@Tinuviel said in Intersectional MU* Community - Discussion:
@Rinel said in Intersectional MU* Community - Discussion:
There seem to be a vastly disproportionate number of us Louisianans in the hobby.
Worst. Purchase. Ever.
Are you kidding? Without the purchase you'd have no New Orleans, and far less likely to have Interview With the Vampire and therefore no Vampire RPG or World of Darkness or WoD Mushes or...
...oh god, you're right.
I loved The Last Jedi's complex emotional themes, and the little puffin whatever animals that I've heard people complaining about. It was a bit too long, a bit forceful on the theme of hope, but I didn't regret setting through one minute of it. I even got caught up in one or two of the movie's gotchas and actually spoke out loud when I saw the reveal. I forgot that I was at a movie and that's what I go to a movie for.
Sure, I can spend time complaining about quite a lot of it, but I put The Last Jedi well within the quality of the original three movies. Solid 'A' grade from yours truly. Would watch again...albeit at home where I can pause and stretch and get some snacks.
@mietze said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:
@Thenomain we were talking about the differences between NPCs and pcs. All people on a game, whether staffer or player, have the ability to create rich RP and immersion and story. NPCs, in my opinion, are more targeted tools. Stating what an npc does does not preclude a PC from doing so also. Not sure what your point is in trying to make it seem like I said pcs cannot contribute to theme, plot, or immersion. I didn't. Not particularly interested in arguing that.
I'm saying that watching an NPC chase down his hat on a windy day contributes to my enjoyment of the game.
Plot? Probably not.
Game? Absolutely.
The Good Place season finale happened a few days ago.
Alright, why hasn’t the next season started yet?
Here's the summary. This content is 
2019 Monte Cook Games, LLC, so if anyone from Monte Cook Games wants me to take this down, sure.
THE BASICS
RECOVERING FROM CONSENT MISTAKES
AFTERCARE & CHECKING IN
THE CONSENT CHECKLIST
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
The Diana Jones Award represents the most important in tabletop gaming for the year, from board games to role playing games and occasionally and rarely card games. The nominees have always made a difference to our collective hobbies.
In the past it has gone to luminaries such as Board Game Geek, a WotC CEO (when they first bought TSR and expanded D&D in ways we didn’t expect or imagine), to the entire Ireland gaming community for their outstanding and at the time unprecedented charitable donations.
I feel that paying attention to our cousins in the more established areas is critical for us to learn and grow, so knowing what it is pretty firmly affects what we love.
This year’s winner surprised me. On the list was Charterstone (an amazingly good board game) and Harlem Unbound (a sourcebook for Cthulhu that faces Lovecraft’s outrageous racism head-on).
This year’s winner, tho, was Actual Plays.
Yes, watching people play RPGs really has taken off, and they are funny, and the best are well edited. I listen to an actual play podcast based on one of my favorite sci fi stories, run by the creator for many of his actors. Having seen enough of Harmon Quest, yeah, this is amazing.
What does this mean for us? I don’t know. We’ve known for a long time that sharing our RP logs is pretty damn funny. Maybe it means it’s time to put our voices to these logs, either figuratively or literally? Maybe we’re ahead of our time, just as much as we’re behind it.
I love the Diana Jones Award. I love how it always gets me thinking about what’s important in tabletop gaming. I love it’s insane history, that it pretty much happened on a lark, and the fact that the committee is anonymous, or as anonymous as possible. We can focus on the event, not the people, and celebrate influential moves.
So I share. I hope this inspires others.
@Auspice said in Consent in Gaming:
What had people concerned is the concept of following up with every player after every game to make sure they're 'okay.' That does lean a bit into 'therapy' territory.
If by "people" you mean the two posters and the 10 total upvotes they illicited, sure.
I think @Derp especially is over-reacting, though I don't natively disagree with his point. The text we're reading is meant for tabletop, and for tabletop I largely agree with it.
FOR TABLETOP.
One of the dumbest things we have ever done in this hobby is take tabletop role-playing and translated it directly to online persistent role-playing systems.
The same goes for this text.
I will start a fight, however: Any staff who doesn't care about their player-base is a shitty staffer.
I'm not talking therapy, I'm talking about caring.
I'm not talking about caring deeply, I'm talking about caring at all.
I'm not talking about individuals, I'm talking about all the individuals that make up the game.
Anyone who thinks that caring about the mental health of their game is delving in to therapy is an idiot.
"it is okay to show nazi symbols and be a holocaust denier because, you know, WWII was fought to preserve free speech!"
Here, for your community facebook group:
@Derp said in Staff scrutiny during CGen:
They all switched it out to 'Irish Pub Dive Bar slash underground boxing ring'
While playing Haunted Memories, I and a few other people complained how many Irish Pubs there were on grid.
Then we researched Vienna.
There are a lot of Irish Pub-themed places in Vienna!
Dear people in the general world,
I really do care how bad your day is. I am willing to absorb a lot of bullshit, but the problem here is that I do care. So when you're standing there, voice quivering in anger, telling me how much emotional pain you're in because of an inability to log in to your computer, I'm going to see that as seriously as someone there, voice quivering in anger, telling me how much you love your boyfriend no matter how much physical pain they put you in.
The problem here is obviously me, but I'm not too far off a lot of people, whose anger and emotional pain are going to pinball to someone else. It resonates, it echos, and it spreads, affecting how their day goes, and I believe that if I stop this at me then I've done something positive for the world at large. But for fuck's sake people, priorities.
That is all.
I hate tiny grids. They do not evoke the setting.
I hate gigantic grids. They do not invoke role-play.
It's easier to mitigate a gigantic grid with travel and map commands than it is to mitigate a tiny grid with temprooms.
In my opinion, it's best to have a grid that's just a bit too big. My favorite grid of all time ever would be Haunted Memories' because it was oozing setting out of every pore. It was too big, but I forgave it because of that and travel features.
I will boot up Civ 4 for his dulcet tones tonight.
I can feel unwelcome when my attempts to find RP themselves are met with silence. After the fifth time, I'm at a complete loss.
Today I stopped by my mother's to pick up mail-order I had shipped to her considerably less ghetto home. I brought Arby's (because we like them) and I helped her make her absolutely fantastic Million Dollar Fudge, which is so rich I need about a half glass of milk per square inch. It was unexpected, and I haven't felt more "home" in a decade.
I had a lot of thoughts on this while in the shower, and I have to get one or two of them down before work.
I am going to take a break from demanding my independence from stereotypes of a larger group and use the term "we", because it's quicker to type and because it's easier to get across the more generic points that I'm going to make.
@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:
- Different attitudes towards what constitutes creepy player behaviour, addressed by me here
I'm jumping way ahead of myself, but you're reacting to the Mush attitude about OOC behavior. One of the key differences between a Mud and a Mush is one of game system. A Mud is typically a game with a coded system; that is, the code is the system. If you're playing with code, you're playing the game. A Mush is most typically a play-space based upon a table-top RPG or agreed-upon rules of role-play, systems that often need a human being to arbitrate conflict of "does it hit" or "am I poisoned". We have had well over a decade to figure out how to make this work without a computer telling us the answer, and sometimes without an adjudicator (storyteller, ombudsman, staff) to tell us and agree upon an answer between us. To do this, we in the Mushing world must rely on OOC.
It's caused some of its own issues, such as a heavy reliance on it and, as @lordbelh said, opportunity to manipulate the more fluid situation via the very channels meant to solve the problem of the system not being code-heavy.
- Anger over metaposing etiquette, brought up by others here, etc.
This is ownership of the character. You're writing the character so it's yours. You aren't giving the code the opportunity to kill you just for interacting with it. The character's daily life is almost entirely yours to write. So when someone writes or controls your character for you, then yes, people get upset. This is the "bad" kind of metaposing. The other bad kind of metaposing is when someone is passive-aggressive at you via off-hand author comments in the middle of a pose, but that's because passive-aggression is bad, m'kay.
- The lack of spontaneity in stumbling across RP on the grid, partly explained here
Mushes used to be a whole lot more spontaneous. I don't honestly know how to explain this one, other than World of Darkness games especially have grown insular over the years. Possibly because of fear of what people are willing to do to your character, but I feel it's more to do with what happens when people with that fear become staff and that attitude starts being the game culture's norm. A much larger discussion for another day, perhaps.
- The ubiquity of OOC communication
I jumped ahead, here. See Above.
- Preferences for openness about characters' hidden motives vs. a preference for mystery and secrecy.
This is also mostly due to the lack of systems to support secrecy. We had something like this, and it was horrible, horrible because there was no way to prove who did what or better yet, who knows what. We in the World of Darkness arena have tinkered with the idea of "supernatural lore systems" as a codified way to determine who knows what, and if you couldn't prove it that you had the knowledge then you weren't allowed to act on it.
It ... wasn't pretty.
There also isn't any code to allow you to affect another character without somebody knowing about it. Good side: There's more you can do because you're not relying on code. Bad side: You need a human being. As game staff gets busier and busier, they're less and less likely to babysit those situations. (As a side note: I think it's many staffer's fault for finding busywork, but again, another long conversation for another day.)
I've overstepped my time allotment by (checks) 15 minutes, but I think that summarizes the main points pretty well. A different approach to application of game systems seems to color most of the differences. Not really a guide, this, but an explanation that might help ease you into why the differences exist.
Ta.
edit: Incidentally, you are always, always okay to be creeped out by someone approaching you as a player (OOC) over things that are emotional. Say 'I'm not comfortable with this' and let them retract. My personal Prime Directive is that RL Comes First. If this means that you need to step away from someone because they're getting all up ins, then do so. What constitutes 'creepy' is so personal, moreso than almost the rest of this, that I wanted to add that on.
This post is one part for people who want to know what's up with with our intrepid little Mu*-Coder-turned-Going-To-School-For-Real, one part hat-in-hand.
Okay, so, here I am. A few days ago, I get a Skype from Cobalt that she was in a bad accident that she was told to be lucky to walk away from, that her car was sheered in half, things like that. I've seen one or two bad accidents, but then she mentions she has a GoFundMe for getting a new car, and I looked at it, and...well, just go look at it.
https://www.gofundme.com/ashleys-new-car-fund
To say that Cobalt has been working hard to go to school and stay in school is an understatement. It's not really my place to spell out all the details, but this is not the first setback she's had, and she is working hard to better her life, sure as hell harder than I am. Even though I've never met her, I consider Cobalt to be a close friend, and so on her behalf, and with her permission, I'm asking for help.
Thanks.
edit: If it helps, Cobalt created the "events" system for Mushes. It might not help, but it might!
Part of my question is: How do G & H know there's anything going on in the Town Square? With Bob's Party I'm presuming you were invited. How would you invite yourself to Town Square?
I ask this in part because you are framing a lot of this as "What Would Happen IC". In trying to help you understand the OOC culture, I'm pointing out that you already are acting on OOC information, which lead you to paging. You engaged in OOC behavior in order to find a scene to play in.
I call this "There Is No Such Thing As Purely IC". That doesn't negate your complaint, but is meant to aim at the argument that the people you wanted to interact with were not being IC, and that's why you feel pushed away. OOC was already engaged; you just skipped a bunch of steps by paging.
So lets keep it IC. You then say that G & H want to go to the Town Square because of a reason they invent, and show up and find out there are people there already. Oh happy day! If they're all busy with their own thing, then you and H pose around with each other some more, trying to negotiate yourselves into the scene.
Maybe people leave because it's IC because they hate G or H, fine. But maybe they leave because they themselves can no longer as a player negotiate the scene. What do you do then? You arrive and the scene breaks down and everyone moves on. This is almost the worst case scenario. Are you still okay with that?
If you are, then you don't page and just show up. You aren't your brother's keeper, and you can figure out how to negotiate into someone's scene a little better next time. This is 100% fine and how we used to do things in Mushes. Doing it this way isn't rude, it's engaging. Using IC to get engagement with scenes and play is okay. If anyone tells you that it's not okay, then it's part of their expectations and they can get over it.
Or as someone else said: Don't take the advice as set in stone. It's all just advice. Try it your way until you learn a new way. You be you.
@Sparks You mean Constantinople?
That's nobody's business but the Turks'.
@Kanye-Qwest said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:
@Thenomain said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:
Part of my question is: How do G & H know there's anything going on in the Town Square? With Bob's Party I'm presuming you were invited. How would you invite yourself to Town Square?
You don't need to be invited to a town square. It's there for people to hang out in. Not approved people. Not You and Your Friends. People. Anyone not being a disruptive dick and/or breaking laws may hang out in a town square.
But they wanted to engage the scene, not the location in the scene. That is a critical distinction that we've had small arguments in this thread about: You don't own the location just because you're in a scene there. (So yes, re-define my use of 'location' in the quoted section above.)
It also informs my opinion about scening in public: You never have to ask to go somewhere other people are. In fact, I'm going to pull a 180 from the other people in this thread: There is no place with an existing scene that you have to gain express permission to get to. All barriers are other because of IC or out of RESPECT. This is why you must have respect for the game and the players on the game.
The people there maybe would have left because their ability to follow things was too disrupted, but that's also on them, not just on you. Both of you take responsibility for it. Negotiate for it either through OOC means (page) or IC means (getting ignored). The former is explicit social contract, the latter is implied social contract.
Phew, that was a lot of diatribe there.
So yeah, @Kestrel, don't feel like you were pushed away because you weren't. You tried out the explicit social contract negotiation of OOC, and you're not used to it. So try it your way.
Me: Hey, Steam, list all your specials by User Reviews.
Steam: Done.
Me: What's #1?
Steam: It says here "Deep Space Waifu Collection".
Me: ... There is no god.