Best posts made by faraday

@sockmonkey said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

One is still only going to go as far as makes sense for their character's IC limits/knowledge base.

This right here is the core of the issue. The two 'sides' of this seemingly-endless debate can be summarized (IMHO) as:

• Defender should set those limits because they understand their character and their knowledge/boundaries/personality/history/predilections/etc.
• Defenders can't be trusted to set those limits because they have an incentive to come up with even the thinnest excuse to avoid the consequences of a roll.

There's also the issue of the way social conflict is resolved. Human behavior is complex, and trying to boil it down to "roll Persuasion vs Wits with some vague modifier and if I win then you're persuaded" is as utterly nonsensical as trying to model physical combat with "roll Firearms vs Dex with some vague modifier and if I win then you're dead."

No sane gamer would accept the latter, but many argue that people who refuse to accept the former are just cheaters who can't bear to lose, deserving of mockery. It's absurd and insulting.

@arkandel said in Historical settings:

"We want to explore the Wild West era without focusing on racial tensions". Then the onus is on players to not be jerks and derail what the MU*'s goals are.

I agree with @mietze that you need to be more explicit than that. And honestly I'm not sure that's even feasible. It's one thing to say "Hey, don't play a racist jerk; that kind of character isn't welcome here." But by saying "we're not focusing on this" -- does that mean nobody can play an ex-slave? Or if they play a Native American, they can't complain about how their people were treated? Does it mean everyone has to accept a woman doctor as if such a thing were commonplace? Regulating that kind of thing is a complicated, slippery slope.

And again - I wholeheartedly understand people not wanting to deal with those themes in their fiction. But whitewashing away the injustices of history just so you can play cowboys and stagecoach robbers doesn't seem like such a hot idea to me either.

@wizz Heh, that's kinda what I've heard, and I presumed why someone used that moniker for the game.

And it's like @bored said -- sometimes you can just say "heck with history" and it works because the history is secondary.

But when it's supposed to be "Hollywood history in a small town Wyoming in 1866" yet you've got the livery being run by an gunslinging female rancher, the hotel run by a white widow having an affair with an ex-slave, one of the town's three doctors being an educated free African American, the seamstress being a transgender woman married on the d/l, a couple of Chinese immigrants running an apothecary down the road....man, I love each and every one of those characters individually, but you put them all together in a population of a few hundred, and, like, how much resemblance does it actually bear to real history any more?

I'm not saying I'd change anything if I had it to do over again, because the only alternatives to "everyone is special" is to either make nobody special, or ration "special-ness". I wasn't prepared to do either one. But there were consequences to that, and a lot of flak from those folks who wanted their historical games a bit more... historical.

For me it's the intersection of real-time, online, collaborative RP/writing.

Other formats have various combinations of the above, but MUSHing is the only one that hits all the buttons.

The "real-time" thing is, I think, the big one that's unique to MUSHing. I've tried PBP and Storium games and the pacing there is just excruciatingly slow. And I think because of that slow, disjointed pacing you don't seem to have a lot of the same community aspects.

@lisse24 said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

OOC Rooms, while popular, incentivize sitting OOC, by making social interaction available while doing so.

I think you're mistaking the chicken for the egg here.

The very nature of the MUSH interface means that character bits always need to be present in "a room". If you force people to be IC or log off, you'll just see people idling in private rooms while chatting on channels, or being on the grid but "not really here". This has been the case for 30 years.

OOC Rooms aren't the problem. The "problem" is the trend of players with limited free time choosing to wait around for "something good" or "something specific" as opposed to just going IC and taking the first random scene with strangers that comes along. And I use air quotes deliberately there because I'm not personally convinced that's a bad thing.

@arkandel said in criticism not allowed in ad threads is only enforcing a false positive, prove me wrong:

So you can be the change you want in the world by stepping up! There's been a post on the Announcement section asking for a volunteer for a short while now, and the position is still unfilled.

Personally I have no interest in managing a wiki for this place because

a) It strikes me as a PITA to now have to check two places for updates, and
b) Perhaps (probably) I'm jaded, but it seems like a moderation nightmare waiting to happen. Especially given how prior attempts at MU game/people wikis have turned out.

So that is not the change I want to see in the world. The change I want to see is a clear, enforced policy on what goes where here.

If the mods don't intend to enforce the "this is not the place for criticism" piece of the Ad Thread Rules of Engagement, then change it. You guys wrote it. Un-write it.

Rename the Ads section to the Games section.

And instead of an "advertisement", it's just a Mildly Constructive "Anything you want to say or ask about this game" thread.

Alternately, enforce the policy as-written and leave the Ad threads for just, y'know, ads.

Either solution would be better than this muddled middle-of-the-road thing we have now, which just gets everyone arguing all the time with "You're not following the rules!" "Well the rules are dumb!"

@ganymede I am not on staff so don't take this as speaking for them in any way. But my understanding of non-magic users is that they're basically like the support people in my BSGU game. They're background characters, outside of the main plotlines. Fine for an alt; not advisable as a sole character. From that perspective, it makes complete sense why they would allow them as alts but not let someone new app in as a non-magic person (and probably be disappointed when there isn't much for them to do).

@silverfox said in How do you like things GMed?:

So this was kinda the stuff I was looking for, but didn't want to limit it because I was curious for all the stuff ever being a 100% novice to GMing.

@Ghost has good advice to consider and I presume it's been successful for their groups.

On the flip side, my style is pretty much the polar opposite. I script things to a modest degree (while still allowing player influence), I run scenes involving my PC all the time (though not as the star), I fudge dice rolls to make a better story (though never to screw the PCs), I let PCs make their own perception checks, and I've had reasonably happy players in both TTRPGs and MUs for decades.

I don't mean to imply that I'm right and Ghost is wrong. Not at all. I think it just illustrates that there isn't just one 'right' way to GM. What works well in a TTRPG often doesn't translate to a MU, and what works on one kind of MU often doesn't translate to another. You have to figure out what works for your own personal style and the style of the people you're running for.

@Thenomain I’ve been burned by crap staff before. And I get that here are staff who definitely show favoritism to their friends even if I’ve never been in a game like that.

Where I think I differ from most folks is that I don’t let past experiences with staffer X color my experiences with someone new. In other words, you have to LOSE my trust, not gain my trust. And once you do, I’m gone. Life’s too short to put up with toxic game environments.

@GamerNGeek said in Picking the community's brain...:

It also doesn't help that my first and main exposure to it has been through Arx (aka Firan: The Second Coming), which puts enough simulation game into my roleplay MU* to ruin it. This is guilt by association, and totally no fault of Ares, but I never claimed any of this was anything but emotional bias.

As Tinuviel pointed out, Arx uses Evennia, not Ares. Ares is far closer to Penn than Evennia, if for no other reason than my own sanity

Some things are just not possible in the architecture, but I'm always open to quality of life suggestions that are. For instance, it never occurred to me that you'd want to look at multiple characters at once, but it would be easy for me to add look Jack Jill Spot to the look command. Ares doesn't have 'ex me' (examine is only for coders) but you can get all your data via the backup command for logging to an offline backup. And so on.

But sure, if not having the ability to throw functions into think commands or making your own custom commands is a deal-breaker, then it's a deal-breaker. I can respect that!

Anyway, good luck finding a game.

@krmbm said in Bloopers:

That place is so many kinds of nuts.

They put a giant stop sign on the web portal? I... have no words.

I wonder if they realize they can just.. turn it off? (Not that I advise it, but if they hate it that much...)

@Ghost said in SerenityMUSH - Discussion:

With a good enough system, a decent staff, and perhaps a reset to wash out some of that Mal and Inara corruption past, I think Firefly could go that route.

I'd love to see another Firefly game take off, but I agree with the others who have said that Serenity has too much baggage. And the wiki seems busted. No logs, no recent updates. Or maybe they're just not using it? Either way, not a good look.

But the issue with past FF games (other than bad staff) is that what made the show magical was the focus on a small crew. You don't get that same vibe on a MUSH without splintering the players into ten zillion tiny groups and stifling RP. I've long mused about doing a planet-based "space western" FF game, but I really don't think that's what people come to a Firefly game for. I think the draw is hopping from planet to planet in a ShipOfOurOwn, having epic adventures like TV-Mal and company. That's great for the FF tabletop RPG (which is loads of fun) but doesn't work so great on a MUSH with dozens of people.

@bear_necessities said in Incentives for RP:

That being said, I have to agree with @faraday to a point - I'm never going to set up a REGULAR reward system, because the point of playing a game is to tell stories. But hey, every so often? I'll give people kudos as a thank you for spreading the love.

Just to be clear - I do fully support giving some sort of kudos (luck points, public praise, etc.) for folks who go above and beyond the normal bar of RPing. Like folks who organize events, run plots for others, etc. But the idea that you need incentives just to play is what's weird to me.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Incentives for RP:

Why do people not exercise? Isn't having a long and healthy life literally the point of being alive?

I don't think that's a valid analogy. We're talking about a form of entertainment here that people are voluntarily participating in. A better analogy would be: Why would you join a baseball team if you don't intend to go to the games and play?

@Ghost said in Incentives for RP:

I'm with you here. If you're at the point where you have to try to incentivize people to be inclusive, there's kind of a bigger issue. This may be the wrong question/wrong approach to the issue/complaint.

Yeah, I think that another way to incentivize RP on your game is to make the RP fun. Getting people involved and giving them interesting things to get involved in doesn't have to require trinkets and rewards.

@Florida-Man On MMOs you'll certainly see folks hanging out on the TeamSpeak or Discord servers just to chat with their guildmates even when they're not "play-ok". Other online RP forums will see people visiting the forums or chat during their downtime even when they can't actually RP. Still others are built so that "RP" doesn't involve a 3-hour-solid time commitment, or have a culture where there's no OOC interaction at all, so those are kind of apples vs oranges. Even TTRPG players will often spend a bunch of the evening gabbing while waiting for something/someone or just for fun.

I don't really think it's unique to MUSHes, except that on a MUSH there seems to be this unreasonable expectation that "oh you're logged in, clearly you should be here to play".

@Sparks Everything you said, yes. Most players don't realize or appreciate what a grueling, thankless task it is to be a MUSH staffer. Staffers must attend to the minutia of running a game, endure a constant barrage of complaints and drama, and entertain dozens of players with very disparate/opposing goals. To expect them to do all that without any perks/benefits is frankly absurd.

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

But those kind of perks should always be additive; they should be a benefit to the volunteer without being a detriment to someone else.

I agree, but this is where a lot of ten tension comes in. There's so much entitlement in the world that people have a hard time seeing the difference between "a volunteer did extra work and got one of the ten signed copies as a reward" and "that pesky volunteer got a book and I didn't. Unfair!"

As for the other "benefits"?

You can change the course of the entire game

Why on earth would you want to do that?

And you get to RP any NPC at any time as befits the game.

I suppose there are some staffers out there who get their jollies NPCing Princess Leia in a medal ceremony, but most of us find it to be a terrible chore.

And you have an organized support network, which is far more than non-staff players can say.

LOL. I wish.

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

I'm not sure where I stand on perks. In a lot of ways, it depends on the perk.

Absolutely. Intent and transparency also matter, and there's certainly a line at which "perks" become unethical.

For instance. "Staffers get first dibs on their favorite superheroes" seems like a reasonable perk. "Staffers get Tier 1 superheroes and everyone else gets Tier 2" rubs me the wrong way because it sets up an inherent power imbalance that strikes me as unfair.

Reasonable people can argue about where that line is for any given instance, but in the end it kind of comes down to players voting with their feet.

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

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

Like, I've literally been doing this for 20 years and have consistently been able to have sex RP with sane partners who didn't get weird OOC about it

I...definitely don't have that kind of success rate in my RL relationships.

Because damn.

damn.

Like...

god damn

Man. I can't even reliably get non-TS romantic RP with people who don't get OOCly weird about it. Kinda jealous.

@Sunny said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:

I am genuinely curious, now. For the people who are still playing on games, do you feel there's a lot of people either ready to write one another off, or just in general hating each other to the extent that they can't co-exist? ... is it really that bad out there for other people?

Yes.

@Thenomain said in X-Cards:

Then the system needs altered out of its original purpose for a new medium.

The whole purpose of the card system is to be no questions asked. If you invite questions, you invite peer pressure of the “aw come on don’t be a spoil spot” or “why are you overreacting” variety.

Personally I agree with what others said earlier... I’d prefer just open communication where adults can adult and say “you’re being skeevy, knock it off” or “this plot line bothers me because X”. If you have a culture of making each other comfortable, you don’t need cards. But among strangers in a con circuit or something where there’s a pattern of harassment and such a culture doesn’t exist? I can understand the appeal.

@Ghost said in Empire State Heroes Mush:

Altogether though, I think the class of musher who prefers diceless all-consent games may be a slightly different creature than the one who is comfortable with stats and dice resolution.

I know many people who are equally comfortable on both (including myself), so I really don't think the gulf you're describing exists. Certainly, though, there are folks who only like one or the other.

@ZombieGenesis said in Empire State Heroes Mush:

. You're saying: Why not just always be reasonable? And others are saying: Not all people are reasonable all the time and dice based/level based systems help compensate for that.

Dice-based systems don't force people to be reasonable. I've seen countless situations where players don't agree on what should be rolled, what modifiers should apply, what the outcome represents, etc. And that's just on games based on real-life physics. Throw in superpowers and I can only imagine the "But I should be able to X" arguments increasing.

Stats can be a tool to help people resolve conflicts, yes. But at the end of the day, unreasonable people are going to break any system and need to be dealt with by staff.