I'm pretty often frustrated by this hobby, for a multitude of OOC reasons. But sometimes you'll ask for help from someone you barely interact with except in the strange, also often frustrating place of a board, and they'll give it to you without hesitation, and it becomes very reaffirming, gives you much-needed perspective, and makes you remember why you bother.
You're good people, @apos. Thanks for the solid. Don't let the bastards get you down.
Seeing a player grow not only in terms of their RP, but so they're reaching out and mentoring other, newer players and even becoming willing to GM for people. It's so incredibly cool to see someone grow more //confident// OOCly in ways that translate IC and it feels like it makes the whole game environment a little better for it.
I mean I'm personally of the opinion that 'Other players being special detracts from me' is one of the most toxic impulses in this hobby but that's maybe another conversation.
I get frustrated with my fellow players often. It's easy to fixate on the irritants because they tend to be very loud in the signal-to-noise sense and drown out the more moderate average.
Sometimes players are great, though. Sometimes someone you've never dealt with before and have no OOC sense of takes feedback with a SHOCKING amount of grace and coolness and refines a character into something you're really excited about. Sometimes people suggest random connections that I'd never have thought of but that make my IC world feel fuller and me more excited to play. Sometimes you stare at channel chatter that shows an interest in theme and positive ooc community, or you get a simple private 'Thank you' and it's amazing.
Sometimes players are great, is the jist, and it's nice to focus on that amid the other things.
Comedy is hard to RP but when everyone clicks with a vibe in a certain way MU comedy is great.
In my ideal world, the threads in the ad forum become locked except to the original poster (who can theoretically post updates) and the board admins (who can theoretically do necessary maintenance and link things). Nobody else posts in them. Not sycophants, not critics, nobody.
Whether this is what anyone else wants idk but it's what I envision when I talk about this.
ETA: And I actually don't know if this is possible with this forum software, so this may only exist in my fantasy world.
@Seraphim73
Yeah it's almost like...you can disagree with someone's game philosophy decisions and still like and respect them. ZOMG. Anyway, yeah, Fara always exemplifies that.
@Roz
A buddy of mine I used to MU with (now retired from the hobby alas) commented on Tormund after the ep and said he's 'That Guy constantly hitting +where to see when Brienne's out in public' which seemed...apt.
@Gilette said in How to Change MUing:
@AlexRaymond -- I actually think it is that, that there are still a lot of people who might log in a bit every week but don't really play. And, in my mind, they don't qualify as active MUers.
Maybe this isn't what you're trying to say, but the implicit attitude of YOU MUST BE ACTIVE AT ALL TIMES AND RP EVERY NIGHT FOR 6 HOUR SCENES is part of what drives more casual players out of the hobby. I don't think somebody who RPs a couple times a week is inactive at all. I think it's a reasonable level of activity and the hobby overall would be healthier if it was encouraged as a desirable median.
This seems like a fun exercise, even though I've never tried WoD, so the overlap here will probably be minimal. I’ve been MU*ing since 1998/1999, so there are likely many games and many of my creatures that I’ve forgotten.
Tales of Ta’Veren MUSH – First place I ever played, fuck me I can remember character names. The only one I’ve retained is Lara, farm girl archer who ended up joining the Valavendil adventuring group. It is probably best that it’s all a vague blur. I was a newb and pretty terrible, always been grateful to the players here who were patient with me.
Chicago MUSH – Old one, not the reborn version, though I’m occasionally tempted to try it. Kate the Chicago Tribune reporter
Harry Potter: Alere Flammas: Sally/Orah/Odette/Eru. A few others, but those were probably my ‘main’ PCs over the years there. I was also Merrow when I was on-staff.
TGG: Strife in my staff incarnation, too many poor dead bastard soldiers to name (my favored children were probably Singh/Byrd/Christiane, and Konstantinov for the lulz. Gallipoli is the most hands-on I've been with a campaign from beginning to end as a staffer, and I recall it fondly).
Steel & Stone: Jarod Rivers/Lady Rebekkah Nayland
Game of Bones: Kevyn the squire/newb knight briefly, before IRL ate me
No Return: Reece
X-Factor: Kade
Something a Great Notion: Trakas
Arx: - Tila (1st?? one), Pasquale (1st one), Esoka (ONLY ONE), Raya (1st one)
Lots of BSG games. I peeked into most of them at least briefly, but these were the chars I stuck with:
Current:
Lots of other places that I flitted away from quickly and without note. I am better at creating characters than sticking with them, apparently, unless the planets are properly aligned.
Edited to add some names, since I'm playing semi-actively again at this exact moment.
The most important thing I look for in someone I want to RP relationship stuff with is...is this person OOCly chill? I've been a lot happier in my since I just NOPED out of relationship stuff with players where the answer was no.
Far as IC marriage goes, I love my shipper RP but haven't gotten my chars married a lot. It rarely feels necessary or organic to me, and I tend to slot it in as an epilogue to where certain relationships end up (or not) when I fade out an alt. I did marry off my character on the GoT MU Steel and Stone, which was life-ruining in some fun dramatic ways. And my alt on Arx, which so far has not ruined her life at all, and just seemed like the natural place to take a long-term thing.
@lisse24 said in Character 'types':
If they have a tragic backstory, it's unlikely to come out in RP all at once, you might pick up hints of it in some RP, but my character will likely never drop the full story.
Same and - OH GOD - if you're telling me your tragic backstory in our first scene, five seconds after we've met, my character's reaction is probably going to be, 'Holy shit wtf did I do to prompt this overshare from this rando? Edge awaaaaaaaaaaaay.' Not becoming besties or something.
@carex said in Let's talk about TS.:
This is slightly off topic but unilaterally banning someone for being a creeper seems like a bad idea. I would go with something more insidious.
You are incorrect on the face of it, to put it mildly. I keep typing other responses as to why but really you should understand this and if you don't that is the thing that warrants examination.
It's also usually 'there's nothing out there that's exactly right for ME therefore the hobby is dying.'
And yeah it's pretty tedious and a cycle of eternal return. There are games! I think there's a pretty OK spread depending on genre and interest right now, really, at least better than other years I can remember.
@Pandora said in MSB: The meta-discussion:
A game is 'doing it right' when it doesn't wind up on WORA/MSB. That said, I think games that voluntarily advertise on MSB are very brave and open-minded, though they should keep in mind that they'll be attracting a specific sort of crowd that is heavily biased toward 'The Way We Do Things Just Because It's How We Do It'.
Are they?
This board is full of people who don't post very much, and even fuller of lurkers, and I suspect those are actually the audience for a lot of the advertising threads.
Which brings up something that does actually bug me. I have no issue with games that advertise here being bitched about. But I have this knee-jerk 'This is Bullshit' reaction to that bitching happening in their ad threads. Make a thread in the Hog Pit! Or a slightly veiled thread in the Constructive area. Link it in the ad thread (I don't actually think bitching about these games should be difficult to find), but it always rubs me the wrong way when these threads get taken over. Often times by bitches only tangentially related to the game that seem to boil down to slap-fights between players or about games from the Long Long Ago, or sprawling MU fights from the peeves thread that've spilled over.
Maybe I'm wrong about this, and maybe this is in the spirit of what MSB is designed for, but it Mehs me out whenever it happens.
@EUBanana The insanity was why we loved it.
Though what I think TGG did best was concentrating its playerbase. It was always a small game, but the characters were mostly in the same concentrated area of whatever front they were on, and everyone had a reason to RP together (all the soldier PCs were mostly on the same 'level', which usually meant starting as privates). Every time I see a mid-sized game splintered into a dozen factions, it boggles my mind. You can get away with that if you're Arx or one of the giant WoD MUs, but most places are better-served by creating a sense of intimacy and character connectivity rather than trying to be everything.
I definitely dislike the idea that liking open sheets versus liking to be surprised is a representation of player quality. I've played in both environments (though not in PvP-heavy ones, I play primarily PvE games) and had good and bad RP (and great experiences and awful experiences with asshole dice-monger players) in each. I think viewing it as an environmental cure-all is wrong-headed and will end in disappointment (also I like to be surprised sometimes and consider it sometimes better RP, which certainly doesn't make me a better or worse player), and I instinctively hate-on the idea that being pro a mechanical choice denotes superiority. But there are other arguments for doing it that've previously been espoused in this thread, like transparency for newbs or ease of GMing without full staff powers, etc.
I won't ACTUALLY murder my co-worker, but saying aloud, in my WFH apartment 'I am going to fucking murder you' every time they do something that raises my blood pressure (and they do this often) helps. It helps a little.
@Tempest said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:
They refused to watch a 2 hour long movie about giant robots? On a game explicitly in that setting?
It wasn't just that they refused to watch a 2-hour movie.
I would still have been unsympathetic to that, because I'm frankly generally unsympathetic to refusal to at least passingly acquaint yourself with source material when the role you're playing requires an understanding of it, but it wasn't widely available to stream and some people don't feel good about piracy and blah blah blah.
They didn't just refuse to watch the movie.
They refused to watch 5-minute clips on Youtube specifically explaining the relevant jaeger pilot thematic stuff.
They refused to watch 5-minute clips OTHER PEOPLE HAD SPECIFICALLY FOUND AND LINKED FOR THEM, so it required no work other than clicking on the links and watching them for 5 minutes.
I just...I cannot even...!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! with these people.
@sunny
This is pretty much where I'm at. There's a lot of rose-colored glasses going on about pre-wiki MUing. What I remember is lots of the same stuff, only disconnected on player's individual Geocities pages and livejournals. Wikis just provide a community portal for people to do the things they were always doing, and hopefully they'll use the available templates so it doesn't look like ass. Maybe the players disinterested in this stuff SEE it more now, but none of this strikes me as new. Just more organized into a user-friendly platform that actually serves the game as well.
Anyway, my preference is wiki/website, with the caveat that I want to be able to do quick stuff like look up profile/finger information and quickie command references on-game.