bonus post, here’s Vorpal trying to intimidate me during all the original UH stuff using my RL name, but using the wrong name

@Colette said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

Maybe you should put less trust into the gossip you’re getting.

I was present for all of this shit. Even as fucked as my memory can be, I trust it way more than I trust someone who’s told a bunch of lies that are laughably transparent to anyone who ever had the misfortune of dealing with staff on UH or HA.

I was super off on 7 years, tho. Chalk it up to sleeping four hours across three days. Going off the logs I can find, looks like it was closer to 3.

PS for the record and since someone asked me, the person who uses the handle @Ruby on Ares is emphatically not the Ruby that I have referenced. Ares Ruby is charming, while UH Ruby (common characters: Rogue, Lara Croft, Wonder Woman) is a mendacious cretin who spent years viciously attacking any woman who tried to speak out against the predators she attached herself to.

PPS, yes, I wish MSB still existed as an archive, the behavior of basically everyone involved was on full display.

@Raistlin said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

Modern superhero comics don’t really grab me either, so if I ran a straight canon game, the canon would basically be the 1990s bumped up to modern day, with some tools bolted on to fold in characters who’ve shown up since. And my worry is that would appeal to exactly one person: me.

I would legit kill for a game set in the early 80s that was actually 80s-vibed or one set in the 90s where I can imply Terry Richardson is being creepy to GenX.

A hack of Aberrant 2nd Edition. I’m a big fan of Aberrant 2E. Well, parts of it. I’d gut the whole nova tech section, which I find basically unplayable. But strip it down to the core system and powers and it’s a pretty slick setup.

I love the setting of Aberrant so, so, so much.

@Colette said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

20 on UH, 24 on HAM, 25 on LnL, not a teen.

So, given yhat time advances on UH and HAM, two of them used to be teens.

That player isn’t keen on those.

Ruby’s known for two things. One of them is being an emotionally unstable pathological liar, and the other is the number of sexpest she’s Ghislained for.

Just 1 year

I might be off on 7, but it was definitely more than one. I’ll have to check my logs when I get back from the OR, but I know this because I was the person who got permission to ignore all of Eianna’s stuff.

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

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

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

I agree that the code plays a part, but I don’t think it’s that simple. There have been plenty of games branded as “MUSH”, running on MUSH platforms (aka TinyMUX / PennMUSH), that had significant amounts of coded mechanics. I never once heard any of them called

Brazil at one point had basically all of oWOD Revised coded

(Also I have no clue what RPI is.)

@helvetica said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

@catzilla Narrative power sets (1-2 paragraph explanation of range and min/max impact) with a baseline skill to roll.

the only OC-only game I remember really taking off used Mutants & Masterminds but I didn’t log into anywhere but Shang for a decade so i could be missing dozens of examples

@renaveleigh said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

@Colette It’s the same people, doing a variation of the same theme. It is the post-Crisis version of LnL.

Which is Post-Secret Wars HA, which is Post-Dark Crisis UH, which is post-Ultimate Invasion HMUX, which was post-Unity 2000… whatever, you get the point.

Just the same people doing the same scenes as the same characters with the same people also with the same characters. Over, and over, and over, and over again, like some Rust Cohle nightmare involving tights.

(Fun side note, Rogue’s been able to control her powers for like 15 years in the comics and I don’t think I’ve ever seen somebody do a version other than a teenager who can only touch people in elaborate bondage scenarios. Because Rogue has been played by the same person on almost all of these games.)

Keeping all player actions is always hilarious. During UH’s last activity spike a few years ago, which ground to nothing when staff didn’t want to do apps, it had been seven years since anybody had played Raven. A character so popular you tend to see her open only slightly more often than Batman. Why? Cus nobody wanted to deal with years worth of somebody else’s bullshit that had “grown” a character into something absolutely no one else would ever be interested in dealing with.* I call it the Chaucer Fairchild Principle. (Somebody did pick Raven up on UH, but only after being given permission to rewrite the entire app and throw out all existing “history.”)

*pointless anecdote example, when I was a kid Power Girl opened on BnB and I had her for maybe a day before finding out that like she was engaged to Blue Beetle or something and I’d need to have their relationship end IC, so I just never logged in again

@Colette said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

attempted to create an approximately comics-accurate merge of DC & Marvel status quo.

In no meaningful way has that ever been true except for major tentpole characters, and even with them primarily just the FF and Superman. On UH, the New Mutants was an infamous clusterfuck because half of us were our comic ages, mid 20s, and half of us were teenagers - just like some of the core X-Men. When a friend wanted to play Oracle, she was approved and then unapproved because, quote, “Batman would put her in a robot body.” On HA, I needed to get Dr Doom’s permission to say he was the origin of Titania’s powers. At a point when Batman Beyond was running around in the present in comics, Terry was repeatedly ruled a banned character because somebody on staff decided it would cheapen and age Batman and got very angry about it.

Even when it wasn’t explicitly enforced, these games have always been predominantly Year One. It’s one of the reasons all of them are so generic. Two different games but there is no meaningful difference between the SuperHero MUSH of 1998 and SuperHero MUSH of 2026, just as there’s no meaningful difference between them and HMUX, UH, HA, and the other who-knows-how-many games that have used the exact same setup in the time I’ve been online.

@Meg

@Meg said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

@helvetica said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

Anyway, I do miss the originality of OC-centered superhero games that were going for a couple years. I love marvel comics/x-men verse, but these everything-and-the-kitchen-sink mu*s…~

yeah, even if i did rp, you’d never catch me on the ‘fuck it let’s have gotham and new york city in the same MU*’ game. it bothers me, because canonically, batman and tony stark exist in entirely different worlds.

i hate them so much that someone once yelled at me to stop calling them potpourri games even tho they are literally just a bunch of shit in a bowl

Rena and I did a massive amount of theme and background work for a San Francisco-based Marvel game set immediately prior to Secret War that was intended to feature the formation of a PC Illuminati and then we never did anything with it, like the true artists that we are

@catzilla said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

@Prototart said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

the guy behind every giant desc with cut and paste names and giant ass cheeks grinding together and tits so big they have to “enter a room sideways,”

I’m not even joking, I have one of them saved somewhere. At his peak like 80% of female comic characters on Shang were using one of his goofy descs. For years it was impossible to make anybody he’d heard of there without pagelocking him because he’d page you ever five or ten minutes without pause.

Shang has a rule where you can’t post more than once in a 24-hour period on their request board. Why? Because he would make a post, wait fifteen minutes, delete it, and repost it.

Shang has a rule where you can’t advertise looking for characters from media. Why? Because all of his posts would be a grocery list of superheroines he wanted to see with bean bag size tits and 2L nipples.

@Coin said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

@sao said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

Pretty sure in any hobby, any undertaking done by humans on this planet, if there is a way for a person to have even imaginary authority and/or influence over other humans, there is going to be an issue with sex pests.

I mean, yeah. I don’t get this whole “man, that one genre, those people, so bad!” And it’s almost always someone who plays in that genre, too; like, you counting yourself, or are you the pristine exception, my dude? lmao

My experience is that there’s been some change in other genres. Not a lot, but when there’s a WoD or whatever place that’s run by abusive, manipulative weirdos who give free rein to sex pests, it tend to cause a stir.

On comic games? Not so much. When Claremont and Ditko were first outed on UH, maybe 20 people left total and most of those - including Chaucer - eventually just went back.

I think it’s more common, and I think it’s viewed as more acceptable. I especially think most people simply don’t give a shit unless it’s directly impacting them.

Of course, it’s also just that all of these games have been run by the exact same people, shedding 1 or 2 each “new” game, and the only lesson any of them ever learned was, “try to keep it quieter.” This crop goes back at least to HeroMUX, which was 2012?

On the topic of “from 20 years ago,” I mean… yeah? JLee from Shang - the guy who ended up on Shang after he got banned from every Transformers game, who resulted in multiple rules being out in place on Shang because they didn’t want to just kick somebody off in the early days, the guy behind every giant desc with cut and paste names and giant ass cheeks grinding together and tits so big they have to “enter a room sideways,” who’s possibly the most infamous and persistent creep to ever become obsessed with 90s comics - was welcome on HA. And I know for a fact that there were complaints made. But he was active, so that meant the game was active, so that meant it was okay. And I know Moritz was there, too, still the same sleazy, racist asshole he was when he was hitting on teenagers in the 90s.

@Colette

So, to summarize:

“I think you’re leaving out a few details.”
“I posted everything when it happened.”
“I’ve seen that exchange.”
“Anyone can see it. I posted it.”

“You should post it.”
“I would never violate someone’s privacy.”

“Well, it’s me, so violate away. Also, I posted it all.”
“I respect the privacy of staff, too! Also, yes, it’s what you posted years ago.”

Enthralling.

@Colette

Well gosh, given that the only player involved would have been me, I can go right ahead and waive any expectation of privacy involving communication I had with staff on HAM, since I have posted all of it here.

@Colette said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

@Prototart

I didn’t know Vorpal before I knew him, so I can’t speak to any possible Damascene conversions. I suspect that it’s you who doesn’t know him well at all, but then he can be impressively abrasive at times so that’s going to happen.

I’ve known of him since I was 13. I am now in my 30s. He has been a massive piece of shit for that entire time.

My complaint about Chaucer’s behavior was on HAM. Try to keep up.

Where’s this exchange you kept referencing?

@Meg said in [What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?](/post/

I was there. I know the deep lore. The game was already kind of going down in flames when he did it, only after being like, ‘i can change him, guys, everything else about him is good except the abuse’ at us.

When everything caught fire the first time, he claimed to be “investigating” after he got called out for lying to cover for other staffers. It wasn’t until months later that he quit - oddly, without announcing anything his detective skills had uncovered or apologizing for any of the lies he had told.

Instead, maybe drop the spicy gossip you do got that you alluded too. Or stop alluding to spicy gossip you’re not willing to drop; it makes you less credible when you vague post something without following up.

Seriously. The only “exchange” I ever had, I posted here.

@Colette said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

I did read that exchange on HAM.

I call him a misogynistic Randian creep because he’s a misogynistic Randian creep: he has been aggressively misogynistic to multiple friends, he had attacked people over their political views, and is, in general, creepy. If you’re claiming he isn’t a misogynist, or isn’t a Randian, then either you’re lying, you don’t know him well at all, or like Saul on the road to Damascus he has seen the revelation and changed every aspect of his personality because he’s been all of those things at least since I was a kid and he was Wonder Boy.

But more importantly: What exchange? My complaint about Chaucer’s behavior? Because that’s one of a grand total of four conversations I ever had with Shakespeare.

You can’t mean when I was Illyana on UH and she was Kitty the day I was banned for outing Ditko and Claremont as predators, so that’s a quarter of our options gone right there.

Do you mean when she got mad at me for calling somebody an incel after he went on a rant about bitches in the OOC room? That’s one of our “exchanges.”

Yes, I went there knowing I’d be kicked off. Someone asked me about playing there again. I said, “The only reason I was ever allowed there was Chaucer. They’ll kick me off within twelve hours.” They said, “oh come on.” I said, “Bet,” noticed Raven - who was very close with Chaucer - was over a month idle, requested the character as a guest, got it, and then went to sleep.

I woke up to a page about how my parting from HAM the last time I was there seemed mutual, and that it was best to keep it that way. Was it that “exchange?” Because that’s when I was “banned.”

Was it the time I went there after Chaucer had stormed off, to say “I told you so?” Admittedly petty, but I can’t imagine there was a staff job about that one.

Let’s have some clarity about which “exchange” you’re talking about.

@Colette said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

@Prototart

It’s always great fun when you pivot wildly Vorpal-wards. Wasn’t it you who once dubbed him “Furry Satan made MU*nifest”?

No, I called him a misogynistic Randian creep because he attacked multiple friends of mine (including one for having the temerity to complain about her insurance after breaking her leg, thus failing to appreciate the sublime perfection of the free market) and lied about a bunch of shit on UH to protect its rep when he was staff there, like when he said the person who went on a protracted homophobic rant wasn’t staff. (He was, of course. And wasn’t he later banned from HAM for going on a protracted racist rant?) ETA: Oh, and of course the time he tried to Power Word me over DMs on MSB, used the wrong name, and then tried to claim autocorrect changed Illyana to “Amanda” when my immediate response was to post a screenshot of him doing so.

My departure from HAM was me leaving because they didn’t do anything about Chaucer’s behavior, then a year later going back to dislodge Raven for like ten hours because I knew they’d kick me off. Like, I literally posted all of it as it happened. Here. (Okay, and going back when Chaucer stormed off to say, “I told you so.”)

You’re welcome to spread any of the lies you’d care to. Bored’d already tried to trot out some of the preferred ones, like all the shit I apparently did on characters I wasn’t playing when they happened, or just on games I wasn’t even on.

For a problem player of such historic proportions, I’ve always found it amusing that I’ve literally never had or caused any problems except on UH and its metastases.

@Colette said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

To be entirely accurate one of the policy disagreements was that some of us felt that HAM was too slow to react to and too willing to overlook “borderline” problematic behaviour from players

Even ignoring everything else - and to be clear, everything else is also bullshit, everybody involved knew UH was run by sex pests and racists and didn’t care until Ruby went from being Claremont’s most virulent mouthpiece to falling out with him, the HAM split was a huge shitfit where Chaucer tried to take over and failed, this is the second or third or fourth game Chaucer has tried to make - making this claim while Vorpal is there is outright comedic.

This is a guy whose entire modern history is being an aggressively misogynistic piece of shit to anyone who disagrees with him and then getting away with it because he’s friends with Chaucer.

And I’ll attest from personal experience that Chaucer plays favorites. He played favorites with me, until I talked back to him. The second I lost his patronage I was persona non grata at HAM. Before that, he’d go over Shakespeare’s head to approve characters I made that she spent days arguing should never be allowed on the grid.

lol.

lmao.

@RightMeow said in When is the last time you played?:

[T]he staff there would hold RP lectures on what my char should do. … Every decision I made felt like if it didn’t benefit the person in charge or completely follow their vision, I got IC lectures. It’s not fun. Or I’d be told OOC how I wasn’t great.

i would have absolutely lost my shit at them and then on multiple forums

actually I might have