Desmond Morris zoologist, ethologist, sociobiologist.

@somasatori said in Numetal/Retromux:

Someone once told me (paraphrased) that the primary difference between maintaining OOC respect for your fellow players after a PVP/tense situation at a LARP and maintaining OOC respect and kindness towards your fellow MUSHers in the same situation is that MUSHers are not obligated to sit in a booth with each other at IHOP at 2am after we’ve finished our scenes.

I found that telling people, “We are pretending this is my living room. We may not all be friends, but we’re all gonna act friendly because it’s my living room,”
worked all right.

@Pavel

‘The Drunken Driver Has The Right of Way’ by Ethan Coen

The loudest have the final say,
The wanton win, the rash hold sway,
The realist’s rules of order say
The drunken driver has the right of way.

The Kubla Khan can butt in line;
The biggest brute can take what’s mine;
When heavyweights break wind, that’s fine;
No matter what a judge might say,
The drunken driver has the right of way.

The guiltiest feel free of guilt;
Who care not, bloom; who worry, wilt;
Plans better laid are rarely built
For forethought seldom wins the day;
The drunken driver has the right of way.

The most attentive and unfailing
Carefulness is unavailing
Wheresoever fools are flailing;
Wisdom there is held at bay;,
The drunken driver has the right of way.

De jure is de facto’s slave;
The most foolhardy beat the brave;
Brass routs restraint; low lies high’s grave;
When conscience leads you, it’s astray;
The drunken driver has the right of way.

It’s only the naivest who’ll
Deny this, that the reckless rule;
When facing an oncoming fool
The practiced and sagacious say
Watch out — one side — look sharp — gang way.

However much you plan and pray,
Alas, alack, tant pis, oy vey,
Now — heretofore — til Judgment Day,
The drunken driver has the right of way

@Ashkuri said in Numetal/Retromux:

WOD was never designed for vampire and werewolf at the same table, much less Mage and everything else.

It’s not balanced for it

That’s not relevant on a MU unless you want to keep it short-lived enough that nobody can gain enough XP to be significantly more powerful than a new PC build.

@Wizz said in Numetal/Retromux:

from an objective third party, there is no chance, zero, none, that “I stand up to staff by forcing them into a combat scenario and everyone claps!” works.

I have seen this work, if by ‘it worked!’ I mean it disrupted the game and caused a lot of players (who were no doubt already unsatisfied) to quit. But it’s not gonna be gaming fun. It was also at a time where you could easily find another WoD game to 'port your whole playgroup, so solidarity-quitting often didn’t sacrifice your story, you just all move to Portland the way people do.

But a combat I’m doing 'cause I’m OOC pissed and want to annoy the person GMing it isn’t something I want to do or imagine as fun even if I did have a +20 stab-o–matic.

@MisterBoring

Bold to assume that Larry Leader was asking. As if it was a normal RPG story where Lord Larry Leader fills the narrative role of plot-hook-distributor and says, “You peasants, bring me the head of Fred the Foe or I’ll set these puppies on fire!” Yeah, that’s fun, and my IC response is where the fun tends to happen.

But no, that’s not the situation I am describing. Larry’s not asking. There are no negative consequences to Larry if he waits forever to make a move on that head, so he can do it himself when he feels like it, or give it to his bestie, or forget about it. Any loot or interesting information picked up from going to get the head will be his.

@MisterBoring said in Numetal/Retromux:

@Gashlycrumb said in Numetal/Retromux:

Having to force my character to act against his own interests in order to participate was the problem.

This is a very interesting statement, because for some people, asking their characters to act against their own interests is good RP.

Erm, what?

Larry Leader tells your PC, “Fuck you, you useless fuck. Now lick my asshole for a few hours every week if you want me to give you the chance to do something that will benefit me and almost certainly harm you. I will not pay you for it. I won’t even let it improve your reputation if I can prevent that, and I can.”

So your PC does it 'cause that’s good RP?

@Wizz This.

I, and others, stuggled to come up with IC reasons to deal with this character, and staff knew it. I, and many others, reported this player’s OOC rudeness to staff repeatedly. (Including a comical moment where the staffer told me how they’d had a talk with the player about their rudeness and the problem was solved, while at the same time the player was paging me rudely, and I told the staffer that was happening and the problem clearly not solved.) Staff knew.

I don’t mind an antangonist/antagonizing PC around. That’s fun. Having to force my character to act against his own interests in order to participate was the problem. Having him launch a suicide attack is, y’know, the same damn thing.

The lesson is more: a) Listen to players when they say another player is a problem, and before they decide to give up and leave or try to blow up the game and leave b) restrain your model-world building at least to the point where you do not need to assign plot-armour to PCs, ‘fudge’ rules to save them from their mistakes, or put up with them being rude, because losing them would lay waste to the setting, and c) Avoid Retro, where supposedly a player who enjoyed such a situation, considered it fair and cool, and bitched about how hard done by he was that nobody liked him, is staffing.

@Jennkryst Eehh. Well, fact is, I told the GM what I was trying to do and was told I couldn’t try. It required. GMing. And NPCs and stuff. I guess I could have just run in and tried to shoot him or something, but an intelligent plan that ought to have had a chance of working rather than just being a disruptive kamikaze scene, no.

@Pavel Yeah. This resemblence makes it all the more infuriating.

@Jennkryst Stupidly enough, I was actually directly told that I wasn’t allowed to try to do that.

@MisterBoring said in Numetal/Retromux:

Isn’t this just on-theme for… Vampire?

Erm, yes, in the sense that drinking blood is on-theme for vampire. No, in the sense that dropping Peter Dinklage into a wood-chipper and enjoying him as a slurpee on stage during the first act of Twelfth Night in Central Park is not.

You’re not supposed to be able to maintain power by making everyone refuse to cooperate with you. There was a fair bit of “well, I have to quit the game because I’ve got a herniated disk from bending over backwards coming up with IC excuses to continue to deal with this ass and there’s no other way to get involved.”

Which is the staffer there who played the de-facto PC leadership for vampire on Liberation and appeared to make it so players could choose between a) taking risks for and licking the ass of a “leader” who insulted them, openly informed them that he’d fuck them over at the slightest chance, and never rewarded them, and b) being unable to be involved in any plot?

Nicholas Brendon

@Third-Eye said in Paid Role-Playing:

The idea of dealing with players who think they’re a paying ‘customer’ always gets a legit, IRL, full-body shudder out of me when this comes up.

Yeah. I think we have problems with players and staff viewing the games as transactional when are meant to be reciprocal, and making them literally transactional would make it worse.

Michael Hague

Go back in memory, back to the children’s library, and you’ll remember him.

I got to meet him at story-times a couple of times as a kid, he was a nice man and his hair was very very shiny in the '80s.

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.