely to play rules lawyer with them and try to discover clever (?) loopholes.
"Oh yeah, I did play an underage character but you said 'with a birthdate more recent than' and my PC was actually born a century ago so we're good!"
Keep it simple, short and flexible.
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Staff and ethics
We often discuss staff ethics here in their most negative interpretation - some might even say we discuss the absence of staff ethics more than what they actually are. So let's do that, maybe.
So... putting aside gross violations of trust - harboring abuse, cheating for themselves or on behalf of personal friends, etc - what would you consider to be the foundation of a somewhat universal good staff code?
Just to get us started (this list is not supposed to be exhaustive or even correct) some potential items:
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'Professional' behavior; this can include language, tone, spelling, etc. Is it better for staff to be aloof or to be on the same level with/chat with their players?
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Activity levels. Is a staff member doing what they are supposed to do? What are they supposed to do and how well/frequently? What's a good standard?
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Communication, following up on promises. How much transparency is a good thing? In discipline cases how much should be revealed about what happened (or the reasons nothing did)?
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Playing their own game; staff not playing alts or revealing their names, or not permitting those PCs to attain important positions.
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Protecting 'appearances' by not ruling on issues close to them (friends are involved, etc); what happens in small games, or if the staff is small and everyone is involved with everyone else? What are the limits?
Discuss. And by all that is holy remember this is a constructive thread.
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RE: Shadows over Reno
@Ganymede is a coterie-mate for thiiis guy --> http://reno.mechanipus.com/wiki/Richter .
But yeah, if you're sane and can pose let's have us a chat.
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RE: RL peeves! >< @$!#
@Silver Air is the worst. It's a drug, you start taking it and then you, like, can't stop. And if you do stop? You DIE. Horrible stuff. Would not recommend again.
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RE: Tracking Alts on Dynamic IPs
@surreality Oh, that can work, sure.
My ideal solution is still to not need to worry about how many alts someone's playing.
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RE: Staff and ethics
@faceless Although you are correct in that "don't be an asshole" is generic enough to mean different things to different people, I hardly think anyone believes harassing players (for example) doesn't fall into that category. In fact in several threads we've seen perpetrators are usually either unaware what they were doing was unwelcome or they admit doing so right away.
There are three things I don't like about more concise sets of rules:
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They tend to be very TL;DR-y. Like they'll span two pages of thickly written text, trying to include all kinds of clauses and exceptions... and no one is gonna read this stuff. Actual assholes don't need to go over several paragraphs to check if "spamming every female player pushing for TS" is against the rules, they already know, and the average player already barely reads room descriptions or even poses as it is, so expecting them to read a contract-like wall of text... it won't happen. So who is it for?
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They tend (in my experience) to invite rules lawyering trying to wiggle through the cracks. "Hey, I know that policy says our characters can't engage in rape but it wasn't my character, he was possessed see?". In these cases staff will resort to tell them to cut the bullshit anyway, so... why not go to that to begin with? We can't possibly pre-emptively think of every scenario someone will try to be a jerk.
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Unlike RL laws, policies protect no one. Staff has complete authority in every case whether they exercise it or not. Essentially every case comes down to staff using their judgment. I can't think of a single scenario where staff should do nothing to correct someone they believe did something bad because 'technically' he didn't according to the current policy.
The advantage of having rules though - for me - is that it lets me see what staff's vision for their game is. That's the main one. "Don't be an asshole" tells me nothing.
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RE: Looking for Staff - Firenze: Trionfo della Morte
@Sunny You know what I want? I want ctrl-f to work in real life, that's what I want.
The number of times I'm looking for something in the house when it's right in front of my eyes and I don't see it is astounding.
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RE: RL Anger
I won't ever comment on someone else's eating habits unless I'm asked... so why are you asking me, coworker? Why come over and tell me you want to lose weight until mid-January, starting last month, and then on a daily basis tell me you're still not losing any when I can see you grabbing muffins and 'energy bars' from the company-provided stuff throughout the day?
I've given him links to FAQs, explained the basics of calories in/calories out, I even went ahead and - when asked - gave him an idea of what he could eat to reduce his carbs intake and still feel full. I don't care if he does any of that or not as it's none of my business, but what can I possibly say back the 10th time he complains his weight is still not going down other than repeating myself?
I know he just wants to vent, but I'm really bad at listening to problems yet not trying to talk about solutions.
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RE: Searching for Star Wars RPI
@ThatGuyThere Don't you fucking encourage @Misadventure.
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RE: Staff and ethics
@faceless said in Staff and ethics:
Now someone gets banned because their character was being a creep? I mean, some people play creep characters. Do you think Ramsay Bolton would have been as interesting a character if he wasn't so terrible? People play characters in MUing all the time that use their genitals to get what they want; male and female alike. These are fictional characters. Sometimes they aren't the best of people. Sometimes they're simply flawed people.
Just as a clarification on my end... you'll get different opinions on this (and already have ) but as far as I'm concerned as long as every player involved in a RP is a fully consenting adult and it's all done behind closed doors I don't give a shit what happens to/with their characters.
When I'm referring to creeps I specifically mean creepy players. That means no springing stuff on people, guilt-tripping them into it, pushing and nagging until they give in or... well, anything of that sort. If both people are into it, go for it.
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RE: Eldritch - A World of Darkness MUX
@Admiral said:
I haven't read Harry Potter. Also I don't like Lord of the Rings.
Wh... what? What?
All that means is I don't like
badliterature.I FIXED THAT FOR YOU.
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RE: Good or New Movies Review
@kanye-qwest said in Good or New Movies Review:
@auspice Gotta confess, this trailer was p boring. I'm concerned about this movie because it's SO MANY characters. I'll see it. But so far, so meh.
GASP how dare you. I got chills.
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RE: Searching for Star Wars RPI
@Ganymede Speaking as a new Star Wars player who's familiar with the movies and has watched Clone Wars (I need to watch Rebels...) along with a couple of books back in the day, but is in no way an expert in the SW universe, what makes or breaks a MU* - as usual, I guess - isn't the mechanics.
I mean sure, it's important that you can roll at least the archtypes and that there's leeway to do each differently but really what it comes down to is what will I be able to do? What kinds of things are there to do after I roll? Sure, I got a blaster/saber/X-Wing but now what? How much help is there by staff, is the player culture a positive experience, how often are events ran, are there things happening?
In DoD's case I've been talking to some of their oldbies and at least one expressed reservations about SAGA in particular just because of its complexity - it intimidates newbies, and she's seen people be overwhelmed and leave because of it. I suppose I can relate to that since even if you get great help to build your PC (and they're excellent about it) it takes a bit from your agency as a player, and it still means you probably don't know how to play it or what you can do with it in regular scenes ("how do I try to tell if someone's lying?").
A macro-effect might also mean that those more adept with a system are the ones to rise in IC power which aren't necessarily the best roleplayers. I am in no way going to imply a correlation/causation link here (many people are excellent at both mechanics and posing) but it's still something to consider. With a simplistic system like WoD that's not as much of an issue since the gap between the filthy casuals and the dice doctors isn't as deep.
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RE: Questionably viable character types and tropes (tangent from staff ethics convo)
@ixokai First of all you make sure whether this archetype belongs on your game or not. I don't mean ethically, I mean thematically.
If you are running a game about survival cooperative horror then you can warn players in advance there's probably little room for political manipulators who pull strings; it's just not the MU* you are trying to run.
If you're also running a game like L&L or WoD you need to know there's gonna be a lot of IC questionable stuff you'll never hear about, whether you are trying to police it or not. Two (or more ) people are gonna be behind locked doors getting their kinks on either way, which is quite unavoidable unless you spend all of your time snooping into everyone's RP.
What you want is a concrete plan of how to deal with things after they go bad. Which they also will. Someone will be an asshat as a player as well as a character and push for more than he should, someone will find themselves crossing the line between OOC consent and "wtf, I never agreed to this" during a scene, or drama will rear its head in all sorts of ways. In some cases it might be no one's fault, or it could even be the player in question is doing everything right but pissed someone else off who's raising a stink.
It's that part - the plan - that matters. How you deal with it after it hits the fan, because it will no matter what you do.
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RE: Eldritch - A World of Darkness MUX
@Coin Well, to be fair, neither does your face.
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RE: Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.
Contact lenses sometimes feel icky and irritate my eyes. My monthlies were fine yesterday and they may be fine tomorrow, but today they're sandpaper on my eyeballs.
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RE: Searching for Star Wars RPI
@Seraphim73 said in Searching for Star Wars RPI:
@Arkandel There's also the issue with any game that's lasted more than a couple of years where people gain positions of power simply by outlasting their contemporaries. This is particularly true in GoD/DoD's case, as there was a wave of departures (in fact, DoD could be seen as one of them) that drained a lot of the upper levels of power away.
That's pretty much the case for any MU* I've ever been in; people drop out and others take their place. While it has effects of its own (say, in Vampire the upper echelons of power are typically supposed to be static as opposed to the PC Prince changing every 3 months because their player burned out) it's probably impossible to avoid unless you use NPCs for those positions.
Look at it as a circle of life. The old give way to the new. It's not necessarily a bad thing, other than that you miss your friends after they move on.