This game made me realize what a cure for writer’s block it can be to just zone out and write a few paragraphs of clothing or weapon description prose.

Steam recently began complying with Australian legislop and requiring age verification to view adult materials. Their ID of choice? A credit card. Not a debit card, not an ID card, but a credit card. The Reserve Bank of Australia reports that only 18% of adults under 30 in Australia own a credit card (Livermore et al., 2023, p. 21). @Faraday said: and they’re so easy to circumvent that they do virtually nothing to keep kids out of spaces they shouldn’t be in. Especially with Firefox and other browsers just straight-up having a VPN button to push, for free (with limits, but c’mon), right there. Even the least technologically interested child will learn that pushing that button gives you access to The Good Stuff. Livermore, T., Mulqueeney, J., Nguyen, T., & Watson, B. (2023). The evolution of consumer payments in Australia: Results from the 2022 Consumer Payments Survey (Research Discussion Paper No. 2023-08). Reserve Bank of Australia. https://doi.org/10.47688/rdp2023-08

christ dude But the answer to the question for me is Yes, with a Big Caveat, and that’s that you simply will never be able to reproduce the same experience as a regular PC. Even if you somehow stay anonymous, the other elements of the game – how the systems work, what the mysteries are, the relationships between other players and the jobs they submit up to you, these will all be floating in your head all the time and will inevitably color your experience. There is also, of course, the gulf between what you want a game to be and what it actually is to play. If you are open about it being a staff NPC, people will expect you to have knowledge and lore and stories. If you aren’t, they’ll be bitter when they find out. But it’s crucial anyway, whichever route you go. It’s far more important the more immersive your game is, too. An RPI needs it far more desperately than a game done mostly in async on Ares, but it’s still important wherever.

My feelings are if a game is going to have child PCs/NPCs then they need to show up semi-regularly or at least get called out in the background as parts of scene sets and the like. It’s jarring when my character has gone months not interacting or even seeing a child and then, in the middle of a scene, a kid shows up fucking up the vibe.

@golgoth That’d be great fun to see!

Well, I think I know how to filter some player temperament through using my knowledge of the English language. It certainly gave me some application question ideas to send to Staff if there is a Player Helper application for Arx 2.

Oh man, what I would give to log onto PernMUSH once more, just to look around. So many happy and bittersweet memories of the place, and how it changed over the years I played there. Up till about a year before COVID, the last ‘owner’ of the database kept it online; then it dropped connection, and I haven’t seen it since.

Well, I’ve already done more than I thought I’d be able to do. [image: 1787079960552-563b6d65-97aa-4f67-ae8b-158dedace629-image.jpeg] I’ve added an Action Panel for players and a Referee panel for Referees. [image: 1787080024859-a5812c4c-90f7-4c3e-8ffb-08b357f56b7b-image.jpeg] Anyone in the scene can be made the referee. So if you only have two players and they want to throw down, they could. This is what the designated referee would see when they call up the panel. Non-referees would only see who was set as the Referee. Technically, they’d have the option to override that, but I’m going on the assumption that all players are here to have fun. The Referee can override just about everything in the scene, including when a new Turn begins(which resets all maneuver selections). [image: 1787080175380-659e0d9f-2a21-4640-9600-06a93e585ed7-image.jpeg] This is what a player would see. They can select their maneuver and target and lock it in for the turn. When maneuvers are locked in, or if the referee changes anything, emit a generic message to everyone in the scene (just letting them know what the action was, not the specifics of that action). My plan now is to give the referee an “Execute Maneuver” button that does exactly that: executes the maneuver and emits the results to the scene. It would also tabulate and apply any damage or whatever. All of this is scene-specific, so in theory, a fighter could be in multiple fights in multiple scenes, and everything would be okay. I wasn’t sure I’d make it this far but I think it’s all coming together nicely.

Lindaaaa is styled Lindaaaa even outside of MUdom in the GoT fandom. “Blood of Dragons”, Lindaaaa and Elio’s MUSH, is specifically approved by GRR Martin. He even linked it. George R. R. Martin began to write this epic series and did not make a concordance, bless him. There are interviews of him kinda bragging on this, tapping the side of his head and saying “It’s all in here.” Westeros.org was originally the BoD’s game page and wiki. It expanded into a general fan-site with news and forums and a wiki that’s a really fantastic concordance. By 2000 it had gotten pretty good and L & E shared it with GRRM, who uses it. Or, if you take him literally in an interview, just telephones Elio about any continuity thing an author or writing team usually looks up in a concordance. Linda and Elio didn’t work on the show, except for the Swedish subtitles. For five seasons of it they did do commentaries for every episode. As far as I know, they consisted mostly of casting complaints that came across as racist and complaints where the show deviated from the novels. It didn’t seem to go over well. They did spend a lot of time trying to say that BoD being approved by GRRM means any other MU is disapproved. I doubt that GRRM, a TTRPG player, could fail to understand that some people might prefer another set of GMs and another in-world scenario and setting. I had a lot of fun running Game of Bones MUSH and miss it, though it wouldn’t do now since inconsistencies with House of the Dragon would make a mess.

If something is advertised as a bar scene, a karaoke night, or auction, I just don’t go. Avoid contributing to boring RP by not being there. Otherwise it helps if you do a passable imitation of somebody who is paying attention to what people are saying to you. I use Pyrephox’s method of a) reacting to what people give me, then b) do something that takes the action further and give other people something to react to. RP is a game of catch. Catch the ball and throw it. Don’t sit there gormlessly hanging onto it.

I refer to resolution systems outside of the standard resolution system that rely on player skill as “mini-games” like in video game design. I think of things like Yahtzee Locks in OSR D&D or using the Mastermind board game to resolve code breaking or hacking computers.

@renaveleigh Naturally.

@Imagicka I’m sure @Jihgfed will eventually chime in, but it was not cancelled! About 25 people showed up to his in person presentation!

@Jihgfed Yay, glad it went well! Thanks for spreading the word about the hobby!

@Ominous said in When is the last time you played?: To find out how the story resolves? Just because everyone knows all the details of a setting doesn’t mean they know how it plays out. Quite. If the PCs have agency you can’t know how the story will resolve because you don’t know what they will do. It’s not a ‘I don’t care because I already how will things play out’ issue, it’s a potential-cheating issue. Like how we had to make up new monsters for our HS D&D campaign because one player would read the Monstrous Compendium and then somehow his character knew the weaknesses of every monster. If the PCs don’t have agency and are just watching NPCs and weather cause events to unfold, then yeah, they will lose interest if they know what’s going to happen by reading the game lore pages. But they will probably lose interest without reading the lore pages, too, because they probably think reading novels is a lot less frustrating than RPing as a character who is utterly incapable of affecting the world, and that if all you can do is watch, most published novelists produce better stories than most MUSH STs.

@Jumpscare The short-desc stuff is what I was meaning. I forgot to elaborate my thought in the previous post, but that’s exactly how it worked in a few of the RPIs I played.

Our latest plot has wrapped up! The wingleader of the rogue dragonriders was killed in battle. [image: 1781799742253-fiery-shitsplosion.jpg] The ambitious goldrider behind it all has been defeated and imprisoned while her dragon waits to lay her eggs. The Weyrs are still navigating the sustainability and resource-sink of this arrangement, as well as how exactly they want to hold her and her supporters accountable. (There already aren’t enough dragons, and the rest of the world does need them to survive.) The next leg of our rogue dragonrider plot begins to kick off in August, and the next hatchings are slated for early July and mid-August. For anybody on the fence, it’s a good low pressure time to ease into the theme.

I tend to be (I hope) rather nice, understanding and malleable as a player. I tend to yes and for the most part. Which is how one of my chars got married in a pub on a quasi-maybe-date. It leads to some great RP. I also try to go towards the funny and just see what happens. That said. I have also played a very arrogant full of himself asshole. He was a great character to play, but he also had money and power behind him so it made him more than a little insufferable. I would OOC disclaimer that as the pilot of my char, I could come up with a reason for him to be there. I can’t guarantee it’s going to be enjoyable for a few different reasons. I was also willing to tone down or full send the jerkfaceness depending on the OOC person and I did check in a lot, BUT the char was designed a certain way. If you weren’t part of his chosen few, you weren’t worthy of air in his eyes. I still had amazing RP and one of his IC best friends started as one of his nemesis at the beginning. It means I can see the ‘my guy’ as also writing for the the story line and where/how your char fits into the story.

@MisterBoring said in Non-toxic PvP: Also, if you approach IC conflict in a fully RP MU (so a MUSH or MUX or whatever) as though it’s a round of all slappers in Goldeneye, I would suggest that you’re in the wrong place and would better be served by a PvP MUD. I promise you I am in the right place lol. Also - my bros and I never demanded no contact orders from our parents after a round of GoldenEye slappers. So maybe we had it right after all? @Kestrel said in Non-toxic PvP: There are players who enjoy playing weird little gremlins or satirical characters they see as totally separate from themselves, where they get to have fun at that character’s expense. This is me. @Kestrel said in Non-toxic PvP: …is basically a service you’re providing other players… you’re welcome.

@Wikibara said in Tales of Zalanthas: @Juniper It’s for people who want to live in both denial and sadness simultaneously, I guess. Ah. Marriage.