It really, really sucks feeling like it might be time to let go of something that’s been with you for a very long time.

Congrats, everyone! We have people joining just to toss around ambiguous JAQs and comments about echo chambers without making any concrete or direct refutes to the actual accusations, which means we’ve officially arrived as a MU* forum.

Meta peeve because it’s more about the forum, but.

Being snarky on ad posts. Just, man. It’s usually the first time people are putting something out there. It really doesn’t do the community any favors – especially with the constant worries about the hobby dying – to put out an immediate response of snark.

@Tez is basically my platonic life partner and is SO cognizant and concerned about being as fair an authority as she can, and protecting people who need protecting

@sao can invent a character out of THIN AIR in the space of a SNEEZE and they will be so vibrant and alive and real in just an instant

have you ever seen @Meg theorize about how a plot is going to go? she has a MAGIC ABILITY to either come up with the accurate answer, or something even more fantastic.

@deadscribe’s RP is ridiculously evocative and he is a chill motherfucker

@Third-Eye is one of the people that i use as a, like. chill barometer. she is more capable than most at healthily disengaging from bad vibes and bad folks. if you rile her up, i will raise my eyebrows

Eit is not here but you will never, EVER mistake her writing style for anyone else in the world.

@farfalla has such a strong sense of internal fairness and justice and does such good work trying to actively keep herself accountable, which is the hardest thing to do

@glitch quietly works in the background to do SO MUCH to support the community. he doesn’t like being perceived. but i see u

@Narson is a ridiculous motherfucker but good lord is he also a delight

@Pyrephox is such a vivid and specific RPer, and so consistently safe in her IC and OOC separation. that is the case for EVERY incarnation of hers, but i will forever treasure the specific delight of one particular RP friendship that was so rich

i hope @Rathenhope never stops making the jokes he makes because holy shit. playing himbos together is A+++

@hellfrog deserves more credit than she ever gets for all that she did to build Arx, its theme, and most especially its culture into what it is today

@Apos deserves so much credit for the amount of work and the depth of world-building he has done for Arx over the years

@ham is another who is consistently interesting and specific in his RP, but who i will always treasure a very particular PC connection we got to explore. it is rare to find people that you can safely RP through something ICly messy, unhealthy, and even a bit toxic, but i always felt safe playing that with you

@tsar is so conscientious about her positions, and such a warm and generous RP partner. whenever i’ve needed a sounding board, she’s always been a voice of reason

@Tat did something honestly remarkable in the design, build, and reinvention of the magic system of Spirit Lake

i cannot even remember the last time @Yam and i got to rp but she is honestly motherfucking hilarious and i love her even though she drinks crunchy milk

Tehom is also not here but, i mean. guys. the arx codebase. and the fact that he put in the time and work to make it accessible to others.

i miss playing faith family of that specific era with @Snackness but i’m so delighted whenever we get to play again

@Tori has built numerous guides and helpers for Arx stuff, specifically all her crafting work, that has helped a TON of people

@IoleRae is so open about mistakes and learning from them in a way that takes so much courage. we have managed to have big scuffles on MSB and come out on the other side

i want @Herja to drop meteors on me every day of the week. i want the richness of her trauma. but also, when one storyline hit too deep and too close to something difficult, she was so kind and generous about working around it

i don’t know if most arx folks have noticed the number of code contributions @dvoraen has made to arx, but i have

@crawfish draws the best fkn cats you guys. i am so excited for my tarot deck. and i’m so excited that she found the perfect audience for her art and seems to be enjoying it so much

@mietze is such a kind and warm RP partner, and i’m really excited to be exploring such an interesting character dynamic with her again!!

@helvetica is just. man. life goals amount of attitude. one of the most remarkable things i’ve seen her do is just – recognize when a situation was no good for her and walked away.

@Mosephine has DEADLY ACCURACY in her detective skills and everyone should fear her

@Dreampipe introduced me to NOBLMAN, SWERV and he will die a hero for that

i once saw @kalakh face an IC situation that could very well have been the end of her character, and she chose to move forward ICly because it was what was true to her character. it was so great, and not everyone has the guts to fully own that

@moth flits in and out of my RP circles just like their username suggests and it is always SO EXCITING when it happens. we got to play one of my favorite character friendships

@MarsGrad and i have gotten to write some pretty delightful character pairings and is always open to talking stuff out

@Faraday just deserves a ridiculous amount of credit for Ares. and not just the huge amount of work, but i have such respect for her having a clear vision and intention from the start and staying true to it.

i legitimately have no idea who @pisscat is, i just know that every couple months i’d have a flood of upvotes as they clearly caught up on MSB posts, and it always warms my heart

@Tchotchke said in Liberation MUSH:

I’m not going to kid myself into expecting change, but I can hope.

Don’t. Like – this thread has pages of shittery, the MSB had way more pages of shittery. After pages and pages of shittery, you’re just fooling yourself. Just stop playing. These things don’t change.

#StopPlayingOnGamesWithShittyStaff2023

@anonymouse jesus that’s all fucking GROSS

I can absolutely see how his attempted OOC overtures with me a few years back would have lead down that road; it must have been me shutting him down so firmly that had him scampering off with his tail between his legs.

Basically my character mentioned something in a scene referencing a prior interaction from a good time prior. The player tried to intimate that I was remembering this detail because I must have been rereading prior logs. I’m not an idiot, so grasped the pretty obvious connotation that he was saying I was rereading his TS logs to get off on. I told him that OOCly sexual comments were absolutely not okay to make to me. He backed off and emphasized his good boundaries!! A few days later, he asked if he could send me a light-hearted “build a sub” meme. I said sure because I didn’t realize what type of sub he meant and I literally didn’t stop to realize this was gonna be about subs in the sexual sense of things. He sent me this meme (sexual joke, but no NSFW imagery or anything, for clarity for anyone who clicks) which, tbh, if one of my actual good friends sent it to me about my character or a TS scene or something, would have been funny. From a guy I barely knew that I had just told days before not to make OOCly sexual comments? Nope. I shut it down, he tried to apologize a bit later, and I said I didn’t want any contact with him.

Anyways here’s the full convo: https://pastebin.com/CwSr99Pj (This was with Michael; I censored the name at the time because I just wanted to show it to a friend to roll my eyes at the behavior, and at the time I didn’t feel like I needed anyone rallying to my defense in regards to an individual.)

I’m gonna say this as a general offer to everyone: if someone is getting iffy like this, starting to fish for OOC intimacy like this, and you want someone to be a sounding board or help you shut shit down? If you want someone to look at something and be like “no, you are RIGHT to find that weird, it is VALID to be uncomfortable, this person is trying to pull shit,” I will be that person. If they’re trying to hold some kinky TS over you or make you feel weird about boundaries because you RPed some weird sex shit? I absolutely don’t care. I TS! I RP weird sex shit! It’s okay to do this. If you feel weird or shamed because you feel like you were dumb for already getting involved or lowering your boundaries some? You’re not dumb!! You’re not dumb for connecting a little with another human being just because they abused the fact.

I am a pro at stating boundaries clearly and effectively, and if anyone EVER needs help doing this, I will help. Creepers deserve to be kicked to the curb. Fuck that shit, life is too short.

Over at City of Glass, we’ve had the great pleasure of getting to use a custom Ares plugin for Chronicles of Darkness made by the community’s one and only Glitch. He’s had to since leave the hobby, but the plugin has remained stable enough for three non-coders to continue using it and staffing with it without too much difficulty, minus a few hiccups. He also let us know that we should do whatever we thought was best with the code, and we figure the best thing is to open it to the wild.

We’ve done our best to pull together the necessary files on this repo: https://github.com/tezafofeza/ares-cod-plugin and https://github.com/tezafofeza/ares-ledger-plugin.

The code includes support for Mortal/Mortal+, Changeling, Mage, and Demon, along with the M++ templates Atariya, Dreamer, Infected, Lost Boy, and Psychic Vampire. (We only use Atariya and Psychic Vampire on CoG, so those are the only two I can fully attest to.)

This also includes the Ledger system, which is technically a separate plugin entirely, but one we’ve used extensively on City of Glass to manage locked notes. Ledger is fully customizable and flexible, so people can freely use the config files for it as just a reference for other stuff they want to do with it.

Here’s the catch: none of us are coders. We are not offering this with any form of support. This should be considered abandonware: nothing in it is going to change or be updated, and the documentation included is all you get. I might answer occasional questions about usage, because I love answering questions, but I make no guarantees.

This is also not packaged like a traditional Ares plugin. You will have to be familiar enough with Ares to know where to put these various folders and files.

ETA: Thanks to @Faraday, these have both been packaged as proper Ares plugins! It’s possible they may still require fiddling, though.

As this is being released into the wild, we fully expect there to be people forking off their own copies, and maybe someone will continue to develop it and package it into a proper Ares plugin. We just ask that anyone who does so to please credit Glitch for the foundation. He did some really amazing work.

@Testament said in Bannings:

Banning someone on a game is kind of a, well, it’s not all that effective. Or I guess, it’s effective, to a point. Unless you want to get into IP banning, and even that can be mitigated if you’re really determined and/or feel like paying the money for a NordVPN.

Thinking about it, and how I view it, if someone was banned for really shitty behavior and then they eventually sneak back on unnoticed by any and all who they might’ve wronged. It tells me one of two things.

Either A, they’re sociopath who lacks social skills to realize they aren’t wanted and simply doesn’t care. In this case, their behavior will eventually show up and they’ll be caught, banned, rinse/repeat. See; Cullen, DWOPP, etc etc.

Or B, they realize the error of what they were doing wrong, did some kind of self-evaluation and changed their behavior. In light of B, that doesn’t make them coming back to the game right, but unless you get really draconian about tracking people, it’s just something that most games have to deal with.

Bans – especially public bans – do have an additional value to a game or community beyond the immediate “get rid of the person doing the bad thing.”

They also make a public show of what a community will or won’t tolerate. They provide evidence to regular players of what behaviors won’t fly, which helps make it easier and safer for players to report bad behavior – which, as we all know, is always an ongoing struggle.

Bans aren’t technologically foolproof, and we all know that. But their value to a community, I’d say, goes far beyond that.

Man, so. My serious of thoughts rattling around in no particular order.

MSB staff can share whatever they want of their justification for my continued ban. I don’t care.

–

BMD is not a protest of MSB. Nor was it made in response to the Hogpit on MSB being renamed and having a new Code of Conduct issued for the site. BMD was made before that happened. It was made because a bunch of folks were banned and a bunch of other folks lost confidence in MSB moderation, so they made a new community. At most you could call it a vote of no confidence in MSB. But the repeated idea that a bunch of people were just mad at MSB saying everyone has to be nicer, that all these people just wanted the ability to be cruel and so they left, is bullshit. The timeline doesn’t hold up. People left because…

–

The social contract between administration and a large portion of the active userbase was broken. Pretty much every other time I can recall an MSB staffer asking folks to chill out, move threads, take a breath, etc., it’s been respected. Or if it hasn’t been, people haven’t been affronted at seeing others get warnings. So why was this instance different? The popular answer I see trotted out on MSB is that it was all about Derp’s appointment, that people couldn’t stop arguing about Derp. Except, if you go back and reread the actual thread, that’s not what happened. Sure, some people were making quiet exits, because they didn’t trust Derp in an administrative capacity. But the reason people started getting vocally angry was one single ban that appeared to be entirely without merit. Two users had what could at most be called a tiff over DMs, they yelled some Last Words at each other over their shoulders, and then one side – the one who opened and continually extended the conversation – decided to report this under the guise that it was some sort of harassment. So you had someone who, at most, got a bit snarky in their exit, now being presented as someone guilty of actual harassment, and the community takes harassment pretty seriously. A number of people, myself included, had access to the log of the conversation, and found it a wildly out of touch response on the part of staff. And, when frustrations were voiced, staff doubled down.

There’s a social contract in every community, and when one side is seen to break it, it has a destructive effect on the community at large. That is why you saw such a strong reaction from a lot of posters who have never caused issues before and who only engage in debate rarely on the board. (I’m not talking about me here, as I know I’m argumentative, but people like tsar, Third Eye, etc.) If you lose the confidence of your userbase as a staffer, if you are no longer trusted to treat people fairly, then it is no surprise when your requests for silence aren’t respected. When people are angry about staff misconduct, then requests to not speak about the staff misconduct will be taken as silencing tactics.

That is what happened.

Had that first ban not occurred, I do think you would have seen some people leaving MSB due to not trusting Derp in an administrative position, but I don’t think it would have shaken out the same way.

–

People who don’t even know Mietze, who aren’t even friends with her, should stop using her name as some sort of tool or proof or justification. Her name isn’t a weapon for you to wield, and it makes it very clear you have no idea what’s going on there.

–

It is very, very clear that the decisions of who to unban were not based in any reasonable justification. The reasoning for not sharing anything about why some people were unbanned while others weren’t – and no, a general “we made reasons based on things” is not a reason – is thin enough to be transparent. If Derp had shit on me, he’d share it. There’s been talk at other times about keeping out the “line-pushers” now that MSB has a new Code of Conduct, except you can’t possibly make that argument for the vast majority of those who remain banned.

–

The fact that MSB staff openly asked people what they could do better and then disparaged the responses before eventually splitting the thread (fine, makes sense) and locking it (not fine) just makes a public declaration that offering criticism of MSB staff is unwelcome and will be treated with hostility. If you actually want to engender trust, you are doing the opposite.

–

You have not managed to cultivate some safe, polite atmosphere. There’s open snark over there, most particularly from the mods. Some of the people talking about how safe they feel now do so because the people who will call out others when they do shitty, creepy things are now gone. VulgarKitten changed her username to Hella and slipped right back on the board. She had previously disappeared after it came to light how she had been lying about her identity on Arx for months, manipulating others, and engaging in romantic and sexual RP with players who had NCOs against her. The safety she praises you all for now is the safety of a predator who knows that a lot of the people who would publicly point out their egregious behavior are now gone, so she can pretend everything’s fine and slip back in (to eventually do it again).

–

Refusing to talk about any of the offending DMs of the banned parties, but then sharing a random anonymous DM talking about not liking three people speaking up, and then acting like it’s not about the three people who had been talking critically about MSB that night is – wow. Hugely manipulative.

Moreover, as indicated in the above point, the people who might feel safer are those who would prefer an environment where they are not held accountable for their actions. This isn’t actually a healthy environment. It is a pretense at civility. It’s surface deep.

–

Also, if you’re going to hold the position that you “can’t speak to” the idea that Derp is bad at “women’s issues” because you yourself are a man, maybe you should listen to the numerous women who have said it? Maybe?

–

Finally, good lord, if you are going to repeatedly harp on the necessity of irrefutable evidence and the ability of people to doctor logs, you cannot also then be confused as to why ANYONE would EVER hesitate to report ANYTHING to staff, Jesus Christ, please use a modicum of logic.

–

Okay. That’s it. I am done. I have just had all these thoughts writhing around in my brain since last night.

Even if I want to yell at someone about how they’re being a total shitty asshole, I want to yell at them with the right pronouns.

@Popes said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

One exists. It’s called Match of the Millennium. It has SNK and other stuff too. Sadly, a chunk of us quit recently when staff decided to promote a foot fetishist, pedo nazi to a place of plot importance, and instead of going ‘oh, we’ll ban them’, instead doubled down.

lol why is foot fetishist included in this list of actual serious things

Honestly everything interesting I have to say about design of consequences comes straight from @Pyrephox’s mouth. They have a great brain for this sort of design.

@Ominous said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

@Faraday The original RPG, D&D, was built around players having a stable of characters, not the one character per player paradigm that developed as teens and college kids who had no background in the wargaming culture D&D came out of took up the game. Ars Magica has troupe style play. Collaborative storytelling forums/games on the internet are a thing with probably an equal sized playerbase to the MU* playerbase. Storytelling games are growing in popularity and we are starting to see them overlap with traditional RPGs. Sure, there will be people who decide such a game isn’t for them, but let’s not pretend that the idea is some left-field ramblings of a crazy man. This has been done and was being done longer than one character per player, and the solutions to any issues should be out there already ironed out in the particular spheres mentioned.

Yeah, but those are all tabletop RPGs.

MUs fundamentally are not. I think a big recurring issue on MUs is people repeatedly trying to just port in tabletop RPGs and not doing any work to adapt it to the entirely different medium that MUs are.

@Raistlin said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

1: Players who are willing to have characters that “lose” in these political games and who’ll accept consequences. It should still lead to engaging and imaginative RP but, in my experience, most people just want to “win” and don’t like being on the other side.

I think the biggest opportunity here is developing a system with interesting consequences. Yeah, there’ll always be players who only want to win no matter what, you can’t work around that other than identifying and getting rid of people who simply won’t play the game where it’s at. But one of the big reasons IMO that so many players have issues with this in games with any sort of competition or PVP (not talking about PK level PVP, just social reputation PVP here) is because the consequences suck to play. I think if someone wants to do a good L&L or Regency style of game, the number one focus they should have should be “how to make opportunities for consequences that are interesting and allow for a healthy cycle of winners and losers.” If you lose rep with the upper class, make opportunities to earn rep with shadier factions, that sort of thing.

It’s easy to say that players don’t like dealing with consequences, but often I think the issue that comes up on games is that consequences too often end up as All Or Nothing situations. Or players don’t have a good sense of what they can do to enact consequences on others, and without a variety of mild to medium severity consequences, people tend to only think of the biggest consequences that tend to be much more character-ending.

Neitherlands was one of the recent ones, and had a very wild ride of a thread over here. It was the gamerunner mostly running wild on this one.

@Gashlycrumb said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

@Roz said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

I did staff on a GoT game for a while (Steel & Stone), and we didn’t actually get any botherings from their direction. I’m not sure if they’d given up on it by that point, if we just got lucky, or if those particular rumors were exaggerated. Based on other behavior from Nymeria I witnessed more directly, I absolutely wouldn’t have been surprised at those rumors being accurate, though.

It happened. They threatened to ban, and probably did ban, people from Blood of Dragons for talking anywhere about the existence of Game of Bones, which was the one I ran. They threatened to ban anybody who was discovered to be playing on GoB. They stalked me across GoT fan discussion groups and MU discussion groups, evidently just to tell me and everyone who happened upon it, “If GRRM wasn’t so busy, he’d give Gashlycrumb such a smack.”

Their reasoning is that since GRRM gave their game his official approval, that meant he officially forbade all other ASoIaF MUs (Seeming thus to reveal that this couple who keep claiming to be scholars of fantasy literature have never read T. H. White.) and it is a horrible disrespect to him to play or even think about one that isn’t Blood of Dragons.

Some point during the years GoB ran, they stopped. I like to think it’s because I and GoB’s players kept laughing at them.

I absolutely believe you! Mostly whenever this topic comes up, I’m just like, how did S&S totally avoid this? I even asked Elf (the creator/headwiz) once just to see if he’d ever fielded anything that I just wasn’t aware of, but no. I know S&S was before GoB, but the talk of the BoD crew doing this were already very present during S&S’s days. I guess we just weren’t cool enough to get harassed

Michelle Trachtenberg at only 39 years old. Just awful.

@Jennkryst said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:

@Roz said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:

@catzilla One splat, or a VERY limited selection of splats. Basically I think that your whole staff should always be able and willing to handle all splats that you make available, or else you’re going to run into the inevitable issue of how you continue support when someone needs to dip.

Depends on how in-depth you want the knowledge of other spheres. Enough to handle scenes? Great! In-depth knowledge of all rotes or something?

handwobble

You can always just ask the players to explain shit, with the caveat that more knowledgeable staff will be double-checking, and if they’re cheating or something, CONSEQUENCES.

I think it’s best to have all your staffers capable of supporting all your spheres with a reasonable level of comfort. If a sphere’s support is going to suffer if you lose one specific person on your team, then I think it’s best to not add that sphere.

Also, an uncomfortable thing that I’ve witnessed on kitchen sink games: abusive or predatory people get left in charge of shit because there’s no one else around to run the sphere.

@catzilla One splat, or a VERY limited selection of splats. Basically I think that your whole staff should always be able and willing to handle all splats that you make available, or else you’re going to run into the inevitable issue of how you continue support when someone needs to dip.