Best posts made by Derp

@krmbm

Except it isn't. It's the summation of what @bored and @thatguythere have been saying so far. We have been asking for at least slightly more moderation outside of the pit to maintain civil discourse, and just like every other time the mods have asked for feedback, we are seeing the loyal and vocal minority think pf a thousand reasons why enforcing basic civility outside of the Pit is a no good very bad terrible idea that will cause them to walk off. And I'm calling it what it is, at this point. It's basically just a less interesting filibuster in the name of there being no consequences for keeping every thread a free for all until they all get dragged into the Pit, and some of us are tired of being held ideologically hostage to it in the name of hearing all sides again until any momentum on this fades into the ether.

The Pit was created to keep that kind of thing contained, and we are asking for that to be enforced. If that means that people who can't keep it there lose interest in participating, so what?

@Auspice said in First Through the Gate Syndrome:

@bear_necessities said in First Through the Gate Syndrome:

I want to wait for someone else to "dictate" the response to the GM set, etc.

I hadn't considered it this way before.

So I think what we're (I'm) finding is this:

The GM set is somewhere between a description and a scene set, but the first person to pose 'completes' the set for everyone.

This is my finding as well. The fear of setting yourself up for the cries of 'but I wouldn't doooo that' and such because you added in something to your pose someone disagrees with.

Which is why I ALWAYS try to pose first. Because screw that. I can be a leader!

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

When this has happened, my response in chat with Auspice and Arkandel has been invariably between "nuke it from space" and "burn the heretic."
Supposing that an offending post can be identified, I would simply step in and delete that message and every obliquely-referencing message that follows. That seems to be the most neutral thing to do: acting without regard for right or wrong, and simply adhering to the rules as directly as possible. This is especially so on advertisement threads, where it is very easy to pick out where a conversation veers into offensive territory.
I think there are plenty of dissenters to that position, however.

If we are going to seriously consider this, can we also embrace @Surreality's suggestion and stop pretending that there isn't a nigh untouchable cabal of folks that try this shit basically all the time, skirt right on the edges, usually get away with it, and end up getting even more leniency due to sheer desensitization and fatigue?

Because there is.

And they do. Already.

And we need to start being honest about that of this whole mess is gonna work.

Edit because stupid quoting code is stupid. Sorry @Sunny and @Ganymede!

And yet, it's a reality of the medium.

Players can value privacy. Staff can respect privacy. But there is no barrier there. Staffers can invade it if they want to, because you are essentially walking into the ultimate surveillance machine, and players have to accept that it is entirely possible that their privacy is being violated, and they'll never know unless that information is somehow misused.

And it has been misused. Repeatedly. Yet we still continue to play these games and hope for the best.

Ultimately, there just isn't much you can do about this, ETA: other than make a big noise about it and hope that someone cares, though there is precisely zero action that you can really take, short of quitting the game (or really, the hobby, since it's possible on every game). It's a great armchair argument, but in practical terms, you have zero control over this. Whoever has access to the server/code does.

@Ghost said in Recent banning:

@Derp said in Recent banning:

@Ghost said in Recent banning:

jb4i48vuHABnw9c8!#34

How did you find my e-mail password?!?

No lie. My middle name is literally "BruteForce".

That's hot af.

@L-B-Heuschkel

In this case, I used Mac for a specific reason:

Mac has a relationship with Harry Dresden, and will sometimes help him out if he has some information, but has to be careful about how he does so because he has Accorded Neutral Territory...

BUT he also has his own agenda, and often politics in the background, showing up with new information and actions that he's taken, which on a MU often translates to 'has to interact with PCs to get that done'. He's a mover in the world.

@snackness said in General MSB announcements:

@derp Or https://uptimerobot.com/

Well, there's that, too. I was more thinking about -- a game opened yesterday and an ad for it didn't get posted until just now because MSB was down and we weren't really sure where else a good central repository might be other than like mudconnector.

If MSB bites the bullet and isn't coming back up might be a good idea to have a place to go so that can be seen, somewhere. For all people gripe about this place sometimes it's still pretty much the only place I learn about new games and read reviews and whatnot, so if that resource goes dark forever it might be good to have an alternate line of communication to the people who can make those calls, for purposes of checking in or whatever.

@Auspice

Ok, so first -- you asked what we would do, if anything, and I told you what I would do and how I think as both a player and a staffer , so you wanna pull back the aggression a bit? I wasn't accusing you of doing anything, or telling you how to behave. I was telling you how I view it.

Second, if you come to me as a third party in the matter, my very first question is going to be did the other person say something to you? Because I truly believe it's not your place to police them, either. So you're right. I won't do anything because you're essentially asking me to police the fun of two other people, neither of which have said anything at all to me, even though I make it very clear that they can.

Different players have different standards that might differ from yours, or mine. That's fine. That's to be expected when dealing with homo sapiens. They're a strange creature.

https://www.residentevil.com/village/us/

HAPPY FANBOY NOISES HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

@surreality said in Model Policies?:

One of the reasons I've long been very anti-politics/issues/activism (from anyone about anything) on games is that it isn't the purpose of the game, and it can create an environment that makes the game less effective as the kind of game it is.

This. That's what @BlondeBot was even saying in the original post. Keep the focus on the game, where possible, at least on the main channels. If you want to have spaces for these, that's fine, but you can have side-tangent channels for that purpose, and that isn't "restricting your speech" or trying to stifle your identity or whatever. Even in the real world there are time/place/manner restrictions on when and where to say what.

@kireek

Yeah, I'm with @Auspice here. You -- seem to be having a lot of trouble distinguishing between the fantasy world of the game and the reality in which we live, and conflating actions taken in a game with actions taken in the real world.

Maybe like -- take a minute and take a step back, and reassert the division between those two things.

This is why I actually tend to have two documents: a pure policy document, and then an FAQ about the policies that I hope clarifies the vision and reasoning.

This keeps the policy document (relatively but still not entirely) short, and allows me to point to something else when people ask why we made a certain decision a certain way, and what we're looking for as far as player behavior goes. I do this for House Rules, too. (Really, if I think that at some point I'll be asked more than once to explain the 'why' on something, I have probably thrown it on a website somewhere.)

@sunny

I am replying to this merely because alt right is early enough in the first sentence that it keeps drawing my eye on the Categories page as the last post and dagummit I get tired of having that little mental quirk until I parse the rest of the sentence.

@tek said in PB 'realism':

I won't play with someone with an anime pb. Full stop.

This, but fucking chibi.

#SorryNotSorry

@Auspice

I think this is the big draw of contemporary protestant christianity. Some people can never find happiness until they invent a reason why they are better/holier/more worthy than someone that they take great pains to paint as lesser.

@Prototart said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

if someone is Hungarian then 100% they are a vampire

Or a porn star. Maybe both.

Knowing that I am essentially getting paid to do homework, wherein homework for this class consists of watching Netflix.

I love my job.

@greenflashlight said in Sensitivity in gaming:

I am hard-pressed to think of a single circumstance in which one person can say, "Please don't hurt me," and a second can reply, "That places an undue burden on my ability to play make-believe," without that second person deeply sucking as a human being.

You've never played with Spider?

People use claims of traumas to try and tip the story away from situations that would disadvantage their characters. I think being skeptical is perfectly reasonable, and my general reaction to that is to give players a 'graceful out' to the story if they do not wanna participate.

I do not change the story unless there is a group consensus about it. I, and I'm sure a few others in this thread given some of the previous answers, have been burned by this as a manipulation tactic too many times now.

It might sound cold, ultimately I agree with @Warma-Sheen that it's ultimately up to the player with the issue to avoid the thing they have issues with, and like @Lotherio, the theme and genre of the thing you're playing should be telling about what content you should expect to see come up. (Naturally, anything that would be outside the norm should get a content warning, but I am not going to put a 'extreme violence and gore' warning on every Werewolf scene I run. That is pretty much just the default.)

So like -- yeah. Being aware of what limits others have expressed is good, but I don't think it's the GM's responsibility to try and keep track of everyone's preferences and try to create something that fits within all of those -- especially not if you're going to go into the level of detail that @Carma suggests with that sheet. That's a good tool for introspection on what you are and are not good with, not something that I would ever suggest you expect someone else to keep track of.

Counter-Peeve: I majored in political science, and I am sick of hearing citizens of the United States talk about how much they don't care about politics because they're so disgusted by it. You guys are part of the reason we're in this mess in the first place, dudes. You're a part of the democratic machine -- your "fuck it all" attitudes toward things like voting and political engagement only serves to keep fueling the nightmare. I even have the math to prove it to you.

Get out and vote for something, it's not that hard. If you're super convinced that all of the candidates suck, then run for something. It's not remotely difficult to win a local election. Hell, if someone is retiring, there are better-than-even odds that the election won't even be contested, so long as they can get an ass in the seat.

It doesn't work right now because all of the sane people who aren't political extremists decided a long time ago that they didn't have to give a fuck, but reserve the right to bitch about how screwed up things are.

@chibichibi

I think that I would personally challenge the premise that this is some kind of problem.

That said -- people do things when they are aware there are things to do that interest them in a time when they are available.

So maybe just ask people what sounds fun to do, and gather a group?