Best posts made by hobos

When I was a kid and used to play these games, the biggest divide in the hobby that I knew about were people playing in the "evil city" and people playing in the "good city". Then I played some PVE sorts of games, quit for several years, and came back as an adult. The first divide I learned about then was that there was a difference between a MUD and a MUSH, and people had strong opinions about this. I thought it was silly, and that this was a lingering niche hobby and we should all just be friends.

This divide is even sillier though, and I get that it's fun drama to go on and on about, but ... it's dumb, c'mon folks. All the "these people" and "that forum". Cool off and get over it. Nobody involved in this scuffle is actually an evil villain. None of this is as earth-shaking or terrible as anyone is making it out to be. First step to positivity: actually stop being negative.

I think the post was a good post even after verifying that Lithium is not DWOPP. Some of those behaviors were really creepy and gross and I can't understand how anyone could've put up with them for so long. Please just don't hit on female characters like that and especially do not get antagonistic with them after they make it clear they're not interested in you that way.

Also, maybe people who were "in the know" knew who Lithium was, but without naming names, people who are out of the loop had no idea. Like I had no clue at all; I don't even play that game. But now I know, and I see zero contrition from Lithium, just defensiveness and ambiguation, as if the way they treated female characters was perfectly acceptable. At least Runescryer apologized for his mistakes and plans to do better in the future.

I was thinking about this some more, about how to play a womanizer-type without actually making women uncomfortable. I think a great way to do it would be to show some damn self-awareness about how disgusting your character is. Emote winking sleazily, or make comedically stupid approaches that immediately stop. Have your character develop real respect and treat others as full people once their idiocy is rebuffed or ignored.

It's difficult to be sure... because I've never really played womanizers. There was one time I played a guy who went through a phase where the love of his life died and then he was miserable and sleeping with women randomly whenever he got super drunk. But that was just a phase, and it was very obvious -- his pickup lines were appalling, and I'd emote about the smell of alcohol and all that. And I guess he was presented as enough of a rounded character that those women still felt comfortable around him despite that. No idea.

But I still think the behavior that prompted this thread was/is problematic, and needs to be addressed and considered, and that Runescryer shouldn't be crucified for making it. I already waxed judgmental about what I think Runescryer did wrong (jumping down someone's throat OOCly for IC things), and it was taken really maturely, so that's good.

For me, it depends what kind of mechanics the game has to manage crowds. If there is a tabletalk mechanic, I will primarily use that. It also depends on the game's culture and if pose order is important. If pose order is important, what saved my sanity in large scenes was being able to use the '3P' pose order.

I've been in some large scenes on games that felt relatively comfortable (or uncomfortable for all the right reasons) and fun, due to the concordance of a culture where "pose order" was not something particularly taken into consideration, and tabletalk was nicely used by everyone involved.

Two problems I noticed in the 'pose order heavy' games are these:

1. A long dialogue scene will take forever. Strategy meetings become painful and really just another way to socialize. People are stuck online for hours and hours if they want to just handle a small item of business. This leads to people colluding OOC rather than discussing IC events IC.
2. The flow of the scene is constantly broken by a person responding to multiple people and multiple lines of conversation in one emote. Not only is this unrealistic in terms of conversational flow but it's also confusing, and can lead to the leeriness towards large scenes that we see here.

As a culture, how to not take pose order into consideration? Well, this doesn't mean you will never be stuck waiting for someone to emote. If the scene is describing something that cannot move forward without someone's input, then you should either wait for them politely as long as it takes, or modify the scene to move forward without them, without powergaming them. If people are just chatting, then just keep chatting. Leave room for interruptions. If you are asking someone a question, then wait for an answer. If you're saying something particularly dramatic that might warrant a response from them, then maybe give a long pause before continuing.

Pose order can be useful for async scenes or play-by-post roleplay so I think it has its place, but I just personally don't enjoy it in an immersive roleplay environment.

For me, in an ideal environment, it becomes too much when people are just firing out emotes so fast that they are colliding and thus don't make sense at all. And I have only seen this once, in a scene that contained roughly fifty people. And it only happened once during the scene before people noticed it was happening and all tried to slow down a bit, kind of like a bunch of friends talking rapidly over each other at a dinner table and then chilling out and slowing themselves down in order to hear everyone else.

Maybe so.

I'd just really prefer an environment where these sorts of things were tackled with logical integrity, evidence, and rationality -- rather than hearsay and cliquery.

Like you said, none of us are new to drama like this. It takes effort to shed old habits. I'd like to see how that is done.

And if Derp says, "That was a long time ago. I don't have any receipts, and even if I did, I don't want to charge Cobalt in the court of MSB opinion for these crimes, because it was a long time ago and they may have changed," and to step back from the accusations, then, that's fine too. It's just an important distinction to make in a place where mudslinging is not supposed to be allowed.

If it is really not supposed to be allowed.

@faraday said in Too Much:

Pose order is a conundrum for me. I don't like that it slows things down, but at the same time - without it, I have an even harder time holding the threads of conversations. You'll be in the midst of typing up a reply to one thing someone said, then suddenly somebody else replies to them first and the convo goes off on a tangent and your pose no longer makes any sense. So I view it as a necessary evil. Honestly 3-per and free-for-all pose orders just give me a headache and suck the enjoyment right out of a scene.

Sorry to hear that, but yeah, I can see where you're coming from. I guess it really is a personal preference sort of thing. I tend to write short, interruptable emotes when I'm in a non-pose-order situation. It just feels more like normal conversation to me, but the thing that is lacking in a text interface is ... seeing that someone else is in the middle of talking. Maybe someday a mud client will be developed that shows when someone else is typing -- dialogue, not action.

@faraday

I've never seen any system like that. It always distinguishes between action and speech in what I've played, so you'd see something like:

At the bar, Bob looks at John with narrowed eyes. "Y... t me, pu..?" He yelled, "G...O..! Now, ... .... .... ch...."

Or whatever. And if people really wanted to yell, they wouldn't use tabletalk for it, usually.

Anyway, reading your layout of rationales, I think that's very well said.

It's very interesting to me that you would distinguish immersion and story. I've never thought of them as very separate concepts before, but now that I see that, it's enlightening. They're not the same thing. Most systems tend to prioritize one over the other to some degree, even while trying to have both, like being bilingual -- there's going to a first language in most cases.

There's characters of mine I've lost without feeling much if anything, there's characters I've lost and felt satisfied about, and there's characters I've felt ridiculously sad about. For me it often has to do with the circumstances surrounding their death as well as how much I liked that character. It can be really sad to not only witness a tragic story but like... be immersed in it more thoroughly than you can get immersed in any other media. If you're more of a method-acting roleplayer, then it's almost like a part of you that you've lost. There can be very strong feelings of grief involved here and I think it's important as a community to acknowledge that these feelings are real and valid. It's an emotional struggle that will lighten with time, understanding, and players being kind to each other.

There's also grapevine.haus and mudlistings.com.

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.

Interesting and realistic story has always been enough incentive for me to fail, but I wouldn't want to fail at something that I have designed my character to be really good at, especially if there wasn't much opportunity to do that thing. I like to fail about things that I have designed my character to be bad at, because then there is the story of getting better at that thing or learning to cope with the deficiency, or other realistic outcomes like total failure regarding that thing.

"Wanting to shine" in this case is just... wanting to play the character you wrote.

Thinking about this, maybe... when it comes to running stories for people, it's important to consider both the strengths and weaknesses of their characters. Times to win are fun, but so are times to realistically fail. Maybe one character has a terrible trauma in their past when it comes to mushrooms, but they're also a rifle expert. They're blasting zombie heads like crazy until the Mutated Mushroom Lord emerges from the abandoned gas station, and then they get the chance to freeze up and fail. In this situation, failing is just as much "shining" as winning, because the player is getting to play the Traumatized Rifle Expert that they initially intended to write.

Maybe part of the problem is just people who are intentionally writing Mary Sues without any realistic weaknesses to balance their strengths. You could force a solution for that by a mechanized system that doesn't let you pick some skills if you've picked others, but I think it's more of a cultural problem. We all need to be better at warmly accepting the failure of a character as part of a story, and not something to resent the player about. That doesn't mean that there can't be consequences involved in-game... if a character screws up badly, they're going to have to suffer the results of that, and all of this is part of the story and a suitable ending or possible redemption arc. But there shouldn't be any OOC stigma towards the players of failures -- the story should be respected and appreciated as a realistic story.

@selira said in Something Completely Different:

To a degree, we all are, but identifying how you are being such and working to address and mitigate these impulses is key to growing as a person.

If someone is working to address and mitigate those impulses, I would not label them. Like you said, to a degree, we all are. So where do you draw the line? I'm not your typical white person, and people micro-aggression me all the time. I don't think they're racists.

I've only been peripherally involved in one Discord RP server... someone invited me, but I didn't really feel up to the hurdle of participation at the time. I left after observing a while. They had a separate website and a lot of game rules for how to generate a character. They had a lot of channels, each channel being a separate room/area, and some channels were for specific events. They had bots for character generation and levelling and dice. It was super serious and legit. I'm pretty sure that there is a lot of variation in Discord RP servers but the one I saw seemed pretty hardcore. There were a lot of teenagers, it's true. It was hopeful thinking that the next generation is also into text-based roleplay, in their own way, and might come around to older games (the person who invited me had found a MUD to play in, too).

Whether administrative action was 100% wrong or not, there are definitely things that could have been handled better and it may be valuable to speculate on those things in order to try to do better if there ever is a next time.

That was partially already done with the reversal of some of the bans. And I don't think anyone who is desirous of someone else adhering to their opinion will ever be happy unless the other person entirely capitulates to their opinion (and even then, probably not). So this isn't about making anyone else happy, but about general self-improvement.

I'll go first. I'm not anyone in charge but I still feel that I made some mistakes to admit here. I should not have gone over to the other forum and tried to talk to them there. Naturally they were smarting from a wound, and I am not a reassuring friend, and I didn't help anything at all. It was not the time to question their approaches or encourage any sort of social change. That was just like rubbing salt into a wound. Further, I shouldn't have taken their reaction personally and used it as an example of the type of behavior that I don't like seeing on community forums. Obviously they have no problem with behaving that way and this is just a cultural clash. What I should have done is recognize earlier that there is a reason human beings behave in tribal ways, and I should have acknowledged that it was about people feeling safe sooner rather than later. I'm embarrassed by how long it took me to get to that conclusion.

Cliquery may not be how I'd prefer a community forum to act, but it is a perfectly legitimate way to act given the political atmosphere of current times. I personally don't think it is wholly effective in terms of actually guaranteeing safety. I think it just encourages actual real predators (like Cullen) to come back incognito over and over with new attempts at conquering the fakery that is required to blend in. But what can you do? We all try to get along in life as best as we can, and it's okay to have different perspectives, and like Derp says... this split is probably a good thing, after all. And if people -feel- safe, that's really enough. Life's already too hard.

To those who have been upset in the past due to being unfairly character-assassinated, is it possible to realize you are just collateral damage to a society struggling to keep itself safe? The personal attacks are difficult to stop taking personally, I know. But realization where it comes from and why might be a good step towards healing -- on an individual level, at least, if not a community one.

It depends on whether you want things to be balanced, too. Maybe thematically for your game it's alright if some people are overpowered. I've seen some games handle this in the sense that you have to build up points that show you're a decent player, in order to be permitted magic-wielding characters.

@Misadventure

It was all text from what I saw. But I did hear about another server (I didn't join that one at all, too busy at the time) that was run like a tabletop game, mostly over voice chat.

@Misadventure

I feel the same way about it, and that is an awesome generator! Thanks for sharing it.

Here's the last character I played on a MUD.

Anyone who thinks Israel and Jews are a monolith needs to look into Neturei Karta, and anyone who thinks criticizing the IDF is antisemitic needs to look into 'Breaking the Silence'.

I know people aren't very well educated on the complexities of this issue but in college I knew a lot of Jews who were pro-BDS. I do know some Jewish people who haven't mentioned the situation, so I don't know what they think, but I definitely do not assume that they must be innately pro-Israel, and I definitely don't hold them to account as if they have to justify Israel somehow, or even associate Israel with them in such a way that I'd be holding the topic politely back while chatting with them. That would really be unfair and cruel.

It's safe to assume that anyone who is educated understands the differences between an individual who has an ethnic background -- and a political entity that shares that ethnic background. Religion becomes an even trickier situation because there's frequently ideological battles over what a religion really is, so an individual really can't be judged on that at all.

Uneducated people, yeah, I have seen and heard a lot of disgusting antisemitism that lumps Israel's reprehensible actions in with Judaism. Sorry for the bigotry you generally have to deal with.

I still feel a bit sour about the last time there was anything controversial posted here, and the dialogue quickly dropped back into unsubstantiated accusations and insults, and it was just excused.

People are going to act like people, pretty much all the time, I guess. But I'm probably weird because I almost prefer being reamed every time I open my virtual mouth on any issue, to the feeling that I am participating in selfish hypocrisy by posting here.

It's fine to think "there is an alternative space for people who clashed with other people, and they both pretty much act the same in their own bubbles, and that's cool".

But it seems hypocritical to say "we're actually better than them, look how civil and fair we are"... when a burst of controversial activity a short while ago revealed this community wasn't actually any different in terms of vilifying others without sufficient evidence.

In short, the temporary absence of anything controversial enough to stir people's emotions isn't proof of people being more logical and kind, at all.

@Ghost

The log with the pushing-lingerie-buying on someone was pretty creepy for sure, but I guess that creepiness was OOCly marked as acceptable by the person who was creeped on, so I'm more looking at the logs with Betsy. The one that I read was like... Betsy said Warren could live with her if he wanted for a while, and then Warren concocted this whole drama about how it'd be so scandalous and paparazzi would besiege them and of course they'd have a great time locked in together anyway (hyuck hyuck). And then he tried to sexily convey his body heat to Betsy's cheek through the palm of his hand. And Betsy was kind of like "no that's okay anyway you want to spar sometime?" And then misinterpreted Warren's unwillingness to spar as confusion that she, a purdy delicate lady, would be violence-inclined. And then Warren got quickly turned off by what a tough girl Betsy was acting like, which honestly seemed like a big part of the purpose to me, as an outside reader... and Warren was like "okay bye" and Betsy was like "bye" and fin.

"Too soon"? I can understand that for someone who is replacing another human in their life, because maybe the new relationship will have potential for abuse that you don't see right away because you're too blinded by grief and the rebound factor.

But with a dog? A dog is not going to abuse you. What is with those people and their weird trains of thought? I would question their judgment with basically everything if they're incapable of seeing how their judgment is not only irrelevent and cruel, but also illogical.

If you need an animal to take care of, for the sake of your mental health, that is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. It only shows you are a kind and caring person. Whatever you decide, you shouldn't listen to those people with their weird judgments.