@KarmaBum Crossing the threads again, but now I wonder if the Wild Imaginary West set says anything about the -isms. If I am remembering it right from the videos, everything west of the Missisippi is monster country. Bleeding Kansas seems unlikely if moving to Kansas to influence its vote involves not merely the horrors of moving to Kansas, but also getting eaten by a gru.

@Faraday I remember them leaving, but not the why.

I would respond just the way you did.

ETA: + telling them that while maybe I wouldn’t do anything bad to them, if other PCs tried to, well, I wouldn’t stop them and the universe would be on their side if it came to that kind of call.

@KarmaBum I’m interested, but probably won’t actually do this. I mean, it’s possible, but how will I feel next week?

@bear_necessities I am all for bad guys if their players acknowledge that the PCs are bad and join the Black Hats Club.

@Faraday Yeah, we are talking about the same PC-couple. I either forgot the magnitude of the kerfluffle or wasn’t aware of it. I know my scheme to hide the origins of the mixed-race baby never came to fruition. I didn’t think the lynch-mob talk was serious at all – not “we want to do this,” but “If this game was historically accurate, this would happen.”

Heh. That might have been fun RP if it wasn’t freaking people out. (Though if things went then as they’ve gone the last few years, I’d have asked them to schedule their lynching attempt so I could be there, since my PC would be on guard 'cause he lived there, had 'em say “sure,” and then logged in to find that it happened exactly when I said I couldn’t be there but that they’d acknowledged my PCs presence by RPing that he just sat there doing nothing, and then framed me as the bad actor for remarking that that’s kinda shitty.)

I remember the discomfort with the issues regarding indigenous people, but not any actual indigenous characters.

@Yam is right – well, certainly your perspective as gamerunner was of a much less OOC-peaceful game than mine as a player.

@bear_necessities

With or without:

@Gashlycrumb said in Historical Games Round 75:

(Okay we have mining claims, and a valley with a couple of competing cattle ranches and homessteads, and a ridiculous frickin’ castle that some freak had built by Italian masons that he imported for the purpose and had guarded by Pinkertons while they worked, then released to run wild across the plains, and now it’s the Manor House like Downton Abbey, but if those PCs go into town it’s more like Deadwood. But it’s Boylei guy’s Wild Imaginary West so you have to carry this steampunkish antenna thing around to prevent weird monsters or giant versions of normal animals coming near you. Later in this story the abandoned Italian masons will appear, having survived by taking over a troupe of giant apes.)

@Faraday said in Historical Games Round 75:

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

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.

I remember some people having their hackles up about location-inappropriate architecture. Or too much of it, or something. Now that I think of it, that ‘Darby’s Castle’ thing is almost true. In the sense that some rich blokes built miniature but still quite large castles for houses in Colorado.

(Okay we have mining claims, and a valley with a couple of competing cattle ranches and homessteads, and a ridiculous frickin’ castle that some freak had built by Italian masons that he imported for the purpose and had guarded by Pinkertons while they worked, then released to run wild across the plains, and now it’s the Manor House like Downton Abbey, but if those PCs go into town it’s more like Deadwood. But it’s Boylei guy’s Wild Imaginary West so you have to carry this steampunkish antenna thing around to prevent weird monsters or giant versions of normal animals coming near you. Later in this story the abandoned Italian masons will appear, having survived by taking over a troupe of giant apes.)

@KarmaBum I agree totally and would love to see that.

Have you watched that guy’s youtube mini-building channel? I thought "I want that as RPG setting’ before he announced its release as a game.

@bear_necessities

I live in Colorado, which makes that kinda easier.

@Jenn said in Missed Settings:

Personally, I’d say Texas, along the Rio Grande.

Yeah – very different setting. Really, there might be Mining Town westerns vs. Cow Town westerns, or towns with both. Alas, there’s not a lot of places to graze cattle near Leadville, which has a fun history. (Somebody said, “Hey, you know that black stuff in the tailings of your lead mines? That’s silver.”)

@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

Indeed there are.

it’s a known quantity of like-minded people. A public MUSH is a different animal.

Honestly, though, a MU does not have to be so different from aTTRPG. You can show people the door if they are not like-minded enough. This is not really all that hard.

The tattooist I know using magic markers to draw these elaborate fake tats on his four-year old. Biomechanical sleeve, MOMMY’S #1 across the knuckles.

@bear_necessities Hehe! Where do you want it set?

@Pyrephox said in Historical Games Round 75:

I admit, I am a person who wants historically accurate -isms and resistances in historical games. Does that mean I want to see a bunch of racist, sexist, bigoted PCs? No, of course not.

This.

The tabletop game I’m running has all these historical -isms, but resistance is practically the point, and the PCs are trying to be the good guys. So no, they are not racists. The players don’t want to do that and I don’t want them to.

And the truth is, there have always been some people who resist. It is far from inaccurate to depict them.

I also told the players that their characters had to pass for males over the age of 12, but only in the dark. So about a third of them are girls, dressed as boys by the standards of the 18th century, and the NPCs are either very bad at noticing or they don’t care. My take is that this is actually believable enough, but even if it’s not, well, we’re gonna play that it is because some people want to play women characters and that’s not a freedom I want to take from them.

@bear_necessities Crap, I lied. It’s ‘Dry Gulch’ on Ares, but it’s listed as ‘In Development’ and has been for quite a while.

Really, Westerns seem like a very easy setting to run. It’s weird that there are not more of them. And now I’m tempted to make one just 'cause.

@bear_necessities I remember seeing one and wanting to join it and of course procrastinating too long.

I think that’d be a setting where factions could be great and fun – if it goes like The Walking Dead, and there’s these various small groups who’ve worked out different methods of survival and they merge or break apart as RP goes. But there would be a lot of wall-building and gardening type stuff.

Most zombie stories are set with the apocalypse very recent, so there’s probably not a big problem with resource scarcity, resources are dangerous to get but not scarce.

A Mad Max sort of setting with finding water and fuel being the big deal could be fun.

Cowboys? Do you mean a western? There’s one going.

@MisterBoring I tried to play a ghost on a few Buffy games.

But this is back on my mind because I just started reading The September House, (Carissa Orlando) and it’s amusing – the living protagonist is constantly being disturbed in various ways by the undetermined but large number of ghosts in her house, but she refuses to leave because it’s a really beautiful house and she loves it enough that it’s worth tolerating the bleeding walls, especially since when the blood goes away it doesn’t damage the wallpaper. It’s cracking me up and I can imagine expanding it to a remote-ish village where everybody works at some high-paying and desirable tech firm, or at a local shop or service, the firm has renovated the houses for the workers, and it’s a choice between staying because it’s your dream job with great pay, free housing and great local services, or leaving because every night a ghostly headless plumber shows up to fix the leaking pipes in the kitchen.

Ghosts.

Just that. It’s a haunted town or something and some PCs are ghosts and some are not, and the ghosts do annoying ghost things and the living people are annoyed or frightened, or confused because they think somebody is not a ghost when they are, or vice versa.

@MisterBoring said in Missed Settings:

@catzilla I think you’d have to really really focus on the community building aspect of “this world has died, we must rebuild it” and less on the actual zombies. All of my favorite zombie media is just really interesting human drama and analogues to real world societal stuff punctuated by extreme gore.

Yeah. And then you get to the problem. Because zombies are stupid and humans are clever. (How many seasons of "The Squawking Head’ ‘The Walking Dead’ did we get before we saw somebody, anybody, make a zombie-attracting noise-maker pit-trap? It was kinda maddening.) So pretty soon the zombie MUSH would be ‘making up new recipes for dandelion greens in our walled village’ MU unless GMs make zombies a lot more formidable or add new adversaries all the time, or make PC plans fail because reasons-we-made-up-on-the-fly and no dice-roll or clever idea will make your plans ever work.

LambdaMOO, which isn’t an RPG but a social thing. Followed by Ghostwheel MOO, which was more like a MUD than a MUSH.

Then PernMUSH, the original one. Then a WoD game, Dublin by Night. I never actually played the original Masquerade, but sometimes chatted as a guest there.

@Raistlin said in Missed Settings:

either Pirates era

The pirates we think of when we say pirates (“The Flying Gang”) were a very specific and brief period (about 1716 until quite specifically 1726) and very few people know this or understand what was going on.

(I am running this tabletop with CoC d20. But on a MU, the little history lessons are not so welcome.)

There’s also the whole “we’re on a boat!” problem. Which is a mild pain playing tabletop when one player can’t make a session and you’re wondering what the heck their character is doing, since they couldn’t leave, but is a constant challenge on a MU. At least, in a period setting where ships are just not very big.

This is a community-building issue.

Okay, yeah, probably you can never have outright let’s-murder-each-other-on-sight factions and have it work. But why would you want to? If they only interact to fight, there is no reason for the opposing group to be PCs.

But stuff like “Green apple Fossoways hate red apple Fossoways and they’re each trying to be the ruling branch of the house,” and the deal where everybody’s trying to steal the McGuffin from whoever has it right now, can be fine fun.

It needs a supportive community to be fine, though. It works on private games because everybody there thinks everybody else’s feelings count and actively wants every other player to have a good time. When this trust is broken things crumble.

Which is no surprise. There are big differences between:

Dracula: “Well shit.”

Van Helsing: “Yeah, the dice were cruel to you! But that was great, loved the way you played it out, I had a blast.And you’ll get yours once you climb out of that hoiy-water-contaminated well.”

And:

Dracula: “Well shit.”

Van Helsing: “I understand that you’re very upset. In this essay I will explain how you are wrong and a problem…”

And:

Dracula: “Well shit.”

Van Helsing: “It sucks to suck.”

Also, yeah. There’s gonna be drama. There’s just gonna be drama. Making some space for the dramas of RPG-related fee-fees is part of gaming. Gamerunners and players can draw a line about how much space and what kind of expression of ye feels. But “never express any kind of upset about the game or your interactions with others on it” isn’t reasonable. Games nobody cares are not good games. You want players to be invested. Passions will rise. Characters don’t have to die for passions to rise.

Players in general and game runners in particular really ought to try to avoid drawing that line at who’s drama rather than what kind of drama. 

Drawing the line at a who is how you get bullshit like it not being ‘drama’ when Abelard raises a “Bridget refuses to compromise in RP!,” fuss, but when Bridget replies, “You refused to turn off your camera, you were obviously bluffing, I’m more afraid of proposed-betrayee I am of your threat, and I don’t even have the information you were trying to blackmail me to get,” somehow Bridget is the drama-creating problem.