Posts made by Prototart

tbh it’s like that with, like, every drug on earth, mu* people almost always just go with whatever popular mainstream media conception of something is

there’s also just that white people “dreads” are so universally gross

like, i’ve known plenty of people with actual dreads, i dated a guy with actual dreads, they’re clean, there’s a crazy amount that goes into keeping them, he put more effort into his hair than i did & at the time i had gigantic 80s hair

white people just have disgusting filthy hair that they let fester until it turns into, like, bezoar noodles

tbh I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody say anything anti-Hungarian, but there’s like zero eastern european pop where I grew up - our church is, like, two hours away

i did however get just a totally insane amount of antisemitism from people who decided i was jewish & lying about it

Knockout on HAM to the surprise of literally nobody who has interacted w me at all

@surreality said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

"Well, golly, I would, but I'm just a silly woman. That's totally beyond my ability! Everybody knows women can't do that, it comes with the tits."

bitches are crazy bro

don’t think of it as wearing out your welcome just think of it as nerds not being cool enough to hang with you

@mietze said in The Game Game:

I think the trampling rush of people to a game when it first opens is almost never about that game itself but:

1. People are obsessed with getting in I'm the ground floor due to obsession (justified or not) that they can advance faster there than on where they are playing because it's a blank slate.

2. Novelty and the ability to get to play around thinking about new characters, esp if it's being pumped up here or amongst friends.

3. The hope that this time staff will "do it right", whatever that means for that individual person.

4. A hope that the new place will allow them to recreate something they really enjoyed and aew probably looking through rose colored glasses about now.

for comic games there’s also The FC Gold Rush

it’s like Highlander rules games have to cut each other’s heads off but then they wake up in the far future and it’s confusing so i didn’t watch it all

(it has been a long term thought experiment between @GreenFlashlight and me to try to turn Mantra into a char that isn’t so weird and oogy)

@Seamus said in ISO: a comics/superheroes MU* (give me your recs):

@fatefan said in ISO: a comics/superheroes MU* (give me your recs):

@Seamus That also sounds similar to the basis of the Wild Cards setting, IIRC.

Yeah. It has a LOT in common. I had not been aware of WildCards at the time. I was basing it solely on the "Jumpstart" from Malibu comics.

fist bump for someone else who loves obscure 90s universes

@Roz said in Firefly - Still Flyin':

@GreenFlashlight Eh, I think this is very much a case where people's experiences vary. I've been in the hobby for some two decades and I've never run into it on a game I've been on. People just definitely remember the instances where they run into it.

this is part of the Comic Game Things i have repeatedly been told are anomalous on non-comic places

it’s basically safe to just go ahead & assume that comic staffers will abuse players in any dozen given ways & that mostly they’ll take it bc “well, at least there are players here”

once upon a time I did one for Magik

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1gLU3ILmMp7mEvKrlUYBhz

and one for Black Widow (the 40s version)

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4Xa8M5PRpyewYZxDveVGOL

so once upon forever ago @Phase-Face and I decided that we were gonna make a MU*

it was going to be a Marvel game set on the west coast - in SF - that split from continuity w mutants regaining their abilities, most dead ones coming back to life, & Utopia becoming a nascent world power (which yes is super Krakoa but we did this like two years ago, it’s just a super obv break point & way to go tho if I were doing it now I’d def steal some Krakoa stuff)

also it had like 80% of Wildstorm merged with it and the backstory & planned metaplot was that Secret Wars was ongoing, Wildstorm & Marvel were hammered together in a previous incursion, & eventually we’d do a whole Illuminati & prob Cabal thing, allow other media chars as incursion survivors as we went, then eventually Battleworld and after it open up to more media chars w appropriate adaptations (& then prob move to ripping off other Hickman & Ellis plots as globals)

obv none of that never happened

but i have like 30 pages of theme files for it & I think they’re p good for MU theme files so I’m posting them, which tbh - I prob have already done at some point but I drink a lot, so it’s the first time for me

https://pastebin.com/14QB3qFD

in the unlikely event anyone is so irrationally horny for them I am willing to finish & organize everything if someone can handle, like, hosting and coding and basically everything other than writing, approvals, descing & one-strike banning creeps

@Auspice said in Embracing Rejection:

@Prototart said in Embracing Rejection:

if you wanna go, like, BnB detail

[flashback intensifies]

yeah, i still have most of a moondragon app i wrote for somewhere that's done in, like, basically clinical writing and has a bunch of page-length traits

@Bad-at-Lurking said in Embracing Rejection:

When the rejection makes sense and doesn't feel arbitrary, I'm fine with it. But with no offense intended to staffers out there, sometimes people get very, very micro-managerial about other people's creative process.

there's also consistency, which is something that's ultra important and basically just non existent some places

like, depending on who you're friends w or NOT friends w and what char you're going for, sentry might get away w "Sentry literally possesses the power of one million exploding suns." as his entire power trait but paste pot pete is gonna get rejected for not having paid enough attention in organic chem to give a detailed write up of the molecular peculiarities of his glue gun adhesive

if you wanna go, like, BnB detail required across the board then thats fine but its just totally nuts when theres no standard actually being upheld

@Apos said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

So a couple quick comments, first I want to echo @faraday with her comment of:

Tech is not the only answer, but I wholeheartedly believe it is an important part of the solution.

I think we should remember that tons of people aren't RPing in google docs, or an MMO client or some random chatroom or something because they think it's the best format for roleplay. It's just easy and accessible.

there are also a lot of ppl who do that not because like they haven't heard the Good News about MUs but bc they once MUd and find those options limited as they are in a ton of ways to still be hugely preferable to dealing w MU culture

like, I basically agree w your points but I think it's important to realize that an environment that's "safe" by the standard of some ppl in this field is still going to be something that just, has a magnetic repulsion to a ton of normal people and i think people are so tunnel vision on what's become acceptable in MU culture that they fail to consider how insane it is to people who aren't in that milieu and when it gets brought up it usually just provokes sneering and gatekeeping when it gets acknowledged at all

which just, leads to ppl rping in google docs and discord while others wonders why everybody on one MU are the same guys who've been on like every single other one since 1990-whatever

@Ghost said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

There's little point in discussing a solution to a problem that people don't want to tackle, which is why I'm currently in "pointing out the problem" mode and not "HERE'S WHAT WE DO" mode.

how can you even sit there & imply that "let's make a version of mu in a minute that works" isnt a viable solution to "the actual reasons normal people refuse altogether to mu or drive them off after a short time are entirely due to a culture of acceptance of horrible behavior & mediocrity" w a straight face

to not mean girl it like i get the hope is that widely accessible and easily understandable code will help functional ppl start games but history just makes me think all it will do is result in a couple more terrible games

every single horror story game has been run by someone who thought they were equipped for it and doing a good job of it and and that anyone who had a problem was the real problem, and that will literally never change unless people decide to stop putting up with this kind of shit even when it doesn't personally inconvenience them and when you consider that the very worst of the worst of the worst games ever, almost none of them closed bc people left they just closed bc someone quit paying for the server one day i wouldnt be super optimistic

@Lotherio said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

I think the last few posts are just evidence enough I need to completely retire from trying to run a Mu. No matter how clear I try to be in the type of Mu I'm after, something is lost in translation. I'm the sticky wicket. Just for benefit of runners and players alike, communication requires two parties, whole blame cannot reside on the runner; most of the communication problem is the static in the middle between type of game trying to be run and expectations of players.

i should maybe specify that when i say what i've said i'm almost exclusively talking about comic games, a niche where successful and well populated games have been run by actual rl rapists and actual rl child molesters who were openly known to be actual rl rapists and actual rl child molesters

edit: and honestly, "Well, The Centrist Position" in the experience of literally every person I've ever tried to get to play one is something that'd ring the same as like "well he did shit on your rug but you put it in the room and that's the only reason he could do that so really youre both to blame :)"

like - HeroMUX had 100+ logins and the only priority of the head wiz was finding ways to protect his shitty friends who did nothing but be shitty no matter how many people on staff who gave a shit it ran off, UH is still around & still run by an incel sex pest w a harem fetish, moritz ran a ton of huge games despite creeping on anyone he found out was a teenage girl, there was a game where two people who were staffers everywhere at one point fucking started inviting me to visit them when they found out I was in my mid teens and bi, it's an endless catalogue and i can list on like one hand the places ive even HEARD of in doing this for literally two thirds of my life that weren't run by incels, predators, hypocrites, violent narcissists, people who didnt have a grasp on, like, even the basic fundamentals of how to convey anything at all to a human, or - fuck, literally all of the above at once

@surreality said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

As a result, when games are created, 'how they work' on this level is not always explicitly outlined. We don't have a particularly good vocabulary to describe the various flavors of games under the MU umbrella, which exacerbates this considerably. It makes it difficult to define the game for creators, and difficult for players to determine whether or not a game is for them when browsing.

it's not really hard to define what you want with a game and I don't think it's a lack of vocabulary - it's really not even remotely difficult or time consuming to write a theme file explaining the feeling/feel that you're trying to build and what you're going for

the problem is that the kind of people who tend to run games have next to no ability when it comes to communicating, period; people who default to assuming everyone thinks the way they do, that everyone understands exactly what they mean, and that anyone who disagrees is a simpleton, people who generally cannot by any means be lead to understand that none of those assumptions are correct or even particularly coherent

and overwhelmingly that's just put up with bc it's a culture that tolerates bad behavior and bad faith actors, no matter how egregious or incomprehensible or hypocritical, in the name of "well, at least there's a player base" - i could name games where if you ask 10 different people what the standards for approval are you'll get 10 wildly different and contradictory answers

if people are serious about wanting other people who haven't been MUing for 20+ years to start and then to actually stay, that's the kind of shit that has to be "solved," not "well, grids can get too big"

and tbh I have literally no expectation it ever will be

honestly I think that the more you strip away - no grids! no descs! everything is on the wiki! - the more you basically just make it "ok then why would i want to do that instead of just be in a Discord rp" or whatever

the strength and like the marketing spin or, whatever should be that - like, it's this thing that's more solid and real and complex-in-a-good-way, that it's more feature rich and has things that really contribute to a sense that it's an actual Game World than something transient and impersonal and just, like, basically impromptu and jury rigged

nobody i ever tried to get into this was put off by mechanical stuff, it was always I guess cultural, nobody ever had a problem w +traits or descs or bgs or any of that stuff - and before it comes up basically none of them were pen and paper people, they weren't from Gaming backgrounds where you can go "well they're used to that" the closest my bf has ever been to Gaming other than when I tried to get her in was Pokemon - and sometimes I really think people just try to solve these problems that are mostly imagined or hugely overstated ones bc it's way more palatable than "maybe so many people quit mushing bc of mushers"