Best posts made by Roz

come play with us it's fun

I turned 30 two days ago.

Today I bought myself a bottle of Dom Perignon. And then I drank the whole thing myself.

Now I'm eating ice cream.

30 is great so far.

I will agree that the helpfiles need serious attention. As others have said, they're definitely not clear in a lot of instances.

An emphatically linked starter guide for the theme would be great. There's totally a history intro and timeline doc, but you have to go digging to find it. I tend to be pretty intuitive and not easily discouraged in these sorts of areas, but I definitely had to look around a bit. Overall things just need to be more descriptive and written from a place assuming a lower level of knowledge from the reader.

Guys you have to take the factions SERIOUSLY. These are SERIOUS CATEGORIZATIONS. They have to be ACCURATE, not ASPIRATIONAL.

No, one woman being sexually harassed is not another woman's fault just because she was using her sexuality to make money.

@shelbeast said in Night People:

Arx is a Lords and Ladies game, yeah? Not my thing. Also... I see all the drama and stuff that comes out of there and don't even want to get involved in that. I'm on a serious anti-drama kick after some stuff on FC.

Eh, it's only really a L&L game if you want to play into the noble politics aspect of it. Which plenty of people don't. That's not really the focus of the game.

@Thenomain said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@lordbelh said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I like stepping out of my pose order occasionally. Slip in a quickie. That sort of thing. Give a better flow to the scene. .

And if a scene is big enough, it will organically fracture. The exception being "meeting scenes", which are punishment on everyone already.

I think we all know in our hearts what each of us did to deserve them.

@theonceler said in TheOnceler’s Playlist:

Arx - Niklas (the good one)

brb crying

@Pyrephox said in Sensitive cultural/political/religious aspects of game themes.:

@Roz said in Sensitive cultural/political/religious aspects of game themes.:

@Derp said in Sensitive cultural/political/religious aspects of game themes.:

@Roz said in Sensitive cultural/political/religious aspects of game themes.:

@Sunny said in Sensitive cultural/political/religious aspects of game themes.:

@Kestrel said in Sensitive cultural/political/religious aspects of game themes.:

I happen to think that rape, sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia and the like make for great storytelling — this coming from someone frequently derided as a SJW — so I tend not to understand why anyone would want to exclude these themes from their story where they should realistically apply.

Some people do not enjoy having to same fight they have to fight in their everyday lives in their pretendy-fun-time games, don't enjoy exploring trauma that they have personally experienced. It's not really a hard concept to grasp even if you don't feel the same way. Empathy is awesome.

Yeah. I don't see why it's exactly hard to understand. People can like all different aspects of a historical time period that are unrelated to specific discriminations that also existed then.

But the point is, they exist whether they are pleasant or not. Pretends fun times doesn't necessarily take a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser to the fact that there are horrible things in the world. Any world.

No, they don't necessarily. But some people would indeed like to take a magic eraser to them in their hobby time. You don't have to be 100% historically accurate for fun to exist. Like, are you objecting to the purity of people's RP experience or something? People who bend settings are generally fully aware of those unpleasant things. They just maybe prefer making a space -- or playing in spaces -- without them.

It's worth noting that people also exist for whom these sorts of cultural restrictions and flaws provide an interesting set of constraints and conflicts to drive RP. Neither of these positions is a wrong one - and in fact, many people (like myself) fall in different places on the scale depending on what mood they're in and what the specific game is. Like, if I'm playing a game set ostensibly in the 1800s, then I want there to be acknowledgement of the mores of the time /even if those mores are not a major part of the gameplay and plot/. If I'm playing, say, a politically-oriented game, then I'm going to want those mores and customs and taboos to be a much larger part of the game, because those are many of the things that drive and complicate politics. On the other hand, if I'm playing a game where the premise is "we're cowpokes putting down a zombie apocalypse with our six-shooters" then I am not going to want racism or sexism to get involved in my pretendy fun times.

Like a lot of things with MU*s, it's not that any one position along the continuum is unreasonable, it's just that getting a group together who are on entirely different places on that line can be...complicated.

Yeah. I don't object -- and I don't really think anyone on this thread was objecting -- to people who enjoy exploring these kinds of tensions. What I don't really get is the idea of like -- "How can you not even enjoy not playing these specific issues?" or "What's the point in this setting if you don't have sexism or racism or whatever?" Different people like different things, some people like all the realistic issues, some people like none of them, some people like only some, some people like the ones they don't have to deal with in RL, etc. But I get irritated at the notion of "You shouldn't ever play in these settings unless you play all the issues."

People should make the games they want to make, and if people don't like the inclusion or exclusion of real world sensitive issues, they can move on.

So after Sky came up in conversation, which prompted Meg to make this post, I did some digging and discovered that she passed away a year ago -- almost to the dot. I just want to put into the world that she was a great RPer, GM, and person in all of my experience with her. She'd retired from MUing some years before for the most part, but she was just -- really great.

Damn.

@Thenomain said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Kanye-Qwest

@Roz had it covered. @Meg had it covered. Hell, even I had it covered.

I mean, you had it covered in a weirdly rambling, roundabout way. Just don't call other people's things vomit? Idk man. You gave some weird explanation for saying a rude thing but also things like "my rudeness has objective backup."

Also, KQ is very aggressive on Arx about letting people have their fun when it's not hurting others or the game. You may have decided that she posted solely to take some sort of sideswipe at you, but actually what she said is something that she says regularly about stuff she wants people not to criticize each other for on the game. So maybe, like...you also think things are about you more than they are?

@RightMeow

I think it was fair for me to say "that's rude" when @Thenomain called something someone else had made "vomit."

I also have a lot of affection and respect for @Kanye-Qwest based on her work on Arx. She's really integral to a lot of the cultural aspects of the game that I really value.

THAT SAID. I think she should probably stop responding to Theno in general (and vice versa) because it always tends to blow up. And, like has been pointed out, it doesn't offer a great view into things for people reading the thread.

@thesuntsar I would say to check your house, but I still subscribe to the less popular theory that you are married to Magpie-player, not Thena-player.

I agree that when the theme is set up specifically to remove gender roles, it's weird to add one -- even one that isn't negative/demeaning. It doesn't exist anywhere else in the theme. Could easily just be something like "smaller-framed people tend to be favored in the society" to contrast how warriors are so often the ones in power in martial cultures, etc.

@Ominous said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Misadventure said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

There are other minor issues of continuity that also intrude, like one group poses just coming in from pouring rain, and two poses later people come into the scene talking about the break in the weather, or you start your scene at IC time, but it ruins slower than IC time, so you have folks showing up for nighttime in the middle of your lunch scene.

Those sound like issues with not providing a proper set for new arrivals or new arrivals not waiting for the set. The first is an understandable oopsie. The second is annoying as hell. No one's writing is so fantastic that it cannot wait for those in the room to give a set and some poses.

I do get a bit annoyed when people pose in before waiting just to see what's going on. It could be totally nuts in a way that you'd notice as soon as you walked in, you never know!

Just a little update. Checking out Arx!

When you have the RP days that are really, really magical.

I'll say this: when my brother passed away suddenly a couple months after I got laid off and while I was still unemployed, it was several of my close MU* friends who got together and pooled money to make sure I didn't have to worry about things like plane tickets. I woke up one morning to a Paypal notice for something like $700. (Several of those people are on MSB. You know who you are, and I love you forever.)

That said, those were also people that I had been playing with for years (most of them about three years at that point?) and had met in person multiple times. They had gone from RP friends to everyday friends who I also RPed with. It's a circle that has become my circle of best friends. (I, in fact, live with one of them now!)

That said, people don't get into my circle of close friends from RP easily. It's easy for me to be friendly to new people, but I am not INSTANTLY INTIMATE on an OOC level. But I demonstrably have no issue with the idea of eventually becoming really close friends with someone I meet on a MU*. I do think I can be kind of cold if people try to dump too much on me early in our OOC acquaintance; I have pretty firm boundaries there, and I'm really sorry but I can't be your sudden close friend or therapist when I just met you so recently. I am pretty good about managing my own mental health that way.

So: I both do not become immediate friends with people AND also can become very close friends with people on MU*s.