Best posts made by mietze

I also think that it is normal/understandable to FEEL almost anything. It is okay to feel sad/jealous/worried/mad/whatever! It is a think that humans do, and emotions are different for everyone and can be extremely situational!!

The red flags/dealbreakers for me are how those things are expressed. I might very well have a situation where if a connected character leaves I would feel like my PC would become unplayable.

But IMO it would NEVER be appropriate to come at someone and demand that either they play a certain way or it's their fault that I would just never be able to play that PC again. That is way too guilt trippy (we all have irrational insta-dealbreakers, that is def one of mine). Sometimes it is most appropriate to keep some things to yourself. You only get to make the decisions for yourself, and it is in fact possible to end things and even leave a PC without that kind of thing.

Also, I do think the avoidance behavior can be an issue (not just about TS or posing style, but a lot of things). IME though like...a lot of people in general are like that except (well, maybe even if!) when they are FB keyboard warrioring or whatever.

Many people will /not/ speak up and ask for what they want. I understand this, because if they do they will have to worry about someone bitching about them being a snowflake, or having no IC/OOC boundaries, not being a hard core RPer, whatever. Many people will not check in or ask (or tell others that they enjoy feedback) for feedback or what the other person because they don't want to come across as suspicious or creepy or like they're too dumb to figure it out.

A lot of upset feelings that I have had to referee as a staff member or work out in groups has at its root that someone didn't get something that they needed/wanted, that they thought they'd dropped enough hints, and they are now hurt that they weren't picked up and run with--but they might well have gotten really angry at people for asking outright and putting them on the spot too.

This isn't some horrible awful OMG MUSHERS ARE THE WORST EVARRRRRRRR thing. I can say the same for the various conflicts I got to unravel and deal with when I was in PTA both at the program level and at the district/state level. HR people get to deal with this at workplaces large and small. Or any nonprofit too.

I don't know what it is about people (though also, the demographics of the groups I've personally worked with have SOME diversity as far as ex-pat/race/culture/personality/gender ect but they're all pretty much white American majority, so I would be super interested to know if it's significantly different say in orgs outside of that) but at least almost universally in RL and otherwise many folks find it super hard to ask for what they want out of a situation or proactively state boundaries. It's really fucking awkward sometimes even if you have a lot of practice. So honestly, I try to give a lot of grace, especially online with people I don't know. Everyone has their own thresholds of what's intolerable, though. It's easy for me personally to say "roll with it what's the big deal" about a lot of stuff, as I would imagine that others could say the same about my peeves.

I think it is probably best practices for staff to fade to black unless they are pretty sure that the player is capable/willing to communicate openly if they are feeling that they do not want to do it. Sometimes people find it hard to just communicate to another player that they'd prefer not but are going along to please that person. I think it is more of a risk someone will do that with staff.

But honestly, otherwise who cares.

Both player and staffer should probably be prepared for some people to totally flip their lid and do the omg ts whore gets everything for TSing the staff thing, which probably doesnt feel great.

While I don't like when fantasy races seem to be just a little too rooted in RL racial stereotypes and bugaboos, tension between different sentient species is something that doesn't bother me. I think it is a really good way to explore stories, especially as a human player, because I do think that putting people into boxes and othering people who aren't in our boxes is inseperable from human existence in many ways. I don't really like utopian game settings at all, so there just needs to be some sort of tension in a game for me to enjoy it, just for my own preferences in what I like to explore in my RP.

Colonialism/survivalism on an alien planet? Cultural and class classes? Conflict and old alliances/hatreds between different peoples of a realm? I do tend to gravitate towards that in a setting.

However, if the setting writers wrote things that seemed specifically steeped in racial slurs/stereotypes of RL I'd probably not feel comfortable playing in that.

A pc i had on a shadowrun game who was part of the Russian mob was part of a group that kidnapped an orc pc and then tortured him to get some info out of him. Iirc he was just slaying his rolls and icly we took a break and my pc dumped a bucket of soapy water on him to clean him up.

As his racial allergy (and he took it at the maximum level)...he was allergic to soap. We offered to retcon that but he thought it was absolutely hysterical and the best death ever. We never got the info but he did reroll a pc to join us.

And yes this was a noncon game like Jesus christ probably about 23 or 24 years ago lol

Super excited to start a family game of Legacy Betrayal after tomorrow (we got a copy for the big kids, since our most requested game on family game night for the teens is Betrayal at House on the Hill. Though they like Redneck Life too (we have all the expansions).

Squeeeeeeeeeeee

Bananas peel much easier and cleaner if you peel from the butt end instead of the stem end.

Also, honestly, I find the quality of written descriptions when they are long to be better now, because the only people who write them are those that enjoy them, rather than people thinking they "have to" and molesting a thesaurus in the process.

I guess I must not be a very visual person because wiki images don't disturb me at all, as far as dissonance with a character, I tend to have my own minds eye view of a pc based on their rp rather than a picture on a wiki.

My fave memory is from UBRS, when you can bypass some stuff and jump down into that arena to start a boss fight. A friend of our forgot to put his mechanical yeti away before jumping down, so it ran through all the places bypassed and brought all those monsters into the arena, so we were dead before the first wave of the arena stuff really even started, and it just kept on filling up and up with monsters because there was one hidden rogue alive to keep things going.

I could see a generic mush as perhaps an innovative way for collaborative storytelling for the purpose of publication. (For all I know collaborators have done this for years now, or something like it.)

However, I would never play on a mush that would take my writing pieces and then publish them to make money for someone else and that would give the rights away in that format to a third party publisher. I am not knocking people that would. However, because I do write for my own pleasure, and sometimes elements of what I'm writing influence my RP or vice versa, I would not want the challenges/entanglements should I ever get up the guts to seek to publish any of my personal work in the future.

But as for just saving/making a log printable for personal pleasure/enjoyment later, that's a good question. I have noticed that even when I doc RP with someone (which is pretty frequent when I'm playing, because of my schedule/time committments/inability to sit for as long as I used to be able to) we tend to stick to mush formatting rather than indentations and stuff. Maybe as an experiment I'll have to see if I can find an old log that survived my laptop purge and reformat it to something more like conventional formatting. I suspect it would be a little weird, and not flow as well as a piece written and then polished to seem like it was coming from one voice.

My gut says that it would seem very off to me, and they are just different things.

"Dammit, I'm mad" spelled backwards is the same! I love palindromes how did I not notice this before?

@arkandel said in Hobby-related Resolutions/Goals for the coming year... ?:

Play again.

My goal as well.

I have started playing this game as an (extreme) novice and (very) casual player. I have a toon on Ultros if anyone wants to say hi/is just starting out as a noob too/wants to play low levels again. @Sunny says it's fun.

If you do say hi type in all caps the first time because uh...in my old age it's hard for me to attend to running/mashing abilities/and reading chat at the same time, so expect a delay in response time.

I keep thinking about a Fading Suns game and have a few ideas, esp now with Ares! I think what makes me the most hesitant is how to control numbers to make an active game with lots of GM/staff attention since I think at the very least that would need to be capped at a certain number of participants and I would probably want a 1 PC per player thing. I am def keeping my eye on the games lately who restrict slots to see how sustainable that is long term, and I am kind of curious as to how one arrives at that number.

TFW you forget you have Skype open (after you've been slowly purging contacts that you have no clue who they are, whether they're mushers or caucus folks or whatever) and find out later you butt dialed someone who then had to listen in on you trying to wrangle the preschooler going potty.

Sorry unknown person. If it was one of you, hopefully you enjoyed the singing of the potty song.

I think the problem is that it can be a good way to do things, and most people have seen a good leader they aspire to be. Or think they were.

Also, not to generalize overmuch, but it’s my experience that mushing people are generally pretty cocky and kind of egotistical when it comes to their caliber of RP/should’ves. And they like to complain and bitch about...everything.

I think that is why you often will hear whining of the first order about “what do you mean I could never be <position>?!?! Well what am I supposed to achieve then?!?” Especially when those positions aren’t defined in the first place. I also think frankly people get bored of PvE especially if there is no or minimal accessible staff STing and so they like having a pc leader to beat up on icly and oocly.

I realize this is super uncharitable, but I really can’t explain enough how stressful being a non-staff leader can be because of the boredom nitpicks and beat ups. Including from, again IME, STAFF PCs who don’t lift a finger to help with giving people something to do or to help answer pertinent @mail or whatever but are happily playing along badmouthing icly and sometimes oocly.

I think pc leaders largely are desired as foils. But it doesn’t work out well for anyone concerned and contributes to a really bad, negative atmosphere on a game.

From a pragmatic standpoint, for a really long time this has been a very lightly moderated forum.

COULD we turn this forum into one that is much more moderated in terms of tone, strict rules, ect? Yes, we could. It would involve taking away some elements that probably people would object to. (no politics/no religion/limited venting/removal of posts at a far lower bar for belligerence, ect.)

Maybe it'll happen sometime, maybe it won't, but it's not really what it is now.

If someone ever creates a constructive only forum community for MUSH land, where civil discourse is enforced with moderation, I would happily participate. I do think that's a lot harder than a lot of people appreciate, which is why to my knowledge it hasn't happened yet, and when/if it does I hope people will be appreciative.

My vision is that the GM is familiar with all the PCs on the game and has all able to access world/metaplot changing stories, and seeing the big picture is able to help facilitate intersection of those world storylines between and with PCs and groups.

However, I would not want people to think that the game revolved around their PC, no, because there are other people involved. People that they and/or their PC might not care for, things that do not always excite that player (but might excite others, ect)

So a small game, run by me, I would not want individuals expecting that everything would revolve around them personally, and in fact I do not know that I would want someone with that expectation on a smaller place unless it was a friends only sandbox.

Leftover tonkatsu on homemade bread makes a really nice breakfast!