@tsar

Hey there!

I am slightly amazed you figured this out at all, let alone after so much time! But upon referring to this post:

https://brandmuday.mythicus.net/topic/121/tsar-s-playlist?_=1761253660522

I think you are actually spot on, so great detective work!

As I mentioned in the post, I don’t dislike you (or anyone else from that scene) in any way. I was just using this thread for its purpose, which was to vent about some irritation I had about it on the day.

Honestly, I have not spent the intervening time stressing about it or plotting heinous acts of revenge, so we are all good as far as I am concerned! In fact, I would go so far as to say that my gripe was not with you at all, so much as how the others in that scene responded to your character vs how they responded to mine.

TO CLARIFY! (since I now remember this!) I think you absolutely warrant people being happy to see you. But despite my being as nice as I knew how to be on that game, what I remember I would often see was…

Pacha logs on

Pacha greets folks

crickets

Tsar logs on, a short or a long time after

It is one minute after midnight on January first

Which I completely appreciate is an unreasonable thing to be grumpy about, especially given that this is mostly down to random chance, people can say hi to whom they like, I don’t know who was awake and at their screens yada yada…so it could absolutely have been an “all in my head” thing.

But in my defence, this is a peeves thread, not a fully justified and reasonable grievances thread!

In any case, yes, I am all good, and I hope you are too.

When I am on a game I usually bring a friend or two along with me, and I primarily play with my friends. If there are characters I then meet, roleplay with and enjoy, I will also play with them. Those people, I usually seek fairly proactively to become friendly with also, because this is my hobby, and I like to be friends with the people I do my hobby with.

There are inevitably characters on a game that I do not know, and whose profile/RP hooks don’t interest me. I don’t feel the need to proactively audition all of those people “just in case” they turn out to be interesting. I try and sign up for events as much as possible, and I find that a good, low commitment way to check out a handful of people all at once, and then follow up with people who seem cool.

That said, if someone approaches me and specifically asks to RP I will almost never say no. There are only a very few people in the hobby I actively try and avoid playing with, and all of those people are extremely aware of the fact as far as I am aware!

@Wizz

I do agree in one sense. I am craving, desperately craving, anywhere to get my WoD/Dark Urban Fantasy fix, but there are only a couple of kind of dubious places to get that right now.

The beauty of Ares is that it allows someone with no technical expertise to get a game up and running (I did this!) as long as you use the tools provided and don’t try to reinvent the wheel. So it allows a lot of games that would never have seen the light of day previously to actually exist.

Because Ares allows plugins, my understanding is that it can theoretically support any number of RPG systems; it just needs someone to create and maintain the plugin that others then use. If someone was to make a fully working WoD plugin for Ares, I have no doubt the games would come.

However, I think FS3 is just so flexible that it can adapt to any number of settings, and also, there are some experts who have got the combat on it down to such a science that most things can be “made to fit” FS3 even if it isn’t their intended/natural home.

I think we are more likely to see WoD but made to work in FS3 before we see fully featured WoD in Ares, for that reason.

@MisterBoring

What do you mean by clique building? So often I see people complaining about what they consider to be cliques, but which I would just consider to be “groups of friends playing together”.

I have to say I did eventually give this place a try, and I didn’t have the greatest time with the staff there either.

I didn’t interact with Vincent, but I do remember seeing Eddie’s player being absolutely awful to him on the channel. To be clear, that player was not permanently banned for harassment (which is how I would interpret “banned” in my thought) but instead was temporarily banned for one week.

I did mostly enjoy my time on this game, and the players were a lot of fun, even if my time there ended on a sour note. My findings were that the staff are very interested and supportive, until they decide not to be any more, after which it took a rather sharp downturn.

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.

The London one is open now if anyone wants to check it out.

https://towersmux.net/

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

Agreed! While I get that sometimes someone constantly posing how hot their character is (especially if it is in a very shallow and uninteresting way) can be annoying, it is also very annoying to constantly have an aspect of your character’s backstory or a trait/merit/advantage you spent XP or points or the equivalent on get ‘no sold’ by every PC you run into.

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 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.

@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).

@Alveraxus

Respectfully, of course I do not mean to say that support for same-sex families is vanishingly rare. That would be a ridiculous thing to say.

What I was saying is that in my (personal, subjective) experience of the genre, I see/have seen very few examples of it actually happening, whether the support is there or not.

Thank you for running an inclusive game. I think all games should be.

@somasatori

It says “The fruit’s flesh is soft and juicy, with a small, edible seed at its center. Technically, the seed is what grants fertility, but the flesh is said to provide for healthy pregnancies and birth.” and also “For a couple to become fertile, both individuals must consume the Evenplum.” so I do assume it is intended to be taken orally, as opposed to a suppository.

@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.