In my opinion, if you hate me then it’s best you’re able to identify me and the game I run. I don’t want people on my game that hate me. You don’t want to be on my game if you hate me!
I understand that some unlinked staff may feel differently, for privacy reasons, or for whatever reasons, that is their choice. But for me personally, healthier ecosystem all around if people can go “ah, him, that motherfucker, what a tool” and steer clear.
@bear_necessities Got it, sorry
Agreed this is not very good optics for the staff
@bear_necessities Seeing if I understand correctly – In this situation you’re talking about, there’s a particular player that is crucial to the overall game plot and it came out that this crucial player is an undisclosed staff PC? However other (non staff) players cannot be/aren’t equally crucial?
@Yam Yeah.
I have a feeling that the type of games one’s been on weighs into the irritation factor here. If there’s only 12 skills and they’re all pretty broad, you can justify an “I was doing this off camera” in a lot of ways. If there are 100+ fairly niche skills and a not-niche person is suddenly an expert in them, that breaks immersion a bit more, and cheapens the experience for the players who were focusing on that niche ahead of time.
For me the issue isn’t that Gun Man is going from level 3 to 4 in Shoot Gun mid-scene, it’s that Gun Man is going from 0 to 85 in Computer Surveillance in a scene that I finally ran specifically to please the one person who has been steadily leveling Computer Surveillance. This did not happen a little bit. This happened a lot. Crunchy traditional game where poor sportsmanship may be rampant, etc.
This whole phenomenon does not bother some people, which is fair. It does irritate me, which is just a personal preference. I have seen too much of it from too many people who weren’t fun and weren’t trying to make IC sense. I find it annoying. I don’t like it. Peeve.
I like systems, to the extent that they support the story and the players and encourage RP. I like the element of random chance that dice bring, I like that +sheets force people to pick what their character is good at and what they’re not good at. To me RP is improv and the system/dice is one of several things giving you new prompts to improv with. I like that.
My forays into MUCK RP and Discord RP where there were no systems were not satisfying to me. A little bit of “you can’t fight this character because it is IC for me that I never lose so you will die,” lots of “I got you” “nuh uh, no you didn’t” like kids playing, and lots and lots of characters who are the best psycho killer in the entire universe at every single weapon that there is AND the best at persuasion and social skills AND the best pilot AND the best mechanic AND the best doctor, etc. I think that stays on the rails a little more with a +sheet/dice.
Many of my friends have long experience with freeform games wherein the players all seem to have been pretty mature and did accept losses/failures, did pick a lane for their skills, etc. I just personally don’t have that experience, so “at least some mechanical systems” is my personal preference.
@catzilla This is the one that I referenced in my post above.
Honestly if they had just asked “hey can we use this is that cool” at the start, or said at any point “my bad, I think the AI scooped it and I didn’t know,” there wouldn’t be an issue. It’s the obfuscation and weird refusal to credit a coder with his code beyond the “idea” that frustrates me.
There is some shady stuff going on with this Age of Heroes game.
The ‘very strange coincidence of taking someone else’s name’ is part of it. Last night we also discovered that Age of Heroes is using “Look for RP” code developed by @Trashcan, without credit or attribution. A representative of Age of Heroes in the Ares discord became defensive and buckled down on ownership, saying that this LFRP code is their coder’s and was entirely coded by her, despite several obvious and distinct indicators within the code that this isn’t true.
When we pointed this out and requested to be credited with having written the original code, Trashcan also said he’d make a plugin for this code. Within a few hours, the AOH “coder” produced an AI-coded plugin. Faraday, aware that there was some controversy over authorship of the LFRP code, notified Trashcan so we could compare the code to ours. The AOH “coder” is claiming again that it is her code and she made it from scratch, crediting him only with the “idea” for it.
Our best guess with this situation is that the AOH “coder” used AI to request a similar feature to the one Trashcan wrote, and the AI scraped his code. Then as soon as he said he’d make a plugin, this person used AI again to try to get ahead of him and quickly produce a plugin first. The plugin itself bears the hallmarks of AI coding, which Trashcan can elaborate on if anyone’s wondering why we’re certain the plugin is AI.
These Age of Heroes people are never going to own up to lying, failing to credit where credit is due, or using AI to steal other people’s work. However it’s pretty uncool behavior in this small community, it is obvious behavior in this small community, it is rude, and it is shady.
So at 93 responses so far, looks like:
If you sign up for something
Go to it
Or tell someone you aren’t going to it
Fucks sake
@howyadoin I don’t think this works for the context @Yam mentioned, though, which is why I wanted to have the discussion in a purely MUSH context.
I think in MUSH we see a lot of things like:
etc etc etc
Many of the times we run into this, there might not even be a GM involved to say “are you sure” and the actions they’re doing aren’t inherently absurd. The My-Guyer’s actions might even be sensible. Sure, that planet we’re visiting does look dangerous.
As a GM you can definitely say “fine, stay with the ship then, guess you aren’t playing in this event” and as a player you can say things like “well you pick somewhere to RP then,” but the bad vibes are already there at that point. Other people are uncomfortable. Most players don’t want to leave the My-Guy person out. Most My-Guy’ers know that.
My-Guy people disrupt a feeling of collaboration and buy-in that is pretty fundamental to the improv we depend on in this medium. That’s what the top guy in the link is talking about: he got his way, the other players agreed, it was all very “in-character,” and it still felt bad.
https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/37103/what-is-my-guy-syndrome-and-how-do-i-handle-it
Interesting Q&A from 12 years ago that still seems to apply. What do you think about “my guy syndrome” and handling it, in a MUSH and not LARP or Tabletop context?
@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?
@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.