@sao said in Age Verification & Games:

16+ is baffling from a liability perspective. 16-18 protects you from nothing. What?

The internet is international. The age of adulthood varies.

My own experience is that WoD is a special sort of disaster.

But Lords & Ladies is also a special sort of disaster.
Original theme is a special sort of disaster, too.
Comic books, star wars, star trek, urban fantasy, even bloody neanderthals are their own special sorts of disasters as well, and don’t get me started on Pern.

The theme of any given game tends to suggest the sorts of disasters you’ll get there. Some are pretty universal - sex pests are everywhere, as are the power-hungry who believe that might makes right - but some themes lend themselves to certain behaviours.

I’ve seen as many horrific abuses of staff power in Original Themes as I have in Urban Fantasy; having The Character Who Is The Focus Of The Story lends itself to certain behaviours, whether that character’s actually on grid or not. Unwarranted OOC viciousness? Lords and Ladies wins there, hands down, because people who just have to be the prettiest princess can’t all be the prettiest princess, and if you don’t fall over yourself to worship the one right in front of you some of them will get very upset and think it’s perfectly justified to try and destroy you whether you’re a rival or some poor sod caught in the crossfire. Still, several of the other genres aren’t that far behind. It’s just that WoD is the thread that most of us have in common and WoD is where these boards started, so WoD is the shared understanding and the shared scars.

@Pavel I know this as the Woodlouse Test, first formulated nearly 30 years ago.

If three woodlice can’t solve your plot with two of them on their backs, the players haven’t a hope.

What happens, happens. A roll of the dice - and my dice luck is legendarily horrific - or someone outplaying my character intellectually, politically, whatever. Bring it on, as long as the playing field is level. And as long as I’m allowed to come up with what happened because of a bad roll, botches are almost always some form of hilarious, because my characters often take themselves too seriously and I love the chance to poke a hole in that.

But when it’s not a fair playing field? When you wake up in the morning, log in and find out your character died while you were asleep for no reason? When your plot fails because staff doesn’t want their friend to be discomfited but you can go hang and they didn’t bother to mention that X won’t be changing in advance? When it’s written in the stars that you’re going to be the universe’s punching bag forever and always because you created what the source material says is absolutely normal? No. Not playing that game.

If the only real way to advance on a game is to TS a staffer’s alt, they can go fuck themselves because I’m not going to indulge them. If the only real way to succeed is to follow this nice set of rails, but no-one does me the courtesy of telling me they exist and I just have to kind of guess at what to do next and hope this is the right answer, I’m derailing myself right out of the game. Let my actions have consequences, and let me do things you haven’t foreseen. And if those consequences fuck me over sideways, as long as it’s all fair or I had some sort of chance, I’m happy with that. And if everything I do has no consequence at all, because the plot’s already written and all the roles are filled and that person over there is the shining hero who saves the world? No thanks.

I was on the L&L Crossroads, briefly. It was not friendly to someone in an ‘off’ timezone - I only lasted a few months.

My first MU* was a place called Spheres, and I logged in for the first time on the 4th of January 1999. I memorised the date because I knew this would be the start of something big in my life, but I definitely wasn’t prepared for just where the journey has taken me.

@Ominous said in Empire Discussion Thread:

I am concerned that this will just be pretty princ(ess)es primping and preening for parties, parades, and promenades without any crunchy politics and intrigue underlying it or flowing from it

This is what Lords and Ladies games are, though, for the most part. And boy howdy do the pretty princ(ess)es get upset when you don’t swoon at their feet and pay them the most fulsome compliments for their daring and delight.

@MisterBoring Stargate was a fantastic setting for similar ideas. Lots of RP in the base, occasional scenes further afield, and missions to the planet of the week.

@Jennkryst Idaho’s been done, as has Washington State. John Wayne’s werewolf game - I forget the name of it - was set in Idaho, and GarouMUSH was set in Washington State.

@MisterBoring said in Character Death:

@somasatori said in Factions:

This could be staff-generated or player-generated in the case of player-run factions vs. other player-run factions, but it’s integral to have core people running stories (like in your example with LARPs, you have the GM and assistant GMs) regularly for people to feel like it matters.

What if it was staff generated by finding a few volunteers to play characters who exist solely to add to the story and die to set the example that PC death can be rewarding to the greater story?

I’ve done this. There was a group of us who used to advertise that we’d happily play short-term characters and plot devices, although there weren’t many games who took us up on it.

Best death as a bit part? A police detective in 1920s Chicago whose partner made some dumb calls and got them both killed. The hitman felt so sorry.

@Popes said in Re: Dies Irae:

@catzilla

The tl’dr is that my PC, the burn out gifted kid pure breed 5 shadow lord philodox was tasked to sit in on a meeting between a packmate ahroun black fury, and the douchebag, newly fostern shadow lord philodox regarding a black fury PC cub’s education. It went about as well as one could expect. (Poorly. There was some player drama from elsewhere involved. (I love my packmates from that game, the shit that player said is all of it lies and slander and I see them on this board. You fucking know who you are.)

So I put the +job in reporting, and Scylla demanded a scene over it with all of the parties save the cub. So we went, and this guy would not fucking sit down, demanding ‘due respect’ as a fostern from a bunch of cliath. Which, to those who don’t know, is basically the college freshman telling the high school seniors to shut up and do what he says. It doesn’t work like Scylla and that fuckwad think it does. Until someone’s ass gets beat, but that’s Werewolf.

The scene went, then we started talking and, like, trying to have a productive conversation with Scylla about, you know, how Werewolf works and why we think she adjudicated incorrectly. I put my whole ass on the line, having played an Elder Philodox in a goddamn NATIONAL LARP ORG, and never losing my seat, which means I know I was doing something right because my sheet was total ass. Things got a little heated, and I just was like ‘Fuck this. You have more interest in sucking the male PC’s dick rather than listening to sense from three female PCs’ in more polite terms, then logged off and never logged in again.

Also, her ideas about how Pure Breed worked were really eugenicist and creepy in hindsight.

Dear gods.

Your PC might have been a burn out gifted kid, but your pack really weren’t in the right when it came to this particular discussion. There was player drama, sure …between some players who were convinced of what was truly a mistaken identity, and someone who hadn’t the first idea what they’d done to upset you all so much.

Without any actual evidence at all to back you up, your pack seemed to assume that one player was actually someone else, assumed the absolute worst of everything their character said and did, and actively tried to drive them off a game.

As for how rank and renown work, well, every game is different and every game’s culture is different. Sometimes it’s a college freshman telling the high school senior to shut up and sit down, but that’s rare; more often in my experience it’s a sergeant telling a private to shut up and sit down. And if the united sphere staff are saying it works like this on this game, it works like this on this game.

I don’t know about what conversations you had with Scylla, but if you’d started a conversation about how I wasn’t doing Werewolf right in my own sphere I might just be a little annoyed with you, especially after your group tried to drive someone else off the game over stuff that happened elsewhere on a game where they didn’t even have a character.

Sure, you played an Elder Philodox in a national LARP game. That and five bucks will buy me a coffee. MUs do not generally work like national LARP games. MUs don’t have to work like national LARP games. MUs usually don’t work like each other, never mind anything else. A MU’s culture is built in its first few open weeks, on the base that staff sets and regulates, and that’s how it works. Everyone takes a little while to figure out what this particular iteration does, what staff’s take on the sphere is, and runs with it. DI’s Garou sphere was much closer to the standard baseline than, say, Liberation’s. Liberation’s is just flat-out weird as far as that goes, which kept tripping some of your packmates up. Liberation’s isn’t a bad take, just weird, and not really applicable elsewhere.

As for Pure Breed - well. All I can say is that if you didn’t think it was creepy and eugenicist already, you were missing how Pure Breed is written. It’s creepy and eugenicist as fuck, and there’s not really any way to unpick that.

I’m not going to talk about Scylla; I wasn’t where she’s been accused of shit, I don’t know. But this corner? This corner I do know.

So… who was whom on Sheltering Skies? Because I still have popcorn, damnit.

When I was younger, I was promised that the machines would do the work so I could do the painting and the writing and the music.

The machines are doing the painting and the writing and the music, now, and they can only do it because someone fed them a whole load of things that lots of people made, for free. Perhaps I have the right to be a little pissed off about this.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

A whole load of bollocks that tl;dr everyone who isn’t running what I want sucks.

News for you, Rocket: Everything you claim to want is out there. It’s just that it’s so unpopular that it might as well not be.

You don’t need a new game, you need to go back to 1999.

The high-conflict high-PvP players aren’t interested in being reasonable, for the most part; they want to win, and they want to do it over your corpse. And if they lose then you cheated and ye gods the whining.

So when you come and claim that you’re trying to be reasonable by wanting to play with all the people we’ve seen being unreasonable over and over and over for decades, it’s not really surprising that most of us just aren’t that interested.

Been there, done that. Read the book, watched the movie, rolled up characters in the RPG, played the game, wore the T-shirt, ate the meal, even had the branded lunchbox.

We tried this. It sucked. It sucked for the people trying to play a game, and it sucked for the people who wanted nothing but victory.

No thanks.

One of our own needs a helping hand. Lem’s done a lot for the MU* community, and I figure it’s worth asking if we can help him out in turn. I won’t out who he is here, but he’s a great coder and a lovely guy who’s helped a lot of games.

GoFundMe: Assist Lem’s family in securing housing

@Prototart said in What happened, man?:

@Evilgrayson said in What happened, man?:

Er - where did you know me from?

the place you were playing Nightwing unless I am completely mixing you up with someone else and have you on my Discord for another reason

I have never played Nightwing in my entire life. I don’t know who you were thinking of, but that wasn’t me. I stole the name from the Stainless Steel Rat, not the world of comic books.

@Prototart said in What happened, man?:

also i never knew @Evilgrayson on a WoD game but they were far and away my single favorite person on the game i did know them on

That’s really lovely to hear, thank you for that!

Er - where did you know me from?

@sao And it didn’t go high enough for many of us.

A few more added.

Gods, do I feel old sometimes.

@catzilla said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:

@Evilgrayson Wait, wait. Are you saying that the player(s) on this game in question are VASpider and crew? I thought you were just using VASpider as an example of what this player and crew are doing.

If you are saying it is Spider, please report it to the staff of the game. I already had one game I loved ruined by her, I don’t want another.

It’s not Spider, no - just someone using the same tactics - and it’s been reported to staff on both extant games. What staff choose to do with that information is up to them.

@Juniper said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:

I interpreted this thread as a warning about two specific players residing in a specific game.

It kind of is - but it’s also a call for people to take a step back and think in general about what’s going on around them.

I have learned of two more sets of people on that first oWoD game who are, by more than one report, employing the same fucking tactics. And there are other games that I’m not on, and shit that I’m not seeing, and things that I don’t know. That call for people to stay safe and look after each other? That was heartfelt. By looking after each other, we reduce the harms of all sorts of things, but this stuff in particular.

Respect your own boundaries, and the boundaries of others. And above all, care.