I think when doing something like this you also need to be very aware that “historical prejudices” are still very real today and that mushes are still overwhelmingly white. So while it might be fun for one person to play being racially discriminated against in the old south, there are a whole lot of people who deal with that every day and might be going online to escape from that and not want to see that in their fun-pretendy-time game. Especially since there are definitely players out there drooling to put that white hood on and let the things they don’t dare say in real life to a person out online.

Like a social contract is great, but also is going to probably ensure that your player base is mostly white.

@bear_necessities I loved when The Network did their cowboy thing. It was so much fun!

God this thread just reminds me how ancient most of us are.

My first time RPing was a total accident. I used to watch the Disney Afternoon and at the end of a Gargoyles episode they were like “Come join us to chat at #gargoyles on IRC!” and i was like what is that?

We had a brand new tiny computer at home and I figured out how to get in (with Homer!) and joined and…there was no one there. Eventually someone came in and said “Hey no one is ever in here. Come into this place instead.”

‘this place’ was a RP room. I want to say like Red Dragon Inn but I think that’s wrong and I ended up in Gryphontavern for years and @Herja and I have a shared Infamous History with a Certain Someone who is like a legend of powergaming in the early online RP world.

Then I drifted away and one day a friend from there sent me an email and said hey, I’m playing on something called a MUX, you should come play!

And I made a truly horrifying stereotyped Irish character (as we all have done at least once) on Project Infinity.

I am still friends with people I met there like, 30 years later. WE ARE OLD.

I missed all of WoD though. Just had no idea it existed and then it just…it just sounded bad, guys. You all tell so many horror stories constantly, so I don’t feel like I missed out!

I always thought of vignettes and journals/blue books and things like that less like solo RP and more like RP hooks–you’re putting it out there hoping someone reads it and is like gee this person sounds cool or hey I have information on that I could help them with.

So I guess it is kind of like throwing a (long) pose out into an empty room and hoping that someone sees it when they come in and wants to pose back.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner. He was 54 and unconfirmed reports saying accidental drowning while he was in Costa Rica on vacation

Decades ago, Tenebrae put something in place where you would basically rate your plot before people signed up. I think it was like ‘Risk of Death’ ‘Risk of Maiming/Weapon Sundering’ and then just ‘No Risk.’

It worked for the most part. People who signed up for the risk of death scenes knew that it was possible their PCs could die and they were usually Big Plots where it was cool if they did. Did that stop some players from still being super mad about it when it happened? Nope. In a big Save the World scene I remember a staffer had a monster with an insta-death ray that would kill anyone with a bad fort save. So he made sure it targeted the PC in the scene with the best fort score and thus the best chance of nothing happening. Like I specifically remember the conversation on the staff channel where a bunch of us weighed in on who it should target because while it was high stakes we didn’t really want to kill anyone.

The PC then rolled a 1 and accused the staffer of doing it on purpose and declared the whole scene had been set up just so they would die and it was a whole thing.

@bear_necessities I always felt like there should be a way for players to indicate to staff if they wanted to be involved in things or not but I have no real ideas on how to implement it. Like you could do metaplot y/n because there’s always people who are dying to get in on things, then you have people that are just there to do social scenes and never want to know there’s a dark god hanging out at the bookstore, etc.

I am that person that loves to pull people into things, though. Did you take a point of map making on your sheet for a lark? Boom, now there is a plot where you have to read a MAP and SAVE THE DAY.

Though I can see how if you made your map making pc just to romance your friend the explorer, you might be annoyed if the Gnome King interrupts your date to make you go get a group together to save the Kingdom of Butterbright.

Honestly the world is on fire so much lately that I want something not so depressing when I try to disconnect from the news so I stay away from grimdark and horror, but pretty much would be looking for a game where the PCs would get to be heroes. Which is not to say they win all the time hooray, but more like a place where the PCs could work towards the greater good without getting smacked down for trying.

I’d be down for a good supernatural cowboy game. Where you can shoot a werewolf or a ghost or something and then go to a rodeo or watch a bar fist fight. Something fun!

@Ominous It still seems like you’re setting it up so that people are going to mob staff NPCs and that’s going to put what sounds like burnout pressure on them. And then there’s favoritism and times people can’t get on to meet up with a staff NPC and and and…

But as @KarmaBum always says: what are people going to RP? Because it sounds like everyone is just going to be fighting for I Talk To The NPC tonight. And that’s going to get really old really fast if you have more than like 5 people playing. Will there be bonuses for people who just chat/fight during the down times ala the Bachelor/ette? Or does this sort of thing favor the person who only logs on for events, gets the NPCs ear, then logs off so nothing can stick to them?

Like this seems great for a small group of friend running a sandbox, but looks like it will fall apart the minute you get more than 10 people.

Just don’t ever have the Royal Heir played by anyone. No one has ever seen them. They’re off fighting a war/building treaties with other people/etc. And while they’re gone, their family has just decided to get them married.

Then they appear at the final event to select the person by…points, cards, gossip, whatever.

@KarmaBum It’s funny that you bring up the Network because when you mentioned a cowboy game earlier I was like damn the most fun I had in YEARS was when the Network did their cowboy season, I too would like a wild west game!

@MisterBoring said in Metaplot: What and How:

Curious PCs

This is where your metaplot will either never gain traction, because people tend to investigate really weird things instead of really big things, or where you will get a handful of players that will look into this and decide that they can’t tell ANYONE ELSE and then resentment will grow with the rest of your playerbase.

But more importantly with a big arc like that you’d have to decide if you were ready to change your game on a dime when that group of players decide they do want to break out and rejoin society right now and now your grid doesn’t work.

@Pavel Yeah they don’t work. I think it’s still relatively easy to spot something that was written by an AI, but there’s no definitive way to really prove it, which sucks when you know a student did it but there’s no way to call them on it.

@Warma-Sheen said in Inuki Ban Thread:

What was said was, “What I’ve experienced here has given me insight as to why some people have chosen to do ‘this thing’.”

I feel like that’s an extremely generous interpretation of what she was going for there.

I think there’s a real difference between “I am having thoughts of self harm” posts and “if I kill myself its your fault” posts. And I’m fine with the latter being a ban-worthy offense.

Didn’t she have at least one other account too where she pretended it wasn’t her but it was definitely her?

Edited to add: I think it was chookitypok right?

MORE EDITS: Nevermind, she’s that on Ares not here.

Anyone who doesn’t cry over spilled milk hasn’t spent 45 minutes pumping it.

Chance Perdomo. I’m so sad.

Fucking old townie racists that insist on bringing up the old (replaced) racist mascot again and again, start threatening people who point out that it’s racist and they need to stop, and then threaten and deadname the high schoolers who chime in to tell them to knock it off.

This is a weird critique post because I do like the game, but:

-I basically can’t play it due to the whole ‘idle out on grid and bad things happen’ bit. I have kids and I work and so I have constant sudden interruptions even if I have carved out some time to play. And yes, sometimes (too often) those things are so sudden that I don’t even have time to hit the pause button (that I am glad was installed). I have been EXTREMELY lucky that most people are cool and seem to understand that part sucks and have returned me to the hotel room each and every time, but it instills an anxiousness in me OOCly that I really, really dislike. It takes me out of the game. It bleeds into RL in a way I really hate because after dealing with an emergency or any sudden, stressful situation I have to be like oh fuck, I need to run to log into this game and hope something hasn’t happened that I’d need to deal with IC while I was RLing and sit there and hit the buttons and wait to get back to the hotel so I can just sign off.

-The game is also heavily, HEAVILY skewed to combat. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t ever make a fighter Misfit that can travel fast and climb. You are at an extreme disadvantage without any of that and might not even realize it until you hit the grid after chargen and see what your weaknesses are. That can be fun to play! It can also get really frustrating when you find you can’t engage with a lot of the systems or areas of the grid because of a certain way you answered a question in chargen without realizing it.

-While people admire the lack of OOC on the game I find it disorienting and confusing. I was one of the every day RPers early on, but two things turned me off hard for quite awhile–one was a very weird IC (?) drama situation that I am still, to this day, not sure if it was totally IC or some OOC that appeared to cause at least one person to leave the game. Or maybe change characters? Because there’s no OOC there’s zero way to know, but it was all incredibly uncomfortable and not in a way I think the game was designed to be. Was someone being an OOC creep? Were people OOC bullying? Was it all IC?? I still have absolutely no idea.

-Unless you’re online when changes are made or game problems happen, you have no idea about them. I would love if there was at least a forum on the site (if there is one I haven’t found it) where game updates or things like that could be posted. I don’t want to have to sign up for Discord to be in the know. I would love to have a place to post feedback that isn’t here!

-The second thing that made me wander away was the Quills. I love the idea of the Quills and it really fit my character concept. I ended up hating it because it felt like every time I signed on I was getting assigned chores/homework. Go to this event not to have fun and RP in it, but so you can write it up later. Here’s an actual list of things we want you to write articles about. Write something every 2 weeks or you don’t get paid. It very quickly started to feel more like work than fun. It’s no wonder this always appears to be the least populated group on the game.

-RP on the game is at a breakneck pace which is both a great and a bad thing. It is hands down the easiest game to find wonderful RP all day every day that I have ever played. If I sign on even for five minutes I have two people trying to scene with me just moving room to room. That’s great for people who have that sort of time–I would have loved it if I were an unmarried, child-free college student. But I guess Ares has lulled me into lazily wanting distracted scenes, which is just not be a thing that can happen on this game. A total plus for people who aren’t switching screens or getting distracted every so often, but not so great for anyone else.

Again, it’s a great game with responsive staffers and lots of RP, but there are some roadblocks that I just can’t seem to get past even though I keep trying. A lot of them are absolutely “me” things where this is a game I want to like that doesn’t fit for someone with a busy RL. But I do think some sort of forum on the site would help with some of the other things (has anyone ever been banned? Are there problematic behaviors to watch out for? Game Updates, feedback, etc.).