Posts made by bored

@faraday said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

@bored said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

The forum needs to be able to handle that. As usual, I do not care about the how, I am ambivalent among different solutions. I do not begrudge anyone their more polite areas.

Just wanted to note that nobody is suggesting that negative reviews be shunted off to the Hog Pit. Reasonable adults should be able to post a negative review: "I cannot recommend playing on this game because staff did (this bad thing, with facts)" without the entire thread turning into a freaking dumpster fire complete with people posting popcorn GIFs and random snarky commentary to egg on one side or the other. Sadly we've seen more of the latter.

There are posts in this thread suggesting that basically the entire forum (with the exception of the Pit, should it be allowed to exist) should operate at a very polite / moderated level. It has also been part of the longer discussion about moderation that goes beyond this thread.

Again, I really don't care how its organized. But its important to clarify that 'highly moderated discussion with almost no criticism' (which seems to be your / @surreality's / etc's preference, and don't think is bad, to be very clear) is very different from 'criticism OK but no flaming' which is different from 'poo and gifs.' Everyone can have all these things, as far as I'm concerned, but we should be cautious of any of them being removed or diminished.

I still maintain that there's a value, and even a necessity for a critical venue and some visibility for it.

You can sit here and promote the rhetoric that criticism is always the monsters tearing down delicate creators, but we also have real examples of games run by the monsters. This whole moderation movement came in the middle of precisely a situation like that (see United Heroes or whatever it was called, a game that ticked every box from deleting all critical speech, to propaganda posts, to staffers sexually harassing players).

The forum needs to be able to handle that. As usual, I do not care about the how, I am ambivalent among different solutions. I do not begrudge anyone their more polite areas. But a publicly visible space needs to be available where someone can easily (and in accordance with forum rules) say that a place is a legit garbage fire when it's a legit garbage fire.

@thenomain

And without any rules, I see a future where staff mods throw their weight around to win arguments, shut down any discussions, and pick favorites... or at least the board perceives them to be doing such regardless of it being true, and every action becomes steeped in distrust, suspicion, and recrimination.

I see this future because we've lived it (on every single MU/staff discussion ever, if you somehow missed the reference).

Edit to less sarcastically add: I have no problem with a rule-zero 'be kind to each other (except where prohibited)' being part of things. Obviously people aren't robots (not even @Ganymede, hurr hurr) and there will always be a level of subjectivity. But having no guidelines at all seems to invite the worst in both the mods and those they're moderating.

I'll add that while I'm fine with nothing changing, if you're going to change things, I agree very strongly that it needs to be in the way @lithium and some others have suggested, ie with clear posted rules of what is ok and not-ok in every forum area. This is another place where my prior (and agreed-with-in-principle, at that time) suggestion of restructuring the boards might help, as it's a lot easier to have heavy handed moderation if you designate areas as the 'be nice, no really, we will ban the fuck out of you' vs. 'critical analysis, try and put some factual content in your posts' vs 'poo and popcorn and gifs' areas. I don't mind carebear zones for those who are more comfortable there, nor Hog behavior being clearly enforced to it.

Outside of some hard rules, I have zero faith in it being applied even remotely fairly consistently, for the reasons we've seen covered pretty heavily. Equal behavior is frequently treated very differently here, and no volume of 'we can totally be objective!' protest is going to make me actually believe that. So if you're going to do it you need at least some pretense of standards, as well as presumably some method of addressing/appealing mod behavior.

I should also add, as much as she decided the best way to keep this thread positive would be to dare me to derail it and personally attack her, this would actually benefit @Auspice. When people disagreed with her modding, they had no recourse but to burn effigies in the public square. If there are rules to point at, and a process (ie message @Arkandel or w/e), maybe that could happen less. As mods you're never going to escape the idea that this forum pretty much has its roots in having a venue to circumvent unchecked, unanswerable, unquestionable authority, so if you want to be active you probably have to balance it with a certain level of self-restraint and transparency.

@arkandel Finally having gotten around to vote, I gave a neutral.The flavor text to that one isn't actually correct for my choice, but numerically I think it's right (ie, I do 'care' but I'd give you a 3/5).

I still haven't seen many instances of positive moderation, but then again it also kind of seems like you've reigned back actively moderating after the first few attempts (mostly, but not exclusively, by @auspice) went so poorly.

You've been responsive to banning the 4channers and Cirno, which is good.

I'm still not sure about the board subdivisions and rules, we discussed a lot about restructuring those but instead we've basically just slowly floated back toward same-old (where we can fight in ad threads a little bit until it gets too mean and then, to the Pit!).

So, meh? I don't have any problems with things now, but its mostly because it seems like you stopped doing much. I'm 100% happy with that, but its also hard to rate that as 'you guys are doing great.'

I've met various MU people online and generally, things do trend more toward 'the real life people are way cooler/nicer than I ever imagined.' People I've thought were dull, annoying, or big fat cheater jerks turned out to be interesting, fun, charming, etc. Of course some of them go right back to being cheater jerks on game, and a small percentage weren't great RL.

On really negative behaviors being warning signs for RL, I really only have one or two data points for this in direct or nearly direct experience. But it can be a thing. Knew of a guy with quite the rep for shady gross stuff... who was also definitely grooming people for RL meetups under very dubious circumstances (on a game infamous for NOT having an 18+ requirement).

So mostly people are cool, but uh, a few are definitely not and it does tend to correlate to their online behavior. Unfortunately that doesn't have much predictive use.

And yeah, definitely agree. Railroading on that grand scale is perfectly OK if it's telegraphed.

If you call the event 'The Fall of Malachor V' or 'The Crusaders Last Stand' people are going to know what they're signing up for.

The key thing, of course, is to give people other ways to matter. They can't save the Neo-Crusader movement, they can't win. But they might, for instance, save a single ship that goes on to form a camp-colony which becomes a center for future recruitment and continuity of the Mandalorian culture.

If anything, their adaptability is one of the coolest things about the Mandalorians in the EU. Once you get past the Boba Fett speshul factor of omg we r best bounty hunter, it's a pretty fascinating invented culture, what with its nomadic, species-agnostic, and yet somehow ageless nature.

@Mr-Johnson

It depends what you count as what.

Technically speaking, the original expansion period is super ancient (BBY 20,000+) and really not developed heavily beyond the slightest history burbs in sidebars, game flavor text, etc. That said, there's d6 and d20 material for BBY 5k~4k (Great Hyperspace War, the Qel-Dromas & Nomi, etc). Protosabers are used to some degree in those periods, especially the earlier end.

It's also dubious if you really need to do anything. If protosabers are the standard tech, then just give them lightsaber stats and no one has actual lightsabers. You could house rule stuff for energy pack damage if you really wanted, etc, but it's hardly necessary.

I've always wondered about ways of doing this without dislodging / upsetting the playerbase too much, though more in mind toward time-skip. Of course, a sufficient time skip is basically a reset.

I figure the easiest-to-swallow version is doing it the smallest amount. A 6-month or 1-year skip at the end of a plot arc, giving time for the event's conclusions / ramifications to play out and create a new scenario, but not so long that anyone's player becomes unplayable. If you do this regularly, it could become normal (it might also be an alternative to a time ratio). A maybe-relevant real example here is Pendragon, where at least system-wise, you skip (and just roll some results) for Winter. Though the game I played fell apart before we actually hit Winter to see how it would go.

@EUBanana Hear that? Start converting those Enfields into E-11's.

@secretfire said in A New Star Wars game? (Legends of The Old Republic (Name pending)):

<IC Play>
Timeskip with new history based on IC play

It's always been my dream to run a game like that. I have a weird fetish for writing extrapolated alternate histories based on a few actions. Living fiction on a bigger scale. It's also why I've always liked some of the company-run RPG organized play/'living campaign' type stuff that did this.

I just don't think it would ever work on a MU. Every timeskip would see ~half your playerbase quit in outrage/fail to engage in the new story/etc.

I've always been a fan, at least in theory, of that kind of played-prologue sort of thing. I would definitely say it's better off keeping it strictly that, than trying to run X months of the game as one thing and then time-skip and switch things up.

As much as people say they like character growth, they also hate change. Particularly the sort that upsets their status quo of existing RP circles, relationships, accomplishments, positions, and so on.

@seraphim73 said in Star Wars?:

Sidenote: I'm actually against WEG D6 because with large amounts of XP (which is -going- to happen on a MUSH, all it takes is time) Jedi are just obscene. Like, Tartatovsky-Clone Wars-level obscene. And I totally understand that Saga Edition has pretty much run its course within the MU* community.

I owned the d6 Old Republic expansion book way back in the day, and I recall it turned the game into 'OK I one shot you.' 'OK I use a force power to ignore it and one shot you back.' and so on, until you ran out of points or whatever? I don't remember the exact powers this many years removed, but it was lulzy to say the least. So you'd need to but in some boundaries or get dinos killing whole armies, etc.

Re: Saga, I think the solution is (and this is true of d20 on MUs in general) pick some level ranges and stick to them. The leveling is only really problematic when you have level 1s and level 20s in the same environment. Jedi are fine in Saga, and low-levels broken with SF: UtF. At higher levels basically everyone can put together some combo to destroy people, so it's... fair? IDK.

There was some other sci-fi game system I saw browsing around that I thought would work bizarrely well tweaked over to SW, I wonder if I can remember/find it.

I think there's probably two entirely different levels of things being discussed here, and speaking in hard absolutes for one unfortunately works badly for the other. No one sane supports creepy, OOC boundary violating, stalkerish behavior. But condemning all OOC communication about RP relationships isn't a great solution either.

I've absolutely had people invite me to do a pair app, create an alt, etc then ignore the RP between those characters in favor of other partners or play on other alts. While I don't have any position to demand they RP with me, I do have a right to ask, "Hey, what's up with this?" I invested a certain amount of effort on the understanding I'd get some RP out of it, and if that doesn't materialize, I'm not out of bounds to inquire (to clarify any possible miscommunication in either direction), and eventually even to ask "do you even still want this RP?" That's not a guilt trip, that's a serious question about how I'm apportioning my time.

This is really just a specific case of general 'RL vs game' stuff. Yes, it's more important that your house is on fire, or your kid is having a recital, etc. But at decreasing levels of RL importance, automatically prioritizing RL over a game is eventually disregard for the still very RL person waiting on RP. I'm pretty confident to say that it's rarely important that you run out and buy chocolate mousse when you've agreed to ST a scene for a bunch of people (to use an infamous and very real example), and if you do that, I'm going to call it out.

Mine were all on L&L or period-setting games and mostly on Firan. Most were pre-existing (roster characters) or pre-established (joining a game with a friend). I think my commoner on Firan was the only one where we actually had the whole courtship, an IC ceremony, etc.

None of the Firan characters ever divorced, though one died. I dunno the longest I played one was, ~two years? Shortest was some Western themed game I showed up with a friend on and... the game imploded within a week or two of opening? (Edit: we'd also arranged a pair of marriages on Realms Adventurous... right before the game changed hands and we all quit. I dunno that they actually got finalized, we weren't really doing it on camera.)

@three-eyed-crow If you have situations where everyone is getting great, fun, interactive roles in a plot and lots of attention and they still flip out? One of two things is happening: either they're dicks (which is possible, but I don't think this is the entire population and I'm willing to design assuming it's not), or the situation isn't as fulfilling as it appears - it's not actually that even (maybe due to factors outside of the scene), a player is having goals met that aren't important to them, etc.

I think going back to the player types can be instructive here. If you have a pair of Killers in a scene, obviously its very easy to create a situation where both can 'win big' but one will be unhappy because their opponents aren't equal, or there's only a single killing blow opportunity, or whatever. So you need to sort those players into different groups, or make sure they have multiple powerful opponents, etc. Conversely, the Achiever might be happy to let the Killer smite the monster only to go on and perform the final ritual that seals the whatever.

The lesson here is that you need some fairly specific GM-player customization and personalization, which may require a lower player to staff ratio... but maybe there are other ways. Systems for people actually putting goals on their sheet and staff directly addressing them, etc?

@faraday said in Spotlight.:

They don't want to be hero-adjacent, they want to be the hero.

Which is perfectly fine if you're writing a story of your own. It's even perfectly fine if you're playing a tabletop RPG and the GM can ensure that your particular group of 4-6 people are the most awesomest, most famous adventurers ever. But the scale breaks down when you have 30 players all wanting to be the Luke-and-Leia level of heroes. @surreality points out that even second-tier characters in GoT get their moments sometimes, and that's true, but nobody(*) wants to only get one or two cool things to do over the lifespan of their character. They want to be Daenerys or Jon Snow.

It just doesn't work. Starring roles are limited. Everybody(*) desperately wants one, and then they get bent out of shape when they get passed over.

I think MU players of any... veteran degree are going to understand that being the star all the time, or even ever (if we're talking Luke level), is impossible and would be quite happy to settle for something along the lines of the GoT secondary cast. Heck, a lot of MU players are used to such degrees of abuse, disregard, and favoritism that something remotely fair would be pretty amazing. I'm just not sure this is what actually is being offered, and that people are turning their nose up at Sam.

What I think people tend to get rankled over is when A) they don't get to be Jon and yet someone else does (ie there are some very clear star players, and almost certainly some favoritism at work) and/or B) they sign up to be that supporting cast member, but their 'big moments' amount to 'well you get your name in a list of names in a post/emit that one time.'

And I'm sure its mostly a staff size / resource problem. But when things are scarce, they do tend to go to the inner circle of staff-alts and close friends.

@ixokai Right, but I think that's mostly a matter of them again being a little more cautious due to what happened with the 3.5 SRD (which was basically the entire PHB minus... the actual leveling rules?). Just because it's not in the document doesn't mean you can't use it, although for safety's sake you might want to change the names of features, if not the mechanics.

In any case I feel like it would be pretty unlikely for them to go after a game like this unless it was actually for profit (and thus potentially a competitor to Neverwinter / Sword Coast Legends / etc).

@arkandel said in Spotlight.:

Without getting into pseudo-sociology here, why is spotlight wanted - and in some cases, needed?

You can't, because the player psychology is essential. I am going to do my Bartle-types bit now I guess. It really hits each of them:

Killers - Assuming an environment that frowns upon outright PK (which is most MUs since Dark Metal), their ultimate win is being the one to kill the Big Bad. Obviously, being that guy is about as big of a star role as is possible.

Achievers - Almost the same as above. Big Bad still counts, as does basically every plot milestone you can think of. Now, some have made points about public recognition (which is different, it's IC spotlight vs OOC spotlight), which may not be necessary, but GM focus is required. You can't achieve much of anything unless the GMs take your actions and say 'these matter.'

Socializers - I think this one really interesting. They want the spotlight because it forces people to RP with them. This type is commonly associated with support players, who we think of as cooperative, yet really they're no less catty (and in some cases more) when it comes to squabbling over this kind of stuff, because it's often very limited. By getting a piece of info, key mcguffin, whatever, and becoming a gatekeeper to other people being involved, you can enforce a social circle around you. By contrast, being out of the spotlight means being ignored. It's basically the worst case result.

Explorers - Exploring in MU basically means uncovering the setting, because physical exploration is rarely possible (and where it is, it's going to be a Very Special kind of TP). Finding out the secrets, the details of the metaplot, being the person in the know. As with the Achiever stuff, this is really only something the GMs can bestow upon you by putting you in the most focused roles and stories.

Per above, spotlight itself is often either kind of a byproduct or a means. Some players might really have a diva attitude and actually thrive on the spotlight itself, but even then, aside from with Socializers, this is mostly about acknowledging the achievement of their own goals. 'You may have heard of me, I killed the thing/solved the puzzle/etc.'

@ixokai Rules mechanics aren't actually subject to copyright. This has been pretty well-explored in the 3.5 SRD era, and even if the later D&Ds haven't repeated the mistake of empowering the competitor that ultimately unseated them (hi Pathfinder), it's still true.

Where you'd run into problems is using a published setting (Faerun, etc) or any of the designated IP-exclusive monsters (Mind Flayers & Beholders, for example).