Best posts made by Pandora

@Ganymede said in TS - Danger zone:

To no one’s surprise I presume, I concur with bored’s distinction.

NPCs are calculated to drive plot. If a staff member is languishing in 4 hour TS scenes with an NPC when that NPC could be driving a plot, that staff member is wasting time. That NPC could and should be used in a better manner, and for that I see a meaningful distinction.

But what if their 4 hour scene of relaxing, no-stress TS with a player they enjoy writing with comes just after a fraught 4 hour scene of PCs shouting each other down while building complicated, far-fetched plans that try to account for every possible variable so they can't possibly lose, accusing the NPC of being too cryptic in borderline-OOC ways that amount to 'If I were in charge this would be going much more smoothly but I can't be bothered to run things I'm not the star of' and now finally they can just bump uglies with the chick that requested this plot in which she gives birth to a potential Chosen One?

As much as I ABSOLUTELY LOATHE when people are TSing to the detriment of the game/plot, I really don't think it's anyone's business who is TSing whom so long as the game/plot is being taken care of.

@GreenFlashlight said in Separating Art From Artist:

@Pandora said in Separating Art From Artist:

The point, and this is where I roll my eyes because I don't respect the idea at all, is to promote the idea that these works should be erased from the future.

Wait, whose point is that? Like, what are the names of the people advocating for that?

@Kestrel said in Separating Art From Artist:

I don't judge people who grew up on Lovecraft not knowing all these things about him who enjoy his works and I wouldn't dare take it away from them. I know, though, it's not a name I intend to pass on to future generations. I'd rather they read good ideas.

Obviously OP is not the gatekeeper of the world's literary access, but this is the sentiment expressed and espoused by those who celebrate Cancel Culture and pretend they haven't seen in oppressive regimes what the end result of such behaviors is.

"Do what you want in your own little corner without oversight."

Seems nice in theory, til you have a group of <insert special race/class/faction here> or whatever over there making up their own elaborate alternative history via Discord with the caveat 'this is just backstory stuff for our own interest' but then the group grows and they pull in new people and the line blurs and a year down the line you have an established <whatever> stating emphatically that they're the first person in their long family tree to speak <insert language every character speaks>. At that point, the mess is much bigger than smacking Bob and Jane's wrists for their dumb incest plot, it's a whole theme breach you had no idea about.

@Macha said in The Work Thread:

When you have a coworker that you can bullshit back and forth about a meme asking if it is "For fuck sake" or "For fuck's sake". And they're actually pondering it.

Good on them, if it's for a work email you've got to be professional, after all!

My Opinion:

NPC: Has goals and agendas that further the plot and story via meaningful interactions with the players & ultimately exists to offer a glimpse into the world/powers beyond that which players see in their day-to-day roleplay.

Staff PC: Here to play a role like everyone else, with player-level abilities and goals, to tell a story about themselves entrenched in this world, again like everyone else.

You'll note that in my example of an NPC, it's perfectly possible for them to have tea, share secrets, or font-fuck any PCs without violating the Terms & Conditions.

A slur is still a slur even if it's a slur you want to keep using as a slur while arguing that it's not.

@Carex said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

Wait, you are talking about your character's boundaries being violated?

No offense but... suck it up cupcake.

I'm talking about your OOC boundaries regarding IC circumstances. So if for example I don't want to flesh-out a sex scene, or be involved in waterboarding someone's character, or anything that I am uncomfortable on an OOC level with writing.

@TNP said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

@Pandora Serious question: if someone is so reticent about making waves that they're unable to type 'Let's fade to black.' do you really think they're able to type +codered to mean the same exact thing?

"Let's fade to black" is fairly often met with 'Why?' or 'Oh, I wish I'd known you didn't TS before we let it get this far.' or 'Lol, let me just do one more pose, your character will get a kick out of this.' or a dozen and a half other things. RED is meant to be understood and enforced as an immediate halt, with any objections immediately going to staff, not the player, taking the pressure off of themselves to have to explain or excuse anything.

Hopefully this also addresses the 'no veto' concern as well; if RED is being used in a way the other party feels is unfair, they've of course got the recourse of taking this up with staff. There is no circumstance I can think of where it's better for a player to try and force another player into something than to let staff intervene.

@Miss-Demeanor said in RL Anger:

@Bobotron Nope! Tooooooooooootally different kids, they like wildly separate things. XD What will happen is lots of fighting as the older attempts to force the younger to play fighting games with him that the younger one knows he can't win so will just fuck around on... which pisses off the older one more.

This is totally why I refuse to have a second child; my daughter has multiple personalities (she thinks she is Raphael and sometimes Donatello from the ninja turtles) but she is obsessed with frilly tutus, fart jokes, *killer-robots, and old-school Ghostbusters cartoons. Simply put, there is no way she would ever be compatible with another innocent human being & the idea of trying to make her get along with another child breaks me out in a cold sweat. Nope, I'm good. I don't want that stress - one kid is enough for me!

Enclosed is the VERY FIRST drawing-with-a-caption she ever made after learning to read:
Note the careful labeling of the body parts: Ray gun, head. Because apparently that's all that really matters. The caption at the bottom is cut off because I was using a shoddy cell phone camera - but yes, it says 'le Plan'. She was born to be a cheesy Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain.

I won't be having another. I already feel mildly apprehensive about the one I've got, but at least she's not old enough to talk politics at Thanksgiving dinner... yet.

The conversation was very specifically about authors being penalized or side-lined for their works of fiction, not whatever harebrained interpretation of their political views is being flogged this week - so can we just not ruin the thread with this again? Amélie Wen Zhao, Julia Crouch, Phillip Pullman, etc. & so on. Authors writing pretendy shit and getting internet-rocks thrown at them.

@Kestrel said in Tyche Banned:

Some topics don't deserve civil discourse.

I disagree with this sentiment.

Racial slurs, threats of violence, malicious intent to make people feel unsafe or unwelcome - all of these are against the rules & I personally don't understand why @Tyche wasn't banned ages ago, as much as we've discussed spirit vs. letter of the law here.

But the prohibition of anything you can describe as civil discourse (which would preclude the examples named above and many other circumstances that we all as semi-functional adults can agree on without having to name them outright) is where I personally draw the line. I don't make or enforce the rules here, but I do enjoy the banter even when you're all completely wrong & that wouldn't stop me from leaving if we ever got to @Kestrel's stated level of wrongspeak/wrongthink policing.

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

So, I didn't read the last four pages, and while I adore you all, I don't think it'd be a good use of my time.

ANYWAY, I wasn't trying to equate authors = RPing, though I get totally why it was read that way and feel it's a valid conversation (again?) for other to take on.

I was focusing on how it's fun to do terrible things to characters.

Excuse me as I go over here thanks.

My bad for the derail( @Ghost made me do it). I agree, doing terrible things to other peoples' characters is awesome when there's a good vibe & I wish more people were open to letting their train going off the rails for a while.

@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

To many shitty people, sexuality and gender identity aren't who people are. They're choices being made.

I'm not saying that's how Pandora views it, just that it's hardly outside the realm of possibility.

I'm definitely a shitty person for plenty of reasons, but not this particular one, alas. I'm a lesbian despite the actual, meaningful inconvenience that can be sometimes; if I could choose to be bi or pan I would, so I know very well it's not a choice being made.

I explicitly said 'men' and 'people socialized as male', which clearly isn't saying 'anyone socialized as male is a man' or I'd have just said men. Non-binary, genderqueer, genderflexible, trans, agender people exist, and some have male socialization, and some play lesbians without a lot of regard for female socialization differences, and that's not been great for lesbian representation on games and it's hardly hating or fearing trans people to say so.

If that's not good enough, do carry on with the castigation if necessary, but I've always felt it best to be really honest here, even if I am being collectively shouted at about it, again.

@HelloProject I don't police anyone's thoughts. If words that describe reality, like 'male socialization' that don't really have linguistic alternatives that would A) mean the exact same thing & B) not be seen as equally problematic - are verboten, we can't really discuss diversity and representation of lesbians and that bothers me because...

@Rinel I'm not trying to pick a fight here, but when you divide the line, in text-based gaming, between trans/not-trans lesbian representation, you are ignoring the fact that men who play lesbians are almost universally not playing trans characters, they are speaking for and over female-socialized lesbians.

As one result, you see almost no butch/stud lesbians in MU*s (And I mean masc-presenting lesbians, not aggressive lipstick lesbians) because it's easier to just play a man and date women that aren't played like a temporary respite from watching porn.

It would be, in my opinion which you may disagree with, a disservice to trans people playing lesbians to say 'Let's lump you in with the lesbians played by men because that's easier/safer than talking about "mesbians" as their own problematic category'. I know problematic is a trite word these days, but work with me here.

The situation with A, B, and C (A regretful-murderer, would-be-victim, and absentee-doctor if I skimmed that example correctly) being resolved with OOC communication works on a MUSH because there is nothing stopping that from working. On a game where someone has taken the time to code critical wounds - and that's not limited to MUDs, there are MUXes and MOOs with injury code as well, you might only have X amount of time to find a doctor before Something Bad happens to the character, whether it be taking a permanent stat-reduction of some sort, or even death. In those games, the thinking is different, and I'll make the comparison thusly:

MUSH considerations:
"The doctor would be around and available to help this person, so we'll find the doctor though IC/OOC means or pause the scene until the doctor is around, and go from there, because the doctor's player can't always be around, but we also don't want Player B to bleed out on the nice new aluminum plate flooring tiles."

Code-heavier game considerations:
"Let's not fuck around with anything that could legit kill us until we have a medic on-hand." or
"The doctor isn't around (it is up to the doctor to explain why they weren't around. Maybe they fell and hit their head and were in a coma last night. Maybe they were somewhere on the ship that the people in a bloody screaming panic didn't think to check. Maybe they had on noise-cancelling headphones last night because A & B are notoriously loud when they're off killing each other at off-peak times) so let's do stabilizing techniques and CPR and elevate B's torso and deeply apologize for stabbing B in the chest and cry together and deal with the fact that B is now facing the rest of their character's life maimed/crippled in some way, or perhaps they'll die, but this is how the story turned out."

I can certainly see the appeal of having things turn out A-OK or at least more to your liking, every time something goes wrong. I just don't know that I find it altogether compels people to tell the best story they possibly could, but simply the most pleasant/convenient.

@faraday said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

Yeah, I really don't understand where this became about wanting a favorable outcome or not wanting to fail. I don't care about that. What I care about is being forced to come up with a preposterous explanation (I fell asleep in the crawlspace with noise-canceling headphones on!) for something that is an extremely routine MUSH event (someone not being online at the exact moment you want them).

I was just trying to illustrate that sometimes OOC communication is done in the interests of IC continuity.

What if A specifically wants to murder B, via framing it as an accident? A knocks on C's door, C doesn't answer. A is reasonably assured that C isn't around. A invites B to a 'friendly spar' in which A proceeds to stab B in the chest. A clutches her pearls and drags B into the hall, valiantly banging on the doctor's door, to no avail. Agony! B bleeds out, unable to be saved. Acta est fabula, plaudite! A carries B to the ship's chaplain, then heads off to find D, E, and F to plot their mutiny. Story! Plot! - wait, what's this? C logs in the next morning like 'Retcon, I would have been there to save B'.

At what point is the line between 'reasonable assumption' and 'preferable outcome' crossed? It's not a black and white issue. I am not a MUSHer, so naturally I stand on the side of the line that says 'If a character isn't there, they aren't there, and the onus is on them to come up with the least preposterous yet entirely-possible explanation for why they weren't available.' No one is going to court martial you for being in the shower when someone banged on your door at Implausible o'Clock at night. Or maybe they are. It's a story, albeit maybe not the one you woke up thinking you'd be telling that day.

@Lotherio said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

Let me rephrase this in another game.

We are playing chess. You get up to answer an emergency call, I want to capture your king. You're not there to decide you move, I do it for you ... and you can make up why you made such a horrible move.

It doesn't seem comparable, in the MU* example, no one is deciding what you DID do, they are only noting what you did not do. So the exact correlatory comparison would be:

We are playing chess. You get up to answer an emergency call, I want to capture your king. You're not there to make a move. You don't make a move. A shows up out of nowhere and stabs me (B) in the chest. If you don't get back from your phone call in time to save me, I bleed out all over your chess board. You come back, explain to the police why I am dead, and why you let your King be one move away from being captured.

I played on a game where setting a broken bone was a skill that not all doctors had and if one of them wasn't around or willing to set your broken arm, staff wasn't handing out free bone-setting splints from NPC doctors, you just had that broken bone until it healed. This wasn't a MUD, so I feel fairly confident saying YMMV based on what game you're playing with regards to the argument 'You don't get to decide that there's no NPC doctors around.' and that's not just a MUD vs MUSH determination.

@surreality said in The Shame Game:

There are basically three kinds of downvotes.

1. "I disagree with this but don't actually care enough to articulate the reasons why."
2. "OMG MY FRIENDS ARE BEING DISAGREED WITH AND THIS CANNOT BE TOLERATED."
3. "I hate your face and everything you say turns me an increasingly vivid shade of puce."

4. I disagree with something in your post, and I'll articulate why as soon as I finish this sandwich and type up my response - I just didn't want you to have to wait in suspense to see that I think you're an idiot. But it's coming, bb. Have a downvote while you wait.

Make an original system that meshes with your game world instead of wrapping tentative threads of suspended disbelief around your theme to make it work with someone else's cast-off system. Then publish it so it meets this thread's criteria & someone else can leech off of it instead of following my advice.

My husband and I spent so many hours in that little room omg. Such a fun idea, and so well put together! We eventually got stumped, but it was great anyway.