Best posts made by il-volpe

@hobos said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

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.

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

This.

I've been accused of "just wanting to win" when what I wanted was to roll. I wrote a character with weak spots all over, and had GM fiat say he failed at one of the few things he was written and statted to be good at. To the benefit of another pc mine was declared to have behaved as if he'd botched rolling a seven-die pool six or eight times in a row.

When dice do this it's a drag (and I very much encourage people playing/running dice-pool systems to use the auto-success option) and can definitely lead to "Oh fuck this, I'm not having much fun anyway and now I've had this precious rare chance to do what my PC is good at and failed, this game isn't worth RPing the also-not-fun aftermath," departures. When it's not dice but a GM's call, of course it will inspire resentment. If you really really must do it, for pity's sake, say, "Sorry, it really is for the good of the game, thank you for taking one for the team, I'll spotlight you soon to make up for it." And do it.

No newcomer on Game of Bones ever apped a PoC character without first asking me if a Black or Asian character would be approved. I figured that it was because Blood of Dragons does not allow them and it was a GoT/Medieval-fantasy MU problem, but I guess I'm unsurprised to hear they 'break theme' elsewhere.

My answer to it was to dump a shitload of medieval-costumed PoC on the 'suggested character pics' page. I don't know if this had an effect. In the context of MUs, I don't think representation among the PCs is of much interest, the more important thing is to avoid being a shithole where players have to deal with bigotry at playtime.

Edited to add that by 'players' I mean to include players who are people of colour, women, LGBTQA, and disabled, all of whom you ought to assume to be present.

@Derp said:
'Well, in light of the larger criteria, there are certain terms and conditions which exclude you from being eligible from the thing we said you were eligible for on the tin, sorry about that.'

I'm afraid I missed the 'sorry about that', and just saw, 'And this should not piss you off, why can't you understand that?'

Dear human I have to deal with:

This trip where you see me squinting at mail, or carrying a folder, and demand "What?!" or "Whatcha got?" and leave me forced to be mildly rude or waste my time explaining something to you that isn't interesting or your business is really fucking annoying. It's made even more annoying by the way you ignore me when I actually do want your attention and then get pissed at me when you finally acknowledge that I've been standing there saying, "Name? Name? Hello? Name?" for the past three minutes.

I understand that you have offspring, and that this experience might train you to believe that anybody who is minding his own business is up to no good and anybody who wants your attention but isn't in shrieking agonies can be safely ignored. However, I am forty-fucking-five and you are rude as hell.

Thank you.

I say, tell players, if you like to chargen and are bored af, make a roster character. If nobody does, don't worry about it. If someone does, you approve them onto the roster if approvable. If someone takes the character but doesn't RP them more than n-amount before dropping them, they go back on the roster. If they get played enough for it to matter, the character is gone same as 'original' characters and it's handled the same way. You also limit the number of times a character can change hands even if it's only one scene per player.

@Sparks said:

You could argue that there are some cultural things that coalesce around specific server lines,

Just so. This happens, but a MUSH is a MUSH because it's using the MUSH code.

Now, here, we have this thread because on the Optional Realities/Project Redshift we've got @crayon redefining a MUSH to mean, not a game that uses the MUSH codebase, but any game, regardless of codebase, which displays cultural standards that he associates with MUSHes that follow cultural and code-use standards that are highly unusual for MUSHes.

Would you play it in the forties?
In '72 and wear short-short shorties?
Nineteen-twenties swapping charms for liquors?
Beatnik mage in winklepickers?

@Arkandel But we love the vitriol.

You know what sucks? PET RESCUES.

I want another parrot.

What I don't want is to have a white upper-middle-class neurotypical straight woman interrogate me and inspect my home to see if I'm a good enough person to have a pet.

@Enoch said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

@il-volpe Do not take this as an insult, my guy, but if the hobby came down to twenty GoB-like games, I would consider it way past dead. Nothing against anyone who enjoyed it, but just because you can keep it open forever, it doesn't mean it is what anyone would consider a healthy game.

GoB certainly did have its period of being dead and continuing to be up for the use of a handful of die-hards were still maybe sometimes playing a little but mostly socialized OOC.

However, prior to that GoB had about two years of RP-on-demand at all hours and 60-some different regular players. It was a healthy game and not tiny and had a respectable run in that state.

You may be thinking of Blood of Dragons, which is still open and, as far as I can tell, populated by fewer than ten regular players and seldom has any scenes going, and as far as I know, has been just that way since it opened in 2006.

Anarchy means without rulers, not without rules. People like to think it's the other way 'round.

My peeve today is someone who insists on using pronouns without giving any clue what noun they are replacing. He called this afternoon, did he? Who of the 49.2% of humanity who might be referred to as "he" called? You want to know if I plan to use that? What, of all the objects that exist and which I might use are you referring to? Also, quit looking at me as if I'm stupid when I ask you to clarify this shit. I am doing the best I can by not trying to invent a shock-collar that will zap you every time you use a pronoun at all.

One Hundred Years of Solitude MUSH

Each character may begin with one useless surreal supernatural power, and those without may have one inflicted upon them, eg. Yellow butterflies keep coming out of your hair.

Once a year or so, you must wrap up for a ten to thirty year time-advance, and either age your character or retire them and make another. Macondo rises and falls.

I hope, I pray, I wish some day people would learn to shut the fuck up about what their college roommate whom I never met's cousin's child is doing and speak the fuck up about information I need, like how I need to order thing X 'cause we're nearly out, and also they decided to rearrange the storage for thing Y and the reason I can't find it is not that we're out but that it's in some other cupboard where it's never been before.

I swear some people refuse to use language for anything but the entertainment of hearing themselves speak and the satisfaction of having my attention. Get a fucking dog, I'm trying to work.

Also, quit looking at me like I'm stupid when I can't find things that you moved without telling anybody.

@SparklesTheClown I don't know what that is, besides 'a manga'. One Hundred Years of Solitude the novel follows this family who found a remote
village that over a century becomes a small city and then a ghost town. There are wars and floods and banana plantation massacres, but it's not exactly an action-show.

@Testament You'd be encouraged to create your PCs descendants as later PCs, and inherit stuff.

eta: Or allow your character to survive the whole run, possibly even unnoticed so at the end the young gallant from the start of the game is an old man who's been sitting in the corner of the house for the last two time-jumps.

Did you know that flashing your lights at an oncoming car is a method of warning of any road hazard behind you (and thus ahead of them)?

Reasons I have done this:
Deer in the road.
A mattress in the road.
A car accident partially blocking the road.
A half-naked man chasing a German Shepherd puppy down the centre-line of the road.
Kids playing kickball beside the road.

I've never done it to warn of a speed trap, and I certainly wouldn't have tried to warn a frickin' cop car of a speed trap. Yes, ossifer, it means any road hazard, and there are deer in the road about a quarter-mile or less behind me. You got nice U-turn skillz, though.

@tinuviel said in A healthy game culture:

If staff are forbidden from playing the game they help run, then they can become detached. Not seeing what players actually want/need, and making assumptions instead. Akin to billionaires trying to understand the plight of the working class, for instance.

I used to strongly agree about this point. I am no longer so sure, since there's also this thing where staff experiences on their PCs are used as validation for assumptions. Staff, having fun on their own PCs, think they've got the pulse of the game. This is why sometimes you find a bunch of 'em saying, "MU problems come from player perceptions" and they don't mean this in the zen you-are-in-samsara-even-when-role-playing way, they mean players who feel wronged are wrong. (Tell me what percentage of MU problems come from player perceptions and I'll tell you what percentage of your games you staff.)

ETA: I still strongly feel staff should get to play the games they run, I just don't think it's a good preventative.

@faraday I really like those foot-glove toe-shoe things called Vibram Fivefingers. They have two major disadvantages. One is that the best ones, with the thinnest most flexible sole, are deadly on ice; you melt the ice under your foot and hydroplane across the street. The other that everybody wants to talk about them.

Just being barefoot is best, but people are batshit about it, so I end up walking around with a pair of shoes slung over my shoulders so I can put them on to go indoors.

I wonder if the conversation here is muddied a bit because "community" and "set of people" aren't really equivalent. I can think of a group of RL people who could be a community of information professionals, a community of gay men, and the community of a table-top game. They're the same bunch of guys, but also three different communities.

@mietze My autistic perspective is basically that many NTs take honesty and clarity as offensive, and are thus themselves habitually unwilling to just fucking say it.

Years ago I was walking around this part of town where some friends of mine (probably neurotypical, though their sons have some traits) lived, so I went up and knocked on their door. One of them answered, said, "Oh, hi, sorry, we don't want to see anybody right now," and shut the door. I left and went to the coffee-shop a few blocks away. There I encountered a mutual friend, who was in a high state of hurt feelings, because exactly the same thing had happened to him ten or twenty minutes earlier. He was furious, they'd said they didn't want to see him and slammed the door in his face. I was fucking /delighted/ that they'd said no and shut the door, instead of asking me in and letting me wonder what the fuck was going on that the vibe was so weird, feeling confused and anxious and not sure what to do, making my day and theirs worse.

Considering friend 3's anger and that it's probably a typical reaction, I have some sympathy. Though the familiar MU behavior of 'say nothing and try to get them in trouble with staff' is still just obnoxious and stupid, because, uh, callin' the cops instead of asking your neighbors to turn down the music is vicious.

ETA: I expect probably most of the ones who say 'I was never told' when staff come in are lying about it and that's far more common and far more obnoxious.

@faraday I had this sort of policy that every so often I'd give the public channel the Brain Cooties talk, which pretty much went, a lotta MUers have the brain cooties, on our game we all pretend we're friends and we make concessions for our friends, but friends respect boundaries and I'm not here to choose for you where you put yours but as host will help enforce them, and everybody's brain cooties are ultimately their own. But as an interactive conversation. I like to think I got a lot of mileage from it, but who could tell?