Posts made by Darinelle

I wanted something unrelated to Puffin so I chose one of my "good" character names from EQ2. Of course, now everyone knows I'm also Puffin and associates the two, but THAT DOESN'T MATTER NOW DOES IT.

<sobs over in the corner with @Coin >

@admiral said in MU Things I Love:

It's easy to roll with the punches and mature as a character when you know that staff will protect you from real consequences and feed you all the best plots/RP that others don't get.

That may not be the case here but in my experience most players are pretty much the same. We're all capable of the same things. The ones who 'perform best' are just the ones that staff decided to favor.

When I say "In my experience" on Arx, it is literally impossible for me to "favor" everyone I GM for. In the last year, I've run 122 logged plots (at least), and that doesn't count even half the NPC-scenes, off-the-cuff GMing, and lore pieces I drop in random places. That's just regular GM plots. I won't say I don't have my favorite people to RP with or to GM for, but those aren't the only people I GM for by a long shot. And yet - I see lots and lots and LOTS of players who do this. While this particular post was calling out a handful of players specifically (known only in my head because I'm not going to point at them here), it happens quite a bit in Arx at least.

I'm not perfect. There are people I like better than others. But I try really hard to spread plot love around.

@tinuviel Arx.

And yes.

All the time.

I could list ten people without blinking twice who roll with the punches, take setbacks as an opportunity to learn, and keep growing as characters without bitching OOCly or accusing GMs of favoritism or arranging things OOCly to make it better. They just keep on truckin'.

It's really, really nice.

@faraday said in Plot session duration:

Some of that is based on the audience - I'm sure it would be different in a politically-oriented L&L game - but I think a lot of it is universal. MUSHes share a lot in common with tabletop RPGs, after all, and a lot of those emphasize combat. Fighting and gear often represent a huge chunk of most RPG rulebooks. Combat and downtime are all a lot of people are interested in.

can_confirm, it is definitely different in a politically-oriented L&L game. At least in things I've GM'd people will stay long after I've closed the log to do RP, or they'll page me 2-3 days later with RP they're doing about that plot. Even when it's a plot arc like a PRP, not specifically metaplot related. I usually end my sessions with "okay, this is beautiful but y'all need to GTFO my office." or "I'm going to bed, stay as long as you like but I'm done with the GMing part folks." LOL. Player enthusiasm to RP definitely outlasts my ability to be present for it most times. Note that this also includes combat-oriented plots, though they're usually eager to also find a healer when I'm done with them.

No idea why.

Watching the arc over time of some characters who started in really shitty places and have rolled with the punches, and consequences, and all of that to build something really freaking great. I love me a good redemption arc, especially when it's not a rushed sort of thing and happens over the course of months or even years, and just drags a bunch of people along for the ride.

Love.

It.

So.

Much.

On any plot I run, be it GM or PRP, I don't really want to run for more than 3 hours. What this means is that if I give people choices (which I always try to do), then they get to choose ONE.

Not ONE, and THEN THE OTHER TWO.

Just one.

Any more than one and I add 1-2 hours per choice, depending on what is there and how the players react to it and interact with it. Adding manual combat in doubles whatever that number is.

I PREFER 3 hours. Or 3 hours, then break, then 3 hours. This is not to say I even remotely abide by any of these guidelines myself on any sort of regular basis, but that's my personal preference.

@tinuviel Yes. Yes it does.

@coin Back in the days of Everquest (I played on an RP server), a friend of mine and I did this as a flame war on our server's EZBoard (aaaahahahahaaha) that turned into 30+ pages of how I was REALLY A MAN AND JUST PRETENDING TO BE A WOMAN ON THE INTERNETZ.

He used to call me as he'd write his latest flame of me and we'd laugh about it.Oh, the good ol' days.

OMFG PEOPLE STOP MSGING ME ON FB BEFORE 9AM. I HAVEN'T EVEN HAD COFFEE YET I DON'T WANT TO TALK TO YOUR DUMB ASS.

@ominous said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (Answered):

@Thenomain Condemns only affected prestige which had no mechanical bearing on anything other than an e-peen score. If there was honestly a conspiracy to condemn Dawn that was a complete waste of effort and resources for one of the most pointless causes. Might as well work towards assassination or something.

Wow, are YOU underestimating the love some people have for (then) meaningless ranking systems.

@Pandora If enough people feel an angry mob is in order, they could in fact put in an @action to say "I want to be part of the angry mob forming." Also, if a leader DOES do something that the NPCs en masse would hate, then we open a crisis and everyone gets a chance to respond. See also the entire Kennex thralldom crisis, where many people were thrown into disarray by a single proclamation, and millions of silver and lots and LOTS of actions were taken by many people across the board, some of which conflicted, in order to figure out what happened.

There are plenty of ways to turn "I disagree with you" or "I think you made a boneheaded decision" into actual plot that people can respond to - whether the actor is anonymous or not.

In other news, just this week I resolved an @action that involved anonymous messengers (GMs can do this) and shenanigans. It can be done, and we're willing to do it - just not willy nilly based on past experiences.

@bananerz said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (:

I'd be very happy if someone is being a dick that it pretty much lowers the difficulty in finding them for the other person. I still think if someone OOCly is being a dick and wrecking a character, get them the hell off the game. But good idea!

I still don't think you understand. We have 400 active characters. On a given evening, we have 200+ unique accounts logged in.

Now, suppose you do something that even HALF the game doesn't like. Take it down further, even a QUARTER of them.

Now suppose they all take a moment to either condemn (if we still had it) or send you an anonymous messenger.

Now you have to what - spend your AP to find out who those 100 anonymous messengers were sent by, and have 100 scenes of "why do you hate my character" or also "you have no goddamn idea what I'm actually doing what the actual fuck"? Or alternately, just be shit on anonymously by 100 people for making a decision that isn't the most popular thing and doesn't make everyone universally happy.

Keep in mind that we (GMs) deliberately make it so that choices have to be made, and especially as a leader it's unlikely that you're going to have a lot of "please-everyone" choices to make about major events.

As @Sunny says, it's not the fringe cases we care much about - we can just boot and ban people if it's a one-time thing. But having 100 conversations with 100 people about "hey, maybe think that yes your character wouldn't like someone but also how fun is it for a character in a positive to make hard choices to also have 100 anonymous people telling them they suck day after day after day" is exhausting. And yes, we can make a news post but no one ever thinks it applies TO THEM. Because of course, they totally have a super important REASON. IC IS IC.

Yes, IC is IC. But leader positions already are hard. Let's not also make it filled with a shitton of negativity you realistically have no way to respond to in any meaningful way.

Sidenote: If you want to send an anonymous message? Put in an action for it. Then the person can get it anonymously, we know what's going on, there's a track of it, and if someone investigates who sent it, we can adjudicate whether you were stealthy enough for it to really be anonymous. It's a valid use of an @action.

If it's not that important to you? Then maybe it's not really that necessary.

@bananerz said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (:

Tracking and Obfuscating: I think being able to spend AP, silver, resources is a great sink in making it more difficult for anonymous messengers to be traced and the longer it goes the harder it gets to track as evidence gets cold and evaporates with age. And for folks who really want to know? You can investigate it by spending AP, silver, resources and whatnot with an @investigation!

As for abuse: If folks can't handle being an adult on a game lots of folks play on, then maybe they should move to a different game that's more suitable. You can report them immediately and staff will nip it in the bud rather than letting it get out of hand. Help keep the garden weed free.

I mean, other than that not being an @investigation, but instead being an @action.

@testament said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers:

@jeshin Because no one would dare have hurt feelings over something a character said in a game.

People have zero chill, even when fictional characters are throwing shade at their fictional characters.

Seeing shade slung around in the condemns was a highlight of the week on Arx. Because sometimes they were just hilarious to read.

Well, but also some of it got totally out of hand for OOC reasons and people were shitholes to each other for OOC reasons instead of IC ones and we found that to be garbage so we turned them off.

Welcome back!

@brent I see you've met Tolamar Brand, the big bad guy of Season 1, who began life as a minor detail in the middle of some other information entirely but the players Just. Couldn't. Quit. Him.

I am apparently a huge lore geek (I'll pause while y'all try to hold back your surprise) so the way I write my theories is generally with color-coded paragraph headings. If you read one of my theories, there are 3-4 lines with paragraphs that support each one, so you can easily scan a theory and see what it's about quickly, and then bore in for more detail.

I suspect that would work if we included some of that formatting in the description rather than just wall of text (which totally takes formatting things) but in the realm of "what we need coded" I'm not sure how high it is on the priority list, tbh.

@arkandel We really step on that hard. I'm of the personal belief, having had it proven time and time again, that if you spend too much time talking about a particular plot OOCly then it never really makes it IC because you've explored all the avenues of thought already and never get it done.

I know this is still done in pages and in the never-damned-enough faction discords, usually to the detriment of the playerbase and usually with wildly incorrect theories, but where we CAN see it, we kick it hard.

As a player I LOVE theories. They're what helps me pull together plot, @clues, RP I've done, and so on, and condense it into one readable form that gives context to a bunch of clues. Every clue I get now has background RP with it, and so it lets me share a coherent view of a particular item with someone. And it makes me think about what my character knows and believes and how this shapes her. It makes a huge difference.

That being said, I literally never just share clues without RP - same with theories. The only person who does this to me has such a woven story with my character that even the context of sharing a clue has RP behind it - and it's never just a clue dump.

If I could punch people who clue dump in the face I would. It's not nearly as helpful as you think it is. But a theory, about which they can then ask for clues as they need them, or go find the clues themselves, or have some kind of coherent idea? Yes. Yes that helps a new player more than just "here are a bunch of clues go make sense of them."

@three-eyed-crow said in Arx: @clues:

My hate-on for orgs that just bank a bunch of clues for people to brief themselves on with no context is vast and I think it leads to problems in terms of people RPing some real whack-a-doo things, but making clues harder to share individually and without scenes would just make this worse.

It leads to character death is what it leads to.

@kanye-qwest said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Ok but all I did was link you "two monks invent art" galleries! I AM SORRY

gasps

I am horrified that you think you're friend_07