@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.

@Yam said in Banning Bad, Actually?:

It’s okay for them to expect some kind of service, and when they don’t get it, deride someone’s hard work,

Well, yeah, it’s okay to expect some kind of service when that’s what’s written on the box. The idea that everybody gets a turn is pretty built in.

@Pavel said in Banning Bad, Actually?:

@Faraday Well yeah, but you’re Faraday. You can speak braille and have counted to infinity twice. You won a game of connect four in three moves.

Oh, the same approach has worked very well for me. And I tried to win connect-four by using tablespoons of mashed potato instead of chips.

@Aria said in MU Peeves Thread:

At that point it’s not harassment, it’s just the other person being annoying by not taking the hint. And my dudes, dropping a hint is not clear communication. It’s deliberately vague communication,

Yep. My own experience with that was finding out that someone felt harassed by my asking for RP and chatting. Thinking, “Yeah, they never actually want to play and they never seem enthusiastic, but they always say they’re stressed/sick RL, and they always say ‘another time’ and they engage with the chat.” Everything about the interaction but the ‘hint’ in their tone said I should continue to reach out, and I thought that ‘hint’ was just them not feeling chipper because illness.

As a staffer:

Summarily banned, with no warning or even notification, a player who’d been RPing sex with child PCs.

Banned somebody who wanted NPCs to be dumb for them and refused to accept “no” for an answer and shut up about it.

Banned somebody who was edging up to gross teen sex stuff, and also was just a problem for not complying to course-corrections regarding theme, so I was already every week telling them stuff like, “No, animals are just animals and you don’t have a gull friend that steals food for you,” and such. This player was actually a lot of fun, I thought, but they just wouldn’t stop being a little too special.

Banned someone who refused to RP IC consequences and tried to escape them by disconnecting or going OOC, and got really rude when told that their PC would have to deal with the situation, not wait for everyone to forget it.

Didn’t ban, but had a player cuss at me and leave because the game was not what they wanted it to be. Which was fine, though I am sorry he’d wasted enough time thinking things were otherwise that it felt like a cheat to him.

Didn’t ban, but should have, somebody who was really bothering other players by using them for emotional support when they didn’t want to take on that role. I knew this was a problem and had talked to the player about it, but I didn’t know it was as big a problem as it was, and the players being harmed were shy to tell me and just left. I ought to have been more proactive about that, the fear-of-staff thing is a problem to overcome.

I didn’t have other staffers to ask. There was no backlash that I was aware of. Three in five got subdued cheers.

As a player:

Not banned, but asked to make a new, less depressing, PC, or leave, since I didn’t fit the intended tone of the game. It was polite and clear, and I did as asked.

Actually banned. From my PoV, it was that the staffer, a former friend, had decided abruptly that they didn’t like me/want to play with me any more but didn’t tell me in words, but by treating me like shit and responding to my “why are you treating me like shit?” and “that was shitty,” by claiming it was a mistake and that we were friends while campaigning against me to others, getting really wound up about it, and imagining/claiming that twice monthly interactions with me were daily rants and harassment. It was far from without warning, but the warnings all came with denials, and direct ‘am I even welcome on this game?’ questions answered with repeated lies of ‘we’re friends, you are wanted, stay’ to me but seen as a violation of boundaries as if an autistic guy is gonna see the unstated line when you’re directly communicating that it’s not there.

@hellfrog I am pretty sure the statement is that they’re harrassing people. I think it’s upthread, about me doing this. The other person I know who was banned seemingly for asking for RP wasn’t told why, just got blocked off the game shortly after asking for RP. Old news now, But anyway, the ‘what if I get in trouble for bothering people?’ fear is legit. Kinda like the ‘how often is too often to +request or poke about a request?’ anxieties.

@Yam

Once we all had anxiety, or we had emotional/mental fatigue from being the person who did the who-where-aboutwhat? scene-organising labour too often.

Now we can top those legit reasons off with the fact that some get away with treating asking for RP as a violation of boundaries and a bannable offense. So yeah, who’s asking these days?

@Cobalt I’ve asked. I’ll message you privately if I get a bite.

Degrees?

@dvoraen said in Missed Settings:

Stargate is practically an excuse for “theme park” RP of a sort, where you just say: “This world is like <theme>!” When I thought about it that way, I was like: “… Why haven’t I seen more Stargate games?”

Ha. What if all the PCs are in a holodeck simulation, or a a horrible wires-into-your-brain VR system, or something in between. They’re dropped around different ‘Westworld’ type theme-parky things, possibly deadly ones 'cause there’s a touch of ‘Saw’. Who will survive, and at the end, which characters who were picked up along the way will turn out to be real brainwashed people who think they’re from the Old West or Pompeii or whatever, and which will disappear forever?

@Alamias Dammit.