I think we can all agree that the following is horrible and should never be used except on your worst enemies:

You paged: Hi, can we talk?
<silence>

We are excited to announce that Alveraxus is opening up for players who wish to join during our Alpha stage.

You can visit us at https://alveraxus.com or connect via alveraxus.com port 4201

What is Alveraxus, you ask? Great question! In short, we are a grimdark fantasy AresMUSH that incorporates dynamics of Lords & Ladies, political scheming, and a diabolical metaplot.

An Empire has risen uniting several disparate lands - the sibling kingdoms of Volaren and Ibarta ruled by complex political maneuvering, the mountainous clans of Storr which laugh at the games their southern neighbors play, and the island nations of Kikari who do their best to do their own thing. Every 18 years, the Empire faces assault from a legion of monstrous, deadly insects. And every 18 years, the balance of power shifts.

During the Alpha, we will be actively running plots and events as we work to test out the two mechanics that we think make us fairly unique - generational time jumps and succession.

Rather than staying fixed in time, we will be fast forwarding 18 IC years after the invasion, tentatively planned to occur every RL year (although the Alpha will be a shorter time frame). This means that characters that survive the invasion may elect to age up or retire, but the children of those characters come to life as characters. You can truly see the merits of that carefully arranged political marriage as the children of that union become playable characters.

We also have a Succession system set up that allows for PCs to aspire to leadership roles, and provides a system for replacing existing leaders. We will be thoroughly testing this during the Alpha, and ultimately want a game where all of the major leaders are PCs, and it is the PCs whose actions dictate who take and retain those positions.

If you don’t want to dive into the politics and backstabbing, but still want to play in a Lords & Ladies or grim fantasy world with a solid metaplot, engaging theme, and active storytellers, there are regions such as Storr that do not engage in that nonsense. We included this so that players can choose the experience they want.

If you are interested in joining us, please visit us at https://alveraxus.com or alveraxus.com port 4201

Thank you!

Two things I want to comment on - players making the ‘wrong’ choice ICly (when they know what the right choice should be OOCly) and incorporating player choices into the story.

There’s a LARP principle that we talk about at the start of every game during our opening workshops that I see a lot of MUSH players take to heart, which is don’t be afraid to make good mistakes - if you are faced with a choice, sometimes making the choice you know is the wrong choice OOCly leads to more fun RP than if you were to make the right choice ICly.

I think if you come from a perspective where winning = the thing, then yes, not being able to do what you want when you want it can be frustrating. If you come from a perspective where the journey = the thing, then sometimes it doesn’t matter.

I have a very firm storytelling principle when I run a scene or a plot which is that if a player comes up with a clever move that I didn’t anticipate, I don’t no sell it. Even if it undoes the entire plot, and shifts to an entirely different resolution. Because ultimately, the players are not the NPCs in a story that I am writing, they are the PLAYERS and I am putting up a scenario for them. Even if it means that somehow the really cool dragon I was looking forward to them fighting never shows its face because they find a way to defeat the big bad WITHOUT having to get the MacGuffin hiding in the dragon’s hoard, well, good on them.

I can always find a way to use that dragon later, right?

@Juniper said in MU Peeves Thread:

My least favourite encounter in stories/plots is the Main Character Syndrome player.

I’m dealing with one in the current game I’m playing and I’m so fucking done with it. A decent amount of plot licking means they’re somehow constantly in the center of everything and there’s very little to do that doesn’t require going through them in some way. And they have a history of OOC aggression towards people trying to get involved in plots they’ve already licked.

When this is allowed to run rampant, it’s one of the fastest ways to get me to disengage with a game. I don’t feel the need to win as my character (I actually prefer losing more often than not as it leads to better character arcs IMO), but if the same person or few people are the ones always doing everything and I feel like my character is just a side character in their story, and staff lets that happen? Yeah, I’ll take my time and energy and go elsewhere.

The issue I find is it happens more often than not. I’d say that most of the places I’ve played in the past year or so, if you were to do a straw poll of players and asked, "Who seems like the ‘main character’ of this game?', you’d see a vast number of players answering the same person or people. That’s a problem.

Staff needs to be cognizant of these things and while it’s hard to tell a player “please don’t get involved in this plot”, there are ways that you can urge things in other directions and not get into a confrontation about it.

But as a player? If you don’t want to share your ball, I’ll go find another sandbox to play in. There are plenty of them out there, and none of them are SO GOOD that they are worth the mental energy of fighting with bad players over it.

@Third-Eye said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

There’s an audience for PvP. I am not in it, but it’s definitely there.

I would like whatever PvP games exist to be really upfront about what they are so people can self-select in or out.

That really was the catalyst of our idea, honestly. A lot of games try to be everything to everybody to have the broadest appeal possible, so we wanted to go the opposite route - be as clear as possible what we are aiming for, realizing that will limit our audience. But hopefully, those players will embrace it and might be thirsting for this type of atmosphere. There are plenty of good games out there, but we wanted to try something different.

We THINK there will be an audience for this, and if there is not, oh well. Great thing about Ares is that the barrier for entry is so low thanks to how easy Faraday makes it that if it doesn’t take off, it’s not like we’ll have thrown away a year of our lives.

@Jenn said in MU Peeves Thread:

But to have Players have to be responsible for needing to scene with people who have shown bad faith and intentional fuckery in the past? It’s not going to end well for anyone, and it’s very possible that many plots will just dead end before they’ve even gotten started.

Yeah. I don’t mean to derail this thread with too much talk about our game which is not yet open (haha, you all can trash us fully once we’re open, we’re bracing for it ), but this is 100% our belief and Roz called out how it’s a staff obligation above. We have that as a guiding principle, and what we’re really trying to call out with our “policy” is staff obligation to find a way to work other players into things they want to be in WITHOUT having to rely upon players RPing with anyone they don’t want to RP with. We have this listed above everything else on the gatekeeping page:

Prime Directive: We do not, and will not, compel anyone to RP with anyone that they do not want to RP with. Period.

The onus is on US, as Staff and Storytellers, to get Player A to where they want to go if Players B, C, and D don’t want to actively engage with them to get them there.

Then they can stare vacantly across the empty pond at each other and not interact, but each dip their toes in happily.

Or something like that, anyway.

(Unless they are really dirty enough to pollute the entire pond with their toe, and then we’ll be right there with you tossing them out.)

One of the truly foundational pieces of our game is:

“We will let you attempt to do anything that you want to do, and deliver the justifiable consequences as a result.”

I’ve always enjoyed playing characters that make the wrong IC decision because I think it OOC leads to better story telling, and that’s been a great source of fun for me. Sometimes a frustration for a ST that expects a story to go on rails, and I just kindly see myself out of those games if it happens too often.

On ours? “Oh, you want to murder the King? OK, tell me how.”

And that, kids, is How I Buried Your King.

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Alveraxus said in MU Peeves Thread:

it does give flexibility for things like radical IC world changes to support the vision that you have

That has to be one of my least favourite parts of all this nonsense Beta-maxing. Obviously, it’s not my game, not my vision, and YMMV, but if you’re going to radically change the IC world to match your “vision,” you should do that before you open, not when people are actively playing your game for months.

Having the flexibility to do something and the wisdom sometimes not to are two different things.

@imstillhere said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

@Alveraxus good luck lol

Thanks.

We’re really hoping that it’s more antagonistic scheming and jockeying for positions and influence, and not character on character violence, because there will be (ideally) ICly consequences among “society” that would stop people from shanking others in the street.

But we’re also fully prepared for this to catastrophically implode if the experiment doesn’t work.

@YetiBeard said in MU Peeves Thread:

@helvetica I realize I’m the outlier but spreadsheets play a weirdly big role in my pretendy fun time. I had some great spell / xp tracking sheets for Spirit Lake and then again when helping plan Shattered.

When building out rosters, I use a spreadsheet with concatenate to populate the command lines to build the characters so all I have to do is populate the cells with the info I want (demographics, backgrounds, description, etc) and then I can copy and paste the resulting cells into the client and POOF it can generate a character far faster than going through any other method.

Was also super helpful for building a bunch of channels when we first launched, etc.

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

I’d ask what was rightfully so about it, but I think we all know. People here have posted that it’s not gamerunners’ responsibility to deal with players’ past MU-related traumas. True enough. Howeever, the fact that it’s well known to be difficult to ask someone a question like this, and that ragequit is a usual result, makes it clear that there’s a “missing stair” right there.

I think we didn’t handle it as tactfully as we could have. The player was freaked out that we knew their IP address, and it kind of escalated from there. I personally could have handled communicate a bit better, I think.

Lessons learned from first time adminning and all.

We had a player who was using VPN to break our alt rules.

I’ve encountered players elseMU who have used VPNs to shield their identity when connecting to a game to violate non-contacts.

I’ve also had players that use a VPN because having it active is the best way to preserve their connection. Or because they are connecting from a work computer (I always recommend against that for any number of reasons, but what people want to do is their own thing).

I have a number of IT friends who run OpenVPN on their router at home. One is a crazy paranoid nutjob, another uses multiple devices to watch things in a buccaneer style.

VPNs make it easier to hide who you are, but personalities and bad behaviors tend to sneak out eventually anyway, and are a better way to keep tabs than IP addresses anyway. Especially since there are plenty of other ways to switch IPs.

We also had a situation where a crackdown on someone violating alt-rules ended up catching someone else who was NOT doing that when we were doing a look at logs and IPs, and (rightfully so) despite how careful we were in approaching them for discussion, they got upset and ended up leaving the game. A lesson learned for us in terms of how to handle.

The short answer, like with anything else - running a game is hard.

@Tez said in Episodic Games & ‘Down Time’:

I’d actually be curious to see how Alveraxus handles this, when they get there. In many ways, a generational jump is episodic, and I know it’s a thought I’ve kicked around as a problem to solve when thinking about generational games or time jumps. Anyone playing there that can speak to it?

tldr: We are still figuring some of it out and might change anyway, but the nutshell is that once we have the Dramatic Conclusion to our Third Act plot (the war that we are kicking off this weekend), we’ll have about a one month period while we sort out everyone’s future characters, during which we’ll have non-ST guided soft RP where players can do epilogue RP for this generation and once their next-gen character is approved, begin prologue/flashback RP with those characters.

So if there’s interest, we can circle back in a few months after we do it and say how it went. I’m sure there will be some good, some bad, and some awful as we stumble our way through things.

Longer version:
We haven’t really fully announced how we’re planning to handle the downtime, and we’re making some changes in our planning now as we are gearing up for what is effectively the Third Act of the Alpha to kick off this weekend, but I can give some general guidelines about the plan. Bearing in mind the Captain Coldism about how long the plan lasts (almost as good as the Mike Tysonism). So I don’t expect it to go entirely how we expect it. BUT.

Current idea is that after the dust settles from the climactic war, we’re going to segue into a period of maybe a month or so of soft epilogue RP while we do the administrative details to setup the following generation.

Staff will not be running any plots, although player STers might. The players will have plenty of interesting drama to RP about, based around the outcome of the war, who lived, who died, etc.

OOCly, that’s when players will sort out what they want do for the Beta Generation. Characters who survived - will the survive the 22 years in the time jump? Where do they want to be? Who wants to play children of the existing characters, who wants to do something completely different, etc. We’re going to let the players sort out how they want their relationships to be and what they want their characters to do, and then as those approvals start coming through we’ll likely blend Epilogue into Prologue.

Assuming that we can sort out everything that players want within a month (there may be some succession to attend to as well - our succession mechanic test did NOT go very well, so we’re going to try to learn from that), we’ll plan on kicking things off similarly to how we did the Alpha generation. A lot of ST run social events to let the new characters get to mingle and meet ICly, and then hopefully off to the races.

Can we post ones we don’t mourn or regret?

Dodi : Suppose I could deliver you a star so big that little children in the crap-infested streets of Calcutta know his name.

Peter Dragon : Dodi, I’m eating spring rolls.

Dodi : Sorry. But suppose I could deliver this huge star, I mean, a guy better known than Tom Hanks, and you’d only have to pay him scale?

Peter Dragon : Who is it?

Dodi : Well, he’s a very complicated client.

Peter Dragon : Who is?

Dodi : I can’t tell you.

Peter Dragon : Can you give me a hint?

Dodi : Eh, he had some legal problems.

Peter Dragon : Drugs? Is it Robert Downey Jr.?

Dodi : No, Pete, my man’s clean. Straight-arrow, strong, healthy.

Peter Dragon : Can you give me a bigger hint?

Dodi : Well… he was falsely accused of a double murder.

[pause as Peter looks at him]

Dodi : Now, because of the potential P.R. problems, my agency can’t officially

[makes air quotes]

Dodi : represent him.

Peter Dragon : You’re pitching me O.J. Simpson.

Dodi : Yes, I am. Pete, little children in Calcutta know his face.

Peter Dragon : Yes, they know to run away from it.

Dodi : The name is more recognizable than Tom Hanks.

Peter Dragon : Okay. But, you know what, Tom Hanks refuses to go that extra mile and hack his WIFE to death!

Dodi : He was acquitted, man! Pete, with all due respect, someone’s gonna put him in something, and people are gonna want to see him. Sure, at first, as a curiosity, but I think they’re going to be pleasantly surprised with his acting chops. Now, he’s been studying with a coach- I recently saw him do a monologue from “Raisin in the Sun”.

Peter Dragon : Really? How was that?

Dodi : Truthfully? It was very moving.

Peter Dragon : Dodi?

Dodi : Yeah?

Peter Dragon : Get out!

Dodi : How about a villain? He’ll play a villain. Come on, who’s scarier?

[mimes stabbing]

Peter Dragon : YOU’RE scarier! God!

Dodi : Come on, Peter, just the shock value sells a million tickets, and he’s going at bargain-basement rates. Hey Pete, do you play golf?

Peter Dragon : You know what? I think I just threw up, like, inside my throat? Get out, please.

[shuts the door on him]

Dodi : [from outside] Okay, but just a word of warning: The guys at Fox are all over him!

Yeah, point taken. Wasn’t my intent, just thought it was an interesting discussion on a topic relevant to my interests, but I see how it could be taken that way looking back at the comments. My apologies.

@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Pacha said in MU Peeves Thread:

Thank you for running an inclusive game. I think all games should be.

Out of curiosity – do you mean OOCly inclusive, or that themes on all games should be ICly inclusive?

I know you’re asking Pacha, but since it came up with regards to our game I figured I’d share my philosophy.

OOCly goes without saying, IMO.

I think it’s an interesting question regarding ICly inclusive. I know that we made a choice to support the idea of “any gender can perform any role” and the various other precepts, and we acknowledge that it stands in contrast to the historical periods we are somewhat trying to emulate. And yes, I can see some people saying that it “breaks their immersion”. Even thought we are an “original” theme, we’re still drawing heavily from a tropey tradition.

Our attitude is that we realize that may limit our audience, and we are ok with that. We would rather have a safer space to allow anyone to play what they want, even if it defies traditional roles (not saying we agree or disagree with those roles, but in many cases, they are traditions) than make anyone feel othered or not, or not free to express who they are.

Yeah, I’m sure there are some folks who find that a turnoff and won’t play. That’s ok.

This isn’t necessarily to criticize any game who does things differently, it’s just a statement of what I (and the rest of the team) feel about our game.

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Alveraxus said in MU Peeves Thread:

it does give flexibility for things like radical IC world changes to support the vision that you have

That has to be one of my least favourite parts of all this nonsense Beta-maxing. Obviously, it’s not my game, not my vision, and YMMV, but if you’re going to radically change the IC world to match your “vision,” you should do that before you open, not when people are actively playing your game for months.

Having the flexibility to do something and the wisdom sometimes not to are two different things.

@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:

Side peeve: why do games insist that they are in beta for years? Why can’t we just admit that things change? ARX I BLAME YOU.

I think some major video games started that trend as a way to avoid accountability to their fans, and it just caught on everywhere. (I got curious when it started because I have a distinct memory of logging into a game regularly and it always saying it was “in beta” (like Orna or something), and quick google fu showed me a post on Steam in 2013 complaining “When will this trend of forever beta going to end”?)

I agree, though. At least for us, we have a very specific planned cadence - Alpha (now) to test out the specific systems we want to test out where things are going to explode or not (one recent test totally exploded, for example) and we change things on the fly, and then hopefully one Beta generation where we stick with what we learned in Alpha. And then that’s it.

It doesn’t mean we can’t change something that doesn’t work, but we won’t be actively looking to change things after Alpha/proof of concept stage.

That being said. There is some comfort in saying you’re always in beta because it does give flexibility for things like radical IC world changes to support the vision that you have. “It says Beta on the box, so you know what you are signing up for.”

@Pacha said in MU Peeves Thread:

What I was saying is that in my (personal, subjective) experience of the genre, I see/have seen very few examples of it actually happening, whether the support is there or not.

AH, that makes sense. I’m not sure how the trends are going. Based around “active” characters, we’ve got 3 NB characters (and one about to come out of chargen) versus about 80 binary. I obviously am not tracking orientation. But that does seem low, even though we offer it and encourage players to play as they would like.

Thank you for running an inclusive game. I think all games should be.

I agree, and to be fair, I think a lot of games are. We’re not alone in making a specific and emphatic statement about inclusivity, but I also know other games may not have it written as a policy but do encourage a community of that. I think generally MUSHers (and of course we have outliers) are a more accepting group in general as a population. I’d like to think so, anyway.

@Jennkryst said in MU Peeves Thread:

I am already totally breaking Rokugani culture with poorly though out setting changes for the L5R game that I surely won’t flake out on this time, what’s a few MORE changes to FauxSamurai gender roles and marriage customs?

Please make an L5R game. I know that some of the lore is problematic, but a lot of games are, and I really enjoyed it as a theme. I would LOVE to play on one.

I remember playing on one that was trying to get off the ground during the height of the CCG and right after they released the first edition of the mini game, but I don’t think it lasted.