@Pavel No matter whether they are or aren’t entitled to set a rule like that, no one is setting interaction rules or even saying such rules should be set.

That I know of.

@RightMeow said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

No one but me gets to decide how I spend my energy and who I RP with or don’t RP with

you do not get to tell a person who they must interact with like you own or control them.

I think everyone would agree with that. What game/context is this happening on/did this happen on?

Nobody in this thread has advocated for even any hypothetical game policy in which “interaction rules” are enforced.

Use clear indicators (like raising a hand, saying “Out of character,” or using designated text channels) when you need to speak as yourself, ask rule questions, or clarify something

Beg pardon?

New Mexico represent

Masquerade was set in Albuquerque. When I went, I was able to navigate a little based on what I remembered from the MUSH, lol.

@Snackness When you’re done making my character for me can you code my game for me? My idea is so good I just need a coder

@Gashlycrumb said in Historical Games Round 75:

The tabletop game I’m running has all these historical -isms

A TTRPG works for historical games for the same reasons a private MUSH would, it’s a known quantity of like-minded people. A public MUSH is a different animal.

@Gashlycrumb said in Missed Settings:

Really, Westerns seem like a very easy setting to run.

There are a few historical -isms to navigate in those

I have bad experiences with “the -isms” on games. Some of those experiences still make me very sad and very angry OOC, years later. What happened to me in the name of “theme” was wrong, and it sucked.

But on a broader view than that: Books and movies can and do tell stories about these social injustices and those who overcome them, as they should. But a MU is not a book/movie. A MU does not have a single author/filmmaker viewpoint, a MU’s content cannot be completely verified or monitored. A MU is about many narratives and many interpretations, for better and worse.

Player A might be great at writing a powerful and nuanced struggle, but Player B might be mid and Player C is reductive and fetishy about it. Public games are not made of just Player As. Everyone has at least once run into some well-meaning person out there who is RPing the world’s worst representation of an oppressed minority.

These stories need to be told. Is a Public MU* the best medium in which to tell them and give them the care and nuance that they deserve? I don’t know that it is. Private, maybe.

@Tez YEAH YOU BETTER

@Aria said in Missed Settings:

The thing is, the first person that I brought the idea to was like, “But what about the racism, Aria?!”

This comment made me go and read through this thread about MU* historical accuracy again. I guess some players find it disruptive to delete The -Isms from a historical setting, some find it disruptive not to delete that, and (like your friend and yourself) these types don’t easily mesh together.

@somasatori that is my point, though. It’s not upfront until AI starts really being asked about. In your own snip there, Catzilla is thinking you didn’t use AI based on the content of your previous posts. It’s not clear.

AI is a personal choice. You can use it or not. It’s just good to be clear about its use.

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

this is sort of where it comes from, being honest. I hadn’t taken the time to figure it out and Claude said it would be fine

Okay

Why did you lead off with this then?

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

From what I’ve heard other people say, and based on what was said behind my back, all I did was boil a bunch of water and churn toxic sludge out of an AI data center.

If you want to use Claude the AI, good. If you learned a lot with your experiences using Claude the AI, good. Just be honest about it upfront. These tea sipping winkyface comments early in the thread land awkwardly when there was demonstrably a major problem with AI that had a major impact on everyone’s experience with the game.

Don’t wait for someone else to have to ask into it before you go “oh, yes, I did use AI.” Just be upfront, man.

When I RP’d a preacher on good ol’ Fort Bloodshed I had a tally of how many weddings I did vs how many funerals. Weddings were ahead but just barely. The funerals were far and away the better RP of the two.

What currently-active MUSHes have a risk of non-consensual character permadeth?

Retromux/Numetal I guess? I don’t know of any other ones, and I don’t play that one so I don’t even know if it’s the case there.

Killing off your beloved character and making yourself and all your friends cry is some of the best fun you can have out here.

I’ll die on this hill (which is also good character death)

I have so many Feelings about this, haha

Can it be done elegantly? I have no idea, because the places I’ve seen it done or tried to do it myself were not particularly elegant games to begin with, and also inherent in running adversarial factions is the feeling of loss.

These are my main thoughts about it:

1. It’s fun to win and it sucks to lose
2. The amount of empathy, perception, and emotional intelligence required to navigate point #1 is vanishingly rare in any group of humans who compete for fun, be that mushes or video games or dog sports (did you know there are hobbies with crazier people than MUs) or anything else.

People spend a lot of time on their characters, a lot of time on their games/factions, and RL is hard and shitty. All of that means that nobody wants to come home from work after a long shitty day and fail to achieve whatever it is they wanted to do because the other faction won today. It feels bad in a way people don’t like and sometimes have outsized reactions to. Sometimes it feels bad in a very personal way, and people do lash out against that.

How do we keep it fair enough that people will accept a loss without thinking it’s the end of the world? I don’t know, honestly. A few things can be tried, all with their pros and cons.

Pre-determined Staff Verdict: X will win the contest of this particular goal/fight and Y will lose

• Takes away some of the drama around player machinations
• Is somewhat boring
• People complain about staff favoritism
• People complain about railroading

Organic Player Clash: X and Y just run into each other/into the same goal they both want, and go for it via whatever measures are at least sort of understood

• Exciting
• Total fkn chaos
• If something is unclear about how to resolve a conflict, this is really going to become apparent
• People complain about the other side being unfair

Arranged Events with Strict and Orderly Rules: Staff has set specific parameters within which X and Y can compete and determine an outcome

• The rules need to be spectacularly clear with no room for doubt
• People complain about staff favoritism anyway
• People complain about any possible reason the other adversary could be better: More active players, timezone favors them, dino characters/FCs with better sheets, they have better gear we can’t get, etc etc

You can navigate around this stuff as best you can by trying to have those very clear rules, lots of transparency, and as much give and take between “winners” as the story will support. It’s just hard.

In terms of everyday RP, adversarial faction encounters are some of the best fun and the worst drama IMO. Everyone wants to look cool and come out on top, nobody wants to “lose”, even if it’s just social banter. Some of my favorite scenes of all time have been with opposing factions, but no amount of carrying the idiot ball, pulling punches, making sure people aren’t taken out of action, and being kind and sensitive OOC ever got everyone on board with me. Some people hated me because I was on the adversary team, and there was no way to change their minds on that.

Adversarial factions are really fun, really exciting, and I honestly do love them, just as I love PVP. But like PVP, it’s extremely hard to separate those big feelings from the drama that ensues.

I would love to see it work without the drama. If there’s a game that can do it I’d be there. Humans are messy though, and that can be difficult to sort out online. Or anywhere, lol.

@Roz said in Re: Dies Irae:

You’re not THAT old, this meme started almost 20 years ago.

TIL I have been wrongly assuming what a “pickme” is for almost 20 years

@Trashcan As if you’re just going to gloss over my coded soda machine in the rest of the list like that wasn’t the best piece of minigame on anything ever, the most outstanding and revelatory achievement of all time

@Faraday said in Minigames in MUSHes:

Once the initial novelty wore off, I never liked these kinds of systems much. They either got in the way of creativity, or were annoyingly tedious, or both.

This is true though, soda machine included lol

@Yam said in Minigames in MUSHes:

Please explain how the coded bounties for players worked.

There were bounties for me on there all the time, and I let people collect them from time to time. However, me putting a bounty on anyone or anything else was huge drama 100% of the time. I don’t want to get into PVP, we have another thread for that, but the bounty minigame definitely emphasized that different people have different tolerances for it.

My favorite minigame of all was when we ran Space Cargo on Into the Black MUSH, but the flight was not automated, you just had to sit there and be ready to navigate the proper coordinates at the proper moment for an hour. If you failed to do it properly then you flew off (into the black, I suppose) and ran out of air and died and staff had to resurrect your entire crew from the dead room.

That sucked. lol.

The code was so broken on Dies Irae that people could not RP because it just fundamentally didn’t work. People couldn’t see each others’ poses, couldn’t see when someone else came into the room sometimes, couldn’t see OOC messages in the room sometimes, it was very difficult to get even simple scenes done.

Staff was as stressed out about it as anyone, but the issues were (apparently) far reaching and difficult to determine due to the hallucinations of AI code which had been applied to the game. The fatigue of trying to deal with this, and being unable to fix this, surely burned out staff and players alike.

I don’t have the facts or knowledge to say who applied this AI code to the game or why, or if that is really what happened. I do know things were very, very broken though, and that the message given to staff and players was that AI code was the reason.

@Yam said in Strike Systems:

I’m curious if anyone has actually legitimately witnessed a fundamental change in someone with regards to MUSH behavior

I have encountered:

• People behaving very differently to me from one game to another game, in that the game structures and communities themselves brought out the best or worst of that person
• People making a big effort to change their toxic MU behavior after fucking up so bad that they realized they need to get their house in order. This would probably be the ‘lost friends’ or fallout aspect you mentioned above
• People who went on mental health medication and/or therapy and as a result developed more community-friendly and cooperative patterns in their MU spaces

Things that can’t get you banned from AOA:

• sexual misconduct and harassment
• bullying
• cheating with alts, fake dice rolls, and abuse of the item system

Things that can get you banned from AOA:

• requesting that people with the above behaviors not be staff
• shipping wrong

womp womp womp