I also come from a WoD background and know that non-consent doesn’t invalidate fade to black, and especially doesn’t allow forcing someone to play through potentially traumatic stuff. So, with regards to “I come from WoD where you’re lucky to have staff even acknowledge you before doing what they want,” I feel like this was a pretty old perspective even 15 years ago. IMO, one thing most successful/decent staff took from places where staff acted with impunity about your character’s consent was to at least check in on certain things. Even just a heads up of, “hey this is likely a combat scene, are you cool with that?” was pretty standard on several games which were non-consent MU*s. Player side, most games had a +warn system. All you’re doing is taking the worst elements of past WoD staffing habits and bringing them into a new generation and setting.

Edit: Also this wasn’t intended to be a reply to helvetica, but the log output from inuki lol.

@Pacha said in MU Peeves Thread:

I always find it a bit creepy when it is clear someone has someone else on watch and they start gushing over them on the channel when they log in, but haven’t even ; waved or said ‘hi’ yet.

It also kind of bums me out if I end up logging in day after day and get tumbleweeds, but there is very clearly a group that are friends and treat each other logging on like the second coming of Jesus or something.

Obviously there is nothing objectively wrong with these behaviours and people can say hi to who they want. But, it is a peeves thread and I am allowed to find the behaviour personally irritating, also!

Seconding this. Sometimes I just need a minute to get my bearings, especially if I’m coming from work, dealing with the kids, trying to settle down myself. We’re no longer in the glomps era. The age of glomp is over, the time of “hey” has come.

I hate my first week of trying to engage people on a new character. It brings me straight back to that feeling like when you switch schools, and on top of that I’ve learned that it takes me more than a handful of poses to find my character’s voice, with the end result that my ancient reptile brain tells me how awful I am while I’m trying to roleplay a social scene.

Edit: Also, I am deeply anxious about asking for RP on a channel. Intellectually I know that if no one responds it’s not a big deal, but ancient reptile brain says that all of them secretly despise me and wish I would go away.

So truly they become HannahBANanna.

I just fully finished a really tough clinical rotation today. I’m not exactly sure why I expected I wouldn’t, but I had a pretty rough time of this whole exit process. For context I worked as a clinical psychology extern at a VA residential facility for homeless veterans who often had substance abuse issues loaded on top of PTSD, depression, anxiety (typically) and serious mental illness (more rarely). Since my emphasis is in trauma, I worked with people who were highly traumatized using primarily cognitive processing therapy, but occasionally prolonged exposure in addition to substance abuse treatment. During my final staff meeting, they did this thing called Thanks & Goodbyes (T’s & G’s) which is usually done with residents graduating from the program.

The thing that got me the most was that I kind of assumed I was a background player, largely unnoticed and just nose-to-the-grindstone working with my patients. I had a large-ish case load and only taught a couple classes (dialectical behavior therapy, and CBT for Substance Use Disorder). It hit me that I kind of internalized this idea that I was separate from the team, so when people started expressing gratitude or talking about how they appreciated this or that about me I had no idea how to hold it and felt extremely awkward in the moment. I also have a history of substance use, and was very grateful to be able to help people who were currently in a material position that was similar to how I’ve lived in the past. A couple of my patients this year relapsed upon release from the program, and at least one of them died as a result of overdose following relapse, so I won’t say I did a perfect A+++ job, but I always did the best I could and advocated hard for everyone. Having been in that world, I know what it’s like to go through the sobriety/relapse cycle, and fall into an old habit that might be beyond your old tolerance.

Anyway, due to a lot of other things in my life (child, spouse, research, work), I generally feel like I don’t have space to hold the kinds of emotions that I need to have about this experience, and I need to get it out somewhere else I fall into bad negative patterns (see above). So, here I am writing about it, I guess.

@thrax said in Numetal/Retromux:

To the playerbase of Newbetal/Retromux

An Apology to the fullest.
It is true The player behind Kahula overstepped a non contact request.

This is really all you have to say. It doesn’t really matter what you do or say to someone, if you’re explicitly hiding your identity to trick someone into interacting with you, it is (imo) bannable. There are some people out there who have completely destroyed their reputation in the hobby and often that infamy is not the kind of thing that people would just straight up forgive. I’m sure anyone reading this can come up with a handful of names of people that would immediately ruin the experience of a game if they were found to be there.

I have no idea who Kahula is or was so I’m not going to speculate on whatever their reputation might be, but befriending someone on a separate platform without mentioning that you know each other – especially when they’ve invited you to a game which usually prompts a “oh, what MUSHes have you been on? Have we played together?” conversation – is such a red flag that it’s a specter haunting Europe.

People who actually act like a welcome wagon when you’re new and don’t know anybody and ask “do you want to meet so-and-so? They match your concept in such-and-such way.” It makes me feel like I joined a more natural community.

@Aria said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

@Wizz said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

@Rinel said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

Very few people who did not grow up as girls are fully aware of this problem.

I am not going to go into a lot of detail as I find it honestly upsetting to remember, but I did want to say that both my own experiences with older players who knew sexually explicit discussion/roleplaying with me was not appropriate given my age – which I openly admitted to anyone I regularly RPed with – were with women, or at least players that presented as women.

I am not trying to dispute ratios or anything like that, but I did feel like I should represent the fact that men typically vastly underreport sexual abuse in RL and it’s likely the case in the hobby as well.

I shouldn’t need to say this, but…

Yes, I can vouch that this is 100% true. On more than one occassion, teenage me offered to play the role of “weirdly territorial girlfriend” for guys I knew. It wasn’t a good way to handle it, but teenagers. We didn’t exactly have much in the way of appropriate skillsets for addressing the real problem.

I was thinking about this yesterday, and I imagine that a lot of why my own experience was able to advance so dramatically (flying across state lines, and part of the ocean besides) was due to my being male. My dad did a decent job in protecting my sisters from abuse but there was that gender-enforced blind spot, I think. It makes sense, given that for a long time the prevailing attitude – which is thankfully on the decline – is that men/male-bodied people can’t be sexually assaulted, or it was often played for laughs in media. Gets a litle rough behind the tag.

Spoiler

I wanted to say: I’ve talked about these things in therapy before but for some reason I feel a stronger sense of catharsis from this group discussion/topic. I guess I always felt alone in my experience, even though I knew I wasn’t, so thanks to everyone for being as vulnerable as you’re comfortable with here.

@tsar said in MU Peeves Thread:

If you’ve been turned away from a game, or know that you’re probably not welcome on a game-- DON’T SNEAK ONTO THEM.

New missed settings for me as I go through my TTRPGs which have similar themes but different genres:

Black Void: During the height of the Babylonian Empire, strange black tendrils covered Earth entirely and flung the human population throughout the cosmos. The main gameplay setting takes place on a planet (ish) called Llyhn the Eternal where humans live in ghettos at the lowest of an alien caste system which is fairly reminiscent to Bronze Age empires. Adventures and whatnot take place via exploration of the world, including within the cosmos itself, traversable by void ships – which kind of look like Spelljammer ships as they’re just sailing ships that use some kind of cosmic force to travel. A MUSH would likely be city-based play where players would be humans attempting to make things work in this very cruel, strange society.

Nibiru: Ancient Assyrians went to sleep one night and awoke in a strange environment, a space station called Nibiru orbiting the star Formalhaut. In the intervening few thousand years, citystates have emerged within the different compartments of this massive space station centered around the largest point of human activity (the city-state of Ashur). The player characters in the tabletop are Vagabonds, which are people who just kind of appeared one day akin to how humanity wound up on Nibiru, containing strange memories of other places. A MUSH would likely ignore the Vagabond piece, or expand the lost memory thing to be an accessible collective unconscious. There are no aliens or magic, but there are strange AI creatures.

Then not related to the “ancient Middle Eastern people transported to alien worlds” theme:

Working Class Space Scifi/Horror: A common touchstone for this would be Alien, where we follow the exploits of a group of space truckers faced with a horrific situation. Alternatively, a good analogous game system for this would be Mothership, which (aside from the ALIEN RPG by Modiphus which is literally Alien the RPG) is basically Alien the RPG. Working class space sci-fi is a big thing for me. Another genre that this might be referred to is casette futurism, with video games like Ostranauts being a good example of the genre.

Unknown Armies: Unknown Armies is an occult RPG. If you are aware of Unknown Armies, you probably have wanted there to be an Unknown Armies MUSH at some point. The premise of the game is that occult practitioners (the players) are attempting to understand and deal with a very strange, disjointed reality. Unknown Armies is sort of like if Mage the Ascension/Awakening remained firmly in a street level, gutter magic vibe. There are vast conspiracies of both magical practitioners and just bizarre nightmare creatures. This is a terrible description of Unknown Armies.

Bas-Lag/New Crobuzon: I mentioned this above, but it would be cool to see a MUSH set in the world of China Mieville’s Bas-Lag. This isn’t an RPG (though there was good Blades in the Dark hack for the setting), but a literary setting. I guess it would be technically considered steampunk, but it’s such a deeply fucked up setting that it’s hard to ascribe that genre to it given that it’s sort of actually like how social life was for most people in the Victorian era rather than how steampunk usually presents the world. Humans are the dominant species, with a powerful city-state called New Crobuzon, which masquerades as a parliamentary republic but is far more autocratic, maintaining its status as a superpower over the rest of the world through its exploitation of science and magic (often to the detriment of its own people).

https://empiremush.org/map/interactive_map/

Channeling my inner Bilbo Baggins here. hell yeah, a map!

@Pavel said in General Video Game Thread:

@somasatori said in General Video Game Thread:

I think he tends to lean heavily into the parody of “sassy gay friend serving,”

If he were the only queer character, I’d agree. But I think, at least to me and in my opinion only, he simply is a sassy gay friend/foe serving. But perhaps that’s my view only because I am the sassy gay friend who occasionally serves…

I haven’t run into any others yet! that’s a good point. I was anticipating this being the only queer character.

If a game could be considered good on vibes alone, Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines 2 would be great. The aesthetic, vibe and appearance of the game is gorgeous and definitely on theme with VTM. It’s not really like… a true sequel to Bloodlines from what I can tell yet, maybe something will come up in the story. It’s also only tangentially a VTM game. The main character has telekinesis powers and can glide through the air like a sugar flyer, which is a bit weird for my Lasombra. Hopefully that’s explained somewhere. Phyre is extremely edgy, but I guess that makes sense for an elder from Constantinople who calls themselves “The Nomad.” Fabien, the Malkavian Johnny Silverhand, is a cool character. His interludes (or the one I’ve seen so far) is fun and more focused around investigation rather than the pure violence/conflict that Phyre does. I do kinda wish they’d just married the two gameplay mechanics into one character and if you didn’t have the disciplines that Fabien does, you would have different methods of accomplishing similar goals, but eh.

The characters are pretty cool. I like Safia (Tremere) and Tolley (Nosferatu), though in the latter case I think he tends to lean heavily into the parody of “sassy gay friend serving,” but it is a big change from the usual way Nosferatu are shown.

I don’t really know 5e as much as Revised/20th but the Anarchs are effectively the Sabbat now? They seem like super anti-Masquerade, burn-everything-down types who are militantly opposed to the Camarilla. It feels like they basically took the Sabbat scripts from the first game and copy/pasted them on this one with the Anarchs.

Outside of it having the Bloodlines tag, it’s a nice action stealth adventure game. It’s not terribly RPG-like, just an action game with some RPG elements like very limited skill progression, but that’s fine if that’s what you want to play. They do a good job with that sort of gameplay.

I have a quick suggestion for the Empire devs:

Right away in the very first section of the introduction to your world information, make a lexicon of your terms.

I still am not entirely certain what a Greytide is, despite looking through the introduction to the Empire, the explanation on magic, etc. I know there are three of them, that the empire was formed as a reaction to the third, and that according to the “ideas behind the game” document “The Greytides were somewhere between the Blights and Chaos, and an early iteration looked more like the scale of Tolkien’s War of Wrath.” That still doesn’t entirely tell me what happened. Chaos in Warhammer could be a surge of cultist humans and champions of chaos, or it could be demons. The War of Wrath had orcs. Is the Greytide all human-based, or are there other species of humanoid creature involved? I don’t need to necessarily know why or how they occurred, as I assume that’s part of learning the story, but having the basics in a central section would be great.

I’m assuming demons because of the Grey Below (referenced in the Magic document), but did my ancestors fight demons or just demon-obsessed barbarian tribes?

Some of the locations are kind of like this as well, like the Scorchlands. It’s where the Cinderkin come from, and they’re clearly distinct from the Red Waste, and it sounds like they’re very close to Wend, but I’m not exactly sure what they’re supposed to be in general.

It’s very interesting information and clearly a lot of love went into the world building. I mentioned above about the too many proper nouns. Generally people are going to look at the bare minimum they need to play their characters, so their house information, the intro to the empire, and maybe the document on magic and one of the religion documents. There are some mentions within these that don’t quite make sense if you don’t cross reference into other things and I might not necessarily know where to look (good on you for having a search feature). Being able to quickly reference a layperson’s guide to basic information on things is extremely useful, especially if someone referenced something in RP.

@Tez said in Empire Discussion Thread:

@somasatori You know, that’s fair. The tone of the question wasn’t great though, and that’s what I think I’m responding to.

That’s fair as well! For me, the comparison statement was a bit of a kneejerk on account of people using it disingenuously about certain real life things that I won’t mention.

On my part, I’m particularly interested in House Heshbeh, but there is a kind of proper noun overuse here. I think I probably just need to read the lore files more thoroughly, tbf. Especially since I always complain about people not reading the lore files on games. Be the change and all.

I’m not trying to be testy here, but it is a bit of a logical fallacy to say “X doesn’t exist anymore, therefore comparisons between X and Y cannot be made, even if Y is a direct copy of X.” I never played on Arx and to my knowledge most of my friends didn’t play there, so no skin in the game with that specific comparison or what “how is it different from Arx” is intended to mean. Just noting that something can absolutely compare to something from the past.

Cortex Prime Evennia fantasy game?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m-MUz2Rihs

I like the use of the West Marches thing! If I have time I might swing by, though I’m historically pretty bad at sticking around Ares games.

If I don’t stop by, then I can’t make my “berem? I hardly know 'em” joke and it will just remain in my head to torment me

“The staff lost interest in this MUSH and let it fizzle out so play with them at this other one where that absolutely won’t happen again”

As a wise thinker once said: “There’s an old saying in Tennessee - I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on-- shame on you. Fool me, uh – you can’t get fooled again.”