@mietze said in An Apology to BSO and BSU.:
I'm glad that you are having a good conversation with @faraday. That's wonderful. But you know, naming someone as responding favorably to your apologetic advances unlike others will also be taken as weirdness and kind of manipulative also.
I said thank you for the apology. Beyond that, I'd just as soon be left out of this.
@arkandel said in Social Systems:
@ganymede Why don't players fuck non-social system rolls (or don't do so as badly)?
Couple reasons:
Fewer consequences. So you got stabbed. So what? Unless your game is big on permadeath, you'll get over it in a few days and go on with your life. Whereas a lot of the social stuff that people bother to roll for has weighty consequences. I got conned into giving away the keys to the kingdom and now I'm completely f-ed. When combat has dire consequences, you see the same resistant behavior.
We're used to not rolling for social stuff. There are hundreds of micro-interactions on MUSHes in any given RP scene, and none of them are rolled. We trust players to resolve social interactions without rolls until suddenly we don't and that feels a bit insulting sometimes.
It's personal. Nobody thinks poorly of an action hero who takes a round to the shoulder and soldiers on. But the sap who gets conned? He's a sap. Players empathize too much with their characters. It's bad enough to lose, but to lose in a way that makes your character look like an incompetent idiot? That pushes peoples' buttons.
The rules are murky. General modifiers for physical combat are well-established in tabletop RPGs, and everybody has a pretty shared understanding of its boundaries (i.e. you can't saw off someone's arm with a butter knife). Yet there's no similar understanding for social conflict. What's the appropriate modifier for "I'm just not into guys" on a seduction roll? What's the appropriate modifier for "I'm (insert political party here) and I'm vehemently opposed to (whatever)"? Nobody has any bloody clue. They just want to roll Persuasion vs Willpower and call it a day, and that's silly. The lack of shared boundaries also leads to the uncommon but very real extremes like I'm going to make one roll and force you to betray everything you believe in.
ETA, forgot one, which may just be more of a pet peeve than a general rule:
@Kestrel said in How To Treat Your Players Right:
I'd like to hear from staffers here. Someone you don't know joins your game and says 'your BFF here is making me extremely uncomfortable and wilfully ignoring the fact I've told him he's exacerbating my mental health issues, along my polite requests to terminate our communications'. Whom do you believe?
As @Roz said, belief usually isn't the issue here. If you say someone is making you uncomfortable, I'm going to believe you because they're your feelings.
When it comes to taking action though, it gets a little more complicated. My main question to the accuser is: "What do you want me to do about it?"
"I want them to stop paging me." Done. "Hey, you're making Susie uncomfortable; back off." It really doesn't matter if they did anything "wrong"; everyone is entitled to their personal space.
"I want them to stop saying things on channel that make me uncomfortable." Well, that depends on whether I think that what they're saying violates game conduct policies. Something blatantly bigoted or mean? Absolutely. But there's a lot of gray areas. I have to use my judgment and you might not be happy with it.
"I want them banned." I'll be honest - I have a high bar for what it takes to ban someone. I'm never going to do it based on one person's "he said/she said". What I look for here is more a pattern of behavior that persists even after I tell the person to knock it off. I suppose it's possible for somebody to do something so egregious they get banned on a first offense without a warning, but I've just never encountered it.
"Please don't do anything; I just wanted you to know." OMG this one drives me nuts. Why tell me if you're just going to tie my hands? Now you've put me in a position where either I let a potential creeper continue creeping, or I violate your confidence by taking action against your wishes. IT SUCKS. Please stop doing this, people.
But like Roz said - I have no problem putting on my staff hat with friends. Since I mostly play on games with people I've known for ages, it's kind of my default position. Those who know me know that I'll tell my friends when they step over the line. I even had to ban one once because they wouldn't stop doing what I told them to stop doing. It sucked, but it was necessary.
What also sucked in that situation, though, was people who were all: "You're just protecting Joe because they're your friend." Uh, no. There was no protection. It just took awhile between the first complaint and Joe getting banned because mostly what I got was Vaguebook comments like: "I know someone who left the game because he bothered them too much" or "He was banned from another game" or third-party "He's bugging Susie." complaints that I felt were too flimsy to act on. Once I got specific, actionable reports, I acted. I can understand how some folks might take the "Where there's smoke there's fire" approach and act on less solid evidence; that's just not my style (whether I know the accused or not).
@Thenomain said in Privacy in gaming:
If I leave my house unlocked, you are still trespassing if you enter it uninvited.
I think this is the wrong analogy for a MU.
It's more like... If you come into my house for a party and I have a security system.
Is it unethical for me to monitor my home? Of course not. The ethics are around how I gather and use that footage.
Creeping on people in the bathroom? Eeew. Clearly awful.
Reviewing the footage from a particular night to verify Jane's tale when she claims that John assaulted her? I think that's perfectly valid.
Combing through footage of guests at a party and eavesdropping on conversations they presumed were private? That's just a jerk thing to do, even if it is your house.
It seems that the prevailing sentiment is that you shouldn't ever try to contact the game admins AT ALL if you were banned, and I don't agree with that.
"I'm sorry - I screwed up and I hope you'll give me another chance" or "I think there's been a big misunderstanding and I'd like to clear the air" seem like perfectly constructive and reasonable ways to reach out.
The key is to accept no (or silence) as an answer. Badgering someone after they've made it clear they don't want to talk to you is annoying at best, harassment at worst. Extend the olive branch and leave it at that.
How to handle them? Don't 
Most games with some element of character-vs-character set up antagonists as a zero-sum game. Cops vs. robbers, Imperial vs. Rebel, superhero vs supervillain - one side's success comes at the direct expense of the other side. Most MU players can't handle that maturely.
Even if you find a rare RPer who can, the problem is that 90% of MU RP is social. It's hard to RP antagonists in social scenes. So there's this natural tendency to mute the antagonism to avoid cutting off your own RP avenues. (TV shows do this too when they reform a villain enough to join the good guys).
Certainly it _can_work - I've seen it done a handful of times. But most of the time it just leads to drama and headaches. Antagonism + strangers on the internet + players overly-invested in their characters' successes is just a recipe for disaster. This is why all my games are PVE.
@raemira said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:
. Almost all of the scenes that were open were ones that were private and not open for anyone to joining them. That's very exclusionary.
It's the exact same command/screen to start a public scene as to start a private one. Public is actually the default setting.
What you're seeing is a shift in the preferences of the playerbase that has been building for ages. I've seen it on all kinds of games for years.
Ares just makes it a little more explicit than logging in and seeing everybody in private apartments, RP/TP rooms, OOC areas waiting for so-and-so to arrive, or scenes on grid where a page of "Mind if I join?" is met with "Well actually we're kinda in the middle of something..."
If you don't like it, that's cool - everyone's entitled to their preferences. But this is a social issue not a technological one, and you solve it with social means (staff leading the way by creating public scenes, making incentives for public scenes, encouraging public scenes, etc.) not technical ones.
In the decades in this hobby, I have personally known people who:
And that's not even counting the general grudges and drama that abound.
So yes, I'm going to require a little bit more than just your say-so that Bob is a creeper, or Spider in disguise, or whatever. Does that mean "iron-clad evidence"? Of course not. These are living room rules, not "beyond a reasonable doubt".
This is neither victim-blaming nor abuser-enabling. It's just acknowledging the simple fact that people can and sometimes do make false or mistaken accusations for a variety of reasons.
@ghost said in Positivity Going Forward...:
I'd like to see a community in the hobby where those elements (or the urges to clap back because people are being mean) aren't necessary where I can make friends and swap ideas.
This.
Since 8th Sea opened, I've gotten a number of queries about the status of Ares, so I figured I'd just post something about it.
As far as I'm concerned, Ares is not yet ready to be released. There is code in GitHub, but it's my development sandbox. It's not stable. I make no promises that anything there will be backwards-compatible with what I do tomorrow. In fact, I'm in the process of an experiment right now that completely overhauls the entire web portal.
Kraken and the 8th Sea folks chose to move forward with a public game despite (and fully cognizant of) that instability. Kraken's already had to chuck and redo his code a couple times because of underlying infrastructure changes. It is not a path for the faint of heart, and not one I recommend yet.
But soon. Really, it's in the home stretch. Apart from the web portal overhaul and a few little bugs, the only thing left to do is documentation. So, y'know, people who are not me will actually know how to use it. I consider having a solid foundation of tutorials to be an essential part of the 1.0 release.
Anyone who's interested can follow updates on the website and see the latest release of Ares in action at BSGU.
@bored said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:
Again, I really don't care how its organized. But its important to clarify that 'highly moderated discussion with almost no criticism' (which seems to be your / @surreality's / etc's preference, and don't think is bad, to be very clear) is very different from 'criticism OK but no flaming' which is different from 'poo and gifs.' Everyone can have all these things, as far as I'm concerned, but we should be cautious of any of them being removed or diminished.
That's not my position, which is why I was trying to clarify. As @surreality mentioned, criticism != personal attacks. I am in the "criticism OK but no flaming" category. That's just not what we have today in the constructive section, which is what I'm griping about.
You would think that with competent adults, "criticism OK but no flaming" would not require heavy moderation but, well... points to the internet.
ETA, and not directed at bored particularly... I'm just kind of irritated that every time this discussion comes up, "mudslinging should be kept in the hog pit, if there even is one" is being misconstrued as "happy rainbow unicorn land where nobody says anything negative ever". Literally nobody is suggesting the latter.
@rook --
@sparks said in Alternative Formats to MU:
The old Pueblo-enabled servers—and even Ares and Evennia, presently—have a design requirement that whatever they do must also be accessible via plain old boring text-only telnet.
Yes exactly. If you want to be pedantic from a tech perspective, it's not telnet the protocol that's the limitation, it's backwards-compatibility with existing telnet-based clients. Or, for short, "telnet".
@roz said in Alternative Formats to MU:
Honestly, my impression is that you believe Faraday is doing work to help encourage RP because you've experienced her stuff after the fact, but you're characterizing other discussion about new platforms as "just for the shiny."
Yeah, I mean... I got a ton of push-back early on for the things that people are now enjoying, but it all started from the same place: How to make things better both for existing players and for new players. It's all driven by real use cases. People I've spoken to and their needs. Not just "Oh hey, a new shiny tool to use". Now not everyone has the same needs, and sometimes meeting one person's needs shortchanges another's. That's just life traveling west in the tech world. You can't please everybody.
Personally, I see more people -- long-time MUSHers, not these hypothetical masses waiting just beyond some barrier - bemoaning "I just don't have time for four-hour scenes every day but I still love the MUSH environment" or "Aww man I can never make it to plots at the scheduled times" or doing G-docs RP when they can't make it online than I do people lamenting that they'll get too distracted by moving things to the web. That's not to discount or diminish the latter's point of view. It's just numbers.
It depends on what type of game you're trying to run.
If you're going for OOC Competition or a MUD-like feel where it's more about immersion and putting blinders on to seeing only what your character sees, then I can understand wanting to limit the share of OOC information. Some MUDs as I understand take this to extremes of not even allowing OOC communication at all.
But I much prefer a community storytelling game, and the transparency of logs, wikis, profiles, etc. is invaluable there in making RP happen, keeping up with things your character would logically know (which you, the player, might otherwise not know), telling better stories and just generally sharing the experience as a community.
Sure, there are occasionally abuses - but anyone who thinks that the OOC Masq back in the day wasn't abused is deluding themselves. For every wiki-stalker coloring their RP in a shady fashion, I've seen literally dozens of good cases of transparency. Even if it's something as simple as "Wow that char has a cool hook; I need to go play with them" or "Oh that's a neat story; I want to get in on that" or "What can we RP about? Oh I see our chars are both into surfing. Let's meet on the beach."
I would never play on a secretive game. I also love PBs, but Ghost and I have argued about that before so there's no need to rehash it for the umpteenth time
@egg said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:
I would have to dangle something enticing on an RP Requests channel to even get RP is some of my problem with the state of the games...
I think that the way of getting RP has simply changed through the years. What you describe as "extra work" is literally the way most people get RP outside their friends circle on the games I play.
It doesn't even have to be anything super-enticing, it just has to be something. "Anybody want to RP? I was thinking about heading down to the gym but I'm flexible."
Even setting aside the people who only do appointment-RP with their friends, most folks don't wander around the grid with their "RPOK" hat on. Even odds you'll get nobody (because they're a) worried you're AFK, b) afraid they might not be welcome, c) afraid that you won't have anything in common to RP about, or d) find something off-putting about your character or you the player) or get a ton of people sprawling into a giant slogging scene where poses take ten years.
Most of us just don't have the time or patience for that any more.
Ares has an OOC room because it supports the onstage/offstage system where players go 'onstage' (IC) to engage in RP and go 'offstage' (OOC) when they're between scenes. Because of the way MUSH client interfaces work, the character object has to be somewhere when you're not actually roleplaying.
Personally I find it preferable to have that be in a designated offstage area rather than an IC private room (especially since not all themes support such a thing - e.g. Battlestar) or worst of all just idling on the public IC grid somewhere.
Whether people chat there or not? I'm indifferent. I get that some folks like it. I find it too spammy and prefer the quiet room over the lounge.
Ares also has a configurable option that ties the OOC lounge to a channel. I think that's preferable, because it lets folks who aren't in the lounge still participate in the chat, and it enables the other channel features like recall and abuse reporting.
@egg said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:
The lack of play.... having to work to play is exactly why I made this post
I think part of the disconnect is right here. Your definition of play is different than mine, and I'd venture to say a good number of MU players these days. As @Tinuviel said - that's not good or bad, it's just a thing.
I don't RP just for the sake of RPing. RP for me isn't just about putting words on the screen, it's about telling an interesting, meaningful story with my character. There are lots of ways to do this, but in my experience "hey, random person, let's meet up in random place and just see what happens" rarely gets you there. Those scenes aren't bad for building relationships (and I don't just mean romantic relationships), but they are a means to an end; not the real meat of the story.
It didn't used to be that way. When I was MUSHing in college and had all the time in the world, putzing around with hours and hours of Random Meetup RP was fun. Not any more. My free time is precious, and I want to "spend" it on something more than "Hi, how's the weather, let's share backstories or chat aimlessly about the latest IC event." Which is what 90% of Random Meetup RP ends up being.
@Warma-Sheen said in What MU/RPG opinions have you changed or maintained?:
I never believed (and still don't) that MUing was a "collaborative writing experience". I'm not sure where that concept came from but I've rarely seen it apply to any MU*.
One of my earliest MUs was Maddock MUX, a sandbox, consent-based western with almost no mechanics or code to speak of. There weren't even background approvals. I've played on numerous other pure-consent or mostly-consent games since. So to me - MUs as a collaborative writing experience has been a thing since 1996.
Which ties into the thing that it took me entirely too long to learn about MUSHing: I used to think we were a single hobby, but I've come to realize that we're really a collection of different game styles loosely unified by the technology we use to play them. I hear stories from @Thenomain about WoD games, or some other friends about comic games, and they may as well be as different from my experience as playing Bridge vs. playing Poker.
@Joyeuse said in MU*, Youth, and LGBT+ Identity:
@Ghost Followed your advice and went ahead and snipped that. Figured it might have been handy, but if there's stuff like that going on it may just be best not to put myself out there like that!
I adore Ghost, but this is one thing where we definitely don't see eye to eye. Yes, there are creepers, people who will hold something from 20 years ago against you, or folks who form an opinion and will grit their teeth every time that you're both on a game together.
BUT, there are also a lot of good people out there. As you participate in the community and build a reputation for being a decent person, then having that playlist or OOC identity will benefit you in getting involved in RP and making OOC connections with other players.
Also people just aren't as good at keeping their identities secret as they think they are. Pose styles, online times, etc. Usually it comes out who people are.
You can see from the number of people who have created Ares player handles or MSB playlists that a lot of people feel the same as I do. Not everyone, of course, but a sizable chunk of folks.
Anyway, welcome to the community!
@Tinuviel said in Consent in Gaming:
If I play a criminal, and you play a judge, and you want to run a trial and I really don't want to sit for hours posing "he sits quietly" over and over again... I don't think I should be compelled to. There are some parts of a story that can be glossed over.
The problem with that is that by glossing over the trial entirely, you're basically depriving the judge PC of the opportunity to do That Judge Thing. It may not be the most fun thing for you to do, but you'd be a good sport by doing it anyway so they can have fun too.
It's not about compelling people to RP things that aren't fun for them. It's about expecting some degree of reciprocity as part of an implied social contract.
By playing a criminal or a screw-up, you're essentially initiating a storyline that affects other people. If you then say that you're only going to play out the high points of that story (where your character shines) and none of the consequences of that story (the cop wanting to question you, or the CO taking you to task, or your buddy arguing with you about how you endangered the mission, etc.) then that's just poor sportsmanship IMHO. Good RPers give as well as take.
Also, you can have an interaction without making it an ordeal. The cops/COs/judges of the world can work to make it fun for the other players too. Keep it short and sweet. Make sure it's not a soliloquy. Strive to engage with the other character and provide some character development for everyone.
For example - on BSGU I did a trial. I had all the witnesses submit a "testimony pose" ahead of time, so their players got to participate in the trial without forcing everybody to sit through 27 rounds of questioning. The on-camera portion was just the dramatic conclusion.
@Ganymede said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:
This is twice I have seen this statement with no reason to believe it.
I have often spoke about the next generation at risk of being alienated if we don't change the user interface, but I haven't personally seen a sharp decline in the number of MUSHes or the activity on them in the last 5-10 years.
That said, I do think that there is more RP going on in other platforms. There are tons of MUDs. Play-by-forum sites with tens of thousands of players. Hundreds of games on Storium, which has gotten national media attention. A vibrant community of folks who RP with emotes on MMOs. Tumbler blogs, Discord RP, Roll20 and other interactive TTRPG forums.
There's lots of RP to be had, and numerically I think MUSHing is a very small part of the bucket. That doesn't make it any less worthwhile.