Best posts made by Devrex

If y'all like a good D&D podcast, my son also has one (cause the post about the Delta Green one made me realize this would be the place to tell people).

Critically Chaotic is an actual play podcast by gamers who wanted more queer representation in gaming podcasts. They are heavily focused on the characters and the interpersonal relationships weaving their way in and out of the adventures, so if you like stories with strong character arcs this might be one you'd enjoy.

Available on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Google Podcast, and Spotify.

I think all but four of my current batch of "RL friends" are people I at first met online long before I got to hang in person, so I don't make a divide at all, I just do the same as most here...there's levels, the people I spend more or less time with or am closer with or less close with, but are still friends. Don't always talk to every online friend as much as I'd like to but there's fluctuations in everyone's time/energy too.

@tinuviel Could very well have been, but everyone on the board backed him? Said I didn't understand how to play. And I'm like...well ok maybe my old dinosaur ass doesn't, cause...in my head I was GMing for him until I suddenly wasn't, and you don't take control of the GM's NPCs. But I came out of tabletop long before I came to MUSH, and I think of things in a very specific way.

@lotherio Yeah, I often don't call for a roll unless the PCs are crunched for time.

Can the thief pick the lock? He's got the skills. Probably. Inevitably, if there's nobody shooting at him, if he doesn't need to get into the door in this round to avoid getting caught, if he isn't trying to escape a prison cell before the next guard rotation.

If he is? Then yeah, need a roll to find out if he's got the chops to get out of there clean and smooth or if he's on to his next problem; having his back to this super locked door when three armed men show up to say, "Well, well, what have we here."

@hella Oooh, thanks for these. I'm super burnt out on writing fiction (other than MUing) right now but I didn't know about any of these and will want them when my heart and brain and mind stop shying away from such things.

When the PCs won't enforce a theme you sort of have to balance it back out with the NPCs in the stories you run. A lot of times we forget all those other people exist out there and so it becomes "oh all I ever meet is..."

In WoT specifically another thing I thought of this morning was about power level. A lot of games let you play Big 3 Special Girl Power Level that was just exceedingly rare. But even they could only "split the flows" (cast simultaneous spells for those who don't know the theme) 4 times. Most people could do ONE flow at a time. Then there was your sort of upper echelon (call it, perhaps, the 'PC' echelons) that could, before Protagonist Gals came along, do two. At most.

And usually in that theme, an average channeler could with one flow or spell impact one line-of-sight target at a time. That's plenty of time for a group of armed men to rush them...which is why they surrounded themselves with bodyguards.

So another method might be to choose your era carefully...or if you're going to put them in the area where a 4-way simulcast is going to be available to most PCs...then your NPCs have to get smarter and mob them with 12 instead of 4. And if you do that on top of no you don't get any kind of melee, you don't get any kind of physical skill...well you're squishy, it only takes one person punching you really really hard to make you lose the spell, you'd better hope your armed men are getting it done.

@sfire Yes. The game is absolutely excellent, the staff is friendly, the vibe is laid back, the RP is good and the playerbase is, so far, pretty much a joy to work with. They've made some story and design decisions which are just plain smart, and they truly seem to care about the player experience. Been there a...week? Week and a half? And the RP has been freaking stellar. Highly recommended.

@too-old-for-this Doing dishes and ensuring the camp house/apartment doesn't get attacked by bears burglars. Multitasking!

@pyrephox Yeah this is exactly why I started thinking about this, because in the past I have been very "I dunno, if you wanna play it and have points for that go to town I guess" and then have been quietly baffled when someone has made, say, a shopkeeper.

And then the shopkeeper is going: "I can't get any RP around here."

And I'm thinking: What the hell do you expect? Nobody's taking your shopkeeper to the Dungeon o' Doom...why'd you even make a shopkeeper? You're free to make a shopkeeper but why wouldja do it???

It's only now dawning on me that the shopkeeper never wanted to go to that dungeon, they wanted something else that I didn't see or know how to provide and it never even occurred to me that they'd want that thing and so to warn them: hey this game is about dungeon diving and bomb disarmament just never even occurred to me. I'm thinking now: what did that shopkeeper want? What wasn't I providing and what were they unable to communicate to me about it? Is it something I can provide or am even interested in providing or is the answer, very much, as you say, for me to simply put up disclaimers like: this game/plot is your basic action movie and we will be doing basic action movie things here, so please make yourself some sort of action movie trope to have Peak Fun?

@Misadventure said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

@Derp & @GreenFlashlight

I want to hear well-spoken and crafted arguments on many sides of any topic.

I don't care if it changes minds, that is very rare. (Again, RL says 30% conversion rate would be stunning).

I appreciate hearing this, because most of the time I feel like I'm just...beating my head bloody on a brick wall whenever I post stuff.

@kk I'm envious! My garden still lives in the realm of "maybe one of these days I'll...".

This looks like it took so much hard work!

@krmbm And I don't know most of 'em from Adam. See @reimesu 's example for what I'm worried about when I say:

Show me evidence, of a thing that happened, in a place that I control, and I will move hell and high water to keep you safe in that place. Because it's there. It's in black and white. There's the violation, there's the trust they broke, there it is.

But there is that other kind of predator out there, the one that whips people up with lies and ruins reputations because they enjoy using that tool to hurt people.

And the knee-jerk reaction of "Oh my god! You said they harmed you? I will nuke them immediately!" Caters to that sort.

@mietze I want to be clear that I will never shame anyone for giving out their info off game. I've given out my info off game, I've been harmed for it (and I've joyfully made new friends from it). I will however gently remind people that I can protect them to the best of my ability while they are in my virtual "house", but once they are in someone else's virtual "house" I lose my ability to do so. And in your example, they are doing stuff on game already and that's...stuff I will respond to. That's stuff you'll have a log for. A page log, a mail log, a channel log, a log log, you'll have it, and I can go "Wow, yeah, this is Not Okay, we will respond to this and thank you for bringing it to our attention."

But evidence is the standard I've chosen. Evidence, and acting within the scope of my power to act. I personally won't budge from it. Anyone can DNC anyone at any time for any reason, but if they want me to start getting happy with the ban hammer, I'm going to need something concrete to work with.

@Arkandel Neither. You're coming over here and having reasonable discussions. I don't care if people post on both boards.

I mean the specific users who come to this board, engage in sarcasm, engage in lots of accusations and poking and saying rude and awful stuff, and then when that is answered, mostly in a measured way, I might add, go back over there to accuse specific users over here of being rapists, rape-apologists, rape rape rape rape, stalkers, etc. etc. etc., while adding a few more gems along the way.

If you don't do that, which you don't, you're not who I am talking about.

Really I need to stop looking at BMD; a few times posts have been brought to my attention and I've taken a breath and gone to see to see if I could get context, but the stuff going on right over here is enough. The aggressive sarcasm, name calling, all that stuff, is happening right over here. I don't care what is done over there, ultimately, but I'd like to be left alone over here, I'd like the rest of our users to be left alone over here, I'd like to go back to where we were 2 months ago where all this was not happening. It didn't start happening till a few folks got bored and came over here to see if they couldn't provoke us into saying stuff they could yell about.

@Ghost I wouldn't say I have nothing to show for it. Quite the contrary.

I have fantastic friends who I went on to meet IRL and who became an important part of the fabric of my life and who I wouldn't give up for anything. People who have had my back, enriched my world, and made life better for me just for being there.

There were times in my life when I was in such a black hole of misery that being able to jump on and talk nerd shit with MUSHers, or be involved in some story where I needed to know what happened next or where I was aware my character's absence would be detrimental to other people's...I mean...sometimes that gave me a reason to hold on and thus I am still here. Not saying that's universal for everyone but. No. I wouldn't say, at all, that it's brought nothing to my life.

And that's why, right alongside seeing the benefits of not doing it, I miss it, and am aware of what it's costing me to not do it.

Ambivalence for the win I guess.

@krmbm I don't know what you're getting 12 from, if you're looking specifically at my game I have about 20 right now, and the answer is, "Some I'm happy to get to know and some I prefer to keep at arm's length while serving them equally according to my rules."

It's not a business. My vibe, my approach to running a game, is more...block party. Welcome to my living room. There's the cheetos. There's the Mountain Dew. There's the pizza. Let's play some roleplaying games. And if you act up and I see it I'mma run you outta here with the figurative skinny part of a fishin' rod.

But I'm not necessarily going to extend the same level of trust to every guest at the block party. And even the ones I'd trust with my life? I'd ask for evidence. They also know this about me and respect it. They respect this hard boundary.

Once upon a time I was a very knee-jerk staffer. I pretty much responded, out of emotion, to the first person to come and spin me a story or a line. I'd empathize, I'd think that was so terrible, I'd get manipulated, and my decisions weren't fair or right. And people knew they could play me like a fiddle if they just sounded as though they were in enough pain.

I now have a better MUSH tool (Ares) and a more objective standard and a couple decades of experience behind me and have trained myself to handle things in a different way, and I think the result is I am more fair to all players. All the guests in my living room. And hopefully they are happily eating cheeseballs and pretending to wave swords around or whatever.

I'm a storyteller, that's my passion, that's what I'm good at, that's what I do this for. And I know my limits.

Also worth noting that @Derp said, multiple times, that the history between he and Cobalt that he referred to was ancient.

I, personally, couldn't access any logs for any game stuff that happened for me any earlier than 2016. I took a pretty long hiatus from MU*ing between I think 2012 and 2016, and wasn't doing cloud-based log captures back in 2012. I don't remember that being an option at that point, in fact.

When the history is super ancient, I don't know that anybody's going to have the receipts to bring.

But he said that. Several times. "This is old history. She might have changed. I have seen this specific action in the past. It wouldn't surprise me if I were seeing that again."

Pretty mild stuff.

Comparing it to literal name calling, which @reimesu mildly called out with a "Hey, cut that out," or pretending that those two actions are the same actions at all, makes no sense to me.

@Macha That's less a dead celeb and more like a dead supervillain.

@saosmash That is not what @derp has been saying at all. He said "use the in-game tools which are almost impossible to forge," and "we will patrol this place by this standard" and no more. Not leaping all over someone just because someone said so is not championing the abuser.

@Misadventure I can at least give you an example of public information sharing. On a game I was on many many years ago we set up "police files" for the law enforcement players. They had a format, they were IC info for everyone, and most players really did use them and update them. They were on livejournal, making it easy to comment on one another's cases, though the link was posted in the faction bb. To-do lists got posted which suggested RP scenes that anyone could pick up and do, and there was very little overlap (that is, I can't think of any times where two people went to do the same to-do item).

I'm not sure that would work at all times and in all cases, but it worked very well in that specific time and in that specific place.

I personally like having the pass/fail result check prompts, I know that the ST can always suggest something different or I can offer something different, but guidance sometimes really helps. And I'm goal oriented, so I know I personally like setting goals to go after too, and enjoy getting XP for doing so. But that's less "this has been really successful!" and more "I really liked it."

@Hella I'm so glad you had fun!