yeah, especially if the game setting is such that there can be a lot of ICly cycling in and out, people can get tired of doing intro type scenes all the time. but it’s good that folks are still trying to loop new PCs into plots.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

Possibly a new peeve of mine (I’m still mulling it over and trying to decide whether it irritates me or not):

When a player is trying to do certain scenes to help them establish a new character and get used to playing that character and speaking in that voice, but others are trying to handwave that stuff and just operate as though the character has always been around and has in depth IC knowledge of current events with no actual scenes to back that up.

has the PC always been around ICly? because i feel like that’s an important point. if the PC literally just moved to the place or something, then wouldn’t they just respond accordingly IC that they just got there?

but if they’ve been in the place ICly off-cam, then it makes sense for other PCs to treat them that way.

@Jennkryst said in MU Peeves Thread:

@helvetica said in MU Peeves Thread:

Is raising a skill mid-scene really that rampant of a problem that we really need to twist ourselves into knots over this? Like, do people do this for real or is this some mythologized outlier situation? Rather than preemptively punish everyone for one theoretical idiot, why not simply toss out that idiot if and when this occurs?

I gotta tell you, I was just in a scene rolling quite possibly my highest skill the entire time… and I still (hilariously, in a fun way) got my ass kicked by the dice. Specifically, basically a huge chicken attacked my ass. You can raise a skill all you want. It’s no guarantee.

Followup question - if a game makes it so you can only raise things via +job… do staffers processing those jobs also have to make sure you’re not doing any RP before raising stuff, lest THE DIRTY CHEATING happen, or whatever?

well i for one also hate XP spends only being allowed to happen via job. like if it’s because of code limitations or whatnot, i get it. but the sort of, like — staff has to approve each and every job because players can’t be trusted to spend XP even when those spends meat the mechanical requirements? hate it. (but i’m a hater.)

@howyadoin said in MU Peeves Thread:

If it wasn’t for the mid-scene “oh shit!” skill raise, my XP would never be spent.

this is honestly incredibly valid and i think probably something that is also forgotten. people can be RPing towards a thing and forget to hit spend until they’re reminded of the XP impact. which isn’t even people trying to cheese the system; it’s that people are naturally most reminded of the system when it’s the most relevant to them.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

Wouldn’t the easiest way to avoid mid-scene advancement be to keep the commands to advance only in one specific OOC room on the grid? An XP Room.

this is what got suggested up-thread and my god i hate this too. this feels like SUCH an overcorrection to a fringe issue.

tbh i just can’t bring myself to care that much about mid-scene skill raises. like, it’s not like they’re sneaking it for free, they’re still spending the xp. they’ve presumably been working on the skill, either on-cam or off. who’s to say that mid-swing isn’t when they break the arbitrary, artificial threshold of skill level 3 to 4 in swording?

i know there were absolutely mid-scene skill raises happening plenty on arx and i think it just wasn’t a big deal in the end. (although a vague memory of someone asking for a mid-scene train to make the cost cheaper was p funny.)

@Trashcan 5 weeks is at least more generous than i’ve seen elsewhere. i’ll just say that i’ve seen the cap hit people who are being actively engaged in the game and RPing and just sometimes lose track of how much XP they have. and i just think preventing those folks from missing out is worth the potential for some occasional cheesiness.

@junipersky Folks who prefer cooldowns on XP spends and caps to unspent XP tend to cite instances where a PC has spend a ton of XP all at once, to go from not having a skill to being an expert, particularly if the timing was particularly convenient, i.e., a situation arose where the skill would be useful so they spend their hoard of XP to suddenly be good at it. Some folks find this immersion breaking and obnoxious to deal with.

But I just can’t really bring myself to find it a compelling argument, particularly when weighed against the cons that happens: people getting behind where their PC could be due to entirely OOC reasons. Those reasons could be medical (very easy to forget for some ADHD folks), RL emergencies happening, even normal stuff like vacation. I just don’t think it’s fun, nice, or kind to turn this into a game of OOC homework just because of some potential edge cases that – aren’t really a practical problem other than temporarily bugging some people.

And you’d have the exact same impact from someone spending their XP regularly on raising a skill and just not really mentioning it/RPing it. It will look the exact same as them spending the XP all at once. Or they’re just not someone you know and RP with! Or sometimes someone IS RPing about it, but they miss a weekly XP spend cutoff, and then they lose out on that week of OOC progress even though it’s an active part of their story.

(And if the impact of raising skills is statistically negligible, as it can be in some systems…then it also doesn’t matter if someone raises it a bunch at once. If the numbers don’t matter one way, they don’t matter the other.)

i don’t want to be an asshole in the constructive space that brought the topic to mind, but omg i hate xp caps and cooldowns sooooooooooooooo much. they drive me nuts. the players are already limited by the rate of xp gain. all of the things that bother people about big xp dumps (a PC going from 0 to 100 in a skill in an instant) will still happen just from — PCs not talking about something on their sheet that wasn’t relevant in their scenes before.

sorry to anyone who was being perfectly pleasant and polite about this today lmao. I’M BEING PETTY. i just hate caps and cooldowns.

(to be clear: by xp caps i mean a cap on how much unspent xp you can bank, not overall game limits on how much xp a pc can spend total. and by xp cooldowns i mean being able to only spend a certain amount of xp within a given timeframe, no matter how much you have banked.)

@Ominous when i staffed on a mutant/superpowers game with freeform powers, we had no system. there was no dice and no rolling. there was no book. powers were defined by writing them out and defining whatever limits needed to be defined for that power, with the overall power level of the game just being controlled by the humans doing approvals.

as someone who played and staffed on an x-men-derived, OC-heavy game with freeform powers for years back in the day…

…i wouldn’t want to go back to appstaffing those lol. it got so exhausting defining limits. i think i’d like SOME sort of system framework nowadays.

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

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

it’s times like these that i miss old threads from defunct boards because dang we had NUMEROUS threads of these games while the drama was happening

Part of me thinks it’s good that we’ve wiped the slate clean, and everyone gets a fresh start, because honestly 2 decades or however long is a long time to be holding grudges, people do grow and change.

i don’t think this is really happening, though. people still remember. it’s just that now we don’t have the references to actually point to for accuracy.

it’s times like these that i miss old threads from defunct boards because dang we had NUMEROUS threads of these games while the drama was happening

NGL, to me RPIs are just a subset of MUDs that are particularly RP-heavy/focused

@Faraday said in "My Guy Syndrome":

@Roz said in "My Guy Syndrome":

we’re not talking about TTRPGs, though; we’re talking about MU*s. they may take systems from TTRPGs, stats and dice and such, but the social structure of how players have to persistently interact is entirely different from a tabletop experience.

Yes, I realize MUs are not TTRPGS (obviously). I said it was because of the TTRPG influence, which I believe came over along with the “stats and dice and such”.

plenty of MU*s have been entirely divorced from TTRPGs. like – plenty of them haven’t had stats or sheets at all. that was the majority of the games i played growing up

Seriously - have you seen “yes-and/no-but” as a commonplace principle in your MUSHing experience? Because I haven’t, even on games with a cooperative focus.

i would absolutely say it’s commonplace in nearly all of the games i’ve played. despite arguing about MU*s =/= TTRPGs just a second ago, i would in fact say that this philosophy has also extended to most of the TTRPG games i’ve played at, too.

maybe we’re just understanding the philosophy differently? to me, this is just a description of the basic philosophy of cooperative storytelling and trying – where appropriate, yes – to build upon what your fellow players are giving you. we even have a common phrase that gets trotted out for when people play against this philosophy in a particular way: no-selling. no-selling is frustrating and obnoxious for players because it tends to be a refusal of story rather than building on story.

“no, but” is a hugely common piece of advice given to GMs, both in tabletop and on MU*s – the idea that you be able to give characters something to keep moving forward, even if it’s a more difficult or more dangerous path, in cases where they fail.

@Faraday said in "My Guy Syndrome":

@Roz said in "My Guy Syndrome":

i really don’t think anyone was likely intending citing this to mean they think everyone should literally be saying yes to everything every single time

I was challenging it even as a general rule / starting point. “Yes, and…” is a perfectly valid improv technique, but that’s not the framework that most TTRPGs (and by proxy many MUs, which have one foot in their TTRPG roots) operate within.

we’re not talking about TTRPGs, though; we’re talking about MU*s. they may take systems from TTRPGs, stats and dice and such, but the social structure of how players have to persistently interact is entirely different from a tabletop experience.

That aside, I think @Trashcan raises an important point that “No, but…” is an equally valid improv response.

yes, i do agree there. i think that’s really just an expansion of the same philosophy. it’s about the collaborative building on what the other player is offering.

@Pavel once again, my point was only that i didn’t think the people in the conversation bringing up the “yes, and” tenet were meaning a version that was devoid of common sense and reasonable guidelines. just as a general effective philosophy of MU* RP being by nature a collaborative multiplayer improvisation

@Pavel said in "My Guy Syndrome":

@Roz said in "My Guy Syndrome":

@Pavel said in "My Guy Syndrome":

@Roz said in "My Guy Syndrome":

@Faraday said in "My Guy Syndrome":

Collaboration doesn’t mean always saying “yes” to everything. It means trying your best to find a mutually-fun solution, but also recognizing that sometimes people want opposite things and someone’s not going to get their idea of fun.

i really don’t think anyone was likely intending citing this to mean they think everyone should literally be saying yes to everything every single time

Here? Maybe not. Elsewhere? It’s absolutely been a thing.

it’s useless to try and account for every extremist view of a given perspective; they exist for every opinion. i was indeed talking about the conversation happening here

Yes, let us simply discount and ignore any experience that doesn’t fit within our own.

that literally wasn’t my point??? i wasn’t saying that that extreme take could never exist in the world. just that i don’t think anyone here in this conversation was expressing it, because it would be nonsensical. and that it would be exhausting trying to defend every single position from the angle of “i must always acknowledge the possibility for someone to take this to the absolute extreme,” because there’s an absolute extreme for everything, but it’s okay to approach conversations with a certain expectation of common sense.

because i do think it’s common sense that a game could not reasonably survive “everyone says yes to every single other player” and if someone came in her seriously positing that idea, we’d all just call it ridiculous and unsustainable. it wouldn’t be worth wasting time on

@Pavel said in "My Guy Syndrome":

@Roz said in "My Guy Syndrome":

@Faraday said in "My Guy Syndrome":

Collaboration doesn’t mean always saying “yes” to everything. It means trying your best to find a mutually-fun solution, but also recognizing that sometimes people want opposite things and someone’s not going to get their idea of fun.

i really don’t think anyone was likely intending citing this to mean they think everyone should literally be saying yes to everything every single time

Here? Maybe not. Elsewhere? It’s absolutely been a thing.

it’s useless to try and account for every extremist view of a given perspective; they exist for every opinion. i was indeed talking about the conversation happening here

@Faraday said in "My Guy Syndrome":

@chorus said in "My Guy Syndrome":

Just in general, MUSH RP is a “yes, and” medium.
Collaboration doesn’t mean always saying “yes” to everything. It means trying your best to find a mutually-fun solution, but also recognizing that sometimes people want opposite things and someone’s not going to get their idea of fun.

i really don’t think anyone was likely intending citing this to mean they think everyone should literally be saying yes to everything every single time

@Autumn said in Long or Short? Application Process!:

At the risk of sounding like I’m victim blaming, we also have to be willing to take “yes” for an answer. If staff explicitly say something like “If your background is more then N words, you’re probably going into more detail than we really need,” and I proceed to write a background that’s 5N words in length … that’s not something staff can fix.

idk who the victim being blamed in here is — players being blamed for writing more BG than they need? but anyways yeah this is very true and frustrating when it happens. when a game has a maximum word count for BGs, it means that they literally do not need that level of detail and aren’t interested in reading it. i’ve definitely been a part of sending back apps that went over the cap.

idk this game or the people running it, but i can tell you that the description of behavior offered by who i presume to be someone on staff aligns very closely with my experience with this player from when they were banned from a different game i staffed on a few years back