@kk I wanted to allow secret alts, because I wanted people to be able to avoid 'log on your alt!' harassment. What I got was a player making half a dozen or more alts to try to interact with another player who did not want to play with them. So I made the public alt registry rule to stop that harassment, which worked, and did not have a problem with the other kind, at least not that I was made aware of.
@Tinuviel Stop it vs stop it completely kinda thing.
@tinuviel said in A healthy game culture:
Ultimately, shitty people are going to do shitty things. No amount of transparency or organisational structure or written rules will stop them.
Rules aren't there to stop the bad guys.
Transparency does stop them. Player-visible alt registries combined with posting logs of GM-run scenes make it so I don't even have to app to know that the world-shaking action is almost always related to the RP of a handful of players and it's really Abelard GMing the orc tribe for Brigid and Camille on Monday and Camille GMing the thieves' guild for Abelard and Brigid and Darren on Wednesday and Brigid GMing the Seagull Knights on Saturday and what looks like thirteen players having regular gamey-game is actually four having very frequent gamey-game. And that knowledge is liable to make me move on, preventing them from doing shitty things to me.
@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.
@silverfox GMing should be fun in itself.
MU GMs who treat it as the price one pays to get enough control over the game to have your PC (regardless of if you call her an NPC or not) get to be super-cool ought to have learned to do better during table-top games when they were 12.
I'm pro staff-PCs, though.
@l-b-heuschkel said in A healthy game culture:
I'm not convinced it's transparency (though transparency is good) as much as it's respect.
Just so, it's about respect.
I think lack of transparency generally indicates a lack of respect. Even if it doesn't to begin with, it nourishes disrespectful crap by providing a deep and rich fount of plausible deniability.
e.g. GM had claimed frustration that players won't include others but that he couldn't do anything about it, leaving me sitting there thinking, "Yes you could, just quit adjusting the plot so they can succeed without cooperating or including others and let them fail. Also, quit giving them private GMed scenes several times a week while other players are waiting on you." Discovering that "tell them that staff alts should not be shutting others out," should be added to that list of nothings-you-really-can-do does not make me feel respected. Same GM also expressed frustration over players refusing to engage in cross-faction cooperation. After learning that the same players are dominating action and decision-making in both factions I am forced to conclude that he's either lying or incredibly dense; those players would have to work the plot from only one character if the factions form a working alliance. The mutual respect that I had believed to exist when I began the game appears to have never been there on GMs part, and has been lost on mine.
My personal view of the History of MU*s places Anomaly TrekMUX in this spot where transparency increased but the fuckery remained, but spin-offs did notice the embarrassing levels fuckery made visible and worked to correct them some.
I think there are some elements of the organisational structure that encourage rewarding unwanted behavior, and/or hide it but not its consequences.
Thinking of catering to the loudest. I have this vague recollection of a game that had 'story points' or maybe they called them something else. You got them by interacting with somebody you hadn't played with in the last week(?) and probably by doing some other things, when you accumulated enough a GM would appear and make something happen that was about you. Most people were talking weasels or wizards or both, but that's beside the point. I wonder if anyone's tried a more sophisticated version of that.
I've got this theory that the granular and hierarchical structure of the traditional Masq-of-our-own WoD MUSH is a filthy sodden sock nourishing the trenchfoot that is traditional WoD MUSH toxic fuckery.
What, if any, organizational structures and/or created/encouraged micro-cultural elements have you seen used to in efforts to keep MU fuckery nutritious or at least neutral? Did they work?
@amethystrose I know two different people named John Wick, and keep forgetting to ask them how that's going these days.
I swear I remember playing an intentionally short-lived MUSH that was really pretty much this.
It was Call of Cthulhu. The setting was a luxury ocean liner lost in the Bermuda Triangle.
I share cooking duties.
When I cook, I cook a meal. At the very most I ask, "Do you feel like having <insert food> tonight?" before I start.
When the other person cooks, the entire process is accompanied by relentless questions about how to do it. Not technical I-don't-know-how-to-cook questions, but, like, "do you want the carrots cut in strips or discs?"
I'm not picky, I've never complained about shit like that, and what I want, oh please, is for dinner to just not be my fucking problem.
@tnp said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
@cobaltasaurus You are allowed to tell your doctor 'No.'
While technically this is true, many of us have such limited health-care options that we kinda aren't, because if the doctor fires us, we can't get another before we die.
@jinshei For some shining moment I thought you meant me, underemployed archivist of MUSHdom.
Hah, self-aware appliances.
I've wished for a ghosts-and-ordinary-folks game without all the underworld complications and cosmology stuff of Wraith, but which would allow one to play a haunted car.
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.
@Cobaltasaurus
She is fucking golden. Pretty as a wild thing, biddable, tuned in, athletic, gentle with kids and old people without being told, brushes clean in a swipe like she's teflon-coated or something, can actually be called off when trying to chase deer if you can believe it, and the spitting image of Beatrix Potter's dog Kep.
Also, very Scottish, and as some of you may remember, if it's not Scottish, it's craaaap.
She has cousins.
