Best posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

@seraphim73 said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

@the-sands said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

However, [WoD/CoD] the system in use in most places.

I would bet that it's not. The plurality of places, perhaps, but not the majority. It's just MSB that is soaked in WoD.

Damn right it's not. It waxes and wanes but there are a LOT of games posters here have no idea exist and that drum along quite happily (myself included, but I'll own my relative ignorance to All the Internet). WoD as the assumed default game makes me Hulk rage.

I don't mind (or, rather, I numbly accept and try to exit the threads in which they take place) WoD tangents here because they're inevitable but Christ a lot of people don't play WoD quite happily.

I keep hearing the Salt-N-Pepa classic "Let's Talk about Sex" whenever I click on this thread.

I'm reading very little of it, but the song brings me joy.

@carex
I certainly get 'will only play sex' or 'will only play relationship RP with little outside it' burn-out, and it's usually a sign for me that this isn't a person I should be shipping with.

@crysta said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (Answered):

Yeah I think Arx Twitter does enough shaming for silly things.

Condemn doesn't work for the same reason no one likes downvoting on forum threads.

It definitely doesn't work and I don't want it back.

What I dislike currently, though, is that serious thematic issues don't receive a blink a lot of the time (murder a dude with an heirloom weapon? Go about your life, nobody really cares) while people freak the fuck out over ultra-minor shit. It makes a lot of thematic things in an honor-bound society feel like they don't have any actual weight, while being paranoid about saying something 'wrong' in journals.

IDK, I honestly wouldn't mind seeing more stuff that impacted IC reputation (like, I REALLY appreciated the Vox posts on divorce and rep adjustments, because that's a huge thing IC, while also appreciating that it didn't call out any names) but I'd like there to be an OOC gate on it, which is probably too much work for staff, so whatevs I guess.

Also, if you've fucked up, a thing that will NOPE me out with someone real fast is 'Yes this happened but really I was in the right and behaving virtuously for reasons XYZ but I guess I'm sorry you were offended.'

Just do not do that ever.

There are more decent-looking games I want to play than I have time and brain for them. It's a great 'problem' to have.

It's hard to speak to what's prevalent in 'the community' about stuff like sexism and homophobia, since different genres (and different games within those genres) are all kind of their own particular ecosystem. Some staffers and players are good about reacting quickly to bigotry quickly and proactively and shutting it down. Some aren't. Some are guilty of shitty behavior of their own. Also I'm a straight woman so wtf do I know? I don't feel like I regularly encounter anti-LGBT players on the games I'm on. There ARE certain players who become way less interested in RPing with you if you don't have equipment they can bang, but they tend to be just as disinterested in straight characters who aren't the gender they're into, so I kind of think of that as it's own thing and not orientation-based so much.

4srs Ares is allowing a lot more people who want to try and run a game to try and run a game and play in a 21st-century manner, which is pretty laudable.

I mean, if we're talking about opting out of sections, I don't opt out of the Politics group because I don't care about politics, I opt out of it because I don't view MSB as a place I particularly want to discuss politics (there are a GAZILLION places on the internet where I can do that with more tailored mod standards to that kind of thing and a population with different interests), and I feel negative engagement with my fellow humans rather than positive engagement every time I go in there for some reason (usually because there's some C-O-Ntroversy blowing up on the board and I don't understand why until I check the Politics group).

Do think it's good to have this in the Constructive section rather than buried in a Hogpit peeves thread that's going to freak out about a new thing in 4 hours, though.

ETA: I try to play what I think is a broad mix of character face types, in part because it helps keep them distinct in my head and I do like my character not looking like a photocopy of a dozen other MU characters. I try not to do this badly when it comes to characters outside my own basic American white girl stereotype. Do I succeed? IDK. One continues to try.

MU*s are writing games, and I've yet to find a better form to do it in. I like collaborative writing. It's the kind of game I want to play. The pace of journal RP never really pulls me in, and I've yet to find a platform that does text-based, real-time RP better than these dumb games. It has an improv feel that's fun as hell when it's firing on all cylinders, and I enjoy as much of the social element of it as I hate. When I write there's usually an escapist element to it, so I guess it's that as well. Less about escaping into a perfect world than getting outside my own brain and into a story.

I do it because I enjoy it. Same reason I go hiking or take part in book clubs off and on, and it exercises different parts of my brain than those do. It's a dumb hobby, but most hobbies are dumb, and this one's free!

@Gingerlily said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

@Arkandel

So this thread inspires a question for you.

MSB a net positive for the hobby, or nah?

I'm gonna answer seriously anyway.

I think there was constructive discussion in this thread before it got bogged down in a fight between @bored and @surreality

His fault mainly, though there's a point long long ago where I would've just stop responding to shit like this (I'm pretty quick to disengage and do not go back) so, like the drug trade, nobody gets away clean.

I think I also said previously I wouldn't have brought an idea at this stage to the general populace because I don't think general input is helpful except in either very late (when it's almost an ad thread but you're bug and interest-checking) or very early (actual brainstorming in which no firm ideas are present) stages of development.

Whether this thread should've been split when it became a dumb fight is a thing I have opinions on, but they're bullshit opinions. I'm neither mod nor person who started this thing.

@HelloProject said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

I can't really understand the mindset of like, I don't know, just doing a lot of poisonous shit and then just not feeling bad about it.

I can't either, but people like this certainly exist. My grandmother's what I can only call a sociopath (I understand this is a term that's really hard to use clinically, but there is no other word for it). I'm not using this term hyperbolically. She is a person who seems entirely lacking in empathy and who is consistently toxic and emotionally abusive to everyone in our family, while expecting them to cater to anything she might want at a given moment. It's never enough, and it will never change. I'm thankfully removed enough from her that my contact with her has been minimal, but the destructive impact she's had on my mother's life and the lives of her siblings is pretty staggering if you were to step back and dissect it. These people don't "get better" and there's no way to deal with them except cutting off contact where possible (in our family, it isn't at this point, so we manage it to as much of a degree as it can be managed).

These people are also exceeding rare and I think it's really important to draw a distinction between consistently destructive personalities and people who...I don't know, just did stupid shit and were assholes about something. I've done stupid shit and been an asshole on occasion, I'm sure. Most days, though, I think I'm OK. Most of the people I meet through these games are pretty OK most days, even if on some days they're lulzy and dumb, or have problems that make them tough to deal with for a little while. It takes a lot for me to totally cut somebody off, and I don't think random assholery is really what cases like VASpider and Custodius are about.

I'm also in the 'you don't need male channelers' camp. I'm a creature with girl parts IRL who's played plenty of men for setting-specific reasons. I like historical games but dislike playing overly against-tradition characters, and like actions roles, so my knights and soldiers were men-folk. Stretched me as an RPer in ways I think were positive. Folks who want a channeler can do the same, and it's not like there aren't plenty of boy roles in WoT.

ETA: I think a more defensible reason to set the game during the books (with no canon characters and possibly a different, NPC Dragon Reborn) or after them is that it's both more familiar to theoretical players and in theory quite dynamic if you're willing to play with the storyline and just make up your own shit off all that. It also makes Sea Folk, Aiel, and Seanchan a bit more playable.

Dealing with people - and RP definitely qualifies as dealing with people - has gotten gradually harder and harder as everyone's isolation and insecurities (my own included) have gotten doubled down on. So, it ebbs and flows. MUing definitely doesn't feel as escapist as it used to and with forever WFH screentime in general feels a bit more oppressive than it used so. So, the reading.

@Caryatid said in Indicating Discomfort in a Scene (online):

I'd say 9 times out of 10 when something shitty happens on a game, it is discussed. Maybe not too or with staff but it's talked about.

And this means when there - inevitably about these repeat-offenders - are complaints, stories will come pouring out of the woodwork about So and So Incident that was never reported and/or only talked about in a different RP circle than the one the other incidents were talked about in. Put these motherfuckers on blast, and you'll find it was almost never just that one innocent time when the poor lamb meant no harm, really.

@PuppyBreath said in RL Anger:

But the most recent icing on the cake was yesterday when I offhandedly mentioned to my mother in the natural course of a conversation how I'm not comfortable living in the same house as guns. Especially with people who are drunk a lot (I live with my younger, also 45-voting sister who wants to get a gun... or already got one, I don't really want to know). Later, my mom finds a poster with a gun on it that says 'Keep Calm and Carry' and she laughs about how my sister should get it because I don't like guns.

This attitude is gross and insulting to anyone who considers themselves a responsible gun owner (I'm not, but I grew up in a family that hunted and my parents had them around. I still kinda like target shooting on occasion). What terrifies me isn't guns, it's the morons who get them with zero interest in safety, respect or proper training and see them as an extension of some politically misguided Ameri-peen.

I mean I don't even look at stuff like Arx and stuff like BSG (which also has skin-color-based racism and sexism and homophobia just not be things in show canon) as applicable to a conversation about whether you should include real-world discrimination on a historical game or a current world game. Those are fictional worlds created by storytellers/writers, who made choices to tell stories that introduced other kinds of conflict. Why should people in Arx be sexist in ways 2017 Americans or 1400s Brits were sexist? Why should people on a spaceship in a futuristic sister culture with only vague ties to Earth be racist in the ways Earth people are racist? If anything, grafting RL mores onto made-up cultures because we just can't expect players to play something different than themselves aggravates me, especially when the argument of "realism" is made for it. Fictional world! It can be whatevs as long as whatevs has internal consistency.

Whereas. If I'm playing a MU set in the 1920s, I might be interested in playing off First Wave feminism or the pressure large, growing immigrant populations exerted on American culture at the time. Somebody else might just want to play something more stylized with fantasy gangsters. Neither is WRONG, but the people running the game should be clear about the kind of environment they want.

@surreality said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

Look at the shit Nemesis pulled the other week. He's all over the forum, in Pit and notably in various places outside the Pit calling me a liar, claiming he knows these dozens of games and forums I've been on and banned from, and so on. Not one word of this is true. I've been asked -- based on discussions here -- to not show up on two games I had no intention of ever playing on in the first place, and that's the closest I've come to getting banned from anything, anywhere, ever; I've never even had staff 'have to pull me aside' on a game I've played on about something. (I also respected that, because 1. duh; 2. wasn't planning to anyway.) While I've modded on several forums, I've neither been banned from any of forum nor banned someone from one. So this shit is just blatantly and objectively untrue.

I was surprised it took as long to ban Nemesis as it did, given his rage-tour across the entire forum. He was banned eventually, at least.

@surreality said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

That said, stories like the ones @faraday described a handful of posts back are incredibly compelling to me. I think they're interesting, I think they are fantastic stories, and I don't see them as lacking depth or creating real world hurt or expressing any form of player-side vileness whatsoever.

And I don't actually think there's stories are so hugely uncommon as some of the posts in this thread seem to want to convey them as. I've played stories that were very rewarding where my character butting up against the adversity of the setting and theme was an integral part of that story. Other posters have, too. This isn't a unicorn or magical or unheard of on MUs, it's a thing that happens.

What I wanna resolve to do is poke my head into more gaming stuff IRL. There are a handful of places where I live that do board game nights that I'd like to try.