I long for being able to finish that game. It’s very beautiful and the story is great, I just had such trouble parrying and dodging on account of having to play it with the sound off on a Steam Deck.

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.

More to add after doing a little strolling down memory lane:

Descent MUX (a NWOD post-apoc game)
Jason
Dume
Casamir
Zoe

@Jumpscare

Egelman et al. (2020) and Ferreira et al. (2021) both report that negative interpersonal interactions—ranging from subtle pushback to overt incivility—can provoke frustration, stress, and defensive reactions. Both highlight the role of code review processes, organisational policies, and power imbalances in shaping negative experiences. Ferreira et al. (2021) provides detailed evidence of uncivil behaviours, including name-calling, impatience, and personal attacks, with 66.66% of non-technical emails in their sample exhibiting such features.

Behroozi et al. (2019) finds that technical interviews are perceived as arbitrary, high-pressure, and disconnected from real-world work, with systemic biases favouring younger candidates and those with more leisure time. They also report that candidates experience dismissive attitudes, lack of empathy, and adversarial interviewer behaviour, leading to feelings of humiliation and offence.

So it seems, at least in corpo-professional contexts, that process design, power dynamics, and communication styles are the primary drivers of cynical interpersonal behaviours, rather than individual predisposition. But this is just based on a very brief skim of the literature, more research must be done, etc, etc, etc.

ETA: tl;dr people=shit and if you treat coders like shit they’ll not be happy, I guess.

References:

Spoiler

Egelman, C. D., Murphy-Hill, E., Kammer, E., Hodges, M. M., Green, C., Jaspan, C., & Lin, J. (2020). Predicting developers’ negative feelings about code review. Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering, 174–185. https://doi.org/10.1145/3377811.3380414

Ferreira, I., Cheng, J., & Adams, B. (2021). The “Shut the f**k up” Phenomenon: Characterizing Incivility in Open Source Code Review Discussions. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW2), 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1145/3479497

Behroozi, M., Parnin, C., & Barik, T. (2019). Hiring is Broken: What Do Developers Say About Technical Interviews? 2019 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1109/vlhcc.2019.8818836

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

@MisterBoring said in FAT BEAR WEEK 2025:

Chunk is the winner. Also, I found out he’s got a broken jaw, so the injured contender story probably pushed a lot of votes his way.

“His face looks sad and that makes me sad” versus “his belly is very round and that makes me happy” definitely came into play in a few of my votes for Chunk. The broken jaw is going to be a permanent issue for him, so I hope he continues to have several more years of being a very fat bear despite it.

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

@Cobalt said in Stupid Memes:

IMG_0818.jpeg

A million years later i just wanted you all to know i now have a custom made t-shirt that says “not friendly, do not approach” on it.

Have some Wingleader rosters up for grabs for some low-stakes responsibility/leadery PCs. With the impression age skewing older than Pern settings of olde, there’s a bit more room for maturity and politicking between Weyrs – which would be fun to see!

https://pern.gaslightswitch.com/char/Aetra

https://pern.gaslightswitch.com/char/B’stiao

https://pern.gaslightswitch.com/char/T’mas

When someone you hero-worshipped as a child turns out, 30 years later, to be into some of the conspiraciest of conspiracy theories.

Arguable, but the Teshigahara film Woman in the Dunes is based on The Castle by Franz Kafka, specifically the first part and the reaction by the villages. Also, please watch Woman in the Dunes, it is beautiful.

@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.

@Melichor said in Melichor’s Playlist:

@tsar OH OH I just saw your playlist — I knew you as Nenita!! Iirc A’nas had a big giant teenaged boy crush on her 😂 He developed as my coping strategy for teaching an unruly class of teenage boys that year, channeling all my frustration into a character.

Your game has come across my radar. I’m staffing on the Ares Pern game right now (On Dragon Wings) and enjoying coming back to the genre after so long away—taking the best bits of the world and scrapping the rest. It’s been a blast.

I’m happy to run across you again! Glad you found me!

OH MY GOD YES, at Ista! That makes so much sense. God, I loved playing her, lol. It’s nice to see you back around in the community again!!

20250920_155131.jpg

This is Oreo.

@Third-Eye shhhhh they were beautiful and I loved your poems

@Jenn if this was discord I’d respond with a laughing emoji. Holy shit my brain is rotted

@MayorMccheez The ‘went to headstaff’ bit was news to me.

I’m just saying that getting a nice present in the post can be a creepy thing and pointing out that it was a nice and not creepy present doesn’t change this possibility.

Honestly, we’re more friendly than friends. We’re not close. I had fun RPing with him. I would play with him again. I’m not on Retro, and a major reason for that is that there are players and staff there where my experience has been that they do have habits of being manipulative, gatekeepy, mean, dishonest, and likely to smear-campaign others. So that happening here seems plausible to me.