Best posts made by surreality

@Cobaltasaurus Yeah, volunteer-only seems to be the intent here, much like the playlists on MSB or some of the old livejournal or FB groups that people post the info themselves. It's not a new idea by a mile, it's just a different implementation of it.

Broadly speaking -- and this is a case of 'oh god, scope creep!' that makes me cringe even as I mention it -- it may be a good idea to have a field for game type. As in, don't limit it to MUSH/MUX. Open up to MUDs, play by email, play by post, etc.

Why? Well, a lot of players here have multi-venue overlaps like that. It might be a good way to show some folks here some viable alternatives if there's nothing that's grabbing them at the moment in their favored medium. If there are some folks they already know who they could get in touch with to help them get started, this is a big plus. Along the same lines, this could maybe draw some people from the IRC/play by post/etc. crowd over to MUSH/MUX, which I've seen happen. The mention of the reincarnated writers game on livejournal, elsethread, comes to mind; a lot of folks here may never realize how many people they run into in another RP type are actually the same players, too, simply because 'it's a different RP medium'.

@Ganymede There's still... issues with that. It's one of those pieces of bad advice that people apply with a broad brush, even to folks like me who live with permanent injuries. (As in, no, when certain things hurt, stopping is the only option that won't prevent further damage, crazy people.)

I live with a massage therapist, and even for muscle strain, that can be really really bad advice to take. He rails about this to all of his clients (and I get it second hand). Tired ache and actual pain are different things, basically. Tired ache you can work through (within reason). Pain really is your body's way of telling you: something is wrong.

It might be worth taking a peek at the series 'The 100' for this. Since it's longer than a film, it delves a bit more deeply into some of the factors in play in a post-apocalyptic society sort of setting.

@Arkandel Think of it this way: yeah, a lot of people have it worse, sure. That's actually a huge reason to work to preserve what you've got, and avoid recklessly breaking stuff that isn't broken by pushing too hard. While that may seem hokey, it's pretty sound. Slower, safe progress is progress -- which is the sane person goal, really. Patience is IMHO more badass in this regard as plowing ahead when your body's trying to NOPE that. Anybody can push it long enough to hurt themselves. Not just anybody can stick with something long enough for real, enduring results.

Doubtful, since I think most of the other folks working on this are not remotely on board with that. (Read: loathe it like it actually enacted every your mother joke that's ever been traded on the forum at once.) I just keep pitching it anyway because it is a setting I really, really want to see happen some day.

Because I am like the team equivalent of the nagging housewife that bangs on endlessly about some random thing constantly, then backpedals on most else to say but, like, I totally only do wiki! the moment my eyes start to glaze over on something.

(Again, this is a self-awareness thing... but @tragedyjones, @Thenomain, and @Coin can doubtless confirm the cosmic truth of this.)

That said, FUCK YEAH THAT WOULD BE AMAZING, so I really really hope it could be a thing.

@Ganymede Fair! I just tend to point that one out because it can harm you (but really, I'm a smoker -- I am not so much a hypocrite as to tell someone they can't do something they know can harm themselves), too, and... really, a lot of people genuinely believe it's totally OK to use that to try to shame people with permanent injuries or actual physical problems into pushing it way, way more than they should.

It's pretty easy to restrict roles without being draconian about players having alts (or insisting they have all of these other crappy traits in the process for flimsy justification of it).

Most games that allow alts already have restrictions regarding what those alts can be, such as 'no two in the same faction/family/sphere/character class/etc.' and 'no more than one character of rank X/status X/in a political office/in charge of a faction/etc.' (whatever system the game uses) is not exactly a stretch to add to this list. Some games already do have a 'no more than one fachead/family head/gov position/etc.' and this problem is rapidly resolved.

@Arkandel I think this is all of us once we get out of our twenties. For so, so, so many reasons in some cases.

This thread is an amazing, productive, helpful thread. I wish I could be more articulate in a contribution to it at the moment, but I did feel the need to say: more like this, and thank you for making this thread, for now, at least.

@Cupcake Scream Queens has to be my favorite new show from last year.

Very little has made me laugh quite so hard; it's rather like Archer that way. You don't want to laugh, sometimes, but some of the characters are such horrible people it becomes thoroughly hilarious.

It reminded me of another show that no one ever seems to have heard of from years back, and I later found out it's due to sharing a creator with that one. It is, of all things, a teen comedy/drama that was called Popular and it was charmingly weird enough that after just leaving the channel on whilst working on a project... I ended up watching it on purpose after that. It's not horror (beyond 'all things set in high school can be horror to adults'), but it has the same over the top funny-charming weirdness factor.

@Sunny Er, most folks I know who have multiple characters don't designate one as a main and the others as secondary. They're just all alternates to one another.

@Auspice That... wow.

But it had a sidebar link to this, and anything that in all seriousness includes the phrase 'Solar powered cameras were strapped to five sheep' is almost like the Pokemon hunting humans right back.

@Swaggot said in Making a MU* of your own:

I think the use of professionalspeak in the context of a game about pretending to be a vampire or whatever is just plain cringey; it betrays how seriously you take yourself.

I also think I'm in the minority for perceiving things this way.

Yes and no, I think. We disagree on impartiality. A lot of people merely pay it lip service, but plenty of others I've seen adhere to it.

It's a more -- and less -- complicated issue than it might be otherwise. Less in that, yeah, you could tell people to please just fuck off, but more, because of, well, entitled attitudes and people expecting a customer service rep mentality.

Meanwhile, this is the core policy for staff professionalism I have set up for whatever I end up running someday:

Staff on <game> are not bound to the traditional image of a customer service representative who must endure abuse with a smile as a measure of their 'professionalism'.

Staff is here to keep the game operating as smoothly and efficiently as possible. A customer service representative is actually there to fix your problem, take down your feedback, check on the status of your package, or take your online or mail order, not sit there getting kicked repeatedly in the face because you're unhappy. Similarly, we're here to help you get your character approved, run plots, process +jobs, mediate disputes impartially, and make fun things happen whenever we possibly can.

That's our job, and doing our job efficiently is what professionalism actually is by our definition here.

...and then there are further rambly-ass notes with a link to this and this, with the latter example as the better standard to adhere to. (Essentially, "Don't feed someone bullshit and call it filet mignon, people are generally not that stupid," -- which goes in both directions along the player <-> staff continuum.)

First pre-coffee-kicking-in observation from me...

...pretty sure one of the reasons I love MU is that it being text-only makes it so much easier to focus on the words. Games with visuals? I get lost in/distracted by the visuals and forget the game part, and promptly die or get lost or eaten by robots/etc. (I can watch that stuff with someone else doing it as a zen background noise thing like whoa, though, and really enjoy that.)

Limiting it to text helps. It just does. And with wikis being prevalent now, there's still a visual reference and creative aspect. Wiki is like... the perfect blend of 'art + code' for me, since it involves problem-solving and visual creative foo thrown into a blender on frappe.

I'm not going to touch the objections to the article with a ten foot pole. (Not even someone else's ten foot pole.)

@Swaggot said in Making a MU* of your own:

@surreality I think there's a lot of malice that gets attributed to simply saying "I don't like your character idea" to people.

It isn't really even a case of ascribing malice to it, really.

Most people aren't going to bother making a character they don't like or aren't eager to play, and put time into doing it, so even before the character gets a yes/no to enter the game, there's some measure of investment there, even if it's just a minor investment of time spent going through whatever motions are of the initial chargen process. (Considering how involved or time-consuming that can be for some games, this isn't always something that somebody could breeze through in ten minutes or so.)

So for some folks, they're looking at it as: "You wasted my time, you asshole!" in addition to "What do you mean my Unicorn Star Princess Ninja Babe with Sparkefairy Magic and the ability to control turtles with her mind isn't the most brilliantly original and thematic concept ever?!?!?!" (<-- Not an actual concept that I have seen pitched, but less dumb than the actual dumbest concepts I have seen pitched.)

...none of which is good. For that player, it does suck. They liked the idea enough to try to make it, and they have now wasted their time.

Sadly, it's often people asking for the weirdest, most out there, most 'did they like, even read the game theme or setting?!' concepts that will be the most vocal, histrionic, and irrational about this. This is because they usually have read the theme and/or setting info, and they really just don't give a fuck, because their idea is just that special, and clearly you, the staffer, will be so blown away by their masterpiece that exceptions will be made for them (even if everything says no exceptions will be made to anything for anybody).

No, really. It's like a sliding scale, it really is. The borderline crap? Most people are all 'eh, ok, I'll change X' or just drop it and try something else with minimal drama. The more batshit bonkers the concept they're pitching, the more over the top crazy the response to the 'no' is going to be. I'm sure there's the rare exception to this, but I haven't come across them yet.

I don't blame you for not wanting to do the customer service rep thing on your games, though. It's a game. You're staffing on this shit because it's something you do for fun. These things almost never generate revenue and real profits, so I don't think there's any expectation of impartiality.

I don't actually staff for fun (because mediating arguments, doing jobmonkey work, etc. is not remotely fun), or with even the faintest interest in financial gain; financial gain is not even a factor I bother to consider. I staff to help facilitate a space where fun can happen -- for others, for me if there's time for it, and ideally for both.

Only some people want to hear 'that's crap, gtfo with that shit' and consider the matter closed. Others want to find a way to work with elements of what they came up with and try to find a way they'll work, which does involve changing things to reach the point at which the 'no' becomes 'yes'. I've seen considerably more of the latter than the former over the years.

@Swaggot said in Making a MU* of your own:

@surreality Here are a few examples of something being banned for being too interesting:

Not a single one of these examples is a case of 'too interesting'. Not a one.

• A Moros character can't have the Shadow Name "Exsanguinate" because Shadow Names can't be verbs, you should take uh "Thanatos" instead (WoD game),

Is this stupid and hopelessly pedantic? Sure. Wanting to use a verb for a name doesn't make somebody more interesting in any way, though, so failure to defend a ridiculous assertion #1.

• You can't make a Cleric who worships a Magickal God even though the game lets you, and even has special messages for this, because Clerics are supposed to be Anti-Magick (Imperian, decided about a year after I had been doing this IG),

You're going to have to clarify here. Is it a system based on a book game, or an original thing with just the game site? Most games based on books have house rules that restrict some shit or disallow it entirely. Was this the case? Was this a case of the game changing the rule and expecting people to comply? ('No grandfathering', or 'grandfathered chars won't be lost, but no new characters of this type will be allowed'? -- both very common.) Was this a random staffer just being an asshole?

Regardless of all of the questions above, there's nothing interesting about this one, either. It's someone asking for an exception and being told 'no'.

• Your escaped convict werewolf can't have three dots in Brawl or Weaponry even though he spent the last decade fighting in a hyperbolic WoD prison on a daily basis, he can have two dots instead (another WoD game; no rule to this effect was in their guide, they just didn't like combat stats),

Do these people need to write that shit down if they're going to manage stats that way? They sure as shit do! Is it a stupid guideline? Yes.

...but as a former werewolf TL, I can assure you, I've seen this concept so many times there's not a hint of anything remotely interesting about it. It's pretty common. (It's also pretty stupid one because good luck surviving prison as a werewolf who has already gone through their change without being exposed.)

Again, this has zippity-squat to do with 'interesting' and everything to do with 'we don't want our game a certain way'. Which people need to be up front about. People having unspoken rules? Still has not a goddamned thing to do with whether the character or concept is interesting or not.

• You can't play Ed from Ed, Edd, n Eddie because it's too silly, but these slew of other people can have canon Pokeymanz and canon Ponies (MultiverseMUSH)

OMG you're still going on about this? Really?

I can go on, but to no insignificant degree staff often expects people to color inside of lines they don't actually write anywhere, and much of the time the lines they do write are literally there to preclude one from making all but the most cookie cutter, lame shit. So pointing this sort of thing out doesn't really qualify as "entitlement" so much as it does "entirely valid criticism."

Should these things be written down somewhere if they're going to be enforced? Of course. That is a valid criticism, absolutely. Absolutely.

It still has absolutely nothing to do with whether they're interesting or not in any way, shape, or form, and these things are not the same complaint. They aren't even in the same zip code.

"People expect me to follow rules they don't tell me about!" <-- Valid and sensible objection.

"People are just castrating my ideas because they're too interesting!" <-- Ridiculously delusional stupidity on par with the people who once altered the real wikipedia to try to pitch an absurd concept and try to pretend it was historically accurate.

@ThatGuyThere And... exsanguination and exsanguinity and exsanguinator are nouns.

Edit: @Coin Indeed. Though if this is his definition of castration, he must get castrated an awful lot, and... shit, that explains a whole hell of a lot.

Edit edit: I think I found the real problem...

I wouldn't approve that, either.

@Swaggot <pat pat> Maybe I'll believe that when you can actually make an argument for your 'too interesting' theory.

For what it's worth, I'm tinkering with something similar to the 'player login + other' idea. It involves multiple logins rather than puppets -- mostly since puppets can get hairy in MUX and people tend to be somewhat distrustful of them due to a history of spying with them -- but I like this idea. (A friend of mine and I had considered a multi-setting game, though it's stalled out for the moment while I hash out system and policy and code and such crap on my own for the next, uh, year or so.)

We're looking at some fairly different stuff regarding the player login concept if it's any help; I can pass along the notes if you like, though it's rough enough that it's not 'ready for prime time' here.

@Wizz There's actually a coded system for this already that has it all covered, actually. +cond. It's pretty neat.