Posts made by The_Supremes

@Misadventure Wandering off this thread: but yes. The game's lore is fantastic sci-fi stuff.

@BigDaddyAmin said:

I hate EvE. It is spreadsheets in space.

But I do like the universe. Roleplaying in the Amarrian Empire would be fascinating.

I was super stoked when White Wolf and CCP teamed up. An EVE tabletop was supposed to come out of it, by WW's hands. Alas, it has perished along with the World of Darkness MMO.

tl;dr - EVE is described as "a so-so spaceship game with the world's best Meta."

The Mittani is the Something Awful (Goonswarm) faction's dictator. He doesn't have a current account, he just plays the metagame and makes a solid income on the side running a set of fansites including one that used #gamergate as a springboard to launch into broader games 'journalism.'

His history's really a fascinating read if you like space politics. But he's winning an MMO: he doesn't pay to play, and he makes money off of other people who do, without working for the publisher.

@Arkandel said:

@ThatGuyThere Who has the high score on even say, WoW? What's a high score?

Fuck WoW. I play EVE. Only person with a high-score there is The Mittani, and he purportedly doesn't even have an active account anymore. #InsideBaseball

@Derp said:

As much as I would want to play this... I wouldn't. I would find my eye twitching at every third pose and going on 'oh my god that is not how that works' monologues, probably much to the annoyance of other players.

So while I encourage this, I'm also big enough to realize I'd be one of Those Players, and leave the rest of you to have your funtimes in peace.

I would also be one of Those Players, but I suspect my will to not at least give it a try would utterly fail about three months in. On the other hand, if it hadn't degenerated into a massive OOC shitstorm by then...

But yeah, pilots shouldn't attend movies about airplanes, etc.

@The_Supremes said:

Just an update in case anyone is looking: FTA is currently offline due to a power outage at our Host. Return is unknown at this time. The outage is severe storm related.

Aaaand we're back!

Just an update in case anyone is looking: FTA is currently offline due to a power outage at our Host. Return is unknown at this time. The outage is severe storm related.

@Spitfire said:

Having read over this thread, I really wish some of the more thoughtful responses from @The_Supremes were translated better onto the Wiki. In this day and age I'd argue that the wiki is one of the first place people look; my first impression of the place led me to make a post in the Hog Pit poking fun at what I saw to be typical social justice rhetoric as applied to MU Policy.

When I get some free time. (Hah!) I plan on giving our wiki another crawl for just this reason. This thread has been very useful in helping me clarify what's what.

I do have to point out the absence of any sort of entry done for the Fianna and the obvious stereotypes they invite. I can only hope you tell players that try to app in Whiskey MacDrinksalot O'Werewolf that they need the same level of depth as well.

Yeah it would. Thank you for pointing out the blindspot, though.

@Bobotron said:

@The_Supremes
Whoops. for some reason (I guess because the newsfile for books mentions V20), I thought Vamp was there.

Looks like I'm going to dig out Changeling the Dreaming and try to read through it.

Yeah, we use it as a back-up source for how 20th works, mostly, and we have vampire NPCs so I may be learning how that all goes down. We'll see.

@Bobotron said:

Does anyone know how the Vampire sphere is on here?

Terrible. We don't have one. (Because Vampire is the only oWoD game I know basically nothing about.)

This may change as things go on, but we have a staff shortage and I'm not inclined to just start handing out wizbits to random people who raise their hands. @Sunny got your other questions.

@ThatOneDude said:

Wow, we are saying that "a poor black person raised in a single parent home" would get more scrutiny in CG? What's the statistics on that vs the 18 year old hot model chick that has 2 doctorates and is also a badass psychic detective with 13 masteries in various forms of kungfu?

That gets rejected outright for other reasons.

Same reason I've been having this conversation: I believe sharing MORE information about policies is useful. The people who don't care won't read the things anyway, and I've been around the block enough to have seen a LOT of unimaginative, problematic bullshit. Letting people who are also tired of these worn out tropes know that I'm sick of them too is part of our branding, you could say.

EDIT: Adding to this: I think the confusion was about what would actually earn you a #NOPE. It's not "black and poor" it's "harmful stereotype of black, poor people as character concept." I think the two got conflated somewhere.

@mietze said:

Exactly. Sometimes to ban 'stereotypes' also kind of exotifies the very people you're nobly trying to "protect."

Fair point. I don't agree with it, but it's an interesting thought.

So. Do you ban smart asians? Hot asian women who are petite? In the kinfolk backgrounds you accept, will you deny any that include the following: rape, abuse, breeding exploitation, forced "marriage", ect (all very canon stereotypes for that class)?

If you can't have a street person who happens to be black and a Bone Gnawer, do you also ban the trailer trash white folks--I have seen far more of THAT than black PCs of any type on a MUSH and I've been playing MU*s for 20+ years now?

Clarification: We do not say you can't have a black Bone Gnawer from the streets. We say that this character needs to show me more depth and understanding than "I heard my white, conservative, upper-middle-class grandparents talk about black people once, so here's an ebonics-spewing, gunslinging, had-no-father-in-his-life, caricature of black people as a Bone Gnawer concept." I'd judge the white trailer trash harshly too, if that's all there was or if the character concept was a pile of Jeff Foxworthy punchlines.

I would also say, quite bluntly, that the dangerous alpha male who may lose his temper in an uncontrolled violent rage but has been gifted with it in part for a higher and in some cases spiritual cause while still being compelling and good in the sack is a very, very harmful 'stereotype'.

It very much is, leading into your follow-on point:

There is a lot of ugliness in Werewolf (at least the oWoD version, I'm less familiar with the new). So what? It can be compelling storytelling. Do a lot of people fuck it up? Yeah. But they'll fuck up the hippies too. You're just not really going to weed out stupid or problem people via background and what you force people to play (or not).

Not entirely, no. And with one exception, these aren't outright bans, they're me alerting you that I'm looking at these things when you show me your app. Bone Gnawer? I want to see that you've thought about your character's poverty beyond the harmful 'magical poor people' tropes that WW wrote in. Black Fury? This is a tribe about feminism, not misandry. Uktena/Wendigo? Show me that you're paying attention to more than just Johnny Depp's Tonto.

Here's the only outright ban we have for social reasons: Romany Silent Striders, mostly because the ST is aware that most of the stereotypes and cultural understanding surrounding them are founded in spectacular, ongoing, worldwide oppression and I do not have the chops as a historian, nor the time as a scholar, to bring myself to a place where I can judge an app on its merits for handling that material.

Is that erasure? You betcha, and I own that.

But I would rather be owning my erasure, than try and pretend that this isn't really problematic. There's other SS lore that can be used if SS are your thing.

Re-ordered for rhetorical impact:

@Ganymede said:

This genre operates by credibility and appearance. This is why "the truth" is irrelevant.

@Sunny said:

I don't know you.

But one, folks know me, and two, they know I'm not going to kill their character without them either disappearing on me. Neither of these facts apply in your case. That's the sad fact of the matter.

This is really what this all boils down to, too, it would seem. I think @Ganymede and @Sunny nail it there. This is, actually, why we have the 'you can do better than stereotypes' disclaimer up front.

@Ganymede said:

I want to play a man-hating "feminist" Black Fury stereotype ... When it comes to offensive stereotypes, the issue isn't what the character is, but who is playing them. And you're really not going to learn who your good and bad players are until you get them in the door.

You're absolutely right that stereotypes are just tropes, and tropes - as they saying goes - aren't inherently bad things. In a skilled writer's hands, they're brilliant tools. I believe that someone could play an character that's built off offensive stereotypes well enough, thoughtfully enough, and compellingly enough, that it paid off in the long run.

But I don't know you.

And I'd rather get to know someone before I let them go out on a limb, because just as there's a list of horror stories about this site and that site as long as anyone's arm, there's a list of horror stories about players, and cliques, and cultures, of equal length. And you're right, I'll still have to put out fires. But this isn't just about flood-filling a game with apps. This is about finding players who see the conversation we've had here and decided that this is worth a shot.

The big message I'm trying to send here is: No, you don't know me, but I give a damn. I have a particular storytelling style, and have particular storytelling strengths and weaknesses, same as anybody. The game I run isn't going to appeal to everyone, and that's okay.

I don't mind that folks bristle at the 'no stereotypes plox' policies. I engage with the objections because it's feedback, and having these conversations is valuable to me. It makes me think about why, and how much this stuff matters to me.

And, importantly, it's not just, as @Ganymede so eloquently put it, "the truth" not mattering, it's anything the FNG says not mattering, either - because it's just talk. And there isn't a single thing out there beyond talk that can be offered - I mean, we're talking about online text-based RPGs... it's talk all the way down. My interactions here aren't about defending my policies, they're about explaining my policies. My questions aren't about challenging people's opinions, they're about understanding people's positions - and through that my own.

And along the way you learn a little bit about who I am, and maybe that helps you with the decision. Because the guy with the #1 bit's personality is kinda a big deal for these kinds of things, and lord knows all of us who've been at this a while have been stung more than once.

@Ganymede said:

@The_Supremes said:

You must be new around here, or around these boards in general, so I'll tell you a couple of things you'll want to know if you want your game to reach out and succeed.

New to these boards, but I gather these boards are filling the niche left by WORA's demise?

First, Sunny's probably one of the nicer people around here. She's got far more experience running a MU*, as far as I can tell from your resume (I know I do, and she's got some on me, I think). When she says the application process seems deceptive, and is more involved than you attest to, that is a somewhat influential opinion. Whether it is right or wrong is mostly irrelevant.

This is a curious statement, to me (emphasis added for why). I can't do anything to address concerns that are not based in fact, aside from addressing that they are not based in fact.

Second, if you're advertising here, then you likely want to attract interested people to try your game out. As you've been around online games like MUSHes, I hope you'll concur that these games are part-setting, part-policies, and part-cult-of-personality.

This is absolutely the case, yes.

Third, if you haven't been around MUSHes for a few years, you're likely a stranger here. If you're a stranger here, realize that you're entering a community that has old hats, as well as new ones. Going back to my second point, it might behoove you to be personable and inviting, rather than critical of others' opinions.

You haven't come out and said that I come off as critical of others' opinions, but I'm hearing that in your tone here, is that fair?

Finally, if you could not tell from warnings, there are some folks here that take pleasure in digging their claws under your fingernails for the hell of it. There are others that will criticize your game to death for our own agendas and purposes. Separating the constructive criticisms from the unconstructive ones will save you a great deal of pain. Also, attempting to defend yourself here is an exercise in futility. Most members here will independently investigate on their own, no matter what people post (myself included). When you respond, however, that may give those independently-minded people a basis to rule out your game.

This is useful for me to know, thank you. Mostly I'm just concerned when I put in the work to put stuff in writing and it gets quoted incorrectly. Every community has different levels of fact checking, but by your statement above perhaps I'll let folks sort it out on their own.

Sidenote: the location of the U.S. Supreme Court's most recent watershed eminent domain case was New London; I could not tell if your citation to Kelo was calculated to refer to the location or the government entity involved, but thought I would add some clarity (and to demonstrate nitpickiness).

Well if we're demonstrating nitpickiness...

Susette Kelo et al. v. City of New London et al. is the case we are both referencing. I've always heard it short-handed as Kelo. But yeah, that's the one.

My suggestion: loosen up on the application process. A lot. Players these days are far more tolerant of policing once they have their PCs, rather than weeding out people prior to the approval. This is mostly laziness on the part of players, I suppose, but the trick from your perspective is to get the customers in the door.

I'm curious how much more you would want it loosened up, and this was the primary reason that I tried to address Sunny's report as I couldn't tell if her objections were about her mistaken-as-reported understanding of our app process, or if she was objecting to the app process as it stands in-fact.

What do you think a good model of an app process looks like, if something that takes 10-30 minutes of work is too much?

@Sunny said:

@The_Supremes said:

To my mind, though, the 1990s style app process was 'write a novella' rather than 'answer 10-15 questions about your character and show me a sheet.'

Sure, but you're not asking for just a sheet and some questions. This is misleading, as anyone who spent ten minutes (that is being enormously generous) looking at the application process could see.
...
The combination of the 1-5 page background PLUS the questions. One or the other, and if you decide on the questions, bring them down to something that's not going to take a damn essay to reply to. This amount of work is great for an OTT or something with a small group of people, but an actual mush, not so much.

What is actually written on my wiki (emphasis added):

Changeling/M/M+: It needn't be very long. Anything from 3-4 paragraphs to five or so pages is sufficient - whatever you feel is appropriate for your intent.

Werewolf: Often that will include a short story or a historical narrative, but it doesn't have to.

You say I've been misleading when I say that the background component is truly minor, because of the above requirements, (which could be more consistently written, I'll admit). 3-4 paragraphs of "this is what this character is" doesn't seem like a big deal, to me. I can stamp that out in six minutes. I'm not looking for the best prose of your life, I'm looking for an understanding of what this character is, that you want to play. And, (and the wiki will be edited to reflect this) the narrative-style backstory is actually optional. I've just found that very few people can give me a working understanding of their character with only answers to focused questions.

So in response to your suggestion that I should choose one or the other: I would choose the questions, then, because those are there for my benefit as a storyteller. I care less about your character's history than I do about how they're going to interact with the TPs, PrPs, and other characters and themes already on grid.

The follow-on to this is your objection to the length of the answers to the questions.

Again, our wiki:

All questions should be answered in 'short answer' format. An essay is too much (although more information never hurts), but more than a single sentence will often be needed...

2-4 sentences per question has been the norm for approved characters. Don't get me wrong: That you see that there's a TON of room for depth in the answers to these questions is a thing I see as a good sign that you're a player who gives a shit about story, but 'essay length' response is explicitly NOT the requirement that I put into place. That is a thing you are reading into this on your own.

@Sunny said:

@The_Supremes said:

That said, I've been running tabletop games for 20+ years and this isn't my first time to the MU* staffing rodeo, either. In my career as GM/DM/ST I've presided over five character deaths. I think I know a thing or two about balancing setting with story.

If you have to throw out how long you've been doing something to prove your point, you don't actually have any business talking.

Actually, you insuinuated that my setting was designed to kill characters off, or in your own words, that 'investment vs. . risk is not balanced.' That's a newbie story teller mistake you identified and that this isn't my first rodeo becomes absolutely germane to the issue. Claiming Appeal to Authority fallacy only works if there's no logical link between someone having credentials and the issue at hand - the issue at hand was whether or not I know how to balance investment vs. risk.

@Sunny said:

@The_Supremes said:

I mean, it's WoD, of course a character /might/ die. If I understand you correctly, you're basically asking about the risk vs investment balance. The danger a character faces is a function of their actions. If you want to play a character that lays low, doesn't make waves, and withdraws from threats rather than confronting them your character can be very, very safe. If that's your style of character, though, I would suggest that they probably wouldn't go near Detroit in the first place, in our setting.

This is the response to 'it looks like investment vs risk is not balanced'. OK, then. These statements make a whole lot of assumptions that don't actually follow the questions I asked and the statements that were made, and for you to get a condescending, insulting tone with me is ridiculous. Your ideas can go fuck themselves.

then, if you're still interested in answers to your questions, I suggest you re-phrase them, as I responded to the statements I saw.

@Sunny said:

@The_Supremes said:

I'm also curious what part of the app process you object to, in particular, so that I can review. Feedback is always a welcome thing.

I'm being critical because there are things about the game that really look interesting and I'd like to play -- the setting / premise is GREAT.

Thank you, both for the critique and the compliment. I worked really hard on the game for a couple of years before I opened it up.

But between the ridiculous House Rules and the condescending attitude in response to valid questions pretty much squashed that. So I do appreciate, at least, being given enough of an impression to ensure that I'm not going to waste my time.

No condescension is intended. You simply were in error when you reported things about my game, I sought to correct those errors, did so again in this reply. I'll be blunt: you sound like you're responding to phantoms of MU*s past, rather than to my game, itself.

I can't speak to specific house rules you object to, but it's not like house rules are a new thing. WoD's canon systems were - by the authors' own repeated admissions - never meant to play together under one roof. House rules are a necessity of so many disparate systems, every site has them. I do you the favor of writing mine down to the best I am able.

@Admiral said:

I've never seen a case of eminent domain used to force people from disincorporated areas to move -into- the city.
I've seen it used exactly the opposite, to force people to move out of the city.

To date you are correct, EmDom hasn't been used in this fashion. RL Detroit, ultimately concluded that voters wouldn't accept it (they were right) because it would feel like a major invasion of personal property rights (and it would've been, not that this stopped people from doing it in Kelo.')

Maybe my experiences in major cities differs from yours. I'll give you the strange 'We love our people and want to take care of them so we move them into the city where we can do so' Detroit.

Again, you're reading stuff that isn't there. There's nothing about 'we love our people' in this move, by the city. It's a budget-saving measure. They write-off huge (read: poor, mostly abandoned, high-crime) neighborhoods as total losses, legally divest the land from what is 'City of Detroit' and cease water, power, policing, fire coverage, and all other city and emergency services. In order to avoid people who live in these places having the right to sue the city for not providing mandated services, they move the few hangers on who still live there to other neighborhoods that they're not writing off. There's no love here, and the process is spectacularly horrible for all parties.

What about the 'Werewolf has to be cuddly and safe and no stereotypes allowed!' business?

First of all, once again, you're reading things that aren't there. There's nothing about our Werewolf sphere that's cuddly or safe. What we are doing is making the game a safe place for players. Since we have players who are POC and all manner of minorities besides, we're not interested in character concepts that rely on (e.g.) racist stereotypes. They are a form of aggression against the stereotyped minorities and - frankly - they show zero effort on the part of the apping player.

If you can't imagine a Bone Gnawer except as an alcoholic black guy who's behind on his child support payments? You've got some work to do as a writer. If you can't imagine a Black Fury except as a vengeful misandrist, you've got a damagingly incorrect understanding of what feminism is about, and again, we're not interested - our Black Furies have more depth than that. That shit wasn't actually okay in the 90's either, but it's become a staple of WoD gaming in large part because WoD was written by and for people who didn't know any better - I sure didn't get it.

That's what the 'no stereotypes' thing is about though: protecting players from well-meaning folks who don't even realize that playing a character who perpetuates damaging stereotypes is part of the problem. Hell, usually they don't even realize that the character they're playing is a damaging stereotype. This shit's hard.

Example of Stereotype we do allow: Ahrouns are violent and full of rage. Why? because no actual real-life people are being harmed by the perpetuation of that stereotype.

Or the 'white people aren't welcome in the ghetto' business? I don't recall if that was your game or just discussion we were having about opinions of the ghetto in general though.

I was not party to, nor witness to, any such conversation - I suspect you're bringing this in from somewhere else.

@wizz said:

but it's not like the game creator was implying anyone who played oWoD was racist or misogynist. (Presumably.)

Confirmed. I don't even believe the folks who wrote this are, necessarily, racist or misogynist, either. But what White Wolf wrote down, and what a lot of us play with is damaging stuff, and we don't even realize it... which is one thing when you're playing around a table of white guys and while it perpetuates the invisible damage, it's the kind of drop-in-the-bucket stuff that's not worth worrying about. When you've got actual people of color, actual gay people, actual trans people, etc, playing on your game though? You need to be more aware. It's really fucking hard work, too.

@Admiral said:

I apologize if I came off strong. Racism is one of my twitchy points. I absolutely hate it and part of that hatred is hating when people try to turn pretendy-funtimes into a battleground for their particular viewpoint even if it coincides with mine.

It's totally understandable that this is twitchy-making stuff. We put the notices of the problematic stuff on the wiki so that the pretendy-funtimes don't end up the battlefield. We write, on our sleeve, where we stand on this stuff so that there are no surprises three months in because I hate that shit too.

@Admiral said:

The issue with the homeless seems exactly the opposite of what I experienced in major cities as well; folks were forced -out- of the city rather than into it, because that's how the city keeps its stats up.

What issue, with what homeless? Are you referring to the City/State's use of eminent domain to seize homes from homeowners and then transfer title of tax-foreclosed properties to those same families/homeowners, effectively forcing them to move? Because that's what I actually describe when I say "forcibly relocating anyone who lived in the newly disincorporated territories." These aren't homeless people being moved, they're /homed/ people being moved. And yes, that's a pretty draconic use of Eminent Domain, and yes, RL Detroit actually thought about doing just that.

You seem to be reading a LOT in between the lines, (you're not alone in this, I'm just grabbing this one because it's the most recent reply) and coming to a wide array of spectacularly incorrect conclusions as a result. This is your prerogative, of course, but I figured I'd highlight the fact.

I was just thanking him for the clarifiction and well wishes, and noting that given his reaction to our concerns that WoD is a product of the 90s and rife with racist themes and problematic cultural appropriation, our game was very likely a poor fit for him, as a player.