This forum's sole purpose was to bring the community together. It was the only thing that made it different from any other number of game-specific boards, Discord servers, etc.
A lot of effort is now going instead into who is right ("we") and who is wrong ("they"). Even much of the cross-pollination aims to do just that, or searches for some sense of closure that's definitely not forthcoming.
@Devrex said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:
The ones who hate us now have every opportunity and tool to go hate us over there. We're not bothering you.
Who is being hated, by whom, or why?
I read and post on both forums. Am I with 'us' or 'them'? Who hates me?
@Seraphim73 is a goddamn (*) Whitecloak, is what he is.
(*) Bloody, I mean.
@Too-Old-For-This I appreciate the subtle correction on Steve's last name.
I will surrender my nerdcard on the walk of shame out of here.
@Seraphim73 said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:
@Tirit said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:
While I understand and concur with most of your responses, doesn't this sounds a little bit witch hunty?
Without some due diligence on the part of staffers, yes it can become something used against "good" players. But like @Arkandel said, it's better than the alternative, of letting problem players lurk in the community, waiting to harm other players and drive them away.
Also I think that's a bit of a strawman argument.
Although now and then things get exaggerated ("you're as bad as <X>!") it's rare for witchhunts to get anywhere near that level.
For the game-killing folks, there's a hall of infamy that mere besmirching by even a few folks from a clique cannot induct false targets into. Those people are a shit-class of their own, and have the track record to prove it.
I'm surprised The Gray Man got lukewarm reviews. I quite enjoyed it.
I wonder for how long Chris Evans will play villains from now on, to counter Steve Rodgers. 
@Tirit Possibly. And yet it still beats the alternative.
Something to keep in mind here is that the MU* community at large, as hard as it is to accurately count its members, is certainly in the range of several hundred players. The number of creeps among us, going back years, is vanishingly small in comparison; under 10, possibly half that.
And still their impact on games has been absolutely massive. Entire MU* were completely derailed off their course trying to compensate for their negative impact. Many affected people stopped playing either on those specific MU* or even in general.
You can't coddle that behavior. You can't allow it to take roots. It will be a major net negative if you do, whether you mean well or not.
@Warma-Sheen said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:
I'm probably repeating myself more than a few times over the last couple weeks, but it isn't just "playing a game" to many people. It is so many things to so many different people.
Here's the thing though. It is a game. It's what people sign up for, unless it's explicitly stated otherwise.
For example if I go to a soccer game, I expect to watch teams kick a ball around. If the person next to me is enraged and wants to use that as an opportunity to scream profanities or bash my head in that's only 'on me' to the extent that I should be aware such things may happen. He's still wrong.
@Tirit said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:
One of the most, paranoid things that I worried about openning my own place is the sheer amount of drama that floats around the community. I think since our community tends to be great story tellers we are also capable of being dramatic... it's the double edged sword. People take things wrong, or too serious, or various other things. Instead of just playing a game. Maybe because it is all text based we miss on those subtilty that are expressed in tone of voice.
You can fix systems, mechanics, rules, policies and processes.
You can't fix people.
The problem isn't in the medium itself. Sure, anonymity and the lack of personal accountability doesn't help.
@faraday said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:
Which honestly makes me sad, because I don't think the MUSH community is big enough to sustain two separate discussion forums
Unfortunately neither group seems to see this. Both are entrenched very much into the "we are right" argument, which is itself the problem. If there's a we there is also a they.
Community forums can't work like that. They mustn't. The only 'they' must be the true undesirables; predators, trolls, racists. That's it.
I guess it's likely the problem will fix itself. Either way, yeah, it's sad.
@reimesu Hey, the party had been dead for like 7 years in this thread.
Do you care to give a quick synopsis of what the book is about or why you liked it?
@Derp I had some "Forbidden" errors pop up when I tried to submit posts in multiple threads (including in 'Readers' and 'Mildly Constructive').
When I refreshed the tab a few times and pasted the same post a few more, it finally let the post go through.
Rise from the grave, thread!
Some good books I've read lately:
Iron Prince, by Bryce O'Connor. Sci-fi, progression fantasy, fun dialogue, light romance. If you like 'military school' settings this works pretty nicely.
The Hedge Wizard by Alex Maher. Just about as close to D&D a book can be without being published by WotC, with some mature dialogue (F-bombs, nothing extreme) and just a touch of grimdark fantasy. A lowly wizard in search for money to pay the bills enters a party to enter a dungeon. Fun, diverse and interesting characters made it a good read for me. I enjoyed the magic system, and its 'dungeons' setup could make for an intriguing MUSH setting!
@hobos said in Wish Fulfillment RP:
Thought this was really insightful. I definitely notice people reacting with OOC unhappiness rather than IC play sometimes when their concept is challenged by another's IC play. I do find it a problem but it's also human nature and seems to happen whether or not wish fulfillment is involved. Here's an example: a player is trying to roleplay a benevolent mafia boss named Ruff Dooley.
Yes. My (quite real, albeit from a few years ago) example of this was when a friend rolled a chef in a World of Darkness game... and an existing PC's player who also happened to be a chef complained to staff about it. There can be only one. This was in a game set in freakin' New York, too.
@devrex said in Wish Fulfillment RP:
In a tabletop, if Player A takes a wizard you don't take the wizard, you take the cleric or the rogue or the fighter. It's the same impulse that has people asking "what does the game need?"
Also yes. This comes from a place of social insecurity. "If I just play <X> people will want to hang out with me". Of course that's a fallacy; it's nearly never the concept that matters, it's how they are played. How fun you, the player, are is an infinitely bigger draw than what's on your sheet.
That all said, there is *still nothing wrong with wish fulfillment. Play that elegant, sexy, deadly Fae assassin whose parents were murdered by vampire mobsters and grew up being trained by ninjas. Fucking go for it, why the hell not? Just... don't begrudge anyone else for being special, too, or compare their flavor of 'special' to yours, and it'll all work out in the end.
Posts like this shit.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/thor-love-thunder-mind-blowing-185800902.html
(Please don't read if you haven't watched Thor: Love and Thunder yet as it may contain spoilers)
But basically clickbait posts claiming revelations and HUGE THINGS WE ALL MISSED then when you read the article it's either pure speculation or absolutely nothing but noise. For instance in the URL above the 'mind blowing' thing isn't in the movie in any form.
I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to play something that's better than RL us.
In fact I am pretty sure if that factor was taken out then the RPG genre in general would be in deep trouble.
The issue comes when it's not about playing something better than we are, but playing something better than others are. That's when shit starts to hit the fan, since you now have multiple people all wanting to be the best - the most powerful, coolest, sexiest.
The funny thing is writers subvert this very well. It's actually a very common in-joke among authors about how their favorite characters are the ones they torture the most. Similarly actors subvert it really well too; they welcome a chance to play tormented, anguished characters rather than wholesome, successful, morally upstanding ones. Look at Chris Hemsworth; while Thor was a vanilla hero (up to Thor 2) he was getting really bored with it.
But roleplayers are different. A lot of us want the wish fulfillment of not being better than our real-life selves but also in comparison to others. I can't tell you why, but I suspect it's the root of our issues here.
@faraday said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:
I'm a fan of cooperative games, but cooperation != consent. I think it's fine to encourage players to work out a mutually agreeable solution, but there has to be some kind of fallback for the cases where they don't agree.
I think this is an unfortunate side-effect of accounting for assholes.
Consent is basically cooperation with asshole-insurance built in.
Which of course has side-effects of his own.
@faraday It goes well beyond the scope of this thread, but I think a fundamental mistake many game-runners make is that despite of the amount of work and thought they put into all sorts of (quite important) things - the code, the setting and its history, the wiki, etc - they spend relatively little time considering basic questions.
"Set this WoD game in New York or a little town in Maine?" Weeks' worth of fierce debates.
"What are the implications of making feature characters playable?" Eh, I'm sure it'll be okay.
@mietze And similarly it's not even just failure.
What about the person who's all over a plot, has done a lot of the ground work, has participated in scenes about it both while PrPs were still running and through 'regular' RP... and when the final scene is scheduled they don't get to join in? Either because there are too many participants or something as mundane as RL schedules getting in the way.
It's perfectly legitimate to feel disappointment. That's the equivalent of watching your favorite show until the last episode, but you can't watch that. All you can do is read a review about it afterwards.
@faraday said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:
@arkandel said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:
The way I see it the problem we are really trying to solve here is that, unlike table-top or video games, on a MU* there is limited access to desired venues, achievements or outcomes.
There can be, sure, but there doesn't need to be. Even if your game has that setup, I would argue that the way you'd solve a problem like "when you die your OOC name changes and you lose social connections" is very different to how you might solve "access to structured plots varied".
I agree, but if this problem had a straight-forward solution - or even if there was a single approach that 'solves' it, no matter how complex it was to implement - I suspect it'd have been a non-issue already.
Getting players to accept or even welcome negative IC outcomes as part of the narrative is difficult.
Again just from reading this thread if I would insist on one approach to not take, though, is to not accept 'hopes and prayers' as a valid strategy. Any of the following for example:
are not really helpful. Of course that's what we want, but there's no real way to design a game around it.
However swiss cheese model approaches can absolutely apply. For example while still building a game ask some questions:
And so on.