@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.

@Aria Yeah. Chewy ships fast enough that I thought it would be quicker to order from them (two days) than to have the human-pharmacy order it for me (two to four days). Then I believed Allipet when they said two days and had an easy web-interface to order, but waited five and found they’d either done nothing and lied about it or contacted my vet via whispering in the keyhole at midnight. Of course, then I believed that spending extra for two-day shipping with the place my vet uses would result in the pills arriving in three days or less.

I should have just handed the paper script back to the receptionist at the clinic and said, “Please order this for me, have it delivered to the clinic and call me when it’s here,” which is what we would have done bog-standard when I worked for a vet. But I try not to be that old guy, even though I am that old guy.

@Aria My vet took a day, because they wanted to check that my dog didn’t have any other kinds of worms and they don’t have an in-house lab. (Which surprised me, looking for parasites in dog shit was my job for a while.)

Then they phoned me up telling me I could come pick up the prescription. I thought it would be, you know, some pills. But it was a paper script. I asked where to fill it. They said Costco, or any big pharmacy. I went to a big pharmacy. They said they didn’t have it. I was not surprised, because it’s for tapeworms specifically, and human beings don’t get tapeworms unless they eat an undercooked bear, which isn’t a common thing to do.

So I tried to get it from Chewy, and they said I needed to mail the paper Rx to them. I didn’t want to wait the extra week for this. So I tried another online pet pharmacy, Allipet. Their website said they’d call my vet for approval and mail the pills that or the following day. They even had my vet in a drop-down menu. Looked good. A week later, I’ve still got nothing from them, so I call them up, and they say they called my vet and got no reply. I call my vet, who says Allipet never called them. I cancel Allipet order and have my vet order through the pharmacy that they use. I pay extra for two-day shipping.

Five days later, nothing. Call the vet. They check the shipment. Tomorrow, says the website.

My dog is shedding tapeworm proglottids on my bed. If I die, don’t eat me, I could have swallowed one in my sleep and if that happened I’ll have tapeworm cysts. Kinda nifty. But also, my dog doesn’t feel so great and her butt itches and is getting sore from licking the itch.

Y’know, I understand why I am not allowed to request a refill (for meds I’m meant to be on for the rest of my life) until a week or less before I am out, but it almost invariably takes three weeks to get the rx actually filled, what with it having to be re-pre-approved every time and the process for getting it re-pre-approved involves throwing the request away and not telling anybody that they need to sign off on it, while telling me the script will be ready in two days so I have to drive around trying to pick it up and then call my doc’s PA, near tears, and beg her to tell the doc to pre-approve it again without ever being asked to and in spite of it being pre-approved four times a year for the last 16 years.

This is just eugenics, they hope eventually my queer disabled working-poor parasite-class ass will die from this or get so tired and frustrated I kill myself.

But why the hell is it happening to my DOG? I’m paying out of pocket. I’m paying extra for expedited shipping. And I still can’t get four dewormer pills, ffs. Call up my vet, tell them my dog’s shedding tapeworm proglottids, they get me a rush-appointment the very next day, but it’s been three weeks dicking around trying to get somebody to fill the script and I am still waiting for it to get here.

@Faraday Yep. I am still talking about those games where you can’t function on par with other PCs without staff attention. This isn’t relevant to your game-running model.

@Faraday said in Player Ratios:

there’s nothing wrong with staff prioritizing ones they’re able to get done over “first come first served”.

First-come-first-served isn’t a great plan and isn’t what I propose.

I am saying that prioritising them with some thought to how it affects playability and fairness is necessary, and there is something wrong with not doing that, even if it’s easier.

@Faraday said in Player Ratios:

Prioritizing based on your available energy vs. the jobs at hand is prioritizing.

As I said, there’s probably prioritising going on there. If there is no prioritising/queue, then it does amount to whatever sounds the most fun.

@Faraday said in Player Ratios:

Now if someone’s waiting 6 weeks and never gets their scene with the NPC, that might be excessive. But so what?

It’s an unfair game. The so what is that people have a reasonable expectation that it’d be otherwise.

Wait six weeks and never get your scene, yeah, so what. Honestly, if it’s not a pattern, and if in this instance you get skipped, well, so what, there’s more game coming. If is a pattern and it seems it is just your place to be ignored on that game? Well, yes, you need to find another game. And you are justified in being irritated that you wasted time and effort on a game that offered you a PC but made you audience. (And maybe it’s not actually such a great thing that this game exists, even for Abelard; this kind of cherry-picking and exclusion is what it looks like when your game is Spidered.)

@Jenn said in Player Ratios:

AwfulStaffer is an entirely different headache.

True. Honestly, I don’t think that the problem of AwfulStaffer will be solved by any of this sort of thing. But the problem of AwfulStaffer lying about it could be.

Please forget the tokens/bribes stuff, since making them non-spendable points and having the same effect would be easy and still get the point without that, and doesn’t outrage people.

@Jumpscare said in Player Ratios:

The order that I do them? Whichever I have the energy for.

There are no tokens, no queues, no priorities. Yes, it means some people will wait a while for their scenes, but it’s more important to not burn out Storytellers.

Probably some form of prioritising is going on here, or some people would never get their scenes, not wait a while.

If it’s just ‘whatever I have the energy for’ with no queue at all, then it’s "whatever sounds the most fun for me’. I’ve certainly seen games where this is how it’s run.

Thing is, if Abelard is AwesomeStaffer’s favourite person and Awesome always enjoys playing with them, Abelard always goes first in such a system. He goes first when he wants to go see NPC Enya about buying a bulldozer. He goes first again when he wants to see NPC Enzo about welding armour and spikes onto his bulldozer. Bridget, who is just okay, gets to take the bus to talk to NPC Enrique when AwesomeStaffer is both done with Abelard and still has energy. No matter how many +requests Abelard puts in after Bridget’s or how ICly long his task ought to take, or how ICly quick Bridget’s task is. And Camille, who’s a bit of a drag in Awesome’s opinion, has to wait for the time when both Abelard and Bridget don’t want anything and Awesome is extra-energetic.

My experience, it goes like this:

Abelard spends hundreds of IC hours building a killdozer in a week and a half, Bridget waits two weeks to take half an hour to visit Enrique, and Camille waits until AwesomeStaffer closes the job because the plot it was about got resolved before Camille’s turn came up. And now Camille and Bridget are both annoyed with AwesomeStaffer because this isn’t fair. And Camille is annoyed with Bridget because Bridget’s complaining too but at least she got to do something. Bridget and Camille are both annoyed with Abelard and think he ought to step aside for a minute ffs, and Abelard is annoyed with Bridget and Camille because prioritising these scenes is not what he signed up for and he knows it won’t go over well if he says, “Naw, Awesome, do Camille’s scene tonight instead, she’s been waiting since a couple weeks before my scene two nights ago,” because, well, prioritising the scenes isn’t Abelard’s job and AwesomeStaffer didn’t ask for his advice. And AwesomeStaffer is annoyed with Bridget and Camille for criticising by asking for their turns. Everybody’s pissed and uncomfortable and quite justified in blaming AwesomeStaffer for creating the situation. Awesome feels their resentment and says, “Bridget and Camille’s demanding additudes burned me out on staffing. Imagine how fast it would have happened if I’d been expected to interact with them.”

@bear_necessities said in Player Ratios:

If you think players act entitled to plot now just wait until you introduce a point system lol my bet? You’ll burn out STs even faster this way.

Entertain, for a moment, the idea that they act entitled to plot because they are.

It’s not an issue in PrP games where what RP-staff does is answer questions and provide support like NPC sheets and whatnot, say, “this idea fits our world proper-like, roll it!” and post announcements like “Cardassian voles infest the ship! They act like so and have these abilities, RP encounters as you please!” For a model like that, the player/st ratio question doesn’t make sense, because that ratio is 1/1 by nature, and everybody’s access is limited only by their own RL contraints.

On a game where staff storytellers are a thing and their availability is a factor, then the question of player/ST ratio makes sense. But before you can answer it you need to know what pace you’re aiming for, how much time STs are likely to devote to the game, and how far the STs’ reaches will, uh, reach.

And ST reach is a thing that doesn’t seem to get looked at much, in spite of it being a pretty big issue on the games where staff-storytellers are a thing. There’s nothing wrong with an ST who focuses on a playgroup of four, or seven, or whatever, but when your ST that all mage PCs depend upon only pays attention to the Etherites and has everybody else pound sand, it’s not a problem of the non-Etherite PCs having a bad ‘entitled’ additude.

@Jenn said in Player Ratios:

The majority is PrP with staff support/guidance on questions, but where story-tellers weren’t NEEDED for any scene, though, when able would host events or dole out new plot trickles or whatnot. But. In between, folks are just responsible for telling their own things in ways that makes sense to the characters and game themes.

This is probably the best model for generating player fun for less gamerunner time, and the best bet model for opening a game that’ll work.

But I do like dedicated GMs and flinging dice about.

@Jenn It’s just not for very-low-crunchy lots-of-PrP games. If you can rp happily along and your pc affect the world as much as anybody else with no staff-ST, it wouldn’t make sense to bother.

Generally people kinda like points, even ones that don’t really do anything like the cookie count. Perhaps especially ones that don’t really do anything. Dr. Skinner can explain.

This is relevant to the ST/Player ratio because what’s wanted is the ratio that doesn’t leave players underserved or (STs burned out). And relevant to the thread because the OP brought up giving people tokens for running PrPs which could be exchanged for staff attention, in one of the top two posts.

ETA:

@Jenn said in Player Ratios:

And you’ll always have the folks with two jobs, or kids, or sick parents who may only be able to go to one single social scene a month. And they’re not earning points, and even if they were, they wouldn’t know how to spend them. But they chat a few minutes every day on chat while they commute, and answer questions,

This person is earning (unspendable) Carnegie points all the time for answering questions, and never getting (also unspendable) Emmy points, so their ratio would alert the staff-STs to try to give their character a major role in something next time the player has an afternoon off. It seems fair to me that somebody who does a lot for the game but hardly RPs ought to get a leg-up to the Important Stuff if they want it, even if they don’t have friends who are STs.

@Jenn Capitalism isn’t ‘exchanging tokens’.

I get you about the vibe.

You seem to have missed some of my posts, it’s an idea to think about, not necessarily something I want to try.

Anyway, what do you think of it when there is no exchange, only accumulation of points?