@Yam said in Banning Bad, Actually?:

You earnestly think it’s okay for people to address others this way?

What on earth did I say that makes you believe I think it’s okay for people to treat others rudely? I have said repeatedly that it is important for staff to set boundaries. All we disagree on is what form those boundaries take as a default action.

Do you think these people can be coached into acting like a model MUSHer with a gentle warning? A second chance? A strike system? Do you think they won’t cause problems down the line?

I don’t know what you mean by “these people”, because I don’t think it takes a certain kind of person to lose their temper, say something they regret, word something more confrontationally than they should have, etc. Humans are going to human.

But yes, I know with 100% certainty that some people who screw up can mend things and behave properly, because I have literally seen it happen. On many occasions.

I have also banned people! Sometimes that’s the right thing to do. Sometimes there are less drastic alternatives. I’m genuinely baffled why this is such a controversial take.

@Pavel said in Banning Bad, Actually?:

You won a game of connect four in three moves.

I’m not even sure I’ve ever won a game of connect four. Especially against my kids, lol.

@Yam said in Banning Bad, Actually?:

This was basically enough to get OnceWas banned. This person was freshly new. This is the most hair trigger case I can think of. He was immediately shown the door, although he was sure to kinda’ buckle down on his stance. Mild, probably, but no one wanted to deal with it.

I didn’t recall them by name, but I searched and all I could find was this post where I basically said that their attitude over a minor documentation issue was “bafflingly aggressive”. I can’t find anywhere where I said they should be banned for it? Or supported them being banned for such a thing? That doesn’t seem like something I would do, but maybe I’m forgetting some important detail.

I’m unclear of what your threshold is, as I recall you were not very approving of this behavior.

Disapproving of someone’s behavior doesn’t equate to thinking they should be banned for it. As staff, you have the authority to set boundaries. Sometimes that can be done with a coaching approach, other times you need something firmer, like:

“If you would like to try again and rework that page into something even remotely approaching a reasonable discussion of issues rather than a full-on attack, feel free. Otherwise leave. It’s that simple.” - actual Fara quote

In that specific case, the player backtracked and we had a constructive conversation. There have been other times where other players full-on apologized and we’ve gone on to have a good relationship.

There have certainly been times where I’ve given someone too many chances, but on the whole this approach has worked out well. YMMV.

@Trashcan said in Banning Bad, Actually?:

and let us leave room for grace and assume this is more than an isolated incident)

That is the whole crux of the debate from my perspective. Various folks in the thread have made statements that indicate they don’t leave grace to ensure it’s more than an isolated incident. That even a single remark they deemed “rude” was enough to warrant a ban. I’m too tired to go and find the exact quotes, but it was pretty clear to me.

I just think that’s excessive. I also think it’s their right to do so on their games if they see fit.

@Tez said in Banning Bad, Actually?:

that we might all be coming into this from different perspectives based on our own experiences with the people involved and the situation at large. I don’t think it’s really a pure abstract thought exercise here. This is coming from a very specific example.

Can’t speak for anyone else obviously, but I have been approaching it as a purely abstract thought exercise. I don’t know the game in question or anyone involved in the original situation, and the log we saw alluded to some degree of prior history that we have no context for. Maybe there was just a bad vibe. I have no idea.

@Tez said in Empire Discussion Thread:

I think it’s a mistake to treat this as a generic case rather than a specific one.

Why? The convo has long since spun off from WS/Ada into a more generic discussion about whether it’s best to tow a hard line on banning people for “being rude” (which is an incredibly vague line that I’d be willing to bet WE HAVE ALL CROSSED, intentionally or not, at one point or another).

@Yam said in Empire Discussion Thread:

I know this is gonna’ be hard to believe for some folk, but you can actually have a game of relatively decent people that, even on their off days, won’t be particularly rude or pushy directly to the game runners. It might not be a BIG game, but from what I gather, it doesn’t look like most staffers want to staff big games anyway.

That’d be nice, but I have never in my life been on such a game.

Look, I’m not excusing rudeness here, but let’s be realistic. These are open public internet games with people who don’t always know each other well, and text-only chat. Text lacks tone. People don’t always word things right. Even the best players can have moments where they get frustrated or impatient.

I’ve never been intentionally rude to a staff member, but I can guarantee I’ve said things in such a way that could be taken as rude, snarky, pushy, etc. at some point. (Actually probably with @Roadspike, lol, since we’ve had some good-natured but spirited debates about FS3 implementations. ) Many players who I consider good peeps and friends have slipped up on occasion. People make mistakes.

Nobody’s saying you should tolerate a player who acts egregiously, or one who’s a constant pain in the butt. It is important to have boundaries. All I’m saying is that it’s probably in your best interests as a game-runner to give people a little grace (and hopefully they’ll give it back to you on YOUR off days).

@Wizz said in Empire Discussion Thread:

if someone decides to ban lots of very rude strangers, I mean. so what? this is honestly the only medium I have ever played where bans are considered this shocking “nuclear option.” they are actually pretty common on tons of other platforms, and it doesn’t prevent them from being diverse and active spaces, because it’s about creating and maintaining the game culture and they understand that people come and go regardless.

I don’t disagree with you on principle. Obviously people should act like mature adults, and staff should set whatever limits they see fit.

My point is more practical. I’ve run a LOT of games through the years, for the most part with a reputation of them being pretty chill, friendly places. Yet even on games like that - if I had banned everyone who was the least bit rude, pushy, entitled, disrespectful, snarky, or in any other way “out of line” on a single occasion, I wouldn’t have had any players. Many would be banned, others would have left because of their friends being banned, and still others would have left because I developed a reputation where one misstep (even just a misunderstanding) leads to a ban.

But again I want to stress that I’m not criticizing Ada in this specific instance because I don’t have all the facts, and even if I did - it’s still entirely their call.

@Wizz said in Empire Discussion Thread:

I do not at all think that behavior is typical of the “average” crowd. … I honestly would prefer more staff to have a very clear and hard line like that

Even good players can have a bad day, lose their temper, get frustrated or impatient, or even just word something poorly that comes across harsher than they meant. Nobody’s perfect.

If staff wants to take a hard line, that’s their prerogative. It’s not for me to tell other people how to run their game. But in my experience, it’s not necessary. You can set boundaries for acceptable behavior without banning everyone who steps out of line. For example:

@Pacha said in Empire Discussion Thread:

Had I been the staff member in that situation, I would definitely have asked them to go away, come back, and try again after an attitude adjustment.

@Wizz We don’t have all the details, but I read that more as they chose not to submit more jobs when there were already a couple open. The job systems I’m familiar with don’t really have a player-driven “cancel” feature. If this one does and they +job/cancel-ed a bunch in a fit of pique, that’d be different. But even then, cancelling a job because you’re impatient is hardly something I’d consider a bannable offense. (Though staff is obviously free to ban anyone they like for any reason, or no reason.)

@Wizz said in Empire Discussion Thread:

you complained that job 18 had been open longest and she points out that it hadn’t even been 5 days? that is looney toons, dude.

I have no connection to this game or any of these people, but I’m kind of puzzled by this take. WS said:

“having a bunch of actions open that we’re being addressed was really making me feel a kind of way.”

As staff jobs go, that is the mildest of mild complaints, and easily handled by a simple: “We try to handle jobs within X days, you can expect a response soon.” Even better if you have a policy to point to on job response times. Personally I always tried to respond to jobs within 24 hours, 48 at the most. MUs can be fast-paced, esp if players are playing multiple scenes a week. I don’t think a polite follow-up after a few days is unreasonable.

The back and forth about the scene logger is a bit more perplexing. Ada seems to expect some evidence of RP (“I haven’t seen any substantive RP…”) yet does not clearly state how that evidence should be provided. Are they, in fact, expecting a log? An explanation in the job? A confirmation from the other player? I can understand WS’ frustration on the lack of clear instructions. But it sounds like maybe there was some prior history there (re: “we wrote out long explanations the last time, you said…”) so there might be more to the story.

@Jihgfed That sounds neat. Here’s something I wrote to intro MUSHing to my grad school writing class: MUSH 101. Might give you some ideas.

The main thing I struggled with while writing that was that MUs vary so much. Even among MUSHes, there’s so much variety that it’s hard to describe anything in generalities. When you include MUDs/RPIs, it’s even worse. It may be easier to do a case study example of the specific kind of MU you’re familiar with (like WoD).

The wikipedia MUD article has a good breakdown of the history of the hobby as a whole.

Yes, I also pronounce it “Moo”.

@Yam said in Historical Games Round 75:

when you’re down there in the trenches, you see how things unfold in ways that are difficult to predict, and you’re there in the crossfire feeling the heat of just how bad things can get.

Yeah I highlighted a couple instances that stick out in my mind, but it’s been almost 15 years and a lot is hazy. What I remember above all was coming away from the experience thinking: “I love historical settings, but I am NEVER doing this again.”

So I can totally understand the folks who don’t want to deal with that stuff in their pretendy funtime games. I just also have trouble with the idea of sanitizing history. Apart from it breaking my brain because of how interwoven oppression is, it feels dismissive somehow to the oppressed.

@Gashlycrumb said in Historical Games Round 75:

not “we want to do this,” but “If this game was historically accurate, this would happen.”

Oh, no, they 100% were going to do it. Two things stopped it - one was me saying that I wouldn’t stop them trying, but I would not allow them to succeed. I wasn’t going to do anything bad to them, but their efforts would be thwarted. It was just a bridge too far for me. The other was that the players involved got so upset over the situation that they wrote the PCs out of the game, so it became kinda moot.

@Gashlycrumb said in Historical Games Round 75:

I want to hear your war stories.

I liked that game. And RPed some stuff that was about racism. I don’t remember it beng a problem at all. My PC just had some elaborate ghoulish scheme to help hide somebody’s relationship and their child’s parantage. There was some chat about how it wasn’t necessary 'cause the rest of the PCs would be fine with it anyway.

Spoiler alert: They weren’t fine with it (well, not all of them).

For those unfamiliar, the setting was a small town in Wyoming just after the Civil War. There was a whole article on historical plausibility, but the most relevant rule was this (paraphrased for brevity):

This is a historical game, and on-screen portrayal of prejudice is permitted. Staff in no way endorses racism, sexism, or any other kind of -ism, but we are not trying to rewrite history. Keep it IC.

Most of the PCs were super tolerant. That was nice in many ways, but it got to the point where:

• Some of the players doing storylines about overcoming prejudice felt kind of gaslighted (like they were overreacting / their struggles weren’t real)
• Some of the players who stuck closer to historical norms felt ostracized (like they themselves were racist)
• It felt jarring any time a NPC acted with historical prejudice.

I got caught in the middle a lot, and it wasn’t fun. The worst situation was when two good players (whom I considered friends) left the game after other PCs threatened to

Spoiler

Were the other PCs acting historically? Yes. Did it suck? Also yes.

There was also tension in how to handle the conflict between settlers and Native Americans respectfully, which made me personally uncomfortable.

The biggest drama was people throwing fits over the number of “exceptional” characters. I approved PCs by looking at their character in its historical context: could that character exist in 1866? Many were bothered by the cognitive dissonance that occurred when you had all these exceptional characters together in this small town. But I wasn’t about to say yes to a female ranchhand but then turn around and say no to a Black doctor because we’d met some arbitrary quota of folks who didn’t adhere to historical norms. Some likened it to Twin Peaks 1866, and I was ok with that. Others weren’t.

@Pyrephox said in Historical Games Round 75:

But these societal forces shaped the era and had a lot of impact on the culture, the structure of society, and the pressures that drove people to accomplish amazing and heartbreaking things. When you remove, for example, the fact that suffragettes could be and were tortured and murdered by law enforcement for campaigning for women’s rights, then the courage it took to be a suffragette is diminished. If you’re talking about union-building, I think you have to include the fact that union-busters used racism to try and drive working class groups apart, even if that effort fails in the context of your game. If you’re talking 1920s-30s, it’s a bit repugnant to me to not make it clear that it’s an era when the people who made some of the defining music of the era couldn’t have a drink in the “respectable” clubs they played in. It also helps contrast some of the speakeasys which were integrated and even havens for LGBT folk of the era, etc. The fact that people had to find refuge in criminality because the laws were bigoted and unjust is a huge part of the story of the era.

This exactly. It’s not that I WANT to see -isms in my RP. They’re just interwoven into society to such a degree that I cannot separate them from the time period.

You want to do alt history and show how history diverged? Cool.

You want to do a sci-fi / fantasy setting cosplaying as a historical time period? Cool - though I think Firefly demonstrated that even this can land problematically.

You want to say: “We acknowledge that these things exist in the real world but they are not the focus here so here are some boundaries”? Also cool, but tricky.

But if you’re going with: “It’s the 1920s but all prejudice has been solved” I’m just gonna be like…

@Ashkuri said in Historical Games Round 75:

@Gashlycrumb said in Missed Settings:

Really, Westerns seem like a very easy setting to run.

There are a few historical -isms to navigate in those

Having run a western game, this is the understatement of the century.

Also I stink at formatting today apparently.

@KDraygo said in Your first game?:

If I recall correctly, I got into MUSHing in the mid to late 90s and my first game was SW1. This kicked off because I had finished reading the Heir to the Empire Trilogy (Thrawn trilogy) and I started reading more post movies Star Wars novels.

Same! My buddy in college recruited me to SW1. That was where I learned to MUSHcode, making some stupid datapad object or something.

I also loved Robotech. I was re-watching it recently with my kids and realizing how much my interest in post-apocalyptic settings started so early with Robotech and Battlestar.

Battlestar Galactica (the original 1990’s version). though I was only there briefly. The flight sims and immersive code systems weren’t my jam, even back then. The game that really got me into MUs was Maddock (consent-based wild west game).

@Yam said in Character Death:

Curious if anyone has actually seen a PC death play out where the player certainly didn’t intend to die AND didn’t consent to being in a situation that warned the risk.

It depends on what you mean by “consent to”.

The first PC I lost was on a (very old) Star Wars game where they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time and rolled poorly on an Athletics check. On another SW game, my character was sniped in the town square by a bounty hunter acting on a dubiously-initiated bounty. My PC didn’t die, but easily could have. On TGG, I generally played non-combatants, but one time my nurse char was killed because I forgot to +takecover before going AFK and the (usually safe) base got shelled by artillery.

One can argue that just by playing on a game with the possibility of PC death I was implicitly consenting to whatever came my way. That’s fair. But I certainly didn’t enter into any of those scenes thinking it at all likely my character was at risk.

@somasatori said in PyReach:

For real, @Tez is right and a lot of very simple things we take for granted in Rhost/Ares/Tiny/Penn is not included in base Evennia. Mail, for example, is handled via contrib file, page is a custom thing, etc.

That’s true, but I will say that same lack of built-in features offers tremendous flexibility, and is why I steer folks to Evennia for super custom projects.

When you come into things with the pre-baked idea of what a MU should have, as Ares and (to a lesser extent) the Penn/Rhost/Tiny family, it makes it difficult to depart from those paradigms. Just think of all the drama caused by built-in commands vs +commands over the years.

Everything being a plugin/contrib isn’t necessarily bad, because it can lead to developers who focus on making a really good (insert system here). Just think of how Myrddin’s BBS or Anomaly’s jobs or Theno’s WoD were de-facto standards in Penn/Tiny even though they weren’t baked in.

In the early Ares designs, everything was intended to be a plugin to offer that same degree of flexibility. But I quickly realized that there are a LOT of dependencies across systems. Far more than I anticipated. To make everything work together seamlessly out of the box, which is Ares’ main “selling” point, the code has to be very “opinionated” about how things should be done.

Everything is a tradeoff.

@MisterBoring said in Character Death:

I think after reading a lot of stuff in this thread, I realize that I don’t necessarily want characters to die, I want characters to have their story end.

Dang, I have the opposite problem in MUs. I have a hard enough time getting my characters’ story arcs to a meaningful conclusion, let alone to bring the entire character to a nice ending.

There are exceptions of course. BSP ended in a way that gave everyone a chance to wrap things up and write epilogues. That was nice. TGG’s campaigns had fixed endings, so we could bring things to a natural conclusion.

@Pavel said in Character Death:

I do. They very rarely appear, and when they do, there’s no guarantee it’ll matter.

Good point. Also, it fundamentally prevents me from doing anything else with that character, which as I said above - is pretty much the whole reason I’m there.

I liken it to how ensemble TV shows rarely kill off their main leads. Occasionally they’ll do it as a shocking twist or something, but mostly they only do it when people leave the show. I realize there are those who prefer the Game of Thrones model where nobody’s safe. They like feeling like the characters are in real peril. It makes the show feel more gritty since the main chars aren’t protected by plot armor.

And to be clear - there’s nothing wrong with liking that. I’m not trying to wrongfun anyone. All I want is a little non-judgemental understanding that there are those of us who get attached to characters - both in TV and in MUs - and who don’t like having to get invested all over again when they get bumped off randomly.