Wow. This topic really made me think about some stuff (and got me to speak up on Brand MU Day for the first time!). I’ve only been MUSHing since 2013, but looking back over my decade+ of playing, it’s interesting to consider how I would have answered back then compared to how I’m able to answer now.

I answered the poll with the “Yes, but only if I have control over it” option. Beginner me understood that life for my characters couldn’t be perfect or else it’d be boring, but if bad things were going to happen, I either wanted to pick specifically what would happen in the moment or carefully plan with my scene partners what specifically would happen. Didn’t always work out well, as you might imagine.

Me with a few years of play under my belt loosened her hold on the reins and had become an actor IRL, who was learning in a very direct way how conflict propelled story and how valuable it was to respond in the moment rather than always pre-planning. During RP, I still wanted assurance that things would eventually turn out okay, but I was willing to play through the drama. I loved some of the stories I told with people during that time. However, two things started happening at once.

One was that the game I was on became very cliqueish, and communicating with people started to feel like pulling teeth – one, because there was some actual behind-the-scenes toxicity going on (that I ended up exposed to firsthand by becoming a staffer), and two, because I was afraid to “cause trouble” by trying to talk to people about what was going on. When communication breaks down…well. It just makes everything way more difficult than it should be, as I’m sure many of us have experienced.

The other thing was that I began to experience bleed. I didn’t know what it was or what was happening; I just knew that the bad things my characters were experiencing were becoming part of my own emotional state, and it wasn’t a good thing. Fortunately, since bleed is also something actors can experience if we’re not careful, some colleagues were able to tell me what was going on and helped me take some steps to deal with it. I’ll just come out and say that therapy was a big help during that time, too. (It can be pretty awesome, y’all; don’t skip it if you need a little guidance!)

At present, I’m a pretty different person than I was when I first started MUSHing. I’m still an actor, but I now have military, school, relationship, work experience, and an autism diagnosis that all shape how I play. I say I RP to escape the world’s BS and have a chance to be a hero in ways that I can’t in real life, but that doesn’t mean I’m averse to having bad things happen to my character for the sake of story. I don’t like bad things happening to my characters, but I do like the awesome stories I get to write with people that can come from those bad things happening, whether they’re physical or social. I also prefer that those things happen with plenty of communication involved. I don’t like being blindsided with bad stuff, and I prefer it not make up the majority of what I play. I really do love my friendships and romances and happy endings and such. But I don’t expect them to be handed to me, either.

I’m still also susceptible to bleed, but I can recognize it and do what I need to do to counter it. Sometimes I’m a little late in catching it and wind up apologizing profusely to anyone who ends up subjected to it, but I hope I’ve spared my scene partners pretty well thus far.

Anyway, that was kind of a ramble. Thanks for reading this far, if you did 😊 I guess I’m just hoping that maybe someone who’s had similar experiences will see this and know they’re not alone!

I was on the L&L Crossroads, briefly. It was not friendly to someone in an ‘off’ timezone - I only lasted a few months.

My first MU* was a place called Spheres, and I logged in for the first time on the 4th of January 1999. I memorised the date because I knew this would be the start of something big in my life, but I definitely wasn’t prepared for just where the journey has taken me.

a man is holding a statue of a bride and groom with a laurel wreath behind them

finding the creative spoons to gm a little story in my little mu* corner

While I’m sure there are some recent articles that touch on the darker side of MU*, I always look to this one (written by Julian Dibbell) outlining an atrocious event that happened on LambdaMOO:

TW: sexual assault - http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle_vv.html

I’m terrible at summarizing so I won’t really try, but it does a fine job of sharing a terrible event, how it affected people, and the changes that happened after. It also touches on what it means to make a society and shape a culture in this shared hobby; for as terrible as the event is, it’s also heartening to see how things can grow and change through player influence.

@somasatori In game is good!

@MisterBoring I could be wrong, but there’s no indication in the forum post that it was continuing after the initial ban.

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@Pavel Agreed. Self care and boundaries are important for game runners and staff too. In my experience this doesn’t get supported enough.

@Superbia I don’t recognize the username, and basic attempts to check their post history did not work, so shrug

I’m a person who often joins and becomes invested in a game on a whim - I can’t tell what the formula is, but if a game is hoping to attract people like me who just hop in without knowing someone, at least some percentage of the playerbase needs to feel open to interacting with, chatting with, getting excited about new characters and new people. Not every game has to be that - I don’t mind the existence of games that are built with a network-only approach and are meant for people who already have connections to have a good time together.

But as a new player approaching an open game, seeing people only rping with one or two others a lot sets off yellow flags that a game isn’t a place where people have the time or energy to open their circles to me. I don’t mind reaching out a lot when I’m in the shiny new excitement phase, but in order to feel welcome, it helps to see signs that it’ll be reciprocated.

I don’t think activity checks or a quota on interactions with people outside of your circle are meaningful solutions, because activity requirements can’t generate enthusiasm.I’ve roleplayed in forums like Dreamwidth where gamerunners often have monthly activity rules. The rules don’t actually stop a game from slowing down, or dying, or becoming a playground for one group. But I think the urge to implement them comes from the wish to have a particular game environment. Two people playing alone in a corner aren’t hurting anybody - but the more people who are doing that, the harder it is for new people to jump in and have a good time, and a lot of games want, at least in theory, new people to have an easy time joining, to buff up the population as people need to slow down or leave for various reasons.

And on a personal level, I find its important to my RP enjoyment to be open to new connections, because sometimes my old connections can’t RP any more! And it’s so much easier not to be bitter and discouraged if I’m not rebuilding my character’s network from scratch.

As I said elsewhere – if I had a single spoon to spare from Keys, I’d be over here, rolling up an arrogant Alphatian nobleman. Prince Haldemar, move over, there’d be a new explorer in town.

@somasatori All 2e merits are done. Everything was reorganized, I’ve updated the lookup_data.py to reflect the new groupings. If you want to drag stuff over and test it against main, feel free. I’m going to start working on the legacy merits next.

@InkGolem People like me but older and somehow worse.

@somasatori said in Everworld of Darkness:

I don’t really know enough about Demon to figure that one out.

God Machine divided by Zero and that basically nuked the Gauntlet, Demons are trying to build Infrastructure to re-stabilize things.

@somasatori said in Everworld of Darkness:

Sin-Eaters

… and Mummies, who also need the Underworld/Duat… but due to the shattered nature of reality, they are temporally locked to now, solving their time-travel shenanigans.

@somasatori said in Everworld of Darkness:

Stuff about Poles

Something something Exalted Creation something.

@somasatori said in Everworld of Darkness:

Prometheans

Always gotta do something about them tainting the land and drawing in people to kill them. It’s just the way of the MU world.

i think you’ve got three dials: game size, nuance/specificity, and staff involvement. Cranking any of these up or down is going to affect the others. You can (and should! if you want!) make a game that is highly specific in a historical or fictional setting, but doing so is going to turn down max players and probably increase staff involvement in direct relation. You can turn down staff involvement and let your players mostly self-police if the guardrails are broad and high enough, until that player size gets to a certain limit.

I think you can pull off most any kind of niche or historical setting if you are willing to accept and spend your time curating a small and like minded player base.

This is a community-building issue.

Okay, yeah, probably you can never have outright let’s-murder-each-other-on-sight factions and have it work. But why would you want to? If they only interact to fight, there is no reason for the opposing group to be PCs.

But stuff like “Green apple Fossoways hate red apple Fossoways and they’re each trying to be the ruling branch of the house,” and the deal where everybody’s trying to steal the McGuffin from whoever has it right now, can be fine fun.

It needs a supportive community to be fine, though. It works on private games because everybody there thinks everybody else’s feelings count and actively wants every other player to have a good time. When this trust is broken things crumble.

Which is no surprise. There are big differences between:

Dracula: “Well shit.”

Van Helsing: “Yeah, the dice were cruel to you! But that was great, loved the way you played it out, I had a blast.And you’ll get yours once you climb out of that hoiy-water-contaminated well.”

And:

Dracula: “Well shit.”

Van Helsing: “I understand that you’re very upset. In this essay I will explain how you are wrong and a problem…”

And:

Dracula: “Well shit.”

Van Helsing: “It sucks to suck.”

Also, yeah. There’s gonna be drama. There’s just gonna be drama. Making some space for the dramas of RPG-related fee-fees is part of gaming. Gamerunners and players can draw a line about how much space and what kind of expression of ye feels. But “never express any kind of upset about the game or your interactions with others on it” isn’t reasonable. Games nobody cares are not good games. You want players to be invested. Passions will rise. Characters don’t have to die for passions to rise.

Players in general and game runners in particular really ought to try to avoid drawing that line at who’s drama rather than what kind of drama. 

Drawing the line at a who is how you get bullshit like it not being ‘drama’ when Abelard raises a “Bridget refuses to compromise in RP!,” fuss, but when Bridget replies, “You refused to turn off your camera, you were obviously bluffing, I’m more afraid of proposed-betrayee I am of your threat, and I don’t even have the information you were trying to blackmail me to get,” somehow Bridget is the drama-creating problem.

@Jennkryst said in Character Death:

Taking a moment to think about it and remember that the L5R 20 questions includes ‘how should your character die’ because the idea of death is always in the back of their minds… Im wondering if that is a factor in the L5R MUs I’ve seen not doing terribly great for too long, or if addressing this and everyone going into it knowing there is supposed to be an almost romanticized view on a good/noble death… if that will somehow help it out? I dunno.

three cartoon characters are chained to a wall with the word death written on the bottom

I keep glancing here, and keep meaning to make a joke about how the address involves gaslighting, but then I don’t do it, so now you all get to see that train of thought.

@MisterBoring I’m not sure if it does, but if so, it would probably take someone with more technical skill than I have to make it work. 🙂

I think I’ve got character generation where I want it now, so I decided to try modifying the dice plugin for the game. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

It keeps the core functionality of the original dice plugin; you can still roll whatever you want, but I added a ‘Roll DMarvel’ checkbox. When you check it, the plugin rolls DMarvel(3d6, but one die is special: rolling a 1 counts as a 6 and gives you a Fantastic result).

Roll Screen:
32bd7150-94c4-493f-9641-e5f02bad679f-image.png

Result:
33026141-b86b-43a0-bec5-e840407490a5-image.png

@Pavel said in Minigames in MUSHes:

@Muse said in Minigames in MUSHes:

@Pavel Or maybe a self limiting factor, like clues know how long since the last clue and will stay in hiding until it’s time again.

Just let me have my slap-upside-head tool okay. 😞

Fiiiiiine, but only because I’m a sucker for a sad face.