The systems are onerous, the dino gaps are frustrating, the personalities of the staff and key players are sometimes terrible, that’s all kinda whatever in the end. It can be dealt with.

More to the point, and pointing at where this thread started:

Every MU in this day and age has a “harassment won’t be tolerated” policy. They vary by content and complexity, but to name just a few across a few genres/types/codebases: Liberation has policies of this type, Spellbound has them, Disquiet has them, Silent Heaven has them, Arx had them, I think even Shangrila has guidelines and policies around welcome and unwelcome player behavior.

There is one game out there that does not have a “harassment won’t be tolerated” policy and that is Age of Alliances. @Zephyr asked Cujo to put one in and he refused.

What on earth reason is there to refuse putting up a line of text that says harassment won’t be tolerated?

Make of that what you will, I guess.

This might sound complicated, and maybe it is. The goal here is to make it as approachable, as possible, though

lol

@SirKay if you don’t have the bandwidth to give game content to OCs, just don’t have OCs. Building second class players into your game design is asking for a headache.

@SirKay said in Consensus on Roster vs OC vs Mix:

Focus of potential place: upper echelon would receive more staff attention (events/missions) and considering Roster for this level; lower echelon might receive directive/TPs/RP from the upper (a team under a roster).

I would be a lot more concerned about a system in which some players explicitly and by intent receive “more staff attention” than I would be about anything to do with rosters.

Good luck tho

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.

Representation/Diversity can be a charged issue when it comes to writing characters, both in fiction in general and in this hobby. Some people never write outside their own experience, due to comfort levels or for fear of getting it wrong. Some people do write characters from a background different to their own, and that either goes well – and adds something to the game imo – or is uh… reductive and problematic. To say the least.

Writing the Other is maybe 20 years old at this point but it’s useful and fairly inexpensive if you’re interested in digging into this stuff.

They also have a number of articles and essays and other resources on the site, some of which are free and some of which are paid webinars and stuff.

Worth looking into if this subject is something that interests you!

This subject has come up with a few people lately, but the real peeve is how much garbage media/tv/movies I have consumed solely because my played-by was in it.

Obviously Cujo is Cujo, and various Cujo policies/decisions are always inexplicable. The ships, the cargo, the econ, the Stuff, the fairness or lack thereof, the BBpost Metaplot, the… whatever the deal with Aryn/Poe is, this weird “you can come back” moment, etc etc, you can pick on all of it.

I think it’s important to remember, though, that the whole debacle that started this was:

On this game if you are harassed, and particularly if you are harassed by a popular player who appears to generate activity, there is no help for you.

Cujo doesn’t need to be like “guyz you can have your toon back,” Cujo needs to be here saying “I won’t tolerate bad behavior, I’ll take it seriously, this is my house and I’ll keep it clean.”

But that’s never gonna happen, so. Oh well. Super fun time simple, big IC grid awaits, lol.

Cujo and Friends got rid of everybody they didn’t like or who didn’t agree with them during the Great Drama and built a utopia for themselves out of the echo chamber that was left. No troublemakers anymore!

That is now, and has been, playing out about the way everybody expected it would.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

good luck to them I hope they are having fun

@Testament Prosopagnosia! I have it as well and it can definitely be an embarrassing factor in my real life. It’s also one reason I hate AI portraits, as I find them extremely hard to distinguish.

In terms of descs though (and I know, we’ve talked about this) I don’t think you need to know exactly what their face looks like. It doesn’t matter. You need a vibe, some physical basics, and anything major unusual, and that’s it, that will inform the impression of the character in the written form.

Tastes vary, but for me, I never need to know details like a roman nose or cupid’s bow lips.

@Testament I will write every desc for you forever if you want

You still have to do the drudgery of editing my filthy human writing tho, and it will be a lot of work

Resurrecting the thread to give an art-related warning. A heads up for anyone who draws their character art on an iPad with an Apple pencil:

If the glass screen breaks you have to go through Apple to get it fixed. You cannot go to a 3rd party screen fixing place like you would for a phone. Apple has proprietary chips in the screen and proprietary calibration software involving the apple pencil, and the apple pencil will not calibrate properly with the 3rd party screen no matter what you do. This causes unavoidable jittery lines in the drawing.

Once it’s been done, the 3rd party place can’t fix it because they don’t have the Apple proprietary crap and Apple won’t fix it because it’s been altered by a 3rd party.

The iPad + Apple pencil has been a great way to draw for years. I don’t want to get into right to repair (although I feel strongly about this rn) or Apple sucking (although I ALSO feel strongly about this rn) on the art thread. There are just a lot of talented artists in the mu community and if anyone else is using the same set up I would like to spare them the nonsense I just went through.

I will do the lifting to set it all up, I don’t usually mind.

What I mind is the person who says “I want to rp!” and then they say “I don’t know what to do. I don’t have any ideas. What character would you like me to be? LOL!”

At least pick which of YOUR OWN characters you want to be, come on now. I’m not doing that for you.

IMO, it’s not great to take a stance like ‘the church is in control of reproduction’ unless players are explicitly allowed to take a swing at that institution and that massive social control. Are they allowed or encouraged to make motions back to their own autonomy? Fuckfruits for all?

‘The church is in control of reproduction’ is one thing. ‘The church is in control of people’s bodies and everyone is chill with this IC because that is our ooc policy’ is uhhhhh less good.

WHAT game is this

@mangosplitz pls

lololol

@heysparky I’ve been in a lot of ST/story/stakes things you ran or participated in real-time on Arx, seemed to go alright there?

For me async is at its most useful as an easy way to pause and continue. I don’t miss being like “do you have the last couple poses, my client crashed”

I like async alright in one on one scenes where I plan to write heaps of shit per pose.

Async that goes on and on forever is something I will do if I have great vibes with a person, but as real-time is my preference and I like to stay busy, sometimes I start feeling like I’ve started outpacing my own RP and it’s hard to write two timelines. I also find it hard to pose out of these long long ones.

When there are multiple async scenes going on, who I pose to ‘next’ has nothing to do with how much I like the person and everything to do with how much I need to think. The scene where I’m giving my opinions on Plato’s Cave is going to be a slower pose than the scene where I’m eating cake.

3+ person async is death to me. This kills the frog.

Overall, I really like the things async lets me do (pause, RP with people in other timezones, meet new people) but for the most part if my async partner offered me async or real time, I’d choose real time without much question.

I’ve run a lot of pvp. Things that were successful:

• Clear rules set out ooc at the start so everyone knows what to expect
• Allowing “cinematic defeat” when people lost so they can topple over a cliff and lose the fight but not lose a limb or otherwise be grievously mangled
• Encouraging ooc banter and teasing in a fun way, gently nipping it if it starts to sound snotty
• Everyone using gear/weapons/powers that are clearly defined, and ideally automatic in the system

Things that were not successful:

• Anything outside the bounds of very clear dice vs dice that requires more subjective GM decision making.

“Politics” or social pvp was a disaster. Spy PvP was a disaster. People who don’t want to fight but want to do tricky shit to advantage their team, disaster. People who want to use special gear, perks, and magic that aren’t clearly defined so that they gain an advantage, disaster.

When everyone was rolling clean, no problems, people had fun. When it started getting into “I should be allowed to do this weird thing that means I win,” there were problems every time.

It would have been easier if that game had more things clearly defined, lol. PvP is exciting in a way PvNPC isn’t, but it can definitely get messy.

I’m here for the other RP smoking