Posts made by Ghost

IT Operations Peeve:

My company is having a cool event where teams of 2-8 come up with out of the box ideas and then during a run of 3 days perform sprints to implement the ideas and do a presentation proof-of-concept. For the those note familiar with the lingo: It's like a science fair, but you create your design in under 48 hours of hard work and then present it to execs.

Anyway, the complaint:

Cool tee shirts. Normally my company's tee shirts are lame as Hell and I wouldnt be caught dead wearing them outside of work. This shirt is cool. All participants get a cool shirt.

So after designing and implementing an automated blue-green deployment system and spending after-hours work researching it, I find out the lazy employee on my team who always sneaks onto projects to 'help' but really just watches people do the work then tells his boss he was on a successful project...is wearing the tee shirt.

Me: "Oh, sweet, which project are you on?"
Him: "Oh, I'm not participating"

And now I'm noticing a bunch of people at the office signed up for a shirt, but aren't participating.

Maybe next time we should make separate shirts that say: "PARTICIPANT" on them. A lot of people worked hard on their projects and we earned these shirts. They should have been kept exclusive to participants.

@The-Sands said in Carnival Row:

@Ghost said in Carnival Row:

People are more keen to roleplay oppressed characters so long as it's not left to the players to be the ones who are plying said racism/oppression.

So are you going to say that no one can play a human? Because those (in general) are the one's plying the racism/oppression. That seems like it would immediately cut out anyone wanting to be in the 'constable' faction (since I can't recall seeing any non-humans among their ranks). Are you saying that all humans PCs must be enlightened and view the non-humans as equal?

I'm not saying that at all. 1) It's not my game and 2) I'm not making the decisions on this one.

It was in response to a few statements about how the problem would be fixed by focusing all of the racism/classism onto NPCs controlled by staff, which are still often controlled by people who play PCs, so it gets blurry there.

My own personal views are that if the setting includes racism and racist characters against "fae" characters, then people should be allowed to make them and have everything dealt with and handled ICly, up to and including PVP dice-rolled curbstompings of racist assholes...because that's what happens on the show.

A player should be able to play "racist constable #2" and oocly be "oh man, this is challenging to write! I love you guys!" but still in character be like: "Fuck you and your critch cunny. If it wouldn't anger me mates that dabble in critch-c*nt I'd beat you with this club." and then later: "STOOOP, you can't do this to me! I'm an officer of the laaaaaa-CRACK-DEAD!"

But that's just me.

@Ganymede said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@Ghost

These are good suggestions, all of which I intend to use if I can finally get all of my fucking theme and setting files done without being brain-jacked.

If you need someone to help word "be good to each other" policies/mission statements, I'm down to help. I'll write 'fuck' less in them for you.

Here's some suggestions. They're maybe not perfect or polished, but I think they're fair in terms of "how can we better address the social BS in the hobby". I don't want to be the annoying guy with opinions who isn't bold enough to throw down some potential solutions.

1. Make it regular that staff will considered screen-shot logs from chats/discord that amount to bullying/whisper campaigns of other players as actionable items for "warns/bans" on games. Likewise, bullying on the Hog Pit/MSB can be actionable on games: The stance that "if it happens off-game it's not a game problem" isn't exactly accurate. These side-zones are just the arenas where mistreatment of players happens, and it's no different than the concept that a "fight behind the church isn't a fight on school grounds". Just because it's being taken off-site doesn't mean it's not a problem on-game. If people had to be responsible for the shitty things they spread about other players (in the game(s) they play together), then they would reign in their shitty behavior a bit.

I get that staff aren't your parents and in many cases they're just fellow mushers who are dedicating their time, but I believe most of us are keenly aware that the bullying in the hobby that takes place server-side is usually performed by dumb motherfuckers who are creeping. I think we're all very aware that the smart people who bully take that stuff offline to other locations where there's no current standard of them having to answer for their behavior towards other players.

Constructive critique is one thing. Character assassination is another. I've stated many times (and will again!) that I have learned FAR too many personal details of players that I should never have learned due to another player simply telling me out of anger to fuck them over.

2. Implement a X-strikes rule where page/chat logs of someone being sexually harassed by other players (with 'please stop' dialogue) will result in being escorted off of the game: Due to excessive bullying, harassment, and stalking I know players who have decided it's better to mitigate the problem rather than deal with it staff-wise as to not make it a "staff problem" that could result in mistreatment or avoidance by staff. This may not be the absolute solution, but is a way of handling it.

3. There IS wrongfun: Take the stance that there are things that the "RP" games don't want crossing lines with. If you don't want the lines blurred between pedophile havens like PenDes bleeding onto your server side? Be vocal about it. Put up notices that this kind of behavior and RP expectation is not desired. Don't "ehhhh" it and let the players thrive until they break a rule because being upfront about them not being welcome could affect login numbers. If you say 'no rape roleplay' and someone complains about rape scenes? BOOT. If you say 'no characters under 18' and players start making characters who 'look' 18 but have 15 year old PBs acting as if they're hush-hush not 18? BOOT. Staff has a responsibility to keep their environment clean and safe for the players who want a clean, safe environment to RP in. Fuck the numbers.

4. Mission Statements: I know these can be just blabber, but there's something to be said by being up-front about things like "We are a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural group that will work to respect each other for our differences". Sure, it may just be fluff, but if you openly state the ethics of your game and staff, and the ethics your players are expected to follow, you may lose some players who are like "whut? I can't make fun of people behind their backs and be judgy?", but IMO? Good riddance. There may be some influential assholes in the hobby, but maybe if their shit wasn't allowed to take so much root it would be less of an issue. Because ultimately: What corrects large social problems in groups of people is deciding WHO you want to be and WHAT you want things to be like, and then committing to it. Sometimes stating that by agreeing to play you're going to commit to trying to follow those good-friendship type values helps make it happen, and you just might find that if people begin to love those values, the people who fail to agree to those values will be on the outs.

@Prototart said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

how can you even sit there & imply that "let's make a version of mu in a minute that works" isnt a viable solution to "the actual reasons normal people refuse altogether to mu or drive them off after a short time are entirely due to a culture of acceptance of horrible behavior & mediocrity" w a straight face

I went to the Alan Rickman school of sardonic straight-faced line delivery; that's why.

Anyway, the above suggestions may not be absolutely perfect in wording, but they're ideas. Ideas get the ball rolling and get people talking.

@Ganymede said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@Auspice said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

While ignoring the social points that @Ghost brought up.

I ignore Ghost's points because they are an inevitability for which he has no solution.

Improving the technology on which we play is something which a number of people are engaged in, and it seems to be improving our access to the games we want to play. Improving the technology therefore is a solution within our grasp.

Making people not be assholes is not, and therefore not worth much, if any, consideration.

Well, sure, if people come to these games for the technology and not the interaction with people. However, it's the people who drive the environments more than the actual tech; people have been playing on these games for decades despite using some of the same tech they did 10 years ago.

@Ganymede said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

I ignore Ghost's points because they are an inevitability for which he has no solution.

au contraire, I have solutions in mind, but step one is in identifying the problem. Step two is agreeing that a solution should be found. Step three is implementation.

There's little point in discussing a solution to a problem that people don't want to tackle, which is why I'm currently in "pointing out the problem" mode and not "HERE'S WHAT WE DO" mode.

Hands down: World War Z.

WWZ is written in the format of first-person interviewed accounts of zombie survival. So there's amazing stuff in the audio book version like:

Mark Hamill as a soldier who survived a massive zombie assault.

Henry Rollins as a mercenary who was hired to guard a reality show

Alan Alda as the man tasked with undoing unnecessary technology (stealth bombers decommission, cargo planes are the hot new thing)

Best audio book casting and narration I've ever heard. Period.

@Lisse24 said in Carnival Row:

@Ghost I have not seen the TV show so I may be misinterpreting your post, but it seems like you solve these issues by focusing on the fae characters. So it is not another PC that is oppressing yours or acting racist and no one has any excuse to allow that to bleed OOC.

On the contrary, it would be you and a group of your friends fighting the machine, which, if you take a glance at my past characters has always been a concept that's interested me.

That could be a fix, as @Ganymede mentioned. People are more keen to roleplay oppressed characters so long as it's not left to the players to be the ones who are plying said racism/oppression.

(am I going to however? Yes.)

HOWEVVVVER, technically NPCs are still written and guided by the hands of people, even if staff, and they'd need to be very controlled about how it's applied. Then again, the setting isn't entirely fae-focused. The TV show focuses on plenty of "non-fae" characters, and those characters being friends, lovers, allies help sell the "civil rights" features of the setting.

I'm not saying that it's impossible by any means; I'm just saying that it would be very tricky to execute and/or maintain in a way that keeps the setting intact as an identifiable "Carnival Row" game.

@Auspice said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

Who do I trust to Staff? (and before you open your mouth, @Ghost, trusting someone enough to Staff with them is a whole other bag than roleplaying with them)

(With mouth stapled shut)
hhrrrrIIII hrrrrrGreeEEe

@Prototart said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

sometimes I really think people just try to solve these problems that are mostly imagined or hugely overstated ones bc it's way more palatable than "maybe so many people quit mushing bc of mushers"

Ding!

@Prototart said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

i should maybe specify that when i say what i've said i'm almost exclusively talking about comic games, a niche where successful and well populated games have been run by actual rl rapists and actual rl child molesters who were openly known to be actual rl rapists and actual rl child molesters

D'Ding!

When people quit mushing (or "new blood" doesn't stick around) it has little to do with the following:

• A lack of comic book games
• A lack of available games
• MU Clients
• Codebase

Sure, making more user-friendly tools would help, but I'm not seeing a constant FLOOD of people posting "I'd love this hobby if it weren't for this codebase, so I have to leave because of this codebase". No. We see a lot of apology threads for interpersonal bullshit, needing to step away because of taking things too seriously, personal beefs, and here are some of the more common hits.

• Player is a perv who won't leave me alone
• People sit on roster characters and never log in
• Cliques
• Someone is slandering my name because they're pissed at me for roleplaying with the character they wanna TS
• I ask people for RP and no one responds
• Players who are friends with staff get special benefits and leeway, and staff won't do anything about it
• Drama. Drama. Drama.
• "I don't talk shit, but this player is complete psycho and has herpes."

I'm not trying to be snide here, but I think that people may end up putting dozens to hundreds of hours of development into new tools and technologies, but it might not matter a bucket of spit unless some of the social issues are addressed and some of these "old schooler" habits are untangled to make the environment more welcoming to both "new blood outsiders" and "normal people who don't want OOC drama". We're talking about a hobby that literally shares advertising space with sex games that allow people to roleplay pedophilia, and people from those games are also coming onto the non-sex games and page-creeping players about how hot their PBs are. THERE WAS A CHARACTER PAGE FOR A HUMAN/DOLPHIN WHO BROWSED WIKI PAGES AND MADE A SIDE PAGE ABOUT HOW BADLY HE WANTED TO FUCK THEIR CHARACTERS BEFORE HE'D EVEN RP'D WITH THEM (and for some people, this is MILD and WEIRD but not shocking!). Some players are really great about wanting stories. Others are just pushy about "getting to the TS part" and will ignore you unless you're fulfilling their personal wants.

I know the social problems will likely be harder to fix (and for some of these people you're talking DECADES of ingrained responses to behaviors), but it's like they say about work: People don't quit a job, they quit the boss/team. I think the same applies to mushing, and approaching this as a matter of "advertising, monetizing the hobby, or purely technology" is a waste of your time.

I think that you're thinking with your writer's brain, and this is very good. I think, constructively, this hobby consists of role-players and writers, and role-players might not think as deeply about this stuff as a writer would. Theme is essential in many things, as is conflict. Conflict drives good characters, and if your theme doesn't have conflict that drives a character to act, then the setting is stale and milquetoast.

So, having said that, I'll use my recent comments on Carnival Row as an example:

One could argue that the characters sell the story, so I think you have to work it from this angle: Figure out WHY the characters are so good in the setting, consider what OTHER characters in the setting might be good, and then apply the show's format to the new characters. These new characters would be the PCs. So let's take a look at the theme.

From what I see, that show is essentially about struggle against oppressive political forces, and by struggle I mean "succeed or starve". Philo has to struggle against his role as a seeker of justice in a racist, brutal constabulary, Vignette struggles to survive against an underworld organization while struggling to keep her people alive in a ghetto during a war, Imogen struggles against high society and fear of keeping her head above water amidst a social circle of brutal, judgmental mavens, and Agreus struggles to maintain relevance and self worth as a sort of civil rights icon in high society (a society that is racist against him).

Is it great that Philo and Vignette have a romance? No. It's a thing, but what makes it great is that it's fucked up, dirty, desperate, and hellishly complicated.

MY POINT: I think when you look at trying to "recreate the thunder" of a genre, the reason why the BSG games did so well is that so many of the players came on board wanting to RP putting up photographs of dead family, living in shitty bunkhouses with little privacy, and GAME RUNNERS were mostly smart to avoid giving people private rooms. They recreated the THEME, and thus the ensemble casts were mostly successful in bottling that lightning. IF YOU ARE NOT GOING TO RECREATE THE THEME then you're just creating an idealized version of the theme, which is at that point not really roleplaying within the setting's universe but an adapted one of your own making. At that point, it doesn't matter who or what you make as a character; you're not going to feel like you're walking around in that setting.

@Ganymede said in Carnival Row:

@Ghost

I think you can easily do it by limiting concepts to the oppressed side.

Perhaps! I'll never say never, but taking a step back I see games where even remotely racist characters are considered poor sport on behalf of the player. We just had a large discussion as to whether or not it's okay for players to make Nazi characters. There's a lot of "Racism isn't fun, oppression isnt fun, I want my game experience to be fun", and I dont think that you can have Carnival Row be Carnival Row without some of these elements.

Carnival Row focuses on a group of 2nd class citizen fae living in a ghetto, where the ruling class of people often call them racist slurs, deny them benefits, oppress them through police beatings, wealthy human employers try to Weinstein them, and as depicted on the show one of the few places where things are pretty chill is a brothel where they still have to deal with discrimination and rely sometimes on racist humans wanting to bang a pix to keep fed.

I'm not saying that it would become a repeat of the Standford Prison Experiment or anything, but I am saying that if you're shooting for making this accurate to the show's setting and feel, it would definitely scrape plenty of no-go points with mushers.

Yanno what? On second thought? Go for it.

If a Carnival Row game could effectively be played with enough players separating IC from OOC to be OKAY with roleplaying the above mentioned stuff, I may just return to mushing, but while I know a number of players who would be able to do this just fine (you being one of them) I still think this hobby has about the same success rate as a MLB pitcher's batting average with these elements.

1. It's important to not make a useless concept. An easy way of ensuring this is to ask which gaps in character concepts are needed to be filled, or what people are putting on the Wanted Concepts board.

2. It can be important to not buy into an over-populated concept, because other players may already be getting the RP you want and it sucks to have to compete for relevance.

I would usually ask "what's needed?" and then based on the response determine if any of those things are interesting to me.

Advice: Don't make a Carnival Row MU.

It's a setting where some of the major themes are:

• Refugee/Poverty Caste
• Racism
• Brothel as a social hub
• One ruling faction keeping the other faction down by means of racism

All of this is stuff the greater MU community is into. /sarcasm

History has shown that prostitution and poverty/oppressed caste rarely go well in MU, and racism (even fictitious racism) has a very high likelihood in resulting in OOC issues, upset players, etc.

Just make an alt-reality WoD changeling set in a gaslamp setting, instead. Trust me.

I think this is a cool, smart idea. Secret World is the shit.

@Lisse24 L O L.

You should become a pop-up then when they're talking.

Them: So on Wednesday we have a meeting with-

You: -HEY let's get some pizza.

Them: Uh. Hang on a second let me finish this. So this Wednesday when we're meeting w-

You: -Would you like to save money on auto insurance???

I recommend the Gundam/Stargate games, @Joyeuse. Both are settings that are easier to grasp with systems that the learning curve is less treacherous. The "get up and go" factor should be high. Smaller, less broadly-scoped games tend to result in more relevance per character to the plot of the game.

As for Arx? I have nothing personally against it, but it's a LOT of code, a very large population that is very faction-focused, and a lot of entrenched leadership and preexisting designs for how those factions work. It could be rewarding! but the learning curve is higher and it may take time to not feel like a tiny little mouse in Times Square.

@Auspice said in First Through the Gate Syndrome:

Why are people afraid to be the first pose in an event?

I think the terms proactive and reactive apply in this case.

Some scenes and PrPs definitely have an idea in mind and some players have an idea as to what they wanna do in the scene, but in many cases a PrP can be kind of like entering someone's house for a first time: You don't know where the bathroom is, the kitchen is, which step on the staircase is loose...

So some players have the mindset of exploring where others want to be led.

On the days I need to get up at 245am for work at 330am...

• 2:45 - get up
• 2:47 - just in case you hit snooze.
• 2:50 - Your SO will kill you out of bed at this point.
• 3:25 - You should be at work at this point so double check everything is in place.
• 3:30 - Start working.

@Lotherio said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

Old hats are good doing away with multidescs and lots of those who have been around end up focusing on PB. Forgetting part of our own draws into this hobby. Instead of defining the target audience and shooting into the dark, perspective from young blood might go a long way too I think.

Bravo. I think about this from time to time. Note, I still think the social issues need to be focused on as the true issue BUT I think it should also be asked: "What exactly IS this hobby, these days?"

You could say that it's about writing, but people interested in actual writing know that the style of roleplay isnt exactly writing. It's like...taking turns writing, which is fine but also not the way you would write with a joint author. And then (as you mentioned) scrapping descriptions for PBs, which is a step again further from writing and focusing on writing ability to flesh out the theatre of the mind sense of things.

So, I get this sense that the way someone would describe the hobby to a prospective player(s) would vary from person to person. Something to ponder.