Posts made by Seraphim73

@egg I would think of it less as 'dangling something enticing on RP Requests channel' and more as 'doing the work to set up the idea of the scene when you're the one who wants to RP.'

While it can be a pain in the butt to come up with a scene idea when you have no guarantee that anyone will join it, there's very little more annoying than someone coming on RP Requests to say "Hey, anyone want to RP" and then when you say "Sure, what did you have in mind," they say "Oh, I don't know. You want to go to a bar?"

@Roz That outfit. So awesome.

@peasoupling said in Recycling characters:

@A-Meowley said in Recycling characters:

@peasoupling said in Recycling characters:

Of course, the first time around, that character became unplayable during her very first scene, so I feel like I'm entitled to actually trying to play her.

I feel like there's a story here...

Monster ate her legs.

A pretty short story, as it turns out.

Like many of the above, I've used the same or similar names, descriptions, and concepts across games, but they're always tweaked for the specific game. For instance, the Termiane Koronel on one Wheel of Time MU* might be a Seanchan spy posing as a mercenary, while the Termiane Koronel on another Wheel of Time MU* that hasn't had Seanchan involved might just be a mercenary, and then the idea of a mercenary flirt with a burned face might show up on another game with the name Terman or something like that, but the character is always tweaked for the setting.

@Alamias said in Game of Thrones:

I'd really like to see a well done Dresden Files show.

Lucas Bryant (Nathan Wournos from Haven) would make a good Dresden. I think Kristin Bell would make a good Murphy. Of course James Marsters has to be Bob. But really, as long as the casting fits, I really want to see a closer-to-the-books Dresden Files too.

Lena Headey is also fantastic in her (admittedly minor) role in Fighting With My Family, another criminally underrated film. Actually, it's less underrated than it is unknown. It's a biopic about WWE wrestler Paige, but it's extremely well done, funny, touching, and awesome. You don't have to like the WWE to like it.

@faraday said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

@Ghost That arms race you talk about isn't unique to MUSHes either.

Heck, it goes beyond even video games: CCGs and CMGs work off similar systems. The company wants you to buy the new product, so it has to be better/more useful than the old product. Stat Creep is a real and horrible thing.

@Kestrel

***Mostly Agree***

@Rinel said in Game of Thrones:
***Thoughts on chivalry***

@Cupcake said in Sexuality: IC and OOC:

So my notion is, if you are self-assessing your capacity to portray another gender or sexual orientation, if you decide that you don't think you can do so because you genuinely don't feel you can grasp the nature of that gender/orientation and you would come off as a caricature (which for obvious reasons you wouldn't want to do), does that make you mindful of your own limitations, or limiting yourself in an unnecessary fashion?

@Ghost said in Sexuality: IC and OOC:

I dig this philosophical approach. I dig the questions.

My own 2 cents on this is that anytime you are writing a character whose perspective is different from your own real-life perspective you're going to get a few things wrong. In good faith is a useful term, here. Is it an attempt in good faith or meant to be a caricature? The only way to know for sure is to ask the player, because assumptions can be (and often are) assumed to be negative until proven otherwise. Plenty of stories in this thread show that.

I agree with @Ghost. I think these are very interesting questions. I also agree that in good faith is incredibly important here. Do I get things wrong when I play a female character or a person of color or a homosexual male character or a veteran or any of the other things that I am not? Probably. Hell, I'll even say certainly.

But I can assure you that it's a good faith effort on my part, and I think that there's no reason that someone shouldn't be able to make a good faith effort to play a character type that they aren't. On the other side of that, if you want to play what you know, I don't think there's anything wrong with that (unless you're playing a self-insert -- I might have a little shade to throw on those who play direct self-inserts).

I don't think that those who play characters whose gender/sexuality/political beliefs/etc are the same as their own are lesser roleplayers -- in my own case I might even suggest that I probably play a cis het white male character better than another type of character simply because I understand how society views them and have a baseline to connect with. I think this latter point is an incredibly important one, and why I always try to have something in common with my characters. Maybe they like a different gender than I do, have different color skin than I do, and have wildly different life experience than I do, but maybe they like Star Wars and hate coffee, like me. It's those little touches that connect me to the characters I play and allow me to explore differences I might have with them (be they gender, sexuality, politics, etc).

For the record, most of my characters are cis/het men, although I've played homosexual men, demi-sexual women, asexual men, heterosexual women, bisexual women, and a variety of other combinations, and I tend to play a lot of POC.

@Saulot said in Historical MUSHes:

@Seraphim73 I know I sound like a pessimist, but I don't think there is a happy medium. You gotta accept that you can't please both audiences, and will have to cater to one. I may be wrong since I haven't been mushing for long, and there may have been games that have accomplished it.

I don't disagree. I think you have to pick somewhere on the spectrum (probably like 2/3 to 3/4 of the way in one direction or the other would be my guess) and then be very, very, very clear in the Mission Statement/Welcome where you're setting the game. For The Eight Sea (thanks @tek), for instance, we specifically said "We are playing a Hollywood version of history, with similarly Hollywood interpretations of real-world religions and myths" on the front page.

Depending on the era, I would totally be down for this. The problems that I've seen with them in the past tends to be "depending on the era," and also "how historical do you want it." Because if it's too historical, than the average player can't play it, and if it's too Hollywood, then the people who really like the era will get frustrated by everyone else. There has to be happy medium, I'm sure someone will find it, I just don't know that I've seen it yet.

@Tinuviel said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

@faraday On the flip side to that, if we the general player base know about the complaint (and if it's complaint worthy, gossip has already started about the behaviour) and then see staff do... nothing about it. Why would we complain if it happens to us?

I would always inform the person who registered the complaint of the action that I took, whether it was providing an unofficial warning to the person, adding a note to their 'file,' giving them some time off from the game, banning them, or whatever.

Not only is this polite and professional (and lets them gauge your actions and see if they think it's enough), but it also means that if they're talking with their friends about the situation, and their friends complain about nothing being done, they can go, "Oh, actually Staff told them that they're being watched and that if they get another serious report, they're gone." (Yes, this might encourage fraudulent reports, but that's why Staff needs to be investigators as well as judges -- thank you @Ganymede).

I agree with @Roz and @Too-Old-For-This that Staff will want to know, even if you've blocked a harasser successfully. And yes, as @TiredEwok mentions, one of the first things Staff will likely ask if 'did you try blocking them or asking them to stop.' I know that I always ask that first, but I don't ask it because I wish the player had done something themselves before coming to me, I ask it because if the player has done this already, and the harasser has persisted, I'm going to take a lot harder and faster action than if the victim "just" went silent on the harasser, because it makes the case a lot more clear-cut, and removes any doubt that the harasser knew they were doing something they shouldn't have.

@Kestrel That's a definite hard place to be in. I think that if I were in your shoes, I would probably try to get a feel for Staff in general, and if I felt that they were responsive to complaints from others, approach them directly, letting them know that the person in their friend-group had made you uncomfortable and refused to stop when I asked them to. I don't know that this is the best approach -- I don't even know if there is a best approach -- but it's probably the one I would take. My thinking is that if they take my complaint seriously, then I've got a great Staff group, and they're willing to take input, and if they don't take my complaint seriously, they're more concerned with the fun of their friends than that of other players, so I probably don't want to play there.

Sometimes friend-groups can forget that one of their members can be a Missing Stair, or can even not know that it's happening at all. The reminder, if the rest of the group is good, can be very useful.

It definitely would be good to be clear that there are intermediate steps between 'no action' and 'banning.' As a Staffer, I believe that there are always steps that can be taken -- sometimes an immediate ban is necessary, sometimes just a request to stop contacting another player OOCly, sometimes a short cool-down period off the game... a good Staffer can usually find the appropriate punishment for a player's actions.

On another topic, I'm definitely with @Ganymede in that I think Staff should be playing their own game. It's the rare duck that enjoys Staffing more than playing (rare and valuable, let me be clear), usually Staff opens a game because they want to play in that setting. I also agree with Gany that Staff should avoid taking positions of power on their game, it's something that I've struggled with myself. I think that the value of having Staff involved in what's going on between players is very, very valuable (as is having Staff invested in what's going on in the game).

Also, everything @Roz said about investigations and what should have happened as a result of them.

I also really, really, really agree with (and try semi-successfully to live) @Kestrel's point about not reading everything in the most negative way possible.

Also (yeesh, this is what happens when I respond to things from a day ago), I agree that Staff should dissuade players they are friends with from making comments about how tight they are with Staff. And that they should reach out to new players. I don't think this means that Staff can't be buddy-buddy with players (we're all players in the end), but there can't be other players claiming special privilege due to being friends with Staff -- and there can't be special privilege actually given due to someone being friends with Staff.

@faraday said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

"Please don't do anything; I just wanted you to know." OMG this one drives me nuts. Why tell me if you're just going to tie my hands? Now you've put me in a position where either I let a potential creeper continue creeping, or I violate your confidence by taking action against your wishes. IT SUCKS. Please stop doing this, people.

Truth.

I don't know about properly, but we implemented it way back on The Fifth World to some degree. There's an NPC tab on the Dramatis Personae page (http://thefifthworld.wikidot.com/characters) that lists NPCs who have come up in various RPs. Players could absolutely add to it.

We tried another method on The 8th Sea (what is it with us and The # <Noun>?), where we built out full character pages for some of the more important NPCs (at the top of each tab at http://the8thsea.wikidot.com/characters) -- we did this because there were fewer characters overall, only a thousand or so NPCs instead of millions. We absolutely would have allowed players to add entries, but should have encouraged it more directly.

I don't even want this sort of NPC Roster limited to antagonist NPCs -- I'd like to see a list of NPCs from across the city who come up in multiple scenes.

If your character's a cop, is there a certain desk-jockey cop who always hassles them when they're in the bullpen? List them on the NPC Roster so others can incorporate them into their RP too.

Foul-mouthed Uber driver who always manages to shave 20% off any drive time? Put them up there. Someone else might want to listen to profanity while driving very fast.

Waitress at the local diner who your character asks about her kids whenever they're ordering? Someone else might want to check in too.

I love shared NPCs, because they make the world feel like a cohesive whole rather than a variety of different realities that sometimes intersect.

@Killer-Klown said in How do you like things GMed?:

If everyone automatically 'won', there'd be no point in gming it.

This is one bit that I wish more people were good with. In the best stories, nothing ever goes perfectly smoothly -- or if it does, then the enemy planned for it to go smoothly. And yet on too many games, everything succeeds every time. Now, it's hard to spend 3 hours doing something and lose with no progress, but I would love to see more scenes end in losses that still provide some progress through the storyline. I would love to see more scenes of heroic rearguard actions ... that still require that the PCs retreat at the end. Like, I don't know, somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of scenes, with the other 2/3 to 3/4 being straight-up successes.

@faraday She was also the medic who always seemed to get targeted by the "extra" enemy (I do that to my own PCs too if there's no IC reason to target someone else).

@2mspris said in How do you like things GMed?:

If it is an intro or some part of a long story arch, then I have specific points of information or occurrence that need to get conveyed and those will be planned.

I call this the "Gated" method, rather than on-rails, and it's what I use (and prefer to play within) as well. There are certain points that will happen, but how they happen, what order they happen in, and how that impacts future gates changes. It's a deeply reactive GMing style that works best with proactive players, so it can definitely be troublesome on a MUSH. Sometimes you have to nudge people to follow-up or work toward the next step (whatever they choose to have the next step be).

I want a storyline that shifts with the actions of the players, but still manages to follow a pathway that makes sense for the world and setting of the game. If someone can handle that without any pre-planning, more power to them. I can usually do it for a single-scene plot, or even two, but more than that, definitely needs some gating for me to be able to keep up with it.

@Cupcake Shining the spotlight on other players and engaging them in their storylines and history as @Apos suggested is definitely something I still have to work on. My best suggestion for that is to have your character ask a lot of questions about what the other character(s) show interest in. Let the other player lead the unfolding conversation in directions that interest them, but always be prompting them for more. I find this difficult because I want to put in my character's opinion and viewpoint, but if you're solely looking to engage others, it's all about the prompting.

I've seen you do this with your characters and know you can, sometimes it's just a conscious decision that we (you and I for sure, and undoubtedly others) might need to make to explicitly make this scene about the other person. And usually, if you're around awesome people (and there are definitely awesome people on at least one of the games I know you're playing) they'll prompt you right back, and then you're both passing off the spotlight, deepening your characters' storylines, and this is awesome.

Seriously, best of luck to you... it's hard, but it can be fun, and totally rewarding.