@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.

Hateful bigot James Dobson.

My dear friend who, one Sunday morning while working at a Denny’s, deliberately poured hot coffee directly onto the crotch of hateful bigot James Dobson, is quite well.

Ahhh.

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.

@KarmaBum Crossing the threads again, but now I wonder if the Wild Imaginary West set says anything about the -isms. If I am remembering it right from the videos, everything west of the Missisippi is monster country. Bleeding Kansas seems unlikely if moving to Kansas to influence its vote involves not merely the horrors of moving to Kansas, but also getting eaten by a gru.

@Faraday I remember them leaving, but not the why.

I would respond just the way you did.

ETA: + telling them that while maybe I wouldn’t do anything bad to them, if other PCs tried to, well, I wouldn’t stop them and the universe would be on their side if it came to that kind of call.

@KarmaBum I’m interested, but probably won’t actually do this. I mean, it’s possible, but how will I feel next week?

@bear_necessities I am all for bad guys if their players acknowledge that the PCs are bad and join the Black Hats Club.

@Faraday Yeah, we are talking about the same PC-couple. I either forgot the magnitude of the kerfluffle or wasn’t aware of it. I know my scheme to hide the origins of the mixed-race baby never came to fruition. I didn’t think the lynch-mob talk was serious at all – not “we want to do this,” but “If this game was historically accurate, this would happen.”

Heh. That might have been fun RP if it wasn’t freaking people out. (Though if things went then as they’ve gone the last few years, I’d have asked them to schedule their lynching attempt so I could be there, since my PC would be on guard 'cause he lived there, had 'em say “sure,” and then logged in to find that it happened exactly when I said I couldn’t be there but that they’d acknowledged my PCs presence by RPing that he just sat there doing nothing, and then framed me as the bad actor for remarking that that’s kinda shitty.)

I remember the discomfort with the issues regarding indigenous people, but not any actual indigenous characters.

@Yam is right – well, certainly your perspective as gamerunner was of a much less OOC-peaceful game than mine as a player.

@bear_necessities

With or without:

@Gashlycrumb said in Historical Games Round 75:

(Okay we have mining claims, and a valley with a couple of competing cattle ranches and homessteads, and a ridiculous frickin’ castle that some freak had built by Italian masons that he imported for the purpose and had guarded by Pinkertons while they worked, then released to run wild across the plains, and now it’s the Manor House like Downton Abbey, but if those PCs go into town it’s more like Deadwood. But it’s Boylei guy’s Wild Imaginary West so you have to carry this steampunkish antenna thing around to prevent weird monsters or giant versions of normal animals coming near you. Later in this story the abandoned Italian masons will appear, having survived by taking over a troupe of giant apes.)

@Faraday said in Historical Games Round 75:

Having run a western game, this is the understatement of the century.

I want to hear your war stories.

I liked that game. And RPed some stuff that was about racism. I don’t remember it beng a problem at all. My PC just had some elaborate ghoulish scheme to help hide somebody’s relationship and their child’s parantage. There was some chat about how it wasn’t necessary 'cause the rest of the PCs would be fine with it anyway.

I remember some people having their hackles up about location-inappropriate architecture. Or too much of it, or something. Now that I think of it, that ‘Darby’s Castle’ thing is almost true. In the sense that some rich blokes built miniature but still quite large castles for houses in Colorado.

(Okay we have mining claims, and a valley with a couple of competing cattle ranches and homessteads, and a ridiculous frickin’ castle that some freak had built by Italian masons that he imported for the purpose and had guarded by Pinkertons while they worked, then released to run wild across the plains, and now it’s the Manor House like Downton Abbey, but if those PCs go into town it’s more like Deadwood. But it’s Boylei guy’s Wild Imaginary West so you have to carry this steampunkish antenna thing around to prevent weird monsters or giant versions of normal animals coming near you. Later in this story the abandoned Italian masons will appear, having survived by taking over a troupe of giant apes.)

@KarmaBum I agree totally and would love to see that.

Have you watched that guy’s youtube mini-building channel? I thought "I want that as RPG setting’ before he announced its release as a game.

@bear_necessities

I live in Colorado, which makes that kinda easier.

@Jenn said in Missed Settings:

Personally, I’d say Texas, along the Rio Grande.

Yeah – very different setting. Really, there might be Mining Town westerns vs. Cow Town westerns, or towns with both. Alas, there’s not a lot of places to graze cattle near Leadville, which has a fun history. (Somebody said, “Hey, you know that black stuff in the tailings of your lead mines? That’s silver.”)

@Ashkuri said in Historical Games Round 75:

@Gashlycrumb said in Missed Settings:

Really, Westerns seem like a very easy setting to run.

There are a few historical -isms to navigate in those

Indeed there are.

it’s a known quantity of like-minded people. A public MUSH is a different animal.

Honestly, though, a MU does not have to be so different from aTTRPG. You can show people the door if they are not like-minded enough. This is not really all that hard.

The tattooist I know using magic markers to draw these elaborate fake tats on his four-year old. Biomechanical sleeve, MOMMY’S #1 across the knuckles.