Posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

It's also not like there aren't weirdly calcified ideas about RP norms within sub-genres. Pern players who've only played Pern have different ideas of the "typical RP experience" than WoD players who've only played WoD, and so forth.

ETA: My RP experience on MUDs was pretty bad, but that's on the games I played, not the genre. I think I had more trouble wrapping my mind around the fact that there weren't coded objects than I did posing, when I tried MUSHing. You could say you were sitting in a chair if there wasn't a chair, zomg.

@HelloRaptor said:

There comes a point where you need to bite the fucking bullet and move up. The number of times I've talked to companies that have perfectly viable (maybe not perfectly, but still viable) modern alternatives but don't want to spend the money or time to train people to use them, is just infuriating.

My first job was at a weekly newspaper that still used dial-up Internet service. I used to beg to go back to my apartment to do anything online, where I could use my cable modem.

I don't care so much about the reputations of specific people, but specific games like Serenity and Blood of Dragons...it's very nice to have a handy link to show people so they can properly Buyer Beware them. Even in archival form.

I do feel like, back when I started MUSHing in the Dark Ages of the 1990s, there was more stuff geared toward For Real Never MUSHed Before newbs. Like rooms you could walk through that would actually tell you how to pose and read the bboards. Really basic shit, not so much anything to do with a particular system.

@TNP said:

Edited to add: It's even better after reading Scalia's dissent. What a great fucking day it's turned out to be.

Pure applesauce!

@Luna said:

@silentsophia I've had huge boobs my whole life. Bra less was never an option. I'd like to wear strapless stuff sometime.

I am always baffled by my friends who are like OH I NEVER WEAR A BRA AROUND THE HOUSE SIGH SO COMFORTABLE. I need a sports bra for my lounging.

@Coin said:

I once RPed with someone who took forever to pose, but her poses weren't huge chapter-length entries, but instead like, a short paragraph. Really? You needed an hour for two sentences?

After the third scene I was like, 'Nope.'

Most of the torturous slow posers I've played with aren't the florid sort who are crafting little pieces of screen-length art. They're serial-editors. They obsess over every comma until the pose is worked to death and has taken 45 minutes to write. And then they'll find a 'mistake' and repose it with like two different words.

Not my idea of fun, this.

I'm happy to put up with a florid writer in a one-on-one scene (bigger/plottier stuff that has to go somewhere, I feel like it becomes indulgent, but that's something else), though it's not what I personally do or most enjoy. Then again, my professional training was first in newspapers, then in technical writing, so I've been paid for brevity. And consider myself better for it, but I also read Hemingway for pleasure, so mileage varies.

@Jeshin said:

Example: Jeshin walks down the road after a long night out drinking. He has a faint sheen of sweat on his face and cannot walk straight as evident by his slow weaving route.

I guess this is sort of metaposing because it mentions the long night out drinking, but it's mostly just calling attention to body language cues that would be observable in any normal interaction, but are harder to highlight in text. Most communication that we have in-person is non-verbal. I don't think it constitutes meta to highlight these things, since they're a big part of normal interaction if you aren't a blind moron.

With a lot of other narrative posing there's more of a gray area. The kind that's generally targeted (rightly) for hate is passive-aggressive thought-posing that there is no way to respond to, ie: Three-Eyed Crow sits at the bar, chatting pleasantly, all the while thinking about how much she hates Creature and her awful personality.

@VulgarKitten said:

@Ganymede said:

For Japan, maybe. For the United States, I doubt it. Last time I checked, the majority of theorists believe that there will be a huge economic problem in the near future as the baby-boomers become decrepit, productivity per capita drops, and we suffer another recession.

You're proving my point with this. Due to the lack of population growth over the last generation or two, productivity has suffered and the economy suffers with it. Were there enough able bodies to take the place of the baby-boomers who leave the work force and become dependent on the State, there would be continued growth (to some degree or another).

There are more Millenials than Baby Boomers as of this year. Those were two big generations that sandwiched a smaller one (Gen X), not widespread population decline that's been seen in Japan.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/01/16/this-year-millennials-will-overtake-baby-boomers/

The main issue with the Boomers, as I broadly understand it, is going to be increased life-expectancy, which the present system in America was not built to handle.

That was Mudrammer iirc.

@Pyrephox said:

Although the biggest reason why I've become wary of being the Active Person in the scene is because, unfortunately, then people come to expect it, rather than being inspired to reciprocate. I /like/ to run things, to get things moving, to pose fun little world-bits...but when it becomes the expected thing that I Will Entertain You, it's no longer fun. That's not what I'm here for. And worse, because I always sideline my PC when having those things things happen, I don't even really get to play my character.

Yeah. Unfortunately, I have also kind of become this (though maybe I'll be less embittered about it when my latest hiatus from MU*ing comes to an end, as it always inevitably does). It just gets draining to be That Guy after awhile if your fellow players are too many Not That Guys.

People just need to take a degree of ownership for their own fun. And the "WANNA RP?" on channel, followed by awkward silence when I respond, "Sure, where to? Anything in particular?" is not really doing that. It's fine to be passive sometimes, we all are, but if too many people are that, all the time, that's where the, "Nothing interesting is happening" comes from.

I don't even mind generic bar scenes if they're generic bar scenes where the characters do somewhat amusing meet-and-greet things. Get drunk, play trivia games, bitch about the asshole playing a rotation of the same 80s song in the juke box, hit on NPCs stupidly. Whatever, something. It's astounding to me how often characters don't even do the somewhat entertaining things we do in real life at bars in these BarP scenes.

Or, as @EmmahSue says better, we're all in theory playing something we find fun. Do something fun.

@HelloRaptor said:

Alternately, stop using McAfee, because goddamn.

John McAfee needs Central American compound and harem money from somebody.

http://www.businessinsider.com/as-if-his-life-wasnt-insane-enough-john-mcafees-home-in-belize-was-burned-to-the-ground-2013-5

@icanbeyourmuse said:

I'm not a fan of putting all the blame on staff. A lot of the players seem to like were the game is. So the resistance of staff might be due to trying not to alienate the majority of the player base. Allowing certain changes might have a bunch of the players go 'This is not what I signed up for!'

There is a sizable audience for The Game of Boyfriends (or Girlfriends, it doesn't make much difference) who will always studiously play that and not much outside it. I'm not even taking so much KD here as MU*ing as a whole. It's not an audience I'm a member of, but it exists and can be very active, even if it doesn't create an environment where much that interests me happens. I'm not sure what staff does about this, apart from making sure other stuff is happening. If they even regard it as a problem. It's a thing a lot of people want to play, and I guess I can't really Wrong Fun it too much. The most active players will have a huge part in setting game culture, whoever they are.

@ThatGuyThere said:

I want to like Faraday but the combat being completely black box leaves me cold. I don't have anything against automated but at least let me know how the system works even if you have it do the work for me.

I'm not entirely sure what this means. The documentation is out there.

http://lynnfaraday.github.io/MUSH/fs3/mechanics.html

And an organizer can grab a complete log of every roll the system makes using +combat/log

I'm often annoyed with how little effort some game-runners put into explaining how it all works/clearly linking to this stuff, but that's another sort of issue.

I've never been particularly interested in playing WoD either, but I'm certainly aware of its popularity in the MU* community (insofar as things in this hobby can be considered popular).

One thing I'm curious about is how widely available and established the code is to set up a WoD MUSH, versus hand-coding a workable Buffy game or Anita Blake game or Vampire Diaries game or... (and so on, through similar themes).

I'm sure the hardware (and the comfort level the players who've been doing it for decades develop with the system itself) isn't the only factor, but I wonder how much of one it is. I also have no idea how different the average WoD game is from the other average WoD game.

I never got farther than a Guest looking at the rosters on BoD, but I also remember the many 'Doors were slammed to Lord So-and-Sos Chamber' posts that seemed to take the place of interesting rumors. It was among the many, many things that induced me not to play.

@Sunny said:

Yes, this is the Nymeria game, to save anyone else the time of going and looking.

This is another one of those times where I pine for the WORA archive, for a simple link to the insane history of Nymeria.

@Jeshin said:

In our marketing phase I will try and restrain myself from implying Redshift is the Jesus of text-based gaming, but people love what they love and they can get carried away.

The "Jesus of text-based gaming" is the thing that put me off contributing to that Storium project, interesting as parts of it were. We're a bunch of grown-ups playing pretend online. I don't think anyone needs to pretend they've invented the way to cure RP cancer to say they have a game that's maybe fun.