Best posts made by bored

@sunny I think claiming that this is 100% limited to Arx is a bit misleading. It's just a visible example because it's large (and because it's a successor, in spirit, playerbase and staff, to a game that was racist and sexist turned up to 11).

For instance, we had/have (I dunno if the reboot is still running) the two Arthurian games that both made a pretty strong point of removing any kind of gender imbalance. This is despite the fact that these games were rooted in eras and genres of literature dripping with sexism and that it was even part of the game mechanics/rules (at least for the first game, using Pendragon). Not shockingly, it actually caused some non-trivial problems (for instance, landed women were thematically extremely rare, so they were mechanically worth more points to marry - but that gets turned on its head a bit when anyone can CG one). That game also had someone screaming about racism too, although granted it was 90% Cirno so who cares.

I'm not sure it's a 'level of venom' thing. I imagine most people would agree I'm one of the more willingly combative posters and don't think the hog pit should go away. Sometimes torches and pitchforks are the required answer, particularly as it pertains to some of the forum's original function as a space where people can report on game abuses away from on-game censorship or reprisal (although the reprisals still happen, as we saw on the SF/Spider thread). Sometimes the vicious dog-pile is social correction.

And I very strongly believe we always need a space where someone can go 'look at this shitstain of a corrupt creeping fucknugget staffer and their garbage pile of a game, AVOID AVOID AVOID'. And when the staffers come on to defend their shitty behavior, they get dogpiled and it's glorious and proper. I support watching those people flail and dig their holes, and moderation in those cases would almost certainly be abused by the guilty staff to silence their detractors.

But I also recognize the value of having constructive spaces and have badgered until the mods gave in argued for the creation of places for people who want the civil discussion. That's actually how we got the Game Dev section. But civil discussion really means civil discussion, if that's what you want. In that thread, I had been suggesting that it get a higher standard of moderation per the desire of people like @surreality and @faraday who wanted somewhere they could discuss ideas with very strict controls on criticism.

We got the new forum, but we didn't get the higher moderation standard. So we still just have more of this shitty weird moderation that's hands off except when they personally disagree or don't like someone, that promotes 'attack the idea not the person' but has no fucking clue of where that line is (as mod participation in the OC thread demonstrated), etc. I don't know that we need a forum-wide revolution but yeah, maybe test 'actually be nice' on the forum where that was supposed to be the goal? Instead of just more half-assing it.

@surreality I mean I agree, moving whole threads is a bad solution (and this came up back in the days of the Advertisement forum discussion too) since it allows people to intentionally derail down to their level. I'm OK with mods just moving specific sub-arguments or deleting people who continue to be cunts dicks assholes despite warnings.

But that's implementation detail, in the end. It still needs to start with the actual cultural understanding of the space being a civil one. That requires a moderation standard higher than the 'attack the idea' routine.

It's an old argument, but I see no problem with factual criticism in advertisement threads (and @Thenomain is hardly flaming here). Otherwise it's going to enforce a falsified positive view because the only feedback will be the happy players/supporters.

If people actually want a policy where advertisement threads are only that, they should just be locked and truly advertisement-only with no discussion, with discussion in parallel threads in appropriate areas.

[EDITED SUPER POLITE VERSION]

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

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.

This is an extremely condescending and unnecessary stance to voice.

No one is missing this. Its the way that things have always been done and to the degree that the hobby continues to exist, it will be (for the large majority) the way things always will be done. Arguing on behalf of the absolute status quo seems one of the least necessary arguments one could possibly waste time making. 'I don't know if you realize, but some people enjoy (or at least tolerate) things the way they are!'

No one in this thread is suggesting that the 'old ways' be banned, just observing that doing the same thing leads to predictable results and that doing something new... can actually work. Also, you're making a serious logical error in assuming that 'because lots of people are continuing to enjoy x' it means they wouldn't enjoy something different. In large part, people have no option or opportunity to ever try something new or different. If they do not have the resources / time to create a game, even if they aren't satisfied, they have no option but to play what's there to play or not play at all. In some genres, they have barely any choice of games at all.

Seriously, all kudos to @botulism and again, anyone who is interested in progressing things in this hobby should seriously look to this example. Note, that doesn't mean 'Make a HorrorMU clone.' Indeed if 'go make a GOMO' is anyone's take away from this, they've seriously missed the point. You absolutely need one persistent character? Ok! Go change some other norms. There's plenty of room for experimentation, here. And engaging in it won't hurt the precious way its always been one iota.

Haven't watched the show (though it's on the list of interesting things, ah Peak TV over-saturation).

Nonetheless, this level of knowledge qualifies me to declare that "racist fairy brothel" is basically guaranteed to sell like hot cakes as a game concept, as much because the players who like to engage with those themes do it for the exploration of the oppressive angles, dark side of tings, etc etc. It's part of the kink. Very likely, your biggest problem will be the fact that the average brothel doesn't have 40 employees and you may have to start telling people 'sorry, we full up on hos' and then the fairy fights start and you've got glitter everywhere.

More seriously, you'll probably have trouble sustaining it in the long term since it seems like a very social-oriented game. The WoD/Changeling/etc folks tend to sort of be trained toward 'do research to defeat the world-ending whosist' as their major mode of play, so a game that's just about social drama and struggles could be tricky?

Best of luck.

@Trix This is basically this forum in a nutshell. Welcome to the show.

We all engage in it, so there's no real value in finger pointing, yet the one place I think it's important to think about is the (relatively) new-ish trend of promoting so-called 'positivity' while engaging in this behavior. If you're doing this, even against someone you think has done something wrong, you're not really promoting anything positive. Extremely bad apples exist, but there's very little difference between how many people treat the absolute worst offenders and players who are just having potentially valid, if emotional, differences on a particular game (whether with another player or staff).

@Auspice Looking back, it was actually @onigiri's comment that focused my attention on this aspect of it (to give proper credit/citation!) but regardless, yeah, its an important distinction to make. IC isn't automatically OOC, but OOC-in-IC-clothing happens.

To me (in part because I'm admittedly a horrible elitist writing wise), these poses always stand out like they were decked out in freaking X-mas tree lights, too, which is more of what I was talking about from the other post. The tunnel vision and way they tend to either ignore or pose over both the person and others around to 'win' the 1v1 interaction are often jarring to the scene continuity (ie, retconning prior interactions to pull out a seat for their 'target' or whatever). Its the exact same way that "Jane listens as Bob pathetically tries to turn her friends against her and says..." immediately scans as 'Lol, well obviously Jane is butthurt and couldn't actually RP her way out of a paper bag.'

I think the one problem here (and it applies to both cases) is that while really these are behaviors we should nip much more aggressively, they're allowed to stand because the result really would just cut too many players for numbers-focused game admins to bear. Its hard take the honest stance of 'this behavior isn't the absolute worst (yet), but we're gonna get rid of you anyway.'

For D&D, old as it is, this is actually a well-tread topic, and the linked data isn't the first time they've reported on it. It's been fairly well established over many editions that most groups don't play past level 10. It's why you had E6, for instance (a 3.5 D&D variant that capped at level 6, but allowed some continual non-leveling progress thereafter via feats), which conveniently hits the same popular range this article mentions.

I tend to imagine, in the D&D case, this is DM driven as much as anything, because higher level chars are increasingly difficult to balance and provide good games. On MUs these issues (for STs) are further exacerbated since you spread the PCs out over vastly different XP points. We hear about dino issues all the time, and the historical answer has mostly been to shrug and pretend it's not really a problem / "omg why do u care about stats?!?!! roleplay not rollplay hurr hurr"

Advancement is an option. You can have none at all, picking any power point and fixing people there, you can allow it but only to a point (caps), you can allow it in full, you can offer tiered characters, etc. I'm somewhat dismissing 'standard @Arkandel survey questions' but it's because there probably isn't a single best approach and will vary by game (to use the orignal example, a D&D Planescape game will almost certainly require higher power levels). However, I do think the straight D&D version of 'continually accumulate xp and grow in power until you can control the fabric of reality while some people are still hitting goblins with sticks' is very likely the worst.

If you have advancement, your ideal is probably the bell curve curve some might expect, of beginners quickly becoming intermediate (while learning the ropes, setting, game culture, etc along the way) and rarely, slowly, and with luck, some making it to advanced and then (this is important) completing their stories. This doesn't actually happen on MUs though, because of two problems at the opposite ends of the same issue: player drop-out means that a lot of newbies don't stick around, while the general aversion to character death and lack of set narrative arcs means that intermediates always survive to become advanced and then never ride off into the sunset.

So there's a variety of solutions approaches. You can not have advancement. You can have caps (we've circled back to E6). You can do tiers to have different layers of play on one game, which I actually kind of like so long as they're open to all players vs. getting an elder because you TS headstaff are a 'trusted player.' Or you can do full advancement... but not wuss out about death and other endings. A fair way back, I experimented with offering a variety of perks to players re-apping after death (including access to snowflake options), and some people did take it up.

@insomniac7809

Registering to violently disagree that breaking up actions into multiple poses and making simple things into six-line affairs is any sign of quality. To me, it's generally a sign of being a purple-prose loving douchenozzle and I don't see any reason to encourage this. It's good to have a sense of continuity of activity between poses, but if the only way you can pad out a pose is describing the physical process of a basic action I'm very likely capable of imagining on my own in minute detail? I think that's a sign that there's nothing interesting to actually RP about and the scene is probably dead.

I'd also quibble about metaposing. It almost certainly depends on the tone of the scene and your company, and of course the content of the actual pose, but personally as I've gotten better at RPing since my MU-infancy, I actually use more meta content than when I started. Subjective vs objective writing is hardly settled in other literary forms, after all. I can see the point of including this to warn against the 'hostile' metaposing that we're all familiar with, but otherwise I'd say its pretty unfounded as a 'best practices' sort of rule.

Otherwise I mostly agree. The tense thing is wrong on a pedantic level (there's plenty of cases in writing where you can switch tenses to actually show or refer to a necessary difference in timing), although I imagine you mean it in a more general sense.

@Apollonius said:

The point I am trying to make is that there are very few controls possible to prevent a game from collapsing into a mire of marriage simulators between pretty princesses and princes. One of those happens to be IC thematic incentivization of why devolving into marriage/relationship simulators is bad.

No, a thousand times no.

Trying to build your game so it will punish people for the things you don't want them to do but they're definitely going to do anyway is head-to-wall level moronic. Seriously, what possible constraints are there that you can offer thematically that will discourage people from doing the main thing that humans fucking do: namely doing the fucking!

One of the major negative factors in a game that has devolved to marriage/relationships and TS over actual plot is that these activities result in weird and negative behaviors OOC amongst different players. Add to the mix a staffer running with his or her pants down and you have a textbook recipe of a game about to teeter into collapse.

You are not going to stop this, however much you try. And the fact that it happened on SC doesn't mean @Packrat should obsess about it. I mean, he probably shouldn't give his main GMPC a fancy sexdungeon, but other than that, its not a big deal.

There are those that want to explore options to limit this behavior. There are those that think that limiting this behavior is totally for naught. One option is to maintain activity levels to such an extent that the playerbase cannot invest too much time in marriage simulation because they are too busy killing each other or killing a foreign foe. Even then, staff activity can only be maintained for so long. Or once foes start fucking each other.

I think anyone who wants to explore ways to limit the behavior is going down a truly bottomless rabbit hole, and they should reconsider their life decisions (ok, just that one). It really is sufficient just to give people other interesting shit to do, and not worry too much about the fucking. The fact that there's some emphasis on the legal/societal side of fucking in L&L is really no reason to obsess about it.

@GirlCalledBlu

I honestly don't remember the Fifth World stuff too well in terms of which characters were what, only that I had a hard time getting a piece of the plot despite having a character who for all intents and purposes made a lot of sense to be highly involved (one of the oldest PCs, head of minor house responsible for a lot of shipbuilding, denied having any kind of position in the fleet administration and told to 'work toward it' in a vague way despite the guy being in his late 40s or 50s, IE presumably mid career at least). My perception was less of specific staffer malfeasance (although I did remember a lot of eye-rolly very public relationship spectacle stuff) as it being a lot of RP among friends and outsiders just being kind of clueless on what to do at all.

@mietze and others:

I don't think its impossible to do, I really don't, and acting like its naive to expect otherwise just seems like an excuse. Staffers don't need to be excluded from the fun, staffers can run fun from their characters or NPCs for all I care, all they really need to do is make the slightest effort to make sure there are good ways for outsiders to be involved. Frankly, it's as simple as acknowledging that a MU open to the public is not a private sandbox (and that if you have private sandbox fantasies, you should handle those in the appropriate venue). Some people will not be able to grasp this, but I feel like in the era of the gentler, more mature Wora MSB this stuff isn't rocket science nor above our abilities as a community.

To echo a few, I know a lot of people here use roll20 or equivalents for non-MU tabletop (I had a D&D VTT game last night), and a lot of us tried out Storium when it came out.

Yet mostly, people still come back to MUing for that experience. Because these other options basically divide things in half, with roll20 et al taking the systems and Storium/forum style taking the community RP stuff. Neither handles both, and so if you want to play Vampire with 50 people... well, we know where that goes.

Put another way, most of the alternatives (forum/tumblr/etc style) are closer to the earliest talker and pure social-MU style games than what we've come to be used to. They accomplish loose, often consent-based RP, but not a lot more. Alternately, you can use VTTs to play the games but not bring in the people. Neither is a complete solution, and its hard to create that complete solution without a degree of complexity.

I'd definitely be for a bit more death in a game like this. It's one of the things that always had me inevitably lose interest in BSG games, because after the first couple scenes 'omg we survived' stops having much weight. Yeah, NPCs go, and you can and should be RPing the impact of it, but again, it's a matter of how long you can keep it up. Real risk just adds another layer of psychological stimuli that can really push the RP. Yeah yeah, we're all authors, but (good) authors write from and capture real experience and emotion so OOCly meaningful moments in RP help supply that.

And while the inevitable argument is that no one will like RPing that... between TGG and freaking Firan, people obviously have gotten into those kind of setups.

Took a look but honestly having FC characters makes it a very hard sell for me.

The success rate for this on Star Wars games, in my personal experience, is a flat 0%. Especially picking a specific planet that isn't in any of the movies, I don't really understand the motivation.

I think there's a lot of absurd hyperbole in this thread, and I say that being notoriously absolutist about shit.

Decreasing general literacy? Who cares. We're pretty much a hobby of amateur (and occasionally professional) writers, we're gonna be in the 1% no matter what. 'Well there are people RPing in all these other ways'? Yeah, they were back then, too. Discord RP is basically indistinguishable from AOL chatroom RP. Web 3.0 slickness and simplicity in general? In the end we're still playing pen & paper RPGs. You can't magic away the complexity of a 300+ page rulebook by tossing node.js at it. Our hobby is what it is, and we've actually had the test case of the lite version: it's Storium. We tried it, shrugged, and mostly came back to MUing.

I think the only 99% necessary thing is playing in the browser. Pushing some advanced (and logical, like bboards / wikis ) features there is a good goal but its not going to fundamentally change anything.

Also, I really can't stress enough that people need to look at what @faraday's done and realize much of this has already happened, or is happening. Maybe there's a barrier due to Ares association with FS3 and its own microcosm of players, but from a technical standpoint its ridiculously impressive and a huge step forward. If someone put together a WoD module for it, I think you'd see a shitton of games pop up running it almost over night.

(And I don't mean to discount Evennia - it's amazing - but I feel it will remain an outlier until it has similar 'out of the box' functionality. Right now it just requires a game runner to be a much more capable coder.)

I have no issue with people RPing it.

That said, if staff is doing it, they should definitely ponder the purpose and put boundaries in or structure RP in a way such that everyone is getting their escapism. So if you're going to have oppressed folk you probably ought to have stories about them earning victories too. I feel this is where most games fall down. IE, stories about class and power (L&L) mean a lot less if there's 0 chance of the peasants revolting/la revolucion/etc. If you're doing historic sexism, you better have ways to show the women defying the norms successfully, having other routes of power, etc.

Basically, it's another version of the stars vs. plebs problem, you shouldn't be recruiting human players to portray NPC-like victims, any more than you should be recruiting them to be extras next to the stars.

Liked Deadpool 2 better than the first one.

Actual budget got them a real villain, awesome supporting characters, plus looool does it take the piss out of everything Liefeld.

@surreality Yeah, I think this is a great solution.

Kudos to @Auspice for the prompt action, too.