Normal humans. Normal town.
The intention is to include an inordinate amount of drama with Calaveras as the central point of activity. This is meant to be similar to most adult television dramas. What we may see as an abnormal amount of activity involving police, rescue, fire, criminal activity, drug activity and the like is simply everyday life for citizens of Calaveras. It seems a surmountable endeavor, but they juggle these events along with their personal drama.
@thesuntsar said in Calaveras: Adult Fiction Drama MU:
legendary hitman turned professor of history
I really have no follow-up, but that deserved a quote. 
@goldfish said in Calaveras: Adult Fiction Drama MU:
That is something I've never done. How do you even do that? How can you be an asshole AND get people to play with you. (I mean, I've seen it but I can't figure it out.)
Enh, it's not necessarily being an asshole.
A likable money launderer. A con-man posing as a businessman. On the run for armed robbery and trying to stay below the radar. Et cetera.
@goldfish said in Calaveras: Adult Fiction Drama MU:
What role can I help fill? Is there a gap in something? Shortage of a type? An imbalance?
We have a lot of white hats, so a bad guy would be "novel," but might also kinda be stuck to get involved with all the super good guys on the grid. There are a couple of bad guys, and a couple of cops, though.
Right now, the medical/hospital-affiliated and local business owners are the most common character types.
(Also, is it a sausage fest or a clam bake? I like that relationship RP and I can play either gender but if'n you need more of one than the other....)
+census says it's 34 male to 26 female, but it's probably dependent on when you're online. It's not so heavily skewed one way or the other at the moment.
So, yeah. Probably doesn't help narrow it down a lot, but it is pretty wide open right now. I can tell you that the one thing we have a lot of are people that are taking care of an aging relative.
@jonah42175 said in How to start?:
I know I should throw out a "Scene anyone?" line, but most of those seem to get frowned upon and considered needy. Am I just reading things the wrong way?
Yes? Or maybe it depends on where you're playing.
I'm only on Calaveras at the moment, and - outside of +events - every scene I've had has begun with me or someone else going IC and saying something about looking for RP on the public channel.
I guess the culture could be different where you're playing.
@thesuntsar said in Calaveras: Adult Fiction Drama MU:
I definitely get the sense that players are going to need to self-start their own stuff.
Just adding - if you're interested to join - there are player-run events basically every night the rest of the week.
The atmosphere on the game is really relaxed and collaborative. All the players I've talked to so far seem cool, so the OOC drama has been almost nil. The two staffers respond to stuff quickly but seem to be content to let players steer the RP with a few meta-breadcrumbs here and there.
It's still more fluff than substance, but - almost a month into it - things look promising.
@faraday said in Calaveras: Adult Fiction Drama MU:
So what is the actual drama? Are there any plots or just hanging out?
It's still pretty new, with (I think) most of us still getting our feet under us and figuring out our characters, so it's mostly hanging out right now.
There's a group running some criminal stuff, and a forest fire, and there was a drive-by yesterday.
But it's mostly fluff at the moment. Fun fluff, but fluff. 
@pandora said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:
Listen, I don't know if there's something specifically wrong with your genital area (there are all sorts of antibiotics these days, best of luck) but how about not using the word cunt/cunty as an acceptable mud-slinging insult when that's actually precisely the sort of shit that will get you slain in the
I object to the assumption that I have genital areas, and I find your post to be personally insulting and mud-slinging.
@ganymede said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:
Because shit in the Hog Pit overflows into the rest of the board.
So deleting the Hog Pit and then making the rest of the board "more toxic-friendly [tm]" is going to stop this?
@sunny said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:
As an out of left field (ish) thought...:;
I am really kind of wondering what would happen if the hog pit just went away entirely and 'mildly constructive' just became the general discussion forums with SLIGHTLY less lax rules than at present. Yes, there are people that would quit here if that part of the forum went away, and there would be a lot of screaming, but...
I don't see a 'new' hogpit style forum wakening, or the user base splitting. I see...people being pissed off, some leaving for a while, and ultimately everyone coming back. There are reasons for gloves off possibilities, but I think that those reasons could be crafted into the semi-constructive rules to allow for it.
I dunno. I keep hearing folks say they really would prefer that, except for a very vocal few, and I'm not sure why we as a culture/community are letting a vocal few people make us keep the hog pit around instead of making the decision that we need to be better.
So, lemme just make sure I'm clear on your suggestion here.
You want to take away the place where people are supposed to be toxic assholes because they're being toxic assholes all over the rest of the forum, then say it's okay to be slightly more toxic on the rest of the board, in an effort to reduce the overall toxicity?
Also, I don't think a "vocal few" people who want the board to be made out of rainbows should have a greater voice than the "vocal few" who appreciate having a place to call a spade a flaming piece of cunty spades.
IF YOU DON'T WANT TO READ THE HOG PIT, DON'T OPT IN TO THE HOG PIT.
Why is this so hard?
There is also http://www.cheesesoftware.com/MUCon/
If you can't install add-ons and/or have a firewall like my work does.
@thenomain said in What does Immersion mean to you in MUs?:
@faraday and I were just discussing how code can easily push you out of immersion in situations where you have to stop what you're doing to remember the "IC" way to do things, when you have other methods already in your culture and the culture of most the people you're playing with. That isn't fun, and so it takes you out of the frame of mind that immersion is meant to bring you into.
This is me, 100%. This is why, when people start talking about a bunch of systems and code to do a bunch of crap, I can probably guess that this isn't the right place for me.
Unless those systems are so seamless that I never have to look up a command to run them, then they are actually killing my suspension of disbelief. I don't want to have to read a help-file in the middle of my death scene so I can remember if it's +death or +die.
This holds true with theme issues, too. If I have to stop and look up the IC word for Tuesday, it's going to yank me out of the moment. So let's just pretend we're using whatever the IC word for Tuesday is, and not sweat the details, k?
For me, immersion is the emotional or cerebral response to whatever scene we're creating. All of the coded bells and whistles may be nifty once or twice, all of the theme minutiae someone was nice enough to document is great, but the meat of it is reading what someone else wrote, having my own emotional response to that and then translating my response into my character's response: I may be appalled by something a character does while my PC thinks it's amazing, and - to me - the immersion comes when I'm able to have some kind of response of my own and then know how my character responds.
If my response is somehow tampered with - because I'm having a hard time finding the right command to run, because there's something about the theme or setting that isn't clear, because I have to question if what I'm doing is "right" - it's going to ruin my suspension of disbelief.
Basically, I just prefer to RP with cool people who are happy to hand-wave the minor stuff so we can get on with the good stuff.
Ohhh. Yeah, I guess I could see that being a thing. Forum/PbP games often have a dock-able chatbox.
@three-eyed-crow said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
I sometimes wonder if web clients that spawned/separated OOC channels to a separate tab by default would help with this.
Like what Ares does?
@rebekahse said in Valorous Dominion:
...are you supposed to start with just a very minor tilt in one direction in only a few traits, or what?
It kinda plays out that way. You're only allowed to tilt to a 14 on one side out of chargen anyway.
It sounds limiting, but it hasn't been a hindrance in my play so far.
"I just met you, but now I am going to pour out my entire back-story in our first conversation together. Now your turn to do the same!"
You can also raise everything but size down the road.
Since all characters are coming out of chargen with the same limitations, at least you know everyone is going to be in roughly the same place: they all kinda suck at one thing so they can be awesome at something else.
Maybe your tough-guy starts out kinda ugly, but eventually learns that red is actually his color, and raises his appearance~
Anyway, I've got two characters here, have had a couple of fun scenes on each. Although I agree that the points are a little limiting out of Chargen, I was able to make two characters that are pretty true to my original concepts out of the points I was given.
The wiki is a mess, and there are a few things broken on the game (+glance, +help finger says you can set things in the finger fields but you can't, etc.), but the staff are super responsive, quick to fix things or implement suggestions, prompt on answering questions, and very friendly.
@faraday Mmm.
I can reach the website, but it doesn't have any info. This is from BGSU right now (and my Ares install looks the same, running on the default ports).
@wildbaboons If you know Wikidot, you should be able to Areswiki pretty easily.
I'd volunteer, but I can't actually get to Ares sites from work. Ports are blocked. 
I can reach M*s through the Cheesesoftware, but not the actual portal.