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.

@dvoraen said in Everworld of Darkness:

Don’t we just call them eldritch horrors and assume tentacles?

yep! Six of one, half dozen of the other.

I do think you could do this without delving into the oWoD stuff. There’s a lot in the Hisil that you could use, especially if you were going the Mage route. The Shadow is part of the invisible realms and can link to the Underworld, the Supernal realms, the Abyss, etc. There are spells that allow for Mages to do things in the spirit world and create large-scale things.

If you go a little beyond that and draw some conclusions about Changelings, you could have the Hedge. It would probably just all be located in one area, near a gate that leads to the Supernal Realm of Arcadia. Then having bits and pieces amalgamated into a kind of island of matter (I’m just going to call it “island” from here on) that has a city constructed on it; if you’re leaning fully into Mage, could even be an old piece of Atlantis. The Changelings would be able to leave the “elemental pole of the fae/chaos” and also go close to it in order to acquire some of their tokens and hedge fruit. It’d be very Stalker-y/risk vs reward. If it was all centered in a single city, the area nearest to the Hedge/eventual entrance to Arcadia would be a terrifying and anarchic mess, likely with (probably extreme) arts and entertainment venues, and probably be stuck to the whims of the local Courts.

Uratha would be tricky but could work, especially if you had a verge or something within the island that humans could wander into and suddenly were outside of the protection of whatever was holding the island together. The Uratha would basically be beset on all sides since they’re occupying a small island of physical matter in a giant sea of Hisil/Shadow. If you had it all centered in one city, there would need to be a big park, maybe a small mountain or large hill with a lot of greenery and lush foliage around it, a sort of “elemental pole of nature/the earth” in the City and likely would be heavily guarded.

I don’t really know enough about Demon to figure that one out.

If you had a big city upon the island then Vampires would be pretty easy to add in with minimal updates other than noting that the Masquerade is undeniably shredded, so individual vampires would need to be strict about their personal Masquerades.

Sin-Eaters would probably require some connection to the Underworld. I think I would probably identify that as similar to the Changelings and the Hedge/Arcadia, where the Underworld is very easy to get into and as you get closer to like the “elemental pole of death” or something, you run into more and more ghosts that are causing problems. If it’s all contained in a single city, that part of the city is probably a rundown shithole that no one wants to visit, but socioeconomic elements force them to remain there. Where else are they going to go, after all? The world ended.

I can’t really imagine Prometheans lasting very long here, but that could be a kind of Bas-Lag Remade (Perdido Street Station/The Scar/etc.) sort of deal, where people are punished by being killed and made into Prometheans, or maybe just Remade (a la Deviant).

@Jennkryst said in Everworld of Darkness:

You don’t need this for Alien Gods, that’s stock standard Void Engineer plots!

Oh yeah, I know, but if there’s a mention about alien gods anywhere it’s definitely my thing. Time to fuckfight Cthulhu!

you had me at “alien gods”

@Jennkryst said in Missed Settings:

Actually, everyone in Small Town knowing about the supernatural enough that the Masq/Veil/whatever is lax, but also somehow forced to not tell outsiders about it… feels like it has legs? Now you can idly chat in the bar about your werewolf’s cool kill and maybe get looks because murder/death is gross, more so than because it’s a horror from beyond reality.

But it’s also not giving ‘reality, but secret monsters’, because the monsters aren’t really secret.

This definitely would be fun, though to some extent it steps away from canon in oWoD games – I would say specifically, since CofD/nWoD often feels a little looser with the various Masqs with the exception of certain groups that have a personal stake in upholding the Masquerade or Veil or whatever like the Guardians of the Veil.

But yeah, I think this would be interesting! Fictionally/genre-wise it would probably feel like True Blood or Twilight, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just a thing.

In the Time of Thin Blood book from revised there was a description of a vampire running an entire Midwestern rural town out of their lair. All of the major players in town served that vampire, and I think there was some mention of childer but I can’t quite remember and I don’t have access to it at the moment. The idea of that was always striking to me, especially since I was living in a fairly rural Illinois town outside of Chicago at the time. I could see that being something that you would run into in a ND town. It would likely not make for a good MUSH, though.

There was a game set in Honolulu in the late 90s! I played myself (basically) and became ghouled to the toreador primogen.

@Jennkryst said in PyReach:

I guess I’m finally finishing that post about one of trans ally and author of Animorphs Katherine Applegate’s other series, Everworld.

Animorphs is one of those Missed Settings things for me. Where are the animorphs mushes!

@MisterBoring I would play that Everquest one, that would be fun as hell

@catzilla Pillowfort was a private server that was occupied by a very connected friend group (or clique, depending on your perspective) of MUSHers. I believe it ran from the late 90s to the early 00s? I was never there myself, so I only have my knowledge as per WORA and other boards’ descriptions of what actually went on there.

There were rumors that it was often used for fairly nefarious means, like orchestrating attacks on disliked players, large scale ostracism of certain players from games, and “invasions” (in quotes because most of my information on that is from people who experienced it, rather than people who participated in this) of games where a sphere would suddenly be made up entirely of Pillowfort players, which understandably pushed other players out. Seanan McGuire was a member of the Pillowfort for a while. I’m also pretty sure that VASpider was as well, but that could just be a rumor from back in the day.

@Jennkryst said in PyReach:

@MisterBoring said in PyReach:

@somasatori So when is the soft launch and what California city is it set in?

Whyfor California, when Miami is right there?

It’s a running gag since more recently we had City of Hope, Liberation and Dies Irae pop up in California.

If I were to run a modern nWoD game, I’d probably make it either in the Midwest (like more Great Plains style around Oklahoma City or something rather that Chicago), Pacific Northwest (probably Eugene or Portland due to familiarity) or the Rust Belt, probably Pittsburgh. Each of these settings would inform the spheres I’d use, with the Rust Belt being Geist and/or Vampire, PNW being Changeling, Mage, or Werewolf (or two of those), and the Midwest being Hunter (I have an idea for a hunters-only game that I’ve been talking out with folks). I also had this idea of a southwest desert sort of thing, set in maybe New Mexico or maybe Arizona, but I don’t really have the personal connection to either of those places that I do with the others.

ETA: however, I do not have the time to run a game atm!