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

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.

People like what is new and struggle to keep fresh what has become familiar. There’s always a new game to check out. People’s rp partners/ships leave and make them less invested on their own, RL happens and then people struggle to re-engage, there’s all sorts of reasons. Also some games don’t have an end to stay to, they just wither out.

As both staff and player I am a Stay-er but I’ve come to understand it’s an aberration, lol. MUSH is a transient medium.

@xCroaker said in MU Peeves Thread:

Real question: What is staff overworked with in most games?

For me, it’s the labor of making sure plot/story is happening fast enough, that it’s happening often enough, that it’s accessible to everyone, that it’s still interesting and fun to people, that all the dots are being connected in an at least sort of sensible way, that it’s not too opaque and confusing and not too simple and boring, that it’s kept summarized and with reminders so people stay apprised of what’s happening…

Even with all that effort, people naturally lose interest in the game/story over time. Very few people are stay to the end people, which is the nature of the medium. I think persevering through the fatigue of “does anyone even care?” is another kind of staff work, perhaps one that doesn’t get talked about a lot.

IMO:

Async rp is not my first choice

Players doing async rp, reading real-time logs, and then incorporating that log knowledge into their “past” async scene as apparently prescient knowledge is unacceptable

Async events are hell. Everyone needs to take a turn before the action can resume and waiting 3 days for someone to say “I pursue the pickpocket” is awful

Speedy rp is kind of slept on as a fun option. Not every pose needs to be a Pulitzer Prize winner or to be 4 hours of real-time writing long. “Text” scenes, for themes that support them, can be a fun way to get rp done in a short amount of time.

I would not pay and I would not accept pay. I’m an unpaid martyr okay I’ve spent 28 years making this a core part of my personality

More seriously, I am just tired of paying for things.

One of the more key things for me (and mentioned by BN up there too) is

p a c i n g

And in particular, understanding that certain things take more time than other things. Asking PCs to brainstorm their own solutions, asking PCs to choose between a variety of options that may have good or poor outcomes, puzzle solving, talking to NPCs, resolving in-group disagreements as to approach, these all take way more RL time to accomplish than you’d sometimes think.

It’s important to keep it moving, it’s important not to get the players stuck on decision points or hurdles that won’t ultimately matter. Understanding for yourself how much time combat in your system generally takes (and how to keep it flowing relatively quickly) is important. And knowing which things are slow is important. It doesn’t mean you can’t do them, but if the PCs need to talk extensively with multiple NPCs and then have a fight, those may need to be separate sessions.

Back in the day I think events could be very long chunks of time and now you’re probably lucky to get 2-3 hours, because everyone including the GM is busy and has kids and has work in the morning. Pacing is key to get the most out of limited time chunks available.

@Jupiter said in Brainstorming Game Ideas:

I would like to make a game, but, I don’t want to put in hundreds of hours in development hell just to have it stall on release or have a player base of 3.

I don’t think there’s any way around this. There is no guarantee for what will be popular. Sometimes games with a dumb premise do really well for a long time, and sometimes games with a great, extremely popular premise go from boom to bust in 6 weeks.

IMO you can’t build for “what people want.” You can’t even build for what your friends might like, because even the closest of us don’t always like the same things. You can only build what you personally love, and that personal enthusiasm makes the work less “hell.”

If you like original setting vampires, do original setting vampires. People will come or they won’t, but if you’re excited about it and you/your team put genuine care and effort into it, I do think that players notice and appreciate.

What tips would you give a new (or even established) GM/ST to make MUSH events/scenes enjoyable? Perhaps from your perspective as a player, perhaps from your perspective as a GM, perhaps both.

There are some lengthy guides out there already, but let’s keep responses shorter form as posts here, rather than links.

@Yam I like anything that doesn’t make me do too much math