@surreality said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

Here's the thing: the games that post logs and wikis to share information do not consider sharing information OOCly a problem, and not everyone agrees that it is one.

OT from the thread, but straight up this. The MU cultures I come from (anime BS games mostly, but sometimes comic games) have pretty much /always/ operated under a sense of IC/OOC transparency where you pretty much know OOC if someone is secretly a werewolf because they put "Is secretly a werewolf" on their wiki page or finger profile. This is considered a good thing because with that knowledge you might identify hooks for your own character you otherwise wouldn't have known about and can then discuss with the other player come cool ways they could interact/develop a plotline. In general you're on the honor system for not 'metagaming', which I would describe as immediately figuring out on your own that said character is a werewolf/spy/alien because you happened to see it in their ooc files.

I have been on games where people are /incredibly cagey/ about sharing IC information OOC and it is a weird experience for me, like "American visiting North Korea" weird.

I often wish someone would put another Lord of the Rings MUSH out there, specifically one set in the First Age. All the old haunts are literally that, the RP community for the setting just seems to have withered.

So I tend to play on games with appable FCs where the hero/antagonist roles of some characters are highly defined because of the source material. In general there's no limit on apping a "bad guy" be they FC or OC, though some villain FCs are rendered inappable because of power/narrative weight (Thanos, etc)

I feel like I've played villainous/antagonistic characters more often than not at this point, and my read on the situation is this: The problem is not usually with antagonist players not wanting to accept negative consequences, but with certain protagonist players never wanting to let the antagonist achieve or succeed at anything (which would usually result in negative consequences for /them/).

In my circles we tend to call this "excessive whitehatting", where some protagonist players just kinda see villains as punching bags for them to knock over so they can feel cool then wash/rinse/repeat every Saturday night. It can be very hard to get them accept any kind of scenario where they might not win because it runs so counter to the Saturday morning theory of heroics I don't doubt a lot of the people I'm thinking of operate on. I see it make people either reluctant to either app antagonists in the first place or do anything /too/ villainous with them in the fear that they will be immediately dogpiled heroes looking to get their triumph fix.

I think most people in the hobby-at least on the places I've frequented years, expect to have a sense of community on a MU beyond just the part where you 'play the game'. I think, if I took some of the earlier comments in this thread as intended, the idea might be that if you don't have time to RP you shouldn't even sign on to the game in the first place. I feel that's more a sentiment more suited that MUDs (If you don't have time to xp/craft/whatever, then indeed why are you getting on?) but against the spirit of MUSH/MUX, whose whole purpose is to have a more a social experience in mind for the player.

So that's why I still like having an OOC lounge /in addition/ to channels, to provide that sense of OOC community around the game. In my experience RP happens when people hang out OOC, find folks they like, and talk about getting a scene going rather than wandering the grid and just happening into it (I don't think most games are big enough for that to be viable anymore). Players want to hang out with one another in that capacity I find, so if you remove it they're just going idle on the grid in more selective hangouts instead, and I'd say I've encountered "The grid should really be IC activity only" as an attitude among staff way more than "People should only log on if they're going to play the game".

Anyways, the point of the thread wasn't to discuss whether or not people like OOC lounges on a game, but how to deal with certain people who, frankly, abuse them (along with channels) in a way that is not easily flagged as breaking any sort of hard rule.

If I had to boil it down I suppose it's about something more fundamental on games: How do you discourage the lonely, attention-seeking person a MU always seems to attract from engaging in negative activity in the OOC chatspaces of a game? I have seen people who pretty much only have ever negative things to say (Talking about a video game? Here's why I don't like that, and I'm going to derail the whole subject about why Thing In General does not work for me. TV show? Same deal. Had a fun scene? I had fun once and it was terrible). They can do this on a public channel as easily as an ooc channel, and it in general brings the mood down without edging things over into nebulously defined toxicity because some people who don't know better will just engage them on it while everyone else throws their hands up in frustration and quietly retreats into pages or other more private places where they can vent about the venter.

I like having a community on the game, but I've seen so many instances where someone takes what is meant to be a playspace and turn it into their critical outlet for whatever they can't deal with or handle in life, and just wonder if there is any way to cut that off without making people feel like they are overly policed.

There is nothing about what I just described that cannot (and does) just as easily happen on OOC channels as a lounge. I really don't think there's a difference and it feels kind of like splitting hairs instead of talking about the actual issue, frankly.

I've been on MUs long enough to have seen plenty of OOC lounges, and in my experience they always get dragged down by some of the same factors.

Invariably, with enough people hanging around, there's always at least one person will treat the lounge as their personal journal, oversharing details about their personal life with strangers and taking free license to bitch about anything that comes to mind.

This has the long term effect of driving otherwise cool players out of the lounge and into private areas onto the game grid to hang out, often 26th l with their friends, which usually accelerates the inevitable issues about cliques/elitism that will show up on just about any game.

Has anyone ever found an effective way to deal with it? It's almost always 1-3 people who can't seem to handle themselves or know boundaries that make a lounge insufferable for everyone else, and admin are generally reluctant to act since they're generally not violating any actual rules.

I'd say more MUs based on anime and/or video game settings. Games utilizing tabletop systems seem a dime a dozen comparatively.

How about a true swords and sorcery setting in the vein of Robert E. Howard? Toss up a HyboriaMU, get rid of Conan (long dead or busy sailing the seas) and you've still got a rich world filled with all sorts of gritty potential.

@Tennyson

Fuuuck, that's a tragedy.

@VulgarKitten

What was it that caused the game to spiral, anyways? Was there some particular drama that caused a bunch of players to exodus, or did it just fade away (which is kind of depressingly thematic, actually)?

I've generally come up on MUs that were based on existing fictional franchises and fandoms, and one thing I've noticed with fandom-based roleplay is that it is kind of inherently fickle. The rank-and-file are mainly interested in doing whatever is hot and new, and the most long-lived games seem to be those that are able to incorporate new themes and characters to play while games with "fixed" themes and settings inevitably struggle once that source material is no longer "active" (See: the complete dearth of Harry Potter games ever since the books finished).

'Dead' in the sense that there are a lot of games out there that are technically still running but just have zero population (Elendor and Beleriand come to mind ,thinking of the current high fantasy thread up)

I wonder sometimes how likely it would be that a small group of active players (Let's say 5-7) could swoop on any of these empty places and try to bring it back to life by getting some activity going in a "If you build it, they will come" kinda way. Has anyone ever seen anything like this happen, or tried it themselves? I'm curious what the results and potential bottlenecks would be.

I often wish someone would put another Lord of the Rings MUSH out there, specifically one set in the First Age. All the old haunts are literally that, the RP community for the setting just seems to have withered.

What I mean with this question is, to what extent does a character make decisions based on the personality, ethos, and motivations you've given them in your head versus what you the player? Ideally most of the time these two things are in sync, but I think everyone who roleplays long enough finds themselves situations where these respective goals can conflict.

For example, maybe I logically know my PC would seek out PC X for further details about some plot thread they have, but I don't like X's player and find them grating to roleplay with, so I'd rather find another way. Or maybe my PC is the sort to jump headfirst into situations without thinking about, but I know staying true to that behavior in this particular instance would mean RPing something i'm not ever comfortable with (Maybe it would just get me into something that's too dark or stupid than I wanna engage with).

It doesn't even need to be an explicitly negative outcome! It could be something like "Well, I know my character would unquestionably take option A in this scenario, but I think it's kind of boring and option B would be way more exciting to write about, so i'm gonna contrive a reason for them to do that".

A lot is made of actions being "In character" and having semblance of logical consistency to them as a hallmark of a good roleplay (especially on games where canon/fandom characters are played), but I think more often not we're all deciding what we players want to see first and doing the mental gymnastics afterward to justify how our character act in a certain way. I also don't think it's a /bad/ thing to do, inherently, but I also know I've definitely engaged some people for RP I normally wouldn't because I'm willing to be a whipping boy for narrative-to an extent. I'm just curious how others navigate that sort of thing.

So I tend to play on games with appable FCs where the hero/antagonist roles of some characters are highly defined because of the source material. In general there's no limit on apping a "bad guy" be they FC or OC, though some villain FCs are rendered inappable because of power/narrative weight (Thanos, etc)

I feel like I've played villainous/antagonistic characters more often than not at this point, and my read on the situation is this: The problem is not usually with antagonist players not wanting to accept negative consequences, but with certain protagonist players never wanting to let the antagonist achieve or succeed at anything (which would usually result in negative consequences for /them/).

In my circles we tend to call this "excessive whitehatting", where some protagonist players just kinda see villains as punching bags for them to knock over so they can feel cool then wash/rinse/repeat every Saturday night. It can be very hard to get them accept any kind of scenario where they might not win because it runs so counter to the Saturday morning theory of heroics I don't doubt a lot of the people I'm thinking of operate on. I see it make people either reluctant to either app antagonists in the first place or do anything /too/ villainous with them in the fear that they will be immediately dogpiled heroes looking to get their triumph fix.

@surreality said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

Here's the thing: the games that post logs and wikis to share information do not consider sharing information OOCly a problem, and not everyone agrees that it is one.

OT from the thread, but straight up this. The MU cultures I come from (anime BS games mostly, but sometimes comic games) have pretty much /always/ operated under a sense of IC/OOC transparency where you pretty much know OOC if someone is secretly a werewolf because they put "Is secretly a werewolf" on their wiki page or finger profile. This is considered a good thing because with that knowledge you might identify hooks for your own character you otherwise wouldn't have known about and can then discuss with the other player come cool ways they could interact/develop a plotline. In general you're on the honor system for not 'metagaming', which I would describe as immediately figuring out on your own that said character is a werewolf/spy/alien because you happened to see it in their ooc files.

I have been on games where people are /incredibly cagey/ about sharing IC information OOC and it is a weird experience for me, like "American visiting North Korea" weird.

There is nothing about what I just described that cannot (and does) just as easily happen on OOC channels as a lounge. I really don't think there's a difference and it feels kind of like splitting hairs instead of talking about the actual issue, frankly.