Posts made by Gilette

@ThatGuyThere

Man, you said it yourself: you go to games because you can play a certain character you want to play there, not because the game itself - the setting, the rules, the atmosphere - attracts you.

It's like when I went to HeroMUX and made this character to fit into the world because I really wanted to play in that world, and then I looked over and there was this typical anime sparkle princess.

You're either not very good at explaining yourself, or not being accurate about what you're saying.

Players should fit to the games they join, not try to hammer out a niche for their character in a game that they may not be suited for.

@Seraphim73

Option C. The game probably should consider whether it really wants to allow player character to run the gamut from front-line soldier to Actual Sith Lord.

Otherwise, the Sith Trooper - by being a member of the Sith group - should be willing to accept and play within the confines of the pecking order, particularly if he is going to be inflammatory. Likewise, the Sith Lord should not UNLIIIIMITED POWWWEERRRR the people below him for no reason.

If the Sith trooper is not willing to play by the rules of the group he app'd his own character into, then staff would need to intervene.

@ThatGuyThere said in Where's your RP at?:

Honestly most of the time these days I pick a game because it is a place to play the character I wanted to play, more than for the game itself.

This is kind of the whole problem. "I'm not here for the game, I'm here because it's the only place I can play my particular snowflake."

Sure, and then you can fucking murder them with Potence 10.

@mietze said in Where's your RP at?:

In addition most systems do have a get out of jail free way to get around PC death, even if it costs something in return.

I think people who fixate on death as the only measure of True Morality on a consent game are kind of weird. Even on games that are anything goes, usually people don't think like that.

It's the easiest barometer. When death isn't happening, and isn't really on the cards, a lot of players start leaning on the fact that they won't be killed. So, to use a WoD example, you get neonates staring an Antediluvian in the face and just failing to sell it in any way.

Because what're you going to do, really, when a player withdraws consent and just says 'That didn't happen'? Ban them? Risk pissing off them and their friends? In this hobby?

All it takes is a few players to start railing against non-consent and/or mechanics-related resolution and the whole thing collapses. It's why people get so vehement about it because it is far easier for certain players to remove those things than it is to make players agree to start using them once they've fallen out of favor.

It's almost as if there's a big ol' tension between the people who have their own story first in their mind and the people who are more willing to get screwed by a random roll of the dice.

I also think people who are comparing MUs to writing a story or watching a TV show are missing the point. Even appealing to tabletop is a bit odd. A MU is none of those things, not really - it is far closer to improv theatre. In a MU, you're not always the protagonist or the biggest star. Sometimes, your character is the guy who shows up in the background or delivers a key to the person who will Do Things.

I really like surrendering part of my character's agency to the dice or to the whims of other players. This is, however, incresingly hard to find.

What isn't increasingly hard to find are people who, say, taunt a character for half a dozen poses, or even attack them, and then attempt to no-consent out of consequences.

Unfortunately, a lot of players are realising that they can hide behind the banner of Consent-Based Ar Pee when things they don't like happen and there simply aren't enough players who will call them on that selfish, dishonest behavior.

My personal approach to my consent is as follows: Ultimately, my consent trumps anything and everything, which means it is not something I revoke casually. If someone says they want to stab my character out of the blue, I'll allow it, with the understanding that the worst my character will get is a few days in hospital. If my character dies, it will be at a suitably dramatic moment, or because I've grown tired of playing them. PC/PC conflict will always be settled by a mechanical system where possible, simply because it is the fairest way of doing it, and I will not complain about either result - even if I go into it knowing I have a disadvantage.

Multi User Shared Hallucinations aren't, y'know, singular hallucinations. The whole thing falls apart when people forget that the text reality is made up of more than themselves.

@fatefan

It's unfortunately pretty dead at the moment. It was super active when I joined around November but all of a sudden things just stopped. I think it's one of those things where a small number of players were playing an absolute heap of PCs.

It was a pretty nice place, too.

I'd love a Supers MU that was not Marvel or DC and was a good old fashioned grab bag world. Have your animal people, your aliens, your robots, your teenage super academy, your global best of the best league, and so on.

The only problem with it is sketching out a superpowered theme/world gets ridiculously hard to keep anyway realistic or grounded. So, I'd say just do the bare minimum to make it work on the world and encourage players to not go pulling at the threads of worldbuilding and so on.

@WTFE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKK8orrcwUY

@WTFE

Text-sex.

@WTFE

OH ARE YOU EVER

It's a collection of basically-IRC chat rooms based around ERP. That's all it is. However, there's a significant amount of players who are there to do non-sexual RP. I don't believe them, of course, but there's also a number of profiles that I've been shown as evidence that there are people trying to do high concept roleplaying.

So, y'know, like Shang but without even Shang's world to provide a shared tapestry and a context to ground characters in.

edit: Checking the site, there are 6000+ characters logged in.

It does feel like the hobby is really in a period of shrinkage, though, and it feels like a lot of players are retreating to where players are, regardless of how weird an idea that is. I know two people who took their non-sexual RP to F-List of all things, simply because there's thousands of people there. I've seen a few people in recent months basically shrugging and heading back to Shang, just because it's a big place. Law of averages and all that, and I can't say I blame them. Some of the places I've dabbled in over the past few months have involved a lot of talking about RP and not much actual RP.

edit: More shrinkage than the constant decline that's been going on for the past few years, of course.

@WTFE

Yeeep.

@Seraphim73

Abso-fucking-lutely. At some point over the past few years, it feels like the MU zeitgeist went from improv theatre troupe to one-man shows.

@faraday said in Where's your RP at?:

And then sometimes you have a story in mind. Not the game's story, your story. Some arc that you want to do with the character.

Speaking personally, I've always thought this approach was a very bad idea. Like, anything beyond a very general outline tends to make RP this weird thing where you're just... watching someone develop their own arc.

@Miss-Demeanor

Because characters are name-recognition. Characters are a list of cool things you have done and can do. Characters are things you circlejerk with and build cliques around. Characters are things you identify with just a touch too closely because your life sucks and you need an escape.

Killing them or retiring them, even when they are well past their date to do so, kind of stops that sort of thing. I've always been a firm believer in retiring/killing characters once there story has been run out. When I find people who've been playing the same character for, say, more than three years... it just blows my mind.

Character death is nice when it's on the table and people can see good times for it.

However, I just watched a RP group disintegrate literally over night when someone suddenly decided to kill a PC. The reason given was much the same: I wanted to create tension. But it wasn't passed by anyone and, so, there were suddenly 3 or 4 very unhappy players who had ideas go up in smoke, lost an IC friend, or OOCly felt it was basically a slap to the face because the player in question was unhappy.

It's gotta be discussed.

@Bobotron

MCM.

Basically, staff wanted to do a full reboot of the setting. The two big factions have been turned into four factions that are less good/bad and more based around ideals. Basically you have your absolutist lawgivers, your at-any-cost vigilantes, your knowledge-seekers and your self-interested morally-dubious alliance. It's actually a really good change that's been a long time coming because the old system was totally stagnant. There's also a new smaller, more compact grid, which is also a good thing.

The big problem is that, at around the same time, they decided to drastically alter the system for characters, too. MCM used to be very freeform and allowed for no real upper limit on character skills and abilities. This, of course, meant that breadth would always trump depth, particularly as there was a big push by players to ignore the coded combat system. It got even more ridiculous when PCs would bring their NPCs to a scene and insist that they could basically have double the spotlight.

The new system essentially allows you to designate two things your character is really good at, four things they're pretty good at, and any number of things that they have but generally can't use to solve anything but the most basic conflicts. This, again, is a good change. It makes it obvious that someone's punching skill isn't necessarily able to stand against, say, Superman's Super Strength. It makes players think about the niche they want their character to occupy.

This new character policy started in January. As of today, only 14 of 429 characters have been made 'compliant'. Part of this is because there are only three active staff members (some have retired, others have apparently gone AWOL). What's more, it'll apparently soon be only two. The other part of is that the new system hasn't really been adequately explained and there are a fair few current characters who simply can't fit into it without shaving off big things. There is a deadline for characters to be made compliant, which is three months from now. Unless progress drastically quickens, they won't get even 100 approved by that time.

Any characters who aren't compliant at the deadline can not be played, by the way, and staff have been pretty insistent that this is not negotiable. I don't know if staff have said what they'll do with the characters who are unapproved at that time. I assume they won't be deleting them. Or maybe they will?

So, two or three staff members handling hundreds of upgrade submissions, plus any new players, plus any issues arising in game...

They really should've just wiped the slate clean and started a new timeline. As it is, with this sort of half-and-half approach, well... As a wise man once said: "It's all in the numbers." I know players who aren't even attempting to upgrade to the new system. Basically, it'll be interesting to see what happens come July.

There are other issues that could be exacerbating the two big ones, but that's more of a Hog Pit thing as it's not much more than informed supposition.

I haven't actually been finding much RP anywhere. Partially due to just being on a bit of a MU break, but also because the big places I used to really burn my time and energy on are really floundering due to serious issues (attempting a reboot with not enough staff and allowing everyone to keep their characters and groups while drastically altering character setups and profiles, for example) or have just petered out.

wait the game that seems to derail almost every thread on MSB on a regular basis has significant problems

well, color me shocked

I do laugh at the people who are like "YOU MAY NOT CREATE FANWORKS OR GAMES BASED OFF MY IP" because, when you go diving, you tend to find that they wrote fanfiction in the beginning and, better yet, sometimes still do.