Posts made by il-volpe

@carma This has happened to me so often that I pretty much expect it, especially when the desired concept is very specific.

I've also repeatedly made characters where staff have warned me (as they should) that my concept doesn't fit what's they're doing and they're not sure what my character would do, yet had a great time and flung fun about like it was ten tonnes of hippopotamus shit dumped through a jet engine.

@arkandel said in The Desired Experience:

Ultimately finding scenes and establishing oneself requires some degree of effort. To put it a bit differently, I've seen creative people before (who I didn't know before then) join a game where they know no one, assume a role without any hooks at all, and before long they are movers and shakers.

Same player can perform the same moves elsewhere and get nothing. Except told they're an idiot for joining a game where they know no one.

@Ganymede You're right, of course. There's a lot more to this old and badly in need of editing document.

@faraday That's a matter of scale. The biggest thing the grunts can do is win battles, right? That matters in their world. So in BSG Abelard saves the team and makes the objective with minimal losses and Brigid does a good job wiping down the mess hall.

@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.

From some blurb I wrote up for potential GMs:

Can I Play Too? and I Can Has Agency?

Those are what players want. They want to interact with other characters and join in the exciting shit. That is to say, everybody wants to play too. They also want to do stuff that matters in the world - agency. You must say Fuck Yes to both these.

Try not to build grid that forces characters apart, try not to add social divides that keep characters apart, don’t get uptight about enforcing those divides if they just exist in theme. People want playgroups and playgroups often mean factions and natural divisions and that is fine, but especially try to say Fuck Yes to letting people play too, and with whom they bloody well want to play. 

The question, “Can you think of a reason your character might be [at location/researching bobcats/watching static on the tv/whatever hook]? Might I offer one?” ought to be directed, on channels or in pages, to PCs who are around during events if they are at all qualified to join in. Encourage people to join in, and encourage people to welcome them. This does not mean you need to let everybody play in every scene and turn every event into a free-for-all of too many characters, but it does mean you should look around and let people be there when stuff goes down.

Players want agency, and to give them that you must give them opportunities to do stuff. Players generally want /equal/ agency which means that if one month Abelard saves the world and Brigid invents a devilish new salad dressing, and the next month Abelard saves the city and Brigid wins trivia night at the local bar, and so on, Brigid is probably wondering what she’s doing wrong.

@derp

The tailor who is just a tailor, ill-suited to dungeon diving, isn't the character I'm talkin' about.

Just pretend they're remotely similar. It didn't take massive mental gymnastics to include Garak. It took Bashir taking an interest in him, and 'The Wire'. Garak didn't make somebody figure out how to get him from dressing-room to dungeon, it was built-in. It took other PCs getting past 'tailor' and GMs reading the bit in his bg about the implant in his head and letting that hit the screen. This is probably equivalent to what @faraday said about working with staff to craft an appropriate storyline.

ETA: I may be confused and you're meaning apps for plain, simple tailors and you know there's nothin' more to them, because you read the apps. Rather than being a player and coming across a tailor PC.

@devrex said in The Desired Experience:

have been quietly baffled when someone has made, say, a shopkeeper.

And then the shopkeeper is going: "I can't get any RP around here."

I suspect that shopkeeper frequently does want to go into the dungeon.

Behold. The most interesting character.

On a MUSH, odds are that the Bashir character never looks at Garak twice, staff ignore his hooks and never run 'The Wire' and Garak's NPCs (Enabran Tain, etc) never appear. Nobody interacts with him much, he says, "I can't get any RP around here," and leaves, and people shrug, "Why even make a tailor?"

Bashir, on the other hand, is genuinely boring until a sudden change/addition to his backstory was made five years and 112 episodes in, but is definitely a needed/wanted position/concept. Nobody will question why he was created nor assume that including him in action or looking for interpersonal depth with him is vain. It's even likely that they won't take five years and 112 episodes to try to help him grow more interesting.

@ghost I am pretty sure the BoD people never tried to get GRRM to do anything, they just imply that his approval of their MU means he disapproves of all others.

Anne McCaffery C&Ding at Pern MUSHes was a thing once. Neil Gaiman responded to a 'Sandman' game by playing it.

ETA: As I understand it, McCaffery's trouble was that she thought that the existence of a free online Pern computer game would devalue the IP license for a Pern video game. When she figured out that MUSHes and video games are not much alike she stopped but became precious about people not RPing in her favourite Pern locations, which was her prerogative I suppose.

@juniper It wasn't the legendary Quinn who did it, but he was involved in its conception somehow.

@bear_necessities

@bear_necessities It was 1993.

It was by the hour, but there was some mechanism where the virtual sex-worker had to pose at a certain frequency. I don't remember much. I may have earned like, $30.

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.

@ganymede Me too. We were friends. I wanna hear the Blaze stories. He was unashamed.

"Wulf" Heynis, best known here as ridiculous gay werewolf "Blaze." Died late last August but I just found out.

@jennkryst If I say, "Mustard and drag it through the garden, please," about my sandwich, meaning all the veggies but just the one sauce, am I being annoyingly twee or helpfully succinct?

@23quarius I dunno. Ex said it was a thing that insurance companies had warned other companies was happening and he'd had other offensive names.

ETA it was the full-on -er spelling also, not a sound-alike thing.

My ex works/ed in insurance. Somewhere out there is a guy who changes his legal name to offensive things and applies for auto insurance and, when he's denied it because his name creates a hostile work environment for the insurance company, tries to sue for discrimination. So they had like three days of really awkward meetings at ex's work about a person legally named "Super N*** N***".

@greenflashlight Yep. As a kid my 'diagnosis' was "gifted, but emotionally disturbed." My parents' divorce was blamed, though I, five years old at the time, thought it was a damn good idea and was only concerned that I might be separated from the dog. Meanwhile, I am pretty sure most of my paternal relatives believed they split because I was such a difficult child.

I had a hilariously infuriating experience in which somebody told (say, NT-splained) me that autism intervention actually made me extra racist and misogynist 'cause it focuses on the white males that are disproportionately diagnosed. In reality the interventions for the "emotionally disturbed" where where all the kids of colour and all the angry girls got thrown. And the Deaf kid who was being tortured with SEE.

@ganymede said in Autism and The MU* Community:

Here’s the flip side.

Yeah, I know. It's kinda hard to stomach, since from my PoV it boils down to, 'trying to avoid being harmed frustrates and annoys people who can harm me, including those who don't want to.'

You're a rational and ethical person of good will. And to me, you're also Schrödinger's Bigot.

There's kinda a lot of shit like that, on every scale. I'm supposed to know if somebody's genuinely over busy or doesn't want to see me, but the behaviors are the same.

An aside, premade content helps people who don't use it make content that fits.

@cobalt Sorry to hear it. I am still in touch with Ceredywn.