Best posts made by Salty Secrets

Aside the times I've left games for personal reasons, like lack of time, playing on too many games and needing to cut back so I can give specific ones the fair shake they deserve, and so on, almost all of my leaves have been over unethical staff behavior.

I'm right there with @Gilette giving Multiverse MUSH as an example of so many things being wrong in one place it's a wonder we don't have more of their former players here. Staff abuse of the suspect flag, staff targeting players for posting here, discrimination by staff and "elite" players of the lesser folks, loud minority players making the game unfun for everyone else, a staff member (Lord English) being caught having modified gripe logs to alter their context and outcome being protected by current and former headwizs, whisper campaigns being run by staff and high-ranked players alike, the promotion of unsuitable, provably malicious players to positions of power (Priscilla etc.), staff favoritism and the list goes on.

I left Brave New World and Fallout: El Dorado over Elsa being Elsa. I think that's a sufficient reason.

Sexual harassment being tolerated by staff is also something I'll leave a game over. United Heroes comes to mind as the latest instance but I feel every other WoD MUSH ends up going that path for some reason.

On the subject of WoD games, I've been known to leave ones that start relatively small or constrained, i.e. Vampire or Werewolf, but then decide they want to introduce three or four more splats in one shot in an attempt to attract more players. Speaking more broadly that's a red flag for me. If your game has a "soul", a "feel", and you throw it away in a transparent attempt to appeal to larger masses, I won't stick around. I only ever join a new game when the core idea appeals to me. If you discard it, you've taken away the reason I joined, and I find it an almost universal fact the new core of the game won't be as thought out as the old one.

@surreality A temporary limit makes the most sense yes. If I ever went through with my idea for a comic game, that's what I'd opt for. First month or two, two characters, only one FC. I might give leeway to people who want to play two minor FC or whose second FC is a minor villain. I probably wouldn't stop someone from playing Jubilee and also Captain Boomerang if they were promising me they'd be an active producer of role-play. These types of games tend to be made or broken based on villain population and activity, so it makes sense to make concessions for people who want to pick up those mantles. I'd still stick very firmly to "no two titular characters" as a rule, even after the initial launch period. I don't think anyone should ever be able to play Superman and Spider-man or Superman and Iron Man, etc.

From experience, TMC's forums empower game owners to silence criticism on their games and that's never a good thing. I recall, without naming names, one incident where someone posted in a thread with several logs as back-up about a case of harassment coming from an admin on a game to warn prospective new players of this abusive staff, and the game owner made noise until TMC mods silenced the conversation and things went back to the status quo of the game owner posting ads and patch notes for their game like nothing ever happened.

Perhaps the most damning thing about it is that it hadn't devolved into what we'd consider Hog Pit material immediately. The person voicing concerns about harassment and providing logs was civil and polite, it's the game owner that went straight into Hog Pit mode. Unfortunately, TMC's policies are basically that game owners are always right about their games. It's not the greatest environment.

I've seen it happen a few times that particularly spiteful staff or players used a player's email or IP to stalk them or ruin their reputation on other games. A WoD game I used to play on once had the single most inhumanly angry gamemaster I've ever met. He collected the emails and IPs of about a dozen players whose behaviors he didn't appreciate in his plotlines, and sent scalding emails to a couple of other games trying to warn them about those players.

I've also witnessed a close friend of mine get banned from Multiverse MUSH and have logs, his email and his IP sent to a couple of other places which got him prebanned from several of them with only one side of the story provided.

And my personal favorite, I made the mistake of making my email public on Brave New World. Big mistake. I got a lot of angry emails when I left from one of Elsa's friends.

While these are unusual and rare circumstances, being only three examples out of the fifty or so games I've played on, I can understand why someone would want to keep their email private. That having been said, since pretty much all MUSH admins can see your IP address, unless you use a VPN to MUSH you're not ever truly safe from stalking and someone who's determined to come after you can find a way. Your email address being visible is the least of your concerns if you're paranoid about being stalked across games.

Making a throw-away email takes thirty seconds with gmail, anyway, so if your email being visible to anyone at all is that concerning to you simply make a new email for every RP place you apply at.

To be honest a database has too much potential for abuse. Databases are often presented as fact. You can't discuss with a database, you can't argue with a database, and you can't appeal to a database. You have to take what's in it as-is.

While there are flaws to having a forum for this purpose, at least a forum provides significantly more context as to why someone should be earmarked. You can tell how many people back the decision, you can see the discussion that's been caused by the thread, and you can even sometimes see the culprits show up to dig themselves a deeper hole or apologize. You can, sometimes, even read the tone the accusations are being made with and determine from that whether they should be taken at face value or not.

A fifty pages thread about Elsa or VASpider is highly preferable to a collection of logs without context or story. It may be less efficient, but does the hobby really have so many rotten apples as to require efficient and organized cataloging of them?

@HelloProject I like it.

I've seen two WoD games, can't recall which ones of the hundred clearly, do something like that. There was a small selection of non-combat poses and you had to pick the one that spoke to you the most and reply to it.

@Bobotron I have to suggest to please not steal your players's ideas unless they're on-board with it. Most people if you page them and ask "can I use that idea" will say yes but you don't want to mark yourself a content thief either. If you absolutely must use a player's idea without their consent at least try to put your unique spin on it so it's harder for you to look bad as a result. The best way to avoid that is still to just not steal ideas and to ask permission first.

Edit: at least don't use the word steal, whatever you do.

There is one final piece of advice I can think of and it's to make your players comfortable with your game, your plot and your setting. This doesn't mean pandering to them and it doesn't mean letting them get the better of you. It means creating an environment where you don't require story-tellers and plot staff to move things forward. You can and should still have them but don't build a game that only your chosen ones can run RP on confidently and safely.

Your players should be comfortable enough to drive your RP forward for you, to create RP on a daily basis, to take chances and run RP. If people either refuse to RP outside scheduled events or even worse won't RP outside of official RP run by staff then that's basically no good to you.