Best posts made by Tempest

Pistachios.

Yeah, idk, I've staffed multiple comic MUs and played lots of characters and I have literally never in my life owned a 'single issue' of a comic or been to an actual comic store (or if I went, it was to buy MTG cards cough). I've read a handful of the 'big book' things that get put out to like Borders/Barnes & Noble/etc where they have like "half of an entire series run in one book". New Avengers, some X-Men, some Cable & Deadpool, and some Batman, and that's about it.

Comicvine, etc, are great resources. I've apped tons of characters off of mostly just reading about them there.

There is definitely room on these games for people who aren't comic know-it-alls, even as FCs. Yeah, there's a dick or two around who'll go "omg don't you know what happened to your character in XYZ Series!!? How are you even playing them!!!" Ignore them.

RP quality and storytelling effort matter infinitely more than "how many Batman comics have you read?"

I really wish people would stop waving this "bring down games" thing around.

It's wrong.

It's a lie.

It's being blatantly disingenuous and looking to be dramatic.

Firan had multiple like...10,000+ post threads on WORA. It didn't seem to have much trouble staying at 100+ characters logged on for years.

If a game is demonstrably terrible in some fashion in terms of the adminning/etc, talking about that here is a warning to people, and something that is needed. When the stuff is /really bad/ and some shill pops up to defend it, yes things will get nasty. Wow. Surprise.

It is not "omg we're gonna shut down that game!"

@kanye-qwest I will take 5 Cate Blanchetts as Hela, please.

There is a difference between having your playlist be public, and....being one of those people who gives out your discord/email/phone number/RL name/bank account number/address/etc to every random person you do a scene with, and then complains about having problems because of it.

I think it's probably like a 1% of people who actually have problems just from their playlist. Not to minimize the problems those people have, I'm sure it's stressful and sucks, but it's far from common.

As @saosmash and @Auspice said, playlists generally simply serve to help go "oh I played with that guy on X-other-MU and we did not mesh at all" or "oh i really liked Jane on that other game!"

On to the topic itself.

I've been MUing for some 17 years or so, and started on MUDs. In the past 10 years, I have encountered almost no issue playing almost exclusively gay characters. (A small handful have been bi.)

Admittedly, I tend to be relatively...'quiet' about my business. I mean, I'll flirt and stuff in public scenes, but I am pretty far from in your face, unless it's a private scene.

I, as a player, don't have a ton of patience for players (or characters) who are super in your face about sexual business, and that has nothing to do with gender or sexual orientation. I don't like hetero guys that are constantly in my face or showing up to scenes with their girlfriend on a leash, and I don't like it when it's two guys or two women doing the same thing. (No problem with leashes, the problem is when and where.)

In my experience, the problem where LGBT+ characters/players encounter issues on games has largely been when they're constantly drawing attention to it, etc.

I know sexuality feels like a HUGE issue to us as people, but it should never be the "defining characteristic" of a person, or a character. Your character isn't "a lesbian woman". Hopefully she is "a doctor with a mysterious past" or something first and foremost.

Edit : Though, in retrospect "gay" or "trans" is a better fucking RP hook than "JANE IS REALLY SHORT TEEHEE!" "OH AND SHE HAS FUCKING RAINBOW HAIR!" So fuck. What do I know.

@WhatInTheSun said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

How many people are active on here? In the few places I've read, there's a smallish group that's vocal, then another layer of semi-vocal.

This is something I've noticed that's different from WORA.

Like yeah, there might be a decent pool of people who post here and there, but MSB is mostly like...the same 5 people from the WoD-crew circle-jerking each other all over the board about how they're the only people who know how to 'MU right'.

@sunny said in Genosha (Interest Poll):

@tempest said in Genosha (Interest Poll):

@sunny said in Genosha (Interest Poll):

@tempest

PLENTY of games have had a 1 year+ lead time where people knew about them, were off and on excited about them, and so on...and went on to be very successful.

Can you name any, besides <insert generic multisphere WoD>?

LOLOLOL.

Arx.

Congrats, you named one.

The one that is more MUD than MUSH.

...Weird.

Edit : Arx also had infinitely more "development" effort from its creators than any MUSH is ever going to have, which is a big part of its success.

@aria said in Good or New Movies Review:

We're gonna go see it next weekend instead of this weekend for Real Life Scheduling Reasons, but I'll be honest....

Between both the Marvel universe and the Norse mythology, the fact that Thor is just cheerfully stupid and innocently enthusiastic about pretty much everything is fantastic. I don't want a Thor movie to be SUPER SRS BIZNIZ; I want it to be Chris Hemsworth hamming it up with all the unabashed joy of a puppy who is surprisingly good at violence.

MCU Thor is the best thing.

I hate Thor as a character in the comics. "Oh wow, a serious guy who is basically invincible and the strongest person in the universe, SO AMAZING!" Is so dull to me.

I like dumb, excitable Thor who wants to smash shit and falls for Loki saying "LOOK OVER THERE!" 10 times straight.

MUs have a /social/ aspect to them. At no point in MUing am I actually karate chopping people or performing heart surgery. I am talking to people all the fucking time, though. The social aspect of MUing also tends to determine if anybody enjoys spending their time RPing with me. That's kind of important. Your RL kung fu or medical knowledge isn't particularly relevant to me enjoying the 5 hours I spend RPing with you unless I'm some kind of pedant. Whereas people being bad at lying, persuasion, etc, while they're SUPPOSED to be some suave casanova is actually a noticeable drag on writing. If somebody wants to roll brawl dice at me and punch me, okay, I got punched. It doesn't really matter how they pose punching. And punching has no real "effect" beyond the physical damage. If you pose a god awful bit of persuasion and succeed on a roll, I now have to write a handful of poses of my character falling for garbage.

It's just the way things are, and the way things always will be. Because we are not just playing a game. MUing is not a video game. It's a collaborative writing experiment. Understanding social dynamics and how to make a pretty turn of phrase or write a convincing argument is a hell of a lot more important than how well you can describe punching somebody with the exact realistic amount of force needed to break their nose and shove bone shards up into their brain.

This whole "we don't expect people to actually be doctors! we just let them roll medicine, so we should just let people faceroll across the keyboard and roll dice for social interactions!" just seems daft. Social interactions are more of a give and take thing. A fist fight is just a 'versus' thing. A medical roll is just 'do you succeed or not'.

It's one of the more pointless recurring arguments around here.

Playing with incredibly socially inept people just /is not fun/. Even if your game lets them roll dice to make up for it, they will quickly wind up ostracized on account of not being a fun RP partner.

@Arkandel said in Sin City Chronicles:

@Lisse24 said in Sin City Chronicles:

@Coin Conflict of Interest on a political game can be troubling, as one player attempts to manipulate things to their own advantage. I can also see why what you posted about might be interpreted as potentially squicky by staff, and maybe they'd want to protect you from being pressured into doing something or pressuring someone else? Other than that, I don't see the issue.

Unfortunately CoI and players OOC maneuvering on behalf of their PCs is as incredibly common as it is impossible to chase down due to how widespread it is. Metagaming in political games is probably my top peeve in MUSHing, yet I recognize it's awfully hard for staff to intervene on something that's basically impossible to not just prove but ultimately even reasonably know happened.

The heart of the issue to me is that people have friends - OOC friends - and they like playing with these OOC friends, something which can convey advantages when that neonate hangs out with the Prince all the time because they OOC love playing together. Access itself is an advantage, regardless of the nature of that relationship.

Yet what can be done about this? What should be? In most cases absolutely nothing, and the line that separates impropriety from perfectly acceptable behavior is very blurry and subjective.

There's no real way to deal with this, I don't think.

The guy who always has 2 friends app in with him is always going to have an advantage with him over the loner. Unless the group of 3 makes 0 effort to make outside connections or something, but even then, the lone person has an uphill battle even if they all start together on day 1.

This gets incredibly messy (imo) on multisphere games because it's no longer Joe and his Friends playing a coterie of vampires. It's Joe now having easy access to members of other spheres, because they're played by his friends.

The only real CoI stuff I've ever seen is the result of the above. It's people who already OOCly play with each other all the time, playing with each other across every character and mixing and matching them.

Eff you guys. A Unicorn horse would probably solo you.

How about an update to 2e?

Okay, in all seriousness here. Just from the past 3 pages of this thread.

@Auspice as a mod comes off pretty passive-aggressive frequently.

And @Ganymede as a mod is coming off as a defensive nazi. "OH WE MESSED UP? WELL FUCK YOU SHUT UP." (Specifically the exchange with @Kanye-Qwest.)

You guys are ALL being weirdly defensive when your 'mod decisions' get rightfully called into question.

And that does not bode well, at all.

The problem is not staff picking a character.

The problem is Headwiz XYZ takes Batman. His wife takes Catwoman. Their 4 friends take Wonder Woman, Superman, Green Lantern, and the Flash.

All while Headwiz XYZ absolutely knows for a FUCKING FACT none of those people are actually going to play the game much. But it's his wife, their friends, etc, so he lets them anyways.

Oh and then Staffer A wants Nightwing, and his two friends want Batgirl and Zatanna, to play with him.

Staffer B wants Aquaman, and his girlfriend takes Mera.

Wow, suddenly your game is already in the fucking D-List, especially for female characters.

I mean, if you stop at "staff picking characters" in this scenario, you only have Batman, Nightwing, and Aquaman picked. Not exactly the end of the world.

The problem is when all their friends also get first dibs.

And god forbid if they're snatching alts immediately too. Even 'second tier' ones, because they're going to snatch all the 'top' on that tier too.

Edit : I will say, that for whatever reason, Comic MUers make the most RIDICULOUS fucking fuss about NEEDING alts. It's obnoxious, but the sad facts of MUing are "big who list = more players will stick around when they log on to look", and a lot of people will NOT hang around if they aren't allowed to squat on 3, 4, 5 characters. So you're shooting yourself in the foot twice on this one issue if you don't allow alts.

TL;DR I used to read allll the Fantasy novels when I was a teenager. Wheel of Time, Dragonlance, Drizz't, and all that.

MUDding and then MUSHing was sort of like getting to 'play' in one of those worlds.

@bad-at-lurking said in San Francisco: Paris of the West:

@cupcake

Honestly, in a setting with people who turn into wolves, vampires (other than Peter Thiel, who apparently believes he can become immortal off the blood of twinks), Mages and baristas or coders who all like movie stars and models, Depp the mayor doesn't even put a blip on the radar for me.

Maybe he made a deal with a demon or something.

On top of the whole "setting with werewolves and vampires" stuff, it seems like people continually forget that the World of Darkness is not carbon copy RL. The World of Darkness is a more fucked up place. Cops are more crooked, more violent, more racist. People are more scummy, less worried about morals. Etc.

WoD is not "real life, but with vampires".

Of all the MU clients, how you forget MUSHclient on the list is baffling.

If you use anything else, you are less than human and have no standards.