I've come to the conclusion, through this thread, that my most successful and fun-to-play romantic 'ships were based on a mutual appreciation for the importance of OCC punctuality and ability to find things other than TS to play.
I'm pretty damn happy with this realization. If I'm doing it wrong, I don't want to be right.
@shelbeast said in Let's talk about TS.:
I've had the whole "Wants nothing but TS thing" happen to me a number of times, too. It... definitely causes a burn out. For sure. I've also stopped logging in to characters because of it. I've full on freezered a character about it, too.
This happened to me when I was younger. I'm old and mean and actually dump the motherfuckers IC now.
@carex
I would be absolutely fascinated to know which games you've staffed on and what that experience has been like for your players.
Given that part of the theme is rediscovering lost knowledge, I don't know how thematic clue deterioration would be. I feel like, once it's uncovered, it's back in the wider world. I do wish you got a certain number of 'free' clue shares a week (kind of like your Teaching stat gives you free trains a week) but if I were to isolate the systems on Arx I think are semi-broken, clues would be fairly low on the list.
My hate-on for orgs that just bank a bunch of clues for people to brief themselves on with no context is vast and I think it leads to problems in terms of people RPing some real whack-a-doo things, but making clues harder to share individually and without scenes would just make this worse.
I wait like 15 minutes then page again once before moving on with my life. If they're busy we can touch base later or I can mail if it's important.
@insomniac7809 said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:
Of course, the real point of 1984 is a socialist writing a sci-fi criticism of Stalin.
That's the clearest read of it that should be obvious to everybody who engages with the text, though I agree it's not wrong to dig into it and find aspects of the society it portrays and broaden it out to basically any kind of oppressive totalitarianism. The generalness of it is part of why it's enduring (even if it's hilariously maddening to see American white nationalists pull out the 1984 quotes with no context). It's interesting to watch how vastly different readers transform it to fit their own ideology, regardless of authorial intent.
(I will own that this is off topic but I'd much rather engage with it than the two or three other maddening off topic tangents.)
@coin
I also love Hemingway and that style of writing which - along with all of my professional training being in journalism rather than fiction - makes me staccato and kinda boiled down by nature. I sometimes try for more lyrical flourishes but it just feels weird and I dun like it. I do think finding a unique voice through word choice/sentence construction is really fun, though, and reading good and varied authors takes me up a notch. I need to break deeper into my bookshelf.
I just go back to, I have played on historical games where a certain amount of period-appropriate discrimination was allowed and it wasn't a huge shit-fest. There were female soldiers in TGG campaigns where it was even vaguely historically appropriate (the Spanish Civil War and Stalingrad were the main ones) and it was fine. Largely because that really happened, we just leaned into it and played it up. There were female surgeons in WW1 (another environment where it really happened in a handful of make-shift cases) and part of the emphasis on the healing/medical code was to give female PC nurses something meaningful to do. There were a handful of PoC soldiers in the various campaigns (I played a Sikh dude as one of my bits) and it was OOCly fine. Discrimination tended not to be a thing that was frequently emphasized in terms of gameplay, though tensions between nationalities (which included English/Irish etc) made for interesting RP from time to time (particularly in WW1 where there was a mixing of units in the trenches for variety of characters). The more irritating players there tended to be ones who were focused on the MUD-like aspects of killing NPCs and hitting +shoot rather than doing character-based RP, and they didn't tend to create the sorts of problems being discussed in this thread.
I'm not sure how it'd play today, honestly. That was a good 10 years ago at this point (we are old) and the environment online has changed in a lot of ways. I think it would still work OK on a small game with very focused character types forced to work together in a stressful situation - which was what TGG was - but agree it's a matter of scope. If you're aiming for something bigger, I do think you'd get trolls or people who just wanted to be edgelords in ways that were 'realistic' but unpleasant. I don't think I'd ever blanket-bad IC ignorance, personally, but I also probably wouldn't run a pure historical game at this point in my life.
Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but none of this surprises me. It certainly explains a lot of seemingly out-of-nowhere hostility, which I'm glad is resolved. I've always seen the perp in question as seeking a lot of validation from this hobby, which is never a good sign, and that's certainly coming to a middle. Maybe we'll all be more critical now, where we should have always been critical.
@sparks said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
Without answering that, the prestige list will not matter to people, and houses will go back to "no, you can't have money for clothes or jewelry, we need to keep the funds for weaponry" (which is what happened before).
Can't staff make it clear this isn't cool and punish people who do it when they are reported?
ETA: I'm a person who thinks that the org head who spends their House's entire income on refining their personal weapon should face social consequences and be considered a bad ruler. Maybe I'm mean.
My initial reaction is 'No' but it gets more complicated if you're grouping MUSHes in the same category as MUDs, some of which have graphical capabilities, or even something like Storium if you're ruling out non-narrative games. There's a Venn diagram that encompasses all these things and I don't think the straight-up MUSH circle overlaps with the straight-up video game circle, but they have overlapping cousins.
I also talk about them as interactive stories or something comparable to an online tabletop game when interfacing with the norms, though.
I have a broad outline and try not to get too married to it, though I find an outline of some sort essential for not just letting things peter out into nothing. Some high points I want to hit but nothing so detailed I'll get stressed if the players do different stuff.
I don't GM much anymore these days but I've recently seen a one-shot PrP of mine spun off into bigger things by ST staff, which has been heartening that I don't suck and made me wanna do more again.
I'm a straight girl creature IRL, as a preamble.
I play male and female characters I feel like pretty evenly. I first started playing men largely for setting reasons and due to my feeling that it's good if characters support the 'norm' IC sometimes (because everyone wants to be rebel-rebel it gets tired for me). I like historical games and fantasy settings which are (frustratingly) often using European feudal gender norm tropes, so there were certain types of characters like knights and trench soldiers were just going to be men if I wasn't doing something designed to push against the setting in a certain way. I didn't always want to play that, so, boys. After awhile I started doing it just because I enjoyed it, felt like it gave me more colors to draw from as a player, and because certain concepts seem more interesting to me if they're male or female. I think I do it OK. I've had players I know are guys IRL tell me they didn't know I was a woman IRL when they initially met me on a dude bit because I wasn't fucking it up too bad heh.
I've never played a gay guy for any length of time, though it's not really intentional. I've conceived a couple characters as gay dudes but didn't care for the games I apped them on for various reasons, so they were two of the many alts I've abandoned on the woodpile. I mostly end up playing straight men (an a bisexual dude who is buttoned-up and gets no tail at all for various reasons) and more variable straight/bi/lesbian women. I'm super self-conscious about whether or not I suck at relationship RP in general but idk I enjoy it.
I get not feeling like a woman who knows woman things IRL though that's become less of a thing as I get older. Like Roxane Gay I'm a bad feminist and bad at a lot of girl things and that's fine.
I kinda don't care if IC punishments/negative rep adjustments happen off-screen as long as there is IC indication that they're happening that the world beyond the PC can interact with, if something is a big enough deal that that needs to happen. BBposts, reputation hits, maybe something localized as a rumor within a squadron etc. I'm always kinda surprised by how effective Arx's propriety mods are (they're basically sheeted negative reputation write-ups). While they have some coded impact, the most effective thing they seem to serve as is theme enforcement, in terms of what the NPCs think of you/how the world is reacting to you. It's on your sheet, everyone can see it, it's plain what the world thinks of you and how PCs can react to you if they're so inclined. Some folks will become less gung-ho about being a rebel rebel if there are clear, public social consequences, and I tend to think persistent ones any player/character can reference and that become a permanent part of their IC rep are better than one-off RP'd scenes.
@Wretched said in TS - Danger zone:
@Ghost The first person I TS'd with did the you thing, it was something I 'learned' early in muing, but it wasn't just for TS, basically any time I went into a one on one scene I went to 'you' posing.
This used to be WAY more common in two-person scenes, sexytimes ones or otherwise. I remember it being the norm when I started in the ancient times of the late 90s but even then it felt like...close to 50/50 in terms of whether people used it or not or liked it or not. It's one of those unspoken and not entirely intuitive 'rules' in the hobby (the big one I generally think of is posing in present-tense).
@saosmash said in The Savage Skies:
I wish I had the juice for another game right now.
Same, same. Looks very cool, though. Awesome to see more and more variety in the Ares games space.
What I always want as a player is //variety//, as it makes it a lot easier for me to mentally split my time. Which is really hit and miss, as popular genres seem to come and go in waves (or based on what kind of code is easily and readily available).
@HelloProject said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
I do think that there are a surprising amount of minorities in this hobby, but I think they tend to congregate around certain places, or stay under the radar. Like, Mega Man MUSH and String Theory (even though ST is invite only now) both have more minorities than the average MUSH. The concentration of trans people on Mega Man MUSH is higher than I've seen anywhere else, which is a part of the reason I've been trying to talk non-MUSHer trans friends into giving it a try.
I was just thinking something like this and looking for a way to articulate it. While I don't think MUSHing is some kind of amazing melting pot of diversity, I think there's an assumption that everyone is white that's not always or even generally true. People don't tend to mention their race unless it comes up in a really specific context, or you know them on a more than surface level.
I remember reading a very long post by Adam of Firan fame back in the early 00s about how he just COULD NOT GET playing a character of another gender and WHAT IF TS HAPPENED ZOMG.
I'm sure these people still exist but if they've shut up it's all for the good.
