@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.

I like descs. I like writing them. I like reading them. I hate it when it’s a link to a picture.

But as a staffer I wasn’t looking for writing quality in your character desc or your BG. I just wanted them to show that your character belonged in the game world.

I don’t think you can do Chekhov’s Gun on a MU, you never know what will become relevant. Or what major super obvious thing you’ve been pointing at with your whole character-concept will somehow, against all the odds and the conventions of fiction, never matter.

@bear_necessities said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Jumpscare said in MU Peeves Thread:

Yes, her eyes may harken back to bygone timeless memories hidden within pools of mystery, but what color are they?

IDK about you but eyes harken back to bygone timeless memories isn’t an automatic AI flag to me. I’ve seen descs like this since the late 90s?

Yeah. Back in the early '90’s there was a WORA thread challenging to people to spoof this – write the most unweildy, long, screen-scrolling purple desc you can write, without it including any basic information. Hair colour, eye colour, skin colour, height, weight, age, and if you were really good at it, appearant gender, all obscure. Actually I doubt ChatGPT could do it so well.

@Faraday said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

I’ve just literally seen too many cases through the years where people will do something like RP the worst line imaginable and think that a +roll Con or +roll Seduction should somehow make that work. For me, it doesn’t. If you can’t even get in the ballpark of portraying a convincing con artist, maybe that’s just not the right role for you.

Exactly.

In tabletop it’s pretty ordinary for a GM to say, “Woah, hold on, roll intelligence,” and then inform the player (on success) that their scheme is flawed and why, and help them come up with a good one. It’s harder to do that on a MU, where play continues without the GM watching.

I’ve had this experience where some PC was supposed to be, and statted to be, incredibly observant and cunning. The player, however, wasn’t, or wasn’t paying attention. So the PC did dumb shit. Then the GM fudged things so they worked out. Sounds kinda fair, and it’s not even PvP. But like Faraday says, it’s jarring. And hard to RP around. The PC is supposed to be Machiavelli, but what I see is Mr. Magoo.

@Dreampipe said in Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent:

Dropped my PlayStation off at a local repair shop. The store was broken into and it was stolen.

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to turn this narrative into a country-western song.

It will not beat the one about the guy I knew who had an eye shot out with a bb-gun as a kid, the way everyone says will happen but doesn’t, and then, 15 years or so later, had his glass eye fall out in the shower and roll down the drain in a cheap motel outside of Baton Rouge. But it’ll still be a pretty good one.

Aww, but this is hilarious shit.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

• Finally, and most importantly, don’t give a fuck about people’s feelings.

And to run a good and popular restaurant, use beef tallow and MSG, make the waitstaff wear funny hats, mop the floor at least twice a week, and

Finally, and most importantly, don’t give a fuck if people like the taste.

No, no. it’s MY advice you gotta take, and MY preferred style of game you gotta build or the hobby will die.

Sheesh, is that not obvious?

@Third-Eye I just went to ours. I missed most of the show but I thought I might burst into tears or something, 'cause Ded Bob at his old stage. Since Johnny Fox and then the fire-eater whose name slips my mind and then Ded Bob died, there are a lot fewer shows I care about.

How do we get the youth to take up sword-swallowing?

What @Roz said.

Honestly, one of the more hilarious things about having been in this hobby since the Lynx was the web browser…

…is that WoD games are just the same as they were in 1998, but the gamerunners say they’re different. And sometimes propose stuff that was tossed in 1995 for sucking as a fresh solution to the flaws of the bad old days.

To invert the trope that is this thread.

Ded Bob died four years ago.

But Ded Bob is back!

(The new Ded Bob isn’t as good as the old Ded Bob, but he hasn’t had thirty years of practice.)

Is there any software for the mac that will just bloody well tell me what is making that fucking alert sound?

@Pavel Would it be fun in that context?

@somasatori Yeah, I very much see your point.

Since the game was low-fantasy medieval-stasis setting, getting the best house in the city would have more to do with status than money, and the reality of housing shortages in a walled city was something more worth representing. Or so I felt. Not that it ever actually mattered.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

@somasatori I really feel like most grid bloat in most games is from PC builds from idle / dead / retired PCs that just didn’t get cleaned up after they leave. I think most games just forget to clean that stuff up when characters idle out, but I have seen a few that will post up a bbpost about PC owned grid spaces that will be removed in an effort to allow other PCs to claim them if they’re popular.

I allowed myself to be weird and tyrranical about the grid, and didn’t let people just build, and when people left their houses and businesses stayed in place to be sold/rented out again. Buildings didn’t just disappear, but there weren’t that many empty ones either and I sort of hoped that the PCs might fight over some of the best houses in the city.