Re: Dies Irae
-
Honestly, there is a disturbing number of times a simple question was asked and Scylla answered in such a way that multiple people just wanted to flip a table and never log in again.
… I’m not saying this is the reason I distraction squirreled away, but it was a non-zero factor.
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
She/her -
You basically couldn’t have a conversation with her and couldn’t tell her anything. It was insanely frustrating. I say that as someone who really, really, really tried to be a good girl - i wrote up every Lost Breed gift and rite - and work with her even as the, like, basic ability of my who-gives-a-shit character to exist was eroded every time she made a decision.
(A couple of people tried to get me to make a Changeling but that crew was so much worse. Like, every single thing I saw from them that wasn’t amateurish love-bombing was an out and out tantrum.)
-
@catzilla Oh they absolutely butted heads, to a massive degree. However, her behavior outside of that was so reprehensible that /all/ staff had enough.
-
-
I’m gathering that this person might be what some people would grudgingly call a Bad Fit, which is generally a summary of someone being kind of a bummer to be around, or exhausting, or non-collaborative, or just straight up rude. There’s usually some list of smallish slights (as shown above) rather than some kind of wild, explosive crashout on pub chan (to my dismay). General Bad Behavior that you don’t want on your game.
Of course… there may be hot spicy deetz we’re not privy to. You really have to be a certain something to get barred from multiple games.
-
@Prototart I unfortunately have had experience with this player across three different games. On all of them there has been a prevalent theme best attributed to a Pick Me Girl of psychotic proportions. Several times she has decided that I am enemy number one that must be completely destroyed because…wait for it…I dared to have an rp partner she wanted.
That was it.
She wanted them, they were already playing with me (and in all cases long time mush friends, we’re talking a near decade in the case of one of them and very close in another) and they didn’t decide she clearly had the best virtual vagina in existence and jump ship for her. After that all bets were off. She tried to get me sitebanned…for what I don’t know, other than not bowing down when she came for me, we had little interaction. She’s resorted to cross-sphere assaults on alts, slander and other obsessive and generally all around shitty behavior. And I made the mistake of not boo-hooing and slinking off into the dark so she could have her way. She’s done this personally to me on two games, I watched her from the outside do it on a third. This is her MO.
-
@Wyrmsign said in Re: Dies Irae:
a Pick Me Girl of psychotic proportions
Could someone translate this into Old People, please?
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
@Pavel
I’m old! Gotta keep up with the kids lingo! In simplest terms, “You should play with me and not /them/ because I’m better at everything.” -
@Pavel said in Re: Dies Irae:
@Wyrmsign said in Re: Dies Irae:
a Pick Me Girl of psychotic proportions
Could someone translate this into Old People, please?
You’re not THAT old, this meme started almost 20 years ago.
-
@Roz said in Re: Dies Irae:
@Pavel said in Re: Dies Irae:
@Wyrmsign said in Re: Dies Irae:
a Pick Me Girl of psychotic proportions
Could someone translate this into Old People, please?
You’re not THAT old, this meme started almost 20 years ago.
I couldn’t be bothered typing “translate this into Not Perpetually Online Because We Have Better Things To Do So We Miss Slang and Memes People.”
ETA: Additionally, since 2020 was eighteen years long, the original meme may as well be from the ancient world.
-
@Wyrmsign said in Re: Dies Irae:
@Pavel
I’m old! Gotta keep up with the kids lingo! In simplest terms, “You should play with me and not /them/ because I’m better at everything.”Also “I’m not like other girls.”
-
Personally I am like other girls. In fact, beyond that, I am all other girls. If you were to look out into a crowd of girls, I am each of them. I have begun to position ourself into individual households so that I can become even more girls.
Edit to add: I spent a lot of time in the thread above talking about my perception of the problems of Dies Irae, but I think the primary thing was that our timeline was too fast. I referenced being added to a Discord group, which is how I ended up joining the project (I woke up one morning and saw I was part of a new group that I had been added to by Scylla, where it was suggested I do the Mage sphere). This was in June of 2024. I had a brief conversation with Scylla when she was disappointed that more code hadn’t been done a couple months later, where I jokingly said “It’s not like we were planning to open by October.”
It absolutely was the intention to open by October 2024. Then we just kept that same breakneck pace. I mean, the Reach took us a long time to open because we had some staff issues in the beginning, and when we opened we weren’t even particularly 100% ready, but the timeline was sensible as it had been in active development for like a year and a half. MUSHes, like any other game, take time to develop. A lot of the code was slapdash and hacked together because it had to be, or else we might “lose the excitement that people were showing in the Discord group.” I’m not defending my own early attempts at coding here, as they were pretty sloppy, but the intention was to get it out and going ASAP. When you’re on a Trello board that has 30 tasks that are listed in the alpha requirements and told “by the way, we need to open in a month,” of course things get slapped together.
That was my own fault though, I absolutely should have just said that I couldn’t do it, I didn’t have the skill to get the game open on my own, and then divested my participation in the project and gone back to my Cyberpunk Red thing that I was doing. I did end up learning a lot, so that’s been helpful in future projects, but it wasn’t in the service to anyone else.
We were opening up one of those big multisphere affairs and, in the process of doing so, had lost our entire Vampire staff that had come up with the base meta for that sphere. Rather than delay, given the fact that Vampire is a pretty core sphere when it’s introduced, we brought in someone who had no previous connection to the meta that had been created by Tellurium, and no one else really seemed to buy in on the Sabbat (or seemed all that interested in running a Sabbat chronicle).
We didn’t have enough staff or storytellers to handle things and didn’t frankly have the time to recruit anyone. I can’t speak to the later staff that came on after I left, but the people who did join really did try to make things work, but the turnover was too quick. Some of it was probably due to Scylla as was mentioned recently in the thread, and other points of rupture were due to requesting a lot out of incoming staff without giving them much in the way of a good foundation or framework to get started.
"And the Fool says, pointing to the invertebrate fauna feeding in the graves: 'Here a monarchy reigns, mightier than you: His Majesty the Worm.'"
Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destines -
@Roz said in Re: Dies Irae:
You’re not THAT old, this meme started almost 20 years ago.
TIL I have been wrongly assuming what a “pickme” is for almost 20 years
-
@Ashkuri
Wait till y’all hear about Performative Males. -
@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:
We were opening up one of those big multisphere affairs and, in the process of doing so, had lost our entire Vampire staff that had come up with the base meta for that sphere. Rather than delay, given the fact that Vampire is a pretty core sphere when it’s introduced, we brought in someone who had no previous connection to the meta that had been created by Tellurium, and no one else really seemed to buy in on the Sabbat (or seemed all that interested in running a Sabbat chronicle).
This was one of my big hurdles in being convinced to join the game, though I did ultimately make a Fera that I think I took IC… twice.
I like the Sabbat. I think there’s a lot more depth to the lore there than is commonly recognized or used when they’re just being run as antagonists to the primary chronicle. That said, the Sabbat is dark and intentionally so. Although I’d been invited multiple times by multiple people, I just kept looking at it and thinking that between the Sabbat and Wyrm spheres being open, the game was going to end up attracting the very worst sort of edge lords, the sort of jerks we’d get on the old White Wolf servers screaming things like “This is the World of DARKNESS, not the World of DISNEY!” as their excuse for playing characters whose sole purpose seemed to be antagonizing other players and then laughing about it.
The fact that the game was open to pretty much every single splat and subsplat was also a mistake, in my opinion. Was it exciting to get to try something I’d never played before? Sure. But unless you’re running an absolutely massive game, all that’s going to do is spread your playerbase too thin to provide consistent RP and require more staff than you’re likely going to be able to find to do the job actively and competently.
As much as I want to see more WoD games out there, I’d strongly advise most game runners to limit themselves to one sphere, maybe two if they’re spheres that can somehow play nicely together–though most don’t. Whether it’s from a thematic standpoint, incompatible rules, or in some cases both, even all the crossover that White Wolf has written into the books can’t always make it work well together.
(Plus, some of it is also very, very stupid. I’m looking at you, Nocker/Etherite moonbase.)
Pick a handful of things you want to do very well, focus there, and if players complain that they don’t get to play their totally amazing Ailil concept on your Mage game? Remember that “because we don’t think it’s a good fit for our theme” is a valid answer for why something’s not included. Frankly, so is “because we don’t want to”, so long as your vision is clearly laid out and consistently applied to everyone.
-
@catzilla said in Re: Dies Irae:
@Wyrmsign said in Re: Dies Irae:
@Pavel
I’m old! Gotta keep up with the kids lingo! In simplest terms, “You should play with me and not /them/ because I’m better at everything.”Also “I’m not like other girls.”
yeah it’s an intensely sexist meme lol. i’m gonna side-eye anyone using it sincerely
-
@Aria said in Re: Dies Irae:
I like the Sabbat. I think there’s a lot more depth to the lore there than is commonly recognized or used when they’re just being run as antagonists to the primary chronicle. That said, the Sabbat is dark and intentionally so.
I really like the Sabbat, but they’re often misrepresented by people as being one-track villains without much depth. That’s a deep misunderstanding of the Sabbat, which has probably as much of a political apparatus as the Camarilla, only focused on different goals. Unfortunately I suppose if given enough room it would have been as you said with regards to the edge lords. I didn’t see too much of that in the short time I was around while people were logging in, but it was something that I was particularly wary about once Tellurium left. Initially we were talking about setting up a kind of “missions” system, where individual packs and Sabbat members would be given tasks and goals to focus on to consolidate power in San Diego. This sort of thing requires people who are very invested in the Sabbat, and also more than one storyteller who’s largely beleaguered in the amount of work that needed to be done to get the sphere up and running.
The goal with the antag groups was to make them similar to Wyrm. In Wyrm, everyone had to be a member of Pentex. You couldn’t just be an unaffiliated BSD pack that was rampaging through the game, you had to answer to your managers and supervisors in some way. This wouldn’t eradicate the possibility of those shitty edgelords, but it would definitely mean that there’s a structure in place to step in if your character went a bit too far afield.
The fact that the game was open to pretty much every single splat and subsplat was also a mistake, in my opinion. Was it exciting to get to try something I’d never played before? Sure. But unless you’re running an absolutely massive game, all that’s going to do is spread your playerbase too thin to provide consistent RP and require more staff than you’re likely going to be able to find to do the job actively and competently.
Yeah, absolutely agree here. If it were up to me, we would have probably just shifted over to being Changing Breeds/Shifter only. As labsunlimited put it, “the San Diego Zoo MUSH.” A lot of the complaints I’ve seen about single or even two-sphere games is that there aren’t enough options and generally isn’t enough conflict, but I beg to differ. You could make a Vampire game where your “spheres” are the different Covenants (in Vampire the Requiem), or a Shifter game where you have staff who sponsor one or two packs and run stories for them. Tbh it might even be more fulfilling, even if it kind of turns the game into a bunch of little tabletop sessions running in the same universe (and isn’t that kind of what it is anyway?)
Pick a handful of things you want to do very well, focus there, and if players complain that they don’t get to play their totally amazing Ailil concept on your Mage game? Remember that “because we don’t think it’s a good fit for our theme” is a valid answer for why something’s not included. Frankly, so is “because we don’t want to”, so long as your vision is clearly laid out and consistently applied to everyone.
I surmise that a lot of this focus was on wanting to be a challenger to Liberation. I definitely liked the idea of having Mages in San Diego, but we didn’t really need it. A lot of the initial push was around Garou and Sabbat storylines, so we could have just gone with that instead of bringing in Mages and Changelings which (IMO) tend to overcomplicate things very quickly.
-
@Aria said in Re: Dies Irae:
The fact that the game was open to pretty much every single splat and subsplat was also a mistake, in my opinion.
Agreed.
And, in my humble yet obnoxiously shrill opinion, if you want to have no PvP (which is a perfectly valid desire) then you can’t also have antagonist splats UNLESS you have an even bigger big bad that can result in a temporary ceasefire… not sure how that’d work with Pentex and Garou, though.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
Thinking back on it, I’ve run into a lot of people who want to play Sabbat and Wyrm simply because they assume they’ll be allowed to get away with all manner of IC nonsense and can just go “I’m the villain”. In my experience, it’s been worse for Sabbat than Wyrm, but I’ve seen them in both. They do all kinds of random vile things to other PCs or NPC humans, and assume somehow that there aren’t repercussions for that. There are repercussions, they’re just different from playing Gaians or the Camarilla / Anarchs.
What’s even crazier is the number of Sabbat players that throw a tantrum when they violate their non-Humanity Morality path and the staff ask them for a degeneration check.If I had a dollar for every person in my history of playing WoD with a character on Path of Bones / Death and the Soul that assumes the path wants you to just kill people at random, I could pay off my credit card.
-
@Pavel said in Re: Dies Irae:
not sure how that’d work with Pentex and Garou, though.
In the right city, you could make the Weaver the big bad.
