RPing with Everybody (or not)
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@Trashcan said in RPing with Everybody (or not):
You can, but the question is whether players should, I assume from the perspective of what’s best practices.
A Mush, if it’s healthy, feels like a world. You can “go” there. There are people there. Some of them, yes, are not your favorite people, but that is what a real place is like. You can certainly choose to ignore certain people, as I described in the analogy. It doesn’t break the game. It’s also not productive to building a healthy community that feels like there are possibilities and unknowns rather than another window for chatting with pals.
When talking “best practices”, you have to ask: best for whom? Every player comes to the game with different desires and different needs, and I really don’t think it’s fair to expect them to put those aside for some vague “good of the game”. That’s not their responsibility. As long as they’re not doing active harm to the game (toxic cliques hogging resources is one example of that) and are playing within the established bounds of the story, who cares what they do or who they do it with?
@MisterBoring said in RPing with Everybody (or not):
That said, if a person intends to RP with a single other person to the exclusion of both the rest of the players and staff run plots, I seriously have to question, especially in the age of Discord and Free VTTs, why people are choosing to pad a MU’s numbers with their secluded RP that might as well be inactivity as far as the census and statistics for the MU in question is concerned.
That’s easy - MUs have structure. Even if you don’t directly engage in scenes with people outside your circle, you can still respond to the goings-on of the game. You can make your own stories within their world. You can even cause ripples that generate RP for other people. And sure, maybe occasionally you step outside your circle for a big event or to take a chance on someone. You can’t do those things on a private discord.
I cannot fathom how people having fun with each other telling stories and generating scenes would be considered “inactivity” by any sensible MU metric. Would you seriously rather them just not be there than be there having fun in the world you built?
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In the end I feel that it comes down to tolerance. If you can tolerate a player you don’t like in a court scene or work together occasionally on a mutual plot for the betterment of the game and enrichment of plot, you’re probably fine. When it becomes exclusionary or hateful, then it’s bad. There’s a serious gut check here sometimes too, because how does staff police things that are happening in pages or on discord? It’s not something that’s ever been solved on MUSH as far as I know.
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@Faraday said in RPing with Everybody (or not):
I cannot fathom how people having fun with each other telling stories and generating scenes would be considered “inactivity” by any sensible MU metric.
If they never respond to the goings-on of the game, and never leave a single grid square, are they really active? What structure are they using?
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@MisterBoring said in RPing with Everybody (or not):
If they never respond to the goings-on of the game, and never leave a single grid square, are they really active? What structure are they using?
You’re making a leap from “prefers to play with their friends” to “never responds to the goings-on of the game.” That may be true for a few people, but it is simply not true in all cases (or even most, in my experience). There are plenty of folks who engage with the game in their own way, and plenty of people who contribute the logs of said RP to the public repositories. It’s really not that hard.
But even in the most extreme strawman, assuming there are two players who only ever RP with each other, never share anything, and literally never leave a private grid room, I say again - so what? They’re having fun. They’re not hurting anything. Why do we need to shame/wrongfun them? Nobody gets any more RP if you run them off the game.
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@Faraday said in RPing with Everybody (or not):
You’re making a leap from “prefers to play with their friends” to “never responds to the goings-on of the game.”
You misread my example then. I was specifically referring to pairs of people who join a game only to play in a single grid room, never interact with plot, often times become hostile when asked to join RP / plot, and usually get upset if plot events ever effect them. I’ve run into it a few times in my 20+ years of hobby, and it’s possible that they are the same two people each time (as every time I’ve encountered this phenomenon, it’s gone down almost identically to the others).
