Seeing friends all play nice together.
I think one of my favourite things to do in MU* communities is matchmake. I meet one cool person and then I meet another cool person and I'm like, you guys are both cool, you should be cool together!
So when I walk in on them RPing together without me later and feel like I might've had something to do with it, that makes me happy, especially if it's in a community where people don't tend to be as trusting or open to meeting new people generally.
Sometimes, researching a compelling concept for a MU* helps you discover really cool facts about the people, industries, countries and histories you're tying your character to.
The way people RP conversations is incredibly unrealistic.
You have people monologuing without room for others to interrupt or prompt with a few questions, nor telegraph their disgust/disinterest which would normally make the person talking pause and start to feel awkward.
And, you have the thing where someone is trying to be as inclusive as possible, so their pose includes a sentence of dialogue directed at every single person in the room, addressing every topic that's been raised, leaving nothing out, lest others feel ignored.
I have a regular RP partner I annoy on these fronts because he'll consistently drop a paragraph of text with 5 different talking points and I just have my character react to the very last thing he said. Usually the quip portion instead of the actually important stuff. And then he gets frustrated I didn't comment on the actual plan or whatever, to which either my character replies, 'sorry, that was a lot to take in' or I tell him OOC that he needs to give my character room to respond if he actually expects me to.
These are two people talking! It's not an email exchange! There are no paragraphs and subheaders in a normal conversation.
I shouldn’t, but I kind of love reading about the ongoing drama of games I no longer play now that it no longer directly affects me.
@Seraphim73 said in Game of Thrones:
@Rinel said in Game of Thrones:
***Thoughts on chivalry***click to show
***I had a totally different take on this.***
This happened a few months ago, but I've been reflecting on it ever since, and I'm in regular contact with all of the players who were involved.
My character, Bob*, was in a long-term, monogamous, but currently celibate (and sexual-tension-filled) relationship with Mrs Jones*, who was trapped in a loveless, abusive arranged marriage with Mr Jones*.
During an event where no one could remember their true identity, Mrs Jones ended up hooking up with Bob's best friend, Dick*.
Once everyone got their memories back, Bob attacked his best friend Dick in a fit of jealous rage. Dick, being a dick, has since made a few mean jabs here and there about how much fun he and Mrs Jones had, which never fails to make Bob grumpy and surly and a bit pathetic. Mr Jones of course also came knocking and threatened to murder Dick, which Bob had a hard time mustering the civility to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his best friend for.
All of the characters involved in this situation are played by people I OOCly adore.
Everyone had a good time and laughed about it.
We still talk about it fondly now and then.
The more I talk to other people OOCly about various awkward drama/jealousy/triangle situations they've had leave a horrible taste in their mouth and ruin their game experience, the more I find myself reflecting on this particular story because I appreciate how rare that is. The cheating here was ICly motivated and ICly reacted to. That was all. There was no bleed-over whatsoever.
So MU things I love: players I can have these kinds of complicated scenes/stories with, with absolute trust that dramatic storytelling will never result in any kind of OOC resentment or awkwardness.
If you have friends you can enjoy IC tension with while always remaining chummy behind the scenes? Hold onto them. They are worth their weight in gold.
asterisks* = names changed to protect the players involved.
P.S. to the players involved, if you recognise this story and your role in it, I love you all and hope to continue telling many more complex stories with you over the years and enjoying our shared tension and wacky hijinks.
Hildegard von Blingin' is my new favourite musical artist. She does medieval-style covers of modern hits.
All ye bully-rooks with your buskin boots
Best ye go, best ye go
Outrun my bow
All ye bully-rooks with your buskin boots
Best ye go, best ye go, faster than mine arrow
In sooth I do not need thy love
But thou makest me a stranger and that feels so rough
Hadst thou need to stoop so low?
To send a wagon for thy minstrel and refuse my letters
Playing in a game run by a friend.
It's not something I do often. Actually, it's not something I would say I have ever done.
It has occurred to me before that over the course of playing a game I have happened to befriend staff-members, but that's different, and I have never had the experience, until now, of playing a game run by someone I've known for years prior to be solid people.
Some would imagine I might want this for special treatment, but no.
It's just a huge relief after so many bad experiences over the years to know for a fact that the game I'm playing is run by someone trustworthy, genuine, intelligent, entertaining, kind and stable.
I don't have any doubts and I don't have any worries about when/if I might discover this game and its staff are actually shit and that I might have to walk. I'm not worried about what might happen if I get harassed on this game and don't know how to deal with it. I feel confident and safe from the get. That's a really nice, refreshing change of pace.
Getting to support a loved one's creation? Added bonus.
@SixRegrets said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
'Cancel culture' is nothing more than the right's latest replacement for 'political correctness'. If you act like an asshole, you should expect consequences. Contra's bigoted bullshit re: transmedicalism and being best buddies with Buck Angel are more than reason enough for the rest of the transgender community to 'cancel' her.
Except ContraPoints never said anything transmedicalist, nor was she aware with Buck Angel's views at the time of asking him to voice one line in her video (after he approached her saying he was a fan and suggesting for a collaboration), nor are they best buds, having never communicated prior to that point.
And even if none of that was true, and she was, indeed, a transmedicalist best bud of Buck Angel, it doesn't justify the targeted harassment campaign and hate mob she received, or that endured by anyone she's ever been associated with for failing to publicly cancel their friend over a single misstep.
ContraPoints never asked to be on a pedestal, but that's where society puts marginalised voices when they speak up, expecting them to now act as a token representation of their entire community. (She has repeatedly said she doesn't want this.) A single crack in that pedestal gets the hatred they endure amplified, and now not only are they not the best, goodest angel in the world, they're the worst evil demon bitch monster who must be destroyed. This is purity politics and it's shit for everyone involved, especially since it almost always targets people who are actually trying, and it disproportionately affects marginalised voices rather than hegemonic normies. Has anyone cancelled Brad Pitt for, I don't know, not going out of his way to speak up for gay rights and Black Lives Matter or something? No. Even Stephen King has to say the literal bare minimum of "trans women are women" for people to clap and hail him as a hero despite a long history of being a bumbling boomer with foot-in-mouth disease.
Watching people who've been unreasonably nasty to me start being unreasonably nasty to each other is always cathartic.
Speaking for myself, I'm pretty rubbish at evaluating and respecting my own personal boundaries.
It's not something I'm proud of. I realise it's also no one's job to do it for me. But when I look back at nearly every single incident where someone I personally knew, who was active in my circle (as opposed to like a stranger grabbing me or something) was making me uncomfortable, there has always been a nagging voice of doubt in the back of my mind suggesting that maybe this isn't as big a deal as I'm making it out to be, maybe I should just brush it off, maybe I'm being paranoid, maybe this is really my fault because I led that person on or encouraged them or tried to be their friend or don't have sufficient evidence, etc.
While a fairly pathetic aspect of my personality that I'm suitably ashamed of, I don't think I'm alone in just having been badly socialised this way.
Furthermore even in cases where it's pretty clear-cut, I would often be hesitant to come forward out of fear of potential consequences/fallback on me, for example if I thought my harasser was on good terms with staff, and that comparatively my social standing/currency didn't give me sufficient leverage, if it's my word against theirs, etc.
So honestly, anything that simplifies the process for me of having a documented, simple, coded way of putting the breaks on something is of benefit for me.
Do I deserve/need to be coddled this way? Sure, no. Is it anyone's responsibility to make sure I'm comfortable but my own? Also no. But we live in an imperfect world and if it was just me out there being affected by this, I'd likely care less, except 99% of the time when someone's bothering me this way I end up finding out that I'm not the only person they're doing this to, which makes me care 10 times more.
Anything to facilitate and make it easier for people like me to come forward serves in protecting not just their fragile sensibilities, but the general wellbeing of the game at large.
EDIT: It also means I don't have to weather the anxiety inducing process of politely reaching out to someone who makes me uncomfortable, with an excess of smileys to assure them I mean no harm, to gently indicate that while I think the best of them and know they didn't mean to, they have made me uncomfortable. Which is always fucking exhausting especially if I'm already — and I will use that word — in a "triggered" state.
I'm genuinely not a pandering person, but I kind of want to upvote literally everyone on this thread because I genuinely do agree with everyone's perspective here, including the people who disagree with each other. And that's pretty rare.
I think MU* are what you make of it. (Sparkling cliche, I know.) I think it's an incorrect blanket statement to say RP isn't writing but certainly, depending on how you do it, it can be very poor writing, and I'm not just talking in terms of technical writing capability. If you're using a MUSH for wish-fulfilment to just make a sexy blank-slate extension of yourself, sure. There's not a lot happening there that the average reader would care to connect with (but I mean, it worked for Twilight, YMMV).
You absolutely can, however, find the right people with similar intentions to write meaty, consequential scenes with a full cast of colourful, three-dimensional, flawed and interesting characters with diverse relationship dynamics. You absolutely can have two characters hate each other's guts without players behind the scenes having their feelings hurt and not having a good time. One of my favourite people to RP with in this hobby — @dev — is someone I almost always make IC frenemies/rivalries with because we just enjoy having that kind of dynamic and without knowing we get on like a house on fire OOC, you'd be very easily forgiven for thinking some problematic shenanigans were going on and that you need to get involved to stop some villain from raining on the other's parade or whatever.
Good Omens was written by two very talented authors and is largely from the perspective of two very enjoyable characters. I don't know how exactly they sat down and wrote it together, if they took turns giving each character a voice or what, but the finished project, which was collaborative, is spectacular and fun, and definitely feels like it contains elements of each author's usual flair and style.
I do yearn for something @Pandora touched on; less "fluff" oriented dynamics and storylines where it's OK for characters to have tension without anyone getting upset OOCly. Sometimes I do wish that players wouldn't make it so easy for characters I've intentionally written with flaws to get a free ride to be themselves unchallenged. Sometimes I do wish someone would call them out and take me on an exciting, wonderful journey of character development, instead of just clinking glasses over how great we both are.
But you know what? Every now and then, someone bites. And that makes it all worth it, in the end. It is perfectly possible, if not easy, to find other writers who are in this hobby for the exact same reason you are, and make that magic happen.
Tangent: I will gladly join @Ghost in launching a campaign to burn the played-by trend at the stake. Finally someone said it. Write your fucking descriptions, people.
Given everything that’s going on in the world right now, this is a useful resource for everyone, IRL.
However, I saw this and thought it might also be worth sharing within the MU* community, for people who want to help safeguard it against harassment but don’t always know how.
Some harassment takes place in private, unseen, in pages etc., and in these instances it’s harder to deal with. But if you see echoes of it in scenes or public channels, try this approach:
@TheBigD said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
The point is that back in the day, the more reasonable people would be willing to have a discussion about the implications of a white person portraying a black person in a roleplaying game. There would be rational, logical discussion about it. But due to changes in the past hmm, 20 years or so, those reasonable people are drowned out by less reasonable people. Where every time there are multiple reasons to do a particular thing, these people decide that you do this particular thing for the absolute worst reason.
And it used to be that you could safely ignore these people. Everyone could see that they were being irrational. Being contrary just to be contrary. Not any more.
I really wonder who you think are the more reasonable people in this debate, because it kinda sounds like this was never your discussion to have, to begin with, and stuff that was never OK is now actually being treated like it isn't OK. Whereas before the more reasonable people, who in this debate I'm gonna assume are people of colour, would be drowned out if they tried to raise their concerns.
Because this just sounds like the MUSoapbox version of that ol' 'PC culture has gone too far, you know back in my day we could call people a f— and a n— and nobody would bat an eyelid'.
And to that I just can't properly respond at the moment, because Stradivarius don't make violins small enough.
@LWhiskey My guess is @Caractus is a fascist trying to make anti-racist movements look bad. It's a common tactic of the far-right.
They do things like claim to be a member of a disadvantaged group and then use the fake identity to do one of two things:
An example of this would be creating a fake twitter account in which you claim to be a card-carrying member of Antifa, and then tweeting things like 'kill all white people' or 'George Soros is my dream daddy'.
Or creating an account in which you pretend to be a Muslim and post things like 'I like fucking goats', 'all women should be slaves', 'Americans must die'.
Another example would be a white person hopping online, claiming they're black, and then telling people that as a black person they never experience any racism, racism hasn't been a thing for hundreds of years, and that it's really black people holding black people back now. Or, conversely, lashing out in such an absurdly disproportionate manner as to desensitise the community to any future, legitimate accusations of racism.
In this instance, I believe their purpose was to divide the community by castigating respected members such as @JinShei and the staff of Arx by first claiming to have been banned on racist grounds, reinforcing negative stereotypes of black people with their app, and then saying 'I myself am black, the real racist is you for questioning my motives'.
It's not just nonsense, it's malicious nonsense. Also while I can't verify this, according to a friend on these boards, the poster was likely this person, who has a pattern of pulling that kind of manipulative BS.
Another common tactic they were utilising on this thread is Concern Trolling.
Friends you can RP IC friendship with, those are alright I guess.
But friends you can RP bitter rivalries, skullduggery, unexpected twists and sporting conflict with?
(It's no wonder I'm playing so much Among Us.)
It used to be a running gag that MU* were all populated by teenagers and college students who were inexplicably and implausibly omnicapable superheroes. 19 year old star doctors, lawyers, detectives and scientists, etc.
As the MU* community has aged, I've noticed that the characters making up most games' casts have too. Lots of people actually do seem to prefer playing 30-40+ year olds etc., and I find that the IC demographics tend to be fairly realistic these days.
I like this. It's nice to see. I've always felt that older characters often have more layered stories to tell, even when I was actually a 19-21 year old on these games myself.
Fucking hate Christmas.
It's a shitty holiday and everything about it is dumb. So is Hanukkah, which just had to fall obnoxiously right on the 24th to the 1st of January this year. (Jewish calendar is variable, and it usually ends up being significantly earlier in the year, sometimes even occurring in late November.)
I hate both of these things! I'm a shameless grinch, and this year I got stuck totally alone for it, not even with other grinches to grouch with in person, because a family member inexplicably died of cancer halfway across the globe (seriously selfish of them, amirite) and my closest mates, who didn't go to that funeral abroad, decided to go on a holiday tour of a whole bunch of countries in the southern part of Africa instead.
So I'm sitting at my laptop indoors, brooding, thinking of how much I hate this time of year, because everything outside is closed so I can't even go have fun somewhere and meet new people. But, thanks to this hobby, there are people who are online at the same time, elsewhere around the globe, who are just as miserable and alone as I am right now and want to have some fun.
Cue a string of amazing and awesome stories throughout the last two days, from adrenaline-pumping, conflict-ridden action-adventure excitement to, you know ... eyebrow waggle. And I had fun.
Now I know this sounds sad as fuck, but while I may not be able to have an enjoyable holiday season, at least my pretendy-fun-time character can. And it's times like this that when I occasionally step back from the hobby or cut it loose for a spell, I remember why it's a good hobby to have available now and then.
Those of you with your old lads — I getcha. Mine’s under a year still and even now I can’t help but have occasional pangs about the fact that one day she won’t be there. I had one of those even the day I got her. I was thinking about it just today (before clicking this thread) after she did something especially cute for my benefit and was a generally thoughtful friendo.
I think once you’ve lost one, you never forget that feeling and you’re always going to be bracing for the next. But on some level I feel this has to make it somewhat easier to be mentally prepared, because the first is always the hardest.
I consider these days that a healthy relationship with death is one where we fully accept that it’s a part of life. I take a lot more photos and videos because of it, and spend more time just soaking in and appreciating her silly (even sometimes annoying) youth. ‘Cause I look at her and the older dogs and know she’ll eventually grow out of some flustering habits as she settles down and matures, but that I might eventually miss her overexcitability then.
Anyway, that was a lot of words and I realise no one cares about those, so here’s a few photos of the main event being a total goof at various stages of her as yet very early life:
Second dog in the third picture is actually totally unrelated to her AFAIK and is an entirely different breed, both me and the other dog’s human were just amazed how similar they look.
@arkandel said in Let's talk about TS.:
Maybe we could apply a Tinder approach to this? The left/right swipe thing.
So I meet Jane IC. I don't know if her player wants to TS.
I type something like "+interest/ts Jane". There's no notification unless Jane has done the same from the other side (+interest/ts Arkandel). If so we both get a message we want to e-shag!
I hate this idea, much like I hate Tinder.
Put it this way: in real life, I don't walk around with a flashing neon sign on my forehead that says 'up for a shag'. It's not that I'm never up for it, it's that I'm never so desperate for it that I need to advertise the fact that I might be.
If I did that, I would expect that all kinds of random weirdos would approach me and say, 'Well OK, do you like the look of me? You're up for it, I'm up for it, why don't we go back to my place?'
That's not how chemistry works.
I'd be much more likely to end up with someone if we just happened to share common interests and enjoyed spending time with each other without any ulterior motives. At that point I might say, 'You know, you're fun to hang around with. Wanna be more than friends?' And if the answer is no, theoretically we would still be friends, because we mesh well regardless.
That's how TS should work. I like your writing, you like my writing, we are not approaching each other specifically with the goal of TS in mind, we just happen to enjoy RPing with each other and chemistry naturally arises between our characters.
Some of my characters end up in relationships, some of them don't. I never set out with the specific goal of getting a character laid. I approach people who seem fun, and if the right chemistry happens, it just does. At that point, and not before, we might start talking about where this is going.
Maybe something like what you're describing would work on an advertised sex-game, like Shang. But on a game that's about more than that, I think that TS should occur as a natural byproduct of organic character interactions, not as a main goal.
Maybe I'm alone in that. But I doubt I'd feel comfortable playing on a game that had that kind of code, and if I did play it, I'd have my preferences set as a default to 'no'. I'd be insulted if anyone approached any one of my characters with the specific goal to e-bang. I put effort into their backstories. They're more than a piece of meat, yanno?