Today’s peeve is:

If you have played somewhere for years and you’re not happy with it anymore, by all means, I will listen to you vent. I get it.

If you just joined a game and all you want to do is bitch about it…

maybe…

simply do not play there?

In this the year of our lord 2025, why are people still allowing bad actors in their game community? Why is there a concern with “we have to be fair” to people who are toxic to staff and other players, totally obnoxious, or otherwise a bad fit? It’s a mush, not a constitutional right, if they’re no good for the community then EVICT THEM.

Today someone AMBUSHED ME (idk if you’re on the forums but you know who you are if you read this) with a link to a website for a game I played around 2012-2018. It was run by a head wiz who became a close IRL friend and who passed away in 2019. I had no idea the site was even still up.

What a kick in the feels. All the old logs are there, and our snapshots of funny ooc moments, and our pictures and playlists. There are lots of captures of jokes and stories and fun moments of my friend who’s no longer with us, and other friends as well, some I still talk to, some I don’t.

I am so grateful and I am so sad. MUSH is such a strange medium in the way it can feel so all-encompassing at the time, and then enough time goes by and it’s just a little snapshot of how things were, and who you were then, and all the fun times you had writing stories with other people way too late into the night.

Really, really grateful and sad.

If it helps people orient themselves in the scene and approach others, IDGAF about walking in and introductions.

What I hate is when I set and then the person poses in and doesn’t interact with me. Get the fuck out with that what are you even here in this scene for, why did I set for you, stop being the worst.

The facts are what they are and they’re never going to change. It’s a Star Wars game! They’re doing stuff. Some is ok. Some is really stupid. The good guys and/or bad guys have the upper hand this week. There’s some spaceships and some guns. If you are unlucky enough to have an issue with someone, especially a harassment issue, no one will help you.

That’s the only thing to say about this place. It does not matter what the theme posts are. It never did. I think it’s ok if we don’t give them free publicity for every single bbpost.

@Cobalt here you go

If someone says “we should RP sometime” and you actually do want to RP with them, a good response is “sounds great, what day next week works for you?”

If you just answer “we should rp sometime” with “yeah, we should!” then everyone’s going to explode into a pile of brainweasels and never get the scene going. Somebody has to ask, somebody has to pick a time, effort.

I feel like the gist here is “Social rp is fine if it doesn’t suck” which… I mean yeah, that’s true of any form of rp, isn’t it?

I feel like this sums up several many MUSH interactions I’ve had with people over the years

@Pavel said in Numetal/Retromux:

It’s really no better nor worse than any other genre, there’s shitfuckery everywhere.

I don’t know that I agree with this.

I’ve played plenty of oWOD, many many years of it, though never nWOD or the other newer iterations, so, speaking from that perspective. This system was never meant to be in a MUSH format. What was supposed to be “a cadre of me and my buddies fighting overwhelming forces of corruption and monstrosity working against us” at a table becomes, on a MUSH, other groups of buddies in the role of the forces working against you. WOD was never designed for vampire and werewolf at the same table, much less Mage and everything else.

It’s not balanced for it. So what you’ve ended up with is this really problematic soup of theme that hasn’t aged well, players in thematic opposition to each other, and rules/structures that aren’t balanced between spheres and require interpretation, and a ton of spheres that have to be supported, all against a backdrop in which “the world is gritty and dark” is used by some players as an excuse for very toxic behavior.

I still like oWOD. Love to play an Ananasi someday, somewhere. I’m not saying WOD games can’t be good or fun, but I do think it takes an extremely firm hand and clear head at the wheel to make them so. While there is shitfuckery everywhere, unfucking the shit is a more uphill battle in WOD than elsewhere.

In my opinion, anyway.

@Ominous What keeps you around on the forum in the sections about RP habits and practices?

WOD players are you guys okay??

@Faraday said in When is the last time you played?:

The possibly vain hope that someday life will settle down enough that I actually have the time and spoons to play again.

What would you want to play, if those conditions were achieved?

@Roz You aren’t even in the several years category GET OUT OF HERE lolol

For those who haven’t RP’d in several years, what keeps you checking in/weighing in on the forum? I’m referring here to the forum parts specifically about MUSHing and RP, not the social/ooc parts like RL support, pets, books, dead people, etc.

Back on FORT BLOODSHED (of ‘staff sent wild animals to ruin my canoodling’ fame) table talk was routed to a channel staff could see, and the staff characters would show up and accost you if you were saying something they didn’t like. That was about 10,000 years ago and I’m still wary of table talk.

But more genuinely, I think there’s pros and cons. It allows a smaller conversation during a giant scene, but rare are the games these days in which such giant scenes still occur. It can create some drama when you get left out of a tabletalk or someone poses to the room “Wow look at Ashkuri he is such an expired salami lol lmao” and then goes “oh sorry that was meant for my table!”

I think for Ares games, whose logging features do not mesh well with tabletalk as it was known in other formats, the “side scene” is better: spinning up another scene where you and your friend(s) have that small conversation from the party in the smaller group.

I’m glad to see Cujo took some action here. Those people cannot be allowed in any communities. They needed to be banned, they should be banned, they were banned.

However

I feel like it’s worth noting here that during my time on AOA Cujo did approve things like barely-legal characters with sex-slave backgrounds, as well as underage characters around 14/15 years old. @Zephyr pointed these things out to him and he didn’t really care (justification being that Jedi/Naboo queens/whatever “start young”) until she pressed him to speak to the players and make them age their characters up. As a player running into it on the grid you feel like “that can’t be right?? this person must have lied to staff. I will report it.” No, Cujo knew.

We greatly appreciate all evidence of bad behavior turned in to staff, and encourage the community helping to police the actions happening around the game. Please never fear submitting +rquests for help, or to provide the administration with helpful information on such matters

This is just idk. An insane thing for AOA to post, and there’s like 1300 posts expounding on that. Shit’s ridiculous.

The most difficult lesson I learned (hopefully learned lol) on my last staffing venture was what I said earlier and what everyone in the thread is saying: people just leave. You won’t always know why. They don’t even always know why. As hard as it is to swallow it, you can’t make a game so good and effort so perfect and a story so great that they stay. There is no amount of correct staff behavior that makes people stay, though there’s quite a lot of incorrect staff behavior that can make them leave.

At this point I just plan that the ending of the next game will be me and like 7 people and that’s alright.