Best posts made by gryphter

Contingent on a background check I have no reason to fear, I have the job! The recruiter called with an offer about an hour after the interview. Goodbye, goddess. It's been real.

My MSB peeve is the need to be a professional arguer in order to voice an opinion here. Some of us just think things and state the things we think imperfectly without meaning anything that may be incorrectly implied by choice of wording, omission, or any other element.

The defense rests.

The best PRP is the one that exists, and is happening because someone has the energy and enthusiasm to run it. All activity is good activity. Even if there are elements that spur conflict, that sparks RP.

That being said, it's important to be very clear about what kind of content your PRP will include up front. You'll find that a broad spectrum of catalysts exists, where anyone who finds themselves traumatized to any extent by content they weren't expecting can and will air legitimate grievance.

You can't always avoid them all; you have no way of knowing if RPing about marshmallows (randomly) might cause me psychological trauma because of my past experiences with marshmallows. It would be unreasonable for me to expect you to realize puffed sugar is my trigger, in this weird example, but if my thing is extreme violence, or animals or children being harmed -- I would have really expected some advance warning of that, as those are pretty common catalysts for many people.

If your PRP exists and you're happy to run it and put energy into it, it's a good one. Just be sure to carefully analyze both your plan and potential ways the PCs might depart from your plan, and do your best to identify and disclose extreme content that some participants might not find healthy for them to engage.

@Auspice

I don't care if you call it a MUD, a MUCK, a MOO, a MUX, or a Fred. If I can engage with the story of a game and feel like my character is part of it, that's what I'm looking for. I don't code at all and I won't be interacting with the codebase. Do I like the story? Cool. Is there a character available that sparks joy, or can I make one? Awesome. Is the climate of your game healthy to be on? Perfect.

I strongly doubt we're living or dying on specificity of terminology here.

Big progress today on the reemployment front! Around lunchtime I got an email with the assessment I'd been promised. I gleefully grabbed a conference room and completed it, and almost as soon as I hit 'done' I got another email from the recruiter to set up a phone interview.

Since I was so "eager to throw open my schedule to make way for this exciting opportunity", we had the phone interview immediately. It went great, and I'm confirmed for an in-person on Thursday! Probably my favorite memory with the current company will be taking a phone interview on speaker phone for another company in one of their conference rooms.

Some small bit of the balance redressed in my favor. Petty, but satisfying.

This is big for me because this change has been my back of mind private exit strategy for a few months. It's gratifying that as I'm becoming completely convinced of the need of it, it's proving to actually be viable. I do believe I'll get this job.

Finally, the light at the end of the tunnel. And with that, officially, good luck @Auspice -- you're welcome to share yourself some of mine.

I'll spill some tea to try to necro the thread in a more useful direction.

I have a terrible, awful habit that I think you all deserve to know about. Quite often when TSing, I sit there at the keyboard and I....

Well. This is very uncomfortable to confess, but I'll soldier on. First I get very comfortable. Some music to set the mood helps -- something sexy. Loose, comfortable clothing is a plus here too. Once I'm all settled in and in the zone, it's time to get. it. on.

I loosen my belt, ease the tension of my waistband...

...and fucking binge on snacks. Loud snacks, messy snacks... whatever! I don't even give a fuck. Savage with it.

So just try to get that image out of your head.

Effective anxiety medication for the first time ever be like:

Now that I've shed my name and become an archetype again following the death of my character (Jonas) and my SCs, I am so excited for metaplot in the Facility and gearing up for the next story.

The current story has been imperfect, certainly, but it would be hard to deny how unique and entertaining playing on this MU is. After all, this was only our first one; the test bed, if you will. Now we as players know what to expect and how to prepare for it, and likewise the staff has learned lessons that will enhance the experience going forward.

The defining moment for me was rolling an ungodly critical success on the attempt to hack us up a way to reach the outside world. The result was unintended by TD but she rolled with the punches and readily steered the story in a new direction.

That says a lot to me about the collaborative nature of the storytelling environment we find ourselves in here, and I like what I'm hearing.

Now in my mind, there's validity to the view that some roles didn't translate well into heavy participation in this story. If you didn't have an official 'job' on the island on the Wellson payroll and were just an attendee of the festival, there was an uphill battle to become involved and important. My particular role was destined to a moment in the spotlight simply by virtue of that role's narrow and rare skillset, but this wasn't the case for all. TD acknowledges this and I'm excited to see how she addresses it in the next story. With what I've seen so far, I have every confidence in the outcome.

I'm just blown away by how amazing it is to be really pretty excited to have died. Like what? Can we just talk about that for a second? Reading logs at work like YES I DIED, can't wait to log on!

There's an 'excellent' point here. To one group of players, being 'excellent' could mean avoiding the use of certain language they find distasteful or harmful. To another group it might mean letting one another express themselves in precisely that way if that's what they want to do.

It's a matter of differing values, and leaving it up to the individuals' discretion to decide what's appropriate informed by nothing but their own gut check is asking for trouble. Some of those bellies are rotten to the core, but they'll still blink those doe eyes at you and wonder what in the world they ever could have done when they know they haven't violated any written policy.

Policies cover everybody's asses.

The degree to which you assume and become a character fully realized in MU* is not something I think any other venue matches. Argument one - the degree of escapism available.

How do you get new blood? Well, with sexy new IPs people outside of the established hobby group care about, perhaps. If we're all here already and we're not getting new hobbyists, we need to try new things. Dare to innovate and depart from the familiar and comfortable. I would note also that we are doing this; people are running games that have experimental elements and visionaries like @Tehom and @faraday and others I'm embarrassed I can't name are modernizing the look and operation of MU*.

It's easier than ever to get in. We just need to sell the idea of why you would want to. IMHO the time is ripe for a Wheel of Time game that could be up and running by the time the presumed surge in fandom from the show heats up.

To my thinking, when I log onto a game, a few important things happen. First, I'm connecting to the infrastructure of a system that someone else owns. They pay money to own it; there is no reasonable expectation, therefore, that anything that happens there is 'mine'. I bring some of my stuff with me, like my PII, and I can't argue with anything said here about how we should be protecting that more effectively -- I should be able to maintain control over my stuff that I brought, or if that's impossible I should have some recourse to feel satisfied about what's being done to protect it for me.

I begin to RP, generating content within this setting which is someone else's creative property. Elements of my content are my original creative product, but they're impossible to divorce from those setting elements somebody else crafted. Who owns what, intellectually speaking? If I create a character from the ground up as being a part of that setting I don't own, and the person who does own it has to approve my integrating what I've written into it, it starts to feel like a vanishingly small portion of this can be called 'mine' creatively. Reduce this even further if I'm playing a roster character, which I far more often do. Sure, there continues to be an original creative element in how I voice that character and move them around the world, but every single shred of it is tied to the stuff that's not mine. It's partly mine, but mostly not.

Now I have this character I probably don't own on a game I definitely don't, and as time goes by I become a part of the community with the other people that play characters they don't own there. Some of these people are my friends, and I want them to feel safe and have a good time, getting to be involved in stories about the game world that isn't theirs. There are other people on the game too, and some of them might have it in mind to make things unsafe and/or not fun for others. I want me and my friends to be protected from that, and to have some recourse for satisfaction when that protection fails.

For all these reasons, I expect staff on a game to exercise their powers to observe. I accept it, because frankly I'm the one with a hand out here, asking to participate in something that's not mine."Sure, but I'm going to keep an eye on what you're up to" seems perfectly reasonable to me as an answer. Much like when I go to work and the entire facility is monitored; it doesn't creep me out, it makes me feel protected. I have the expectation that the people who own the company will do what they need to do to maintain a safe environment, and I trust that any information collected supports that goal. I don't know what I could possibly put in a pose written as part of a game's world that I couldn't bear to have the game runners read, but maybe that's just me. If it's sex and I'm embarrassed about that, well, maybe I should keep my pants on at the office if I don't want people to laugh at my inadequacies of both equipment and technique.

The security guards probably shouldn't gather 'round the monitor to watch, but they might, and if I don't like that I feel it's my fault for giving them something to see (even if science lacks a sufficiently sensitive device to measure its tiny scale accurately).

And for anyone keeping score at home, I'm in the 'wave at the camera, smile, and give them a show' camp.

I found MU* about 25 years ago, around the time I was 10, and fell in face first. I was better at interacting with people through that black void, and I could be people in wild situations the likes of which I would never dare actually put myself in. Social situations moreso than adventurous ones. I'll go on an adventure right now as long as I don't have to speak to a human on it.

I do believe that growing up from that point onward more interested in interacting with people through my favored translator had a serious impact on my social skills in the real world. I'm an extroverted introvert kind of monstrosity who struggles to communicate really anything at all verbally, to physically-present humans. I can recall when I was much younger having to visualize writing what I wanted to say in my brain like a pose, then just grit my teeth and read the damned thing out loud.

I didn't do as much of this as I might wish I had done, because why would I? Real, present humans are scary as fuck, and there are MU*s waiting.

I've made great strides, but it's still a gulf -- a gap -- that remains impactful. I avoid actual physically-present interactions with other people to the greatest possible extent and am generally accounted a much less pleasant, affable, and social person out in The Real. That's to this day.

So I submit, albeit anecdotally, that a preference for living in the black screen probably does have a maladaptive impact to some extent or other. Depending on how young you were when you moved in and how immersed you were, I would imagine, you would see this to a greater or lesser extent.

ETA: This felt super bleak for the tone of this thread, so I wanted to inject some optimism. I also gleaned from this hobby organisational and business writing skills that nobody in my professional climate can match, which pay my bills. All is not lost; abandon not hope, ye who enter here.

I'm not scared to dive in, but I've learned that being the one to do this every time is also not a good look. Collaboration is knowing how to let the spotlight shine on others. I'll watch so much of that awkward dead air before I realize nobody else wants to dive in, and now I feel more sympathetic to the ST who is just waiting for someone to respond, so I do.

I still like the old analogy that logging onto someone's game is like stepping into their living room. It doesn't become your house just because you entered it. If you start wandering around the house, it's perfectly reasonable that the host might want to keep an eye on whatever you're up to and make sure it fits with the values and the environment they've established in their home.

I'm currently Raven! It's experimental; I've rarely played women. I'm enjoying it so far, though it is harder to put myself out there with this character. She's a gothic metal badass and I have to find out where her story is going.

ETA: Experiment terminated.

@fatefan Admittedly, I did not consider the Teenage Mutant Furry Gangbangers angle. I'm not angry at myself for this; in fact, I like myself a little more because of it. But yes, this would totally happen and be weird and retroactively ruin my childhood. Soooo... yeah.

This is why we can't have nice things.

I'm two years into a new career, but at my age I had some wily old man tricks that let me move fast, at first. I made my way off the entry level team, dragged down a promotion, got a nice chunky bonus and all that good stuff in the first year.

Now they've got me working way above my pay grade, and I'm feeling super exploited with the amount of work I'm doing at the level I'm doing it at for the pay I'm getting. I don't really feel like I have the clout to say I'm so great at this stuff I should get promoted more, and yet, they do in fact have me doing the work of someone years my senior. I do this work; it's a non-issue. I just feel like I ought to get paid the appropriate salary, somehow.

@auspice If we can all get on board with what the unique vision and aspects of this game are -- and I think for the most part we're all there -- I think we can have a really great time building something singular and buzzworthy together.

In the elseMUs of my activity the weight of my decisions has drastic import for other players. Everything I do has to be properly mindful of the downstream effects and carefully vetted for soundness and unforeseen consequences. Being able to engage in something different and really surrender to the sense of a temporary character whose most meaningful part in a story might very well be their death... it's actually very freeing.

We're all there together with a focus on playing in this moment right now, rather than hoarding resources or carefully politicing for a long life and a powerful position. It's a fascinating change of pace, and it keeps me coming back because I think I'll value being able to say I was part of this.