Best posts made by L. B. Heuschkel

While I'm currently player only, I've always viewed myself as player first, staffer second. As in, I came there to play. Playing is the fun part. Joining the staff is something you do so you can spread that fun to even more people, and give them reason to come around, hang out, and play in your sandbox. In a manner of speaking, what goes around comes around.

Staff unfortunately also comes with dull work and occasionally, extremely frustrating situations. I've always been an enthusiastic player, busy builder, and very reluctant admin because I fucking hate having to deal with admin stuff.

@Goblin I am like this with cheese sammiches. Dairy and wheat and sugar intolerant. And every so often -- get me a cheese sammich on sugar-filled white bread if it kills me.

@Seraphim73 I think you're on to something very important here. Story telling, from the GM's perspective, where the point is not just writing the story, but making every bit player feel that their input mattered, that it affected the outcome.

Ironically, it's one of the hardest things to accomplish.

Many players compete for the attention of staff or other (more or less correctly perceived) 'community leaders'. I've been staff, guild master, and game master enough, virtually and offline, to realise that the more known your name is, the more people you have wanting to lick your feet -- or stab you in the back, depending.

The challenge here, which I think at least formal staff (but honestly, anyone with a big name) is responsible for rising to, is inclusion. The loud and confident players will make themselves noticed. It's the other ones you need to look out for. The quiet ones. The ones who often end up feeling that they weren't really welcome, that their input didn't matter, and that they wouldn't be missed if they left.

They're wrong, incidentally. A game that retains only the loud ones ends up in tumbleweeds or drama fests, or both. Even the most extrovert players need more than 1-2 other players to feel that the world they exist in is alive. They need an audience. And to retain that audience, they need to make room for it, to allow an exchange where sometimes, you're the lead actor and sometimes, you're the guy on third row eating popcorn and clapping.

The quiet ones need catering to too, they need equal opportunities, and they need attention. It can be an ungrateful task because many of them are withdrawn, face social challenges, are drama queens, suffer from various disorders, or are just introverts who may not even -want- to get dragged out and seen (but they still appreciate getting the -offer-).

Players are not obligated to care about this group, the group that I think of as 'the silent ones'. Staff that run official plotlines is. At least to me, that's a very defining difference between player and staff. A good and decent player will try to do what staff have to do too, and make room for everyone that wants to step up. But they don't -have- to.

https://twitter.com/RupertMyers/status/1322132368510111749

@faraday said in Staff’s Job?:
Unrelated -- one way to look at the permissions/role/title angle is Ares' roles system. Instead of simple flags like WIZ/ROY/JUD, Ares lets you define custom roles, each of which is granted permissions to certain commands.

You might have a builder role that can build/desc/teleport around. You might have a wiki staff role who has permissions to manage wiki pages, or app staff who can view apps and jobs.

It works great, though. I can build rooms on request (I am a professional copywriter, short prose is what I DO) without taking on other responsibility. Go, Ares.

Michael Bondesen.

I realise this won't ring any bells outside Denmark, but that's a rather bloody huge cultural icon having gone on ahead.

@Thenomain 3000 characters is a lot, too. I mean, yes, I'm a professional copywriter by training, I can definitely do it, but if I only have content for 1200 words, I am going to absolute -hate- bloating it into drivel just to meet some imaginary standard of verbosity. Long != better.

I can see the point of making sure that people have some setting familiarity. It saves explanations, and helps prevent players deviate from the theme. But I have to be honest -- unless that wiki or theme page is VERY well written, my mind is going to wander. At least after 3000 or more words. Novel, movie or game website, if it hasn't hooked me after five minutes, it ain't happening.

If I ever become involved, again, with setting up a game theme from the bottom and up, this is going to be one of the big issues for me. A theme, particularly one that's either original or from a not very widely known fandom, needs to have a door marked 'clueless newbies'. An in, so to speak, for those who are unfamiliar. One that doesn't make them feel like their presence is at best tolerated. A way into the theme that doesn't feel like a novel -- even if it's just a one-page bullet list of dos, don'ts and suggested pop culture references.

Yes, it will mean that occasionally, you get some moron who thinks he's playing superheroes while everyone else is playing Lord of the Rings. But the other way around means you miss out on a lot of people -- something which I imagine is a dangerous choice, since most MUs seem to be struggling to get a playerbase going (nevermind keeping it).

@Alamias said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

@Aria Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!

DO YOU KNOW WHAT FISH DO IN WATER?

@Coin said in Punishments in MU*:

That's not even getting into some people getting approved because staff is their friend and "they can be trusted with this".

Burn it with fire.

Disgruntlement or reason to party? Not sure. Sometimes, a little bad news is good news. At least when it comes to finding out that no, 14 months of extreme fatigue is not depression. It's exactly what I've been saying all along -- and now the ultrasound agrees that my thyroid gland is enlarged and so full of cysts it looks like it's been shot with rock salt.

@mietze There are, and it really is about getting off on it. There was this woman on a MU I played... Some of us finally started to grok what was going on when we started talking about her, instead of to her (she was expert at keeping relations so that her friends never talked to -each other-).

In the span of a few years she was raped, pregnant, miscarried, pregnant again, miscarried again, abducted, found a dead body, seduced in a romance story worthy of Hollywood, dumped in a ditto, made homeless, opened a shelter for street dogs while homeless, attempted killed by her sister ... the list went on.

Hundreds of people on social media appeared to support her through one disaster after another. Once we started poking... They were all stock photos. Every single one.

Denmark shuts down completely from Dec 25. I don't disagree with the decision as such, but bloody hell, so mad at the people who made it necessary.

I've been in bed/on sofa for 14 months. Finally getting into treatment, finally looking at a diagnosis. And now all non-emergency hospital procedures are shut down until further notice.

Guess I'll just take a couple of months more.

I've yet to lead a scene in a MUSH but I have nearly 40 years of game mastering experience from other places -- and my take is, you make sure to ask everyone what they do. Yes, some players talk and type fast -- and you let them, and then you wait for the other guys to get their words in, and if the fast guys can't cope with that, then frankly, that's their problem. If people want to do scenes where only they matter, they can do their own. When I game master, I want input from everyone.

@solstice said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

I feel like every single thing I get in life anymore is chronic, and just has doctors shrugging and being like, "Oh well, that's your life now."

It's a big awful pill to swallow. Particularly the knowledge that no matter what you do from here and on, it's not going to get better. There is no 'someday I'll be well'. Only 'how long can I postpone the inevitable', and trying to make the most of what you have left.

Not going to lie, there are days where I feel like it's a battle so uphill that even getting out of bed is too hard.

@Auspice You are unfortunately quite right. It's one of the reasons I have yet to dip into MUSH GM'ing because I'm not quite sure how to handle that. Probably calling for rolls through pages, asking people to page me their intentions before posing, something.

Or, well.

Telling people to respect each other's poses, keep to the pose order, and make room for everyone. Because really, they should be doing that anyway.

@aria Good catch. On the partner. As for the OB/GYN, some people should never be let out of medical school, not to mention, the cave they were born in.

@Arkandel said in Engaging the Whole Scene:
But the real issue is not even that. It's simpler - ego is very much a thing. Many players are not trying to participate in a story, they're trying to win the game. To me that's what it boils down to.

Unfortunately this is true. To me, that's a game breaker. I will roleplay with people of this caliber once. Just once.

@JinShei She sent me piles of artsy fartsy pictures of women in silhouettes dancing around with large swathes of fabric or posing in yoga and ballerina positions, always with the head cut off -- very artistic, apparently, only photograph half a body.

I mean, I'm not bitter or anything. This person only cost me most of my online friends and several very good offline friends as well.

It's possible that I misunderstand the term OOC room, and if so, I apologise.

To me it seems beneficial to a game, to have a channel or location in which players -- rather than characters -- may connect. Not so much in order to idle time away or get into arguments about real world matters, but to check out each other's character concepts and make arrangements to get in touch in character.

It may be a timezone // small playerbase thing. I vastly prefer finding roleplay on the grid, meeting people in the appropriate locations without arranging much in advance. However, that's just not always viable, and that's where some kind of OOC room or channel is handy. It's -practical- to be able to ask, 'anyone up for a scene at...' or coordinate when the two other people for your sting operation will be online, or for that matter, put together the practical bits of next week's plot.

The down side of an OOC environment is, obviously, that it needs to be policed. Players can do so a far bit of the way on their own but eventually, there will be some git who starts manure for, well, manure and giggles.

@Ghost said in Well, this sums up why I RP:

Sidebar: I was always really disappointed by just how many scenes never got logged or posted. I have been of the opinion that if it happens in-game, then it should happen on-camera. I dont care if it's TS or two characters complaining about a third.

I am of the firm opinion that almost everything should be posted and then readers can decide for themselves what parts they want to read. I'll contend that at least some games prefer to keep a PG13 website, and that should be respected. Apart from that, though, let me decide what parts of the story I want to read (unless you're really boring, that's probably going to be all of it because like @Ghost, I read logs while taking a break).