Posts made by SparklesTheClown

I'm kind of fascinated by the fact that in recent years, a lot of WoD games have become quite sane now that people have started doing things like not putting literally every sphere into one game, and like, have general mission statements about building a healthy community with good conduct and player relations and such.

I feel like we're at a point where if you choose a game that's just an overall toxic environment, when there are other options now, it's pretty much masochism if you stay somewhere you don't wanna be. But if you enjoy that, sure, go ahead.

edit: I'll play in a toxic environment if I can play Beast, because I just learned what it is, and the crashing and burning will be a hilarious trade off.

@Thenomain I guess these are all good points. I did play Reach for an extended period of time even after I'd gotten dicked over multiple times.

I guess I ultimately feel similarly to how you described what Paris was saying.

re: Sacrificial lamb

Back on String Theory, our metaplot ran in "seasons", and within those seasons would be other plots. Before the beginning of each season, they would basically look for sacrificial lambs, but you would have no idea who was chosen and in which plot they'd be dying in, or when. So most of what it did was make death feel very real and plausible for every single character around us, rather than actually make us know when to expect it or be spoiled.

Also, re: warnings, kmbm really has a solid idea there. Just put a warning on all your plots, even the ones that don't have anything happen. Your plots can just have a general rating of "this kind of thing might happen in my plots", so it won't spoil anything at all because people won't really know when you're dropping some crazy shit, but they know enough to expect it -of- you to avoid your plots if that's something that bothers them.

I should state that I absolutely hate downvotes in a social context, because they're easily abused and in my opinion create a sort of emotional and cultural toxicity. Just look at old WORA.

That said, Multiverse Crisis MUSH (pretend that you didn't play during one of the super shitty eras for a moment) had a +gripes system, and from the staffers I knew who dealt with it, I know that they largely used it to catalogue patterns of behavior to see if someone was actually a problem or not. It was an anonymous system, and in my experience the people who mostly complained about it were problem players who didn't think they were problem players and thought there was a vast conspiracy against them or some bullshit.

The major downside of such a thing is when you actually -do- have toxic players who will abuse such a thing, though in that case I feel like you should honestly have some handle on the culture of your own game and know what's happening in it (which is incidentally something that a +gripes system helps with). The other downside is that such a system doesn't work with horribly corrupt and shitty staff, but then I'd repeat what someone else here has said: Why would you be playing a game with shitty staff anyway?

I get that putting up with shit-tier staffing is a WoD norm, but like, it's not something that you are under any obligation to do. I personally refuse to play a game where I can't trust staff, I don't give a shit how many of my friends are on it.

@surreality I feel like this should all be a given. I don't really understand why all of these exceptional circumstances keep getting brought up. It makes me feel like the discussion is kind of missing the forest for the trees.

There are literally so many games that have worked like this for years, this is all super basic stuff. I don't know why people think this is controversial and untested territory that is a threat to our basic rights to do fun things. Like, giving people options and tools to communicate better in a hobby where people have so much trouble communicating does not seem even remotely like something that causes more problems.

@Gilette

I disagree that MUing is in its twilight or whatever, because there's always a new stream of people. I have always said and will always say that the only thing that keeps us small is that no one bothers to advertise, because I know from personal experience that people go out of their way to try and approximate the MU RPing experience, because they have no idea that these things even freaking exist. There are tons of communities that would jump at the chance to not have to use their shit-tier medium anymore. Everyone is always saying "Oh, MMOs replaced us", if that was the case, there wouldn't be thousands of text-based RPs going on right now, even on freaking Twitter. People use what they can, because they don't know a better alternative, and when they find MUing they generally stay.

So yeah, MUing isn't dead or dying or full of dinosaurs or any of the other things that a lot of people believe, it's just not advertised and the result is a very slow trickle of new players who have to essentially stumble across the hobby or be recommended it. I guarantee that if I started a Dragon Ball Z MUSH and did an ad campaign, I could suck in all these people who are sick of RPing in backwater chatrooms full of pop up ads or shady IRC channels. You execute a hot theme that people like RPing, advertise it, and bam, players.

But I digress! Didn't mean to go so off topic there. Carry on!

I should just note that I am noticing something that I've noticed in other threads that are supposed to be constructive, which is saying "No, this idea won't work", and then not offering a viable alternative.

If you don't have a viable alternative, then figure out how the idea that you're saying can't work, can work. I personally don't find it constructive to pick apart why everything can't work but never have anything to constructively offer after that.

WoD games are some of the few places in MUs that actually needs a prefs system and doesn't have one. I hold to what I used to say back on WORA, which is that the WoD part of our hobby is always like 10 years behind much needed innovation, and is highly resistant to common sense things that other games have done for the longest time now, because basically ??? "It doesn't work fuck that/slippery slope/I won't even try it/but the principle of the thing!"

Granted, I said "actually needs", not every game needs such a system, but most of the ones that do, usually have one (typically ones with potentially mature themes). Like, let's have some self-awareness here, WoD games are like a step or two above Shang as far as mature themes go. Not having a preferences system in such games is insane to me. And I've always found such systems to only make having a dialogue about preferences less stigmatizing.

I've been on plenty of games where the sorts of perspectives here on, like, what is essentially basic human social interaction and setting up expectations based on that, would be considered downright alien. Saying "This is unacceptable and I shouldn't have to adhere to the basic social etiquette of every day life in a MU, because <insert worst case scenario here>", is a bit outrageous. Basic social etiquette and communicating expectations is many, many steps removed from "being someone's therapist".

I personally think that if one is unable to communicate at a super basic level without it being distressing or making them feel the burden of a thousand therapists, GMing is probably not for them.

I don't know how many people have read the Material Design documentation (I'm almost done), but I keep thinking: How can this be applied to MUing?

I feel like there's a way, like it's on the tip of my tongue. I think that we should scratch our heads and think of ways, even if it might seem like nonsense, that we could learn from Material Design, even if in some abstract or esoteric way!

I thought about putting this in the code section (and there might even be code applicable ideas), but Material Design is a design language and not necessarily strictly code oriented.

Any ideas?

https://material.io

@Derp I don't really understand the necessity of "all or nothing". Everyone having their particular preferences of what they want to play and what they don't want to play is basically RP 101.

Just straight up dictating what objectively does or doesn't happen in the world just seems kind of bizarre and heavy-handed to me. I'm not sure why expecting people to be adults, which has literally been the cornerstone of every good MU I've ever played, is so outrageous that one needs to finely dictate in IC terms why certain events don't happen. That's just kind of really weird.

Like, plenty of games say "We don't accept these kinds of themes", but they don't go "Oh this never happens 'cause unicorn magic" or something. That's just lazy writing in my opinion.

Can you imagine if Full House went out of its way to explain why there is a lack of brutal murder in the series?

re: Non-extreme triggers.

Almost any decent game I've been on encouraged communication and just generally not being a dick. Except for the most extreme edgelords of this hobby, there is barely a single person who is not in some way emotionally attached to their characters. I would say that even ignoring triggers, it should be common sense that doing something that will be ridiculously emotionally distressful and cause some hardcore angst will probably also be OOCly stressful in some way if they aren't expecting it.

That said, I have done plenty of roleplay in which my partner was fully open to angsty situations, and we played it very well, because our mutual expectations were communicated. We didn't always communicate the specifics, because being surprised can be fun, but we communicated our broad expectations. I don't care if I'm in WoD or playing Dragon Ball Z or something, I'm not going to go out of my way to ignore how someone might feel about me doing something, I'd rather our fun be mutual, regardless of the nature of it.

I personally don't know how anyone could enjoy a hobby that largely depends on communicating, if you don't consider mutual expectations to be an important aspect of it. This alone pretty much takes care of half the problems in this thread, with the exception of just dealing with downright toxic or problem players who are never happy with anything. But I personally don't see the logic in suddenly going "Well, some of these players suck, so fuck this mutual expectations nonsense".

Hell, if I may play the race card for a moment?

By that logic, I should just stop assuming that people will be decent human beings just because I'm black and sometimes people are really shitty about that, rather than just continuing to treat people as I want to be treated and hoping for the best.

If people are awful, stay away from awful people, but I don't think that should be used as an excuse to just not even try to make the effort to make sure that the people around you are enjoying themselves and are comfortable.

While I haven't read the entire thread, I figured I'd respond to the first post, since I have pretty particular ideas about this sort of thing.

I think that ultimately, this sort of thing boils down to communication and trust. If you know that your content is generally considered unacceptable or triggering for a large portion of people, then warning them ahead of time before they even enter the story, that a plot might contain certain hard themes, is only respectful. This is a collaborative hobby that's supposed to be fun for people, so I think that it's only fair to have other people in mind when doing this sort of thing.

That said, you can't be prepared for everything, nor can you really add a laundry list of warnings, like, "Warning, there will be rabbits", just in case someone is afraid of rabbits. You warn for the most commonly accepted triggering things. If someone has a problem, they should politely bring it up, though this can be troubling if you're in a plot run by someone you don't trust or feel comfortable with, which is why I generally suggest to have a healthy caution about knowing at least something about the person running your plots, and if they're cool to communicate with.

That said, if you are the runner and someone brings something up to you, I think that being polite and having a discussion about how they can accommodated is important. If you can't compromise for that particular scene, do what I've done in the past, which is promise that you'll have a place for them in a future scene. Sometimes it's all you can do, and hope that the player understands.

At the end of the day, communication is what matters. If there's no mutual communication, trust, and respect, then it's very difficult for everyone to have fun. And that is the key here, the point is for people to have fun, because this is a hobby where we all just wanna do our shit and feel awesome, and possibly escape the shit we deal with irl.

I recall an extreme case on Shang of someone saying they were triggered by semen. I have no idea what you do with that on Shang, to be honest, but there are limits. Like, you don't play Megaman MUSH if you find robots triggering, or Fallcoast if Mages and Vampires trigger your PTSD. People can only accommodate within reason, but obviously these are, as I mentioned, very extreme cases.

I also believe that certain MUs and communities find certain things more/less offensive or unacceptable than others. I think this is perfectly fine, not every community is the same. But I think that as human beings, you can't really argue, "Alright but I should have the right to just do my rape plots without warning anyone", that's kind of a toxic 2005 dick move in my opinion. If you wouldn't walk into a crowded bar and yell, "HEY, EVERYONE I'M GONNA TELL YOU THIS STORY I WROTE ABOUT RAPE", you shouldn't do it in a MU.

Incidentally, I know exactly how a bar responds when someone starts singing a song at an open mic about bears raping people (Spoilers: EVERYONE GETS SUPER UNCOMFORTABLE!)

tl;dr Basic social skills go a long way.

I'm sorry for almost getting a bunch of people assassinated due to having no idea what pisses Mages off.

I'm also apping right now! I'm just lazy due to writing an article today and now doing a Free Code Camp project.

@faraday Oh I see, that makes sense. I thought you were implying that Evennia was more like jQuery vs. Javascript.

@faraday Isn't Evennia straight up Python? Nothing wrong with that, just asking.

Oh, I'm also learning regular code language shit. I mostly want to learn MUSH code for fun and also for recreational educational purposes.

@Cheesegrater I was just gonna go to CCP (Community College of Philadelphia), which I'm not actually accepted into because my financial aid stuff is a bit wonky and I wanna make sure I can actually do it. Free Code Camp is actually a pretty amazing resource though, I've been looking into people's experiences with it, and it's already done more to kick me in the ass to actually doing shit than in all the years I've tried to do anything code-wise.

edit: What's a good resource for learning MUSH code?

@Jim-Nanban This is actually very helpful, and a part of my interest in computer science and such. So I think that I -can- gain something out of using MUSHCode, to be honest.

Excuse me for being late to this, but what are the prereqs of symbolic logic? And while we're at it, what are the prereqs of boolean algebra?

My coding endeavours have been going well. I've actually been doing FreeCodeCamp, because it's good career-wise and college is dicking me around with trying to do financial aid anyway.

Also, out of curiosity, I know it won't help me in the "real world", but do you think learning MUSH code is still worth doing for fun now, or is Evennia just going to totally take over and I'd be wasting my time coding with MUSH code now?