Hi! I’ll continue to help keep the lights on and keep this community safe.

That’s about it. I don’t have any big speech, haha. There’s a lot to learn about the backend. You’d think it’d be a simple on/off switch, but it’s more like 500 switches.

@Shygaming said:

The same is true more broadly. A kidnapping story where the hostage wants to be kidnapped is not really a kidnapping story. A horror story where the victim wants to be hunted is something else entirely. A dystopia where everyone genuinely enjoys being oppressed has lost the thing that made it dystopian.

I feel disgusted for even having to ask this, but let’s follow this to the conclusion you seem to be hinting at: Do you want players of your game to feel like they’re being r*ped?

If not, please describe the what you’re hoping players experience when someone r*pes their character.

@MisterBoring said:

@Wyrmsign Likely he finally upset the wrong subset of people.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a single event. It can be the culmination of many smaller incidents over time. It happens that way more often than we probably think it does.

@Tez said:

There’s something to be said about the fact that we are more comfy with killing someone.

When someone is killed, they don’t have to live through the trauma.

@Kestrel said:

Maybe the safest and most sensible way to enjoy story-rich CNC RP is to just do it on a game that forbids it, but behind a closed door, in a private room that can’t be spied on, and contrive a reason to never tell anybody IC or OOC.

I know you mean that as a joke, but please never do that. The amount of times I’ve had to review logs to fix bugs only to stumble upon policy violations is already more than I wish it was.

@Kestrel said:

What if my five gfs are into that, who are you to tell us that sucks? Everyone consents!

Nobody consented to the hidden sexist game mechanics that apply to every character universally.

If your game allows sexual assault, then it’ll be known as the game that allows sexual assault.

EDIT: The above message was originally a part of the Paroxysm game thread, before the topic was forked. I didn’t create a topic just to say the above, nor did I write the title for this thread.

@Jennkryst said:

@Coin said:

@Yam said:

Guys what the HELL happened on this haven game and is this why you’re all vaguely fucked up regarding RP? I’m told there was a huge documented thread about this elsewhere but now it’s lost to the ether forever.

IIRC the documented thread was on MU Soapbox.

If only people hadn’t lied about plans to totally keep it around as an archive after kicking everyone out.

In an effort to repopulate the lost details, I have three stories from Haven.

The first is when I created a character. I knew of all the horrible stuff that went on in Haven, so my quest was to study it to ensure nothing of that sort could happen in Silent Heaven. (This was part of a larger goal to play every active RP game in order to identify what works and what doesn’t work, and then combine everything together, haha.)

So I went into Haven with the intention of taking notes.

I was immediately shocked when, during chargen, someone named Horsey Biscuit attempted to have unprotected sex with my partially-created character. My chargen experience was interrupted by a prompt to choose Yes or No to accept the unprotected sex attempt.

I made a note to block all possible actions during chargen (and to never have such a bizarre prompt, which I already wasn’t planning). I moved on and entered the game.

I found an inn, and did some RP with a few people who were there as well. Eventually , one character propositioned mine via RP. My character told him to buzz off and to go make out with a can opener.

This made him very angry, so he initiated combat code with my character. I asked him OOC for a tutorial on combat and he responded by telling me OOC to “just let it happen.”

He knocked out my character and woke her up in a hotel room, with her arms and legs bound. He then instructed me to say the phrase that allows non-consensual sexual acts to happen to my character. I refused. His character then said that mine wasn’t worth r*ping and he left. Still bound in the hotel room, I logged out. I made a note to disallow aggressive actions on new characters for their first week, and to make any detainment effects last for only an hour while requiring another character to be present and RPing.

…

The second time I logged into Haven, my character woke up in a completely different place, so I went exploring. I found a farm, a lighthouse, and a warehouse district bereft of characters. Then, unfortunately, I accidentally wandered onto the campus and found folks talking about a 12 year-old’s tentacle training, so I got out of there.

Then someone offered to run a PRP scene for me, where my character had to get on a phantom ice cream truck to avoid a bear attack. That was some fun RP. I brought my spooked PC to a restaurant to ask about the ice cream truck and they had no idea what she was talking about. Then I mentioned the bear and they said that there are no coded encounters with bears so I must by lying. That was the most disheartening way to crush the only positive experience I had, so I left to continue my wanderings.

Then there was a broadcast of “wet t-shirt contest starting in 10 minutes” at some club. I would have preferred any other event, but I’m here to study this game, so why not.

They denied my character entry into the club because she had an appearance score of 1.5 out of 10. But they left the door open and I was able to watch the RP from the outside.

The next hour or so was just a bunch of boobs going everywhere. I couldn’t discern any coherent story progression. So I logged out, having learned nothing from the event.

…

The third story is not mine, but rather someone else posting about the time the admin logs were accidentally visible to all characters for about a day. I still have a portion of a log.

Sat Feb 6 13:12:30 2016 :: LOGONCOUNT: Jacob MinOff: 716, Esteem: 9057, RPXP 0+61000 XP 0+3200, Influence: 961, Karma: 5663, Cash: 0+380
Sat Feb 6 13:12:30 2016 :: LOGONINFLUENCE Jacob: Result: -70, Cost: -150, standpoints: 0, slut: 0, status 0, tier 30, prof 0, social 0, praise 0
Sat Feb 6 13:12:31 2016 :: LOGONCOUNT: Dani MinOff: 449, Esteem: 0, RPXP 0+510000 XP 0+102000, Influence: 12092, Karma: 24742, Cash: 0+119
Sat Feb 6 13:12:31 2016 :: LOGONINFLUENCE Dani: Result: -126, Cost: -150, standpoints: 0, slut: 0, status 0, tier 20, prof 0, social 0, praise -46
Sat Feb 6 13:12:40 2016 :: INFLUENCE BEHAVE: Dani gets given -1 for Habit logon…
Sat Feb 6 13:12:40 2016 :: INFLUENCE BEHAVE: Jacob gets given 2 for Habit logon…
Sat Feb 6 13:12:45 2016 :: ATTRACT: Kayly was given 10 for Showering.
Sat Feb 6 13:12:50 2016 :: ATTRACT: Kayly was given 10 for Showering.

There were also point gains for female characters putting on makeup, point losses for females eating too fast, and point losses to male characters for “banging an uggo.”

The implementation of hidden lust and attractiveness values is gross, doubly so for the misogyny present within the system which punishes women for their actions and qualities.

If it weren’t misogynistic, and if it covered actions for all sorts of vices (not just lust), then I imagined that would be an intriguing system for gaining the attention of demonic influences.

That was actually the inspiration for a system in Silent Heaven that the SH players have called “attunement,” where every system ties into a certain vice. For example, if your character KO’s another character in combat, that contributes to your character’s Wrath attunement, gaining the attention of a wrathful demon. Going idle contributes to Sloth. Overeating contributes to Gluttony. Having a character desc that’s longer than a single page contributes to Pride.

I made sure there are 3 or 4 actions that contribute to each of the 15 vices, in order to avoid repetition.

Ultimately, there were some good takeaways from my Haven experience. It had some particularly neat concepts buried behind a miasma of reprehensible content. The main drawback for Haven was that everything was executed in some of the worst ways imaginable, to empower abusers at every level of the hierarchy, both IC and OOC.

I found this on the character request page.

“Your reply email and any accessibility, communication, or content-boundary information are for private review by Auralae, Dante, and the supporting staff who need it. Never submit a password, server address, port, connection file, private credential, or medical diagnosis.”

What a strange final item on that list.

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Yam said in MU Peeves Thread:

Peeve, the (bad) public chat comedian. Everything is a fumbled attempt at a joke and a convo killer. We are nothing but a captive audience to them, and they refuse to engage with players in any way that doesn’t center around them.

If you’re gonna’ go up there with a mic at least be funny, aaaaa.

what’s the deal with airplane food amirite

Said during a funeral scene

@Ominous said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

My dream server would be a combination RPI-MUSH. I love the fact that when your character enters a room, you don’t get the actual name of the other characters. I’m not sure how you square the circle of characters with vague identities and players with set identities, but I’d love to see it.

I may be biased, but take a peek at how it’s done in Silent Heaven! Characters appear as their shortdesc until they type GREET. You can also introduce other characters by typing GREET (name).

There are in-game photographs, too. You can identify people in a photo to other characters, based on who your character knows. You can even look at the details of photos, allowing you to read a specific character’s description at the time the photo was taken.

The players, without any prompting, designated a spot in town where their characters leave behind mementos and photographs of past characters who have left Silent Heaven in one way or another. It’s really sweet.

If you, as a new character, looked at one of those photos, you’d just see a bunch of shortdescs in the photos. But if someone were to tell your character a story about them and identify them by name, the shortdescs would be replaced with characters’ names. In that way, the departed characters can still have their names remembered by characters who have never (and will never) meet them.

With everyone’s responses, and to my surprise, I guess that makes Silent Heaven a MUSH, haha. Strange that I didn’t think of it as one.

For me, I see them as how much of the game is dictated by code.

MUD = The coded mechanics are the draw. Hack & Slash. Light on roleplay, if any.

MUSH = The roleplay is the draw. Purely Roleplay. If there are coded mechanics in RP, they’re often for dice rolls.

RPI = The roleplay is the draw, and it’s supported by coded mechanics. A blend of the two above.

There are additional connotations of RPI games that Kestrel mentioned above, and I don’t like those, so I call Silent Heaven an RPI-lite as a way of distinguishing it from those toxic elements.

I love MUSHes, but I also love a little bit of crunch with my RP, haha. Not too much crunchiness that it veers into MUD territory. But enough that I feel like I have enough autonomy to not need to nudge a Storyteller for the day-to-day things.

Maybe being on the other side of the screen makes me very considerate of other ST’s time, haha. I’m perfectly content to make my own fun on a game and just RP with others and give them the spotlight! I like supporting others’ stories.

I’m all for a shorter application process. Characters are likely to evolve as players get the feel for both the game and the character. So it feels a bit rough to set so many things in stone before starting. Players in Silent Heaven often update their characters’ backstories as time goes on, and we allow updating them as often as they want.

---

I saw a different game recently announce that it’s feeding character applications into ChatGPT to decide whether or not to approve characters. This is in part to help their staff “spend less time on the tedious parts,” as they claim.

I think that’s a step backwards. If you don’t want to read it, don’t require it.

@Artifact said in Numetal/Retromux:

There is no one on this forum who isn’t jaded enough to see right through your unmitigated bullshit.

I take people at their word, particularly when they explain their motivations. The original post is a little convoluted in its wording, but it does support his explanation. It could still be a lie, but I’m able to follow the logic.

The correct solution would be as @MisterBoring said, to post the username that sent the message. If it was on Discord, the name will be present on the block or ignore list.

@Faraday said in Non-toxic PvP:

@Roadspike said in Non-toxic PvP:

The pacifist is a player archetype who will join a moderate or high conflict group, then do as much as they can for their faction without engaging in the central conflict.

This is what I’m reacting to.

But you cropped out half the definition. It doesn’t make sense without the second half:

Then, when they get backed into a position where they’re called upon to resolve a conflict by fighting it out, they’ll agree to the fight but refuse to fight back, letting the opposing side win, in order to give the other players the most unsatisfying resolution possible.

There have been plenty of pacifists in SH that don’t act as the proverbial rock in the shoe. They don’t stand in the way of scenes, they don’t unnecessarily prolong assured victories, and they don’t make the resolutions agonizing.

By removing the second half of the definition, you’re missing the core problem of the player archetype I was describing.

I’ll digress, though. We’ve discussed this example thoroughly.

There’s social conflicts, espionage, vandalism, and more on SH. But just because something is IC doesn’t mean it’s automatically fun. Here are three examples of when a PP became too much effort to allow them to continue playing.

One PP was secretly exploiting code to stalk other players in order to show up immediately where the RP was happening in order to get in the way. I’ve since patched those exploits.

Another PP had been given a no-contact request from a number of characters who were tired of their shenanigans. (A no-contact request is a last resort when two people’s RP styles are untenable with each other. It means no direct RP, no plotting against each other, and to keep interactions minimal in public events.) The PP then sent their friends to get in on the scenes on the PP’s behalf, then report back so the PP could influence things nearby (e.g. vandalism) in an “I’m not touching you” plausible deniability manner, giving the people on the no-contact list zero recourse to react.

A third PP was asked to tone down the snark. When the snark was not toned down, we said to stop the snark entirely. This resulted in the PP repeatedly saying IC something along the lines of, “I have no opinion I can voice on this matter,” as a way of getting around the snark ban.

In all three examples, their goal isn’t to provide fun conflict, it’s to wear down the other players by getting in the way as often as possible, while also denying any satisfying resolution. They typically don’t care about the win or the loss in the plot, because they score a win simply by disrupting the scene and forcing everyone to deal with their antics.

@bear_necessities said in Non-toxic PvP:

The fact that PP stood there and took it, and then snarked about it afterward, is IC.

And the 3rd and 4th time PP stands in the way and says, “Let’s just get this over with,” and continues with the snark? Snarking over 20 times a week, often in pose after pose.

I think that’s what was missing from my explanation. PP does this with great frequency. It isn’t just a one-time thing. It’s a pattern of PP’s daily activities consisting of standing in the way and snarking. If your character wants to do something that PP opposes, your choices are to either give up and walk away from the conflict, or fight and give PP more snark ammunition.

It wears MH’s player down, as well as a decent portion of the playerbase, to witness that act day after day.

@Faraday said in Non-toxic PvP:

That’s assuming the flak MH is getting is IC and not OOC. Like it’s fine for PP to ICly grumble about getting beaten up at the danger pit, but they can’t OOCly go around trashing MH’s player for playing in-theme.

In this scenario, PP isn’t grumbling, PP is purposefully taking a loss at the danger pit in order to be able to bring it up IC whenever MH says anything. Not only was the conflict void of excitement, but PP now uses it as ammunition to ICly derail anything MH tries to talk about afterwards.

@howyadoin said in Non-toxic PvP:

Being threatening over petty slights to brand newbies who haven’t even joined a faction yet also happens and is treated IC and all part of the story and we work through it.

Please DM me with what this is about. Conflict should be fun for everyone involved. I’ll look into it.

For clarification, here’s a re-enactment of the Problematic Pacifist. Assume that the Problematic Pacifist has much higher stats than the MacGuffin Holder, making it so the MacGuffin Holder can’t get around the Problematic Pacifist without engaging in combat.

---

MacGuffin Holder: It’s time for me to bring the MacGuffin to the danger pit.

Problematic Pacifist: That’s a bad idea. You should take it to the safety pit where my faction wants it to be.

MH: I’ve been vocal about my plans to do this for the past week.

PP: And my protests have gone ignored.

MH: If you have a problem with it, meet me at the danger pit and try to take it from me.

PP: I’ll meet you there, but I won’t fight you.

MH: I’m not giving it up without a fight.

PP: Too late, I’m already here and standing in your way.

MH: Move.

PP: No.

MH: sighs, attacks

PP: Now you can all see how much of a bloodthirsty villain MH is!

MH: (Having to fight a rival who isn’t fighting back just so you can use it against my character isn’t fun.)

PP: (I’m sorry but I’m just playing my character.)

MH: keeps going just to get this plot point resolved

PP: gets KOed, recovers later

MH: The deed is done. The MacGuffin has exploded.

PP: Sure, you feel proud now, but how many innocent people who weren’t fighting back did you enjoy stabbing at the danger pit?

MH: goes to Storytellers to get this behavior to stop

---

In this way, the Problematic Pacifist is able to weaponize their pacifism against their rivals and generally bring the mood of the game down by holding those forced situations against the person who attacked them.