MU Peeves Thread

[Coin]

@Gashlycrumb

I am, once again, asking for people to stop comparing MUs to any sort of paid work or actual businesses. It’s a bad comparison, the stakes and realities thereof are not the same, and it puts undue pressure and expectations on the staff of games who are trying to provide a medium through which people can experience free entertainment.

I also think that it’s easy to say

And “If you don’t trust staff, leave” is used as a hammer to silence people who ask for evidence of trustworthiness. There’s also a strong tendency for “trust me or gtfo” staffers to also be Police Vultures who show zero trust to players, and that can be hard to swallow

– but the same is true in reverse. As a staffer, I’ve given leeway to people I shouldn’t have because it wasn’t cool to ask for evidence of their trustworthiness. Everyone loves to say “trust is earned”, but that’s minimizing the beauty of actually trusting people. Trust is like Faith: if you have proof, is it really?

[RightMeow]

I feel like (and this is my opinion not a fact) if you don’t trust someone leave. I mean that in games, in life, in relationships, in jobs, in all things. The older I get (and man is it older) the less time I have to give. I want to fill that time with people I trust. People that don’t make me second guess all the time (I have brain weasels there will be a few off moments).

It does NOT mean that the person isn’t trustworthy if I don’t trust them. It does not mean they are a bad person. It does not mean I am a bad person. Sometimes people and situations (especially in text) don’t mesh. That means, I stand by the ‘if you don’t trust them, leave’ statement. I don’t see it as a blanket to cover an issue. I think it a boundary to protect your time and your mental investment.

This is again, only my opinion.

[Gashlycrumb]

@Coin said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Gashlycrumb

I am, once again, asking for people to stop comparing MUs to any sort of paid work or actual businesses. It’s a bad comparison, the stakes and realities thereof are not the same, and it puts undue pressure and expectations on the staff of games who are trying to provide a medium through which people can experience free entertainment.

Reasonable.

Even so. I invite you over for spaghetti and John Waters movies. You show up. I don’t have enough spaghetti or seating. I make a disparaging comment about having too many guests.

[Coin]

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Coin said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Gashlycrumb

I am, once again, asking for people to stop comparing MUs to any sort of paid work or actual businesses. It’s a bad comparison, the stakes and realities thereof are not the same, and it puts undue pressure and expectations on the staff of games who are trying to provide a medium through which people can experience free entertainment.

Reasonable.

Even so. I invite you over for spaghetti and John Waters movies. You show up. I don’t have enough spaghetti or seating. I make a disparaging comment about having too many guests.

Still not a good comparison. I don’t invite every single person that comes to my game personally. It’s an open invitation, which to me means there’s a reasonable expectation that people will understand if my house is at capacity when it comes to providing spaghetti for everyone, or even space in my apartment.

For your analogy to work every game would have to be a private game that is invite-only, and in that case, I would more-or-less agree. But then the hobby would die. Fast.

[Gashlycrumb]

@Coin Oh, I feel that approving my PC constitutes an invitation to play. And an invitation to play is equivalent to the spaghetti night invite – it’s reasonable of me to expect a plate of spaghetti and a chair. And reasonable of you to stop admitting more guests when there’s no more spaghetti, chairs, or space in your apartment.

You might well handle things that way, yourself. I just find a lot of places give you this encouraging “come on in, love to have you, there’s plenty!” until you’re approved and then it’s “too many players” and hostile vibes.

[Coin]

@Gashlycrumb

Have you ever run a game?

I ask because if you have, but you haven’t experienced the worry that if you don’t keep up your player numbers the lack of available round-the-clock RP will slowly erode your playerbase until the game is dead, I envy you.

Some games that subsist on being essentially for a certain group of people “but also open for others” can afford to shut the doors, as they have a dedicated group that they are reasonably sure will hang in and RP those stories with; but for the majority of games, closing the doors to apps isn’t feasible if you want to keep activity up and RP available.

Personally, I limit numbers by running a roster-only game. I’ve also never really encountered this vitriolic “too many players!!!” that you keep referencing. At most, staffers will say, “damn, we got more players than we expected/can handle, what are we gonna do?”

[sao]

@Gashlycrumb Eh. You can either trust staffers to do their jobs, or not. If they’re not providing enough transparency for you to make that judgment, that’s its own issue - and may be reason enough to walk, in and of itself. I am skeptical of this tightrope you describe. The balance just … isn’t.

If you decide to stay on a place where you don’t trust the staff because you want to RP with people there, I think it’s a bad call. To be clear, I say this from the perspective of a person who has made this mistake. I would not make it again.

Life is just too fkn short for that kind of stress. This is a hobby about having fun. If you think your staffers are shady or cheating, get out now.

I’m not a staffer, I’m not telling anyone to trust me or GTFO. I am a player. I am old and tired. Just get out if they’re bad. And if they’re not? Let 'em be.

[Gashlycrumb]

@Coin Yeah, a handful. One that was open-to-all and, in my books, a success, and quite large, hovering around 60 players and a couple hundred characters for a couple of years.

I know what you mean, though I’m not sure it’s that big a deal.

It’s adjacent but probably irrelevant, but I say, don’t aim for 24/7, but for predictable time-blocks of activity.

@sao You’re almost certainly right and it’s a mistake I keep making. Possibly related to experience similar to what @Sillylily mentioned.

[Roadspike]

@sao This isn’t a direct reply to you, but you were the last one on the thread talking about this subject. For me, it’s the difference between “I don’t distrust you” and “I don’t trust you.” I’ll play on a game with Staff that I don’t distrust. I may not fully trust them, but I’m willing to offer them the chance to earn that trust. I will not play on a game where I don’t trust Staff. That is for the people who have already burned me or someone who I do trust.

And I agree that life is too short for the stress of “do I trust this person I’ve put in a position of power over my fun or not,” and this has only gotten more true as my life has gotten more full.

[mietze]

i’m not really sure what staff is supposed to do, though.

“fair” is a pretty tricky thing to get right, and people feel what they feel (and sometimes what they feel isn’t something that is anyone else’s fault).

[Pavel]

@mietze said in MU Peeves Thread:

i’m not really sure what staff is supposed to do, though.

Their best.

As callous as it may sound, it’s not future staff’s responsibility to make up for the evils of past staff. They just have to do their best at being decent people and decent staffers.

ETA: They’ll get it wrong, make mistakes, and (hopefully) learn to be better. The same as anyone else. Just do your best, don’t be a dick, and that’s all you can do.

[mietze]

@Pavel that’s my thought as well, to be clear. the best they can.

no matter how hard one tries to be “fair” though there are always going to be people saying it’s not good enough. maybe it wasn’t for them, but there’s only so much a staff person can do.

they can’t know someone’s interested in something unless they speak up at something they see (or like, respond to inquiry). if someone doesn’t understand something they’re not going to know that without being told. i’m not really sure how staff is supposed to make sure that nobody gets the spotlight “too much” for any given person’s taste because a lot of time it’s the people who show up/make inquiries. people don’t like to hear that (and i do get the grumpiness over it, i’ve felt that in the past pretty often even though intellectually i understood that i wasn’t turning in requests or communicating with staff, so what did i expect), but i would say in a soft majority of cases i think that’s true.

i also think that’s where the “if you don’t trust leave” stuff comes from too. when you get to the point of having a ton of resentment, it’s not salvageable on the game a lot of the time. it’s stressful for everyone to deal with when someone feels that way AND desperately wants to hook into the metaplot/larger game. Sandboxing with friends can be enjoyable if you can turn off the desire to be part of the bigger picture.

maybe it’s just me being in my stuff, but it seems like it’s probably pretty hard to be a staffer now. i know i’ve been shocked lately to see habitual no shows across games, and a passivity that i mean sure some people did years ago too, but it does feel more common now to me, and i’m only seeing things playerside.

[Coin]

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Coin Yeah, a handful. One that was open-to-all and, in my books, a success, and quite large, hovering around 60 players and a couple hundred characters for a couple of years.

I know what you mean, though I’m not sure it’s that big a deal.

I mean, how important an aspect of running a game and its success is, is subjective.

[KDraygo]

@mietze I agree with what @Pavel said, sometimes there is just nothing staff can do and it is out of their hands. Through my decades of playing on games (no game running experience and very limited staffing experience), I would also also say that there is no perfect blue print to a successful game. The main reason is because the core of these games are the players, who are human, which means each player is unique in their own way, how they respond, how they perceive things.

The best thing that game runners can do in terms of fairness is to truly ask themselves, am I doing the best I can for the people who are on my game, am I still focused on the vision of my game, am I seriously reviewing incidents that occur on my game. And lastly, am I learning from mistakes I have made, which results in building experience which will only take time. Just like in life, you can do everything right and things just don’t work out sometimes, it can be hard but those times you just learn what you can from that experience and try to move on. Certainly harder done than said, but in life, you can only move forward.

[Gashlycrumb]

@mietze
@Coin has some excellent practical tips above.

no matter how hard one tries to be “fair” though there are always going to be people saying it’s not good enough.

This is true. It’s also okay.

Probably part one of the trick is to accept that not everybody will like everything you do as a game runner. In fact. probably every person will find something you’ve done that they dislike. Sometimes people will mention it. That’s okay. Sometimes people will lose their tempers about it and yell at you rudely. That’s not really okay, but it is a sure thing that it’ll happen, so you must try to be okay with it.

Another part is that RPGs are never moment-by-moment ‘fair’. It’s just not how they work. Sometimes you may end up in situations where you ought to say, “I’m sorry, player, I know that my call on this has left you with the short and sticky end of the stick. Thank you for takin’ one for the team, I will try to make it up to you.” Yes, this is tantamount to admitting you made an unfair decision. But it’s also a whole lot kinder and more human – “I’m doing my best as an imperfect person in an inperfect world,” is a lot easier to take than, “Your feelings are invalid, there’s no reason you should think this end is short and sticky.”

Yet another part is to accept that you, yes you, are going to make mistakes. That’s okay too. Don’t lie about them. Don’t hinge your ego on being perfect. Don’t try to hide your mistakes in the belief that players won’t trust you if they know you make them. Honesty counts for a lot. So does honest self-examination – if you can’t accept that you might have screwed up, then you can’t really accurately judge your choices. A lot of games that seem otherwise awesome turn out to be utter crap because of "I am a fair person, so my calls are fair’ type thinking obscuring facts and leading to “player said my call was unfair, so they’re insulting me by calling me an unfair person” interpersonal weirdness.

I tried very hard to discourage people from thinking of me as an authority figure. I am not the greatest, or even a great, GM. I am not a leading egg-spurt on the theme or even the mechanics. I am a middle-aged geek just like everybody else here and I’m not the gamerunner because of any merit other than my willingness to do it.

@Coin said in MU Peeves Thread:

I mean, how important an aspect of running a game and its success is, is subjective.

Well, yeah. By what metrics may we judge a MU successful is another thread. I think GoB was successful because it had as many players as I wanted, or three times as many, but a much lower player-to-incident-of-OOC-drama ratio than most, and because it had two time-blocks in which there were always, every day, scenes going on, and people reported that they were having fun. And because when ‘House of the Dragon’ premiered, like five years later, former GoB players (some of whom I barely remember, I’m embarassed to say) popped emails of GoB nostalgia to me.

But definitely an invididual thing, too – GoB’s popularity was firmly linked to that of Game of Thrones and most other MUs don’t see a burst of new apps every season premier and finale of a television show, or have people lose enthusiasm when the show’s quality falls.

[somasatori]

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

But definitely an invididual thing, too – GoB’s popularity was firmly linked to that of Game of Thrones and most other MUs don’t see a burst of new apps every season premier and finale of a television show, or have people lose enthusiasm when the show’s quality falls.

This is a side note, and I do have thoughts about the main topic, but I wanted to point out that this was a fairly common occurrence in the past. In fact, I’ve been surprised that there hasn’t been a resurgence of Dune or Cyberpunk 2020/77 games in the last few years. At the turn of the 21st century, for instance, DuneMUSH got a big surge of players due to the sci-fi channel miniseries that had come out around that time. Final Fantasy MUSH always saw player surges when new games were released, and so on.

Game creation is far more accessible these days with regards to genre emulation thanks to Ares and Evennia (i.e., without specialized systems like the modiphius engine for Dune or CyberpunkRED but able to provide the aesthetic and setting with theme/story customization), so just a bit surprised they haven’t popped up. Like, no D&D-style fantasy adventure games after BG3? That would have seen a huge surge, I would guess.

Musing complete. Please return to the normal thread. @Coin makes some very good points and I appreciate your perspective here @Gashlycrumb.

[Pavel]

@somasatori said in MU Peeves Thread:

At the turn of the 21st century

How dare you phrase it this way and make me feel old?

[Third Eye]

@somasatori
People periodically talk about making a Dune or Cyberpunk or another attempt at a Wheel of Time game, they just don’t materialize. Maybe one day! I’m not sure there’s so much an aversion to IP as just…some stuff comes to be, some stuff doesn’t.

[Roadspike]

@somasatori Now you’ve got me thinking about how to do Dune with FS3…

[somasatori]

@Roadspike