Best posts made by faraday

@arkandel said in Regarding administration on MSB:

No one says we can't be in the Constructive section and give a completely horrible review for a game or even a staff member. Do we also need to call them a fuckhead?

The problem isn't necessarily the "bad review", it's the snowball effect that one creates on a discussion forum.

Reviewer: "This game sucks"
Game admin: "No it doesn't"
Reviewer: "It totally does. Here's a log."
Game supporter: "Lies! Cruel lies!"
Bystander: throws fuel on fire
Other Bystander: jokes about getting popcorn

And pretty soon we're devolved into hog pit territory and it's hard to pinpoint exactly where along the way things went off the rails.

This is why review sites don't allow discussions about the reviews. They just don't end well. Ever.

And yeah, I get @Thenomain's nudge nudge about discussing something that comes out of a review. I just think that sort of thing works better when discussed in the abstract with cooler heads, like I mentioned to @Three-Eyed-Crow a couple posts back. "When is it okay to spy on players, if ever" can be constructive. "OMG UH Staff is spying on everybody" is a fine 1-star review, but unlikely to end in anything other than a dogpiling dumpster fire when turned into a discussion.

@wizz said in Regarding administration on MSB:

I don't find the toxicity WORA was known for "entertaining" and I have a pretty low opinion of people who do, and it frustrates and discourages me that big meltdowns like the UH X-Men drama tend to draw new faces who want to see more of the same.

Yeah. I get that @Arkandel has no intention of doing away with the hog pit. That's the mods' right and it is not my intention to beat a dead horse.

But I will say this: We talk sometimes about the future of MUSHing, about how hard it is to draw in new players, etc. As someone who knows writers who might be interested, who has a daughter who some day might be interested... I can't in good conscience invite them into a gaming community that is so darn toxic. And I'm not just talking about MSB here, because the same attitude that feeds the Hog Pit pervades the games too.

Now it's not all bad. But it is pretty disheartening.

@bored Thank you.

And in a constructive vein - I think the one thing we both agree on (and so have others) is the idea of an "Honest Reviews" section. We may differ a bit on our desired execution, but I think the core idea is the same - that players should have the ability to review a game outside the hog pit even if that review is negative.

I don't think forum software is the greatest way to record reviews, but since it's all we've got... one potential way to do it is to allow people to create a poll for a game with 1-star to 5-stars as the poll result options. Then limit people (by policy; I don't think the forum software can enforce it) to just one review post per game. No debates, no dumpster fires, just individual reviews.

@ganymede said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

And as I have yet to hear a solid reason as to why a player must engage in IC discrimination, and cannot find any situation where a player should engage in it.

OOC player-to-player discrimination is never excusable, but here are a couple of real IC examples.

A frontier game set in 1840's Australia. My female ranchhand was subject to IC discrimination by various PCs, including her reluctant boss, for being unconventional, 'loose' (their impression because she worked with the men), and a bad influence on 'proper' young ladies. The discrimination was entirely thematic and I had no problem with it. I would have actually been a bit bewildered if nobody had batted an eye at her, since her struggle against convention was what interested me most about the character.

Same frontier game (still 1840s, remember). My char's BFF came out to her, revealing she was a trans woman and oh-by-the-way was romantically interested in my char. Later that same char admitted she had married a man, in church, without revealing the truth about her identity. My char, a practicing Catholic, was more than a little "WTF" by all this. But although it started out with entirely-period rejection and damnation, it led to a really great character arc where my char came to realize that her BFF was still her BFF, and that these other unconventional people were really her only true friends and allies in town, and who the heck was she to throw stones.

BSG game. My char is Space Irish (using the paper-thin analogies for the sake of those unfamiliar with the setting), her father was jailed for being part of the Space IRA, and she's suffered a lifetime of abuse at the hands of the Space British. You can bet she's bigoted against Space British characters. She had a lot of issues dealing with her NPC Space British boss.

Now I'm a pretty empathetic person RL. I'm sure a lot of folks here are sick of my bleeding heart views about everyone getting along. But my characters are not me and IC is IC. If someone asks for a FTB, I will agree without question. If someone asks me to do (or not do) something because the RP is going in a direction they don't like, I'll do my best to work with them. But I'm not going to feel guilty for having my character react in thematically appropriate ways that are true to that character.

@auspice said in Encouraging Proactive Players:

If someone wants to do this, they can reach out. I will make myself available to join in, but if a player wants to do legwork? Wants to research? Wants to brainstorm? They should indicate wanting to do so. I am not going to drag people along who show zero interest in wanting to do so.

@ghost said in Encouraging Proactive Players:

At the end of the day, you can lead a horse to water, dump it on its head, push their face into it, beg the horse, pray to the horse gods, whisper it it, and learn to speak in centaur language...
...but if they don't wanna drink, no amount of prodding will make them do so.

These two things go together in my mind. It's not really fair to expect STs or staff to bribe/cajole/browbeat people into playing. It's a roleplaying game. Freaking roleplay. If all you ever want is BarRP, knock yourself out. Otherwise, step up and show some initiative.

Sadly I think most MU*ers come from a tabletop/video game experience where story is presented to them on a silver platter and all they have to do is show up and consume. Oooh look - a questgiver. Click. Do the thing. Job done.

As for the original question, most proactive RPers will do their thing as long as you just get out of their way:

• Don't put up artificial roadblocks. (like having to submit plots in advance)
• Don't be heavy handed. (okay, the city guard probably should have responded in their scene... just let it go if you can, and if you can't? Try to deal with it as encouragingly as humanly possible)
• Give them legitimacy. (explicitly encourage PRPs and publicly recognize them)
• Let them impact the world, within reason.
• Give them little nibbles to run with.

I'm not a fan of offering XP as a reward, and most people don't seem to care too much about softer rewards. I'd say fully 75% of the plot-runners on BSGU never bothered to submit a request for their bonus luck point.

@the-sands said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

but if they are just average people and they didn't take it then you shouldn't blame them because you did something wrong.

That's absurd. If the rules say "Drive 1 means the average person who can drive well enough to get to the grocery store without incident" and I take that level because that describes my character then I haven't done anything wrong. New players can't be expected to psychically know which rules to follow and which rules not to follow. It's a game designer's mistake for writing the rules that way and a staff mistake for not saying in their house rules "this rule as written is stupid and we're ignoring it" but in no way, shape or form is it a player mistake.

@the-sands said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

Again, my real point is that you can't blame the person who didn't take Drive (which was what was initially being implied).

I'm not blaming them. I'm just saying that gives them an advantage over the player who tried to play the game with the rules as written. I don't see how that's really debatable. Your RP your character as "an average day to day driver" and so do I. But I paid two extra points for it. That means your character is two points better at things that actually matter in the game.

Also, if the staff really does mean the rules as written (which some places do), then RPing being an average driver when the rules say you aren't is cheating. It's no different than RPing a doctor-level medicine knowledge when you have First Aid 1.

@arkandel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

Your identity. You are Joe, and once Joe dies and you become Bob. This is a subtle loss but not one to be underestimated since it does matter, and there's no way around that one

This is not a subtle loss, though. This is the main loss for an awful lot of players, myself included. I couldn't give a crap about the XP/rank lost -- on the games I play, mechanical advancement is downplayed or non-existent. I care because my investment is in the character. Their relationships, their personality, their goals -- their story in other words. All the scenes played, all the knowledge gained ... gone. Congratulations, now you get to start from zero and do BarRP all over again to build up new relationships and get used to a new character's shoes and invent a new character's family history and life story... nope. Not interested. You couldn't bribe me enough for that.

But anything short of that? Sure, I'm game. My characters have been conned, dumped, severely injured, arrested - as long as it's on mutually-agreeable terms, I'm down with almost anything for the sake of a good story.

@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

How do you bring a person into that fold?

Even setting aside the Technical (black telnet screen with obscure commands and clunky accessory wikis) and Advertising (good luck finding games) issues, there are huge hurdles on several fronts:

Stylistic -- MUSHing is not friendly to casual players. People leave you out of plots if you're not around. You quickly lose track of what's going on. And even just a single scene requires a 3-4 hour chunk of continuous time. It's very demanding. Also, it falls into a weird void between writing and gaming, and even within MUSHing people are very polarized about where on that spectrum it falls.

Cultural -- let's face it, we're really not a very welcoming community. We stick to our cliques. We turn our noses up at people who don't play by our definition of "right" (their poses aren't the right length, they do too much or too little metaposing, they don't page before entering a public scene, they want control over their characters, they're too powergamey, etc.) And many games are frighteningly toxic in their culture or staff abuse.

Most of us play because we've been doing it for decades and we've got friends who play. But I'll turn your question around and ask: Let's pretend you had some writer and/or gamer friends. Would you really feel comfortable inviting them to play MUSHes? Would you be confident that other players would treat them well and actually help them learn to play? Do you think they'd actually have fun?

If the answer to any of those questions is 'no', then those are the questions we should be addressing before we even think about advertising.

@surreality said in Horror MUX:

Hello, sea change.

I'm genuinely happy that people are having fun and I applaud the staff for providing a different experience that's resonating with some folks. But... it only becomes a sea change if it catches on with the majority of MUSHers. I really don't see that happening. There are too many unique factors at play here with the setting - the revolving archetypes (so death isn't permanent), the short stories, etc.

People didn't care too much about their characters in TGG or Paranoia dying either, but neither of those really caught on for the majority of the MUSH/TTRPG population.

The change I hope this drives is more game-runners being willing to ignore the "that'll never work" / "we tried that once in 1999 and it failed" naysayers and be willing to take a chance on something different. Even if that "different" doesn't include everyone or lead to a massive WHO list.

@surreality said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

It can't simply be dismissed as 'Bob is oversensitive, tell Bob to suck it up', but there's no real easy answer here that I can see, either, beyond telling people to simply not engage Bob in that manner, potentially over and over and over and over again as different people do this, and that doesn't seem like the appropriate answer, either.

I think that if you have someone like that being unreasonable, you just have to tell them so as gently as possible and hope for the best. You can't expect everybody to bend over backwards just to avoid upsetting Bob if Bob has a ridiculously low tolerance for what upsets them.

It isn't easy though. I had someone I thought was a close MU friend quit a game once because I tried, as politely as possible, to tell them that their claims of "OMG Jane broke the rules and wronged me terribly!" were unreasonable and I wasn't going to take action against Jane. (Ironically, they also claimed it was because I was only defending Jane because she was my friend. You may notice a common theme here when decisions don't go someone's way, even when they're supposedly your friend. Staffing sucks.)

I must confess though that I've always found it weird that you need to incentivize RP at all. Like... RP is literally the point of the game. Why do I need a carrot on a stick to get people to tell stories, on a game that's about telling stories?

It's pretty baffling to me, honestly.

@Lotherio said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

The folks only on to chat with friends to line up RP for later is a turnoff for some that likes spontaneity, as much as the hyper thirsty new player always asking for RP can be.

I think that instead of expecting people to compromise on a game that we're doing for our own enjoyment, we just need more recognition that people play these games differently and that's okay.

If you're playing the game at all, then you're contributing to the game's story and community in your own way. Even private scenes with friends often have ripples to other players. And if Bob and Mary are only ever holed up in their hideout never RPing with anybody but each other, they're not actually doing any harm to the game (especially compared to if they weren't there at all.)

There's nothing wrong with walking away from a game if it's not a good fit for you. But let's not forget that these are games. Expecting me to spend my precious free time playing a kind of game I don't like, or in a way I don't like, is... kind of weird.

@Sparks said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

And then it's nobody's game.

Very much agreed. Staff can't really dictate culture, per se, but they can and should drive the culture. This is done through the plots they run, the code they write, the types of characters they approve (or don't), the things they reward (and how), and the behavior they tolerate (or stamp down).

@Thenomain said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

But what does that mean, "like a PC"?

Circling back to this one for a second...

In a TTRPG I think this is much easier to quantify because PCs have one or more other defining characteristics: complete character sheets, presence in every session as a core team member, gaining XP and loot on par with the other PCs, etc. Granted this may not apply everywhere, but it's reasonably universal.

But I think that the biggest defining characteristic for a PC in a TTRPG is that the player is trying to succeed. What "succeed" means may vary - get to level 20, complete the mission, kill the Big Bad, survive, whatever. But generally PCs have an agenda.

Players of NPCs shouldn't have an agenda beyond "play fair and tell a good story". Of course your NPC ICly has an agenda, but the minute the player becomes too invested in that agenda, they're being played like a PC.

(I will refrain from rambling on about my utopian dream that all players would go into the game with no agenda beyond "play fair and tell a good story". While that would sure be nice, even I'm not that naive :))

So for all that I've worked to make Ares async-friendly, I don't actually enjoy async RP that much personally. I have had a few good google doc scenes with friends that otherwise wouldn't have happened, but for the most part one of these things happens:

• the scene stretches on so long that it begins to muck with my sense of internal continuity
• I forget the scene exists and never get back to posing
• I'm so worried I'll forget the scene exists that I check it obsessively for new activity
• My partner forgets the scene exists and the scene just sorta...dies

So my version of RL-friendly is planned and short. If it's planned, people can adjust their schedules around it. If it's (reasonably) short, they know they're not going to be at it all night.

@tooters said in Mourning a character, how do you do it?:

I don't get emotionally attached to the characters I make. Not only that, I don't understand why the vast majority of players do.

People get attached to characters in stories. Just look at any fandom to see people going bananas over their fav chars are treated (good or bad). Making people care about the characters in your story is kind of a fundamental hallmark of storytelling.

I won't pretend to understand the psychology behind why it is this way, but it is undeniably A Thing in human society.

So if you can accept that people get attached to characters in stories, in general, it follows that people would get attached to their own characters in their own stories, to include MUSHing. The degree of IC/OOC bleed that pervades roleplaying only intensifies this effect, and the PVP aspect @Ganymede mentioned can introduce an extra layer of perceived unfairness/anger/etc.

I wouldn't say I "mourn" characters (that word has too much baggage in my mind), but I do get bummed out when their stories get cut short for whatever reason. I don't really do anything specific about it though.

Just to clarify - from what I've been told, it's not joining the discord that gets you hacked. It's a suspicious link that you get sent after/during the process that takes you to a fake website where - (this is the part where my reports got a little hazy) - you are asked to enter your discord credentials to "verify yourself".

So the moral of the story isn't 'don't join discord servers' - it's be wary of ANY link at ANY time asking you to enter credentials. Double check the URL, the lock icon, the source of the link, etc. to make sure that it truly is Discord asking for your Discord credentials.

@Ganymede said in Highlights of Ares?:

You don’t know how much Ares does until you’re not using it any more.

To OP's original question though - the async RP and web portal get the most attention for Ares in a "love it or hate it" kind of way. Obviously I'm biased, but I think that perspective tends to gloss over a lot of what's baked in from a MU client side too.

The automatic scene logs, dispensing with command prefixes, the integrated help/+help system, player handles and friend features, a comsys that supports both MUX and Penn commands, accessibility features for screen readers, unicode support, the editing commands that interface with "/grab"... there's kind of a lot.

Plus a fully out-of-the-box system that you can run with no code or coding experience.

@reimesu said in The Case Against Real PBs:

Actually, I have an inability to imagine faces from text. Which is why I like PBs. It's not a failure of imagination, it's that it's not how my imagination works.

Same. One of my early games was Babylon 5 MUSH. I played for YEARS on that game never actually knowing what any of the non-FC characters looked like. A few years ago I did an exercise of asking my old friends from that game which PB they would choose for their characters. Suddenly those characters were enriched for me in a way that they never were before.

Can people use it for creepy ends and/or get weirdly obsessed? Sure. But that's not what everybody is doing, and that doesn't mean the practice has no value.

@Derp said in The Case Against Real PBs:

Point being, calling it a writing hobby and getting mad that people lack the skill to wordsmith something to give you a perfect picture in your head really misses the mark of what skills are actually important for the end result of “being entertained with a collaborative story,”

I still consider it "a writing hobby" because I would argue the core of writing is exactly what you're describing there. Writing fiction is about telling a story, not about the mechanics of florid prose. There are tons of popular books out there with bare-bones or even non-existent descriptions, and even ones regarded as literary classics (ala Hemingway).

@Ghost said in The Case Against Real PBs:

But either way, my litmus test is "is it wrong to use a 'real' person's image (ex: Facebook, your RL girlfriend, or someone's mom) as a PB?" and if the answer is yes, then for the same reasons it's wrong to use celebrities, too.

I have nothing against your personal litmus test and I respect your principles. My issue is you seem to be casting judgment on others for having a different litmus test.

I would never use a regular non-celebrity real person as a PB. But big-name (adult) actors/actresses are putting their likeness out there into the public eye in ways that regular people do not. Their faces are on action figures, posters, video game characters, etc. Hollywood scripts are written with dream casting ("I had Tom Cruise in mind for this character.") Fan fiction utilizes characters from a book/film/series in new ways the author/actors maybe never anticipated. And people have been fantasizing about celebrities for as long as there have been celebrities.

Whether all of that is abhorrent boundary-crossing or just part of the job they chose (or both, maybe?) is something everyone has to decide for themselves.

@three-eyed-crow said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I use separate apps for Spotify and Slack and other such programs whenever possible, and I honestly don't view this as that different than using a MU client. I just think it's a better user experience.

The main difference IMHO is that those apps are easy to use. A MUSH client just isn't. It's like a DOS shell.

I have no philosophical objection to breaking out chat and RP into a separate stand-alone client, though there's a ton of work involved there when you account for all the different platforms. What I object to is expecting people to learn all these game-specific +-commands with crazy syntaxes.