@Floof said in MU Peeves Thread:

I’ve been trying to just be like fuck it guess I’ll just be awful then! But it’s SO HARD.

Cheering you on. This is why my mother wrote “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly,” on her piano.

It’s irritating that “It’s only a game,” so often comes up in the context of, “You’re wrong to have hurt feelings about it,” but seldom in the context of, “Relax, you’re allowed to suck, it’s not your Ph.D. dissertation.”

Play for fun. With typoes, grammatical errors, and another beer if you want. You don’t have to impress people. I’ve had a lot of fun with people whose characters have orbs. Some of them have even been limpid pools. I’ve had fun with players who have limited English vocabularies and used me as a thesarus. I’ve had fun with players who regularly fall asleep at the keys. I’ve had fun with players who are emergency services workers and just dissapeared mid-scene.

And also, give people a break. Don’t dismiss them as sucky just because they don’t impress you the first time you see them. Let people enjoy the hobby instead of feeling like they shouldn’t show up if they’re not at the top of their game that day.

Also, people. You don’t suck. I’ve been playing these silly things since, uh, 1994 and I have yet to meet a MUer who could not write bestselling novels for John “See Jack Litigate. Litigate, Jack, Litigate” Grisham if they’d just get paid enough to try. I have RPed on MUs with Jim Butcher and Neil Gaiman and neither of them developed the gushy “they’re just the best RPer” groupies that your average staff-alt gathers. Hell, Gaiman essentially said it was too hard.

Hateful bigot James Dobson.

My dear friend who, one Sunday morning while working at a Denny’s, deliberately poured hot coffee directly onto the crotch of hateful bigot James Dobson, is quite well.

Ahhh.

Heh. My peeve is this idea that long = good when it comes to writing.

Having genuinely worked as a professional editor, I assure you, it ain’t so.

The other problem I have with the people who write novels is that they give too much to react to, they advance the scene so much with their poses, that I’m left being like, I wanted to explore this one thing in this pose, but they’ve already moved on past it in their own pose that posing back an concentrating on that thing when they’ve already moved on from seems pointless.

In RP, this. Very much this.

Abelard looks down, embarrassed, and carefully sets his beer glass back in the ring of condensation it left on the table. “So, yeah,” he says, biting his lip, “That’s why I fucked the ocelot.”

Camille has arrived.

Brigid is sitting with Abelard at a table. She looks at him with compassion and says, “That must have been awful.”

Camille comes in and makes her way across the dance-floor, attracting attention with her boss moves and demonstrating all the latest steps. After the song ends she sashays swishily over to where Brigid and Abelard are sitting. With catlike grace she springs onto their table, kicking over a glass. “Fourscore and seven years ago,” she declaims loudly, “I started typing this pose, and civilizations may yet rise and fall before I am finished!” Twirling gleefully, she leaps away, singing, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum! Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum! "

Abelard stares as time collapses to a pinhole. When his inexplicable lethargy passes and he is able to react he picks at his shirtfront, noting ruefully that the beer splashed on him by Camille’s kicking feet has dried to an indelible stain.

Brigid says, “What the fuck.”

Very often either all the other PCs are frozen in time while the “great writer” fillibusters, rendering the dialogue disasterous, or it’s five hundred words describing how the trail of smoke from Camille’s cigarette swirls slowly and majestically about in the still air of the stinking and stuffy dive bar until it forms an elegant Rorschachian type image that resembles a tiny man standing outside a giant vagina wondering if he should go inside or not.

Edited for typoes and to add: Don’t feel bad for writing badly while gaming, either. Have fun, this is play-time. You’re probably not even close to as bad as you think, anyway.

For fuck’s sake, if you are using a published RPG, don’t make a fucking house rule that directly contradicts the published rules after some poor player made a choice based on the published rules, and then force them to live with their “IC consequences.”

Peeve of the Day: When you don’t even want to be in a scene half that big and probably wouldn’t join if you had a choice, but you still feel bitter that your character can’t go. WTF, brain.

I wear a glittery enamel pin-badge that says ‘MAKE IT GAY YOU COWARDS’ on my hat.

Today a stranger started some sort of right-wing rant at me, assuming I’d agree, but then spotted this delightful bit of flair, shut her mouth, turned around and walked briskly away from me.

What joy!

The worst thing about social RP is that tedious twit who responds to your channel-chat call-for-RP by paging you a lecture about how they don’t like social RP, implies that it’s your very favourite and that you’re an inferior player for liking it, and gives you a weird sort of ultimatum to the effect of ‘I will RP with you but only if you keep it at least seventy-five percent plot and less than twenty-five percent social or slice-of-life’ and then refuses to bring any plot-elements to the table. You want to say, “If I wanted lazy and demanding I’d set myself up as a dominatrix and be on FetLife, not MUs, go fuck yourself,” but you’d get banned.

I feel very fortunate that the comic-book and gaming store of my teens did almost always have a woman at the counter.

And very fortunate that now most of the gaming stores in town are places where hot trans girls want YOU to play Magic: The Gathering with them.

I like descs. I like writing them. I like reading them. I hate it when it’s a link to a picture.

But as a staffer I wasn’t looking for writing quality in your character desc or your BG. I just wanted them to show that your character belonged in the game world.

I don’t think you can do Chekhov’s Gun on a MU, you never know what will become relevant. Or what major super obvious thing you’ve been pointing at with your whole character-concept will somehow, against all the odds and the conventions of fiction, never matter.

@bear_necessities said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Jumpscare said in MU Peeves Thread:

Yes, her eyes may harken back to bygone timeless memories hidden within pools of mystery, but what color are they?

IDK about you but eyes harken back to bygone timeless memories isn’t an automatic AI flag to me. I’ve seen descs like this since the late 90s?

Yeah. Back in the early '90’s there was a WORA thread challenging to people to spoof this – write the most unweildy, long, screen-scrolling purple desc you can write, without it including any basic information. Hair colour, eye colour, skin colour, height, weight, age, and if you were really good at it, appearant gender, all obscure. Actually I doubt ChatGPT could do it so well.

Dan Simmons

@MisterBoring said in Celebrities We've Lost 2026 Edition:

Robert Duvall, legendary actor and filmmaker.

Gus! Nooooo.

@MisterBoring

@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

Are people trying and failing to run live scenes? If so, why? Perhaps there are tools to help.

I’m gonna just take a guess…

Scheduling is a pain and if you’re doing it through messages that somebody might take a day to answer the proposed date can roll past before you’ve heard back from everyone that it’s good.

With asynch on the game a player is more likely to discover and interact with players whose habitual online-times don’t match their own. This creates RP groups with greater than usual scheduling conflicts. And it meaans that timing-incompatibility problems that you’d otherwise never even know about become evident on an Ares game. Of course, you also wouldn’t know about the player and characters either.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Gashlycrumb I think there’s honestly a lot of nuance and discussion to be had on job queues all together

Yeah. The original AnomalyJobs came with the coder as the headwiz yelling at people for using it wrongly and establishing by force of virtual lung-power, a standard for single-topic +requests and what sorts of things you could page about without being told it needed to be a +request, etc, and rode herd on the rest of staff about that, probably unpleasantly. As a gamerunner I had a vetting process for them that was meant to keep pacing more fair but would not have been robust enough for a game with the level of GM involvement and plot complexity I wish for lately.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

some people just absolutely cannot explain what they’re actually asking for in a job request for whatever reason that is

I know I’ve been that guy. Well, my hyperbolic joke about it is that there are those staffers where you ask if your PC can have a housecat and they tell you that a talking green ridable tiger isn’t themely, and you try to explain housecat until they get sharp and you feel anxious and bad about it and still don’t know if your PC can get a kitten. But of course in actuality it’s nothing simple like a kitten, it’s some complicated scheme that I’m explaining badly.

@MisterBoring That’s very true. Honestly, I don’t mind a slow turnaround and can be very patient (all my forum whinging aside). What grinds on me is observing that other characters are getting tonnes more shit done in the same time-period. If you do 'em all in order and some players flood your jobs system, they get to do more shit.

I always felt like it was rude to have too many jobs going at once, just like I wouldn’t send you a bunch of emails one after another without waiting for a reply. I was really happy with the ‘you can only have so many jobs open at a time’ feature. (I would add to it some sort of +request/FIRE function so a player with too many +jobs could make an emergency sort of one, but that’d be icing on the cake.)

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

The subgroup of players that exist across all MUs that I refer to as “The Job Mill”. These players will generate more jobs than the entire rest of a game’s players combined, in some extreme cases multiple jobs a day.

For players outside that group, this is a frustrating explaination for non-responsiveness. Certianly the unending job-mill could tire a staffer out, but “I am too busy responding to a small extremely active group to get around to you,” just makes people wonder why you don’t do one job from each person who has one open, and get to those second and third and sixteenth ones from Job-Millers after you’ve dealt with the one from the guy who hasn’t made a request in weeks.

@Noraaa said in MU Peeves Thread:

But for me, I think the fatigue mostly comes from what I’d call a “creative tax.” When you tell stories for folks, you put your love and energy into it. But you are not drawing from an endless well. Creativity comes in bursts and windfalls, and there are droughts. The ask is that you basically draw from an endless well, though.

This is totally legit. Staffers should say it when it happens. I think players will understand. Of course, if you tell me that you’re just drawing a creative blank on my PC and don’t know what to do with him, I’ll probably want to talk about stuff I’d like the character to do or have happen to him.

I wonder how much resentment of players comes from feeling that creative exhaustion and associating it with the player who just happened to be the one in your queue when the block attacks.

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Gashlycrumb we sure could

I think you mean, “I” by “we” and forgot the “wish.” As in “I sure wish I could openly accuse Gashlycrumb without anybody finding out that my ‘evidence’ is hearsay, speculation, and affirming the consequent.”

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

@MisterBoring it’s always about specific incidents. People just don’t own up to them because they don’t want the scrutiny - for a variety of reasons, I’m sure.

All patterns are made up of specific incidents, but we can still talk about patterns.

@Yam said in MU Peeves Thread:

There’s also the whole concept of reputation in our very tiny community. If you have a reputation of being someone difficult to deal with

That is so.

Nevertheless, no.

I do not believe that every time, (or almost every time, or even a majority of the time) a player finds staff chronically unresponsive it’s because the staffer is justifiably annoyed with the player, or the player has a bad reputation.

It’s pretty demoralising and anxiety-provoking to tell people that unresponsive staff probably dislike them personally for probably good reasons. And it doesn’t go well with being compassionate, patient, and willing to extend trust to staff.

Seems pretty off when paired with concern over game-runners feeling discouraged because somebody admits that players can often get a pretty good idea of how active they are and where.

What @xCroaker said just exactly except I suck at video games and don’t play them.