Best posts made by Sunny

@ZombieGenesis

I am really looking forward to this. REALLY.

@ninjakitten said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

@sunny said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

(especially given we have a whole subset of games that don't even have grids any more).

Which would those be?

The ones that I'm told exist every time an adjacent topic comes up. "We do fine without a grid! Nobody needs one any more! Nobody plays on them anyway, we just choose rooms off a list." Unless that's been just hyperbole and the games DON'T actually exist.

eta: I don't know what they are, I just know I'm yelled at about them every time I mention preferring grid based/initiated play, so I was trying to acknowledge they existed before somebody came at me again about it.

@Cobaltasaurus

Yes. Would you play somewhere like that? Yeah, we all pretty much would, I think. When was the last time you heard "man that game was so good, I wish I could've played there but those grid descs were full of holes". NEVER THAT'S RIGHT.

ETA: It's the room and what's in it that's important. Get the info across. The pretty of the desc is 100% irrelevant, it can be filled in after the fact by the first person that is so bothered by it that they have to fix it. That person WILL come along. They always showed up for my OTT games and those descs were even LESS important.

There is a wide gulf between "someone in a position of pretendy-fun-time power is not playing with anyone but these four people" and "someone in a position of pretendy-fun-time power is avoiding X and Y specifically" and treating the latter like it's the former does no one any good EXCEPT for that particular breed of abuser who likes to bring the staff hammer down on their victim as a "consequence" for setting boundaries.

Or get clever/code with it.

Room designation: Medbay
Amenities level: Low
Staff level: High
Occupancy Limit: 16 people

Make all your descs like that instead of narrative descriptions, and now it's like coding instead of describing. And it supports your genre.

Yeah, that was my thought as well.

@Ominous

Oof. Is THAT why the mention of social dice mind control was made? Lol yeah, that’s so a nope out right there for me. I trust maybe two of you fuckers enough to play that sort of system with. Maybe.

@roz said in GMs and Players:

It is one more place of fun, engagement, socialization, and community that is now lost to that person due to the systemic efforts of their abuser.

I cannot overstate how true and important this part right here is. It sucks. It sucks SO HARD.

It just needs to be internally consistent. We don't actually need the answers to the questions, but YOU, The Storyteller, does have to have the answers / know the big picture, because otherwise the little picture / little pieces the players get don't make sense.

It's like the parable of the blind people and the elephant and everybody touching it has a different idea of what they're touching, right? But if that's your game, it always has to be an elephant -- if you have a hippo today, a zebra on Tuesday, and an elephant on Friday, the picture your players walk away with is NEVER going to make any sense.

The answer can be anything from "aliens" to "global conspiracy" to "you are actually in a simulation" or whatever, right? It's just that there has to be an answer there, and every single decision you make has to be consistent with that answer, whether or not you share that with your players.

Once upon a time, the 'answer' that never hit my game's grid was 'Set is asleep under the city. Yes, that Set.' It informed EVERYTHING, but touched nothing we actively did directly.

Look, back when I ran games, I almost always had at least one or two staff members on my teams who were part of that "couldn't ST their way out of a wet paper bag" party. At least half of those people, it was NOT for lack of trying, let me tell you. Somebody around here could probably tell you all stories about the stories that my psychedelic coder ran. They weren't good. We made her stop. But these people, they contributed in their ways, a lot of them VERY significantly. See: coder.

You can say the same for players and the ones that run PRPs and those that don't. Those that don't, most of them aren't just logging in to passively consume. They ARE bringing value to the games they play on, most of them.

The automated prompts thought is great. I bet it would be possible to create some pretty incredible choose your own adventure, and I know of at least one game that's working on randomly generated dungeons PCs will be able to go do. Seeking alternatives that solve the problem -- more Things to Do -- is a far more likely to succeed endeavor than shaming people into running things.

I should also say that this question was "from staff", so that's where my answers are coming from. I agree entirely with those commenting that the most important thing is having other players engaged and interested in what you're running.

Staff doesn't really provide/engage with that beyond the policy level, but they DO engage with it: by clearly demonstrating that staff encourages PRPs and considers them to be a valid way to interact with the world. If staff make it clear by providing a solid framework for people to run plots, creates tools for people to do so, and incorporates information from those plots into their game resolution/IC communication methods, it makes it clear to the other players that PRPs are valid. If prps are valid, PRP runners will be engaged with by interested people. If you build it, they WILL come.

eta: emphasis on the fact that I did not name specific tools. it doesn't matter what the tools are. you just have to have clearly made tools for people to use. the effort here is literally what matters.

@Ganymede said:

@Wizz said:

There are fewer places, people, and structure to hide behind; to suggest that the God-Machine could orchestrate this elaborate collapse of society, force populations into small pockets, and then for whatever bumbling reason couldn't tighten the noose just sounds hand-wavey to me.

I'm not sure I'm following your train of thought. You seem to go off the rails at this point. At what point did I say that there wasn't a constant threat? I believe my last post suggested otherwise.

That's the point; he's saying that the threat is too big, there's no logical reason that the demons would survive. It's a threat in the books amongst zillions of people for them to hide in. It doesn't just turn off the smoke screen, it dresses them in neon colors, hangs lights all over them, and stands them up in the darkness for everyone to find.

My SO and I (when we're both mushing) don't really play together. Most of the couples I know, they're not even remotely a problem. A lot of the time you'd never know without someone telling you. There are a few loud couples, but for the most part enh. The few toxic ones I know, one person in the relationship or the other is toxic beyond just that. I can't think of an occasion offhand where it was "man, if it weren't for the way Sally behaved in regards to Susie, she'd be great" instead of just "man, Sally is a raging psychoweasel in multiple ways, including her relationship with Susie".

@demiurge

I would recommend that anything sexual in any fashion involving another PC be something that that PC's player has to consent to. This includes fantasies of consensual action and the like. Not that the other character can't have them, but that they can't be explored on screen (in any way, shape, or form) about another player's character without that player agreeing to it OOC. Because of the nature of the game's reality, fantasies of consensual acts could easily be used for the purposes of being a creep.

From her post, I did not get the impression that Ingrid app'd in with Sam's cooperation; it sounded to me like the characters are linked in history/the source material, rather than something agreed on, and given it's NOT a situation like a leadership role (just playing an FC on a comic game doesn't qualify unless there are specific rules pertaining to this), I'm with @Arkandel on this one. Sam's player doesn't owe her anything, and to be honest if I were Sam and I read this about her considering asking staff to MAKE me play with her? That would not make me want to play with her more.

@demiurge said in Dreamwalk MUSH:

THAT SAID, I'm getting the vibe from a lot of people here that they want a blanket ban on offensiveness. That, I'm not really willing to accommodate.

There is literally zero discussion from anyone here regarding suggesting that you address "offensiveness". People are specifically addressing sexual matters. Please don't put words into my mouth. "I don't want to deal with someone harassing me sexually" and "I don't want to see anything I find offensive" are VERY VERY VERY different things and I absolutely object VERY STRONGLY to you characterizing the point being made this way. Given where this discussion is taking place, I am bowing out of it now. I wish you luck.

@Lithium

The player can move on and play their character whenever they want to do so. At any time the player can make their own decision about their own PC that allows for the character to move on. It does not require that the player put the 'fault' on the other player's character. There is never a point in which there's too much that a player gets to make decisions for another player without permission and/or it being baked into the rules.

Edited to add: If the characters are so intimately, heavily connected that it is literally impossible for a creative person to come up with a story that doesn't involve making decisions for someone else's PC, then they shouldn't have applied for the character without speaking to the player in question in the first place.

Edited again to add: Does nobody else find it creepy that the player in question has had someone ELSE @mailing to nag about the RP?

Update:

What I was waiting on resolving is as resolved as it's going to get for the time being, but everything unstable is mostly stable again. Thus, this thing is getting the green light.

I'll be getting a clean install of Mux up on my site this weekend sometime, and I'll be passing the address around here and then to those that emailed me, as well. We'll get everybody together and the brainstorming / discussion / etc will begin.

@faraday said:

And btw, in either case Jane could've avoided the conflict by coming up with an internal justification for Jane wanting to move on, rather than making it have anything to do with a presumed IC reason for Bob's OOC absence.

And this is what I'm advocating for at the end of the day. It's possible, and I do think people should take that little bit of effort to do it -- it causes less problems for everyone involved.