@Auspice It is, but I think they run things with a 7 day free preview (either all the time or regularly enough it seems like it) before you get charged that you can cancel within that window without a charge. I think it's about $5/month.
(ETA: if you are a horror fan, they also have Cold Skin at the moment, which is pretty good and mostly unknown. Worth checking out if anyone looks into this.)
@Auspice I found it on Amazon, through the Shudder subscription. It's a horror comedy, and pretty fun. General concept is not new -- a 'hoax paranormal team goes to a location that is actually haunted, cue chaos' thing. They did a good job with it.
@ZombieGenesis said in Worst Movies:
Sometimes I'm rewarded by finding hidden gems like Deadtectives.
^ Also found this quite fun.
Axe 'Em, aka 'I almost broke up with my husband for renting this'.
It is legitimately unwatchably bad. Not even funny bad, no matter what the reviews suggest. It is 'The Room' of horror flicks, and there is serious competition for that in the genre.
Currently, the old desktop. When the old desktop dies, I'll run it from the other one, which is much newer.
On the bluest of moons when traveling for a bit, the iPad, with a keyboard and mouse set up with it. I've used the husband's ancient backup laptop for this once in a bluer moon, but it's almost as bad as the tablet, and taking both with us somewhere is not worth it, especially if I have to take the tablet anyway for other things.
I have logged in from the phone just to chat OOC briefly, but I would never even try to RP from it.
@Trix The 'IC punishment because I don't like you OOC' kind of situation -- which I have definitely seen on and off over the years -- is the sort of thing I'd mention to staff. It's not easy to prove, but in an ideal world, the staffer in question will look into it and drop a bug in the player's ear to knock it off at the very least. That -- ideally -- is often enough to get someone to not continue that behavior, since they know they're being observed for potential abuses.
@Staricide The document linked early on is really good about some of this. It goes into things like 'this is iffy for me but if we avoid painstaking detail it may be all right, will speak up if it turns out it's not' and similar.
I think it's a good approach that leaves a lot of the 'some yes, some no' elements in play.
'How' really is as important as 'what' for a lot of things. There are ways someone could do <thing I never cared about one way or the other> that are suddenly unbearable to RP, while someone else could play through <thing I prefer to avoid if at all possible> without threatening to raise a single hackle. That they mention this is, I think, a noteworthy thing.
That's my preference, yes.
Sadly, it is only possible for staff on games to do this, not the players who are also endlessly subject to them.
...this stops precisely no one who is inclined to do it.
You have to be smart enough to realize it's stupid, see. Or not one of those people with the 'it's different because it's me and my new take on this dumb idea isn't dumb like everyone else's take on it'.
I count on none of these things being the case.
I think, re: terminology, it's more useful to focus on describing intended play style than anything else, aside from the specifics of theme and setting. (Tabletop simulator, freeform collaborative shared world writing space, etc.) This info is probably going to be more useful to a newcomer than the specifics of the codebase it's built on.
The new arrival doesn't care about the difference between MOO and MUSH or DikuMUD historically, why they're different, or how they've been used, why this game is different than the other MOOs before it. They're interested in the kind of play they can find there, and how to do it.
Tell people that.
And if there are too many fae prostitutes, it can be resolved in the traditional way:
a hoedown.
(I'll see myself back out.)
I have to second Ganymede on this one.
"Everyone is awful and terrible and everyone is nothing but the worst sort of hypocrite at all times," is bullshit.
Plenty of folks actually walk their talk. Most actually do it most of the time, and fuck it up once in a blue moon.
Are there folks in the hobby that couldn't take responsibility for their actions if their life depended on it? Yes. Are there folks who are never willing to consider any perspective but their own, whether it's founded on evidence or 'just a feeling' or whatever else? Sure. Are there folks who try to avoid consequences for bad behavior by trying to play the victim in spasms of passive aggression and melodrama? Ayep! (This could go on and on.)
These people exist everywhere else, too. This hobby can no more 'solve' them than we can fix the problem they represent in any other aspect of life. People handle it in the same ways: avoid these people, constrain their interaction with them to a tolerable level, or leave whatever game they're presently infesting.
If you can deal with these people in other aspects of life, you can deal with them here. If you realize they exist in other aspects of life, being somehow surprised they're also here is absurdly naive, as is thinking they can be barred from entry or participation or creating the occasional disruption the same way they do in any other aspect of life.
Should there be strategies to manage crap behavior? Yes. Should the people responsible for administrating an environment apply them when needed? Yes. This is all 'duh' material. This is not grand revelation. This is not news.
@Derp The 'a gaming group is not a replacement for therapy and shouldn't be used as such' is actually in that pdf.
"An RPG is not supposed to be a therapy session where people work out their real-life trauma (that's an unfair burden to everyone at the table, who probably aren't qualified to be therapists)." (p.3 sidebar)
The responsibility for well-being they're talking about is 'don't disregard the comfort of your players', not 'take on their emotional baggage as a replacement for therapy'.
The former is important. The latter we shouldn't be doing.
@faraday What I mean is that the different stories on HM run at different paces. One may be 4:1, one may be 1:2, and so on. It varies, and sometimes it's 'this week will be the month of May, and next week will be all of 1942'.
A number of consent games have arguably had a timeline that people more or less ignore completely (or don't enforce). Some haven't had one and just let things unfold in their own time.
Instead of looking at it as a shared timetable/timeline, I'd think something like 'a shared history' is maybe a better indicator. As in, however fast or slow events occur, they exist in the shared history of the world all the characters occupy.
Timescale isn't necessarily it, either; some consent games don't bother tracking it at all, others change it up from time to time, like HorrorMUX, which has different stories at 1:2, 4:1, etc.
@Ganymede In all seriousness, I did work on files from hell regarding these sorts of things wayback (oh, gods, it's been years now) just so 'this game's definition of these things' was clearly outlined, and people new to the hobby would have an explanation of a term or issue, with examples of how, why, and when it is problematic.
And people freaked the fuck out about it, because 'why should you even have to mention X!' as if there was some universal means of defining and handling any given X going on in the hobby. (Spoiler alert: this almost never happens. 
)
So, I do believe this can be helpful, and I do think it's necessary to do it on any given game. I also don't believe it's going to happen any time soon, because folks were very bizarrely hostile to this happening at all, for any reason.
@Ghost said in Carnival Row:
if you're shooting for making this accurate to the show's setting and feel, it would definitely scrape plenty of no-go points with mushers.
Unless a vocal minority of posters now speak for all of us, this is not the case. It's far from being universal.
I'm not willing to give them that power to control what other people can or can't do by treating them as though they're the whole of the hobby.
@faraday ^ This, x10000. If I could upvote something a hundred times, it would be this.
@Lotherio I don't believe this to be the case.
While I see the issue, I don't think it's an insurmountable one at all. It's one people need to bring out of the assumption pile and articulate. That may not be easy, but it isn't something I'd ever consider even near impossible.
I also don't think this is a function of theme in any way. Theme is (generic) your story focus, and what kinds of stories you aim to explore on the game.
I'm talking about the how, which is a different animal. It's an important critter in the ecosystem, though, and it's one that deserves a file of its own. This is more the territory of a mission statement, from where I sit -- something along the lines of:
This game is a place to explore the story elements described in theme, through <tabletop simulator/freeform writing/whatever means and method are chosen> and is intended for <all audiences/mature audiences/adults only/overgrown 13 year olds>.
<Brief explanation of what this means.>
