There is a game I am on where I signed up for an event. At the event, was a particular person.

This person, for want of a better word, has a bit of a fan club on this game. People talk about this person a lot; they seem to have a lot of close friends, and people respond super enthusiastically when they do things, log on etc. etc.

I do not begrudge this person any of this, and to be honest, they do not seem to do anything to encourage it. From my point of view they do not do anything to -warrant- it, either. But, I am prepared to accept that is very subjective.

In this event, which was just a one-shot adventure-type thing with some light combat, I ended up nearly walking out part way through because this person’s fan club was so busy gushing over this person and trying to interact with this person that my character was totally ignored.

This happened multiple times, where the rest of the group just played as though my character was not there. As an example, my character did X thing on their turn. I checked it with the GM, rolled for it, it was in my pose. Nobody referenced it in their pose, acknowledged it had happened, or anything like that.

In the next round, this person does a very similar thing (similar enough to the point of being redundant in the circumstances). The rest of the group are falling over themselves to (ic and ooc) tell this person how clever they are, how cool and badass their idea was. Even the GM referenced them doing this thing in their pose, ignoring that my character had already done it.

It’s not a major thing, but man is it irritating. I wasn’t going to mention it, but the talk of cliquey groups brought it all rushing back! I have been kind of light on the details as I don’t dislike any of these people or want them to feel bad. However, if the purpose of the scene is a self-congratulatory, feel-good session with your in-group, maybe don’t paste it as a public event and invite people you’re not really interested in including.

I have realised that from years of playing in WoD MUSHES, I am so conditioned to staff wanting to breathe down people’s necks about every little thing that I get incredibly anxious when I see other people RPing about something my character did—even something super innocent. It brings me out in hives that someone is about to send me a shitty job to tell me I am WRONG and BAD.

I think it is nice that games are a lot more chill these days, but I think it probably speaks volumes about the general state of WoD games that my most comfortable state is to be completely under the staff’s radar because staff on a WoD game paying close attention to what you’re doing is almost universally bad.

I normally do not struggle too much with the “brain weasels” but walking into an open scene only to have everyone in it check out within a few poses is a special kind of disheartening.

I am rationally certain that it is nothing to do with me and I just happened to walk into a scene that was already trailing off, but it is harder to convince the self destructive demon on my back.

I always find it a bit creepy when it is clear someone has someone else on watch and they start gushing over them on the channel when they log in, but haven’t even ; waved or said ‘hi’ yet.

It also kind of bums me out if I end up logging in day after day and get tumbleweeds, but there is very clearly a group that are friends and treat each other logging on like the second coming of Jesus or something.

Obviously there is nothing objectively wrong with these behaviours and people can say hi to who they want. But, it is a peeves thread and I am allowed to find the behaviour personally irritating, also!

So, in conclusion: Stay far, far away from this game is what I am taking away?

I have had a great time playing Arx in the past before and I definitely met and RP’d with a lot of lovely people there. I think the two (slightly related) things that I really struggled with on Arx were:

• There is often a lot of what I will call “tonal whiplash” where there is a terrible civil war, or some other disastrous thing going in in the background, but all the player events going on day to day are like a pet fashion show or a slam poetry contest. I understand why this happens and of course anyone who runs anything on a MUSH these days is an angel, but I sometimes just wish there was a bit more “bite” to some of the day to day RP. Which, I am sure someone will tell me it is there but…(see point 2)

• Lack of (genuine) variety in Roster characters. I remember a period (not recently, but I don’t know if it has changed) where there were like five roster characters who were a variation on “vaguely piratical sailor girl with a brusque attitude but a heart of gold” or “gruff bearded warrior with a large sword, a drinking problem and a dark history he never talks about”.

Which, again, I get isn’t anybody’s fault. It was a bit better when there was an option to make an OC, but I get this also led to its own raft of problems with some kind of egregious stuff sneaking by at times. Or maybe I am just too picky.

I think the staff do a good job and have a massive amount on their plate, but I found these things really had me struggling to get back into it when I have tried. I think if they could get a handle on the rosters at least, that would make the game more appealing to new players again, since the numbers seem to have dwindled a lot.

Just a couple of thoughts!

Pacha

It just struck me…

A thriving community springs up around the sole source of an increasingly rare resource, presided over by an influential female figure. However, behind the scenes, a less popular and well-known figure secretly controls access to this resource, and a power struggle ensues. The unknown figure begins implementing a series of embargoes, blocking access to the resource unless the leading female figure publically validates and acknowledges their control.

Is this the story of Liberation MUSH, or the opening act of Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome?

Peeve of the day is people relentlessly humblebragging on channels about how important they are at their job.

Should I create my own MU for that?

It doesn’t really seem shady to me? On reading it, it just seems to say that they have the right to use anything you create or put on the game or wiki. It’s non-exclusive, so you aren’t losing any right, just giving them one, and it’s non commercial, so they can’t use it to make money or for business purposes.

To me, obvious uses of it would seem to cover situations like:

• You volunteer as build staff. Some time later you fall out with the game’s administration and leave. You cannot demand they delete all those rooms you made, as you have given them a license to use that writing.

• Your character becomes the vampire prince. Two weeks later you vanish from the game and are never heard from again. The staff is allowed to turn your PC into an NPC until they eventually replace them. You have given them a license to do this.

• You volunteer to create a number of wiki pages and help the staff with wiki organisation. You later become uncontactable. The staff is allowed to alter your design, use the template elsewhere on the site, or replace what you did with something altogether different.

So, it is a bit overly formal, but there are definitely plenty of legitimate use cases for having such a clause.

Interesting further info, for those following along:

https://imgur.com/a/O2BUQdA

Hi there

To clarify, from my point of view (I play Lysander), I put in a job about interviewing those prisoners on 25 October.

From my point of view, I initially ran a scene where Lysander wrote to basically every PC on the game who had a specialism in law or law enforcement, inviting them to take part.

I took all of those people, and then everyone who approached me and asked to be involved, and put them on a great big job, which totalled about 8-9 people.

Unfortunately, there were various delays and such, which meant that it took until now to get the resulting scenes done. Because of the passage of time, a lot of the people who had been on those jobs initially fell off or lost interest, so by the time it came to do it, there were 3 of us.

The three characters could not do the same days, so we ended up doing two scenes on two different days. I did both, but that involved me staying up past 2 am two nights in a row, so I did put in significant effort to attend those scenes.

To the massive credit of Spes, she went around everyone that was online and available on both nights to find other people who might like to join in and participate, with the result that we had extra people at each event.

It certainly was not any attempt to exclude or slight anyone, and anyone that approached Lysander I included on the job. Even other people who wanted to go ahead in a way Lysander disagreed with (wanting to be violent with the prisoners), I did my best to find a way to let that happen for them, and they are going to get a chance to do that.

So, anyone who asked me was included, and I proactively asked everyone who seemed to have a relevant interest in those scenes (law or law enforcement) to get involved. Obviously, if you are playing a character whose main interests are, say…needlepoint or exploring the wilderness and you had not expressed any particular interest, there was no logical reason to invite you to such a scene.

I genuinely do not see what more I could reasonably have done to include people.

There was definitely a long delay with staff being unavailable and then the Christmas break. I will personally say that I am not a great fan of “closed” events being posted publically (I also play on Shattered, where they do that a lot, and I really dislike it). Still, I get it is a useful organisational tool.

I am not sure there is an overarching point I am trying to make. I just wanted to set some facts out from my perspective.

@Roz

(sorry for the late reply to this, it just felt like a big question to answer)

I think there is a mix to be found?

Speaking from my experience as a gay man, I played on a lot of RPI MUDs before I found MUSH games, and many of them would say something like “We allow LGBT characters! We have no rule against it!!” but would leave out the context that the IC world was heavily biased against it and that whenever an LGBT character became known, they would be swiftly murdered in short order, as an example.

TW: Transphobic violence

Spoiler

So, discovering MUSH games which seemed largely to have moved past that was a revelation. I am happy almost every MUSH I have played was happy with me wanting to play a character who represents me, for example. I would not want to play on any game which centred real world themes of racism/homophobia/misogyny and other issues like that, because I ultimately MU as a form of escapism.

If a MU game wanted to incorporate other elements - L&L games for example, almost always deal with issues of classism to some extent, though in a far more high fantasy setting than we might experience day to day. Or a fantasy game where there was a racial prejudice between elves and dwarves, or something. I think for me those are much more deal-able with and tend to be slightly less visceral because there is an added layer of separation.

Obviously as players we all have prejudices and blind spots that we can’t help but bring IC with us, but in terms of my MU games I would generally prefer the common modern prejudices not to be there, even if the world is flawed in other ways.

But then that is also just my subjective feelings on the subject. So someone else might feel differently (and rightly so).

I mean, the fact that they thought, “I want to make a MU!” and three of the top picks on their Rolodex to help them were Polk, Chookitypok and Gailin from Arx is pretty damning.

@Polk

What about her request to:

“But I also need you to help me transition servers in a way that doesn’t negatively affect the others. I’m asking you to do that for me as a favor for old time’s sake. You know I’ve stood up for you in the past. It’s okay to be angry at me now. But let’s not hurt the others here.”

Which you seem to have entirely ignored?

Whoever this supposedly “fine” head staffer is, it seems like they are fine hiring some pretty questionable staff, as long as the leopards aren’t (yet) eating their face.

I just went and checked because I thought I remembered it from way back when, and I was right, but the IRE games have a minimum age of 13 to play rule. That definitely surprised me because IRE is definitely the most ‘corporate’ of the text-based games out there, but they are MUDs, which do tend to feel more like a text-based MMO/Video Game in tone than a MUSH, in my opinion.

On the other hand, those games definitely have adult themes and are rife with TS. They also have coded-in IC marriages, so an element of romantic RP is provided for by the game runners.

Looking at this game, they have made a no TS rule, which I assume is in response to this, but honestly, “Kids might do TS” is only the tip of the potential problems. For one, the rule will be as ineffective and unenforceable as anywhere else that has tried it.

I was interested in the premise of this game for sure and would have been excited to play there, but I don’t think I will because as an adult I would be less than comfortable in a game where there might be kids - even though years ago I was one of those kids!

I think it is important to protect the adults as well as the kids in that kind of situation. While I think it would usually become apparent quite quickly if you were playing with someone who was that young, I also do not ever want to run the risk of having to answer the question of why (for example) I have a sixteen-year-old child I don’t know in my discord contacts.

Not that I think that in the year 2023, there is going to be a huge influx of kids putting down the PS5 to come and text-based roleplay as Jedi or whatever, but I have no doubt there would be a couple.

Honestly, if it is the case that one of the staffers is 16 or wants their sixteen-year-old kid to play and that is why they are hell-bent on 16. Just make the rule: “Everyone must be over 18 except this person, who is a special exception because we said so”.

Is it a fair and objective rule? No. But nobody ever said the rules on your MUSH have to be. It’s yours. We just get to read the rules and decide if we can live with them or not to play there. In this case, while the premise is tempting, I am going to give it a miss unless they make it adults only.

@Testament

I somewhat agree with you. I was mostly responding to the concern that a lot of people had raised about “The Church” controlling people having babies, and obviously, given the situation in the real world, that is alarming when taken out of context.

So, I wanted to add the context I thought was being missed, but I cannot speak to what was in Spes’ mind when she wrote it.

I think it is really difficult on a game like that. Like…I glanced at it because I like sex as much as the next person, but (happily!) a lot of the canonically LGBT characters I might have wanted to play were already taken.

Under their rules, I think I could take a canonically straight character and gay them up, but that feels weird - especially on a sex-focused game.

Like, if I played the gay Scott Summers and Jean Grey showed up wanting snoo-snoo, I think I would kind of feel duty-bound, especially since they are such an iconic pairing.

Obviously, I would not be, and their rules make that clear, but I think the weight of social expectations would certainly be there, and I would feel like I was taking something away from that other player. Maybe that is a weird hangup only I have.

I am sure it is worse for anyone who would want to play a trans character because I can’t even think of one (granted, I am not a huge comics person).

I do not think it is sufficient to say, “You could play a shapeshifter character, who can be any gender,” because unless the character is also trans, it is not equivalent.

It seems like a really difficult knot that could be easily untangled by allowing OCs.

Its an old song now, but each time I have felt down this week I have popped it on and it helps me steel myself against the sort of…grinding horror of it all.

https://youtu.be/KYG7-d_Q9zU?si=Rgwyy6EsSwyPE8wd

Sending much love from overseas. Feel your feels…but then organise and resist.

@helvetica

Yes, it is true! Things are really jumping right now.