Posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

@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.

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

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

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

I expect my critics to tell me something more than what I can see for myself. Just like a teacher or professor, I want their piece to be more than an opinion. I want it to be an educated opinion.

But, like... isn't that what they kind of do now?

Ok, so, for example -- you, based on background, think that this play is more meritorious than some critics do. But they also don't share the background.

We all do this from time to time, and time can change those opinions.

I loved Brokeback Mountain when it came out. I thought it had an important message. I still do. And I was pissed when critics canned it.

??? It has an 87% on RT, that's not really canned.

Isn't it also widely regarded as the movie that should've won Best Picture that year, now that we're all retroactively embarrassed by 'Crash'?

I mean I'm sure there were critics who didn't like it, but Brokeback Mountain is a movie that can be called a critical and commercial success without any qualification.

@seraphim73
For me it's not even so much the window thing. I DO absolutely prefer doing actual reading and actual referencing of help files on the wiki or website. If I know I need something, that's where I've got it up. But sometimes, I can't remember the exact command syntax or in some thematic cases the exact spelling, and I want a quick hit (in many cases to copy-paste) that takes 10 seconds and I can insert before a pose.

When I'm using 'help' at all it's for quickie command reference of something I've gotten wrong/a few keystrokes off. So I generally just use help/detail. I read the news files in full on the web for deeper/longer reads, but I look at the ways I utilize game files vs web files as pretty different.

@sockmonkey said in PBs You Haven't Had a Chance to Use:

@Arkandel No one would ever get mad about that! We're all mature adults here. Right?

Lololololololol.

@packrat said in How do you construct your characters?:

To everyone who finds themselves working from a picture or a 'played by' as a primary part of the process, was this something you started doing recently? Or did you also do that say, eight years ago before character wiki pages or 'played bys' were a common thing, just then not express it to the same degree?

I've always looked up actor photos for desc inspiration, because I'm not an artist and can't draw worth a damn, and find most digital face mock-ups too uncanny valley for me to see them as a human in my brain. I used to maintain a Word doc for character building to keep track of storylines I wanted to pursue or skills I wanted to raise, and I'd plug some pictures in there as I found them online. I still do the same thing in a Gdoc and would continue to do so, wiki or no wiki.

@betternow said in How much Code is too much Code?:

My guideline: I never, in the history of ever, need to have a coded system tell me I have my period, and how heavy the flow is. Looking at you, Firan.

I'm not sure what it says about me that the code that made me NOPE out of Firan was the one telling me I needed to @bathe, not the @period mails I logged into as a female character. I guess I'd mentally prepared myself for the weird sex stuff, but the bathing was a bridge too far.

@arkandel said in How much Code is too much Code?:

At the moment what reasons do characters have to go outside their usual circles? What are you giving 'me' in return for taking the 'risk' of meeting up with people I don't already know I like?

What's being done on BSU with Ares is pretty different than standard temp rooms. They're sort of being tried as grid-replacement (though there's still a grid), so you create public scenes within them. So it's not like the standard holing up in a TP room with your friends, it's everybody using temp rooms for normal, public RP.

It does feel like a cultural adjustment and I'm kind of feeling out what I think of it. Mostly I feel like it's a work in progress that will evolve.

@mietze
I tend to look at coded toys (especially many of the ones on Arx) as Features Not Bugs That Aren't For Me. There's a type of player they are for that clearly really loves engaging with them, but I'm not in that demographic. I do play with some of the stuff on Arx now, but that was only after resolutely ignoring it for like 3 months until it stopped feeling overwhelming/like homework.

My own preferences run pretty lean, code-wise, but I come from a free-form background.

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

If nothing else it's been instructive about whose games I'd be a bad fit for.

I'm curious what games you think have done this well, that you've played on.

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

I'm really genuinely confused about what this argument even is anymore.

There seems to have been some goal-post moving away from whether or not players should be able to opt-out of RP that includes racist/sexist/homophobic slurs or storylines, to whether it's OK for those storylines to exist at all, to whether fictional discrimination is functionally the same as RL discrimination (damn the Man for keeping those Bajorans down), to whether any kind of fictional or non-fictional discrimination should exist at all on MUs or has ever made for good stories in the history of fiction across the world.

Some of these arguments are dumber than others, imo.

@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.

When I play a character who's subject to IC discrimination, it's because there are aspects of the theme or setting that I think are interesting to explore with that specific type of character.

Like, on a GoT game in the long-long ago, I played a bastard (the illegitimate kind). There were specific class and personal issues I wanted to mine for dramatic purposes. I did this! There were character arcs! It was good times! Some people do enjoy playing off IC adversity. I have zero OOC issue with players who just don't want to engage in this stuff, but it would've been weird and not particularly fun for me if this character had been ICly legitimitized and never faced any sort of social side-eye.

Like I don't get the extension of the argument from 'players should be able to opt out of dealing with racial and homophobic slurs that exist IRL' (which I basically agree with) to 'all IC discrimination serves no dramatic purpose', if indeed that is the argument that is being made.

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.

@cupcake said in Characters You Enjoyed Playing:

Ygraine @BSO. Another free spirit, Yggy was a tall, freckled, blonde braided farm girl who became the best damn ECO (fite me) on Orion, who often ended up giving people life advice.

Yggy! She was a great deal of fun, and I really enjoyed Yggy/Phin. Them as buddies (loooooooong before they ever hooked up) really helped me hook into the character.

Phin@BSO is definitely one of my favorite characters, in a way that sneaks up on me every time I think back on how much I enjoyed him. He started as kind of a toss-off generic Viper pilot Lee Adama riff (with Zac Efron's face, for lulz). I wasn't sure if I was in the mood to MU right then, and I apped him because I wanted to play with a handful of people/because staff had let me and a buddy of mine create twins on a BSG game, which was low-key trolling that sort of amused me. I had no real expectations. I ended up getting really into him, and he slowly came to life inside my head in ways that were really rewarding to play. If I were to try and rank my favorite characters, he'd easily make the Top 5 (maybe higher, some days), well above characters with backgrounds I liked more initially, or who had concepts I was more excited about. That doesn't happen for me often (false starts with concepts I'm jazzed about are much more frequent) and it was an experience I look back on extremely fondly.

Mostly I want to give you major props for doing this and say I'm enjoying reading them. It's also a handy source of writing prompts, which gives me fewer and fewer excuses not to devote some time to non-RPG creative writing each day.

I had a lot of characters I really enjoyed on TGG, though a lot of them had their lives cut short (which was part of the fun!). My favorite was probably my Sikh combat engineer, Singh, who I only played for like 3 months and who died a bloody, meaningless death in the trenches of WW1. As you do.

I've played characters I loved more, but the one I probably had the most pure fun with was Rebekkah on the old Steel & Stone GoT MUSH. She was an 80-year-old dowager who existed only to snark at her grandchildren and complain, and was my blatant rip-off of Olenna Tyrell. Was a blast.

@auspice said in Stranger Than Fiction MUX:

Mod Voice
I have gotten report of a supposed "MSB plot" to take down this game. I don't know if there is any truth, whatsoever, to this. I don't know if it was a joke, if it was a few people trolling and when they got found out they decided to point fingers this way to try to cover their own ass, or what.

WTF?

Are there details available to offer about this? My tendency is to side-eye these claims heavily and roll-northernly-eye the 'MSB rule' and such that staff has shown tendency to do thus far, but I'd hate to be rolling my eyes northward unfairly.

(I am not plotting against this game, personally. I do not play there and do not care, apart from the motion of my eyes.)

@miss-demeanor
See, I'd much rather have Joffrey Baratheon than Ramsey Bolton. I think the Joffrey vs Ramsey thing is actually a pretty good illustration of what makes a playable asshole and what doesn't. Joffrey was TERRIBLE, but he had reasons to interact with other characters without going full sadist 24/7. He was capable of having at least some shadings in his relationships from scene-to-scene. Ramsey's major sin for me was that he was BORING, one-note awful, all the time. Which is how MU edgelord characters tend to be played. It's very rare you get an entertaining asshole who's nice and fun to play with OOC or willing to give any nuance to their character.