It almost sounds as if you became frustrated and unhappy when your online experience was derailed by people forcing unwanted interactions on you with no consideration to whether you were having fun and when you had no way to stop it except logging off.
There may be a lesson in there worth learning.
@Pavel Is it that surprising? Firan, for example, had loads of players in its heyday, lots of Noble Privilege and a whole incest metaplot. Most of the players probably didn’t engage with those parts of the game very deeply, or even were aware they existed. I remember the incest family Demon cult from the very beginning of the game on The Reach --plenty of people (including me) played there while not even touching their whole…thing. How MUCH bestiality play was going on in the average Werewolf game, do you think? Because I guarantee it was greater than zero, especially in oWoD where canonically, werewolves could and did fuck wolves to get more werewolves.
@DrQuinn If an actual, real child is being actually assaulted via the mechanisms of the game, absolutely. (Note, I recognize that this is possible and happens and should absolutely be stopped, whether it’s passing CSAM or grooming underaged players, etc.)
But if we’re talking about consenting adults typing words then there are no children involved. If they play necrophilia, there are no corpses involved. Bestiality? No animals involved. Noncon of any type or flavor? No nonconsenting people involved.
In which case, what penalties do you wish the gaming community to inflict on the consenting adults typing the fictional words at each other? Or an entire game that allows such words to be typed at consenting adults?
I think there’s a difference between allowing IC sexual assault (or other taboo) content, and providing code that allows one player to expose another to that content without their OOC consent.
I have no problem with a game allowing players to decide to play out SA content together, so long as a) either they take the responsibility to ensure that content does not ‘leak’ into the play of anyone who didn’t consent to be involved or b) the game has very explicitly made it OOC clear that this content exists on the game and you may be exposed to it without opting in.
However, I do think that code that allows one player to subject another player’s character to sexual assault without their OOC content crosses a line that I am not comfortable with, and that would be a deal-breaker for play for me.
@bear_necessities It’s very easy to have fun on a game where things you’d find disgusting are happening, when they’re not happening to you. I played on Shang, a game filled with fetishes that gross me out, for years, and did so pretty happily, despite the presence of various dickwads (figurative and sometimes distressingly literal).
In fact, speaking of finding useful games in a game with things I don’t like, I often refer to Shang’s kinks system as a decent structure for RP Prefs if you want to get coded and granular with them.
Play where you want, let other people play where THEY want, and get what they want out of the experience.
This convo is going to end up settling on “This kind of RP is only good when it’s actually good, and not bad”.
Amusingly, that is my exact feeling. 
I don’t mind child or pet NPCs as a general thing, but a lot of players do not have a sense of moderation nor do they understand that other people do not have the same attachment to their NPC follower as they obviously do. So, it’s unfortunately likely for a scene with a kid/pet NPC to become “LOOK AT MY NPC AREN’T THEY CUTE/NAUGHTY? LET’S RP ABOUT THEM.”
But when people don’t do that, it’s fine.
@junipersky Absolutely.
There’s a lot I could say about industrialization as an epistemological framework and how it doesn’t always do education and human welfare justice. But this is not the place for it!
Just, I absolutely understand your frustration and share it.
So… like everything in education, it’s not really possible to repeat the “Mississippi miracle” because no one can agree on what led to the gains.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/12/01/how-much-of-mississippis-education-miracle-is-an-artifact-of-selection-bias/ <-- Article breaking down the statistics used and how different sides choose to read and interpret the data to draw different conclusions.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/mississippi-education-miracle/686731/ <-- More on the X factor that can’t just be copy-pasted
https://educationwars.substack.com/p/overselling-the-mississippi-miracle <-- It is just complicated! And we will see if Mississippi can keep it up.
Yeah. I’ve worked in educational research and it turns out that successful implementation of programs across cohorts is incredibly difficult. Even if it’s being implemented the same way as a successful iteration (and this hardly ever happens for another whole host of reasons), you often don’t see the same results because there are real human factors involved. Relationships between teachers and students, neighborhood trust, neighborhood/family risk factors (turns out kids have trouble concentrating on ANY education when they’re starving or afraid for their safety), and just…so many other things.
My basic steps:
Try to think about what other PCs in the scene are into, based on their character pages/previous conversations. Try to engage at least one of those areas where possible, in the set, conversation, or whatever.
Read the other PCs’ poses. Try to make sure I am reacting to what they give me. In larger scenes, I’ll usually pick one person to primarily react to, because otherwise the poses get real long and real busy. But always try to react to something.
Leave something in the pose that takes the scene further and gives other people something to react to. Don’t just answer a question, ask one of your own. Do some action that requires a reaction. (And seriously, in a talk-heavy scene, never just flatly answer someone’s question without lobbing the conversational ball back with some sort of comment or question that can also be responded to. Don’t make someone have to interview you.)
I have very vivid, cinematic dreams and often have a good memory of them when I wake—but, unfortunately, the ones that stay PAST that so that I remember them days later are usually the anxiety dreams. Which all have a basic template:
Either my coworkers or my friends gather around me and say that they’re sorry, they really thought that if they gave me enough time I’d become a decent worker/friend, but it’s just not working out and they’re tired of pretending that I have any potential, so we’re just going to sever this relationship. They’re always very nice about it, but very firm about the fact that I am simply not up to snuff and I’m never going to be worth investing time into.
The venue varies–parties are common, as are work days where I also have a big project to present after this and before I have to clean out my desk.
Definitely craving something in the horror-adjacent urban fantasy space - CoD, Unknown Armies, Curseborne, anything like that would be great.
My forever-want is gaslamp fantasy with a real sense of Victorian authenticity. Not necessarily “perfectly historically accurate”, but made by someone who understands what the social conflicts of the era were for the place they’re setting it, and has a real reason to set a game in THIS place and THIS time, with supernatural/fantasy elements that really lean into it. Spiritualism, for example – hell, something set in the Burned Over District would be great fun.
I evaded a LOT of minimum age requirements as a teenager, I admit. But I think it’s perfectly valid to want an adults-only experience (even if I also think it’s healthy to acknowledge that it’s more an adults-and-people-good-at-acting-adult only space, instead).
I do not want to give my government ID to anyone over a game. Not least of which because some people are crazy and some of these crazy people run games.
@Faraday said in Staff Bits Linking Handles:
@bear_necessities said in Staff Bits Linking Handles:
If you don’t have a handle, you have something to hide, and my brows immediately raise.
As the creator of the handle system, this kind of bothers me. The system was never intended to pressure people into identifying themselves across games. There has been enough stalking, creeping, and other shenanigans in the MU community (and the internet at large) that I don’t think anyone owes anyone else their OOC identity. Ever. Staff included.
That’s why even Ares games have a built-in alternative method for alt tracking that doesn’t require a player handle.
It’s meant to be a fun tool for those who choose to use it. I’m not a fan of it being held against those who don’t.
(Also in practical terms a creeper can just make a new handle, so I’m not sure what it gains you really.)
I never have a handle!
I don’t have anything to hide. It’s just a combination of a) I’m lazy and I don’t really like metaconnections between games, and b) I enjoy being able to have a little bit of a “fresh start” in a new game, where I can settle into a character without people bringing up previous characters.
Opinions may differ, but I don’t believe I’m a problem player–some people might avoid me, for sure, but I’m happy to tell anyone who I was in conversation or whatever, if I remember, but I do like it to be information I choose to share with people as opposed to information that is just automatically linked to me.
@BurnNotice said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Yam Imagine a horror game where seven out of every ten characters ICly are this person and they all do it at each other all the time and you have my peeve.
Have all my upvotes. I only have one. But you have it.
I want a robust system that lets me do Cool Things. I’ve been trying out various system-light games over the last couple of years, and even in a tabletop environment, I really want a game where I know what resources I have, what skills make my character unique, and a bit of randomness to keep the tension high.
@bear_necessities said in When is the last time you played?:
@catzilla said in When is the last time you played?:
run a silly one shot that will (probably) not have an effect on the setting.
so, curious, how could a game get you to run a plot that could have an effect on the setting, affect the metaplot or change the world in some sort of way? Is it just as simple as keeping that “You can do whatever you want here as long as it doesn’t break the world” on the tin or would you need something else?
I’m not @catzilla but here’s my list:
Give me those things, and I am a plot-running bunny. It doesn’t take anything else (other than the things that I need to “hook” into a game in the first place), but I will admit that I do like bennies. I don’t think XP is the best idea, but it’s nice to get. Even something that’s totally OOC like players saying, “Hey, that was fun,” and, er, actually showing up, on time, ready to play the plot that was advertised? That works.