@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.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

. You really can’t say staff is refusing to interact with a player because the player is a chore when there was never a period when they did actually interact with that player.

A lot of people don’t realize they’ve become a chore until well after the fact. We’re not often conscious of annoying social behaviors because we’re used to acting a specific way, even in an online text form.

I mean this very nearly literally. Not ‘over time Abelard became tiresome to AwesomeStaffer and Abelard didn’t know it’ which certainly does happen, but ‘AwesomeStaffer has not responded to Abelard since they approved him.’ Awesome has no bad experience of Abelard. Little ways Abelard is annoying haven’t built up over time.

@Pavel I think so? I think the deal was supposed to be that a paying player couldn’t tell if another player was paid or paying to be there, but the paid ones would be paid to pounce on the payers and do stuff their finger-files asked for. The scheme really didn’t get far. I expect it was also meant to have, uh, some kind of naughty mobs so instead of running around typing ‘attack monster with sword’ like on an ordinary MUD, you’d go ‘tickle nymph with magetongue’ or somesuch and seek the treasured magical Long Strong Dong With the +8 Double Prong and stuff. Lewd Zork was also a thing then.

Once I was supposed to get paid to TS people on a pay-to-TS-people MOO. I never did, because it never got completed, possibly because the place hosting realised that it would be difficult to be sure all users were of age. That was back when 14.4 baud dial-ups and does not seem viable today.

I used to ask players to donate to certain charities, but also made it clear that I wouldn’t know if they did.

I suppose you might monetise a MU by allowing connections only from a website with adverts.

@Yam said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Gashlycrumb Idk how to ask this… does this happen to you frequently? Are you a bit of a chore? I mean I’ve absolutely been a bit of a chore.

No, it does not happen to me frequently. No doubt yes, as all humans are a bit of a chore.

I’ve been playing these games since 1993, and seldom had conflicts with staff, or anyone. In the last handful of years I’ve come up against it/heard about it more. My sample size is small, but I certainly believe @catzilla that this could happen twice in a row. People used to bitch about staff running plots starring so-and-so but never meee, now it’s staff that just don’t answer.

If I have become an insufferable chore recently and this is the reason I’ve had this experience, then staffers have developed time travel. You really can’t say staff is refusing to interact with a player because the player is a chore when there was never a period when they did actually interact with that player.

Look. GM attention on a GMed game is a reasonable thing for players to expect. There’s nothing wrong with a GM taking a break, or a GM choosing to interact with the people they particularly enjoy to have some fun and relief from their troubles. But if that is so much of what they do that they never get around to the players they don’t particularly enjoy and leave those PCs unable to act, it’s not “GMs are people,” it’s bad judgement or careless or mean.

@sao said in MU Peeves Thread:

skipping one for awhile because you aren’t feeling it is an extremely reasonable thing to do.

This is true. But I’m not talking about skipping one for a while. That’s gonna happen.

@Yam said in MU Peeves Thread:

discourage all would-be game creators who may now believe that someone is always going to be watching them on the +where to decide whether or not they are stretched thin enough.

I’ve said it before, to the disgruntlement of the MuSB readership: If you run a MU that has more than a few hand-picked players, someone will criticise you. If that is gonna fill you with rage, or shame, or anxiety, you should just not run an open-apps game.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

There’s a lot of stuff to consider on staff side too:

1. Yes, they should honestly be honest with the player and ask them to leave, not waste the player’s time, damage their own temper, or profess that it’s wrong for players to expect GM attention on the same time-scale as other players.

2. Yes, but I’m not talking about that, for as I said, a player can tell how many +requests have been submitted between two of their own +requests, and even if you’re not trying it’s likely that you will notice that the job number went up a lot since your last +request, or didn’t.

3. Yep. I would suggest if they’re having a bad year they should take sabbatical. If they’re having a bad month, week, or day, well, yeah, that happens. But players are also people, and they talk to each other, so if you tell them you’re not responsive because bad week but they also heard Abelard talking about the quick and cool response he got that same week, well. Reasonably, they’ll probably think you ran out of steam after you got to Abelard. But when the same thing happens week after week? They have a point.

4. What? If I have a scheduled appointment, I expect the person to show up. Even if it’s at a weird time. Why the heck is any staffer scheduling something at a time they can’t make?

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

This sounds like something you’ve done yourself. Are you a +where stalker?

It does?

I did once inspire the wrath of VASpider by telling her that yeah, everybody knows from the +where that she’s TSing with Tiny while players are waiting for +requests, and nobody’s saying anything because it’s against MU etiquette, which is how it goes, but for crying out loud, don’t tell the public channel that’s what you’re doing. I am not sure that counts. And it was probably 2003.

@hellfrog Those are valid reasons to ask them to leave, not valid reasons to cheat.

@tsar said in MU Peeves Thread:

But you can’t convince me that running plots on a game is the same responsibility as caring for living, breathing beings in a real caretaking sense.

It’s not, but y’know, they want joy and relief from the absolute horrors and it’s not wrong to be dissapointed, annoyed, or hurt at being shut out when it’s working for others and they can’t figure out why they’re not able to reach the top of the queue.

@Trashcan said in MU Peeves Thread:

You’re certainly free to decide this doesn’t match your preference, but it’s not really fair to decry it as a miscarriage of justice.

A miscarriage of justice? Haha.

But really, the expectation that everybody gets a turn and the GM doesn’t skip yours because they kinda feel like it is not something that needs to be explicitly stated in a policy. It’s how gaming works. It is fair to decry it as rude fuckery, which is what we talk about here.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

in the majority of cases

Perhaps so, but this does not mean that the problem I mention does not happen frequently.

I never hear people complain about staffers having PCs in general, They complain about staffers cheating for their PCs or other staffers’ PCs, or staffers making all plots the Staff-Alt Story.

Hell, there is such a taboo (and likely a justified one) against +where stalking that if a player is waiting for a five minute reply to a +request and happens to see the staffer online 15 out of 16 days and they appears to be spending 5+ hours each day actively RPing their alt with Abelard and Bridget or GMing scenes for Abelard and Bridget, the player still won’t say anything. This is probably for the best, but it doesn’t mean that players don’t know, and lying to them about how busy and thinly spread staff is doesn’t entertain.

@helvetica Not any one specific game, but yeah, I was specifically talking about situations where it’s obvious that staff isn’t spread thin and one really can’t help but notice this.

Of course staff should RP.

@catzilla Yeah, that’s the new innovative method of MU GMing. Respond only to the players you feel like responding to. Get really huffy when someone outside that set asks for timely reponses. Take their request as a hideous accusation. Claim you didn’t mean to ignore them, you’re just really swamped running the game and you’re doing your best. Castigate them for giving you a hard time when you’re doing your best. Don’t actually try to do better by them. Say you will, though. Pretend you don’t know that +requests are numbered and people can do math and figure out that you’re swamped by three requests a day. Pretend you don’t know that people can see you on +where RPing with or GMing the players you feel like responding to for three or six hours several times a week while not providing +request response that will take you five minutes. Punish players who complain that you’re unresponsive by refusing to respond to them. Complain about your inexplicable inability to retain players. Complain to your friends about the killjoy players who destroy the vibe by asking you to be responsive instead of leaving. Blame them for your inability to retain players.

The strange delight I feel when students suffer from autocorrect.

This week, there were a lot of nasty analyses and nasty generalisations.