Best posts made by Ghost

• A state hospital with mental patients sees an upsurge in violent activity, and most patients have different stories of something strange bothering them at night.
• "He took her home from the bar and was found dead the next day."
• The haunted stories of the forest from the summer camp seemed fun...until we found Mary Barton's cabin.
• Something whispers to me through the drain in the shower.
• People begin receiving links to YouTube videos of people watching them sleep, filmed inside of the room.
• A local internet blogger's feed shows his descent into madness and suicide, but when you click frame-by-frame...something shows up in the room.
• A popular paranormal TV show hires local experts to be their guides for an overnight in a violently haunted place.
• Bodies have been found in an apartment complex. Their bodies were found half-fused into the wall, with no visible breaks. We thought it was just one apartment building...but it's happening next door.
• "Confess your sins". Someone, something, is coming for sinners, and bodies are being found with communion wafers in their mouths.
• Mortals recreating the events of movies like: The Purge, The Crow, You're Next, or The Strangers.
• A man walked into the diner tonight saying that he has something to show us. No matter how hard we try...we cannot find a way out of the diner.
• " Thousands of snakes surround the cabin, as far as the eye can see. We can hear them. We're running out of food. Jake thinks we should make a run for it..."
• "Something is chasing her. If we can keep her alive until dawn...the curse ends."

The only MU'ers I ever truly hung out with in person involved a hotel party where it was a ton of rum and coke, cards against humanity, and then my SO and I hooked up in our room, which the MU person littered with rose petals and a dreamy picture of Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Figured 1 and done. No more. Never again. I'll call it ending on a high note.

You should change your name from @faraday to @ralphmacchio, because...

@Lotherio I love BabyYoda's "WTF is going on? I don't know what's going on but I'm not comfortable" faces.

(Btw this is not a spoiler. No one knows what Baby Yoda is, but no one knows the name of Yoda's species so by default it's just Baby Yoda)

FS3 worked for large combats because the combat system does most of the work in determining who hits, how they hit, and how much damage is done. All people need to do is write a pose for who they're targeting and then roleplay the results. It really does a great job of queueing people to where they need to be in a scene. There's no time spent by the player in compiling their dice pools, either. It's pose, then run the round of combat, and pose.

Very simple and effective for mass combats. IF I ever ran a game I'd want the possibility of large combats, so FS3 would be my go-to.

@Cobaltasaurus Fuck that's horrible. I'm sorry that happened.

Yanno, the real shame about LARP is that it can be SO FUCKING COOL when players dress up, get into character, and treat it like an ongoing soap opera/HowToHostAMurderMystery, but the sheer number of players and groups I've seen use it as a hotbed for poly/swinger recruiting and other shady activity totally ruins it. I see pictures(also WoD documentary) of these players in Germany in full Nosferatu makeup and question whether or not I'd do it again if it were like THAT, and I still think "...i wouldn't if it were with the same crowd."

My town has a LOT of shady stories surrounding these groups. I know of an orgy that happened mid-LARP in someone's shed, 4 or 5 "SCA" affiliated groups who went from RP to being these weird social clubs with swinger/dungeon/poly parties (and the members all have secret names like Dragonstar), lots of broken marriages, cheating, poly drama, blood play, etc. (Disclaimer: I don't judge poly/bdsm/etc. I'm into some of it. By weird I mean more so that I see more gaming stuff being used as a front for recruiting college age girls into the parties than I do see them giving a fuck anout gaming itself). Parties where they say things like "unless you have a sign on your shirt saying 'no touch' expect to get mauled or undressed if its your first night there".

But I gotta wonder. With how pervasive some of this stuff is in the gaming community, how many people are there who show up looking just to meet people, game, and make friends who get pressured with this next level stuff? I know quite a few who have sworn off LARP and some gaming groups because of harassment, bad stories, and being shunned or excluded for not ponying up on the sex action on the side.

In fact, I'm actually dealing with some of it myself right now in real life. A group of gamer meetups is now turning pool parties into "dungeon parties" and some RL friends have reached out to me saying things like "I...didnt sign up for this". It's resulted in conversations about how sex clubs, bdsm clubs, etc all contract to secrets, anonymity, no cell phones, touching rules, etc but these "clubs" really don't.

In my estimation you can probably trust people at ACTUAL sex/swinger/bdsm clubs more than some of these people.

I'd hate to be the naysayer (I'm not trolling, I swear), but this is an awful lot of detail and work to go through for a player base of LordsAndLadies players whose main interest (as it usually is on all of their games) is to find and maintain TS.

Sure, you might capture 3-5 players who are really into the theme and space combat, but dozens of LaL games have shown that the plot falls by the wayside in favor of TS, safe (non character threatening) roleplay usually involving romance, and a metric fuuuuuuckton of ball/coffee/tea/nightclub scenes.

You can come up with an amazing idea, systems, theme, combat, maybe even a new codebase, but at the end of the day, the MU community rarely changes. Every new game will draw in the same crowd (plus or minus the people who decide they can't join the game because of some ancient feud against a staffer or another player) to take a peek. The LaL frequent flyers that are on every other LaL game will come to take a peek, and their characters will fall under the same boundaries of behavior that they partook in on their other two-dozen LaL characters: To seek and maintain TS, safe roleplay, and a metric fuuuuuuuckton of nightclub/tea/ball/banquet scenes.

You're better off using an already existing codebase (FS3), speed-creating a wiki, and hoping that whatever detail you've put into the theme enraptures at least ten people enough to participate in the core metallic while your 20+ other players continue to do the same shit they do on every other LaL game.

In short? Don't overdo it. It's not worth the effort given the shelf life of most MUs nowadays.

@Misadventure not to be contrarian, because I love your opinions, but in my experience if you require players to jump through hoops to get their TS, they will simply do it anyway, or vacate for a place that won't make them justify their TS.

You see, it is my opinion that on most MUs, TS>Plot for most players. Ive seen hundreds of players quit plot, or games altogether, due to a lack of TS. So the trick is convincing people to partake in RP and plot alongside their usage of mushing as a terrycloth monkey that is providing them sexy relationship time not present in RL. To convince some players to set aside their hunt for attention and/or sympathetic romantic roleplay, you've got to make it worth their while, and most people are NOT lacking complication in their lives...which is why TS wins.

Like I said, I don't mean to be a troll, I just feel that it's better to understand the hobby's player base before exhausting onesself on hectic coding endeavors.

@Auspice I knew a few people who were basically homeless LARPers who paid their LARP house rent by doing dishes, mowing the lawn, etc.

To make matters worse, one of the LARP House owners hosted regular LARPs at the place and would get increasingly mad if things didn't go his way. Tenants lived in fear of getting exiled from the house if they did something like kill their landlord's character, so by and large they just gave the guy everything he wanted and let him win.

I listened to a gaming podcast a long time ago, but this girl (who, admittedly was on the prettier end of the spectrum) detailed her attempt at WoD LARP in Missouri, IIRC. She also detailed LARP houses, metric tons of pressure from male RPers, and a general lack of self grooming and cleanliness that matched what I had experienced.

So, my town, Missouri, the town Auspice mentioned. I dont know how prevalent this stuff is now because I stopped larping around 2001, but these stories are common enough across multiple cities that I wouldn't be surprised to see 3-4 other LARPers on this forum add their cities, too.

@Misadventure said:

I just want to get out what I have thought up for my character. I dislike being removed from play before that by something I had little to no interaction with. it MIGHT be possible to make players feel their actions have repercussions beyond their immediate RP, and thus understand the escalating states of tension and so on with effectively remote seeming RP.

Seriously though, players are not there to be someones extras.

Agreed. If my character dies, I want it to be in honest combat (where I knew the risks), or I want it to mean something. I have no want to have to restart a character or story because some other character/player arbitrarily felt it was a proper plot twist.

If it's a good plot twist, I may agree to it, but I have no wish to restart because my character was an excellent supporting actor death in another character's main character focus story.

Also, to be somewhat fair...

In the punk/metal scene I've known plenty of couch hoppers and party houses that were like this. "Dude we dont have a room and you can crash on the couch for some scrip" In these cases it was a bunch of punks or metalheads all dividing the rent so that they could afford to work less, party more, or spend more of their cash towards the band.

But this is also what crack houses do, so...take it as you will.

I would say only 30% of the people I know who relied on LARPHouses and paid money to live on couches ever got out of the habit and made something of themselves. The rest are a lot of mental disorders, still living in cramped houses, mostly single, no kids, shit job, focusing on their 1st and 3rd friday LARPs or mending their SCA armor.

Oh. And a lot of them moved on to create or are involved heavily in some of the "clubs" here in town that I mentioned earlier. Buncha dudes these days in wrinkled poets shirts at house parties with nicknames like "SwordSaint" and are in some fucked up polycule.

So the LARP House people are also the people recruiting gamers into the poly scene, these days.

@bored said:

And casual observation of the MSB-adjacent MUverse bears this out. If the overall desire for most people was to simply have their relationship RP and avoid at all costs anything that might threaten it, you wouldn't see the non-consent dominated WoD-playing population.

You mean...the non-consent WoD games where most people spend time in private rooms and only a certain population of players and their alts actively involve in dangerous plots?

Just because the WoD games are non-consent doesn't mean that a player can't make a character, focus on their relationship roleplay, never be at risk, and simply avoid the non-consent danger points because they're so busy in private rooms with their IC partner.

@Derp said in Why We Don't Make New Friends Anymore (Or Creepers Do Creepy Things):

@Ghost said in Why We Don't Make New Friends Anymore (Or Creepers Do Creepy Things):

The Canal Killer was prominent in the AZ cosplay/con scene and was known for driving around in a retrofitted 80s police cruiser covered in fake blood with ZOMBIE HUNTER on the back of it.

Those people were already dead! You cannot murder an animated corpse!

His trial was supposed to be in October but got pushed to 2020. I fucking hope that's not his defense. Oh man...

@faraday I've always found you to be a very fair and supportive RP partner, and I have always tried to share the stage. I think, sometimes, I've found that my attempt to share the stage has often left me feeling as if players were assuming I was taking a step back and letting them take point. Anyway, I'm digressing from the main topic, but I think fair minded people who wish to share the wealth are less common than we would hope.

You can learn a lot about a person by how they treat their "enemies".

The former. If I don't feel like I have a character in mind that I'm really interested in playing, then I don't play the game. I've done the latter before and it just feels like I'm doing it to provide people someone to RP with and it's a waste of everyone's time.

@Lotherio Oh, it's totally a western (or a samurai story, which are really interchangeable re: Fistful of Dollars/Yojimbo, Magnificent 7/7 Samurai). It's really smartly done and is done by a man who likely grew up playing with the same action figures that I did.

I don't know if this has been done or not, but the idea came to me and I wanted to share it before it was lost on me:
What if on games where characters can choose to play villains (Star Wars comes to mind), an option were made available to flag the character as a villain? What if doing so meant the player of the villain character consented going in that the intention of the character is to -provide- antagonistic roleplay against the protagonist characters? This would mean that the focus of the character is to give other players a PC to defeat/capture/kill, and when this happens the character freezes and any xp gained goes towards a new character, especially on games where new chars have to start fresh? Who knows? Maybe the character gets captured and later on there is a jailbreak, but pre-consent to eventually being DEFEATED and inserting new villains, or giving other villains the chance to villain, will keep cycling a game around.

I remember my old SWRPG MU days and there were so many "villain" chars that would only really come out and RP or risk being taken down unless they felt going in that they had some unbeatable gambit(it seemed). Villain chars are the lifeblood of genres such as Star Wars, and even making a really dangerous TIE pilot, battleship commander, or KnightOfRen/Sith with the known intention of giving the heroes something to blow up would really spice up RP and support the game, IMO.

Maybe give an extra alt slot JUST for villains? Ideas. Ideas.

@Arkandel said in Good TV:

@Ghost said in Good TV:

I wouldn't wanna fight Carano, Frankie Adams, or Ronda Rousey

Nor would that fight last long.

HOW COULD U EVEN KNOW THAT BRUH

I went to the Jean-Claude Van Damme school of flexibility-based groin punches and helicopter kicks.