@thrax said in Numetal/Retromux:

When Staff came to speak to her she did not hide, nor keep information from them. The thing I wonder is how can they ban someone for avoiding conflict from someone known to be a problem. Yes she did hide herself, but is that in itsself worth a full gameban?

Hiding yourself from players you have a no contact with in order to RP with them is something I think deserves a gameban, regardless of how open you are with staff.

It really feels like Ganymede has just decided to let Derp drive it into the ground out of some need to avoid losing face from reversing a decision.

Well, I’m reducing my MSB activity to lurking now. Gany just basically said that the only person who needed to be apologized to on MSB for what happened was Derp.

I get two things from reading stuff from this thread.

1. That I definitely am not the target audience for Lords & Ladies roleplay.

2. That Arx, even with all of it’s trouble throughout its history, is a pretty good example of ‘doing it right’ in our hobby.

Congrats to all you Arx players and staff for doing cool stuff.

@Juniper said in Numetal/Retromux:

Most people want to be special in some way, sometimes tactfully and sometimes… not. I think we all get to have more fun when we’re not veering aggressively away from being “cringe”.

The vast majority of players in our hobby understand how to make unique special characters without trying their damnedest to drive it into everyone’s faces at 100 miles an hour.

@Cygnus said in The 3-Month Players:

Without PVP acting as a failsafe, these players often cause games to fail because no one can stand not being able to meaningfully stand up to the bully.

The failsafe against toxic players should be staff action. Going PVP just because a player is toxic seems toxic in it’s own right.

@Trashcan said in AI In Poses:

“I don’t want to RP with GenAI because it’s not very good” is not going to age well as a position.

I think the better position is “I don’t want to RP with GenAI because I’m here to RP with real people.”

@Pacha said in Empire Discussion Thread:

My assumption (perhaps false!) is that when opening a game one wants to develop a large and diverse base of players.

I feel like we’re reaching a point where new gamerunners are going to focus more on just running the game they want to run rather than running a game that attracts a large crowd.

Starting a new thread, for a new year.

First up, and this one hit me hard, David Lynch, legendary director of such weirdness as Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, and the original 1980s version of Dune.

@hobos

Please stop. If you actually care, stop, step away, and come back in a few days or even a week or two. You’re making yourself look bad with each new post.

Ooh. Another peeve of mine:

People who attempt to argue rules that are clearly written.

Two Examples:

1. A player in a combat scene in a tabletop D&D 3.5 game I played in tried to claim that Improved Initiative was situational and per the PHB did not apply to the combat scene we were involved in. Improved Initiative in the 3.5 PHB has some of the simplest and clearest rules text in that book.

2. A player in a Vampire game tried to argue that they shouldn’t have to make a degeneration roll for killing a feeding victim on accident while at Humanity 8. While the Humanity rules aren’t exactly simple, they do clearly state that accidental killing is a degeneration roll when you are Humanity 6 or higher.

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

I recollect a staffer doing this, with five people waiting around for the scene said staffer had scheduled themself, with all the players evidently too afraid to page, me doing so and getting “I will not be doing that tonight,” as a response to me, and evidently complaints to others about my horrible soul-sucking behavior.

There’s also the inverse, where a player or staff schedules a scene and then nobody shows up, causing the scheduler to become a nuisance, in one case I can recall actively claiming nobody else on the game understands the theme or setting.

@catzilla said in MU Peeves Thread:

A smaller scene? Especially one that might center around your character being there? Unless something has happened IRL where you literally cannot send a quick ‘sorry something IRL has come up, can’t make it tonight’, then totally agree.

What really sucks is when people schedule something on a MU, then not only ghost it, but are very much on the MU in a completely unrelated scene and ignoring pages / attempts to get them to join the scheduled event.

The longest app I can think of was for a Palladium system game (may have been RIFTs, might have been Palladium Fantasy, can’t completely remember) that wanted all manner of hoops jumped through. This may not be 100% accurate to the reality of the game, but if anyone remembers it from this process, chime in:

The application text required the following:

• Full Name
• Age at the time you entered play (had to be at least 19)
• Full & Short Descriptions
• Full Typed Out Character Sheet (IN THE PALLADIUM SYSTEM) including full inventory and the stats for any vehicles / power armor / giant robots you owned.
• Full prose background, with one paragraph dedicated to each of the following:
  • Your character’s life from birth to 18.
  • Each year after 18.
  • Your characters history within the realm of any faction they may have been a member of.
  • Reason your character came to the region described by the grid.
  • Relationship history of your PC and any PCs you knew prior to coming to the grid area.
• Rough ideas on what your character’s IC goals might be.

Then after typing out all of that mess, you got to sit with the staffer assigned your application and chat about anything they found peculiar for at least an hour as I recall, more if you were trying to be something on the far side of balance. (So for RIFTs, something like an Auto-G or Mega Juicer).

After that, you went into the approval queue. In an effort to have some sort of arbitrary control over the population of the game, the staff would take any approved characters and put them into a queue, and then at certain points each month, they’d let a few people finally go IC.

@Faraday said in "My Guy Syndrome":

This “yes and” thing has probably tangented too far to be useful, but the reason I was brought it up originally is because I really don’t think this is the default MU behavior.

I agree it’s not the default, but I’m not sure default MU behavior is what I want out of a MU at this point in my time with the hobby (especially given all of the interesting new RP I’ve done outside of MUing and the few times I’ve done improv on stage).

“Yes, And” doesn’t mean you agree to do things, it means you agree with the narrative as presented so far AND are moving forward with it in this way. It’s about not negating the story people have already told.

A character can totally encounter something that results in them beating feet or whatever to get out of the scene. Scene exits are fine in improv (which is where “Yes, And” was originally given an identity as a concept), and they can be in RP. The RP can indicate that the PCs are going to the stable to defend the horses from the giant mutant wolf, and a player can “Yes, And” by totally posing, “Ser Gobles suddenly gasps at the mention of giant mutant wolves, his armor chattering in fear, ‘I… I am not yet ready to face the menace of the mutant wolves, I must away. You have my support in this task, but I cannot face them myself.’ He quickly runs away, not wanting to be confronted by the source of his phobia.” In that case, you’re not denying anything that’s already happened, you’re just exiting the narrative without derailing it.

@Babs said in Long or Short? Application Process!:

Chances are no one will notice.

This is the exact phrase that lead my best friend to copy pasta a chili recipe into his US History final essay and still somehow get a B on the assignment.

@Faraday said in "My Guy Syndrome":

Yeah, that can be fun - but I still think there’s nothing wrong with politely bowing out of a scene where your character just doesn’t fit.

I agree. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of instances of this causing disruption just comes out of people not understanding how to bow out politely. In cases where I do it, and this might be a tiny bit shady, I simply say something along the lines of “My RL responsibilities require me to hop offline for a while.” and then I just log off.

@Trashcan said in Long or Short? Application Process!:

That being said, I absolutely prefer a shorter application process and endorse doing the absolute bare minimum to get an app over the line. GET ON THE GRID and start playing.

I agree with this, and in my opinion the bare minimum should be:

• Application Coherency: The application should be coherently readable and make logical sense. I’ve read enough offenses to the written word in my time in the hobby that bad apps will haunt my afterlife.
• Lore Knowledge: The application should indicate that you have a basic understanding of the MU’s setting. Most games these days have a loredump summary type document somewhere that contains all of the information that literally every character in the world would know, and the application should reflect that.
• Mechanical Knowledge: A large majority of MUs have some sort of mechanical system for conflict and task resolution. Some of these are based on TTRPGs with their own published book lines. Your application should reflect that you are familiar with the core mechanics of the game, and possibly note if you are new to the specific system being used. (Being new to a system shouldn’t be cause to deny an app, but should be brought to staff’s attention so that they can help you learn it until you get up to speed.)

There are some optional additions to this as well:

• Acknowledgement of Responsibility: If an application is for a position of IC power or responsibility (and yes I am aware that allowing PCs as IC leaders is often fraught with peril), then the application should include an acknowledgement that said position requires you play your character in a way that generates positive RP experiences for others and not just yourself.
• Roster History Acknowledgement: In games where the application is for a roster character that has already seen play, the player should acknowledge to the staff that they understand the IC storyline already written for their character. If a character has already developed rivals in game, then the character is dropped back to roster and picked up by someone else, their first scene in the game shouldn’t be one where they are suddenly best buddies with those rivals with no logical reason.

@Juniper said in Long or Short? Application Process!:

If I have to apply, I’m already gone.

While I understand this and can sometimes agree with it, I’ve also had the experience of playing on games with no application process whatsoever and watched as the game filled up with random trolls and ended up shutting down pretty rapidly.