@devrex

I have to agree with that assessment, based on what I've seen here. There looks to have been a period where the admin were silencing posters just because they wanted people to be quiet while they deliberated. This wasn't respected, but that period is passed, and now people are saying they are afraid to talk, while the only limitations on what you can say are.... to at least try to be courteous while saying it. There's no need to be afraid to talk, @RightMeow.

I have examined my own feelings and I definitely feel like I can post more now that the main people who would bring up my past mistakes and mock me no matter what I said or how irrelevant it was are no longer posting here. Now I almost think I need to make a forum signature that says 'watch out I'm a terrible code-abusing person' because my posts don't always have sassy little replies that bring it up. Seriously I'm feeling a strange void and it makes me a little guilty.

This 'pseudo-dating' perspective is primarily why I really prefer not TS'ing. I'm really inclined to agree with Ghost's views here, based on my own experiences and reflections.

Recently I roleplayed an IC romance that was really great. It was like, started off work buddies, became enemies swiftly, started semi-tolerating each other but with a lot of peeves and digs, started growing some forbidden romance sorts of feelings (they were different races, but with a lot of repressed racist problems in a very racist society, one was a half-elf and one was a human) and finally all bubbled up into a situation where the other character was changing into her armor and my character followed and I engaged a FTB. They continued with this secret fling for a while, entertained thoughts of eloping, struggled with birth control, confessed to close friends, and eventually died for each other in a very tragic fashion. Later, after their deaths, I finally reached out to the player behind the character... and they confessed that they was sort of taken aback by that FTB, because they would typically write these things out. I explained how I felt about it and how in the past I'd had boundary issues and how I didn't like all the drama. They agreed, told me some really terrible and cringy stories about their own experiences (including someone who was very obviously typing one-handed and made every attempt to flaunt it), and we moved on easily as gaming friends.

So, you really don't need to TS to play out fun IC romantic writing. Cerebral, heartstring-pulling stories don't require graphic erotica, even if they are romantic stories. IC romance does not equal TS at all.

@Hella

I know. You have never encouraged me to defend you, regardless of what people say or think. You're right; people will believe whatever, and it's okay. There's enough room on the planet and on the internet for everybody.

It is pretty weird to see people actually encouraging 'hey, you can just start over at a place and pretend to be someone else' right here right now though.

@Kestrel

;Harassing' is now apparently 'lightly defending a person who was accused of predatory behavior while predatory behavior was actually done to her' ... kind of like Amber Heard, since you mentioned her. I haven't been following the trial. But I was just camping at a family reunion a while back, and people started talking all the usual crap about her and then acting like I was crazy for going to bat for her based solely on the power dynamics involved. They kept bringing up all the nasty things she supposedly did and so on and so forth and I kept saying they weren't relevant to whether or not she was allowed to say in an internet article that she was a victim of domestic abuse. Power dynamics are relevant, and her ex-spouse is more powerful than her in a variety of ways -- the most obvious of which is popularity.

Anyway I'm... so tired of this. What I've been trying to do in this thread (since my original plea for impartiality from everyone involved was largely ignored in favor of debating whether or not someone is a sexual predator for sending an email to a person he had no idea wouldn't appreciate an email) ... has been this: to outline exactly how easy it is to paint people with unfavorable rumors in a way that is unfair and untrue, just based on who is or is not in the dominant friendship circle.

For my part, regarding any rumors that anyone might be worried about, I have not spread any rumors. I don't even spread them in private, okay? It is none of my business and it is unnecessary and I am not even 100% sure about them. I am not engaging in any nasty little social assassination games; I am trying to speak against those games and shed light on how harmful they are.

And you know what... I am looking at Apos' policy of excluding people based on discomfort caused to the community, and thinking about this some more, and...

It's perfectly fine. The near-opposite of impartial, really, but -- if that is what it takes for people established in a community to feel safe and happy, then it is well within their rights. Safety is a human need and there is so precious little of it in the world for most of us, that it is actually commendable to have created a pocket of the internet where some people feel safe. Play the social assassination games if that's what you need to do. Maybe as a global society, we will eventually grow out of the many other negative 'isms' that make insular tribalism feel necessary as a defense of our basic human need for safety.

@Misadventure said in MU* Mystery RP:

Two extreme opposite approaches can be described:

• There is a specific set of clues and information to reveal a specific "solution"
• Player brainstorming is used to formulate the "solution" behind the scenes

Does one approach appeal more when you are a player vs a staffer/ST?

One approach appeals to me so much more than the other, and that is that the GM has already built out the world and whatever happened has already happened. The clues and evidence laid out in the world can bring players organically to the solution.

Other thoughts:
Should players be allowed to fail in finding the "solution"? (this could happen for both extremes)

Definitely. Although I think sometimes staff can add in new information that can help guide players on the right track, if they want to, but failures should be definitely possible, even multiple failures in a row.

Does player mental engagement matter have value vs creating dramatic/engaging/amusing scenes ? Meaning what's the worth of actually thinking things through vs posing whatever is enjoyable? No, no one needs to present real world expertise for verisimilitude.

For a mystery plot, how is it fun if there is no mental engagement? That's how I feel at least, and I love mysteries. The thing I love most about them is genuinely trying to figure them out. I think it's actually even better if you can pick up some new facts in terms of real world expertise when it comes to trying to figure out your mystery. A TV show where they get all the forensics details wrong doesn't appeal to me much. Of course it doesn't have to be as hardcore and tedious as it might be IRL, but it's nice to learn things and have a high level of believability to a plot.

Does some level of verisimilitude matter, or is entertainment enough? What if entertaining is expected to result in optimal outcomes without significant relationship to those results?

A nice amount of verisimilitude makes things entertaining for me. Due to the limitations of the medium, it's of course necessary to suspend disbelief about some things, and kind of gloss over other things. But in general, verisimilitude is nice.

I love putting together puzzle pieces myself, but it would seem a bit meaningless if all the puzzle pieces were perfect black squares and once I had lined up a certain amount of them in rows, someone would generate an AI art image onto the section I had lined up. And then I'd line up more perfect black squares and the image would just get generated a little more.

Maybe that makes it relatively simple for game-running but it takes like 75% of the fun out of it, for me. The only fun left is writing and acting dramatic. That might be good for Social type players but I usually get Explorer on the Bartle-type quizzes.

In a MUD I played for a while, there was this one player who didn't seem to care at all about their characters, just like you describe, tooters.

It was RPI and there were strict rules about revealing players-behind-characters and all that, and maybe ~60 active players or so, in different spheres of the game that didn't interact that much... but I could always tell this player's characters within like the first twenty minutes of interacting with them. They were all ridiculous antagonists who always tried weird metagamey ways to get under my skin, and the skin of others. I say metagamey because it wasn't strictly IC, but it was borderline enough not to get caught in the rules. Like, let's say your character had a very close friend named Finn, who died tragically. This person would know that, and then later create a character, stroll up to yours, and be like "Hi, my name is Finn". Or let's say your character knew a famous outlaw and was part of an outlaw group. This guy would create a character and come tell your character (who the player OOCly knows is currently friends with Famous Outlaw) and be like, "Oh yeah, I was there ten years ago when Famous Outlaw was escaping Famous City... the guards surrounded him and killed him. I saw him die."

So this player, right... I later find them go on an OOC rant about how "long-lived" characters have players that are "OOCly-invested in staying alive" and all gang up together with other longer-lived characters.. and basically, to this person, the game was full of a bunch of dinosaurs who were against engaging in any sort of conflict or interesting plots, for fear of character death.

Meanwhile, this person's idea of 'interesting plots' was creating a character who was insane, bulling into an ongoing territorial conflict betwen warring tribes, and telling a bunch of crazy lies in order to get one of the player's frequent antagonist targets (Famous Outlaw) in trouble.

Long story short, I'd much prefer to play with people who care about their characters and care about the stories they're telling, than someone who will cycle psychopathically through a whole series of characters while not caring about them at all.

Let me just tell you I freaking love Famous Outlaw. I loved Famous Outlaw so much that if Famous Outlaw died I would not play the game anymore. Famous Outlaw wasn't even my character but they was inspiring and wonderful. Eventually I sort of quit this game because Probable Psychopath's brand new 80-year-old character met a dramatic death on the highway... while completely unrealistically attempting to get my character's best friend killed. After that I just couldn't handle how stupid the game was anymore, and the fact that Probable Psychopath was playing in a perfectly reasonable way considering how the game worked.

Sometimes I still think about Famous Outlaw and am real-life inspired by things that Famous Outlaw said. Famous Outlaw pulled on my heartstrings forever. Famous Outlaw is a fantasy character in a fantasy world but perfectly meaningful to me.

I don't think Kestrel called anyone a fascist, just a phony. I appreciated the rest of the post. Obviously Cullen is someone to really look out for.

If someone is trying to take on-game, mechanically-logged information to another medium in order to coerce other types personal information out of someone, I'd actually consider that very deserving of report. A pattern of that kind of behavior seems likely to indicate an abuser.

I agree with Devrex's last paragraph (maybe biasedly); I think it's actually relatively simple to distinguish between people who are truly predators and just someone people don't like, as long as a culture of 'I don't like that person, they did some questionable things, they're probably a rapist' is not encouraged.

If you're dealing with some behavior that you're not really certain of and you want to talk about it with the community to see if you're being gaslit, you can always do it without naming names and throwing out casual offhanded accusations. After a report is made and investigation done with the evidence, then it makes more sense to name people. But a culture of weak accusations doesn't make strong accusations carry more weight in any way, it actually does the opposite and provokes the kind of push-back that will end up heartening actual abusers.

@Warma-Sheen said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

@hobos You don't have to pretend to be someone else. You can still be you. You just distance yourself from your past by not announcing yourself as having played X, Y, or Z characters. It isn't that foreign of a concept.

I've done it. It wasn't that difficult for me. People did not like my style of playing when I first started. I changed my views and moved forward without having to worry about the people with the torches and pitchforks who thought I was a horrible human person because I had a different perspective on how funtimes game should be played years and years ago.

But regardless of all that, I definitely prefer an outlet that encourages people to change for the better and grow.

This makes sense as long as nobody finds out who you are and gets upset about it. I don't feel like it's right to cozy up to people who don't like me under a different screen name, but that might be some personal itchy problem of my own.

@lotherio

I'd love to tell you, but like I said, the game has pretty strict rules about talking OOC regarding IC things... but just imagine this absolute rage machine, this monster bred for enslaved destruction in a completely terrible and corrupt world. And then imagine that he studied his oppressors, escaped, eventually found zen, and became the biggest and strongest force for kindness and thoughtfulness that you could conceptualize in such a crappy universe.

I mean, it's understandable why such a story would resonate with anyone in real life. And when stories resonate and have meaning, there's always degrees of emotional attachment. My thoughts are that if someone's telling a story that resonates, it will have meaning and emotional investment, and the characters involved won't just be narrator tools that get tossed aside without any sort of caring.

@Ghost

I'm pretty sour myself right now because my hope that this forum was going to be a fairer and nicer place has been pretty much dashed on the rocks by this discussion, if a moderator is accusing someone without receipts. It just becomes the mirror opposite of BMD, where I do not go anyway.

And I guess a mirror opposite should exist, for people who have been unfairly treated by the gang there, like Macha.

But it has become obvious that MSB is not actually trying to do better, it is just another MU gang that has different perspectives but acts the exact same way.

@Ghost said in MUers in the news?:

I kind of "set-and-forget" this post I made and came back to all of this. I wrote a long, dumb post trying to explain something.

But there's really no explaining this to someone with a history of "lol'ing" using the term negerboll and posts stuff like this:

Tweet

This article pretty much spells out the futility in trying to convince someone to act appropriately.

Don't racelock your games, people. It's uncouth.

Ugh after reading more about this now I feel disgusted that I came to their defense.

No, it's not ethical. And they won't like you after that.

Interactions on online roleplay spaces are largely transactional. People are going to like you for whatever enjoyment you bring to their experience. And they will very quickly dislike you if you destroy their enjoyment. Giving them space for character development, giving them fun stuff to roleplay about, nice writing, making them feel good about themselves, et cetera -- versus getting in the way of their intended plots, disturbing their fun, triggering them, emotionally burdening them in an OOC way, delegitimizing their character concepts in your roleplay, et cetera. They don't usually care about you as a person in real life; at most they are just trying to act ethically themselves while pursuing the enjoyment of a hobby that we share.

If you make them feel bad, that's stuck in their head now. The most respectful thing to do, ethically, is just leave them alone. And if you can't do that, because it's a small hobby... don't bring back the bad feelings to them in any way. Just play quietly and politely. The most ethical way is to be clear about who you are so they can avoid you. The second most ethical way is at least to let the game runner know who you are. The third is to just turn over a new leaf without bringing any attention to it.

Insinuating yourself in others' good graces and then bringing back whatever bad feelings you once caused, in an effort to pad your ego in some imaginary redemption arc, is honestly kind of a very lame plan that will backfire. They will feel betrayed and annoyed. And those are bad feelings, so all you've done is make things worse, because now they have even more bad feelings on top of the old ones.

At least, this is my opinion based of my admittedly not-great understanding of human interactions and basic ethics of integrity.

You really can tell, yeah. It's like the text equivalent of the uncanny valley.

Also, even if it wasn't, I don't think I'd want to play with it. It'd feel weird to know that some human didn't want to play the actual game with me and instead was using a robot to interact?

Kind of like if you walk up to someone IRL, and offer a handshake, and instead of shaking your hand themselves, that person instructs a robot butler to shake your hand for them.

For game lore written by AI, it's the same feeling, as if you want to walk into a beautiful palace constructed by human beings but instead you're walking through a hologram generated by a robot. Maybe it doesn't really look that different but there's a totally different vibe.

A long time ago in college I remember a discussion about AI where we were considering if robots could ever reach human levels of creativity. The consensus was that human creativity was measurable and logical and robots could achieve it, eventually. But I disagreed, because I don't think human creativity is actually measurable and logical. I think we don't know what we know. So we can't code it into a robot. There's a whole dimension of sapient consciousness that lends weight we can barely even sense, let alone measure and encode, to the things we think about.

You know that feeling you get sometimes when a vibe is "off"? Sometimes vibes don't align, and sometimes they do, and sometimes they're just unnoticeable. But a robot doesn't have conscious vibes. It's empty.

So, the human consciousness behind a piece of artwork, whether it's visual or verbal/written, is immeasurable and invaluable, and shouldn't be discounted.

Probably making myself a double pariah here but...

I kind of agree with you, Ghost. On the specific point of not using other human's pictures to play out sexual kinks, at least. It's creepy. Saying "well that person's general image is just public domain, when they go and choose to be famous they're constantly selling their virtual body and everything everyone might do with their virtual body ever, so...." is very very close to the similarly silly comment that "what we do in virtual space doesn't matter, so anyone who's ever been nonconsented on a game should've just logged off lololol".

And I also agree with everyone else saying that the way you're expressing yourself is overly aggressive and unnecessary.

But I'm pretty sure it's because of some kind of trauma, because while I'm loathe to call it "trauma" exactly -- considering it was completely virtual --- virtual trauma is a sort of trauma too, you know?

Like that's the sort of thing we discuss in this space. What matters in the virtual world, if anything at all? I'd say people feel many of the same sorts of things.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure you have some kind of issue because I have absolutely been in the place where someone was kind of hounding me for TS and trying to tell me what PBs to use and pushing me to find more PBs and in the end pulled some really weird predatory manipulative stuff that had been making me feel like I just wanted to quit.

Every time I read one of your posts in this thread, I think about that situation, and the way it made me feel was just so simultaneously disgusting and disgusted that I just, well, agree with you. And I can empathize with your tone, too.

It's just that the majority of people using PBs aren't bad actors like that.

Recognizing that a fair deal of MU*ers are vision-impaired is integral to the understanding that a PB doesn't function as a replacement for an actual description. Vision-impaired people have very little use for PBs in general.

But I can't understand if this is just about PBs, or specifically about PBs that are photographs of people. If it's just about PBs, well, when I started mudding as a wee 12-year-old was the first time I started drawing pictures of my characters and it was definitely not about cybersex.

That said, I completely agree that for some people, it's apparent that the PB is about cybersex. I think those are the minority though, and I've learned enough to steer clear of those few. Either way, the PBs aren't the problematic thing about them, it's the sexpesting that is problematic.

What's awesome is that I just came to this forum thinking I wanted to ask about tv show recommendations, and then I saw this thread.

Sometimes I watch a show and it just kind of reminds me of MUDding, somehow. So I wanted to ask for recommendations for a show like that. Something with like... thoughtful character development and fun action scenes, relatively lighthearted but darker in the fun sorts of ways...

(Like Legends of Vox Machina, I just don't like re-watching stuff.)

Maybe I will try the Reacher show but I didn't enjoy those movies. Maybe it was Tom Cruise's fault; not a fan of him either really.

You can define player success in a wide range of ways. I admit my instinctive reaction to this post is to feel that I wouldn't enjoy Q, and I don't feel successful as a player if I'm not enjoying something. That's not because I want to ruin other people's stories, but more because I want the story to be a mysterious surprise and negotiation feels like spoilers to me.

We use numbers like HP to help to moderate a consistent fabric of virtual reality for a large group of players that aren't all sitting around a table in real life. When the rules of the game world make sense, organic events can arise from player choices.

You can definitely have ways to make in-character losses (setbacks and challenges) less stinging out-of-character, like consent mechanics.

But I think that the closest you can get to the ideal of "everybody gets everything they want" is to have a game culture where everyone knows the expectations and how everything will be sorted out, and they are there by choice because they like that specific culture.

That way if people prefer a culture of collaborative writing, and negotiating plotlines like Q, then they can enjoy it while playing that way with their group. And if people prefer thrills and suspense and organic happenstance, they can go enjoy that elsewhere.

My experience here is probably pretty different because it's not primarily in tabletops or MUSH-style games.

The favorite mystery I ever investigated in a game was when there was one PC who killed another PC and tried to hide it. In this game you were able to find tracks of people, investigate bodies and get information from different types of wounds, judge people's recent locations based off things like what they smelled like or the type of dirt on their boots, search locations for objects that had been hidden by PCs, overhear distant conversations, hide and stalk and eavesdrop, etc.

Due to all these mechanics and the fact that the original mystery was actually an organic player-provoked event, things were a bit different than I imagine they would be if a GM had to go lay out clues and drop breadcrumbs. Plus, the players didn't even necessarily need to solve the mystery. Things happen all the time that don't get investigated, and murders go unsolved, and so on.

There were times during the initial course of this story (my character was a city guard) that I imagined, as a player, that the murder-victim had actually just quit the game and not been murdered at all. The murderer was a great liar and gave no sign of lying. It was just my luck to be roleplaying a weirdo who was overly-convinced of foul play. Many times I amused myself by being absurdly dedicated to finding out the "truth"... and then, it turned out to be actually the truth, as evidence gradually came to light. Other players began to realize my character was onto something, and their characters got involved in the plot too, and it turned out to be an incredibly epic and memorable story.

@Misadventure said in MU* Mystery RP:

Two extreme opposite approaches can be described:

• There is a specific set of clues and information to reveal a specific "solution"
• Player brainstorming is used to formulate the "solution" behind the scenes

Does one approach appeal more when you are a player vs a staffer/ST?

One approach appeals to me so much more than the other, and that is that the GM has already built out the world and whatever happened has already happened. The clues and evidence laid out in the world can bring players organically to the solution.

Other thoughts:
Should players be allowed to fail in finding the "solution"? (this could happen for both extremes)

Definitely. Although I think sometimes staff can add in new information that can help guide players on the right track, if they want to, but failures should be definitely possible, even multiple failures in a row.

Does player mental engagement matter have value vs creating dramatic/engaging/amusing scenes ? Meaning what's the worth of actually thinking things through vs posing whatever is enjoyable? No, no one needs to present real world expertise for verisimilitude.

For a mystery plot, how is it fun if there is no mental engagement? That's how I feel at least, and I love mysteries. The thing I love most about them is genuinely trying to figure them out. I think it's actually even better if you can pick up some new facts in terms of real world expertise when it comes to trying to figure out your mystery. A TV show where they get all the forensics details wrong doesn't appeal to me much. Of course it doesn't have to be as hardcore and tedious as it might be IRL, but it's nice to learn things and have a high level of believability to a plot.

Does some level of verisimilitude matter, or is entertainment enough? What if entertaining is expected to result in optimal outcomes without significant relationship to those results?

A nice amount of verisimilitude makes things entertaining for me. Due to the limitations of the medium, it's of course necessary to suspend disbelief about some things, and kind of gloss over other things. But in general, verisimilitude is nice.

I love putting together puzzle pieces myself, but it would seem a bit meaningless if all the puzzle pieces were perfect black squares and once I had lined up a certain amount of them in rows, someone would generate an AI art image onto the section I had lined up. And then I'd line up more perfect black squares and the image would just get generated a little more.

Maybe that makes it relatively simple for game-running but it takes like 75% of the fun out of it, for me. The only fun left is writing and acting dramatic. That might be good for Social type players but I usually get Explorer on the Bartle-type quizzes.

@Hella

Well it's not for absolutely nothing that I've been vilified in the past. But thanks, I appreciate your generosity of spirit, Hella. Glad you understood that I was trying to be positive rather than demanding that you or anyone throw themselves to proverbial wolves. #heartwarmed

And whenever I get around to being able to play again, I will be trying to take my own advice, at least.

Editing to say, also, I'm sorry for attacking people here who are probably just doing their best. There is a lot of history of vitriol on these types of forums, and it's not something that changes overnight. But at least people are making efforts and it's definitely not as bad as it could be.

@Ghost

I legit don't understand if you're trying to make fun of me for acting like a self-righteous poser on a forum about text games, or trying to agree with me that people shouldn't posture about being better than others so much, or what.

I'm guessing the first though? But I didn't swerve? Although maybe you're having trouble parsing my posts. Anyway I guess it's a waste of time to respond, only I don't actually dislike you, so that's why I'm responding here.

You know that, like you, I'm a villain in most MUSHer's eyes -- but that's only partially why I have empathy for people getting unfairly vilified.

When people get accused of something without evidence, it's wrong. It can be painful. Whether it's on some forum for text games or in your cubicle at work or at a family thanksgiving dinner or in a global political committee -- the human feelings of being hurt and excluded are still human feelings of being hurt and excluded. You can pretend feelings are silly and dumb but human beings have feelings and this is just a fact of life.

And wherever we are in life, whether we're in a forum for text games or a cubicle at work or at a dining room table or a massive international conference... we can choose to be considerate of human feelings, and act in a fair and kind way, or I guess just not.

Bleh, I'm out of steam.