Best posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

I've played on games with public +watch code on "hang-out" type locations and nobody cared. Players could use it, not just staff, and it was useful for watching events if you could be online at the time but not actually RP in them. I kind of liked the theater-y atmosphere it fostered. People did occasionally TS or do embarrassing things in those locations when somebody'd left the +watch on, oops, but oh well. If you are having hot sex in the park, people can probably see you anyway.

This is way different than staff secretly spying on players and wandering around DARK, of course, which is creepy.

Yeah, fair. There are people in India and who've lived primarily on Native American Reservations who still have largely positive connotations toward the swastika, and to whom the Nazi connotation is learned in history class later in life. My first job as a reporter was on a Res in rural AZ and it mind-fucked me to see it on random old bridges and in regional art. But I got used to it after awhile. The corruption of positive symbology by ignorant fucks is, sadly, an age-old tradition.

Intellectual property always strikes me as the elephant in the room whenever anyone talks about pay-for-play MUSHing. Whatever Nymeria thinks, very few people are going to give a shit about your online game if you aren't making money off it. But the second you want to profit off something based off an existing property, the author/gaming company/show-runner/etc. is going to be obligated to care.

With an original work it's probably viable, though I'm not sure what a game could offer me that I'd pay for. I enjoy RP games because of the other players and storytellers, and those aren't things you can really guarantee for me with a monthly fee. If anything, sub-standard RP or inactive GMs would become far more aggravating if I was forking over micro-payments.

I grew up in Northern Idaho during the 80s/early 90s, when it was a hotbed for Aryan Nation activity (the house my folks lived in was like three miles from the Ruby Ridge stand-off. Maybe it still is like this, I am long gone and don't know anymore!). Not "people having views that were mean and abstractly hateful," but robbing banks/putting bombs under people's cars/selling weapons to and supplying training for groups that are classified as domestic terrorists. There were backroads you did not want to drive on because of white nationalist militia fucks were trigger-happy about anything that got too close to their "compounds." I am terrifyingly white (ginger, y'all), so my family was never targeted, but this shit is real. It's not an intellectual exercise in people having distasteful views. These are actual domestic terrorists.

Admittedly I don't know where the line is, in terms of how these fucks should be curtailed. I would personally be against applying European-style speech codes in the US. I enjoyed the hell out of that Richard Spencer getting punched video in a visceral way, even while on a civil discourse level it made me uncomfortable. I'm angry that, after a couple decades removal from this, I became as complacent about it as anyone else, and it chills the fuck out of me to see it alive and well right now, even if it's wearing more socially acceptable clothing in some instances. I have no answers and don't know where we go from here, except acknowledging that this shit is a part of our country and it's a problem we need to deal with.

Also, yeah, seeing the term "Nazi" thrown around casually to describe people are who are just bigoted morons hits me wrong as well, but I don't think I'm in a position to bark at people about it.

@Ghost said:

EXAMPLE: On Battlestar Genesis, I believe, we had a char named Gars. Gars' PB was Linc from Tropic Thunder (Robert Downey Jr playing Kirk Lazarus who was playing Lincoln, an "Amos and Andrew" talking Mississippi black man from 1967 who was in the Vietnam war). The problem was, he wanted to play the character, but saw nothing thematically wrong with being a marine who, mid-firefight, would say things like "Come get some, n+gga! Huah! Mississippi Black Snake in your MOUTH, Bitch!" in a setting that took tens of thousands of years before Earth history, in outer space, where there was no Vietnam war, nor Mississippi.

Oh God, I remember this guy. He was also one of the many players who never seemed to accept that gender roles are not the same in the BSG-verse, and that female fighter pilots and Marines are commonplace and had been for his entire career. I was always surprised by how hard this particular idea was for a lot of people to grasp (including a not-insignificant number of female PCs who played stuff like 'altering' their uniforms to show more boobage, sigh).

I find the Sunbelt pretty livable (I'm in Phoenix atm). It's growing and in the cities, at least, there're pretty decent job prospects. The reasonable cost of living is what's kept me here (might be able to buy a house next year, woo and such!)

Good luck, @Auspice ! I've been in a situation where I just needed to pick up and fucking leave where I was at and make something new somewhere else. I had family to support me, so it wasn't horrendous, but when you don't have that kind of cushion it's a bitch making huge changes like this. I hope every little bit helps.

It strikes me as much easier just to tell someone they can't do something than to see the stupid thing they're doing and try to stop it.

I think if you want open CG, you have to accept that the game will have a certain amount of crack, and it can't be helped. Which is a valid trade-off to make, it's just a trade-off that's inevitable. I don't see a hybrid of open cg/approval really pleasing anyone.

@Goblin said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

The heat. The fucking heat.

Even if I wanted to leave the apartment it's now 110 degrees outside.

Man I loved Girl Scouts. I didn't get as into it as might have served me better in terms of both life skills and padding my college resume with higher-level ranks, but it was always an oasis of sanity and cool trips/crafting projects amid a somewhat blargh home life. Would recommend! Also the cookies are awesome, though I was always mediocre at selling them.

I'm pretty blunt, both IRL and online (as I mention probably too often, I used to be a reporter IRL, and if nothing else this made me pretty unself-conscious about approaching strangers and badgering them until they play with me), but I try to keep in mind I'm in an environment with a lot of other players who aren't like that. I'll admit this is sometimes hard for me (I'm sure I sometimes steam-roll people without meaning to, sorry), but if someone can meet me half-way, that's usually all it takes to make me happy.

MU*s are fundamentally social games. This is obvious, but I don't think a lot of players really stop and think about this enough. I do think this means you have to throw yourself out there if you're going to enjoy them. I realize this is hard for a lot of people, but I think you just have to suck it up after a certain point. Other players absolutely should help you, especially if you're new (I think pretty much everyone should go out of their way to RP with newbs, and I like to think I try to). It just needs to be a two-way street. I think we owe everybody one or two times of hand-holding, but if it's every time something needs to change.

@Roz said:

But here's the truth: sometimes a player's RP is just not as well-liked by the rest of the playerbase and others just aren't as interested in RPing with them. It sucks, but that's just a fact of the hobby. Some people are more fun than others. But as staff, I can't make someone RP with a player they don't want to RP with, nor should I. That isn't my responsibility. We shouldn't punish players for RPing with who they want to RP with.

I think the best way someone can remedy this if somebody feels like maybe this is happening to them is make an effort to RP ABOUT other people if you're in a scene, rather than themselves. Like, ask about somebody's IC job or how they feel about that thing that happened ICly or whatever. I feel like this also helps in the being inclusive thing. I don't mind people who pose less-than-perfectly, as long as they're engaging with me and not expecting it to be All About Them 100% of the time.

@tat said in Alternative Formats to MU:

And yet, despite the really nice web client also available there, I will almost certainly be using a separate client for the RP aspect. That's because I want my real-time stuff to be broken out into it's own 'space', because it works better for my head and my attention that way. It's the same reason I use the slack PC client instead of its browser-based one, why I use an email client instead of webmail, and why I freaking hate facebook messenger. I want that stuff in its own box.

I use separate apps for Spotify and Slack and other such programs whenever possible, and I honestly don't view this as that different than using a MU client. I just think it's a better user experience.

I'd probably PLAY a web-based game if it was in a theme I was interested in and I liked the other players, mind, but I don't view 'a separate app in which to play' as a dinosaur thing, and certainly not one that needs to be tied to telnet.

I do think having a better web-based experience is the clearest way to bring in new players, and I don't think I'm a Luddite. I'm excited to see how Ares and Evennia are developing. I just don't think a preference for the separate-app experience is purely a byproduct of being an Old.

@Arkandel said:

Agreed. And you know, even in games which ultimately failed I can't help but think players were expecting staff to hand-feed them entertainment a bit too much, and gave up too fast.

One of the (many) reasons I think I'll never staff again is how intolerant I've become of players needing to be hand-fed entertainment. Passivity irritates me to almost irrational levels these days (this is not a good thing to be irritated about if you MUSH). I realize players often have their reasons for it - both bad experiences elsewhere and just personality - but zomg blargh.

@rnmissionrun said in Alternative Formats to MU:

The population of Arx suggests that maybe times have changed and people are open to new ideas. Time will tell.

Arx is also pulling from other types of games like RPIs, and sort of combining audiences. @roz has mentioned the Tumblr RPers who've come to Transformers: Lost Light. I don't think it's just about getting the (fairly small) population of MUers to try new things, though that's part of it. I think it's about making games that have appeal beyond the MUSH community, which stripping away the archaic commands and using programming languages people might encounter in other kinds of games (or in their RL jobs) is part of htat.

While I don't have time to code a MU, I can imagine a gamer who works in coding RL finding an Evennia game or Ares game a LOT more appealing to play with in their spare time.

I just never say 'I'm bored' on channel. Never. Because it does, to me, come off as "Entertain me, masses!", however anyone means it.

It's not that I never am bored, but I can just quietly go play a video game or go read or something.

There are plenty of other kinds of text-based players out there who will defend their format as "the one true writerly way" (the levels of elitism in journal RP, my God) and would say MUSHes are still too gamey/that the real-time format reduces quality of composition. I don't agree, and prefer this type of play because of the way it makes me write/interact with other players, but this is far from the only place you'll find "We write the bestest."

FS3.

@sparks
For a long time I was REALLY hoping Roll20 would improve its interface for text-based RP/persistent world RP, and become a viable alternative. It's doing something different and not really right for that, though, but I'd have been ALL the fuck over that if it had gotten there.

I started on MUDs, after doing a random online search for "games" on my parent's AOL dial-up, back in the day. They were labeled "RP MUDs" but they weren't the kind where people actually RP'd. Mostly people TS'd awkwardly (since emits were really limited) and got 'drunk' at the bars on the grid off coded alcohol. I did enjoy killing random monsters, though, and it kind of introduced me to the concept of text-based games.

I was into fantasy novels in high school (I was about 17 when I started doing this) and searched a lot of the early fandom stuff that existed in 1999, so between that and MUDing I found MUSHes pretty quickly. My first was the WoT place, Tales of Ta'Veren, which was a really good experience for a newbie. I played on raw telnet for like 2 years (and this was back in like 2000, when I was on awful dial-up Internet anyway) before downloading a client and also was 17, so I was pretty terrible when I started, but the playerbase there was nice enough and I learned by watching better RPers.

Is there more butthurt over the downvotes lately, or is it just Certain Posters? I can't decide. Possibly both.