Posts made by Wolfs

Add me to the "general fan of Exiles" list. I liked what they did with AoA Blink and Nocturne overall, yep.

If the game focuses on keeping to a specific theme, then by all means stick to it as best you can if that's important to the running of the game. There's absolutely nothing wrong with trying to do that.

If it's branching off into other directions by design, getting sandboxy already, that makes things murkier and you have to start considering what's okay and what's not. How far are things allowed to go off the beaten path? How much does a thing threaten to break immersion?

When and if it comes to The Talk, be open and honest with whoever's not keeping to theme. Simply explain to them why what they're doing is breaking theme, why keeping to theme matters, list some possible repercussions of it, and give them the option to either knock it off or deal with some or all of those consequences.

You should quickly find out how mature and/or interested in keeping to theme that person is afterward. If they're determined to knowingly do something that's not thematic, they COULD do it in private places with the understanding that it doesn't affect anything IC, but that still takes anyone involved in it knowing that going in. If they expect it to count, then assuming IC=IC, you get to put the Deal With It glasses on.

It feels to me like the vision of a perfectly-run place that's fair to all, no drama or strife, and so on is just that: a vision.

The places that have great RP, competent staff, mature players, and little drama are few and far between. I think it's a reason the vast majority of MU*s out there have a relatively short shelf life.

I once staffed on a couple places years ago, and I vowed to never do it again. As important as good staffers are to a place, it's way too easy to fall into the usual traps of human nature when it comes to who you associate with, who you like, who you don't like, and so on. At times all the stuff behind the scenes made it harder to just have fun in general RP, and if there's not an inherent wariness of staffers in general from some people, there are others who can and will try to abuse your time when they figure out who you play and who your staffbit is. That can be solved with making a clear distinction between your staffbit and your characters, but it doesn't always work.

There was once someone I knew who wanted to open his or her own place and this person asked me to staff. S/he (because I have no idea) said a lot of the same stuff: "I don't want to repeat the mistakes the other places make. I want us to be fair. I don't want us to play any favoritism, no special perks just because we're staff, etc." Who was the first person to use the "Well, I'll play so-and-so because I'm staff. I just need you to give the approved stamp to it so it looks legit" excuse? One guess, and I chose not to stay there long after that.

I've come around to the idea that staffers are probably entitled to certain perks, such as certain characters if they want them, but with that comes a responsibility to actually play those characters more than once or twice a month. If squatting is bad from general players, staffers doing it is much worse because it sends a bad message to everyone else. Staffers need to set the right example, not the wrong one, and for the time and effort they presumably put into a place, they do deserve a benefit or two as long as it's not being abused. From my experience, however, that's rarely the case.

A place that's run kind of like a dictatorship by one or two people can work and have longevity, but like I said above that seems to be the exception to the norm. These days I'm just on a place to have fun and hopefully make some friends within the context of the game, IC and OOC. I don't need the drama, and if and when a place reaches the point that it's no longer fun or worth it to stick around, I'm ready to try another one.

I just think someone who wants to start a game should be honest about the pros and cons of it, the tendencies of basic human nature when it comes to cliques, favorites, personal perks and so on, and simply do their best to work with that instead of trying to prevent it from happening at all.

I tend to stick with characters more often than not, compared to playing them briefly, dropping them, switching over to others, etc.

I've never been a WoD person so the thought of just having a character that might be killed at pretty much a moment's notice has never been a thing I've dealt with. It's always been the more consent-based places for me, usually superhero stuff or occasionally branching out into book worlds (Wheel of Time or A Song of Ice and Fire), or a more original place like Aether.

If I'm playing an original character, I try to make them into someone I can grow along with if it's a genre or setting I'm new to, so that tends to lead to me sort of forming a "connection" with them in the sense it gets easier to slip into their heads because I feel like I instinctively understand what they'd do or how they'd react to most situations. That's a comfort zone there, and I'm not necessarily saying a character leads me instead of me leading them because in the end it's our choices that determine what our characters do, but I think you know what I mean when you feel you know them so well that it becomes second nature.

If it's a feature character of some kind, like the comic book examples, there are some that develop into personal favorites and the fun comes in taking what's known of them and building on that in different ways, putting them into new situations to see how they come out of it, and generally just interacting in ways the comics don't always touch on.

I'm not saying "TS all the time," though I know a lot of people do that and I have no qualms about playing that side of things when the mood hits, but comic books only show what the writers decide to do with the characters. They pick what team someone is a part of, who they fight, who they're friendly with (or not), and the appeal of the superhero (or any other world - take Firefly for example) is of being able to put your own mark on someone and do different things, hopefully while showing enough to make people believe that character is still what they're familiar with.

So, for me part of it is a personal connection I develop with most characters I play in a creative sense, but ultimately it comes down to who I have the privilege of RPing with in creating shared stories and ongoing things. The overall continuity and evolving story is something I don't like to just toss aside the moment activity begins to wane, so sometimes I may hold on to a character longer than others would.

I started out with about as basic a version of raw telnet as you could imagine when I was in college. Dating myself here. I still have some logs from back then that I copied over to a few disks, and the character formatting junk that showed up in front of each line is a major hassle to clean up, so I kind of gave up on doing that ages ago.

For a while I used Zmud and that worked pretty well, but it's been SimpleMU for me ever since. I did give TF a look once, but I just didn't like its interface. I haven't tried anything else unless you count the mobile telnet apps on devices, but I rarely use my devices for that. If I do, it's Mukluk for me on the phone, and I think I got Blowtorch to work passably well on my Kindle.

I never did pay for SimpleMU (bad, I know!) but to be honest the base version does the stuff I care about it doing (including the spawns on a game that it was beneficial to use them on) and 99.9% of the time I don't need a spell-checker. Not sure how I ended up being the good speller when my father and brother never were, but I'm not complaining.

The bit about Potato working with https links might be enough for me to give it a peek sometime, though.