Posts made by faraday

@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.

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

1: Game has to be some flavor of Mush or Mush. I've looked at the Ares stuff, and I'm sure it has strengths. But it is too different for me, and when I can't do little things I'm used to, it stresses me out.

Only tangentially related to your query, but I'm curious what about Ares you found stressful. The web portal is something new, for sure, but it's wholly optional. When you connect to the game via a MU client pretty much all of the player-side commands (posing, channels, pages, bbs, etc.) should work the same as what you're used to from MUSH/MUX. In fact I've had people who've logged on and thought that it was just PennMUSH with some extra softcode. Feel free to PM me if you don't want to get into it on this thread.

ETA: Keeping things familiar and approachable for veteran MUSHers is an important design goal for Ares, so if there's something missing I'd love to make it better. (there's an article summarizing some of the differences from Penn/Tiny btw)

@surreality said in Historical MUSHes:

I suppose anyone could have! ...but it's also relevant that no one did. It's pretty strong evidence that the 'anyone who wants to play in a setting where these things exist just wants to get their *ism on' hypothesis is absurd on its face.

At the same time, though, if someone had decided to give those characters IC grief, I don't think that should reflect poorly on them any more than the decision to play a monstrous slave-owning a-hole should reflect on Leonardo DiCaprio.

If (generic) you don't want that in your games - by all means make it a policy. But in absence of such a policy, people reacting in historically-appropriate ways to historically-oppressed characters should not be taken as a reflection on their OOC feelings nor the compassion or quality of the game community.

@Lotherio said in Historical MUSHes:

@Cupcake said in Historical MUSHes:

female Indian medical doctor

Susan "Bright Eyes" La Flesche Picotte

That's actually a perfect example of the possible/plausible debate. Mary Walker (Army doctor), Kate Warne (Pinkerton detective and Union spy) and Bass Reeves (former slave turned lawman) are other examples of ground-breaking people that did things that were generally prohibited to people like them in their day.

Should everyone on the game be allowed to be that unique though? Or waltz through their story without facing any of the challenges that those real people faced? What about something that just flat-out didn't exist, such as a female soldier serving openly (i.e. without disguising herself as a man) in a front-line regular unit of the Union Army? And what happens when you now have a whole town full of these exceptional people? At what point are we no longer playing any semblance of history and just playing costume dress-up with modern sensibilities?

Ultimately it's up to an individual game-runner to make those decisions, but we're being disingenuous if we think drawing those lines is easy.

@Lotherio said in Historical MUSHes:

Exactly this. I don't see why it should be different for historical places. The OP didn't even ask for accuracy, it just came up as it always does when Historical Game is intoned. I think in part, there are a handful of players that would prefer a game related to just trying to survive in a historical period. Nothing wrong with that at all, it just seems that if a place isn't historical enough for some, it tends to get negative feedback pretty quick on the accuracy meter.

I would agree with you that modern-day TV dramas and movies aren't any more plausible than their historical counterparts.

The only thing I'd note is that you have to ask yourself why people are playing in a given game. If it's WoD the answer is "I want to play a vampire/werewolf/etc." The setting itself (modern day) is decidedly secondary. If it's historical, though, I think you get more people gravitating toward it because of the setting, for whatever reason. So the more you stray from it, the more jarring it becomes to people who are interested in that period of history. And you run into weird cognitive dissonances like, "Discrimination isn't a thing in this setting but the Civil War totally still happened!" So I think it's a little more complicated.

@A-Meowley said in Historical MUSHes:

@surreality said in Historical MUSHes:

I think it would be ridiculous to say that staff allows what I've described because of an inherent desire to be sexist/racist/ableist/homophobic/etc. RL.

Good thing nobody's said that!

Except that they have. Just not in this particular thread.

@Lotherio said in Historical MUSHes:

I brought up Magnificent Century on here, cause its sort of the gateway to more Turkish historical drama I feel, or at least opened the gates for others. Many of the negative'ish critiques point out the costumes are definitley not period, from cuts and excess skin exposure to the fabrication needed to make them so elaborate to the material itself. I don't care, I like it, it captures enough of the perception of the period in my mind even if embellished quite a bit. Even the storyline, as much of Suleyman's (Suleiman) life is known, far less is known about what actually may have happened among the woman and the harm; but damned it is good drama - I bought into historical portrayal of the time of Suleyman, and after half the first season finally realized I'm really just watching an historical soap opera and I couldn't stop watching.
Then I ponder if such a place opened and I imagine if it was presented just like the show, how much negative feedaback would it receive from portrayal of costumes, to gender, to religion itself.

I agree with everything you said. I don't know the show you're talking about, but I've watched plenty of historical movies/TV shows and they're all like that. They use the historical time period as the general setting, but it's a rare show indeed that gets higher than "eh...kinda, I guess?" on the accuracy-o-meter.

A movie might get MST3k commentary or people griping on forums about them using the wrong patches on their uniforms or something, but we'll still watch and be entertained. MUSHes don't seem to get the same treatment.

I don't think most players actually want authenticity. Authenticity in many historical settings means you're probably going to have to play an uneducated, superstitious, oppressed person with a short lifespan and limited social and geographic mobility.

"Want to go on an adventure anybody? We'll probably starve, get lost, get eaten, or die of some horrible disease along the way. But hey - it'll be fun! Anyone? No?"

I think what interests people is the more romanticized view of specific elements of history - the freedom of the wild frontier, the genteel lords and ladies, the chivalrous knights, etc.

@Tinuviel said in Historical MUSHes:

Well, one can have various levels of accuracy but if it's not accurate it's not accurate. So saying that something is "historically accurate" is the wrong term to use. "Inspired by a historical setting" or "set in the backdrop of the XYZ," would be better. Nobody gets to be the historical pendant, then.

I think that's being a little nitpicky about the terminology. Short of a documentary/non-fiction, nothing in fiction is 100% accurate, yet "accuracy" is the term people use in common parlance to describe Into the West as being "more accurate" than Hateful Eight.

That said, I've played on a number of historical games and I've never seen one say "We expect people to be historically accurate." Usually the gripes about accuracy come from individual players complaining that something is outside their personal bounds of what is "accurate enough" for their suspension of disbelief.

@Tinuviel said in Historical MUSHes:

Most of us folks that have more than a passing interest in history mostly grit our teeth when people insist on being "historically accurate" but aren't. Fictional takes on history are fine and are done often enough. We just get people trying time and again to be "historically accurate" rather than just using history as a story tool.

The problem with that is that "Historically Accurate" is a scale, not a yes/no checkbox. I don't think anybody would want to play a western that was 100% historically accurate because it would be bleak and boring. Your PC would be be more likely to die of dysentery than to have an interesting adventure or drama.

Hollywood westerns, for example, range in accuracy from Tarantino westerns (crazily over-the-top but entertaining) to Into the West (reasonably realistic but still over-dramatized). Your MUSH can draw the line anywhere along that scale. Where we have difficulty is defining that scale so people can come into the game with a common set of expectations.

@Saulot said in Historical MUSHes:

@Seraphim73 I know I sound like a pessimist, but I don't think there is a happy medium. You gotta accept that you can't please both audiences, and will have to cater to one. I may be wrong since I haven't been mushing for long, and there may have been games that have accomplished it.

I think it depends on what you mean by "happy medium". There have been numerous historical games that have done "Hollywood History". Like @Pandora says, this means that the historical setting is much cleaner, fancier, healthier, more progressive and more adventurous than its historical counterpart. Sure, there are people who grit their teeth at the historical inaccuracies, but I don't think it's any worse than Deadwood or Pick-a-Crown-Drama on TV.

@Thenomain said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

@faraday

Then all those times where you said you never had to deal with it were ... eh, I don’t know. I’m glad that you do understand, but they do not mathch things you have said to me in the past.

And this miscommunication would be different than the other 847 times we've crossed wires how, exactly?

What I think you're alluding to was past comments in which I meant to say that the crap is not prevalent as part of the game culture on games I've played. If it were? Frankly I wouldn't still be doing this after 20 years. But sure, scattered through the years have been a few bad apples. And I've certainly heard the horror stories from other games enough to know what exists.

@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.

@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.)

@Saulot FWIW, I'm not upset if someone doesn't trust me enough to come forward with a concern, but I do think it's a bad decision.

If I see a problem in my workplace but don't raise my concerns to my manager, how do I know they're even aware of the problem?

I get that people are sometimes afraid to come forward for fear of repercussions, and that's their choice to make. But don't expect problems to magically get resolved if people aren't willing to step forward and say "this is a problem". Managers (including game staff) aren't psychic.

@Kanye-Qwest said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

wouldn't it be nice if we lived in a world where reaching out to a player to say "Hey we heard you are being a dick. Knock it off" was ever that clear cut and simple?
... Unless you see a clear cut behavior that is not acceptable, you have to realize there are at least 3 sides to every story. At least.

Yes, this. There are some maliciously abusive creepers to be sure, but I think in a lot of cases the people involved don't actually realize that what they're doing is being a dick. Like you see sometimes in workplace harassment cases where it's like: "What? I just touched her arm 72 times - what's the big deal?" Unless you can confront them with specific things they need to do/not do, "I heard you were being a creep" is just not going to be effective. It's sad but I think it's true.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

Things that were public and involved multiple other people, just not staff at that exact moment. That Guy spun that stuff into 'oh I was just having fun and also I apologized and also what was the harm?' when it got to staff via other reports but the logs and my particular 'this fucker is a fucker' interpretation of the situation would've been a hell of a lot different.

I can verify that reports like this matter to me. In fact, they were a significant factor in the banning case I mentioned awhile back because it was clear that Bob had a pattern of inappropriate behavior that a number of people found troubling.

It's one thing to hear whispers of "Bob is harassing Susie and Jane" without corroboration, but when Bob is also getting reported by 7 different people (with specific examples cited) for inappropriate stuff he's been saying OOC and on channel, that colors the situation greatly.

@Pandora - So just in case it was missed in all the spam... Ares does this already. It would be trivial to make Evennia do it too. The Penn/Tiny/Rhost codebases might be a bit trickier to implement. You might be able to do it with a hook on the page command though; I haven't messed around with that in years.

Point being though that I think this is eminently achievable on all codebases with minimal privacy implications because it's only activated at the receiving player's request and only for pages from a specific individual. You're not really giving them anything they couldn't already do with their client; you're just making it verifiable to avoid log doctoring.

@Ganymede said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

This is not to say that Faraday's more hands-off approach

Just want to be clear: If someone comes to me with an actual complaint that involved them personally I am anything but 'hands-off'. I will deal with a problem directly. Where I draw the line is vaguebook third-party whisper mills about alleged issues or spending precious minutes of my life wondering: "Gee, I wonder why Ganymede quit. Was it because of unmentioned harassment or do they just not love me any more?"

@Thenomain said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

Some of the best players are the least tolerant toward bullshit, and if you're losing the players you want to keep then you better damn well pay attention even if people aren't coming to you.

No, really, it's not my problem. If you'd rather leave my game than talk to me about a problem you're having, I'll miss you but that's your choice. I'm not going to chase people down or try to play Sherlock Holmes of Interpersonal Drama.

I can't even keep track of @Ganymede's examples here, lol.

To me it's very simple.

If someone is being a creepster to you, and you don't report them, how can you expect staff to do anything about it?

If someone is being a creepster to someone else, and you report them but the 'someone else' won't corroborate the report, then IMHO it's not really fair to accuse staff of doing nothing as long as they made a good faith effort to investigate and monitor the situation.

If everyone is going to throw up their hands and say "Well he wasn't banned after one complaint, why even bother?" That is not my problem.