Best posts made by peasoupling

I would leave that game so fast. As a completely uninvolved person, if that was policy, I'd just be out.

@arkandel said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

For example let's say you have a Far West game. The setting is supposed to showcase certain discriminating themes (racism, sexism, etc) but every player you run into plays a liberal character yet NPCs stay on the age-appropriate side of the political fence.

There comes a point where, unless staff takes exceptional efforts to inject theme with regular doses of the aforementioned -isms, the NPCs' views won't make an impact; PC-to-PC interactions vastly outnumber every other, and if most characters' superiors and employers are typically tolerant and progressive then the game can easily end up in this bipolar state where something is supposed to be happening, people IC refer to it happening but aside from the occasional PrP no one actually experiences it.

Which can also be frustrating for someone who is playing a supposed target for the -ism.

See also: you chargen a poor struggling character who finds herself having to resort to shady work to make ends meet, and within five minutes of hitting the grid some slumming billionaire is throwing wads of cash at you and buying you a gold-plated scooter.

A recent study that's going around predictably shows that women in NYC spend a few hundred dollars more than men, per year, on public transportation. Guess why.

You can look into other studies on things like the social and professional costs of avoiding sexual assault and harassment. Or just listen. Women know already. You are not conveying any new information. You are not helping. Given that society is already steeped in the idea that it's women's fault to get themselves in risky situations, that statement is, at best, the equivalent of "I told you so".

@Ghost said in TS - Danger zone:

I've wondered sometimes (and never asked, perhaps I should have) if the "you" was because they were knowingly trying to put me, the player, as the target of an action or if they were honestly trying to write scenes from a 2nd person perspective for the reader to absorb.

Three or four paragraphs of "She grabs her boob" get super confusing.

That is all.

That is the entirety of it.

Assuming two people of the same gender. And I don't even want to imagine what it would read like for two or more non-binary they/them partners.

I mean, it's doable, but.

PS: And by that, I mean, I think I'd need both hands, at least, to count the times I've had to interrupt a scene to ask: OOC Wait, whose boob? My charname's boob?

If everyone is a Great House, no one is.

More seriously, some of us would have liked to play in a barony, once upon a time. Poor crummy noble house sounds like fun. The roof on the castle is leaking and your horses are kind of sad looking. It's a different experience, and that's the whole point. Everyone doesn't want the same things.

But then, I never could get into the coded resources game part of the game, and I often felt my character was too rich, too fast. I liked it better when I had my 500 per week or so and had to save up for stuff. I did enjoy having fancy diamondplate swords, of course! But, really, I didn't enjoy getting them nearly as much as when my character was first able to afford a really nice high quality steel weapon, or a silk velvet doublet, or something like that.

@faraday said in Historical MUSHes:

What about something that just flat-out didn't exist, such as a female soldier serving openly (i.e. without disguising herself as a man) in a front-line regular unit of the Union Army?

This cuts both ways. If you have female soldiers serving openly in front-line regular units of the Union Army, I can't play a female soldier disguised as a man. Not really.

I feel like this game would be worth it for the Played-By pictures at the very least.

You could have a game entirely staffed and played by people who did their PhDs on that particular time and place and it still wouldn't be historically accurate to anyone's satisfaction. Especially their own. Which they'd let each other know, vigorously!

Beyond that, you do have people who go "well, this was pretty uncommon, so it's historically inaccurate" and people who go "well, this happened once, so it's historically accurate" and people who go "we have no evidence this was impossible, so it's historically accurate". And, of course, "well, this sticks it to the libs, so it's historically accurate".

But even if everything is historically inaccurate, some things are more historically inaccurate than others, and in different directions. So staff would still need to decide what exactly they're going with, what their specific vision for the setting is and how rigidly they want to enforce it, regardless of whether they call themselves historically accurate or a medieaeval fantasie.

@thenomain said in What does Immersion mean to you in MUs?:

Immersion on Mu*s to me is the same as Immersion in tabletop play: If I think the character as something with its own life, the world as something with consistent rules even if they're different from reality, if I can imagine the game as existing in its own right.

This is pretty much it for me too. It's not so much about the code as it is about some kind of verisimilitude (even if this is genre-dependent) and the feeling that the world makes sense.

Now, code can be useful to have because sometimes it helps streamline things like communication and sharing information, and because the usual OOC commands can be clunky. So special IC commands can be more useful, but I don't know if it's a matter of immersion.

In fact, taking Arx as an example, sometimes the IC messenger system is kinda... not immersive at all, if I take it at face value. How is this baby badger running back and forth across the city at the speed of light to deliver messages and suits of armor? (I am sorry if anyone has a badger messenger, this isn't aimed at any one adorable animal messenger in particular!) So I don't take it at face value, I have to ignore it or mentally substitute the coded reality for something that actually makes sense. It's just more practical than mail, and helps separate mostly-IC from mostly-OOC communication. And I say mostly because a lot of IC messages include things like: 'OOC: Clarification on that thing I mentioned'.

As someone who'd probably play on a cowboys MU* to RP tragically dying of tuberculosis as much as to disarm bandits with amazing trick shots, it feels like there are two separate issues here, and there's an enormous excluded middle somewhere out there.

One issue is the setting, and how much do you remove discrimination and awfulness from the setting at large. Do you allow women to openly serve in the local cavalry soldiers fort? Will a black character be elected sheriff without anyone batting an eye?

Another thing are the PCs, how bigoted they are allowed to be, and whether you let them express that bigotry or not. Can you play a fire and brimstone preacher who refuses to marry Joe and Tex? Or characters of different races? Can the barmaid insult other people's masculinity by way of homophobia, even if you don't care that Joe and Tex are confirmed bachelors happily living together?

You can have a Lovecraftian game set in the 20s and 30s without allowing PCs with 'enormous racist' as a main personality trait. Once you've decided that (I am all for it), do you allow the white heiress who'll happily adventure alongside POC while enthusiastically believing they are a credit to their race? Do you have evil racist NPCs?

Why would I want to play a sexist/racist/etc character? I am not making a character who will be throwing slurs around. But I probably wouldn't like to play an enlightened 21st century progressive gunslinger in a 19th century that's amazingly better than our own time, either. These things aren't an on-off switch, people can be kinda racist, and kinda sexist, and kinda homophobic, etc. Most people are.

After all, I would probably like people to react to my character having fought for the Union in disguise as a man (I am very much ready for this hypothetical cowboy MU*), and not by saying, "I can't believe they still won't let women serve openly in combat roles."

Generic City, 2018, is a racist, sexist, etc, setting too.

Even when the assumption is that RL events are happening in game, people tend to focus on pop culture, what movies are playing and what songs are hits and whether the kids are dabbing their memes, rather than politics and world news. There are local politics, but they tend to be incredibly generic. So while it's harder to ignore that sort of thing in a historical setting, it's really a matter of degree.

But even though the setting is all those things, it's not ahistorical for people to exist who rise above the prejudices of their time to some extent, and you could limit what sort of raging bigoted jerks PCs are, at least. But I do think you'd need to draw hard lines on what's allowable and what isn't, and do the same for NPCs and plots in general. Some people will think you've gone too far, some people will think you haven't gone far enough, but you're never going to be able to please everyone.

I will be playing a totally useless disaster. Just because her dreams draw her to a small town doesn't mean she has any marketable small town skills, after all! Hopefully people need terrible employees.

I mean, if you look at it that way, no one wants authenticity in modern settings either, they want to play a romanticized version of the modern world, full of sexy billionaires and heroic cops and thieves with a heart of gold and creepy serial killer cultists, and hardly anyone voted for Trump except possibly the serial killer.

@krmbm said in Cyberrun:

@Admiral said in Cyberrun:

@Groth Am I correct in my assertion that the game is sex-based? Because the game seems sex-based.

Gonna have to go with a yes on the sex-based.

Nia, a dark-eyed gal with biosculpted curves (A-)
Willow, a curvy, tattooed honeyed teenage beauty (A-)

Those... really could be shortdescs from just about any game ever.

These are some characters I've played. There were a bunch of other characters and other games, but either I played them for 5 minutes (I do that) or I don't really remember their names and the wikis are gone. I'm an enormous flake.

Former:
Oathcircle: Mildred, Cam, some Nosferatu Indiana Jane...
Phoenix Rising (Werewolf game): Sarah
City of Hope: Elise, Ione, Veronica
Fallcoast: Anya, Rebecca, Shelby
BITN: Rachel, Angela
Arx: Leta, Maude, Ylva
The Descent (2017-18): Gabby
Welcome to Lovecraft: Callie
FtA: Detroit: Jordan
San Francisco: Steph
Portland: Angie

Current:
Gray Harbor: Abby
NOLA: Molly

Sometimes, a setting includes some form of prejudice or another. And you make a character, knowing that, because you want to engage with it somehow. Maybe you want to have tragic struggles in your background, maybe you want to be a badass subversive rebel, maybe you want to climb to power behind the scenes since open power is denied to you, etc. Those can be fun character types. And then you hit IC and everyone is really, really nice and egalitarian.

The challenges you thought your character might face are gone, and even their backstory and characterisation seem to ring hollow. Why, those other Taurans still living in the slums according to the setting files are apparently just lazy and insular, since everyone hangs out with Taurans, marries Taurans, and hires Taurans to be Vice President of Marketing like it's no big deal.

In my experience, you don't even need antagonistic PCs to avoid the above, if the decent people PCs acknowledge the setting has its problems and RP accordingly, which is vague, I know, but can make all the difference.

Historical accuracy isn't a binary condition. It's not like a game can actually be historically accurate. Not even history books can be, unless they are very, very boring, dry, factual accounts of things that happened in the last couple of centuries. If a game has "historical accuracy" as its stated goal, I worry they'll mostly be policing people's descriptions for styles of belt buckle that hadn't been invented yet.

I'm a History person by training, but I can overlook a lot of anachronisms for the sake of fun, while other deviations might make me decide not to play on a game because I'd have to grit my teeth excessively.

The issue, for me, isn't really one of accuracy in general, it's consistency. Staff really should set the tone and the historical flavor they're going for and have some reason to pick a setting other than "it's a neat time period and I want to play a craftsman who specializes in belt buckles and dying of tuberculosis."

If you know what themes you want to explore, you'll have a better idea about which bits you think are important enough to have in the news files as a common baseline, and which bits are meaningless trivia. And then staff can enforce the former and make sure players understand they aren't the history police when it comes to the latter.

If I make a character type that has some IC disadvantage by design, in the setting, I do so deliberately. That's not a random roll of the dice for misery. I am choosing to engage with that disadvantage.

Now, the fact that the world, and history in particular, is a terrible place does mean that, in many settings, this will disproportionately affect women, PoC, queer people, religious minorities, etc, particularly if they want to play a character, in some way, like themselves. White men will probably be playing on easy mode by default, though they can, of course, choose to play a white male peasant if that's their jam.

And yes, if someone is not at all interested in dealing with that, however remotely, in their fun times, maybe that game is not for them. It may be a game for someone else who is interested in dealing with that. Both are fine, but they may not enjoy the same game. Then again, depending on how much of a sandbox the game is and where exactly they draw their lines, there may be room for both!

I can't believe I went to all the trouble of writing a two-line post and had a tiny fraction of my mental real estate occupied thinking of character concepts for a day and a half, nearly two. And also, I fretted about nudging someone to maybe play there or do characters together or something, for a whole 15 minutes on account of anxiety. Shame on staff.

I mean, if this post had been up and people had been hyping it for more than 3 WHOLE DAYS, some of the tut-tutting might actually make sense, but really?

I will say that IC is IC but... even absent any <ooc> communication, the exact same IC action, written out in different ways, can be creepy or not. Like, seriously, some people's writing throws red flags all over the place.

Maybe it's just me!