Best posts made by Thenomain

@Arkandel said:

no one can force someone else to type stuff they don't want to do.

Hi there! I am going to go on a tangent on this. It's a quick tangent and I am not attacking anyone here about this.

This? What Ark said? Is entirely, 100%, completely true. It is also entirely, 100%, completely misleading.

I'm pretty sure he knows this, but as we're typing things out and making a point, we the reader have to keep context in mind. I am deliberately taking this out of context because I think it's important.

That's the quick bit. But Theno being Theno, I'm going to continue.

The generally accepted "fade to black" rules evolved because of the misleadingness of this statement. The number of people who have felt compelled to, or been outright told that they have to, play out a scene has put us in this situation. There have been a non-trivial number of people who fail to respect the person on the other side of the screen.

I admit, we can be stupid about our own role in this hobby, sometimes. Sometimes we get obsessed or even addicted, and that means pulling away is difficult. I, myself, refuse to blame the obsessed when someone manipulates them via their obsession. Talking about being adults, the abuser is harming another while the obsessive is harming themselves. (n.b., where the obsessive drags others in, then yeah, we'll talk.)

So we've come down to Online Social RP Rule #1: RL comes first. Wait, sorry, that's a different discussion. Online Social RP Rule #2: You may always, always, ALWAYS fade-to-black. This hobby comes from the table, and the table works because of discussion and negotiation.

People need reminded of this, because the social predators have and will use the typical "you didn't say" to defend themselves, and the socially broken that sometimes we are need to be hit in the head with it.

(edit: I am basically supporting a superset of what @Ganymede just said.)

Anyhow, that's it. Carry on sexy funtimes!

@Ganymede

I would like to think that Theme and Setting trump all other forms of RP. This puts the decision square into staff's hands as to if PKing Willy Nilly is something without consequence of the powerful NPCs and environment that are at staff's disposal.

I also believe that a healthy game requires everyone having a reasonable chance to play, sometimes regardless of the actions of others. I am more wishy-washy on this aspect, because one man's trash is another man's PK. Could we bring in the aspect that "your rights end when your fist reaches my face"? Do the expected rights to RP Anything end there?

Hm.

@Jennkryst said in Shadowrun: Denver Plot(s) - Conversation:

@Thenomain said in Shadowrun: Denver Plot(s) - Conversation:

I can’t be an otaku?

Otaku (おたく/オタク) is a Japanese term for people with obsessive interests, particularly in anime and manga.

Well...darn?

Otaku was the SR2/3 term for what would become Technomancers, in SR4/5

So we can blame Tom Dowd? Because...that's not even a little bit of a stretch for me.

roll20 API to a Mu* interface, side-by-side == I'll be in my bunk.

Storium harkens more to where we came from, when we were essentially turning the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books into a multi-billion dollar computer game genre. They're going back to the books, taking cues from the Fallen London engine, and mixing up something new.

I don't know where this pissing match disagreement of ideas came from, but I found invoking both "roll20" and the "Storium" to be along a path more right than Evennia. I will let the server nerds argue server shortcomings.

@krmbm said in What MU/RPG opinions have you changed or maintained?:

Don't feel bad. You were doing community service: we all knew where to avoid if we didn't want to deal with the twinkery and where to go if we did!

I felt bad because there were almost no GOOD WoD games during that era, and Dark Metal may have just been a symptom, but it was a symptom I encouraged.

I would drop the "almost" but I played on one that the staff ended with a real end-of-the-world scenario and it was just...good. Not great. Not blow-your-mind fantastic. But solid enough that players continued there and played without staff supervision for several months after they said they were done.

As much as there was vitriol and poison from that era, I absolutely miss how easy it was to find AND MAKE things to do. We have precious little of that these days.

(edit: I didn't think "and make" had enough emphasis. Now it probably has too much. Such as it is.)

@Ganymede said in What MU/RPG opinions have you changed or maintained?:

I used to think that staff victimized players. Now I realize we just victimize ourselves.

Sometimes we get help.

@Tinuviel said in Asynchronous Plots in Ares:

@Groth I get the idea. But that doesn't really make practical sense. What if you were killed in your day-to-day RP? Or started dating someone? Or any number of other things that could dramatically change or invalidate any "it hasn't happened yet" RP.

The concept already depends on people being okay with finding some way to justify it. We already bend time, as Tat puts it, when we say what time of day or if something can happen after or before some other scene. We used to have “night zones” for Vampire players. Time bubbles with combat time stops (as horrible as those wretches were). We’ve gotten in some good practice.

So if you can let go the idea that Mush time is strictly chronological, then it should be manageable in those rare times where something that divergent does happen.

I understand your level of concern (Ares Discord is tired of mine, so boy do I understand), but I don’t think it’s worth putting too much worry into besides as a conversation piece.

@Auspice said in Cyberrun:

@Thenomain said in Cyberrun:

I have one strong rule, however: Don't force me into your kink.

'Exploring the psychology of a character' isn't bad, no. I didn't say it was.

I was saying it's a bad excuse to do exactly what your rule is about.

You said it in direct response to someone who said they did it to learn the character organically, giving no indication that they did so for--or even had--The TS.

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I'll try to be clearer next time.

@faraday said in What MU/RPG opinions have you changed or maintained?:

What happens too often in MUSH land, though, is that you have people who are:

a) Showing up to a bridge tournament expecting to play poker and then getting disappointed.
b) Trying to play both bridge and poker simultaneously with the same deck of cards and acting shocked when that doesn't work out.
c) Badmouthing those who prefer a different type of card game than they do.
or some variation of the above.

This is one of the best analogies I’ve seen.

MUSH games are not very good about setting expectations of what kind of game they are, and players are not very good about respecting those boundaries even when they are established.

Some of the longest running games have been by friends for friends, where expectations are generally always known and there is already a large pool of people willing to help people into the game culture. Some people have no problems putting down a hard but fair line about the expectations, but I find them the exception instead of the rule.

@Sunny said in What MU/RPG opinions have you changed or maintained?:

making something a priority (everyone's enjoyment) over continuity does not mean I don't/can't recognize someone taking advantage of that

This.

It doesn't surprise me that some people don't understand the PTSD° of surviving some of the worst, most self-centered staff and overbearing, self-righteous players.

The quote above is a sign of healing.

° This is not to demean anyone with battlefield- or domenstic-style PTSD. My heart goes out to all who do.

@Lotherio

So you're saying that you prefer systemless to systemed, and a more open setting to a deeply established one?

@Auspice said in First Through the Gate Syndrome:

Why are people afraid to be the first pose in an event?

I will be blunt: I have never, not once, in probably as long as we both have been around, seen an event not start right out of the gate.

I’ve seen people ask if someone wants to go first, but it comes across to me as politeness.

I’ve seen people go back and forth with “what do you want to do” / “I dunno, what do you want to do”, but that’s not fear of going first, that’s just...normal writer’s block.

I never set because I’m terrible at setting, and I will throw kudos to people who can do that thing I somehow have no knack for.

But not wanting to start? This is a new one on me.

@Ghost said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

If you need someone to help word "be good to each other" policies/mission statements, I'm down to help.

Just ping @Apos to give his top, mm, three to five things people should do or not do. Or one. I have confidence he could get it down into one.

Possibly "Be good to each other."

On Dark Water, it was:

• Act like an adult.
• Treat others like adults.
• Respect others and expect to be respected.

I believe there was something about taking an adult situations out of public places if asked by another player, because this came up way too many times.

99% of the players respected all of this. At least in public. Sometimes they were disrespectful of staff, but since @Cobaltasaurus is nicer than she needs to be, almost nobody got thrown off the game for it.

@faraday said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

I was resistant to coding it into Ares because I worried that the "OMG you mean staff can dig into the database and read my pages!?!?!" hysteria would drive people away from playing on Ares games.

Didn't we once have a...discussion about how staff can access all that information anyway, so worrying about this kind of thing is pointless? (edit: Because you can't stop staff even if you wanted to.)

For the record to the world: This is why I'm for Soapbox and places like Soapbox and disagreeing with each other. If we settled, nothing would ever improve.

I was having this very interesting discussion with a bunch of Mudders on the Evennia Discord about if Mush is a culture or a codebase.

I kept trying to explain that Mush is not a culture.

So.

Here we are.

I was in the middle of writing a reply when I noticed that @Seraphim73 covered all of it.

The book isn't a how-to, it's a self-help guide, no different than Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads and any other "how to run or play in an RPG" book or article ever written by anyone ever.

c.f., This entire web site.

I can't imagine that anyone at Monte Cook Games cares if you disagree with it, but there's a nontrivial movement in the RPG community about emotional self-care. Monte Cook Games has at least one game where the emotional stakes can can get pretty high. This document is probative to his consumer base.

What I'm saying is that each table does its own thing, but making sure that the table is comfortable playing a game is important.

That said, if anyone wants to read the opinions of a man who has written many (kill kittens for satan) RPGs (dogs in the vinyard) about (poison'd) being (in a wicked age) assholes (apocalypse world), then here is David Vincent Baker's blogforum, anyway and the more forum-y Barf Forth Apocalyptica.

For the people negatively reacting to the "wouldn't it be nice if we everyone were nice" nature of MCG's Consent in Gaming, go there. The man knows what he is doing.

THAT SAID, here's what I think of Consent In Gaming in relation to this hobby.

It's alright.

That is, it's not bad.

It can help some people figure out what they want out of a game and how to communicate that. It can help some staff how to create their policy. If it does this, great. If not, whatever.

I do believe a few things that coincide with this text. Communication of expectations is key. Period, full-stop. What that communication is can be different, but I think all people should be understanding and respectful of where other people come from. I agree that people need to be self-aware. I think the text infers the idea that it's staff's responsibility as staff to facilitate interaction and wherever possible of enjoyment of the game.

I think the text is too short and a little disingenuous, but I can't really fault it because it states its thesis up front: This is a text about dealing with consent issues. Period. Full stop. I feel that it promises much more than it delivers, but that's just, like, my opinion, man. It sprinkles a few ideas, links to a few others, but doesn't really dive into it. The text is an academic essay or thoughtful blog post.

That is, it's alright. It's fine. If it can help some people in the hobby, great. If not, I don't think reading it is time wasted.

@faraday said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@Auspice said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

When people ask me what I'm doing, my go-to answer is: 'text-based roleplaying.'

That's great unless you're also talking about people who are already into text-based roleplaying (e.g. forums, storium, discord, tumblr, MUDs, etc.) It can be helpful to have some way to explain how MUSHes differ from that, and how MUSHes differ from each other.

The same can be said about coding. There's style and there's language and there's goal and AIGH!

So perhaps we can treat it like we do coding: We start with "I code" and go from there. There is always a level deeper we can get, and that's okay.

@Derp said in Consent in Gaming:

I called it out for being a bad translation to MU.

Like you did.

This is true! We both said it wouldn’t translate well.

I do think you went too far, tho. Instead of skimming my post like you did the book, maybe read it entirely, because we don’t come to the same conclusions.

Except the one.

@Ghost Makes Me Think Of:

We all game for different reasons. I've had mild tense fights with my board game group because I get frustrated and bored when they take too long to play a game I'm mostly there to play because I'm being social, and they're some of my best friends. Ultimately the paradox is that the vast majority of us socially game for selfish reasons. I don't think most people want to make the game boring for other people, but other people are going to think what you think is right is frustrating, and that's going to create some drama that is going to have to be dealt with by someone. Every time I see someone on this forum say, "Well it's not up to me!", I cringe. It's not always up to you, no, but if you have no introspection then how do you know?

You don't.

And if you can't express this, how can anyone else know that you do?

They can't.

Sometimes you just don't care if someone else thinks the game you like is frustrating. This attitude can be healthy. This attitude can be toxic. And the difference between one or the other can be wide as the gulf between telling someone to calm down and them freaking out on a public channel, or as thin as the line of perception of a joke taken the wrong way.

It's that fine line that I'm interested in. Of course every scene or game night doesn't need a decompression or talking-through, but damn the knowledge that it's an accepted option is one less fine-line situation to worry about.