Best posts made by il-volpe

@Bobotron @BigDaddyAmin

I can't speak to its activity aside from the MUDstats numbers. When people who've come from there talk about it (You may talk about 'Blood of Dragons' on 'Game of Bones' though I do try to discourage bash-sessions about it unless you're doing so in private or on the channel that's reserved for being rude) the usual word goes that they either cannot get a scene, or the RP is repetitive nobles-having-huffs-at-other-nobles + tourneys, or that the player in question has been verbally abused by the staff there and cannot stand it any more.

Go to war, investigate magic, breed dragons, slay rogue dragons...

GoB is 1:1 in a time period that's kinda blank, but all of that is stuff we've done, or had people try with varying degrees of success, and a fair bit of fun. (Though the wars are mere skirmishes, and players do keep trying to tame the wild dragon just by yelling at it, which doesn't work, with comical results.)

@Alzie I think the confusion about BoD staff claiming that other games are not allowed to exist is because when Nymeria goes off on a rabid public howling spree about other games and how they are evil and bad and hurt her butt more than it has ever been hurt before, and are illegal and should be sued and she'd be in the right to do it, she actually means, "Hrmph, I wish people wouldn't do that," and when GRRM says, "Hrumph, I wish people would do that differently," he means that they are evil and bad and hurt his butt, etc.

@juniper said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

Now imagine that instead of doing that, Jane continues to treat it like a secret and admits to keeping things from Bob.

Weeeeelllll... this often seems to result in a situation where Bob knows Abelard's secret and Jane's secret and Jane knows Bob's and, and. And you've got five characters in the room and every one of them is in the know about every other and even knows that every other is in the know, BUT they're all treating it like a secret so they have to RP about Starbuck's secret menu or sneak off in pairs to talk plot, and it's god fucking forbid that they RP as a group about something rewarding, and while all of them have IC reason to be involved and OOCly want to, desperately, only two out of the five will get to play, and very likely one will get left out of the loop entirely because passing on the interesting info once is fun, twice is kinda fun, but by the time you've done four separate scenes telling people the same thing you're bored of it and poor fucking Dylan, who just wants to be in a goddammed scene, is banging his head on the floor begging to play Superfriends and wishing his getting to play the damn game was more important than pretending that not-secrets are secrets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g20_8-TPyTQ

I have decades old friendships with people I've never met in person, and people I have met in person but met on games.

Yeah, they are real friends and it's not particularly odd or different from other friendships.

@Jaunt said:

And folks here are welcome to submit articles to us, too. They don't need to be an admin from one of OR's core games to do so. We've had several folks submit articles from outside of our own community. Nobody's asked about that, though. Instead, maybe they've just assumed it's a certain way, when it's not.

Why would they want to? The articles are weak by our standards and the site treats our beloved non-automated games as lesser, and in a manner that doesn't make it clear that you're really just a site about RPI MUDs or things that behave like them.

See, people here didn't come to your site. They keep not coming over to it in spite of you asking, it seems. This is very likely because we don't think your site is great, and we don't think your favoured text-RPG platform is superior. (In fact, quite the opposite in my case. Automation was fun for a while, but it just narrows RP in the end)

But, yeah. Obviously most folks on OR (and here) are not professional writers.

Oh, it's not the quality of the writing. Your contributors' mastery or non-mastery of the English language is a separate issue. The articles (or the ones I've read, anyway) just don't have anything to say that this community hasn't already covered, rehashed, picked apart in great detail.

I'd be pleased to advertise on your site, and would be happy to get some MUD players on my MUSH and if some of my MUSH players wanna go play MUDs that's great too, but contributing to OR would not be a feather in my cap, and reading it hasn't done anything for me. Which is fine, but please don't act surprised.

I'm kinda puzzled as to what one needs to do to make it accessible for blind players. My first 'MUD' was LambdaMOO, and one of my first MU* friends is blind. He uses a screen-reader, the MOO didn't do anything about it.

I think MUSHes do need to think about accessibility, in numerous ways. I am pretty sure the player demographic has a disproportionately high percentage of disabled people. I don't think not doing this makes the game not-a-MU, but it does kinda make the designers dicks.

@Alzie Yep. I was being sort of nice, or something. Actual thought when I looked was, "Oh, it's a content-mill, 'cause they've promised to post new articles every week, so they do not care if they have anything to say," (Another reason why people here are unlikely to want to submit articles; being the wageless writer-slave of a content mill is what we call a 'scam.')

My other thought was, "For fuck's sake, if I see one more piece of bullshit treating GMing as a 'customer service' activity, I'll spit nails. Into somebody's eyeballs."

@ganymede The entertainment factor is increased if you do it when they don't ask, but when they say something like, "I'm so hungry but there's nothing in the house/I am too sick to cook/I can't decide what to cook, much less muster the energy to do it," and don't tell them you did it until after it arrives.

Possibly violently not the point.

Knight of Crowns: I will ask you a series of questions designed to root out all pretenders to the throne.
Only a true High King will hold the answers in his heart.
What popular television program stars actor Tim Daly?

Eliot: What the fuck?

@Jaunt It is outright deceptive in the context of advertising outside of the RPI community.

@carma said in Weird or unrealistic gaming... stuff:

I think I traced it back to @boop's post here.

Abelard, Brigid, Camille, and Darren appear to be the most common names used in posts referencing example names since then.

It was this post. Clearly Abelard, Brigid, Camille, Darren (and to a lesser degree Euphonia, Frog, Gillian and Henri) are the best example PC name convention.

ETA that it was @Derp who added Darren, and @boop tragically used Joshua and Sam when it was Euphonia and Frog. What a world.

@Jaunt said:

I'm not suggesting that we're special.

Doesn't matter what you're suggesting; you're acting like you think you're special, and intention is not magical.

Regardless of my thoughts on the quality of the 'manners' here, I'd suggest that part of the issue is this site's complete lack of transparency on its expectations of users, and code of conduct.

I dislike some elements of Japanese manners and find them annoying and rude, but regardless of this thought, I cannot reasonably go to Japan and take offense at normal behavior that happens to annoy me, nor do weird things that Japanese people think are rude but which I think are fine AND expect not to be told to fuck off.

If it does exist, I haven't found it, and I have looked.

It doesn't exist, because these are not rules. It is not a code of conduct. It is not a user agreement. If you act like an ass (by the communities' standards of what acting like an ass is) then people will react to you as if you are acting like an ass. Either you adjust and learn to behave in a way that meets community standards of not-assness, or you're an ass. You're allowed to be an ass. But the expectation that doing anything that is not expressly forbidden should never raise ire? That is silly.

I don't think anyone here wants to put a list of rules-of-conduct on the site. Honestly, looking over the site with some measure of throughness gives you a good clue, as does responding to the suggestions of others (I mean responding as in, taking their word for it and complying to some degree, not saying, "But it's not written down to not do that!" or "It's normal on other places!")

Actually, I'm pretty sure I'd annoy plenty of people if I acted about my MUSH ads that I put on "Game of Thrones" fansites and Play-by-Post sites and tablet--top gaming sites the way you've acted about yours, except I would have been booted off the site for it.

@derp I shall begin using Darius and tell no one.

Bravo.

I was once invited/hired to TS people on a game where you paid like $5 to join and then could hire certain characters to TS and pay them for the session, and the game owners took a percentage. This seemed feasible but I don't think it lasted long.

I used to ask players to give to certain charities in response to certain events. But I also always made it clear that it wasn't mandatory and that I wouldn't know if you did it or not.

My 'bravo' has naught to do with this -- rather, I express approval at OR reducing the frequency of their updates to once a month.

I think we've been-there-done-that with pay-to-play MUs.

I don't think we need revenue to advertise the hobby. We just need better newbie support, more different kinds of games, and to take advantage of free advertising among table-top and play-by-post RPGers.

@devrex Eh, I think you're just making a leap. This means, "FFS, /invite/ people," not "spend a lot of time coaxing people to play." (Please don't. Play with people who show some enthusiasm.) If you posted an event, you're covered.

ETA: also assumes a small game.

@Thenomain said:

This shouldn't be a rule. It should be a definition of playing an RPG. You follow theme and setting. If you don't want to follow theme and setting, please find your entertainment elsewhere.

Cue 'Fight Club' clip of Marla Singer walking into the testicular cancer support group, "This is cancer, right?"

Cue me getting yelled at by players who are mad that I refuse to approve them to play an elf or a French princess on a Game of Thrones MU.

@derp said in The Desired Experience:

As Arkandel said: If you're fun to play with, people will play with you. And if you aren't, then staff can't help you with interpersonal skills.

@derp said in The Desired Experience:

I just wanna do things with the four or five people I trust, and maybe put a few new feelers out every once in awhile if the mood strikes.