@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.

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.

@Faraday said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

I’ve just literally seen too many cases through the years where people will do something like RP the worst line imaginable and think that a +roll Con or +roll Seduction should somehow make that work. For me, it doesn’t. If you can’t even get in the ballpark of portraying a convincing con artist, maybe that’s just not the right role for you.

Exactly.

In tabletop it’s pretty ordinary for a GM to say, “Woah, hold on, roll intelligence,” and then inform the player (on success) that their scheme is flawed and why, and help them come up with a good one. It’s harder to do that on a MU, where play continues without the GM watching.

I’ve had this experience where some PC was supposed to be, and statted to be, incredibly observant and cunning. The player, however, wasn’t, or wasn’t paying attention. So the PC did dumb shit. Then the GM fudged things so they worked out. Sounds kinda fair, and it’s not even PvP. But like Faraday says, it’s jarring. And hard to RP around. The PC is supposed to be Machiavelli, but what I see is Mr. Magoo.

Adviising students visiting the US for a short class to keep in touch with their nation’s consulates, and providing them with addresses and telephone numbers for the consulates closest to the cities the students will visit. Feeling like this is a necessary precaution. Want to cry.

I’m all for timelines on plots. If you do nothing, stuff still happens.

One of the most irritating situations I’ve encountered is to have all plot fed directly to Abelard, who is meant to distribute it but then refuses to give it to other PCs (presumably because this would disempower him) but also does not suffer any consequences for inaction. He excludes others and increases his IC power by ignoring the plot. @wheeee!

As for those players who don’t want to do anything to prevent the plot from destroying their favourite pub, but will complain bitterly when it does, well. None of the small handful of MUs I’ve made/run were meant to serve as sets for people to RP utterly independently of any GMing I might do. On a similar note, don’t come to D&D night at my house to play cribbage and bitch that the D&D players are noisy and have their dice all over the place.

@Juniper said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

In my experience the PC with the most power, or the first player to hear about it handles it using their NPC minions. It ends up as:

GM, to King: There are reports of zombie coyotes around the villages west of the city.

King, to GM: I move my personal army to go take care of it, and my best friend Danielle can go bless the land.

Abelard, Bridget, and Camille: How can we get involved?

King: Fuck off, it’s handled.

Later, some political rival: Why didn’t the City Watch Commander do anything about those zombie coyotes? They’re inactive and lazy!

This is why I’m a fan of the bottom-up version where Squire Manfred and Lady Ophelia get looped in. The scenario is more immediate and if they end up needing backup they can kick it up the chain of command. But the best way is for the GM to directly loop in as many people as possible because if you’re relying on players to involve other players… they fucking won’t.

Just fucking so. Perhaps even followed by:

bbpost or IC event announcing that there were zombie coyotes in the Western Wood, but the King’s men have gloriously destroyed them and burned the wood where they were hiding, Huzzah!

Ophelia pages Manfred: Everybody knows we go hawking or lute-playing there three times a week, but we didn’t see a thing, ffs, GM. is such a dick.

Sir Wacko, Landed Knight of the Western Wood: I realise my keep doesn’t have windows, but WTF, I ragequit.

@Ominous said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

My post was not meant to imply that plot stuff can’t flow both ways.

Didn’t mean to sound as if it did. I’m just saying, trickle-down-plot-economics has this peril. It works best in settings where the chain-of-command is almost invariably played by the book, like in a Star Trek or military game. (And still needs some shaking up in those.)

If you’re doing politics and intrique where players who are ostensibly lower on the chain of command are nevertheless trying to command, it just can’t work.

The question about NPC lackeys is something I’d strongly advise having a plan about. Lords and Ladies have lackeys, but how much can you do with them? If I was building an L&L game again I’d have clear rules about it, and a caveat that your NPCs are always kinda gonna suck against PCs, because. GoB had a couple of McGuffins that people used NPCs to steal and it was so boring and dissapointing to whoever lost it to just find it gone because NPCs rolled okay.

GoB’s set up had all the top (King, heads of major houses and almost all minor ones) as not only NPCs but not in the city. It was pretty much a bunch of non-heirs sent to the kingdom’s premier-but-not-the-capital city.

@Ominous said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

in general, the top echelons of power should be NPCs who give tasks to the PC underlings.

When a plot is delivered to the IC-world via a ‘power gives tasks to underlings’ route, it doesn’t matter if the top PC power is the Galactic Emperor or the Assistant Manager.

GM, to King: There are reports of zombie coyotes around the villages west of the city.

King, to Lord Mayor: There are reports of zombie coyotes around the villages west of the city. Get somebody to deal with it.

Lord Mayor, to City Watch Commander: There are reports of zombie coyotes around the villages west of the city. Go deal with it.

City Watch Commander, to Abelard, Bridget and Camille: There are reports of zombie coyotes around the villages west of the city. Let’s all go deal with it.

Okay, but how about:

GM, to Squire Manfred and Lady Ophelia: You’re riding past the villages west of the city, singing ‘The Ballad of Brave Sir Robin’ and practicing the lute, when you spot some zombie coyotes.

Well shit. What will Manfred and Ophelia do? Tell the watch? Tell the mayor? Tell the king? Try to take out the coyotes themselves? If they tell the watch but not the mayor, does that reduce the mayor’s standing and power? If they tell the mayor and he deals with it without consulting the king, does that undermine the king’s power?

When plot-stuff flows both ways, PC power is constrained by the powerful PC’s need for IC support from the less powerful. If it always flows top-down, well, not so much. Not at all if you let the mighty get away with taking no action/ineffective action/action only involving off-camera NPC minions.

@Roadspike Yes. But if what proves a PC worthy of a leadership position is a high Leadership stat, this doesn’t work.

Yep, there are lots of ways to handle it. But none of them are half as much fun as having somewhat believable IC leaders rather than ones who are supported only by unseen faceless nameless NPC masses whose lack of desire to frag them is inexplicable IC.

@MisterBoring

@Gashlycrumb said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

PC was supposed to be, and statted to be, incredibly observant and cunning. The player, however, wasn’t, or wasn’t paying attention. So the PC did dumb shit. Then the GM fudged things so they worked out. Sounds kinda fair, and it’s not even PvP. But like Faraday says, it’s jarring. And hard to RP around. The PC is supposed to be Machiavelli, but what I see is Mr. Magoo.

@STD I’d make the players (it is a big group) all roll 5d6 and write the total on a card, shuffle them and give them back to me and set the timer on my phone with the results but not tell them that’s what happened. But of /course/ it should have Fate points or their ilk.

But your ordinary before-you-roll SL roll doesn’t give you good or bad luck, just strange, so you still roll your attempt, you just succeed or fail in a strange way. You roll to search for clues in the room, you get strange luck and a success, you skid on the rug after being startled by a pigeon that’s in here for some undetermined reason, and uncover the hidden chamber. If you don’t get SL, you just look under the rug. Maybe if you get SL and fail you can spend one of your Fate points to make Strange Luck turn your failure to success, while if you don’t get SL and fail you must spend two.

ETA: Better yet, you roll a FATE system D6 when you get Strange luck, to determine if it’s good, bad, or neutral.

@STD oh god. Now I really want to work up a homebrew for my table-top game and do a Strange Luck game, where all the PCs have Strange Luck, and every time you roll anything you also roll for Strange Luck first, it’s just a pass fail, pass and the whole table quickly brainstorms some extremely unlikely result for your attempt. And there’s a timer set for a some random length of time between five minutes and half an hour, and every time it goes off you get another bit of Strange Luck. I wonder how far we’d actually get.

@Faraday I do remember a WoD +rumour system that I think was good – you rolled to see what rumours you heard. You rolled to see how easy it would be for another PC to hear a rumour you started. You could attempt to change that difficulty by boosting or quelling the rumour. You could investigate rumours and roll to see if you could find out who had started, boosted, quelled or investigated the rumour.

It might have seemed wonky if there was somebody who was really good at those rolls, but in RP nobody listened to them or told them anything. But it did put a sort of buffer-layer simply by making it not so immediately obvious.

Sometimes I’ve found even the “your social conflict dice work on NPCs, PCs react to your RP” jarring. If Abelard has enormous influence in ‘society’ and everybody loves him based on his dice, but every single PC thinks he’s an insufferable prick and an idiot, it’s rough. Though really, this sort of thing may have less to do with social-stats and their use and more to do with players who want to play total assholes but not the consequences of assholery.