@Darinelle I owe you a massive apology for my post the other day. I took anger and venting and let it get under my skin and instead of directing it back at the source I chose the worst possible path which was to vomit it forth on someone entirely undeserving of such things.
What could have been constructive communication and bridging collaboration was instead tainted and made toxic by my own words.
You most certainly did not deserve that.
I am sorry.
@ganymede said in Unlikeable, incompetent, and inactive: Can these characters work in an MU?:
Iām pretty sure that I have made a career of playing dislikable PCs.
Yet somehow people fall in love with them.
Guess Iām just Pop-U-Lerr.
So popular you posted it twice. 
Comfort foods:
Homemade potato leek soup.
Pillsbury croissant dough set in muffin tins and wrapped around prosciutto and chunks of swiss, then baked.
Infinity Room is on Netflix and scratched so many itches in my mind that I literally shut the tv off, and went straight to bed, content with the world. Which for those who know me, is actually a pretty amazing feat.
No spoilers. 
@Derp said:
@Biggles
Removing a character from territory through non-final measures is fine. Staff killing a character simply because it seems expedient is clearly not.
I disagree.
I suppose that's the easiest way to say it. Regardless of how your character is removed from the game, they're removed, in some cases, killing is the best option. I'm not sure when people started to lose all respect for other players. You in your own words said people have a set of expectations, one of mine is that people are going to be up front with their absences. That way you know /not/ to count on them if they're going to disappear in the middle of a plot. What you seem to be missing completely is that this is entirely about OOC respect for your other players and staffers. If you cannot give anyone a head's up as to being gone for a period, why on earth should you expect some sort of, 'Oh we'll put the mush on hold till you get back and then we'll pick up where you left off.'
The problem is that you are assuming Kingsmouth is another TR, or another HM, where people can exist in a vacuum apart from everyone else. That doesn't happen on this mush, or other mushes like it. Everyone gets to know everyone and everyone is involved with things, unless they're a Civilian player, in which case they're in the background, most likely getting their feet wet, but truly missing out on all that the game has to offer.
I respect Coin's post and admit he makes a valid point. It should be more clearly stated that absent characters can be killed off. That said, I've still yet to hear of a non-Political player who has been killed off without their consent/recommendation. I have heard of people skirting the lines between Political and at the time 'Support' and Civilian, but so far I've only seen good responses from the rest of the crew, be it staff/players in response to ensuring said rule-benders smarten up.
The game is 'smallish' I think 150ish users, with an average activity of 50ish people on at most times barring these early times right now. So yes, characters get involved quickly and encouraged to join plots, that's one thing I have to say for it, there's plots... lots and lots of plots. First day on grid, I was introduced to three completely separate, long running plots, and a host of smaller ones that involved all sorts of crafty responses to get them completed. The system is designed to encourage people to be active and to participate. Which I think it does well, as for the issue at hand, I will speak with staff to get them to clear up that caveat, if no one else here has done so already.
I am not sure why Kingsmouth was singled out for being supposedly 'low' for their way of handling inactive players. I've staffed several mushes now that simply kill off any character that idles out. They're given a one week warning, then bam, gone. The best a player could do was set a vacation tag on themselves and it would save them from the auto destroyer.
Some stories and some games are so tight knit and moving, that having someone coming in and then leaving and then coming in, disrupts play for everyone involved. If your character holds responsibility for a territory, but isn't around for several weeks, well that territory can sit idle, or can be holding up the dozen or so requests to attack/terrorize/subvert/patrol/investigate/etc. As such, you're being a prick for not telling anyone you were idle, you're wasting everyone's time and character death is a perfectly valid reason for you to be gone. You don't get to come back with that sort of selfish behavior.
Now if you're just a Civilian character minding their own business, not attached to anything, well... I can't say that I've seen one of them killed off yet. Feel free to enlighten me if one has been, but as far as I can recall not one has been, that hadn't requested it, which I'm going to say is just blatant fear-mongering on your part at this time.
Yes this game is very involved, yes it has a lot of people working for and against each other. You don't have to get involved in that at all, but if you choose to, realize that it is what it is, and it may not be for you, so that is fine. It is why we don't just have one mush/mud/MMORPG. Different strokes for different folks.
Who are you?
No, I kid, but seriously, idiots will whine regardless of sphere they're in. That being said, Vampires are totally the weakest sphere... Why won't B&S be applied already? Seriously?! (No really, why? It makes vampires last a little longer. 
)
@HelloRaptor
A friend played a sleepwalker, she was OOC'ly talking with a Vampire in a room on grid, they both logged off an hour later. Jeurg saw them in a room with +who/where then invited the sleepwalked over for RP and melted her mind to the point of unplayability because he had seen the player in a room with a vampire. This eventually was retconned and was the tipping point that had Jeurg thrown from the mush, but that should at least give you an idea as to how he was.
Leka was another ball of something not entirely pleasant. I actually have nothing bad to say about her with my own dealings with her. If anything there was some great RP and some great, dark hooks that made for a really cool encounter. Then again, I was playing my Vampire smart and he turned down a lot of 'Changeling gifts' because he could see the barbs in the contracts. Others did not and they paid the price.
There were other people on that mush that were worse in some regards, so I don't know what else to say. <Edit: Removed the Ernst portion after further debate. ;)>
That being said, there were numerous Changelings and Mages on the same mush that were equally idiots, don't assume that vampire is the only sphere that idiots flock to. They're everywhere, anywhere, you're surrounded by idiots, and if you're not, chances are you're the idiot... (paranoia.) Many changelings were killed, mages as well, and a couple werewolves because they were played by idiot players who did really stupid things... One changeling walked into a bar where one vampire was sitting, surrounded by mortals, having a good social bar scene (HM=BarRP) and started shouting out stuff about vampires and wanting to meet a vampire and wanting to know what sort of Clans there were and factions and the like. Naming specific people, etc etc. Loudly so that you know my vampire would overhear, and rush to her to tell her all his vampire secrets... Yeah no. She died two days later, and Changelings didn't bat an eye.
Idiots everywhere.
You think your character is cool? My character is a fucking
considerate Human Monk from a haberdashery who prefers to fight drunk.
I have played this character.
@surreality said:
Sometimes, there's not a lot you can effectively do. Sometimes, 'run away' is a real option! It's entirely valid. It adds story to the scene if nothing else, and while some folks won't enjoy that, others will.
This needed to be bold for emphasis. A friend and I just joined a new mush, and the intro scene consisted of us helping an already established player run away. They weren't combat oriented, and they chose to run away as the only sane thing their character could do. But they were crippled and it was more of a hobble, which then turned the scene into a beautiful chase/run to save your lives and theirs and it turned into one of the most exciting and enjoyable scenes I've done in a long time.
So yes, even running away can be awesome!
@surreality said:
Even things like crafters for mystical objects? The 'best' or most potent sources of power for them, thematically, in WoD are all tied to violence and negativity, even if it doesn't necessarily make sense for the object itself. (Not all objects are weapons, after all -- you're going to get a magic healing widget powered up in theme faster from some relatively mundane horror show than you are from the surgeon's kit that saved thousands of lives in a crisis.) It's a built-in bit of conceptual railroading, from my perspective, in ways 'it's a dark world' doesn't cover well enough to pass a laugh test; one would imagine that the most powerful lights in a dark world would have equal strength (if not greater, being so rare) but thematically, they do not and cannot.
I am going to disagree, not because you're wrong, because I do indeed believe that a lot of ST's and Staff will railroad people into combat plots because they're 'easier' to evaluate and plan for.
Plus, a combat scene is probably one of the easiest things one can run from an ST point of view. I won't name names, but there is one person on TR that runs nothing but combat scenes, often these scenes end up being a page or two long, and they do this because it is a quick way to net themselves 2xp a pop. But that's a whole other kettle of fish.
But where I disagree is that it doesn't have to be that way. My argument would be, you're running with what TR has created as the status quo, for PrP's. There are plenty of other ways one can advance, gain an item, explore, solve puzzles, etc. The ST just has to be more involved. To be honest, if tomorrow TR said, no more XP for combat scenes, you may find that the shift would happen naturally.
Or all PrP's would ceases to exist... one or the other.
Some things should be open to all, some not... If you're not allowed to know your accuser, there should never be more than just a sternly worded page to you. That being said, I can see an argument for keeping identities secret. I just had the pleasure of having a 'Dominant Alpha Male' as he called himself, thrown from a mush because he was trolling every female characterbit (assuming said person was a female IRL) to become a submissive for his harem, and not getting a clue when most of them would tell him to GTFO.
So meh, where do you draw the line? Can I be frankly honest and say that anything you say to anyone in a mush setting will get told to someone else, no matter how much you say 'oh this is hush hush, just between you and me' mushers are gossipers. I can count on one hand the number of the umpteen hundred mushers I've played with, that I could actually believe would keep a secret. Sometimes I tell wicked lies just to see how long it takes before someone will spread it, then I make sure to let them know they failed that test. Yes I am a bastard.
Staff discussions, they're shared with everyone, everyone knows what you said, everyone knows what is going on behind the scenes, to pretend otherwise, not only makes you hypocritical when you make a big announcement saying quite the opposite of what happened. It is just the way it is. So, do you need transparency in some things? Maybe? But to me, the biggest thing is, when you approach someone from a Staff/OOC perspective, be honest. Honesty is probably the biggest thing that negates the need for transparency.
If everyone was honest with each other and upfront and straightforward, we could probably quash most of the issues that hamper mushing today.
Also, 'you' in this case, is a generalized 'you' not you specifically ES.
So we've sort of decided to apply 'twinking' as the ability to stat your character to maximize their potential in a certain direction, usually pretty focused. What is wrong with that? To be honest, I would rather have that than everyone be a jack of all trades. I like the new GMC XP syste (similar to oWoD) in that the difference between 3 dots in a skill and 4, is not a hell of a lot, but now, 3 and 6? Now we're getting somewhere. With the current system, everyone can have 3 dots in everything, specialize for 4 dice base skill and still have tons of XP left over. Specializing actually costs you a boat load of XP.
But think of all the games you've played, old D&D etc, there were classes, each class did something well. Other classes could find ways to do what another class did, but it was usually a challenge. It is one of the reasons I love Werewolf. You have a pack of wolves (a team) and why would you not want to have every member specialized in a various area so that as a whole you were much stronger than the sum of your parts? This is where I think what you've defined as 'twinking' should absolutely come into play. You find a problem, AKA you need to sneak in a steal a painting, you send in your thief. Got issues with spirits, you send in your Spiritmaster, rituals? Ritemaster, etc etc etc.
So to me, I'd rather see people good in one area and meh in others, so that it facilitates everyone getting a moment to shine.
That ties me into that comment that Somasatori posted about 23-25 dice, well that's fairly easy, my werewolf can drop 47 at 9-again and rote, but that's ridiculous and also because he's 'twinked' in that specific area. That being said, I make it abundantly clear to any new, or existing ST, what my character is capable of, and then I work with them to deal with things, and if there are new players, I really encourage them to express and expand upon their limits to see what they can do. I honestly don't want to hog a scene unless it's specifically for me (Aka sojourning through deep Shadow to go steal something from a rank 5 spirit) then you better believe I will play to all my character's strengths. But little combats, there's no need to show off, let the new guys have a crack, save their asses so they survive another day if things get out of hand, but don't steal the limelight when it isn't your turn. It's all about being respectful to other people and players.
So, hopefully that helps a little? I realize I've hit several nails with this post