Best posts made by evilcabbage

hi, i'm evilcabbage, resident serial killer of armageddonmud. i am a prolific killer in the game in that in the eight years of playing armageddon i have managed to kill exactly six pcs, all of which had especially good reasons behind it.

i start with that so you understand what kind of a player i am. i do not do things without reason, and generally if your pc dies by my hand, you deserved it. you may not know what you did, but somewhere along the line you made a bad mistake and someone wanted you dead. this... has never happened to a single new player that has ever come to the game.

the community in armageddon that we have right now, barring the unadulterated rage of some people who a) do not play anymore, and b) do not have a feel for the current climate, is incredibly helpful to new players. we don't bend over backwards for them - we don't hand them keys to the castle. but if you come to our discord and you were to ask, "hey, @evilcabbage, can you give me some advice on how to get started", chances are i will answer you and give you some helpful advice.

if you were to, for instance, go, "hey, @evilcabbage, what is a blue robe templar," i would tell you "blue robe templars, addressed as lord or lady templar, are the magick-wielding authorities of the city of allanak and require bowing when they enter an area, and when you approach them to speak to them."

if you went, "hey, @evilcabbage, my pc lives in allanak and i need to know where to buy water", i could tell you where the water sellers are and how to get the knowledge to use them. generally you shouldn't tell me your pc lives in allanak or wherever to begin with, but for very simple things like "how should i react to x robe entering a room", i will be more than happy to tell you the appropriate titles and addresses and what you should do.

why would i do that? because this isn't a game where concealing basic information any citizen of a city would know is considered good. the people who come here, and make the complaint that certain people are staff bootlickers, forget that some of those people they call "bootlickers" were on staffs naughty radar for doing bad things - and improved as players.

here, i'll quote something from hedge:

"They'll lynch you in-game for a minor error that's easy to make, like emoting walking over to the message board to read it - reading is illegal, you see. The message board is right there and newbies fresh off the wagon don't realize it's an OOC construct, because it exists as an object in the room, so they emote reading it and every bored soldier PC, tavern idler and their cousins are leaping at the chance to antagonize them for it."

this does not happen. we do not lynch people for emoting reading it. we ooc politely, "the message board is actually just a gaggle of rumor-mongering people, not a real message board, as reading is illegal for commoners and restricted to important merchant house family members and the highborn (nobility and templarate)".

despite what hedge would tell you, we "are" very welcoming to new players. the welcome might be an introduction to being mugged and murdered, or being abused, or being treated lower than low because you're a commoner and that's a templar, but you are being introduced to the world.

if you make crazy egregious mistakes like punching people with "kill" instead of "hit" in a tavern brawl, yes, you are going to be introduced violently to crime code. you might try to steal from someone, fail, and get caught. you might call someone the wrong title - generally they'll correct you. it might be mean, the way they do it, but they will correct you and 99.9999999999% of the time it does not end in your death unless you revert to insulting said person.

i hope i have cleared some of this stuff up for some of you. i'm here until thursday.

i'm going to make a statement i have made on our discord before, but take the threat with a grain of salt.

if i am assisting a new player in ooc, and someone has a problem with that, that's too bad for them. i can pkill them so they'll be quiet and i can return to helping.

on a serious note, if someone takes issue with it, i am not a nice person. i will tell them to shut up, i'm helping a new player, they can kindly go somewhere else because this new person is more important than they are to me. i'm very protective oocly of newbies and when they have questions or issues, that takes precedence. an old player might get salty, but he won't ragequit because i told him off. a new player might ragequit because he feels he's being treated unfairly in a generally unfair world, and i have to explain how things work, and that we don't hate them, our character might hate their character, but we're all in it for the story. we aren't here to make you as a player feel unwelcome.

we want new players butchering people and going on well-roleplayed murder sprees too.

@d-bone said in Armageddon MUD:

Well there tend to be a few examples- but all of which could color a player to refrain from using ooc.

The first example is a new player asking questions oocly about things his character would icly know to other characters in game. Said players asked questions would likely respond not with an ooc answer, but a simple ask IC.

General communication about things you can do in the game oocly are highly discouraged, if not punishable infractions.

A benign question asked oocly- even if your character icly might have knowledge of such- that is illegal could be something as simple as:Hey is it a good idea to go outside the west gate and hunt there or is the east gate safer? Some games go find out ic, Arma has a much harder stance on that shit, not only do you not get the answer, you should be 'reminded' not to ask questions like that.

Thus after maybe a week of this behavior- of being 'encouraged' or 'punished' to use ic communicion only, a player is not going to WANT to ask for a retcon until the scene is far too far in.

(On the RPI I play on currently, during a travel phase to arrange play times for about 10 or so players.. I used ooc personally.. 4 times total? During a trip, over the course of a week. This was to arrange travel times.. with diverse players. Instead players tried to try and match u preal time to in game time which is all sorts of stupid and difficult. Imagine how much easier if everyone was just willing to use ooc and not afraid people would call them out on that shit)

in our game people will say "we're having x happen in x weeks (our in game version of rl days), and will clarify with an ooc as to when exactly this thing will happen.

also, if you asked me oocly whether the east or west gate of allanak was safer, i would reply in ooc: the entire desert outside the city is basically unsafe, so there is no real way to say which is safer oocly.

the nuances of that could be explained icly by those that know, and i would probably add "you can definitely find that out icly by asking".

well, we're not making contrarian viewpoints - except that i don't think anyone here who plays armageddon and is assisting in advertisement has said "not" to use the ooc command for things like asking brief questions.

yes, you can get mugged, crime-code generally turns off at night in the streets unless an npc is very nearby. you won't be mugged for being new, but you can be mugged, it's something new players should come into the game expecting could happen. i don't see the issue.

i had it hard when i started out, and other people before me probably had it harder. oocly, we are here to help people. icly, however, it depends on who you talk to. i thought that would be obvious.

there are ooc warnings if you read help labyrinth, or IC if you walk into the labyrinth rooms and see "this place looks like a total shithole". you'd know you stumbled into the rinth, and you'd have a pretty good idea that some very bad people live there. this isn't a mush only forum, we're advertising for a mud. if that does not appeal to you, and you have no prior experience with our mud, then i'd ask that you respect what we're trying to do here and go about your business elsewhere.