Best posts made by Lithium

If you are going to moderate, make a list of rules. Make the rules clear lines that everyone can understand. Then enforce them. Harshly.

There is a very real schism in the way certain people say something and can get away with it, and then someone else says the /same thing/ and they do not get away with it.

The rules need to be applied equally.

They need to come down on everyone equally.

Otherwise... it's the same old meaningless circle jerk where some people can get away with saying anything, and other people cannot say anything without being attacked and railed on.

If you half-ass this moderation thing (Which is what it seems like right now honestly) it's not going to make /anyone/ happy.

On the other topic of the hog pit, if you remove the hog pit you're going to have an even tougher time to moderate things because there won't be anywhere that people can just... vent.

Venting is how some people move through stuff and move on. Without that outlet it's just going to make the explosions when they happen elsewhere be all the more messy.

It /would/ be nice if everyone could just get along and sing campfire songs and be completely nice to each other but at this point opinions are so ingrained in some cases that even perfectly reasonable statements get someone's back up and there is a pissing contest or a cat fight or a dog pile.

In a lot of ways, this Forum is best equated to the power of the Mob Mentality. In a Mob, people have anonymity, we have that same anonymity.

Everyone knows what Anonymity does by this point really, it removes filters and people behave without restraint.

@faceless Life 3 can do transformations on yourself. Life 4 for other people.

Most themes have room for multiple areas of RP.

Not all of them, but most of them.

People like to prioritize what they enjoy the most but that does not mean that anyone else has to follow those expectations or priorities.

If the game says: Keep sex to private rooms' then they are explicitly saying 'We do not care just don't make it a thing' if the game does not care, then anyone else caring is violating the spirit of the game in a sense.

In the end sometimes it's just about enjoying the theme, but everyone enjoys it in their own ways.

As for why /I/ pursue TS on games not built around it is because of the three following reasons:

1. Character growth and development. It affects the character in sometimes deep ways, emotional changes, reactions to the individual, etc.

2. Continuity. Most sex MU's don't have any sort of continuity to them really, I enjoy the ongoing continuity that my character is living their lives in.

3. I enjoy the RP of it from time to time. It is /fun/.

That's it.

The locations need to add to the theme so that players can feel invested into the theme and that the world is what it is.

Locations are the only static way to do that beyond news files.

Hangout 1 place where people can play games, drink, eat, socialize.

Hangout 2 place where people can play games, drink, eat, socialize.

Two identical locations...

Except that if 1 is a bowling alley, and the other is a chuck-e-cheese, then two totally different environments.

Then there is tone... is this part of a city horrible or not. If people actually take the time to read descriptions and such, it can add a whole lot more to the game than who is banging who.

It's probably only going to get worse, now that he was banned, he has something to crusade against on 4chan and that'll only draw more trolls here.

I suppose I could be surprised but...

Level based systems are inherently exclusive.

That is why I dislike Saga for MU* and indeed all level based systems in that environment.

I could care less about who is more powerful than who so long as people can participate in things but EVERY Saga game I've seen always comes down to this:

An abundance of plot for high level people, and nothing for low level people.

And low level people can't even really /help/ in anything designed to account for primarily high level people.

There are also civilizations where female bloodline was super important... and they ran things.

Sooo... yeah.

@Tempest said in High Fantasy:

My main concern with FATE as a system is that it usually feels like it boils down to "what did staff let you get away with?" for your stunts and stuff. Which is less of a thing in 'pure mechanics' type games. And while a potential problem in a 'traits-based' game, traits don't come with actual mechanics backing them up like the custom-made stunts/etc do.

I am by no means an expert on FATE though, and that was just my impression from briefly playing on one game that used it.

Every system has broken bits and pieces. Look at the current big source on these forums, CoD. So many broken merits.

So.

Many.

If I do Fate I am making a list of what stunts will be available. It will likely be a large list, but I cannot guarantee I can think of everything. I am doing a custom magic system as well. In the end, like most games, Fate is only as broken as the game runner allows it to be.

@2mspris LOL One of my characters was on that CrackMUX list.

I also played on med and shadowed for a while too.

@Autumn so many feels from that Ambermush list...

@Misadventure Nope!

There is going to be room for all sorts of play styles and stories. In the notes I've been throwing together for basic themes everything has some darkness to it. It is a brutal and bloody world, power gets you only so far because there are other powers.

Now as far as regular NPC's go, yeah, I expect a PC could be made to be strong in their chosen areas of strength and experience, but there's a /ton/ of different ways to build a completely valid and effective PC in FATE which is one of the reasons I like it.

My main thing is I want the game to have space for White Hats, Black Hats, and Wishy Washy shades of grey types.

There is going to be war, intrigue, dungeon crawling, bar fights, magic, monsters, & more as the players try to make sense of the new world.

I am borrowing one element from Earthdawn that I liked, isolated communities of survivors of a world shaking event, only a few large cities.

The main city is a place where four 'countries' that have risen up since the devastation meet, and it is neutral ground with 'peace' enforced by the Twisted Spire (Mages Consortium) essentially.

In the mid 80's, all there was, was table top, and dial up BBS's. The 'internet' was a 'thing' but not /the/ thing it is now.

I had to wait sometimes days between 'poses' sometimes and you know what?

It sucked.

Bad.

If I had to wait hours between poses I'd fuck right the hell off because that's literally two poses before I have to go to work.

I don't have time to sit and wait 30 minutes between poses anymore, let alone hours.

Then again, the idea of having discord and voice chat necessary for RP on a game with a bunch of strangers? No.

It's weird enough on Roll20, and that is more like a virtual table top.

@surreality said in Has anyone ever tried to resurrect a dead game with a group of dedicated players?:

There's also the possibility that if the staff haven't seen anything budge for ages -- and some places stay up for years after they've 'died' so this can be quite some time -- the people running the joint will not really be checking in to approve anyone in the first place, provide any needed assist, etc. and may actually resent people dredging it out of the mothballs because the time they once spent administrating the game has long since been dedicated to something new. It's a bit shitty, but it's a thing to bear in mind.

^^^ this.

This is the biggest hurdle to trying to revive a dead game. If the population is zero, aka no staff, no players, then staff are probably not even checking on it anymore. Which means even if you have 10 people. 20 people. If staff aren't there to check on it, you can't really get anything going because nobody will get approved etc.

@faraday This is why I like the idea of a full web integration, no needing a secondary client. It's absolutely true we need to get rid of the old syntax and just go with new syntax that is more intuitive. Even the nomenclature of what a 'pose' is can be disconcerting, @emit, @what?

@Ominous Roll20 is free. Don't have to pay a thing unless you want to.

Is it possible to at least be able to block someone from chatting with you? I don't need @Cirno spamming my chat box with him cursing me and typing that he's grabbing his cock. That'd be awesome because I'd really just rather not read it at all.

Thanks.

I just want plots where there is meaning and purpose behind them. Where the players actually affect the game world in lasting ways.

Otherwise, it's just monster of the week nonsense.

I know there is a way to ignore whole groups, like Taste's Less Gamey or whatever, but is there a way to ignore just a topic/thread within that group? Like the Basketball one. I don't follow basketball, I don't want to read it but having to mark it as read every time there's a new post is... a little annoying.

Just wondering if it is possible to do, other than ignoring whole major groups.

The problem with FC centric games is everyone has their own idea of what an FC is like based on what comics they prefer, who was writing those comics at the time, and who they interacted with.

There's been so many retcons, reboots, and rewrites that it is just... impossible (in my opinion) to make an FC character that everyone will agree with. Which means it's just an OC with special powers (and usually much stronger than any OC can be). How many times have we seen FC's re-written to be alternate gender, or alternate sexuality, or alternate timeline, or whatever?

To many.

So the idea that an FC is somehow /superior/ to an OC is just silly really. Every FC that exists on any MU is an OC, it's not going to be faithful to the comics, because the comics aren't faithful to themselves.

That is why I prefer all OC games. Every character is just as important as any other character. Or at least closer to a parity.

It's also why I prefer super/comic games that use a hard system, so there are rules that define what people can, and can't do, along with some randomization to help resolve conflicts because people don't like to lose but if the dice say you lose, then it's easier to accept because blame can be shifted to the dice, and you can move on from that.

@Three-Eyed-Crow some people think downvotes actually matter in the grand scheme of things.

Though I have heard rumor that if you get a low enough reputation it affects the amount or time between postings you can do.

@social-diseases said in FCs on Comic MUs:

You have to begin with a solid base. And I understand this should go without saying but it does apparently have to be said - if you do not have the temperament, if you do not have the organizational and narrative skills, you should not even make the attempt. If your goal is self-aggrandizement, you should not make the attempt; if your goal is to create a sandbox for yourself and for your friends and your attitude is that anyone outside of that group is so peripheral to your interests that they may be subject to any level of abuse, you should not make the attempt. When you begin toxic, you have no right to complain that the environment is poisonous. And when there is a problem on a comic game, 9 out of 10 times, it is because of this. All other problems flow from the source of malicious or inept staffers.

The sheer amount of 'No' in this bit is just absurd.

No MU is ran entirely by one person, unless it /is/ a game intended to be a sandbox for a few people and if so there is /nothing wrong with that/. Nobody has the right to tell people not to /try/ something, to not even make an /attempt/ at something is just... No. You don't get to choose that for people. That is the point of having multiple staffers, to shore up each others weaknesses and to play to your strengths. Nobody can be /everything/, at least not for long, without suffering severe burnout.

The problem on comic games is because they're all the same for the most part. Most games are a mix-mash of DC and Marvel (and more). Screw that. Most are WAY alternate timelines. Screw that. Most are places where there is no parity between FC and OC. Screw that.

Any staff problems only compound the issue.

@ganymede said in FCs on Comic MUs:

@social-diseases said in FCs on Comic MUs:

Camping is a problem. There is no easy solution.

Here's a solution: how about only allowing one PC for every player? No alts. You're either playing on the game or you are not.

Permit people to use redshirts or proxy bits for the same PC, so that they can RP in two places at once if they are worried about missing RP opportunities on the game by being occupied in one scene.

This is a good idea, alts are not a good thing on Super Hero MU's in my opinion, they allow people to hold their 'favorites' and thus deny them to others. It is the rare person who can be ultra active on multiple characters at the /same time/, and even if you manage it, your attention and focus is split. Far better to just not allow alts as much as you can enforce, at least, not amongst the FC's. Maybe allow 1 FC and 1 (or 2, whichever) OC's might be the way to go here. Something worth trying at least.

I think a policy of FC's needing to /lose/ more might help. In the comics FC's are kicked around for much of an arc before they finally win the day, if they do at all. Part of the problem is that some people playing FC's aren't actually /writers/ in the sense that if they don't have a clear goal for a thing, they want to win by default especially if they're playing their favorite FC.

(EDIT: To remove stupid gif.)