Best posts made by L. B. Heuschkel

One factor which is also somewhat important isn't technological but social. Atmosphere and game culture matters a lot. In a supportive environment that doesn't tolerate stalking, grooming and other abusive behaviour, stalkers, groomers and abusers will be rarer.

Whereas in a toxic community where no one gives a fig in the name of 'free speech', the people who are considered prey will leave. For me, the turning point that made me leave WoW, for instance, was exactly that: I realised I spent one hour in eight actually -roleplaying- and the rest of my communications with other people were either helping them deal with someone being toxic at them, or watching people be toxic at me. Every public statement anyone made seemed to attract a horde of rabid alt-right recruiters, every female had a following of males either trying to get in her pants or telling her off because fuck girls the internet is for porn. The game became a hotbed of extreme rightwing politics, blatant racism and sexism, and Blizzard's infamous stance of 'not violating our community standards', a concept they take to almost Zuckerbergian levels.

At some point it's just enough. People, the sane people, dropped like flies. My friends were gone or leaving. You get off the sinking boat, leave it to the numberchasers and the edgelords trying to out-nazi each other.

TLDR: The first hurdle in preventing online abuse is to create a community in which abusers do not feel welcomed.

@testament And that's kind of the point, indeed. We can feel sorry for someone and agree that their situation is shit, but that still doesn't mean they get to assign us to mop and bucket duty.

Ugh, this is such a big deal in the chronic illness communities I'm in. People who play I Am More Sick Than You and assume that everyone who might be not quite as miserable -- or whom they believe are not as miserable -- are always available to clean up, to offer a shoulder, to give them anything they want. Because they're sicker than you, yo.

It doesn't work like that. If anything, distress makes people show their true colours.

@mietze Drawing a blank there too. If I write in a scene description and in a note at the top of a scene that this is a slow scene, expect so and so much time to pose, blah blah -- and people complain it's not fast enough, then frankly, no code is going to fix their refusal to read words.

There's never a promise of true privacy in someone else's sandbox, and obviously, staff can and likely will, poke at things uninvited -- particularly if you give them some sort of rules violation to go from. You should never enter anything into the command line that ultimately, you don't want anyone else seeing.

That said... I think I said it before, in the other thread, but here goes again. The hill I'm willing to die on is respect between players and admins. The fact that you can monitor someone's conversation doesn't give you the right to do so.

But I'm not going to contest the argument that some people will, anyway.

Two months ago I was experimentally put on a low dose of medicine for hypothyroidism, to see if it would affect extreme fatigue.

It did. My hormone values didn't change much, but I felt better. Then my GP retired.

New GP took me back off it, with the usual song and dance that fatigue is in the mind, and also, you're overweight. I feel like crawling into a corner and just lying there. I spent almost two years practically only leaving the sofa to crawl to bed and back again. I was finally able to walk a bit, maybe do a few things. Able to shower and have a conversation in the same day.

Back to square one. Lose weight while unable to do anything even remotely resembling exercise. Because my country thinks fibromyalgia and CFE aren't real.

@Auspice I am ridiculously easily found on Google. I mean, this is my name. The one in blue right there. I am a writer, I need people to be able to find me, I use my name everywhere. For me, the privacy filter is between hands and keyboard, putting nothing on the net that I don't want to see in Google later.

@Auspice said in How to Approach (nor not) a Suspected Creep:
The white knight, the overly romantic 'husband' material ........ who is somehow in a deeply committed relationship with multiple women at the same time.

That guy managed to singlehandedly drive six female players out of my WoW guild before I realized and kicked him out. He is a pain in the ass.

@Wizz Wow. That guy must feel like a real man now, having the guts and bravery to cuss out an eight year old. Much awe, so alpha, amaze.

Sigh.

@faraday I think that attempting to judge the quality of mush writing is a dangerous path, to be honest. We roleplay for the entertainz, after all -- not to meet critical acclaim. I try my best to write concisely and use all muh wordz but I am very well aware that I flounder into purple prose, I use the same verb twice in one pose, I make all the mistakes. I do in my first drafts too, but there I have the luxury of going back and editing. Mush poses don't have the structural support to survive a meeting with a literary editor.

That's one of the places where mush writing and novel writing differ dramatically. One aims for instant gratification in the here and now and to hell with a typo or a repeated verb. The other aims for perfection and goes through five edits to get there. In the end, the novel will have the better prose (one should hope!).

The only kind of judgement that's really fair to pass on mush prose is whether it was entertaining to write and to read, which is a very personal thing. I monitor some characters' scenes like a hawk because they do really interesting stuff; their prose may not pass the Hemingway test but hot damn, they can tell a story.

Why not? I've met people a few times and gone what the hell, didn't I know you back in whenever...

Past games:
LegendMUD: Kae, Tancred, Marcel, a couple of others I forget (it's been decades)
DiscworldMUD: Andrew, Danilo.
WoW (Argent Dawn, EU): Koriandr.
DiscworldMUSH: Andrew, Danilo.
Marsilikos: Andrei.
The Network: Esteban.
Trelawney Cove: Domingo, Mustelidae
Gray Harbor: Ravn

Present:
Keys (keys.aresmush.com Mustelidae, Nicolas, Ravn.

@gryphter said in Gap between RP fantasy and RP reality:

Usually for me it's something like 'this character has lots of meaningful relationships and connections, I bet I can find all sorts of important and interesting stuff to do.' Then I hit the ground and can't find RP outside of a bar. To be fair I'm not super masterful at taking the initiative and reaching out, so I'll own my half (whole?) of it.

I have invented character concepts I loved only to have the actual character flail and go down like a brick shithouse once I put it on the grid. Characters who for some reason just couldn't shake the inertia and had no reason to go out there and make stuff happen. When that happens, I retire them fast and try something else. Because yes, to get action you need to be willing to start action. It's very much a give and take affair, and entirely too many players in my 35 years of games -- on and offline -- just sit there, expecting you to do all the work of entertaining them and providing nothing in return.

That said, you have to meet people first. Going to a bar and doing so is the beginning of something -- not the end. But that something won't happen unless you get into touch with others and manage to catch their attention. So it's also on the other people present to not be exclusive, to allow new faces to join into the conversation.

@reimesu Well, now I'm not trying to restrain a manly sniffle into my breakfast, nope. Damn onion fairies.

I'm pretty sure that this is a far more vague answer than you were hoping for, but in my experience -- in plots or in fiction writing -- a story takes the time and space a story takes.

What you need to look for is not page count or the number of days it takes to resolve: It's reader/player engagement. As long as your players are happily pushing on and moving forwards, you're doing it right. If they start to slow down, get distracted, grind to a halt -- then you need to push the story onwards, whether by means of a new set of clues, something dramatic opening the next phase, or introducing new people.

It's very much a listen to your audience thing. And in that, not at all an easy thing because some players seem wildly excited and then suddenly lose drive without much warning. Other players start slow but stick with you until the end. A lot of them get distracted by something shiny elsewhere, and some turn up in the middle, asking if it's too late to join.

The ones you want to try the hardest to please are the quietly loyal ones -- who are often not the ones you'd think of first when you think of potential people to include. As it happens, the highly active, widely well known players are typically the ones who get the most offers, and you may easily find that the ones who are most grateful to participate are the ones whose names tend to be on the fringes. The ones with small children, the shy ones, the ones in odd timezones -- people who may be ready to bend over backward to be included in something that's set at a pace they can keep up with.

A large part of your decision about pacing making needs to revolve around that: Your player segment of choice. Some people have every night all week in EST. Some people have two nights a week, some are in Singapore or London, and some are online 24/7 but suffer from so much fatigue that a few poses a day are all they can manage. Which is your tribe?

@mietze said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:

@Scissors I think it's both. A lot of people probably don't think they are "as bad as" their behavior. But yeah, I do think in this particular case, he enjoys provoking reactions more than playing/participating.

Spot on. The characters I've seen, the people I've seen him go after, it's all about using whatever works to get under their skin and establish who's boss.

I'm inclined to agree with whoever said that he's probably enjoying all the mentions here immensely. It's still worth it to let him have that satisfaction, though, if it means that the various games don't have to deal with the fall-out of each having to go through 2-3 harassment cases before the jig is up. Any harassment case avoided is a good one.

@reversed said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

I've definitely heard complaints about how my bisexual character was clearly only around to do lesbian TS stuff because I wasn't receptive to the advances of a male player I had no interest in pursuing anything with.

Of course, I heard about these complaints second hand, because they weren't said to my face. Of course.

Think we've all run into toxic people like that. And if it's not their sexuality it's their character faction, the colour of the shoes, or something else. Some people will find an excuse to be a dick no matter what.

Have had same experience a couple of times, playing a straight white male and getting accused only being after teh gayz because saying no to some female. Toxic people will toxic.

@silverfox I am so utterly excited that we are playing together again!

10/10 would get deliberately or accidentally murdered by anytime!

I handle mine by generally trying to not be a dick -- and by keeping away from people who feel like they can't quite tell my character and myself apart. Unsurprisingly, my characters tend to end up spending a lot of time with people who share my OOC interests and timezone though, -- simply because we have a lot to talk about IC and OOC.

I'll say this: People who harp on about complete IC/OOC separation intimidate me. Mostly because it's so very often an excuse to be an utter dick IC. And then pull the "lol it's just rp" defence.

I have to concur; one way to avoid the worst bleed is to play characters who are very much not you. I share some opinions and traits with all of mine -- but they are never the same traits, and I disagree dramatically with them in at least some ways. Even my most community building, socially responsible characters have aspects of personality that makes me want to grumble at them.

They are, after all, not me. And they're not meant to be.

@Derp A player I play with regularly tossed a nugget of wisdom at me the other day. They often have very controversial opinions IC -- and said, "but I always make sure to touch base on the OOC channel right away, make sure that people know that it's ok to call my char a dick when he's being one."

And maybe that really is all it takes.