When you tell potential players that they can't talk about being women or queer or trans or people of color, you are telling those people they aren't welcome.
A simple 'Be polite and kind to one another' covers not calling each others nazis or freaks.
So I actually played for the first time in over a year today. And it was fine. I have so much dust I have to shake off, but I'll get there.
Also, it was wonderful to pitch my weird concept, get instant support for it and make it on the grid in under a day. Which is basically the exact opposite of the last ten or so games I played before I stopped mushing for a very long time. No arbitrary hoops, no 'exactly the same thing you said, but rephrase it to the way I like to say it', no 'Well, you can play that if you want but....' side-eye.
It's almost like people are running a game they want other people to play or something. Revolutionary concept in MUSHing, that.
I am grateful for people's thoughts and not trying to be consciously uncharitable. What gives me pause about rules like 'no controversial topics mentioned ever' is my real world experience dealing with that idea and tabletop gamers specifically.
The majority is almost never encumbered by rules like that. Everybody else, however, can be.
I want to extend good faith and a strong welcoming vibe to everybody. But I don't want to do that at the expense of having some people think they have to hide or put up with low grade aggression and/or bigotry to make 'socially conservative' people comfortable.
If we're applying the living room, well, this MUSH will be the living room of a gay dude who isn't at all neutral on the idea of making that space welcoming for everybody of good will and good faith.
I'm a gay dude who plays dudes who are gay. Mainly because I don't want to be the kind of player who puts up bad stereotypes as characterization. I have tried playing straight characters, like 99 percent of FCs I like on comic book games, but within a few hours of making those characters, they get hit on hard, OOCly and ICly, by folks with female characters, usually with enough persistence and a creepy enough vibe that I just slide right out of there and find excuses not to log back in.
On the topic, yeah bi-erasure is kind of a thing, in this hobby. But I feel like we're a long, long way further down the road than we were when people were writing public screeds about how gay werewolves ruined their games. (That's right, there was butt stuff on your MU*, lady. I hope it still keeps you up at night.)
As a player, the only time I have a problem with app rejections is when they feel just arbitrary, rather than actually serving a purpose.
More than one MU I've been on has had a lot of 'unstated rules' about their applications that end up being endlessly frustrating. Stuff like, 'Hey, you compared your character's attributes to existing characters in the fiction that are literally used as attribute benchmarks IN THE FICTION, we don't allow that. And no, we didn't tell you that ahead of time. Rewrite everything.'
Or 'Um, I personally don't like character type X and think it's overdone. No, it's not on the banned or restricted list, I just feel like I need to make a stand on YOUR app, as opposed to anybody else's. And no we don't need to update the banned or restricted policies, I'm just talking to you.'
Or 'Your character is a little too political.' With 'political' being a euphemism for 'character type based on a group that makes me uncomfortable in real life'. In a modern game. (Note, I'm not talking about making a Nazi character here, just somebody who was a mutant rights activist, on a game about Marvel mutants.)
When the rejection makes sense and doesn't feel arbitrary, I'm fine with it. But with no offense intended to staffers out there, sometimes people get very, very micro-managerial about other people's creative process.
@mietze There was one. You might say it suffered a Fatality.
Nothing like some ball-battered shrimp, if you know what I mean.
And I'm not entirely sure I do.
10-15 years ago, this hobby had a problem with queer people.
Trans characters rarely, if ever, existed. Lesbians and bisexual women were usually played by very thirsty old men and gay or bi men were usually played as magical sparkle twinks by thirsty middle-aged women.
Queer characters played by actual queer players sometimes got some serious pushback for existing. I remember the 'my MU was invaded by gays!' complaints for a couple of different places, back in the day. And I remember my reaction was, 'Bitch, if you don't want queer guys, don't make a game based on a queer-friendly (for the time) show!'
These days, it's a hell of a lot better. I mean, there are still a lot of people who can't/won't get laid fetishizing queer people. But there are a lot of us playing people like us and not getting any flack for it. Which is nice. Other than the occasional bigoted 'But, but having visible gay people breaks immersion on my game about historical faeries and vampires', it's all good these days.
Eh, I just assume that everything I type on the Internet is being monitored by somebody, somewhere, sometime, even if it is some poor bastard at a data collection center getting called in for a manual check of my communications because as a gamer, I talk about stuff that no doubt makes several NSA algorithms twitch.
If I were truly worried about staff watching me digitally bump and grind, I'd just make sure to make it a more uncomfortable experience for them, than me.
"Okay, in this sandbox sex scene, we're going to be Cthulhoid merfolk, working our way through the Cephalopod Sutra. But I'm going to narrate in the voice of Bob Ross. Annnd go!"
Trade Wars 2002 with semi-automated systems for trade would make a hell of a fun MU. There was a lot of hidden depth in that silly old BBS door game about being a free trader.
Can I play a struggling writer who works for pennies and is cousin to an existing character?
Cut-Me-Own-Throat Scribbler, the best/worst gossip columnist and semi-investigative* reporter in Ankh-Morpork.
*Which is to say, he'd investigate until somebody made pointed comments about how hard it is to run around asking questions with broken knees, at which point, he'd just kind of wing it.
I agree with the points about coded travel systems putting arbitrary and silly limits on player engagement. Few people have the time to wait around and do random RP until they are allowed to actually do something meaningful, plot or character-wise, these days.
But one point I haven't see addressed is that those systems don't even do a good job of emulating the genres and franchises most people want to play with. Travel in most novels and all TV shows and movies happens at exactly the speed of plot. Which is to say that if the writers need it to take a while it does and if they don't, it doesn't.
When you start adding layers of complexity to a setting that is REALLY sketchy in the way even the source material handles travel, like Firefly or Star Trek, you're not just missing the point of the narrative structure of those shows, you're wandering away from genre fidelity.
It's kind of like report RP in Star Trek games. Sure, in real life, Starfleet officers are up to their oh-so-toned unitard-clad asses in electronic paperwork. But in terms of an actual episode, that's not a thing unless the plot needs to be a thing.
@Joyeuse said in MU*, Youth, and LGBT+ Identity:
Good golly. Some people have been at this longer than I've been alive
Eh, experience is lovely, but talent and enthusiasm are more important in RP. And reliability. And sanity. And ... a lot of things, come to think of it. 
Honestly, in a setting with people who turn into wolves, vampires (other than Peter Thiel, who apparently believes he can become immortal off the blood of twinks), Mages and baristas or coders who all like movie stars and models, Depp the mayor doesn't even put a blip on the radar for me.
Maybe he made a deal with a demon or something.
Actually, that would kind of explain his career in real life, come to think of it.
No, what's going to stretch my belief, if I ever play there, will be apartments or houses where just one person can afford to pay the rent.
I, for one, welcome our Radmoose and Robo-Mountie overlords.
I just want to play a morally agnostic tailor who is thrilled at having undead clients because he can do truly exquisite tailoring for people who don't need to breathe.
@magee101 said in Gamifying Plots:
@bad-at-lurking said in Gamifying Plots:
I'd love to have that kind of time, but MUing is not a job and I'm fairly sure that if I stopped feeding him, my dog would eventually eat me.
Just to put some perspective. As a Player ST fairly reliably for two years straight, I keep up a househild, raised my daughter, and still found time to run 1-2 scenes per day for people, either private or on grid. Yeah I didnt have a job I was the stay at home parent but keeping a kid alive and happy and learnung and keeping the house up aint a vacation either. It all depends on your passion.
With all due respect, just because you have done that doesn't make it a reasonable expectation for others. I know myself and I know that if I don't keep running a game in a healthy balance with the rest of my life, I'll burn out on it. I think it is unreasonable for any of us to decide we know what that healthy balance is for anybody else.
(It's surprising how many times I had to ediit that so it doesn't sound like I'm being judgemental or combative. If I didn't succeed, please believe that it isn't intended to be either.)
@SerenityMush said in SerenityMUSH - Discussion:
Full disclosure - we don't have full admin powers on the game yet, so we're limited in what we can do.
Aaaand that's a huge warning sign for me, right there. You seem to have the best intentions in the world and I respect that. But until you are paying for the server and in possession of the code and database, all the good intentions in the world don't count for much.
It would be the easiest thing in the world for the previous management to let you rebuild a player base and then take over again.