Best posts made by L. B. Heuschkel

It doesn't quite qualify as gallows' humour but I'm still dead laughing. Gentlepeeps, I give you the Queen of Denmark passing quarantine time making paper dachshund hats.

https://twitter.com/sammystritch/status/1240644470435123202

@Arkandel Everything is okay if you can pull it off well enough to convince everyone else...

And therein lies the problem with canon. You can't. Even if you somehow convince the entire current playerbase that Batman is a girl named Sue, new players won't know or recognise this canon.

At least for MUs that are fanworks, I think that tampering with official canon is dangerous, because it means not everyone is on the same page any longer.

@mietze said in RL Sads:

So I am so sorry you are in this place, and especially if you have complicit family to deal with.

No, that's the one good thing about this bloody mess. It's the only family I have any contact with, so at least no guilt trips from other relatives. Silver linings?

@HelloProject

@HelloProject said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

I mean don't fuck kids I guess. Kind of lowkey weird. I know this will make some of you mad but I said what I said.

I wanted to laugh but then I remembered once on WoW my character was developing a relationship with another and had been over several real life weeks. They were now at the end of the second date kind of point and things were headed... Well, towards a private dungeon instance, and maybe a bit of snuggling and fumbling with pieces of each other's armour.

Then the player tells me she's 14 in real life.

Not fun. Nope. Not even in the slightest. Couldn't see my ass for the soles of my feet, that's how fast I left.

@Wizz Man, my bedroom is a depraved nest of excitement. Because our backyard is full of bees and there's usually a few around in any given room at any time. XD

A player who refuses to share the stage if they cannot be at the centre of it is honestly a player you'll be better off without. Good players understand that sometimes, you're on centre stage, and sometimes you're support cast. Inside scheduled events, and outside of them. While it's true that we are all the star of our own life, that's not how collaborative story telling works.

I personally quite enjoy scenes in which my character takes a sort of narrative, story driving role -- setting the scene, letting the other player(s) respond, organically developing the story as a response to their actions. My own character may be present in a minor capacity or not at all -- he mostly serves as a vehicle for me to get to make stuff happen to others.

I also enjoy being the star. But certainly not all the time, or even most of the time.

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

I’ve seen it many times, often seemingly posted in earnest. And some of the comments when it’s shared are just vile. Which is why it bugs me.

Usually from the same crowd who will tell you not to let your illness control your life, that you choose whether you want to be a victim, and that where there's a will there's a way.

A.k.a. the 'never have been sick for real' crowd.

@Auspice True, the book was released in what, 1990? It probably was snail mail at that.

Now that's the kind of dedication I need my RP partners to show in slow pose scenes. XD

@silverfox This is unfortunately a very common problem among people with various chronic illness and disability issues. The core of it is often that people grow bitter about all that they are missing out on -- having a life in the conventional sense, being able to go where they want to go, do what they want to do, hold a job, have children, whatever it is that they cannot do. They see others who can get help -- and feel fundamentally cheated.

It's a bad mentality to get into, because who are you going to argue with over it? Disability and/or chronic illness is not a competition. But because aid is often scarce and takes one battle after another to get, ill and/or disabled people often end up in the mindset that it is a battlefield where you are constantly forced to prove that you are sick enough to warrant helping.

Combined with the constant exposure to toxic positivity (don't let the disease rule your life! you can do what you want if you want it enough!) it is very easy to fall into this kind of honestly depression-adjacent mindset.

@Kestrel Actually, it sounds to me like we play much in the same style. Down to the point where I am currently doing the man rumoured to have murdered his wife bit too -- and he's an assassin too, just to stick with your list.

I'm not good with fluff. Sure, there needs to be little victories and happy scenes too, but I am prone to thinking that nothing kills a character as quickly as obtaining a happy ending. Domestic bliss roleplay is dull. Settling in to live happily everafter is dull. We tell stories about people who rise up and overcome -- or fail to. Not about Martha's meatball recipe.

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

Having my character turned into something they're not -- something that I have no interest in playing, and that I am not portraying IC -- by others? Nope.

The only person who should decide what role you play is you. I am happy to take on the villain mantle at times but I decide when I do so. If someone tries to cast you as something you never intended to play, screw that.

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

Like I think almost everyone but the person who generates it eventually grows tired of the PC that is constantly needing to be rescued from kidnappers/rapists/assassins every week. And a lot of people get tired of the being a total unrelenting jerk ic for Reasons You Should Unravel (but forget about reciprocal play)?

Yes on both of these. I love having the trauma conga steamroll my character when it makes sense. Consequences are good. Bad choices leading to bad results is good. Being a dick for the sake of being a dick, or coming up with contrived reason after another to need rescued/talked out of suicide/whatever is not good. It's a fine line, but there's being a person who stands where the manure hits the fan, and there's being a drama queen slash attention whore.

As you point out too, reading the room is good. I generally don't introduce my characters in a dramatic fashion; I don't run up to strangers in real life and start ranting about my shitty life, why would they? Drama happens along the way -- and it should indeed be distributed, I prefer to run plots where everyone takes turns being the victim. Currently running a plot based on my character's complex background -- and in the next I will be focusing hard on someone else's because hello, my character is not the only person in the world who's got problems.

@Ganymede said in Plot Advice:

I concur with this. Be flexible. There are a million reasons why the team composition would change between episodes, so roll with it.

It's not just possible that the team composition will change, it's highly plausible. Some players will lose interest in the plot, or in the game. Real life happens. Player base is fluid.

Make sure that the plot can be picked up late in the game by new people. Leave openings and bits that new people can contribute. Try to write your story in a way that encourages participants to talk to and include others. The more people are aware on some level that something is going down at the dark castle, the more people are on the potential list of recruits for the heroic army.

@egg said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@L-B-Heuschkel People are struggling, but they were also not RPing with me in 2019, pre-pandemic, when I started this thread. So there's that!

It's interesting to me, because I am RPing more during this whole thing not less. I want a distraction and social interaction. In theory, MU*s are both, except when you have to endlessly hustle to RP, and then they're just unfun.

Not disagreeing in the slightest. I gave up on MU*s around 2010 because of this. I'm in Europe, and RP? RP meant having to be online from midnight to 6am to get any. Simply not an option.

Ares made it possible for me to get back into the hobby. Where I play (Gray Harbor) there are players in the US who are able to RP (if work slow) through the Ares interface during the mornings US time (which are my late afternoons and evenings), and players who are cool with slow scenes that don't happen in realtime.

I struggle with focus too when slow scenes take more than 12-24 hours for a pose round but it's a price I'm willing to pay. Most still resolve in a couple of days, not weeks. Live scenes are definitely more fun, but time zones means this is simply not an option for me most of the time. I understand that for some, slow scenes are difficult. It's just that for some of us, they're the difference as to whether the game is playable or not -- whether the reason is being on another continent, chronic illness, or other tardiness.

Finding RP from Central European Time has always been difficult. The one 'up' about it is that the people who are willing to make the effort usually are invested roleplayers -- the scenes I get are usually pretty full of content, not just random bar banter and people trying to score. Every cloud has its silver lining.

@mietze said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

WTF. You do not have to send out Fuck Me Vibes to be subject to people being gross. You do not have to have a conventionally beautiful/handsome PC, you do not have to "invite" it, and people who are "picked" for being gross towards are not secretly inviting it.

You sure don't. Creeps gonna creep and to the real creeps, what you do doesn't matter one bit.

@Caractus I took well to the character concept as it was presented to me -- a rambunctious, lecherous old guy from Djelibeybi. I'm not going to pretend I didn't backpedal with the speed of a thousand cheetahs the more I realised what you were doing.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to play a sex game. But I think you may have to look at what games you are apping to. If their theme is not sexual in nature, then that character is going to come across as -- very off theme at best. Discworld is somewhat Eurocentric,not going to disagree with you there -- but sex themed it is not. Trying to turn this into a matter of 'they hated black people' is a strawman. The issue was not the colour of the character's skin. The issue was the aggressive sexuality that made several other players highly uncomfortable.

There's no 'yall. I was not staff, as you are very well aware. I agree 100% with staff's decision to reject sexually overt chars that look like they're designed solely to write porn on a game that is decidedly not sexual in theme. Hold the strawmen, app on games that are sexual in theme -- as you've pointed out yourself, they exist and apps like this are welcome on them.

No matter what one's taste is, not all games are inclusive to all players and play styles. I've visited a number of games where my apps were denied for various reasons that I agreed or did not agree with. That's how it works. You either adjust to the theme if you want it enough -- or you move on to another game that's more in tune with what you want. If you can't convince staff that your app is legit then it's probably not a game you want to play on anyway.

It's a big sea, there are plenty of fish. Over 'n out.

@Narson said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
but instead isolate 'Black History'

That is an argument I am not qualified to have on the simple basis of not being American. I have no very little idea of how this subject is handled in the US. Black History Month is definitely not a thing here.

Awareness is increasing of the presence of POCs in Europe before, well, 1970. Their presence was never denied here, though, until fairly recently -- which is, to me, what makes it a white supremacist agenda. Fiction, art, poetry, historical accounts from just a few generations ago all treat POCs as -- well, just part of the scenery. Yes, they existed. Sometimes they were referenced in funny or strange ways, like 9th century accounts calling black people 'bluemen'. But they were definitely there, and pretending otherwise is a new, and highly questionable agenda.

@insomniac7809 I think you're absolutely right about that. You only need to take a look at any incarnation of say, the Arthurian legends in film. Rinso white in spite of the original 15th century work, Morte d'Arthur, naming numerous POC characters around the Round Table. Habits die hard.

I'd prefer 5 minutes and doing scenes 'live'.

However, I'm on European time, and the people I play with tend to be asleep when I am awake, or at best, at work. So I tend to consider myself lucky if I get a pose a day -- though sometimes, I manage to have a bit of time overlap and get maybe a handful of pose rounds in with someone.

So I voted for the last option because that's what most RP I can get is like.