Happy Pride Month, everyone!

I woke up this morning a wee bit sad as I had to close a tab open to MSB on my phone, and reminded myself:

The forum was never the community. It was just where the community agreed to hang out. It could have been Reddit or Discord or a MUSH but - for a few years - it was the MSB forum.

If WORA was ever a thing, it is here now. The spirit of open, lively debate is here.

What we left behind are admin who admit candidly that they wanted us off their forum, so we are gone.

The people left behind on Derp’s forum are a separate community.

People can decide where they would like to belong. (Except for those of us who were banned but I also think that just reinforces what most of us had already chosen.)

I am happy to be part of this community. 🥰

@GF said in Bannings:

At some point, it has to become a vibes-based decision.

Honestly? At every point. Even looking down the barrel of logs and screenshots, you’re still gonna have to make a decision based on your instincts.

I’m not sure people grasp how much even the most flippant of us wind up agonizing over these decisions sometimes. “I don’t want to make a big deal out of this” is probably the most common phrase people say to me when they want to put someone on my radar, and that’s sort of a sad state of affairs. Even on GH, which was a hot mess, we only ever got a handful of actual complaints about behavior from people; most people who are getting harassed just leave rather than go through the whole process of reporting someone.

The only false report I’ve ever gotten on any game, to my knowledge, was from Ruiz. Who went right for the throat with a job to complain about the person it turned out she was harassing. Neither player got banned over it, though the other player eventually quit.

^ See above re: wrong way on a decision before. I should’ve banned Ruiz right then (or at least shortly afterward when her creepiness started to twig @bear_necessities), but no one had receipts and it felt somehow wrong to ban someone just because my co-admin thought they were creepy.

Which is just the dumbest rationale I’ve ever used, and it embarrasses me to this day.

tl;dr - be a good admin and swing the ban-hammer freely till you achieve the desired PEACE & QUIET

I forgot this thread was here. I stand by my “let Derp’s forum lie” mentality, but also…

Derp has been completely honest about why certain bans were lifted and others weren’t: He doesn’t like us.

Which is completely fair. I don’t like him, either.
When he was made admin, I had every intention of just bouncing. But I realize now that I fucking care about this community, and he doesn’t, so I’m glad I came back.

I don’t expect to ever be unbanned there. Derp can’t handle people speaking truth to him, especially women.

The community that was WORA - that Arkandel handed over to Ganymede - isn’t fractured. It’s right fucking here.

WORA has never been an immutable line in the sand. It’s always a party that’s popped up at someone’s house 'cause their parents were out of town.

When Nymeria threatened copyright infringement and we had to flee off Proboards (or whatever that was), the community moved to a new location. This is the same thing: Ganymede torched our old neighborhood and gave the keys to Derp, so we just moved on.

It’s really hard to explain how much of this is because… honestly… Derp is such a mansplainy little turd, that it is hard to swallow that he “wins.” He and Ganymede essentially have the keys to our shared history. And it hurts to think of losing that (for the 4th time?) because of this narrow-minded little man who doesn’t have the common decency to yield to the will of the community he was supposed to be entrusted to oversee.

Derp should have done the right thing and stepped aside when it became obvious how upset so many of us were.

Ganymede should have done the right thing and asked him to step aside when it became obvious how upset so many of us were.

The misplaced trust in Ganymede over the years compiled by the smug crowing imagined in the background by that tiresome manchild…

It still stings.

So that’s why I’m still reading, even though I know I shouldn’t. I’ll grow out of it soon.

They won’t.

@Warma-Sheen said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@Pavel said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

I understand the ‘must have proof’ mindset, though. Sometimes (rarely, but still) bitches do lie. After all, this board was founded after people were falsely accused of something and punished without any sort of transparent investigation.

Yep.

Sometimes people lie.

Please show me the receipts where people have lied about being harassed. If this is such a prevalent problem, you should have no trouble producing them.

We lost our CKCS recently. So now we have 1 & 1/4 Boston Terriers.

@Cobalt lordy, just when it feels like it can’t go any lower

Just from my own past experience? Don’t give away your DB. Don’t let someone take it over. We did that with GH, and I regret that decision big-time. Stuff only got worse, and - even though I publicly walked away - there’s still a sense of responsibility. And people who still think I was responsible for shit that I had no control over.

If they love it so much, let them make an homage.

LOLOL and Gany banned us all to protect this nasty weirdo

this hobby, man

@Cobalt just jumping on the bandwagon.

Derp’s knee-jerk assumption was that YOU are the bad actor in this scenario, and everyone agreed - right up until you walked into the room, when suddenly they realized they weren’t just talking about someone who couldn’t defend themselves. Then Ghost and Macha did their frantic back-pedaling, and Derp of course ignored the fire he just started.

They’re not there for discussion. They have BANNED everyone who actually wants to discuss things.

@Yam I’ll own that it was a snide comment.

But I don’t feel it’s on the level of implying that kids who choose not to MUSH were raised wrong.

Anyway. Carry on. It’s clearly a “me thing.”

Ed to note in case people are only seeing the quoted section: The complete quote is: “Even those of us in the hobby lament that there’s shit-all for fun new games right now.”

@Ashkuri My point is just… it’s not “the modern generation being raised wrong!!!” that’s lead to the majority of this hobby being middle-aged folks.

We all found our way into this at some point, so either our parents were also iPad dads, or that’s not why kids aren’t joining M*s in droves.

(The “iPad dad” comment is really stuck in my craw. Just seems like a shitty thing to say to us parents who are, like, doing our best out here.)

@Juniper said in Age Verification & Games:

TBH I’m not worried about minors infesting my spaces because they’re not interested in the level of effort that is required to get invested in this stuff (anymore. Thanks iPad dads).

My teenage son roleplays online several nights a week. His stories are full of lasers, demons chasing people through time and space, and lots of stupid teenage arguments. I’ve never once heard him say, “I sip my drink and look cool.”

He’s aware of MUSHing, has seen me do it, has even chatted with me and brainstormed a few times, but he’s not going to join a hobby full of middle-aged women pretending to be sexy vampires.

While I think our janky reliance on telnet is definitely a barrier to entry, my take is just that young people aren’t joining 'cause this just isn’t fun. If you were a young person, would YOU find any of this interesting or fun? Even those of us in the hobby lament that there’s shit-all for fun new games right now.

@catzilla said in Neon Protocol:

I didn’t see this before posting. Now I’m 99% sure it’s her.

I’m almost positive it’s not the same person.

This Star Wars game is also run by the person that runs the current game called Age of Heroes - the one that jacked all that code.

https://ageofheroesmush.com/char/Persephone
https://swdarktimes.com/char/Persephone

I put 7-12 months.

I’m technically running a private story right now, but I wouldn’t really count it as “RPing on a Mush” in the common parlance.

@Pyrephox flippant example, as that’s usually all I have, but I see your point. Replace “throw tomato” with “smuggle in a weapon, ask a salient question, etc.”

The idea that the whole scene is impervious to characters feels like lazy storytelling.

Which I’ve totally been a lazy storyteller and just put a scene on rails or slapped a post up because I didn’t want to deal with curve balls. It happens, but if it happens often, I should probably tell a more interactive story.

@Roadspike said in Scenes within Scenes:

If it’s a one-way scene that again, can’t be interrupted? Don’t make it a scene! I’m sure we’ve all been in plenty of scenes where we thought, “This didn’t need to be a scene, it could’ve been a post/vignette/scene-set.” So don’t make them scenes. Have the GM post up their too-important-to-be-interrupted scene as a Vignette, and then have the actual scene be everyone’s reaction to it afterwards. You know, when people can actually interact with each other without interrupting.

Shouldn’t the solution be to find a way to make it more interactive? Like, if the King is making a proclamation that affects all the PCs, wouldn’t you want that scene to be something people show up to?

Even if they know they can’t stop the speech, can’t they RP trying? Throw the ST a curveball and bring a rotten tomato and wind up getting arrested?

It seems like the assumption of “all the PCs show and watch like good boys & girls” may make it easier for the ST, but it’s not giving characters much room to maneuver.

Through the early 2000s, the big Pern games had strict building quotas, so areas couldn’t actually build rooms for everything. Your builder might get a 20-room quota, so admin had to prioritize. It wasn’t uncommon to have 30+ people in the Galleries room, all watching and reacting to the same Hatching room scene, which also has 10+ people posing in it, so having places helped minimize the spam. The galleries might have four sections in it, so you’d be seeing the big event spam and then mostly just the 5-10 people your PC was actually close enough to talk to.

And all the people apologizing for forgetting to use the places code.

I remember on at least one WoD game, the code interacted with code for things like heightened senses and obfuscation. People could drop into table-talk to avoid having an invisible character eavesdrop, and/or certain characters could eavesdrop if they had the right stats.

It was a nice bauble - not unlike mutter code that would replace random bits of dialogue with ellipses, or language code that only translated things if you had the right stats.

@Faraday Thank you for taking the time to add this. Genuinely appreciated.