Best posts made by Devrex

@Macha Hahaha. I knew you were. But I didn't see a need to!

@krmbm Well I didn't say don't tell people that, I said don't malign folks over it. And yes. To reiterate. My argument, and @derp 's has exactly been: we are only qualified to patrol the game and no other outside venue, we require evidence that someone has actually wronged someone before we bounce them for wronging someone. That's exactly right. That is exactly what I'm saying. Most of the time people leave themselves enough rope to hang themselves with. Or to boot themselves with, as the case may be.

You think it's harmful. I, @derp, @reimesu, have told you of examples where great harm has been caused by being too reactive, too.

So far this philosophy of mine has been equated to being cold and unsympathetic about it and showing no empathy, to never having been abused or stalked (making vast assumptions about what people have been through or not), to just letting abusers run amok like crazy, whatever else. @roz has just told me that people's personal opinions of Derp are coloring the argument, which...really says that a lot of this isn't about the substance of the argument at all, then.

This idea that one can care about creating an evidence-based, process-based space but must automatically swing the pendulum clear over to not caring or not acting or not being empathetic or just letting abusers be abusive then is a false equivalency.

What if the person I threw off my game on someone else's word was you? And it was "I know you can't see anything in this stack of logs" or "I know I haven't provided you with anything to look at at all, but @krmbm is awful and hurtful, please believe me!" What if that person just clashed with you a little bit, and you're not really in emotional or physical danger at all? Would you really feel happy if I just said "You're gone, you said stuff about this other player I like better than you, I'm concerned about their emotional health here so you're gone and I'm also going to label you an abuser when the inevitable questions arise about why you were banned?" You'd really feel that was fair and just and right and how you wanted to be treated?

Personally, I've come to be a bit less enamored of the whole "character advancement" as an inherent part of RPGs in general. I get that it's baked in deep, but I think that a lot of games (especially MU games where the PCs represent a much broader swathe of the population) you don't need to have every character at the start of a bildungsroman.

Might be on to something here. @Derp maybe starting characters at a higher level, and then combine it with "you can advance your character once a year with a set amount of XP" or something to combine it with the character arc idea. Would be an interesting experiment to run.

@Misadventure You might also get some traction by asking PCs to set some goals. Phrased like: "What are three goals your PC wants to achieve that they will need other PCs for?"

Thus PCs will generate "quests" for other PCs as well, and will have the basis for some story and relationship building. Even if it's simple as: "The blackberries for my special blackberry jelly are up in the hills where all the bears are, and I'm scared of bears and need someone to go with me."

Which is my over-coffee stab at a Stardew Valley example.

Some could be one-offs, but at least one should be a reusable schtick.

@ZombieGenesis Thank you so much. Every share and we’ll wish helps. We did meet our fundraising goal! The initial hospital transferred us because they didn’t care that Go Fund Me takes 5 to 7 days but the new one was a lot nicer and checked him in after I showed them the campaign. The doctor hasn’t seen him yet…doctor is in surgery with another kitty, but they have him back there on his IV and stuff and I don’t think they are going to be all like: “9K upfront NOW or we don’t operate!” I so appreciate everyone who took an interest or shared or helped, words really cannot express.

@krmbm VA Spider was referenced multiple times, and I believe that example is more than famous. But yes, at this point, you and I have a 180 staffing philosophy difference. I'm fine with agreeing to disagree about it...and agreeing that we would not enjoy being on one another's games.

Flight of the Golden Crane is a Wheel of Time MUSH set in an alternate universe version of the War of One Hundred Years. War ravages the world, and one fragile alliance defends the interests of the Light against chaos and Darkness: the Borderlands Alliance launched by Shevan Jamelle, once governor of the province of Rhamdashar, now King of the newborn nation of Malkier.

Players will take roles as members of the Alliance and will face threats from within and without. The Blight is wide awake and threatening invasion from the North. Greedy lords and ladies and crazed fanatics eye their lands from the South. Internal threats and intrigues could tear the newborn border kingdoms like rotted cloth. It will be up to the PCs to keep all of these threats at bay.

We’re about 1100 years before the books/television show and that has meant a lot of extrapolating from source material. Thus everything anyone would need to play is somewhere on the site. Don’t know a thing about WoT but have been looking for a high fantasy game for awhile? It’s been set up so you can walk right in and treat it like an original fantasy if you want to.

What can you do on this game?

On this game, you can fight monsters. Protect your home. Repel invasions. Oppose, make use of, or ally with various factions. Negotiate with warring generals, lords, and leaders. Study strange phenomenon. Chase useful local resources that can aid in this conflict. Maneuver your way into earning resources for the people who look to you for leadership. Engage in intrigues with border lords whose ambitions and agendas may threaten the newly forged and therefore fragile alliance. Engage in intrigues to improve your own character’s power, prestige, influence, or position. Track down thieves, Darkfriends, and other bad actors. Build the relationships that make it all worthwhile for your characters, and which lead to rich character growth and development. Face dangers that may test your character’s faith or loyalties. Not all dangers are physical…or obvious.

On this game, story is the focus and players have been given plenty of freedom to make their own fun while being provided with straight shot access to getting into ST plots too. Effort is also made to make player-run plots just as relevant as staff-run plots.

We chose this time period because it offers a range of experiences at a time and place where every single PC action has the potential to be significant.

Come on out and see us at goldencrane.aresmush.com.

@Ganymede Hahah yeah. He's home now. Mostly hiding under the bed but he seems like he's doing alright. He had a plate of food I put just next to the bed and he reached out a claw to draw it baaaack under so he could eat under there. But he came up to see me last night.

*Nobody's running the types of things I want to play in, so I don't get to play in the types of things that I run for other people and I'm frustrated about that. (this sometimes morphs into the dreaded OMG this place is populated by people who don't take RP as seriously as I do, since they like different and less meaningful things, if one isn't careful.)

This can be so, so disheartening. It's happened to me many, many times. It's quite a lucky thing when you get to a place where two people want to run and play in the same type of stuff, so they can feed each other and keep each other sane.

*If I run something publicaly, it tends to get cluttered up fast with players I don't like. (who don't engage and probably are going to come to MSB and bitch about how boring all PrPs on this mush are within 5 minutes of finishing the 3 hour scene that I had to pester them to pose/do their action/ect the entire time or who would wait for 40 minutes to give everyone a 1 liner pose that didn't react to anyone else's pose)

In my opinion, this can be solved by staff offering support for a player's right to refuse service to anyone they feel like refusing service to.

Nobody owes anyone else their creative labor.

I'd tell any player they have the absolute right to tell someone not to show up at their scene. "You dialed it in last time and that sucked my energy away so I won't be adding you to this one," is valid and okay, and in my opinion staff needs to back that. So is asking someone to leave a scene. "This is the third time I've had to ask you to pose and you gave nothing to work with. That's disrespectful to the other participants and to me, and I'm going to ask you to leave." Policies should be supportive of the fact that someone who is asked to leave has no real choice but to do so, if the code doesn't allow you to just straight up remove them.

*I'm over here working my ass off, running a ton of stuff for people to help take stuff off staff's plate, but it looks like instead of inviting me or securing me a spot in stuff that other people or staff are running, they're just doing stuff with themselves/their usuals.

This one is harder; if what staff is running is mostly public they get who they get. I get baffled by players who say this but don't sign up for the public fun on offer, or put in +requests, or otherwise use the tools. For this I would think communicating clearly: "Hey can I get into this, hey can you save me a spot, hey can I follow up on this lead, hey do you have any mysteries coming up I can participate in, hey would you be available for some RP..." would have a favorable response. Sometimes staff just doesn't know how to include a player more directly, is staring at their sheet or their backstory and is at a loss for a hook or an angle. Sometimes staff isn't aware they're interested or care about that RP. They might just need to hear from the player in a non-accusatory way.

*The system rules/lore is confusing and I get anxiety just thinking about putting myself out there that way as a storyteller.

The solution here may be for staffers to offer themselves as "rules support". Player tells the story, staffer offers back-seat drive guidance till they feel more confidence. I've done this for players before and am more than willing to do it again...but I haven't always been good about communicating that fact. Note to self for current project!

*As a player participant I see people do no-shows, act like entitled assholes OOCly, try to run over/backtalk the ST, bitch about how they never get to do anything fun on a public channel while participating in this STed scene, argue with the ST over rolls/mock or not shut up OOCly about rolls, ect ect--fuck that, I don't want to risk having to deal with people like that.

Weirdly I've seen less of this over the years, not more. Most players I've run into and have run for have been kind, appreciative, helpful, and forgiving. Everyone's mileage surely varies there, though. I offer this not as a refutation but more to offer a sense of hope...many players are awesome!

@arkandel That's usually how I see it, as an investment in nurturing someone who might discover the love of it but who might not, and either way for one night at least they're getting engaged and doing the thing. If they even walk away with more confidence to page some other player and say "Hey I think my car broke down on the side of the road near that highway where the serial killer's been operating and I think my cell phone is dead, your RP hooks say you're good with cars, wanna come to the rescue?" then...awesome. The serial killer need never make an appearance even. They've gotten confident enough to pitch a thing that will entertain them both for one night and won't be reliant on +events. Well worth one night spent going "I'd set a -2 mod for that" when asked.

@selira I'm not sure what constitutes arguing in bad faith, but of course I have my own blind spots and biases. That said, I do try hard to engage with the actual words that are being actually said. I also try not to make accusations per se, but I do see behaviors happen and I disagree with those behaviors. It sounds like you're trying to push me into shutting up by attacking my character (i.e., you argue in bad faith). Is that what you're trying to do?

And you just used the word "asshole" and defended calling people an asshole as a good thing. Is that what you meant to do? Do you mean to say that if someone yells a name loudly enough the person who gets called a name is automatically wrong and the name callers are automatically correct? Because that would be disturbing. If I suddenly shouted a name at you right now would you then step back and evaluate how you were coming across or would you want to defend yourself?

@rightmeow For my part, I am only speaking to folks who are still here and who are still beating certain drums, and speaking to behaviors which I continue to see happening to some degree. I can see how it might be read as piling on to those other folks, and for that I certainly apologize.

@lotherio Eight is about my limit, and I prefer four to five...for the same reason. My attention span just can't keep up with more, and as it is I'm reading poses and jotting down notes that boil each pose down to the action so I can call for rolls and write a pose that includes everyone at the end of a round. Ideally everyone feels like they contribute something to the scene or at least has the opportunity to do so if they want to (sometimes reaction is all a PC can give and if it's fun for them that's still a success). The more people in it, the harder it is to offer ways to make that happen.

@juniper said in Too Much:

Every single emote had a response to everyone else in the scene, it was chaotic and nonsensical. Nothing ever got done.

I have this habit (trying to respond to everyone), mostly cause I'm really paranoid about making anyone feel left out or ignored, and I am only now starting to realize it could create problems. This is good to know though!

I'm far more a fan of: "K guys, I'm running a party scene in a very large location. Here's location A, location B, location C, they're close enough to get to and wander in and out of but far enough away from each other that your character wouldn't notice something on the other side of the room. We're just going to agree nobody's going to be screaming bloody murder at this scene cause 20 person scenes aren't the place for that. And go have a one-off breakaway scene using this as backdrop if you wanna." It allows people to meet randomly which is the only real reason for a 20-person party scene and to forge new character ties, but it also allows folks to have a quieter scene where they aren't getting lost. And if the GM does want stuff the whole room can react to, they just sit in those rooms and skim for people falling off tables so they can emit that to every room.

@ganymede Given how brain-fried everyone is...modern settings often seem the best bet. Less heavy lifting on "what do? What RP? How does world work?"

@hella Fair, and often me too, but I'm just observing kind of what seems to be pulling people in and the games that seem to be doing well. I think it's cause with modern world games people can choose to engage with the heavier world plot...or they can just say eff it and go RP getting a cup of coffee or hitting the climbing wall to have a deep conversation or something.

I play Coulson a lot on comic games, which means a lot of shrugging and finding ways to contribute while hanging out with Superman and Thor at the same time. If the players are good and interested in selling each other's strength, then there's always some sneaky/spy/gadget-based thing I can do...or the players let me get mileage out of being the Dad/Leader type and letting me come up with plans to best use all their strengths. I imagine it would be miserable where nobody cared about "sell" or including people at every power level, but in the right environment balance doesn't tend to matter for me one whit. I like to watch the characters interact and to see what new stories can develop. And...admittedly...when playing FCs I also sort of get a kick of finding a comic or a podcast or a short story where I find the writing ended up pretty close to what me and the other MU*ers did. I'm kind of burnt out on comics right now but I admit the first thing I do check is "are any of the characters I could play still available," OCs are risky. I like playing with them as they're key to making new stories, but I don't like taking them on a comic game cause a lot of people don't feel the same way and avoid them. I admit that I would find Coulson working with the Thundercats kind of hilarious so...super broad doesn't bother me if I can find RPers who like generating the kinds of stories I also like.

@arkandel It's frustrating that folks would do that, especially given that killing a PC is the most boring thing a person can do. There's a lot more mileage out of making lives complicated. The thug just...proves his dice are badass? Yay for him? The mindset of people who do this has never made sense to me.

I think also some of the competitiveness about a character taking over another player's "niche" has to do with MUSH rising out of tabletops.

In a tabletop, if Player A takes a wizard you don't take the wizard, you take the cleric or the rogue or the fighter. It's the same impulse that has people asking "what does the game need?"

And when sometimes opportunities to get involved and get the good RP (which I define as the story-based RP or deep character-development RP that would not be edited out of the book or movie, as opposed to sort of random-aimless-small talk RP that you mostly have to suffer through to get to the good RP) are limited, when someone comes in and wants to fill the same niche, I think it's not...entirely just due to being shitty to sort of tense up and go, "Great, what if my RP group no longer needs or wants me cause Captain Shiny New Guy can do everything I can do? I'm super screwed."

It's not always being aggressive and mean. And of course the onus is on the old player to manage their own feelings about new guy, it's not new guy's fault, but...that's where some of this arises from, and knowing that can help sort of the game as a whole find ways to sort of...be reassuring to the fact that there can be two characters with the exact same character build and everyone can still have a good time.