This is quite amazing.

24 years in this hobby and it’s the same old patterns, over and over and over again. 24 years of ‘X is a creeper and staffer Y is protecting him’ from A, with B to G arriving to agree and support and #metoo. And then Z pitches up to defend X and Y by demanding evidence and discrediting A to G and discrediting the place we’re reading it on. At first it worked, because the world was a different place and we were younger and many of us hadn’t met it before, but as more happened and more came to light and the world around us changed, we’ve seen the patterns and realised what was actually going on.

24 years later, and while most of us have grown and changed and learned, it seems that X and Y and Z still think their old tactics work.

Find a new strategy, guys. This one’s old enough to go drinking with its mates in the USA, and has been for a few years now. We see you and we see through you, and we know that whether the original story was credible or not, people who use Z’s strategy are not to be trusted.

Bleed is a) an absolute bastard, and b) what we play the game for.

If we aren’t trying to evoke an emotional response in ourselves and others, really, what do we spend all this time typing at each other for? Laugh or cry, smile or rage, we do this daft hobby of ours in order to feel - and to fail to acknowledge that is to set ourselves up for insanity.

Emotional bleed, in and of itself, isn’t the problem. It’s the failure to control that bleed that’s the problem. We can be in tears over what just happened, while at the same time relishing those tears. This is normal - for us at least - and this is good as long as we all stay friends, or at the very least cordial. There’s trust involved in giving people license to manipulate you, and if people break that trust it hurts, and that too is normal. Backbiting, whisper campaigns, releasing logs of private scenes on taboo/secret topics - all those are a betrayal of the trust we’ve put in others to allow them to affect us. We extend our trust to those we extend deep IC ties to - whatever that tie may be - and we can only hope that they have a similar understanding of what they’ve been entrusted with.

And if someone’s staffing, especially using NPCs to push story, that’s a position of special trust, because we’re giving them license to mess around with our emotions while they remain insulated. A game’s staff have many more ways to break our trust, which is why the good staffers are trustworthy - and why we react so badly if and when it happens. Trust is a fragile thing, easily destroyed and very difficult to rebuild.

Belatedly, I’m going to add to the VulgarKitten stuff. She’s been doing this same thing for more than a decade, and I am both annoyed and irritated that she just can’t seem to grow the fuck up and stop hurting real people over pretendy funtime games. I am so sorry that she did that to you, @IoleRae ; all I can say is that the pattern seems to happen when she starts getting jealous because someone’s being a responsible feature/staffer and engaging with people who aren’t her.

I mean really, WTF? What is she, 5, and in need of all of daddy’s attention to the point of trying to throttle the baby?

So yeah, when I said I wasn’t going to be returning to RtA if she was the one drumming up support, I… wasn’t kidding. There are very few people on my own personal will-not-RP-with list beyond the standard bunch of idiot creepers, but she’s got pride of place at the very top. And had I had my way at RtA, she’d have been banned.

@IoleRae It’s only a few days ago that I found out who she’d been, and I immediately raged. There aren’t many people I remember from a decade ago without prompting, but that character name is etched in my memory with a massive flashing light and a really loud warning siren.

It’s not just you. It hasn’t been just you.

And to anyone she’s made a victim of, or who’s feeling isolated, or just isn’t connecting to people? Reach out to me on game or on the board, and if I can I’ll help, just as I’ve done many times before. I can usually help connect people to other bits of a game, to plots they might find fun, or people they’ll get on with. It’s more difficult on Arx than it was when I had a staffer’s view of what was going on, but I’ll help. And I’ll even mitigate my arse of a character to do it, because helping people find fun is far more important.

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

everyone wants to take down The Man! everyone has different ideas for how to do it and wants the credit

Everyone wants to take down The Man, until they themselves are The Man, at which point everyone else has to be delighted with the idea and nothing can ever go wrong ever again…

We lived in the country - mice in the house was standard - when we gained a crotchety old tomcat who was ludicrously intelligent. We rapidly came to an arrangement with Zappa; he brought us dead mice, he got tuna. 14 mice in 10 days, worked like a treat.

Unfortunately, this cat was too smart. After he’d emptied the house of its rodents, every time he wanted a bit of tuna in his diet, he brought us a dead rodent. So after a while he was getting a bit podgy, and we stuck him on a diet.

5 mice in one day.

He got his tuna, and we decided that a cat who can catch five mice in a day probably didn’t need a diet. Diet ended, everyone was happy, and we realised that our cat had grasped the basic principles of economics.

@De-Villefort said in But Why:

@STD
In those dark dystopias you fight the corporations to make the world a better place for everyone. In the dark ages, it was a struggle to survive just being a human.

Think about the fantasy genre and the themes it has.
Lord of the Rings - Take the ring of power, resist it’s call to make you all powerful and destroy it.
Game of Thrones - Kill everyone and take power for yourself.
Beowulf - Kill monsters and take power for yourself.
Robinhood - Kill the nobles and take power for yourself because you think you can do a better job.

It’s all about selfishness. It’s an entire genera based on the idea that getting what you want is the only important thing. You are just replacing one self-important jerk with a nicer self-important jerk and nothing ever gets better for anyone else in a dark ages fantasy. Look at Lord of the rings, all those books, all that adventure and the only thing that really changed was 1 ring got destroyed and one human village got roasted by a dragon. Then life pretty much went back to normal.

If this is what you took away from the fantasy genre, I pity you. If all you see about you is selfishness, then perhaps you should look beyond the mirror.

You know, maybe you really ought to try actually doing some reading, given that Lord of the Rings has no dragons in it and Robin Hood is actually a name attached to a legend which wasn’t actually about taking any power at all. Beowulf isn’t even fantasy, it’s an epic poem told a millennium and more ago, and Game of Thrones was a specific reaction to all the fantasy novels about honourable people with good and selfless endings.

Reading can broaden the mind!

@Tez said in Admin Accountability:

@Meg said in Bannings:

this situation happened very specifically because of power invested in one person.

Pulling this thread out bc I was thinking about it last night, you know, in that ‘lie in bed and think about things as you fall asleep’ kind of way. I wonder if there are good ways to build checks for that kind of thing, have some kind of accountability baked in. Right now, I own the server. Glitch handles the subdomain stuff. Pyre and Pavel are admin. But if I suddenly fired everyone, like – in the end, that’s where it stops. With the person who has the keys to the server account. How do you build in checks?

As the USA is finding out right now, with the best will in the world, the checks and balances don’t always work as intended.

Be transparent. Be accountable. Be open to discussion. And if the people you think have integrity are looking dubious, stop and ask why rather than warming up the banhammer.

My characters often spawn conflict. I am conflict-avoidant.
My characters are often deeply flawed. I try to find and correct my flaws.
My characters often consider the law to be an inconvenience, for one reason or another. I think the law is a necessity.
My characters are often killers, either in the form of soldiers or flat-out murderers. I feel guilty if I kill an ant by accident.
My characters are usually sociable and charismatic, or at least capable of dealing with people at times. I’ve learned a lot about how to do the whole people-ing thing from them.
My characters are often over 6’. Me, though, I am definitely not.
My characters are generally male. I’m becoming more open about the fact that I am not and have never been male (although I have been mistaken for it quite often in RL, and even told I’m in the wrong bathroom before now).

I find it hard to play a character who isn’t deeply flawed in some way, and attempts to do so invariably fail. My characters are not me; they are warped and twisted reflections of me as seen through a fun-house mirror, then grown through their own experiences.

In game settings where telepathy exists, and on games where thought-posing is annoying me, I will make a telepath and those thoughts will get read for maximum effect.

You have been warned.

I too have a long history of administrative roles, and finally transitioned into a career a few years ago. This is partly because the career path I should have taken wasn’t as open then as it is now.

What I learned in administration is that you never, ever, underestimate your admins. They see everything. They know everything. And anyone who can organise other people - especially people with big egos and big tempers - to get things done is not someone you want to cross.

And yet the administrative staff are so often dismissed by people who only ever see the surface of things. It’s both stupid and weird.

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

everyone wants to take down The Man! everyone has different ideas for how to do it and wants the credit

Everyone wants to take down The Man, until they themselves are The Man, at which point everyone else has to be delighted with the idea and nothing can ever go wrong ever again…

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Evilgrayson said in MU Peeves Thread:

Yes, let’s tell the human-hating centuries-old elf who’s just slaughtered a whole town that they’re an idiot. That’s really going to go so well.

This is absolutely something that any number of my characters would do.

@Evilgrayson said in MU Peeves Thread:

the human-hating centuries-old elf had casually grown the mother of all trees through the mouthy one

And this is absolutely the extreme overreaction consequence I would be looking for, please and thank you.

If only more people thought like that.

I’m with you. If my character does something that stupid, they should get consequences! But ye gods, the wailing if consequences actually happen.

Yes, let’s tell the human-hating centuries-old elf who’s just slaughtered a whole town that they’re an idiot. That’s really going to go so well.

And yet if the human-hating centuries-old elf had casually grown the mother of all trees through the mouthy one, you’d have been able to hear the OOC screaming from my side of the Pond.

@dvoraen Ray - who got that revelation in the Murder of Crows while discussing Lowers secrets and specifically the things that had happened to people who said the wrong thing in the Murder of Crows - hid in his secret subterranean lair for a week.

@Rhamnious Looks like the Accords from here. Red Wardens, Prismatic Order, Triarchy, Smiling Shadows, and True Lyceum. Two ‘good’ orgs, two ‘bad’ orgs, and one ‘neutral’.

@SpaceKhomeini said in MU Peeves Thread:

I’ve found that being polite and direct (at least in my time working at HCL and Microsoft) at the first given opportunity, i.e. “how can I help you? I’m engaged in something right now but have a few minutes” tends to be an effective shortcut.

That approach turns the whole thing on its head, which is why it’s so effective. You have to be polite at all times - but if the other party only has a few minutes, it becomes more polite to get to the point so they can go do the needful.

@dvoraen said in The Arx Secrets Thread:

@Evilgrayson I seriously considered trying to do the Paladin bit for Bhandn at one point (doing it on his own, to specific god(s)), but I could never quite justify it to myself, and I second-guessed the idea constantly as to whether it was even thematic if not heretical.

But I did want to do something involving Vellichor, but the reasons why now escape me.

Was it heretical? Absolutely. But Ray didn’t care, and Death wasn’t like most of the other gods.

@MisterBoring said in Arx Stats for Nerds:

I always assume that whatever the visible staff count is, there’s an invisible staffer who just gets online to help squash bugs and update code. They may have a PC or two, but they never mention their being on staff, because the part of staffing they do doesn’t really require player interaction.

Good for most games, but Arx’s coder was Tehom. So already in the count.

Ray started from nothing, just a criminal henchman with a cliche’d backstory.

He found out over time that he was a quarter Nox’alfar. He found out that his father had been a holder of part of the Will of Baalphrigor who’d sacrificed thousands to the Abyss in a war, and who’d killed Ray’s mother.

He found a woman who could cope with him and got married, and a man who could cope with them both but couldn’t get married but was a not-quite-husband. He found a goddess who could cope with him and swore to Her service. He rose to be a Second of his crime family and one of the top-ranking members of the criminal underworld. He made friends and he made enemies, and he was the protege of the Queen of the Compact, while his wife was a successful businesswoman and a ‘successful businesswoman’ and a protege of a Voice of the Crown and his not-quite-husband was a Knight-Lieutenant of the King’s Own.

He ended up dying to save a bunch of souls in a shardhaven, and his goddess and his patron brought him back to life. He became an Aspect - and then went and performed the Paladin rite on his own and for one goddess only, and became the Paladin of Death, because that was a much safer title to use. The Wheelspinner came to him, and in the last battle he did what he could.

House Mazetti tried to ennoble him, often. House Velenosa made the offer as well. He’s accepted on behalf of Tanith and his child(ren), and House Calvaria will rise.

He started with nothing, and he ended up with so much, and I’d like to thank Herja for a truly stunning storyline and Tanith and Austen’s players for some absolutely amazing times - and the rest of Ray’s friends for putting up with the irritating murderous git and letting him be around regardless.

It’s been a whale of a time.