@Floof said in MU Peeves Thread:

I’ve been trying to just be like fuck it guess I’ll just be awful then! But it’s SO HARD.

Cheering you on. This is why my mother wrote “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly,” on her piano.

It’s irritating that “It’s only a game,” so often comes up in the context of, “You’re wrong to have hurt feelings about it,” but seldom in the context of, “Relax, you’re allowed to suck, it’s not your Ph.D. dissertation.”

Play for fun. With typoes, grammatical errors, and another beer if you want. You don’t have to impress people. I’ve had a lot of fun with people whose characters have orbs. Some of them have even been limpid pools. I’ve had fun with players who have limited English vocabularies and used me as a thesarus. I’ve had fun with players who regularly fall asleep at the keys. I’ve had fun with players who are emergency services workers and just dissapeared mid-scene.

And also, give people a break. Don’t dismiss them as sucky just because they don’t impress you the first time you see them. Let people enjoy the hobby instead of feeling like they shouldn’t show up if they’re not at the top of their game that day.

Also, people. You don’t suck. I’ve been playing these silly things since, uh, 1994 and I have yet to meet a MUer who could not write bestselling novels for John “See Jack Litigate. Litigate, Jack, Litigate” Grisham if they’d just get paid enough to try. I have RPed on MUs with Jim Butcher and Neil Gaiman and neither of them developed the gushy “they’re just the best RPer” groupies that your average staff-alt gathers. Hell, Gaiman essentially said it was too hard.

Heh. My peeve is this idea that long = good when it comes to writing.

Having genuinely worked as a professional editor, I assure you, it ain’t so.

The other problem I have with the people who write novels is that they give too much to react to, they advance the scene so much with their poses, that I’m left being like, I wanted to explore this one thing in this pose, but they’ve already moved on past it in their own pose that posing back an concentrating on that thing when they’ve already moved on from seems pointless.

In RP, this. Very much this.

Abelard looks down, embarrassed, and carefully sets his beer glass back in the ring of condensation it left on the table. “So, yeah,” he says, biting his lip, “That’s why I fucked the ocelot.”

Camille has arrived.

Brigid is sitting with Abelard at a table. She looks at him with compassion and says, “That must have been awful.”

Camille comes in and makes her way across the dance-floor, attracting attention with her boss moves and demonstrating all the latest steps. After the song ends she sashays swishily over to where Brigid and Abelard are sitting. With catlike grace she springs onto their table, kicking over a glass. “Fourscore and seven years ago,” she declaims loudly, “I started typing this pose, and civilizations may yet rise and fall before I am finished!” Twirling gleefully, she leaps away, singing, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum! Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum! "

Abelard stares as time collapses to a pinhole. When his inexplicable lethargy passes and he is able to react he picks at his shirtfront, noting ruefully that the beer splashed on him by Camille’s kicking feet has dried to an indelible stain.

Brigid says, “What the fuck.”

Very often either all the other PCs are frozen in time while the “great writer” fillibusters, rendering the dialogue disasterous, or it’s five hundred words describing how the trail of smoke from Camille’s cigarette swirls slowly and majestically about in the still air of the stinking and stuffy dive bar until it forms an elegant Rorschachian type image that resembles a tiny man standing outside a giant vagina wondering if he should go inside or not.

Edited for typoes and to add: Don’t feel bad for writing badly while gaming, either. Have fun, this is play-time. You’re probably not even close to as bad as you think, anyway.

For fuck’s sake, if you are using a published RPG, don’t make a fucking house rule that directly contradicts the published rules after some poor player made a choice based on the published rules, and then force them to live with their “IC consequences.”

Peeve of the Day: When you don’t even want to be in a scene half that big and probably wouldn’t join if you had a choice, but you still feel bitter that your character can’t go. WTF, brain.

I wear a glittery enamel pin-badge that says ‘MAKE IT GAY YOU COWARDS’ on my hat.

Today a stranger started some sort of right-wing rant at me, assuming I’d agree, but then spotted this delightful bit of flair, shut her mouth, turned around and walked briskly away from me.

What joy!

The worst thing about social RP is that tedious twit who responds to your channel-chat call-for-RP by paging you a lecture about how they don’t like social RP, implies that it’s your very favourite and that you’re an inferior player for liking it, and gives you a weird sort of ultimatum to the effect of ‘I will RP with you but only if you keep it at least seventy-five percent plot and less than twenty-five percent social or slice-of-life’ and then refuses to bring any plot-elements to the table. You want to say, “If I wanted lazy and demanding I’d set myself up as a dominatrix and be on FetLife, not MUs, go fuck yourself,” but you’d get banned.

I feel very fortunate that the comic-book and gaming store of my teens did almost always have a woman at the counter.

And very fortunate that now most of the gaming stores in town are places where hot trans girls want YOU to play Magic: The Gathering with them.

@Gasboy said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Cobalt I have told some that it’s okay to go have a good cry. Get it all out. They’ll feel better. And if they aren’t feeling better afterwards, perhaps they should reconsider playing on that particular text-based game.

I’m pretty sure most of us have cried, or felt like it, over MUSH crap.

But if we tell people about it, it’s “you’re my friend and I wanna talk about my feels” and not “Cobalt, you’re makin’ me cry by not making the game do what I want” stuff.

I’m peeved over past experiences where people thought I was really upset when I was just like, “Y’know, this is kinda a drag.”

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Meg “your secrets are safe with my indifference”
you can put it on your business card

I’m tempted to do just that.

I’m an archivist and sometimes end up processing the crap you left in your office when you died, and the shit on your hard drive. Part of me lives in shame because I am influencing the historical record, but it’s also standard practice: I remove your porn and any evidence of extramarital affairs and consign this information into the ‘to be forgotten’ section of my brain, where it gets disconnected from your name.

Except in the case of my own uncle, where my aunt found some CD-ROM labeled “Dom Karen” in his desk and asked if that was a kind of wine or something, and I said, “Nope, that’s probably the kind of thing that makes family memories that last a lifetime, give it over,” and got rid of it.

That deal where, of all the people who are involved in a situation, the one expected to do something is the one who is least empowered to be effective? Too realistic.

That PC who is rude as fuck, but also extremely touchy (eg. “How are you doing?” “How DARE you! Suggesting that I might be doing anything other than brilliantly is unforgivable insult!”) is also too damn realistic.

@Towers Towers is the one I know of. It looks good.

@Roz I was thinking it wasn’t a blacklist, but a situation where Player was innocently being a player when staffer pages them some variation of ‘your IP and so-and-so’s IP match, please explain?’ and things went pear-shaped socially.

@Snackness I dunno. I recall my ex being surprised that I knew he’d been using a website of mine from his work, and when and for how long.

I kinda get it as a thing that everybody really ought to know but it’s still somehow creepy to say, “I know your IP address.” Watch Daniel Radcliffe in Guns Akimbo freak out about it. And anybody can look up a geographical location associated with an IP but I might be creeped out if a gamerunner or forum admin or whatever was to tell me where I live. (I told a “player” who was attacking a game their work supervisor’s email address, but that was war.)

@catzilla said in Active WoD MU*s?:

The Houston one is their own game they started some months ago. According to a mostly dead Discord server, the Houston one is in Alpha?

I don’t know why inuki is pretending to not be chokitypok/jujube/etc.

Is there a reason we care?

Seems like a relief, considering who else springs to mind if I think “WoD, set in Texas”.

@Alveraxus said in MU Peeves Thread:

VPNs make it easier to hide who you are, but personalities and bad behaviors tend to sneak out eventually anyway, and are a better way to keep tabs than IP addresses anyway. Especially since there are plenty of other ways to switch IPs.

Certainly there’s no reason to be suspicious about somebody who connects from several different IPs – it’s probably home, work, the library, the coffee-shop. I never looked at the geographical locations unless I was fact-checking a story. No reason to be suspicious of people using VPNs, either. I figure you’re streaming Anishinaabemowin-language television the way one does.

There’s not much reason to be suspicious about two people connecting from the same IP, they’re house-mates or they use the same library or whatever. I’d ask and make a note.

It’s a good thing to keep an eye on, not hard proof of anything. And should be tempered with a good dose of “could I give a shit?” in a lot of cases – OMFG the horror if it turns out my suspicion is correct and Abelard and Bridget are really the same person and not neighbors. If they’re not making trouble, cheating hard, or squashing people’s fun, could I give a shit? Hell, odds are pretty good that Abelard just didn’t want to tell Camille that they really like her but sometimes don’t wanna chat and made the Bridget set of alts to avoid the conversation. I don’t even want to push an admission of this pretty-normal-but-embarassing situation.

We also had a situation where a crackdown on someone violating alt-rules ended up catching someone else who was NOT doing that when we were doing a look at logs and IPs, and (rightfully so) despite how careful we were in approaching them for discussion, they got upset and ended up leaving the game. A lesson learned for us in terms of how to handle.

I’d ask what was rightfully so about it, but I think we all know. People here have posted that it’s not gamerunners’ responsibility to deal with players’ past MU-related traumas. True enough. Howeever, the fact that it’s well known to be difficult to ask someone a question like this, and that ragequit is a usual result, makes it clear that there’s a “missing stair” right there.

What’s CoG?

Fulcrum is Metro 4.0, with Escalus, set in Minneapolis.

The London one isn’t open yet and might stay invite-only. I haven’t heard of the Houston one.

@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:

I’m not saying that everyone that uses a VPN is bad or has malicious intent. I used a VPN for a while because it helped me with my MMO connection, and broadly I support the right of all people to protect their privacy online, because god knows that no one else will.

But.

Why is it that when I get the ick, like 50% of the time they are connecting via VPN?

Probably because MUs don’t collect the browsing infomation you might want to keep private. They don’t collect your credit card number or your social insurance number or your medical records or data about your pr0n-viewing habits.

I have only encountered two reasons for a person to use a VPN to connect to a MU. 1: They have it on for other reasons. 2: They have an ‘illegal’ alt.

Certainly stalking on and across MUs is a thing. But unless it’s an unlikely situation where somebody like Faraday is stalking you, the only stalker a VPN is likely to protect you from is a wiz-level staffer, who probably only has that power on one game. Nobody else is seeing your IP info. “Don’t play MUs where the game-runners are stalking you,” is a pretty obvious rule for protecting yourself, and a VPN isn’t enough in that situation anyway.

Using VPNs to do the stalking, however, can be effective.

I had somebody make a dozen alts to attempt to play with somebody who didn’t want to play with them. This poor player was having a weekly experience of finding out that NewPC was, in fact, AnnoyingPlayer. PoorPlayer would then ask AnnoyingPlayer to leave them alone. Not complying with such a request was a bannable offence. AnnoyingPlayer would abandon NewPC and make a new alt, EvenNewerPC, and pounce on PoorPlayer.

I made registering alts mandatory, and regularly looked for matching IPs. People using VPNs would regularly forget to turn them on, so yeah, I could see that a PC was logged on from Davenport, Iowa, and then again from Anchorage, Alaska, less than two hours later, and knew that the set of alts associated with those two IPs were probably all the same person. So, I’d ask them to register their alts and they’d either do it, quit the game on their own, or get banned for being bad at lying to me. Easy-peasey.

I felt hesistant about this because of the idea that ‘alt privacy’ is and should be a thing, but it didn’t take me long to feel confident it was a good choice. SO much, so very much, fuckery simply disappeared when the players themselves could spot stalkery shit, and conflict-of-interest shit, and cheaty shit. The game was empowered to police itself. And it allowed players more freedom – I could allow people to have alts in potential-conflict-of-interest situations and trust that they wouldn’t cheat in that way. Because if they did, it’d be obvious to everyone.

I dunno. If I, like many before me, write a story about Conan the Barbarian, I am not sure I’d describe it as having outsourced part of the work to the late Robert E. Howard. I mean, technically, yeah, but there’s sort of a fuzzy line there. If I write a story about Robin Hood did I outsource it to Anonymous? One weird drunken night a friend of mine and I wrote a hilarious libretto for an imaginary opera about Robert Downey Jr. tripping on mushrooms and getting shipped to Guam, and okay, this notion was inspired by Robert Downey Jr.'s actual drug-fueled antics in the late 90’s, but outsourced to? Hmm.

If I cut and paste room/area descriptions from a novel and just cut and edit a little to be more MU-desc like and uniform, that seems clear plagarism/outsourcing. But not necessarily a terrible thing if the novelist doesn’t mind.

None of these actions seem equivalent to getting a glorified markov chainer to do the job, but maybe I’m just sour; I have a lot of professional artist and writer friends.

Double standards.

Abelard’s so pissed about what Bridgit did IC, so mean and it messed up his RP prospects. So he does the very same thing to Camille, because she was standin’ next to Bridgit, and accuses Camille of being unable to accept IC consequences when Camille doesn’t like it either.

(Portrait of Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh. An oddly hairless man. Like a monkey ready to be shot into space.)