Posts made by Ghost

I'm hearing rumblings that the creeper may have been banned, but also the people who reported the behavior were banned.

Guess those adventures ain't so infinite?

@surreality Oh wow, it's surr. Hope all is well!

I kinda wish some of those AI generated picture programs were around when I was mushing. I kind of like the abstract, inspired style of night Cafe. I probably would have preferred that weirdly interpretive style of things rather than just "that one dude from that one show that people think is hot".

@Misadventure said in Another Played By Creator:

I personally dislike using real people for played bys. Too much baggage.

https://artflow.ai/

Agree with you 100% on this, especially if there's TS involved.

Looking back on it, I feel really guilty about the idea of using an actual living human being's face as a reference to sexual content without their consent.

I will also say...

...that in a lot of TTRPGs, making a new character because your last one died can sometimes be as simple as drawing dots on a gubernatorial ballot. You can literally make a new VtM, Aliens, All Flesh Must Be Eaten, etc character in minutes.

In MUs, however, it can become an absolute pain in the ass that takes days or weeks and is regularly held up by the availability of staffers.

The exception to the rule is that making TTRPG characters for Shadowrun, Traveller, ANYTHING BY PALLADIUM GAMES, Eclipse Phase, and most superhero games (FASERIP, Mutants & Masterminds) is a HORRENDOUS pain in the ass that might be worse than getting a MU character approved.

So there's a big "-1" for death/dying in MUs and a big "-2" for death/dying in some TTRPGs

"Ya lost 10 HP, Steve, so... <dumps pile of Shadowrun books on table>...you get to play again after passing the fucking bar exam."

@Arkandel said in The Great PC Death Dilemma:

@Ghost said in The Great PC Death Dilemma:

Really, if MUSHers wanted to play ACTUAL World of Darkness or Dungeons and Dragons, they'd be doing just that. Where it always got difficult with me is that I'd join a World of Darkness MUSH expecting to play the WoD TTRPG with lots of prose and writing

Sometimes what system the MU* people join isn't what they're necessarily looking for. It's often simply where their friends are playing - or where people are playing.

For example I know folks who're not into either fantasy or Lords and Ladies, but they've been playing on Arx for a while. It happens to be where their social circle hangs out.

Yeah. I think one of the major mistakes I made as a Musher was that I'd join these games using WoD, NWoD systems, Star Wars Saga edition, Shadowrun and in my head it was "I'm playing the <system> RPG but there's writing included" and it's really not that, up to and including (Original topic) rules on hitpoints, death, dying, etc.

So hindsight being 20/20 I think my advice to anyone new in the hobby is to say "if what you're REALLY looking for is a tabletop game using those systems, you should check out roll20, Foundry, Fantasy Grounds, Startplaying.games, etc. Don't join and hope it's played like that. It's not."

The approach to pc death/pc churn needs to be approached differently between MU/TT

Yeah, all of what was said before is what has led me to this "All TTRPGs are RPGs, but not all MUs are TTRPGs" belief.

Really, if MUSHers wanted to play ACTUAL World of Darkness or Dungeons and Dragons, they'd be doing just that. Where it always got difficult with me is that I'd join a World of Darkness MUSH expecting to play the WoD TTRPG with lots of prose and writing, but it's really not that. WoD was never truly intended to handle that level of scope (# of players, spheres, staff, etc) but instead was designed to be a small number of players per GM (or be designed like a LARP with specific rules in mind for larger crowds of people).

TTRPG can be like MU in some places, but at the end of the day the general MUSH simply cannot be a TTRPG.

The general MUSHer wants to write out these stories in open-ended states, hit targets on character romances so they can TS their favorite people or whatever. In 20+ years I've -never- found a MUSH that actually uses the full TTRPG rules -or- includes the kind of story focus that a dedicated gaming group would. It's more about writing these stories with or without the system in mind. Heck, in some cases players join the games with a specific setting and really don't know or care about the setting itself. They just want to write specific stories within the general theme of the setting.

In the end I decided that what I wanted was TTRPG, so that's where I fell on the side of things. I feel like there's something healthy and logical about understanding the difference between "MUSH that uses a dice system" and "TTRPG", where the general culture, approach to dice, use of system, focus of RP are simply different.

I know a lot of my posts come back to "is it an RPG game with writing OR a writing group that uses light RPG elements", but I feel that it applies to this topic.

I've played in a lot (and I mean a lot) of TTRPGs (D&D, etc) where the players knew the GM didn't have the balls to use the hitpoints system in a way that would kill their character. In traditional D&D (and all RPGs) there's a system where if you take too much damage, the character is dead. Write up a new character. However, you can always tell when a GM is actually using the "death and dying rules" based on how the characters play.

Using death&dying rules
"I spend my time observing the room, looking for traps, and making sure it's safe before proceeding."

NOT using death/dying rules
"I strip naked and do a Simone Biles floor exercise running series of flips with my wire cutters out, searching for traps as I flip, hoping to snip wires and disarm traps as I tumble."

I often refer to the latter as: "When the character knows they're in a D&D game"

Mind you, I don't argue for absolute and final PC death as the ONLY answer to things, but players behave differently when they know at some level that they have to understand risks on an OOC level and properly play their characters as understanding risk, as well. An absence of RISK outside of the PC's control changes the landscape greatly, and if you leave that risk in the player's hands they will almost always only choose the risks that either promote their PC or are as minimal as possible.

So I agree with you a lot @Ganymede . Were I to run a game I would require that in staff run scenes consent be waived with specific caveats in mind (caveats being things the game shouldn't have anyway, like rape, etc.).

A while back in my TTRPGs I'm a GM of I instituted a few rules that have helped things GREATLY:

1. PC death is never off the table, and the more brazenly risky the action the more likely PC death is an outcome. Play your characters as if they know they're capable of dying.
2. I will always try (within reason) to not have PC death be the only option for failure (ex: instead of everyone dying, they all wake up in a cell and need to escape)
3. The only successes you can achieve without dice rolls is trivial stuff (making coffee, unlocking your own door with a key, ordering off of a menu).

This stuff has helped my TTRPGs but may not necessarily apply to MU in all cases

@Arkandel said in The Great PC Death Dilemma:

@Ghost said in The Great PC Death Dilemma:

3. In RPGs, if PCs never die, then new players will -always- remain X% of XP behind elder players, who will always remain X% ahead of other players, thus there will be:

That is not necessarily true. It depends on the XP distribution system being used in that particular game.

True, it's not necessarily true, because some games can vary XP based on attendance/behavior, but if you have 2 players with similar RP attendance they'll move parallel to each other. However, if the "god stat" player has 2-3 years (give or take benefits from +jobs, connections with staff, etc) then any regular player is never going to "catch up" to that, ever.

I may have posted something about this years ago, but this is something that is always on my mind when it comes to online games and RPGs. Basically, it goes like this:

1. If no humans ever died in the real world, we'd run into issues of overpopulation, lack of food, CO2 imbalance, etc.
2. In RPGs, if there is not a threat of a PC dying against the will of their player, then outcomes are staged and "fear of failure" ceases to become a thing.
3. In RPGs, if PCs never die, then new players will -always- remain X% of XP behind elder players, who will always remain X% ahead of other players, thus there will be:

• No true reason why positions are ever rotated with new players taking place
• "Capability" is a matter of how old the character is and never the player's ability to RP
• Without the "great equalizer" of PC death, player disenfranchisement grows as players will never be able to compete with older characters.
• Players literally need to stop gaming, quit, get banned, etc to have a character die or taken out of the power rotation

So that's the short version. Here's my minute at the podium about it.

All "my PC dying isn't fun for me" aside (which I know is a common argument to PVP or dice deciding PC death), I personally find games where my character can do ANYTHING with very little fear of death (or other repercussions that would effectively have the character sheet retired) to be rather BORING. I feel sometimes like knowing (as a player) that nothing TRULY bad would never happen unless I approved it takes away any of the suspense of playing a character. Example: If I were playing baseball in real life and could literally control whether or not I missed the ball on a swing of the bat, would swinging the bat remain fun? It's kind of like that for me. Likewise, also knowing that OTHER PLAYERS know that whether or their PC suffers repercussions/death is a matter of their approval often makes me feel like CHOOSING TO ACCEPT REPERCUSSIONS as a matter of "fair play" is a foolish act because you're going to be playing with players who likely wouldn't accept the same kind of fair play.

Here's an example.

A loooong time ago on Fallcoast there was a "Law" faction of PCs designed to investigate and round up criminals. The PROBLEM was that it was a "consent" game, so unless a character consented to being investigated/hunted/killed for their behavior, the LAW sphere really couldn't DO anything about laws being broken by PCs unless staff intervened. So a group of players went off the rails and made this monstrous Frankenstein-like revived undead creature and posted a roleplay of them going "into the ghetto", some NPC upset the Frankenstein, and then what followed was a lengthy display of "Frankenstein creature tearing 'gang members' apart in the middle of the street". Of course, since it was their own ST'd scene apparently ZERO people recorded it with cell phones, called the police, or was there ever any danger to the PCs. It was, effectively, "LOL I don't consent to getting into trouble for this so Frank is gonna just wantonly massacre "Crips" in the middle of the street, and not only will no one call the cops, but this won't really make the news". To make matters worse, despite there being logically left-over evidence of *multiple people being torn apart in the middle of a street in America", the Law/Hunter sphere couldn't do anything truly about it unless the group of people "consented" to being hunted/chased for it.

The PCs involved ultimately went away not because of repercussions from their RP, but because they were caught cheating the XP system.

Now, this isn't a critique of Fallcoast at all, but an example of where lack of fear of PC death, consent systems being entirely hands-off, and "lack of fear of PCs dying due to dice" gets out of control. You get this over-the-top stuff where you can jump out of an airplane without a parachute and still not die unless you consent to it. In my opinion, this kind of stuff leads to roleplay that becomes increasingly over-the-top.

So, here are the ultimate questions I have:

What DO you do about games and RP systems where "dinosaur characters" are able to simply continue to amass XP with over-the-top RP and zero fear of death/repercussions (as if playing a video game in "god" mode where you can go on a 5-star GTA rampage and simply never die)? I know the MU community will likely never thrive in games where dice determine character death and PVP becomes a thing^. How do you make it so that PCs actually have RISK as a factor without requiring it to be an OOC matter? How do you encourage the retiring of PCs that have so much XP they're spending it on "specialty: basket-weaving" because they're maxed out and hanging around with zero risk of failure/end without consenting to it?

^ Note: The last time I saw a "PVP fight to the death" was somewhere in-between 2000-2006 on "SerenityMush" where it was two god-stat level PCs posing stabbing each other repeatedly, breaking bones, gouging eyes, until ultimately one player CUT INTO THE OTHER PC'S CHEST AND DESTROYED THEIR CYBERNETICALLY ENHANCED HEART...and because neither PC consented to PC death...and then was promptly revived on the spot as the cybernetic heart was repaired and returned to RP without issues the next day. Groan.

@Runescryer 100% Agree.

To make matters worse, shallow directors like Eli Roth (ugh: Knock Knock, Cabin Fever, Hostel), Rob Zombie, and Tom Six (Human Centipede and the even worse HC2) are becoming more common. Each of them at least attempted something somewhat artistic at first but have become increasingly more pandering to the infantile side of their directing. One COULD make the argument that Human Centipede 1 was a "body horror movie about a man attempting to rob others of their humanity", but Human Centipede 2 doesn't deserve a single shred of respect and was downright a film that was so fucked up that I can't see anything deep in it beyond an attempt to literally torture the audience. Eli Roth has had SOME creative work (Hemlock Grove), but keeps wobbling back to "true", which is childish gorefests and "boobies!" to the point that I can't see an artistic point behind Cabin Fever or Knock Knock. Rob Zombie seemed to start as an homage to Tobe Hooper's "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" but has since devolved into BARELY B-movie quality "spooky ookie bad guys and my hot wife" (Lords of Salem, 31, 3 From Hell).

((Note: Please don't take this previous paragraph as hypocritical. I've tried to see value in these three directors. It's not a kneejerk assumption of "edginess". Their stuff is just...hard to defend.))

Add in "Purge" initially being a dystopian reflection of where society could be heading that got turned into "Purge fashion and glorifying what YOU would do for the Purge?" It's like Denis Leary said. "The French treat us like shit because they gave us the croissant and we turned it into the croissandwich".

So perhaps what I'm saying is that I feel there's an actual cultural monetary value in people making "edgy" shit for "edginess'" sake that when you get an actual artist trying to make something of value (or, in Sandman's case, putting out content that's 30 years old and because it was released NOW) it gets lopped in as "trying to be edgy" when there's some really great thought behind it.

I also feel that there's a lot of "immediately negative assumption of intent" that's crept into the fanbase entitlement (or "fanbase extortion", if you will) that muddies the waters, too. There's a lot of risk to the authors to be accused of biases they may not actually have for the content in their stories. So the entertainment world is just a fucking minefield right now.

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG IT'S FINALLY COMING.

Jamie Clayton (Sense8) is taking on the role of the Hellpriest in a "hard-R" Hellraiser movie that has Clive Barker's involvement.

YouTube "Hellraiser Teaser Trailer"

@Derp I will fight to the death over how awesome Caroline Forbes is.

I fucking LOVE the trope of "privileged, perfect princess girl who becomes messy vampire". It's such a great transition. A girl who had everything, life of the party, center of her own little world. Becomes undead. Goes from prom queen candidate to...

...and I am forever grateful that the transition's tone didn't become some snarky Buffy trope and instead made the character grow up.

@Ganymede said in Good TV:

Tritely, when my partner watched the series with me, her first comment was "looks like they really wanted to borrow from Twilight" and it was all I could do not to choke her.

You know I used to feel the same way about "Vampire Diaries" stealing from World of Darkness, but then I found out that Vampire Diaries came out before Vampire the Masquerade. When I found that out it really fucked with my head because my beloved "World of Darkness" now may be actually derived partially from "Mystic Falls High School Vampires".

#TeamCarolineForbes
#TeamRebekkah
#TeamDamon

@hobos One thing I AM very disappointed about in recent pop culture is a word you used: edginess. Allow me a short soapbox here.

Edgy is a term I'd seen thrown around a lot while MUing a few years back, and I've seen it used over the years in greater increments. While there's nothing wrong with something that is "edgy", it's usually thrown around in a connotation of "this person is trying to be edgy for edgy's sake". This approach usually comes with a biased opinion of the writer, the content, or the intent behind the content that is wrapped in the bias of the person using the term "edgy". In most cases, the person using the term "edgy" doesn't delve into WHY the content is the way it is before judging the person an edgelord or the intent behind their writing.

Example: A long while back I was apping for a character on "Fifth World". I noticed that 9/10 characters on this "lords and ladies" game were basically "Prince/Princess Perfect" with variations really based on what weapon they used. "Princess Perfect the Knight" and "Prince Perfect the Archer". So I decided that when I made a character I would make "Prince...who had a lot of privilege and thus became a drug addicted sorcerer who would rather club crawl than face his lordly duties." I simply wanted to make something flawed that wasn't perfect and my creative mind went to the concept that the idle rich in the setting are no different than any other setting: privilege and lack of equal amounts of risk for illicit activities. I wanted to challenge myself by writing a character that was deeply flawed, somewhat unreliable, but a talented sorcerer and thus useful.

So...I made the character. I had scenes. Then, a few years later an allegedly (airquotes) good person on the Hog Pit started joking and guffawing about my character and how I was an edgelord, trying to be so edgy, and it was so embarrassing to them that they quit the game. Which, I'd always found hypocritical given that this person was always afraid of being judged, themselves.

I guess the moral of this story is that I feel that art needs to have an edge, and the popular use of the term "edgy" is less of a critique of the greater content but more an attack on the content itself with a means to belittle it. In some ways I think our society as a whole needs more "edge" and needs to face those hard details, but the PROBLEM is that you take an edgy concept like "The Purge" (which was intended to be a dystopian critique of where our society is heading) and then people only seem to fixate on "Oh I'd love the Purge!" and lose the entire point of the original content to begin with.

GOOD art will usually have some sort of "slap effect" that at first may come across as "edginess" (as in: trying to be) but only upon taking the time to review it with an unbiased lens you may find that the original purpose wasn't to be edgy at all.

One last example:

Nikki Sixx's photography might be laughed off as "oh look how edgy they are..."

When in fact the entire art photography book he put out had a theme of taking people with deformities, missing limbs, and developmental issues and showing how beautiful and intriguing they could be. So you could take a first look at that picture above and think "LOL Wannabe NIN EDGY LOL" but then when you take a moment to consider that Nikki Sixx (who often talks about how ugly he feels inside and wants to show his own beauty) focused on people who society deemed "disfigured and ugly" and put out a book of creative photography highlighting their beauty...it becomes something entirely different.

...I guess this wasn't a short soapbox. Alas.

@Ganymede said in Good TV:

The fact we are having this conversation right now suggests to me that this episode did exactly what it was calculated to do.

I looooooove shit like this: The little lies in society that are accepted; themselves that are considered normal. The strange behaviors in humankind and what a little push or shift in logic would wrought. It's the kind of stuff someone should think about before dealing with a Djinn.

It's such a fucking shame that super deep writing like this has fallen by the wayside in an era of repetitive blockbuster action movies and pandering fanbase entitlement content. Art SHOULD be dangerous and SHOULD make people question things.

• • I personally despise Marilyn Manson as a person but he comes up with some banger quotes and lyrics.

@hobos said in Good TV:

I thought it suffered from darkness-induced audience apathy to such an extent that it was ludicrous

Note that episode came from Sandman #6, which was published in 1989. So, with that in mind I don't feel that "audience apathy" was at play.

Back in the late 80s, Gaiman, Moorcock, and Moore were the tip of the spear in terms of writing hard-hitting content that challenged readers. I also think that Sandman #6 "24 hours" was definitely an idea that later lead to American God's.

The point behind episode 5 (and the 24 hours story) was to display just how much chaos a godlike power could unleash on a small scale. The terror of it doesn't need to be unveiled on some global, cataclysmic scale. Simply opening up people to let go of their inhibitions and no longer ignore the little impulses led to unfettered truth.

Example. It wasn't that those characters were so dishonest with themselves that by simply being honest all this edgy stuff happened. There are reasons why people don't answer their every urge, or tell a white lie, or choose against their desires. That one character ended up fucking another and then violence happens wasn't the point. The POINT was that giving into your impulses 100% means you fuck the cook, and then when you get angry you react to that, and then you react to every impulses, be it dread, relief, and it ends up becoming an inescapable quicksand. Such chaos can start out to create something beautiful and then unravel out of control, and thus the whims of a shortsighted man with godlike power spells doom for everyone he comes into contact with.

The concept of 24 hours was written at a time where Alan Moore was challenging the concept of civil rights in V for Vendetta and the deep questions of the Watchmen. Gaiman is a different breed of writer and at the time 24 hours was published it was shockingly unapologetic and unafraid to touch these themes.

This season of the Orville.

God damn.

I mean... God daaaamn it's so good

@Derp Given the whole theme of my whole "Are MUs a tabletop game with writing or creative writing with some minor rpg elements?" thing, I think this applies to my answer.

In tabletop RPGs, EVERYONE in the game gets XP at the same rate, same time. You play maybe 1-4 times per week maximum, so as a GM and player you give/gain xp as a group as you go. XP growth speed is a common topic in tabletop RPGs, as is the concept of gaining experience itself. XP/sheets is 100% a "tabletop RPG" element.

However, in terms of MUs, everyone is on at different times. Some people are on ALLLLL of the fuckin time. So you could have 2 players join at the same time but "PlayerA" may have a day job and 3 nights a week availability, "PlayerB" has no day job or need for sleep and is hound-dogging XP for everything, and the next time PlayerA and PlayerB meet...they look like the Rock and Kevin Hart standing next to each other. What the "mega xp asap" players in tabletop RPGs often don't understand is that there IS something detrimental to rushing to fill out all the dots on that character sheet.

Because of this, I 100% believe that MUs should be capping xp expenditures to a maximum weekly spend. You can't punish active players for being active, but you CAN try to ensure that "ultra-active" players don't use that as a way to eclipse the rest of the game in terms of sheet capability.

I think FS3 (@faraday ) handled this very well. Even with the biggest difference in stats, it was still ultimately Fudge so having better stats may have gained you extra dice, but didn't ensure godlike capability over your peers.

• Limit weekly sheet changes to a maximum cap
• Focus on trying to ensure the game has a sort of "capability range" in plots so that newer characters aren't always being eclipsed by older characters and older characters aren't being slowed too much by newer ones
• Understand that existing RPG systems (World of Darkness, D&D, Star Wars) are "level-based" in terms of how filled out the character sheets are, and that some players will ALWAYS rush to get xp/min max

And most importantly

• If you don't want your game having an XP imbalance (or if +rolls aren't that important) then either ensure your MU doesn't have an existing RPG system as a base, uses a more free-form type system, or maybe even no XP system at all

@hobos said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

To those who have been upset in the past due to being unfairly character-assassinated, is it possible to realize you are just collateral damage to a society struggling to keep itself safe? The personal attacks are difficult to stop taking personally, I know. But realization where it comes from and why might be a good step towards healing -- on an individual level, at least, if not a community one.

Constructively, I don't think that accepting oneself (or being susceptible to bullying/abuse) as collateral damage in a "community trying to keep itself safe from bullies and abusers" is an acceptable approach because it removes accountability from the people who are actually performing the abuse. That approach ignores the fact that abuse is being used in the name of combating abuse, and innocent people who have done nothing wrong should never accept abuse on the basis of "oh this person is just trying to protect themselves", because in this scenario the targets of unfair character assassination are rarely exonerated and the people who perform said character assassination are often cheered on for it and rarely face accountability for it.

Absolutely not.

Or, in short....

I've been held at knifepoint in my own home. The fact that I want to take steps to never be held at knifepoint in my own home again doesn't make it any more okay if I go next door to my neighbor's house and assault them to ensure it's less likely they'll ever hold me at knifepoint. It also shouldn't be some sort of consolation my neighbor that even though they were innocent I beat the shit out of them.

The honus of responsibility absolutely needs to be on the abuser. Accepting that concept of simply being collateral damage ONLY works if it's also accepted that the abuser was in the wrong, acting against an innocent person, and is held responsible for it. This approach, nor that healing, will ever happen if you just let it go and the person continues to abuse others.

@Arkandel said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

However what concerns me here, and I'll be honest, is that you don't seem to think the plan went wrong.

As opposed to what about removing the Hog Pit and instituting an anti-attack policy that they thought might have gone right?

I think there's a huge difference between "changing things and accepting the results, even if a number of people don't like it" and "changing things and it being the wrong decision", which I think ultimately is what some people are trying to browbeat the MSB staff into admitting: "We fucked up".

I don't think the staff at MSB are "refusing to admit the plan went wrong" at all. I think the staff at MSB are refusing to adhere to the opinions of a select number of angry people who want to see them admit to being wrong.