Posts made by Ghost

@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.

@surreality But I wasn't talking about whether or not it's wrong to judge someone who's saying rude things, or is somehow illogically male trying to tell a female how to play a female. There is no moebius strip of logic to not believe, because no one suggested that anyone is wrong for not liking people who say rude things to them.

I'm talking about the lengths people go to to apply judgment behind the scenes while presenting the appearance of someone who isn't judgmental.

In relation to the topic of LGBTQ+ support, I think the behind the scenes culture of judgment may be a factor, which was my intended point.

@Doozer Metalocalypse.

They didn't so much fight monsters with metal, but more so would play (example) an EPIC metal show outside of a prison in a 200 foot tall robotic spider stage where they assisted the prison in their death row executions by having prisoners launched on rockets into the sky, and then black hooded roadies use lasers to shoot the rockets and make them explode into shapes like colorful bats and skulls.

...and then accidentally cause a jailbreak that unleashes hundreds of murderous felons back into the civilian population.

Suggestions (and more bullet points, because I write a lot of technical documentation and it's my thing).

• No Railroading: Railroading is a term for when the person running the game/RPG has written the beginning, middle, and the end already and is just walking the players towards a pre-determined series of events that the player cannot influence. DO NOT. My advice instead is to write a beginning, prepare a few key points that will happen, and keep in mind 2-4 ways it might end, but ultimately let the players determine the ending.

Pre-writing sets and/or some quick OOC information in setup is great.

• Them, not you: I'm opinionated on this, but a good PrP is designed for the players and not for your character. If your own character is in the Pro, try to keep them a secondary or tertiary element, and don't make it something slyly designed to be all about them unless it's absolutely necessary.

Good Example: If the PrP is because your character is in jail and the PrP is a jailbreak, then that's great.

Bad Example: You want XP and justification for a new item. So your PrP is really about you getting that xp and an item, and everyone else signed on for RP but really you're just duping them into helping your PC get a reward that the other players won't also get.

• This movie is rated R for... Do this. Be up-front about potential trigger warning, content, and just how much risk or combat will in it. This allows people who arent combat characters or have irrelevant skills choose if the scene is for them and also provides some up-front support for people who want to avoid certain elements.

Some people see those MPAA notices and say: "I'm not into intense violence, language, and nudity" whereas others say "Oh hellsyes..."

• MOVE IT ALONG: Be prepared for players being super picky and careful. I'm not saying to RAILROAD it, but have a real-life time limit in mind. You may find players checking under every box or behind every single door, but at X number of minutes per pose and the reality that people eventually have to sleep, try to find ways to crack a whip at their asses so that they're driving the scene forward. Maybe a clock is ticking in the scene? Maybe the cops are on their way? Maybe an alarm gets set?

One method I've seen used by the creator of Happiest Apocalypse on Earth (great guy, btw) is he draws a clock on a piece of paper. He makes notes about events that will happen at 2pm, 4pm, 6pm, etc and mentally keeps tally of how long things are taking, then unleashes these events that will keep it moving along.

• More than one solution This is kind of like the railroad one, but not entirely. If your PrP involves a puzzle element, be open to multiple ways of solving it. Let the players surprise you. Make up puzzles with more than one solution, but please do not implement puzzles where there is only one solution and nothing happens in the PrP unless the players choose/guess the only right answer. Let them make perception-type rolls (search, alertness, etc) and give them clues, but never assume they'll figure it out without your help.

• Sheets and Divas Keep an eye out for people roleplaying being learned in skills their sheets don't have, trying to do EVERYTHING in one pose and leaving others players with nothing to do, and using statements like "Well I (as in the player) can Google BOMB MAKING on the internet so I should be able to do it without a roll." Nope. Make 'em roll and...

...last one...

• ...LET THEM FAIL Here's my opinionated one. Let people fail rolls. Dont guarantee them a win. Keep it exciting for them and you by keeping it challenging. Maybe the bad guy gets away? Maybe the heroes get half a win and don't ace the scenario? By all means don't kill all their characters or anything like that, but the bad guy getting away if the team failed is great incentive for signing up for part 2 because your villain was memorable and the PrP was fun.

@Ominous said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

@Ghost It would probably attract the most annoying of edge lords, though, and they're such a pain to RP with.

...

I...

...but...

...and there WILL be PUS-COVERED NOMADIC TRIBES OF EDGE LORDS WIELDING RUSTY HALBERDS AND BATTLE AXES AND REALLY FUCKED UP FACIAL HAIR AND FACEMASKS MADE OF SKIN WHO WILL RAID VILLAGES FOR ALL OF THE MOST BADASS MEN TO DRAG THEM OFF TO CAVE TO TURN THEM INTO THEIR SPOUSES.

LOL. Come on @Ominous, don't make this depressing.

Play this song in a side-window while reading this. It'll make it better. I promise.

You know what would be neat? A really thickly gothic/blackmetal type fantasy game.

I'm talking stuff closer to Conan where there are rivers of blood and the "Icy Witch of the Woods" or haunted swamps where whole legions of ancient armies lie buried deep within the mud only to devour foolish travelers who would enter. I'm talking black spires and ziggurats of cults led by emaciated lich-like men and women covered in serpents and cockroaches, or nomadic bands of chaos-driven flagellants with bloody fingertips and black shrouds over their faces.

(fuckyouauspiceIknowbutIneedthisgiftosellthisidea)

I'm talking about powerful tribes of barbarians fighting back the darkness and knights in cracked and blood-soaked chainmail standing on the walls of blackened castles staring out into the lightning-lit night sky, past the rain, to creatures moving out in the trees.

I'm not talking chainmail bikinis and Lords and Ladies. I'm talking...

and

Fighting motherfuckin...

...I think this would be thoroughly badass, and would welcome evil, blood, mortality, grit, and grime over coffee rp.

ETA: And no happy endings. There is no happy ending. Their is no hope beyond survival, glory, hard liquor, and a solid boning once in a while after washing caked up mud, blood, and black mold off of your chiseled badass body because the sun rises once every 45 days and when you live in a Hell of eternal night...that's what's best in life. And then on that one night you dare to put on a nice shirt or dress and try to get a dance with someone you like, the fucking Duke explodes in a shower of bloody rags and starts murdering people in the mead hall because he was consorting with a harem of 24 fel-corrupted death witches who used him as a vessel for the return of a 12,000 year old pestilence demon.

Because \m/ Dio horns to the sky and poured mead for the glorious dead. Metal, baby. Metal.

ETA2: And stuff like a +code to let staff know when you're having something remotely near normal romantic-type roleplay so that they can scramble the eggs of your sweet, romantic interlude with a sudden assault by sentient fungus that bleeds from its eye sockets and whatever that is that is probably a mouth. Why? Because in this world fighting frenzied axe-brawling for your life back-to-back with the person you love only to end up in a dirty washtub together is romance. Raar.

Okay. Bedtime.

@Runescryer said in Whatever Happened To Star Wars MU*s?:

@Ghost Those are also the issues with literally every fandom game: comics, Trek, WoD...

Which includes Star Wars, yes.

@Joyeuse Star Wars has a bit of an "up and down" reputation with Mushers.

1. SYSTEM: There have been multiple attempts using the West-End Games d6 system (low complication, but pretty rigid when it comes to force users), the d20 edition (D20, Saga, both were like D&D: level-based, lots of stat blocks, lots of code to support it, but definitely WALLS of +5 to this, +7 to that, +2 if you're within 5 feet of another...), and the new Fantasy-Flight system (low complexity, but using a dice system most games aren't currently designed to handle. Will take effort to port it over). In the end...the fan favorite seems to be the D6 WEG system.

2. The Dreaded Force-Slot Debacles: For years (probably from about mid 1990s-2008) the D6 WEG games were the only Star Wars games, and it seemed the same issue with Feature Characters (Han, Luke, Leia...) and Force Users (as in, users ALLOWED to have the Force) happened at every game: There were a limited number of allowed FCs and FUs, and everyone else had to have a normal-type character. In many cases, FC/FUs were slotted to staff members or friends of staff, and because they were special characters a lot of the good plots and great things were built around that higher caste of characters. There were rules on each game as to how active FC/FU characters were supposed to be, but rarely enforced. Often, when one would open up there would be this weird "Hunger Games" display of "taking applications" for Force User slots, which would STILL often go to staff or friends of staff.

So, some players have a bit of fatigue from dealing with #2. Sure, there was fun to be found, but it was very hard to simply play what you wanted to play.

3. Divided Playerbase: Some people want BIG UNIVERSE with MANY FACTIONS, and others seem to want ONE PLANET with LESS FACTIONS. There seems to be no general consensus as to what makes a Star Wars game work. Some have tried and people have cited not playing because the game was in too small of a setting without many factions. For some it's WHO staffs the game. For others its WHICH system is used. For some, the moment FC/FU slots get mentioned they're out (I would probably be one of those, because that feeling of waiting and being rejected just to play a character concept you have in mind suuuuucks).

Sidebar: Not long ago were some D20 Saga Edition games where the guy running the game would constantly berate the playerbase, calling them stupid, etc. I quit 2 of them within a day after watching the head staffer bitch people out for not being smart enough to listen to him. This staffer, who is a bit infamous, was also taking side money from people over paypal for stuff like "buying levels" or "purchasing rare equipment".

4. Repeated Playerbase Habits: This may not be a popular opinion, but I think it's relevant. Star Wars, World of Darkness, and Battlestar Galactica have revolving-door players. By this I mean that if you go onto a Battlestar Galactica game, you'll probably come across players who were on the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh etc Battlestar Game that has come and gone. With enough time in the hobby you may notice that players and/or characters tend to repeat things from game to game. I don't think this is KEEPING anyone from making a new Star Wars game, but I think most elder-type players will expect things like this:

Example:
Steve played "Chad Starshooter" on four different iterations of Star Wars games. When a new one comes out, he may want to play "Chad Starshooter" again. If not allowed to, he may make "Bill Sunblaster", who maybe uses a different PB, but is the same character in essence. Ellen, who played "Tiffany Darkside" on those previous games was a girlfriend to "Chad Starshooter". She will then play "Debbie Shadowside" and be with "Bill Sunblaster".

Also an example:
Dave ran Star Wars games 1-3. On the 2nd, he disagreed with some player resulting in an OOC spat. The 3rd consisted of players who either sided with him in the spat or people who didn't care. The 4th Star Wars game after Dave's was a "refuguee game" of players/staff that said "FUCK DAVE" and made the new Mecca of Star Wars Mushing. Eventually, the players of that 4th game splintered, some went back to Dave's game. Some just moved on. POINT: A NEW Star Wars game will likely involve the players of Dave's 1-3 game and the 4th game, and will likely bring old baggage based on who is staff and who plays who into the game, resulting in a number of players passing based on who is there or chosen as staff.

Also another example:
I've also seen some players who had issues on, say, one Star Wars game in 2004 get back into Star Wars in, say, 2019 (theoretically) and come back with those same issues. This is kinda like the above example, but more like "I put up with this shit on "Dave's" game in 2004 and am super on alert for it in 2019, so many of the same complaints to staff and whatnot can get repeated or handed down from game to game.

I'm not without my preferences. I think the best there was (despite force user slots) was some of the EPIC starfighter stuff I got into on SW1 eons ago (shit, when was that? closed in 2003? fuuuuuuckme #old). I'd consider coming back for some RP for a few games, one of them being a proper faction/galaxy-spanning Star Wars game that allowed for playing force users right out of character generations. I think it might do well if people gave it a clean slate chance.

(Hah, I watched @Arkandel post his while I was typing this up. I suppose he is Siskel and I am Ebert. COUNTERPOINT:)

It: Chapter 2 was fucking amazing, save maybe a couple of things that are just nitpicky, but those would be spoilers.

(SPOILER-FREE)

In fact, I kind of want to jabber about how fucking much of a genius Stephen King is, and how I'm always reminded somehow by his writing or movie adaptations deep down what a genius he is.

Ultimately, "IT" isn't a story about a creepy clown. It's a story about fear, and how children believe in magic; the magic of horror, the magic of friendship, the magic of how their childhood crew can face anything so long as they stay together. It's about how fear is deadlier when you're a child because you believe in the monster under the bed, but fear is deadlier as an adult because you're more aware of your own mortality. It's about how it's easier to overcome fear when you're a child because you believe in things that may not actually, tangibly exist, and about how it's twice as hard to remember and believe when you're an adult. I can think of a time in my life that my childhood CREW probably could have handled a monster, and when I daydream about it, I'd probably want my childhood crew there with me if I had to fight another as an adult.

He doesn't write about clowns. He writes about concepts that almost all of us intimately understand on a human level, and builds stories using those binding concepts as the network of veins pump the blood through it.

But we should never directly call them myopic assholes because that would be considered a direct insult, and would violate some game and board policies.

Totally 100% agree. It would also be judgy. Which we shouldn't do.

@peasoupling said in MU*, Youth, and LGBT+ Identity:

@Ghost said in MU*, Youth, and LGBT+ Identity:

@mietze Yes, because it was in reference to your post/concept.

It really reads like you were replying to an argument @mietze didn't make. The actual argument was in the rest of the sentence that you left out of the initial quote. It feels like you just read the start of the post and replied to that, ignoring the rest.

Nah, I read the whole thing. I'm not gonna touch the whole "this person who plays a cop on TV is telling me what it's like to be a cop in RL" topic. I mean, that stuff is annoying and weird, but I feel it's a mild annoyance.

But what I saw in mietze's first part of the post is pretty common, and it applies to all kinds of stuff: LGBTQ+, race, nationality, parenting, etc. DROVES of people in this hobby bitch and judge constantly in side-pages (aka whisper campaigns) about what people should or should not be doing based on that person's alleged RL demographics, but then also get upset when they, themselves are judged.

I think it's a thing this community needs to work on, and I absolutely think this applies to someone asking about the level of support for queer demographics in the hobby.

To which, I think the answer kinda becomes: Mind the judgment factor, always.

@mietze Okay, hey, but what about the content in my post?

Let's talk about that.

@mietze Yes, because it was in reference to your post/concept.

Edit: Well, I mean perhaps a little because you do tend to cherry pick one form of judgment being acceptable but not in a bidirectional way, but altogether my YOU in that was more of a universal statement that happens to include you, me, everyone.

People need to stop being so judgy.

@mietze I'm also not talking about you specifically. You in the general you out there sense.

@mietze said in MU*, Youth, and LGBT+ Identity:

I think what turns me off more when I see someone RPing something that they probably have no life-experience in

This is part of the problem.

1. These are fictional characters. We are not supposed to simply roleplay ourselves and stay in our lane. That I have never been to a galaxy far far away and arent 8 feet tall and covered in hair doesn't mean I can't enjoy playing a Wookiee. That I have a story in mind does not mean I shouldn't write a character of another gender or race. I do not personally need experience being from Spain to write a human who comes from Spain. I can be creative, maybe do a little research, and make shit up in a hobby about being creative and telling stories. It's called being a writer.

2. The judgmental cadre in the hobby who thinks stuff like this (re: people shouldnt play things they don't have experience in) are simply piling on shitty judgment because when they say things like this they're claiming by some divine level of clarity that the person has no experience with that character type; which is rude and presumptuous. Who the fuck are these people to assume and/or judge/weigh someone's level of experience level to gatekeep being able to roleplay something without whisper campaigns?

@Joyeuse. #2 ^^^ is part of the reason why I advise against sharing OOC demographic stuff.

3. People shaming you for what you play based on their biases is bullshit.

Gonna be real for a moment here, @mietze . I don't think you can have it both ways. You shouldn't get upset at people for "slut shaming" but then get annoyed because theyre playing something you havent "judged them" to have experience in. Judgment is ugly, and while some judgments are more valid than others this does not make being judgy truly okay. You shouldn't complain about whisper campaigns but then partake in them. There's another thread hitting these points right now so I'll take it there if it's worth continuing.

My end point is this: People on these games can be fucking judgy, and while this thread started strong with YES WE SUPPORT, the initial platitudes have stopped and we have moved now into the 'well...but its super cringey when...' realm where people are now giving glimpses into the stuff they'll be talking about in pages or discord.

@saosmash said in MU*, Youth, and LGBT+ Identity:

"elves are a small, lithe people who excel at poverty archery."

^

@Rinel Right. When I wrote that I wasn't critiquing; though I've always believed that the point of making a character is to make some new perspective or skin to explore and not to write some idealized Second Life avatar of oneself. When the game/scene/player disappoints you there's less risk of internalizing. (Again, this is just how I rolled; I can't qualify what is best for others)

As far as I'm concerned, RP whatever you please, and I support exploration into the perspective of different genders, specialities, religions, species, etc.

Bear in mind there is no silver bullet statement in play here. No one is saying that there arent maladaptive behaviors outside of MU in the real world.

I liken it closer to little culty things like LARP, Church Organizations, Wine Culture, Crossfit, etc. Whenever anyone places themselves more in one particular social environment and less with general public social life, the "societal norms" of those very particular groups can and possibly will impact one's ability to function outside of those groups; they become so comfortable in that one environment that it affects some of their social skills outside of it.

It's not an uncommon concept.

@Joyeuse , @mietze totally touched on something I made a mental note to say before getting distracted with my whole Anonymous IzLyf shit.

You'll see a number of players playing a myriad of roles regardless of their own gender/identity (I'm a fan of this. Go go exploration) You'll see some of those players roleplaying caricatures (or arguably, fetishization) of subcultures they, themselves are not a part of in RL; stuff like straight women playing gay males, dudebros playing lesbian pornstar tropes. Is it offensive? Probably needs to be judged on a case-by-case basis, but from what I've seen people actually knowing your OOC race, gender, nationality (etc) can create issues on your PC's identity choices. There are people who don't want to see (example) white straight men play anything other than. Sign of the times.

Eye of the beholder.