@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.

@tsar God yes.

There was a GM who would stand me up and then reschedule the next week. Stand me up. Reschedule. Ad nauseum. Each time involved me waiting about for hours because, well, people are late sometimes. Things happen.

Having survived some serious abuse that was smothered in gaslighting, I take notes when people appear to be trying to tell me my memory is wrong. And I like logs. So, I was easily able to calculate that on average, GM would stand me up six times per time they actually showed. If snarling and giving immediate but unscheduled attention when I eventually developed a ‘tone’ in requesting to reschedule again counts as keeping an appointment.

I was the one accused of not understanding that other people have lives, denounced as a jobless basement-dweller who does nothing but MU, and castigated because expecting somebody with ADHD to keep an appointment is ableist bigotry.

Sometimes you’re going to miss scheduled MU events. Sometimes you’re gonna be late. Things happen, and MU events are low-priority in the scheme of things. But for fuck’s sake, don’t make a habit of it, and apologise when it happens. And if the reason was that you didn’t feel like it, LIE. And if you don’t feel like showing up for a scheduled thing you agreed to be there for, but do feel like RPing snugglebunnies with your bestie, it’s probably tough fucking luck. Maybe you can beg off, but at least show some fucking humility about it. The expectation that people will be just fine with it if you show up late for scheduled RP and then say, “Naw, I’m not going to do that tonight,” and go to RP playing dabo at Quark’s is damned overbearing.

Edited to add: @Aria, really when it’s not a chronic issue I find these kinds of things vaguely funny, in a ‘whaddaya gonna do?’ kind of way. Quite recently I scheduled an event where I weighted a certain player’s convenience above others because that player almost never gets to attend group stuff. So of course everybody showed up but that player. Who apologised later and we all shook our fists at life.

Edited again for typos.

I had no idea that I desired to wear a tuxedo while teaching until I noticed that the faculty handbook forbids me from doing so.

This email is ‘encrypted’. What I am supposed to do is click a link within the email, which brings me to a website, where I can then click to choose from among the email-addresses mentioned in the email, and it will send the actual message to that email address.

Like a large proportion of these things, this doesn’t actually send anything to my email box at all. Thus transforming what should be a two minute task that I can do on my own schedule (reading an email for a single word peice of info) into a group effort requiring three different people at least and having to be performed during business hours.

Also, HOW THE HELL does that make anything more secure?

@Pavel

Indeed, because the two sentances following are about people making themselves look bad.

@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:

I find it very telling when people make a policy of not posting. Maybe they realized that when they post they are telling on themselves. It’s always my favorite when someone goes to post and just makes themselves look worse.

@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:

I find it very telling when people make a policy of not posting. Maybe they realized that when they post they are telling on themselves. It’s always my favorite when someone goes to post and just makes themselves look worse.

This puzzles me.

If game-runners make a policy forbidding others to post, I find it telling.

But the majority of people in the hobby neither read nor post to forums about the hobby. I don’t think it’s because they know they’ll look bad, they just don’t, uh. Want to.

Do you mean people who have a rant in private but keep it private? Or?

@Tez

An aside, I feel that Firan’s most excellent moment was when they banned my friend because there were no gay people in Firan-world, or there were only pre-made characters and none were gay, or at the very least, that particular character wasn’t to be gay, but staff could tell that my friend was making the character think gay thoughts.

Did Firan announce its ‘no forum posting’ rule? It seems like that’s one that doesn’t end up on game websites, but shows on bbs. I’m not sure Blood of Dragons has it on their site either, though it’s well-known and they have a history of bbposts forbidding players to ever mention other GoT/ASOIAF MUs or to speculate on how long it might be before George R. R. Martin gets the finger out and finishes the next book, etc.

@Roz I don’t think getting banned at all is commonplace. Being treated shabbily may be.

Fortunately, the hobby is still big enough and broad enough that Your Milage May Will Vary.

My experience is that I’m playing fewer games and have fewer RP-buddies, but I hear privately about shabby crap at about the same rate or higher, and more insist on keeping it private for fear of repercussions.

@Roz Not sure there’s a new story. I mean, yeah, I was banned from a game a few years ago for it.

Once upon a time, if you posted about the fuckery on a MU to WORA, and the staffers on that game responded by treating you shabbily or banning you, the forum readership would heap scorn and derision upon said staffer and game. This was really about the only way WORA could hurt a game. Any other complaint tended to cause new players to show up. Which is reasonable – No game is perfect, but if somebody’s bitching about its flaws, this proves that it’s good enough that at least one person is invested. Enough, even, to have an emotion.

The last five years or so, it seems to be pretty much a given that somebody will take your ‘peeve’ and insist that it’s a targeted personal insult and get hostile with you on the game. This will happen if you complain about something that happened ten years ago or something very general. Somebody put it something like, “My peeve is a one-size hospital johnny and you’re taking it like it’s a bespoke suit just for you.”

The “vote with your feet” line is a far cry from new, but shaming players for complaining became cool.

The last year or so of MSB included some real gems – It’s wrong to suggest that GMs who do things are better than those who do not, it might hurt their feelings. Why should anybody bother making and running a MU if it’s inevitable that someone will complain about it? Heck, the whole “Are friends bad?” catch-phrase appeared, as far as I know, as a straw-man response to the suggestion that GMs shouldn’t spend all their time making game for insular cliques who don’t spread the fun.

Games with stated rules “Do not post about the game, it makes the game look bad,” pass without much comment, even when they’re not ‘Blood of Dragons.’

@Roz Yes.

Sorry, though, it’s not the thread for it. I was being implusive.

@Jumpscare Naw, it’s the same shit, but it’s no longer considered wankery to punish players for pointing at it.