@Arkandel said in What MU/RPG opinions have you changed or maintained?:
And for the love of Cthulhu don't make any last-second melodramatic motions, long posts or bridge-burning to signal your exit. Inform any actual friends or regular partners you're going or how to reach you if they want to, then make a graceful exit.
Needs more up-votes.
@Thenomain said in What MU/RPG opinions have you changed or maintained?:
I feel bad for helping start Dark Metal, which was started for that exact reason, but spawned many clones of itself that hurt instead of helping.
Enh. DM served a purpose, and its clones probably did, too - gave people a place to go be twinks, even if the people in question were just the ones playing the WoD equivalent of a GOMO game.
Don't feel bad. You were doing community service: we all knew where to avoid if we didn't want to deal with the twinkery and where to go if we did! 
@Auspice said in What MU/RPG opinions have you changed or maintained?:
The issue I frequently run into is the opposite: players playing something entirely different (usually this is someone who knows absolutely nothing about the theme or setting and just wants to play somewhere active while investing low effort into learning).
This is really common, especially right now. There's such a dry spell in open games that people are just trying to shove concepts onto games where they don't really fit, and then they're miffed when the game doesn't adapt to accept them.
Which actually leads into my "then vs now."
Back in the day, I used to wish ill-will on any other game that wasn't the one I specifically was playing at the time. I remember thinking often and strongly that I hope Other Game implodes and people come play on Game I Like instead.
Now, I realize that variety and options are really good for this hobby. We need release valves, even if they're places that I personally wouldn't play.
@peasoupling said in Cyberrun:
Those... really could be shortdescs from just about any game ever.
Oh, for suresies. Just... they're pretty much all like that. Like, I wasn't reaching high and far to cherry-pick those examples; it was all low-hanging fruit.
@Admiral said in Cyberrun:
@Groth Am I correct in my assertion that the game is sex-based? Because the game seems sex-based.
Gonna have to go with a yes on the sex-based.
Nia, a dark-eyed gal with biosculpted curves (A-)
Willow, a curvy, tattooed honeyed teenage beauty (A-)
Seeing a community start to form around something that came out of bored spit-balling about a haunted hotel. People enjoying the idea and expanding it and connecting to it and making it into a weird fun world. It's cool. I'm enjoying this.
@JinShei I sent 'em mail on GH to point to this here post. 
@JinShei I know of a couple other people are fiddling with Ares and FATE, so you should be in good company. \o/
@JinShei said in Interest in a Discworld game?:
Currently, I'm thinking that since I tend to run very consent-based games, we can use a stat for the magic ability and let the players roll that if they contest, in a similar way to Gray Harbor and their glimmer.
Just a suggestion: Don't do it the way we did it on GH. It's super-hacky. If I knew then what I know now, I'd have respected @faraday's many splashed warnings that FS3 isn't meant for spell-casters and gone a different route, either laying a full plugin on top of it to deal with powers or just picking a different system.
I think FS3 is fucking awesome, which is why I used it even though I shouldn't have. Most of my "learn to code ruby" time is now spent making workarounds for the hackiness that I could have avoided by going a different route from the outset.
Hindsight.
There's an issue with the game's host causing downtime: http://status.digitalocean.com/incidents/g7frcnd0gp2z
Sorry for the inconvenience!
@bear_necessities said in Gray Harbor Discussion:
Game is back! It was @krmbm's fault
No, but it was. 
So sorry.
@Thenomain said in OOC Knowledge Levels Question:
So you're telling me that Ares says that functionality is being withheld unless you engage with a system? Because this does not sound like a neutral informative.
Yes. A tiny man also jumps out and baps you on the nose if you don't use it. I'm assuming that will stop when Ares is out of beta, but you get used to it.
@Thenomain said in OOC Knowledge Levels Question:
This is a fair distinction. Then change my "save a scene" to "start a scene". That's easy enough.
Okay, so this still isn't Ares encouraging you to share it, which seems to be the crux of the issue?
The reminder on Ares to start a scene pops up one time, tells you that you won't have full functionality if you don't open a scene, and then you never hear from it again.
The culture on both Ares games I've played was definitely geared toward sharing logs. But that's not about Ares. That's the culture on those games - and possibly M*s at large right now.
On the last Pern game I played, we OMG SHARED all the logs - and that was using MOO and Wikidot. It was clunky and complicated and awful, and we still did it with every goddamn scene.
Because of the culture. Not the software.
@Thenomain said in OOC Knowledge Levels Question:
Ares encourages me to save a scene because it’s expected behavior when RPing on Ares.
Sorry, it does?
Been playing Ares pretty much every day for six months straight, and it's never encouraged me to "save" a scene. Maybe this is a semantic thing but...
It does remind me to start a scene if I haven't, for the reasons that Faraday mentions. Ares DGAF what I do with the scene from there, though. If it might get deleted, it lets me know - in case I want to save it offline, which is irrelevant if people already save logs via their client.
But saying Ares encourages you to save your logs is like saying Wikidot encourages you to save your logs.
Also, I have a bunch of unshared/unsaved logs for various reasons (TS mostly). Ares and I remain friends, despite this. 
@Ninjakitten said in OOC Knowledge Levels Question:
That's a thing I'd wondered about! Does it send you a mail or something?
Yep yep. It will say "Unshared Scene Deletion Warning," or something to that effect. On GH, unshared scenes will hang out for 90 days; you get the warning after 83 days, so you have a week to download it.
@Sparks said in OOC Knowledge Levels Question:
I may be misremembering, then; I just thought if you were in a room RPing and didn't have a log going the game would periodically break in with a reminder to the room to start a log. Which did feel like encouragement to log scenes. And since I think a log gets deleted if not shared after a certain point, I read that sort of like "share it or lose it", or encouragement to share the scenes.
Ares only reminds you once - the first time you pose/OOC in a room with no log running. And the log deletion is an option; game admin can choose to store unshared logs forever, or delete them after some number of days. You get a little reminder to download them if they're going to time-out, so it's less "share it or lose it" and more "share it or save it offline." Ares also awards your luck points based on closing your scene, not sharing it.
So this is more a culture thing than a system thing: We, as a community, seem to be all about the log-sharing. Ares just makes it a lot simpler than it used to be.
As a player... I like mystery. I like finding things out. So I don't read logs, and I don't dig deeper into lore than I have to for the sake of getting approval and remaining thematic. There have been times this is awesome, as I realize something the same time my PC does and can play it accordingly. And there have been times when I fall out of plot completely because the assumption is that I'm reading all this shit when I'm really not.
As a staffer... I like being able to point people to logs, wiki pages, and other players/characters as places to get involved with plots. I trust players to be reasonable about what they know or don't know IC vs OOC. Yes, there have been occasional meta-gamers that abuse the availability of info, but that's a lot more rare than the people that use the info to involve themselves and others.
So I guess that puts me in @Pyrephox's camp: I go both ways.
The twists-and-turns that I could never have predicted that turned a silly little throwaway plot-seed into a super-fun story. I don't know everyone's tags here, but you all know who you are. 
If it is/was this one, you might try reaching out to @goodstarbuck (assuming it's the same person here as there).
http://arescentral.aresmush.com/game/5acc10ddbbdbe40e71740992/detail
@Rinel said in Gray Harbor Discussion:
I like the Dark Men but I'm struggling with how to thematically have them pose a threat. In my last scene I wrote it so that their attention was displayed by a small area of woodland going totally still in the middle of an oncoming storm making everything windy, and a fog rising out of the forest edge. But I'm not sure if that's too physical for them?
Of course I can just retroactively have it be done by a shadowy human working for them, so it's not a huge deal, but it does have me wondering.
I think @Pyrephox gave you a good answer. They're meant to have the meta, OOC knowledge that you as a player have about your character - what buttons they can push to scare/sadden/anger your toon. If the forest suddenly going eerily still freaks out your character? Then they're happy.
As for physically hurting someone... They can do it in Dreams, or they can lean on people in the real world to get them to do it for them (this has underpinned the Billy the Ghoul plot), or they can just not inflict actual physical harm.
If you're having troubles or want to bounce ideas, I highly recommend pinging on the Questions channel or forum on the game. We have a lot of really friendly players that are cool about brainstorming.