Sometimes there’ll be a player you really like that you just kinda lose touch with after you both lose the connective tissue of the game you were on at any given time. MUSHing is a transitory hobby, I try not to get too down about it.

Then 15 years will pass.

Then you meet a player you really like a new game and you both think you’re a TOTALLY NEW FUN PERSON.

Then one day you’re talking about old games and you realize that, in fact, you played together quite a lot on that one random game 15 years ago, and the internet has now brought you back into proximity for the first time in this decade+.

Sometimes the smallness of the hobby is actually nice.

Thank you BMD mods for making it easier to rubberneck and preserve this trashfire…I mean stay informed.

NGL the thing I’m trying to wrap my head around is this pile of refuse passing as a game not having a WORA/MSB thread prior to this.

I voted no due to the potential for abuse by bad actors but get why the Magicians guy deleted his post and think the kind of reception is worth reflecting upon.

@mietze said in MU Peeves Thread:

I wish people didn’t always turn this into “if you’re not in action/plot its because you just prefer social things” that is honest far from the truth a lot of the time.

I was once told - by someone in control of plot stuff - that because I was a ‘social RPer’ and in a decent number of scenes (many of which I asked for) that I didn’t need plot involvement. It was a hell of a thing and like five years later I’m still mad about it.

I have no interest in this game and shall never be present upon it but my friend in Beelezebub I do not think this proves the point you think it does.

@Cobalt
Whatever worked or didn’t work about The Pack, I really hope the experience wasn’t too discouraging for you. Like I said lots of posts back, it DID seem like a game a lot of players responded to in positive ways, and I am really impressed with how you responded to an atmosphere that you didn’t feel good about being the gamerunner of anymore, because that was obviously really hard and Unfun to deal with this directly. I think it’s always constructive to reflect on why something didn’t work, or didn’t work for you personally, or get across what you wanted to get across, but I hope that doesn’t mean it was as wholly negative experience because you are a gamerunner lots of people like and respect and it’d be awesome to see another project from you in the MUSH space when you were excited to do it.

@Narrator
lol my dude did you just compare yourself to Jesus on a message board? Is that where we are now?

I thought about going back but end of the day I came to the same conclusion I did a while ago: I left my most active period on Arx on a really good note and that’s the experience I want as my strongest memory of the game. It’s cool to see a chapter of it get a conclusion, though, a lot of MUs don’t, and I’ll be interested to see how it ties it up.

@Selira said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:

I’m still pretty shocked Derp made up a multiparagraph theory wholecloth and tried so hard to sell it. Why? What was the benefit of that kind of speculation? I realize I’m speculating here, myself, but he’s more than welcome to come here and provide the answers.

That was the first moment I was sorry I was banned (apart from every time I try to find something on that mess of a board because the bad search is even worse if you aren’t logged in) because I would’ve enjoyed enthusiastically and repeatedly reporting Derp’s own post for violating his ‘you need to bring receipts’ and ‘no personal attacks’ rules.

Within the past month.

@Pyrephox said in Scenes within Scenes:

I feel like there were a few games – Star Trek games, maybe? Back in the Days of Yore that had where you could spectate scenes in viewing rooms - like watch an Away Team get into wacky adventures. I wouldn’t mind that sort of set up for the Big Scene People Need To Be At…but honestly, traditional places are more flexible.

One of the really early MUSHes I played, a Harry Potter game called Alere Flammas, had a ‘viewing room’ where you could watch events or classes even if your PC wasn’t in them. IIRC this was pretty common on the BSG games, too. It’s not really what anyone’s talking about here, since the watch parties were OOC, but it was neat.

@Roz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

oftentimes it really just literally is “my brain cannot keep engaged in this format.”

You also totally lose the improv element which is part of what a lot of us like about this.

I’ll admit, my dislike of async has been aggravated by people who I fundamentally do not think have had any respect for my time or any interest/engagement in what we were playing. I’m perfectly willing to do time-shifted scenes due to timezone or availability conflicts and always have been. That isn’t usually what this is about anymore.

@MisterBoring said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

Yeah, I’m aware, but even having the ability to look at a list of scenes and just see flat data about the average time between poses might make it easier for people to choose scenes they want to join based on their personal preferences.

A lot of Ares games have these posted but they differ from game to game and, shock of shock, sometimes players don’t read things.

@Trashcan
You are a treasure, my friend, these numbers are really cool.

I’m not saying these numbers are wholly accurate. Shattered started as, I think, quite heavily real-time RP based and drifted toward more time-shifted stuff as it aged, which is both the nature of the activity bubble tapering off and an overall Ares trend I didn’t personally like. But we did try to prioritize Traditional pacing and playing there felt different than the Ares games I’ve tried since it closed (which isn’t a complete sample) .

When I venture into staff waters again there’ll probably be more conscious tracking of this stuff in real-time because it’s useful in creating the kind of environment you want.

@MisterBoring said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

I’d honestly be curious as to how many staff-folks try and track metrics for their games, and what, if any, tools they use to do so.

On Shattered I tried to pay attention to it, it’s one of the things I find useful about having all the scenes visible, but it defaults to ‘feels’ and ‘how easy is it personally to get X kind of RP’, we didn’t collect hard numbers even insofar as we could’ve manually. All events were live unless it was a player doing some personal thing themselves, though, that was just how we did things.

@junipersky said in RP Standards:

I think that was more me just having more on my plate than before though.

I mean, there’s genuinely been a shift in the hobby, at least where me and my buddies play, toward longer and slower that I don’t necessarily like, I don’t think putting this off on a personal thing is correct. Mostly I hope there are enough people left who still like the kind of RP that I like that I can find My People and My Games.

The closest I’ve come to seeing RP ‘standards’ posted was on a Pern MUSH I didn’t stick with for long (Second Pass, I kinda got there at the end of its life, unfortunately), and it was more of an explanation of MUSH RP conventions than hard-and-fast rules. Their site is gone now, alas, but I found their old RP Etiquette Guide after some nosing around in The Way Back Machine.

Posing in general.

• Please make an effort to correct typos and use something resembling proper English grammar. If you have a writing-related disability, a spellchecker will catch the most egregious ones and people will be willing to cut you some slack on the rest if you warn them up front.
• There’s a place and time for the one-line pose and the twenty-line pose. Second Pass poses usually run between 3 and 6 lines, with a few outliers in either direction. In general, try to create a happy equilibrium. Keep in mind the time needs of other players when you tend towards longer poses, and their need to have something to respond to when you tend towards shorter poses.
• /Read things/. Read descs, read bbposts, read news files, read other people’s poses. Then try to retain at least a general sense of having read it.

I tend to think the middle part is pretty standard for MUSH RP, at least in its day (this copy-paste is from a 2016 capture), but even that varies pretty wildly depending on individual game culture. Mostly, I think, people figure out what the ‘vibe’ is in RP by the most active players and staffers and emulate it.

If a game hits for me I tend to stick with it for the long haul, at least if Something doesn’t happen (I also bounce off places that aren’t for me pretty quickly). I get more invested in characters over time as they and their IC connections develop. It’s part of why the 3 Month Bubble is so frustrating for me as both as a player and a staffer. It’s reality, I’ll just never enjoy it.

Oh good, other people use the ‘Locations’ menu to start scenes, whenever I say this is almost exclusively how I do it people are surprised.