@Silver said:

@Sunny I don't feel the need to tell on somebody to staff and have someone else be my daddy, but more to the point I also don't feel the need to "fix" someone's behavior issues on a game because I get really fed up of fixing people's behavior issues for them. They're not going to change anyway.

And thus, you are part of the problem. If someone is breaking the rules, why would you not tell staff? Particularly if they're making you actively uncomfortable? We're not talking about kindergarten bickering here, we're talking on a mush violating stated policy.

@ThatGuyThere
If it's a minor annoyance then it's not a problem.

This is exactly a display of the behavior I'm referring to in my previous posts. This is again making wide-spread decisions and the like based on a couple of bad apples. Both of the responses above prove my point in the addressing of the symptom rather than the problem. Thank you both.

While I know it's easier to just '@set me=unfindable' when faced with the bad apples, the more appropriate choice of action is actually 'p staff=Hey, so and so is hassling me about being in a private place with someone else. Can you let them know it's not cool?' (better) or 'page creeper=Hey, when you bug me about who I'm playing with it makes me uncomfortable' (best).

Yes, the flag is an easy solution, but it's also an incredibly passive aggressive solution that does not in any way, shape, or form deal with the problem, but instead addresses the symptom.

Unfindable enables passive aggression. It also enables those bad apples to go 'oh, no, I had no IDEA who the person was playing with, she's unfindable, I didn't see anything' and makes cheating along these lines much more difficult to address.

Harassing someone about playing with another person? This is generally against the rules on any given game; the key in this one is the word 'harassing'. Using OOC knowledge (obtained from +where) IC when this sort of thing is not permissible? Against the rules, the key for this one being 'cheating'.

Make (and enforce) rules that actually address the problems themselves, not the symptom. If you have some guy paging people with links to him jerking himself, the solution is not to @wall for everyone to please pagelock themselves. See?

ETA: tl;dr: All unfindable really does is let assholes keep being assholes.

@Silver said:

@Thisnameistaken said:

And I hate the Unfindable code. Personal peeve.

Unfindable code is great. You don't need to be able to see that I have a secret room or even a base on-grid by using +where. Nor is it necessarily anybody else's business who I am having secret meetings with. people can and do use that knowledge OOC.

Can we PLEASE stop making rules based on the very few bad apples, and instead start getting rid of the bad apples? This isn't at you, @Silver, but an illustration of the trend.

Okay. This bit is a more personal of a need for the game. I really need someone to come pick up one of my characters' primary political rival. The character comes with a playgroup and a base of power, and an incredibly interesting dynamic with my PC (at least in my opinion: they get along very well, they're on the same page about most things, but they can't both have the title). If this is something that might interest you, pretty please let me know. My PC is currently using a tactic that is going to have her eventually cementing things in her favor if I don't get the big powerhouse of a roadblock in. -.-

@Roz said:

I assumed Sunny's "I love when Garnet sings" was more general show love, versus specific recent episode.

The episode with...uhm. Explaining what Garnet is. When she is fighting the other Crystal Gem. That one is my favorite, that has Ruby and Sapphire in it. The song is great. But she actually sings a lot. Pearl sings less. Garnet is always hilarious.

...I am nerding out about Steven Universe.

Things I love? You guys. =D

ETA: @Sammi -- that episode. Yes. That one. There've been a few others. I actually DVR the show. -.-

@Roz said:

Steven Universe.

That is all.

I love this show so so so so so so much. My favorite is when Garnet sings.

The reason community property is important is not for the cases like those being brought up, though. Yeah in those situations it's unfair/etc/etc. But if someone has been supported by their spouse since they got married and has only ever been a stay at home mom and then dad cheats on her and runs off with an 18 year old and leaving her with 3 young children, her life is now destroyed. She has nowhere to go. She has nothing to fall back on. I've seen it happen a number of times -- a LOT of the people on public assistance are there because of this precise sort of circumstance. At this point, you can get help to get on your feet and schooling and stuff, but it's really, really awful.

It's really easy to judge people, too.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said:

@Pyrephox said:

Although the biggest reason why I've become wary of being the Active Person in the scene is because, unfortunately, then people come to expect it, rather than being inspired to reciprocate. I /like/ to run things, to get things moving, to pose fun little world-bits...but when it becomes the expected thing that I Will Entertain You, it's no longer fun. That's not what I'm here for. And worse, because I always sideline my PC when having those things things happen, I don't even really get to play my character.

Yeah. Unfortunately, I have also kind of become this (though maybe I'll be less embittered about it when my latest hiatus from MU*ing comes to an end, as it always inevitably does). It just gets draining to be That Guy after awhile if your fellow players are too many Not That Guys.

What I've found that helps me a lot is straight up telling the people I play with: 'I am tired of being That Guy. Can you please do something for me? Otherwise I'm going to burn out.' It's an entirely active process; you need to balance your own needs against others'. Sometimes I ask, and the person just isn't comfortable running stuff, and I say 'that's okay'. Usually, whomever it is will be all sorts of happy to look after me a little bit.

This is actually why people such as Spider or The Clique that Shall Not Be Named are as successful as they are. They run a lot of things that make specific people feel really special. They include them, gathering up a bunch of people who start to rely on them entirely for their fun, and thus when the crazy starts to get out, you have a choice: leave ALL OF THIS RP FUN behind, or put up with the shit?

@ThatOneDude said:

@EmmahSue I don't know you but I want to marry you

Pfft. If she is ever free, /I/ want to marry her.

Also, what @EmmahSue said.

As far as introverts and asking for RP...I know. Really, really, I know. I have a couple of really shy friends that have opened up enough to me to tell me that they're shy, and I do a lot of facilitating RP for them. It's just what I do. Anywhere I am, on anyone, wave a flag at me and if I can help, I will. It makes me happy to arrange RP for others.

ETA: @tragedyjones - I feel the same way. If someone asks for play and I'm not available to at least help out somehow, I feel like a jerk.

It has begun! Sharing Ash's post here:

======================= OOC : Open/Wanted PC Positions =======================
Message: 23/31 Posted Author
War Plot PCs Jun 18 2015 Asherat

The time has come for the Royal Army (and a handful of troops from each of the provinces) to ride off to war! This is a plot players have been anticipating for a while, and staff are dedicated to making it as entertaining for you as we can. Over the next couple of days we will be adding a few rooms to the grid for rp purposes for the group who will be traveling to the Flatlands so there is the possibility for variety in scenes, since this will be a longer arc outside the City of Elua. We'd also like to encourage players to consider making alts to join the war plot. If you have hit your alt cap and would like to add another temporary alt just for the purposes of being a part of this storyline, the staff will allow for it, so long as you are prepared to ditch the new character (or one of your old ones if you get attached) once the party returns to the City. Soldiers, whether leaders or just men on the ground, are who we expect to be most involved, though there are other options including some for female PCs. Priestesses, healers, and courtesans from some of the Houses of the Mont are some of the female characters who might have traveled with the army, assuming they were able to do so without being a liability. If you are interested in making a new character to join up, please contact the staff or Reynard and we can help make sure you are set up to do so!

Have fun out there!

@Tempest said:

The majority of MU-players (at least on WoD-esque games) are not the sort who just want bar-and-relationship-rp.

This bears repeating. People will do the bar-and-relationship RP, yes. Some of us even enjoy the purely social events. But most folks would at any given time be way happier to be playing something more substantial. They're just not sure of how to get it, and you cannot teach an introvert to be an extrovert. You can teach them to mimic it, but it's never going to be entirely comfortable.

People who have every reason to be involved in an ongoing plot (and often, actively have people trying to engage them), yet do nothing and complain about there being nothing going on, have to be one of the more annoying subsets of players.

Most of the time when this is going on, what they're trying to say is 'I don't know how to get involved, and I know you think you've thrown me clues, but I don't see what I'm supposed to be doing with them and now I'm getting frustrated.' They don't/can't articulate it that clearly, and yes, absolutely, it's annoying as fuck. They aren't (usually) being as much of an ass as they're coming off as, they truly don't get it.

As players, there's been such a stigma about OOC influencing IC for so long that it's spilled over to things it shouldn't. 'I can't tell you how to get involved in the plot, you have to find out IC RP with people' is not healthy for any game, and it's not helping anyone's fun. But we do it and do it and do it again.

Nobody is actively responsible for anyone else's fun. It's not my fault if people are bored because I go away for a week. Really, yes, they should be making their own fun, but at the same time, if I can take ten minutes to give them a week's worth of stuff to RP about, I should.

I don't need to make a thread. I find it interesting, but I don't think it's a problem that has a solution. You can either restrict them and let people prove themselves on not bigshots, or you can let just anyone try and then those that fail, well, chalk it up to a loss.

As far as off-the-map stuff and the occult things....they're keeping the game within scope. That's an important part of managing a game: X is what we are playing. There's a wiki page entitled 'where we are not going' or something similar -- it's very upfront about it.

A friend of mine really, really, really enjoys a more robust economy system than what they have, where he would/could be able to outsmart people with types of crops and win economic and thus political influence that way. That's a fun game! I love those sorts of things. It would be soooooooooooooooo cool if KD had something like that.

It's not the type of game they're running. Just because I want something, or want the game to be about something it's not, they are not obligated to do it. Does this mean it won't be the game for everyone (or even most)? Absolutely. But to present these things as if they are design flaws rather than the person in question being interested in other things, that becomes a problem.

Particularly when there are major problems presented without any specific examples of anything. There's nothing anybody can do about those things, if nobody is willing to say what happened. What the problem is. 'It's stagnant and not political enough' -- okay, please. Just one thing, specifically, that presents what the problem is.

Like, @Misadventure -- what was it that you wanted to play that you were told no absolutely not about?

A lot of it is in the merits themselves; if you look, they say with some merits (like occult initiation) that they need permission from staff. I think some of the miscommunication comes from that lack of clarity, though. I know clarifying some pieces of the Wiki is on the to-do list; I'll check in with them about making it clearer that there are some character types that either require discussion with staff first (rather than at the end of chargen), or some time-played on the game.

It is an interesting question re: leadership, but it's not applicable to this game. There are MANY MANY leadership positions that are open and available for newcomers to just walk in off the street and take -- just not those with the Sovereign titles over the Provinces.

Yes, they do have a requirement on some things that you've played on the game for a while first; any of the Sovereign characters, occult characters, that sort of thing. There are others, and I think some of the foreigners fall under that as well. So yeah, I can see them flat-out denying some types of concepts. I definitely expect that did happen, and I wish you'd have just talked to me about the concept and worked through stuff first.

It's why I'm actively so much of a newbie helper; there is a lot of shit to know and navigate, so having someone to help you your first time in is pretty helpful. .

Straight up, Skaldia is blunt. He does not sugar coat anything, and he answers questions with the fewest possible words. He doesn't waste time. It's worth keeping in mind that we blew the game up; it went from a fairly small playerbase to very very active all but overnight. There are just two of them. They're not interested in adding to their staff team, for a lot of good reasons. So he's blunt, and he's also overworked. I've had people show me logs of what they interpreted as him being hostile and every time he's just: this is how it is. We're all used to staff being scared of telling people no, and so they dance around the issues and fuss and so on. He doesn't play those games.

If that's not the sort of person you enjoy interacting with as far as staffing styles go, it's not worth coming in and then getting hurt/offended and leaving. That's who he is. I won't say anyone is wrong for not liking it, not enjoying it. It turns some people off, sure.

I'm going to maintain that it's not a problem and that it's working very well; I've seen at least one complete meltdown on a player's part and he dealt with that shit so quick everyone's head spun. There was no pussyfooting around; he took the rabid dog out behind the barn and shot it without letting a huge long dramafest happen. Some of us greatly appreciate his staffing style, but it's not for everyone. I've seen a few different logs of his 'bad behavior' (shared by the people complaining about him) and they're full of people being passive-aggressive little shits at him because that's the staffing-mode they're used to, that's how they think they need to communicate. I try and tell people no, don't read into that, don't take it as he's not meaning what he's saying, or he's unhappy, or he doesn't like it. HE WILL SAY THAT if that's the case. If you take what he says without putting in any of your own meaning to his words, he becomes an absolute breeze to deal with.

However, I am biased. Ash and Skaldia, their game, and their staffing styles -- it's all Just Right for me. I am happier on this game and feel safer on this game than I have anywhere else; it's why I'm so comfortable disclosing my alts. I know if any of the fuckers around the community that like to harass me decided to show up there, the moment they caused a problem, that would be that. KD is almost exactly what I'd like in a game; I'm missing my strong political rival (which would be the last piece for it to be perfection for me), but I expect that will eventually happen.

Not to be a snot about it, but the people who run the game do have permission from the author, and she even links to the mush from her website (as well as a bunch of other sorts of games, because the author is awesome like that)...but with that, it implies that we're going to generally use the source material, rather than rewriting swaths of it.

I can understand that it's not your cup of tea, What I understand less is the specific complaints that you had about staff, in that they stifled things / blocked things people tried to do, or enforced the stagnation. I very much would like to know what it is you feel that they do that has stifled things. If there's a problem there, I am absolutely sure that they'll want to address it immediately. Nobody's perfect, even if I feel like these guys are very good. If you have feedback to give on what is being done wrong that isn't just sort of waving your arms around and saying 'that', it would be helpful. Just because other people agree with the general opinion you hold does not mean that anyone has bothered to bring up specific examples of behavior.

'It's not what I expected.' - What did you expect?
'With it's current trajectory' - What things are happening that lead you to believe it's just going to turn into something that it isn't, right now?
'Staff is killing the game I was interested in playing' - What game were you interested in playing? Politics, clearly. But which political actions were quashed? What line did you try to pursue that you were blocked on? What bit of theme-expansion did you try to do that was shot down?

It's not about stepping on puppies, or it not being the game for you. I'm interested in hearing where you are coming from. I'd like to know, so that if there is something I can do to help the place out, As I said, my experiences have been dramatically different from your own, and I'd really love to try and figure out where the disconnect is between our experiences. My feelings aren't hurt; I didn't bring Emma into it because of my feefees, but because she was a specific example of why I felt like the players have a great deal of agency on the game.

Your previous posts were more than a bit of a negative slant / overstatements, if you go back and read them. They speak of a great deal of frustration, and the lack of producing actual examples when requested and instead going to 'well it's just my opinion'...Great, I understand it's your opinion, but where did this opinion come from? 'Someone else feels that way' isn't an answer: they're not here talking about their awful experience.

I'm actually going to double-post, because there's an angle here I missed in my previous post.

The part about being a world-builder, but not being able to read staff's mind, and them having the expectation that you know what is on their mind. I think that may actually be a mixture of misunderstanding and miscommunication. There are 9 books. Many of these books cover all of the areas that they allow people to play characters from. These cultures aren't hidden, they're just in the books. I haven't read them all omg, so if I were going to play a foreigner and needed information, I'd start out with asking it, rather than trying to establish it.

If creation of this sort is like...what you enjoy, there are several Houses still that are blank slates. You get to design them yourself, within reason.

Skaldia is blunt, straightforward, and does not pussyfoot around. He speaks directly, and more often than not when he is being interpreted as displeased, he is simply stating fact. It's dryly spoken, so people interpret it as being annoyed or whatever. I personally prefer staff that get straight to the point without dancing around the topic and wasting everyone's time.

Gotta admit I'm entirely baffled by this. Can you provide some examples of the stasis you're referring to? What sorts of efforts were squashed? There are a couple of hard lines (tech advancement, world exploration, staff controlled monarchy) that they're very open about, but other than that I have not seen any examples of staff crushing things. I've been encouraged in all of the crazy shit my characters do, even if I do get eyes rolled at me occasionally.

It's not a GoT game. It's not intended to be a GoT game. It's a Kushiel game, and Kushiel is a very distinct sort of theme. It is what it says on the tin. I play two incredibly political PCs (and one that's absolutely not) and I have not had any difficulty getting engaged in this sort of RP. It helps, though, that both are very proactive about driving conversations into the political realm.

As a concrete example here, Emma worked VERY hard to advance the war agenda. She wanted to invade the Flatlands, knew it was on the table, and chased people around to discuss the topic with them so they knew why voting yes was the thing to do. The whole Parliament vote, the whole declaration of war, the decision to invade instead of defend (this is the first time in Terre d'Ange's history where they have been the aggressor, that's a pretty big World Change right there)...that was all PC driven. Staff provided us with 'hey they've taken the Flatlands' and it just so happens that's the best angle to invade us from, and now they control nearly our entire eastern border. Some of the PCs decided that this was really, really bad, and they have been working hard for a while now to push things the way that they're going.

As a second concrete example, there's a group that's on extended-absence from the city currently pursuing plot stuff related directly to the lack of Scion powers.

There's a whole lot of player agency on this game. Staff doesn't squash much of anything that I've seen. I really am interested in hearing specific examples; if there are specific examples, I can engage with them about the topic and see what washes out.

ETA: I guess what I'm trying to say here for my example is that this whole war thing, right now? That's player-driven/initiated.

@The-Tree-of-Woe said:

50 is ancient for a gorilla.

I know. But he was still a huge part of my childhood growing up (every time I visited my father, I wanted to go see Ivan), and part of my awareness-learning of the world -- I loved going and visiting him, but eventually I did realize (as did many others) that where he was was a bad, bad place for him. Too small, kinda yuck. I was so, so, so glad when he went off to a good zoo. He had a good run of it.

nWoD 2.0 aka The God Machine aka The Way Better One.

@tragedyjones

Yes. Yes, I want your help. Precisely what I need, I'm not entirely sure, but you're definitely a subject matter expert for the system itself. Please, pretty please, I expect you and I are going to do some little bits of headbutting as I suspect we have dramatically different ...put a word here, I can't think of the right one. Approach? Viewpoints? Opinions? I think it's probably approaches. I'm not worried about it, but I also wanted to make sure you're coming in with the understanding that it was likely to happen. Everyone else I might be working with that I butt heads with, they've mostly worked with me before and they already know it. I don't think I've worked with you. I'm awesome, I just have ...quirks.

Everyone else
This is happening. I have a collection of those who have offered to help, and what those offers were. In the next couple of weeks, I'll be getting things started and get a site up and all of that fun stuff. There is no delay, but I just wanted to remind that I stated above that it would be a few weeks.

The reasoning behind that is that I have some Things (yes, Things) in the offline world that have to be stabilized. I want to be sure I'm starting out at 100%, given the stress-load doing something like this comes with. Not that it's all bad stress with the building process, most of it is really exciting.

We have plenty of help now and a really exciting team lineup. I think every base is covered that I was super concerned about, and I've got the background story (replacing 'metaplot') rolling around in my mind. I need to find my stupid Viseo disk.

Generic You Here
I am not going to turn anybody away before they show up and I've talked with them (except for those few people who know better than to show up in the first place), helpwise, but once we've started working together, if somebody isn't someone I think I'm going to be able to work with or whatnot? I'll ask you to excuse yourself from the development process. A request to leave during the development process does not and will not have anything to do with whether or not you're welcome on the game. While I've probably worked with most of you over the years, personality management is definitely part of my job. It's not personal, it's not you, it's just that I generally know pretty quickly whether I will work well with someone or not.