My Mother and a couple of my sisters spent many years playing a Star Trek PBEM game (It was called the FGN I think) and I’m trying to remember what their experience was.

As far as I can remember, there really were only (or mainly) officers. Heads of department and then their 2ic. Like Chief Medical Officer and then Assistant Chief Medical Officer? Might not have been that nomenclature exactly but that was kinda the vibe. Obviously that doesn’t make for particularly large crews, but they had multiple ships and stations and stuff. The game runners basically managed the entire federation I guess and gave ships missions and stuff, and then the players mostly just did things with their crew. They could transfer to another ship or station in the fleet, and if you wanted to play with your friends they’d be as accommodating as they could.

Also like, I’m fairly sure there were people who were just like “I wanna be the wise bartender on the ship” and so they could do that if they wanted. But yeah, basically it handled having a lot of people by having a lot of ships rather than just jamming everyone into one. The ships would sometimes be on missions together or whatever, but also often were just doing their own thing in the galaxy, and one ship that got sassy with the romulans over here might cause problems for another ship who is trying to deal with some romulans over there, like it was a shared galaxy even if you didn’t necessary interact with everyone else in it regularly. In theory you got to have your ‘limited Star Trek ensemble cast on a ship’ adventures, while also being part of a much larger group of people also going on adventures?

Would that work as a MU? Would ‘real Star Trek stories’ be able to be told? Would it even be practical to try place many different ships and stations all doing different things asynchronously into some sort of coherent universal timeline?

I don’t really know. But I do know a ton of Star Trek fans had a ton of fun playing a PBEM game a couple decades ago, and I thought maybe a tiny bit of info on how they did things (even if maybe it’s not exactly the type of thing that we’re talking about wanting here?) might be helpful to someone. Or at least stand as evidence that you can do something with it, somehow.

@Pavel said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

“we have proof that L&L games literally cause spontaneous combustion”

It’s because of all the bared ankles, right? It’s gotta be!

…well that and the incest.

I know this is probably just, like, ‘Tertiary Education’. And maybe there’s even a great reason for it.

But man it feels so bad when so much of what I’m being assessed on for my classes is stuff that wasn’t taught or even part of the provided course material. Like, it feels the majority of what I’m being assessed on is stuff that I have to go and research myself.

At which point I can’t help but wonder what the hell I’m even paying these clowns for?

The answer, of course, is that I’m just paying them thousands of dollars to decide whether I get the qualification at the end of all this.

I kinda feel like I’m being scammed.

Marvel Rivals is pretty dang fun.

Semester 1 finished, great grades all round. At age 38, on my 4th attempt in 2 decades, I’ve finally successfully completed my first semester of a bachelor’s degree.

That’s definitely a big happy.

Although, I was hoping that big success on the first semester would make me feel more confident about, you know, the rest of the three years I’ll be doing this for. Apparently not!

Still, it’s a start and it’s proof that I absolutely can do this. My brain no longer gets to point at my past failures as if they’re evidence that I’ll fail again

I’m 38 years old and am two days into a Bachelor of Information Technology.

That in and of itself isn’t super amazing really I guess. Not in the context of me being me at least, I’ve flunked out of multiple universities multiple times.

But, at the risk of counting my chickens before they’ve hatched, this time feels different. I’m actually managing my time properly and not procrastinating.

I even noticed today that I was so invested in reading the stuff I was meant to be reading that I didn’t even notice the time going by. It felt good.

So, knock on wood, maybe I’ve got this!

@Jennkryst said in City of Glass - Discussion:

There is only one eternal, unchanging precident: there will never be a game with Mummy, because everybody hates me specifically.

I think it’s just that most game runners have Mummy issues.

My pro strat: I just never try to page strangers. They’re scary!

That’s only half joking. The rare times I do want (and work up the courage) to contact a stranger for any reason it won’t be for something same-day. I’ll wait until they’re idle or offline and then contact them and like pitch a scene or a hook or whatever it might be, which kinda ensures the ‘leaving a message’ context so (hopefully) nobody’s going to offended by the lack of preceding small talk.

ETA: And then the 5 hour idle stranger immediately replies with “Sure do you wanna RP now?” and I panic and say “Oh no I was just about to log off but we should talk about this tomorrow bye!” <_<

turn it into my Everworld knockoff.

I totally read that as ‘Everwood’ and was both super confused and embarrassingly excited for a moment until my brain added the rest of the context.

@junipersky Look at him standing there on his hind legs. Like a little Rory Calhoun.

@Pavel said in Asking for RP:

whereas I’d much prefer 30-45 minutes of solid RP than three hours of drek.

It takes me like 10 minutes to write a pose, so 30-45 minutes of solid RP is like me making 2 or 3 poses.

I envy people who have the creativity and writing skill to crank out a good pose faster than that.

There is so much media I want to enjoy. It’s released faster than I can consume it. And it’s so frustrating to know I’ll never be able to catch up.

It also means I end up like multi-tasking on stuff; like listening to a TV or youtube series or whatever while simultaneously playing a video game. Although that means I can’t really focus properly on either, which harms my enjoyment. But I also know that, so I make sure that I only do that with stuff that I don’t care that much about and don’t mind only giving half my focus to…

…which means I’m specifically avoiding all the best stuff because I want to give that my full attention but that would mean less efficient consumption.

@DrQuinn It’s even ‘better’ when you do try figuring out a reason only to have every single one of your suggestions shot down because it wouldn’t be ‘in character’ for them, while they continue to refuse to offer any of their own ideas.

Bonus points if when you give up trying they get upset at you for not being willing to be flexible for the sake of RP.

Wanting to get back into a MU I haven’t really touched in over a year, but I am just constantly getting distracted by fun things that don’t require a ton of effort and focus.

I wish finding fun RP times didn’t feel like such work to me.

@IoleRae The alien with the long shnozz making the record scratch noise at 35 seconds is the best part.

@junipersky I was mostly being tongue-in-cheek, but yeah, eye hair and height defs make sense. Though ‘basic blob person’ is embarrassingly sorta how I see literally everyone, including irl <_<

I’ve got some degree of aphantasia (I don’t think it’s complete, but it’s very close to complete? It’s hard to say without really knowing what everyone else actually experiences), but my general take on PBs seems to be the complete opposite of @Testament. PBs don’t really have any value to me except for like giving some kind of impression of personality I guess, but whatever that impression is quickly gets subsumed by whatever impression I’m getting from their RP anyways. Though I definitely understand using pictures to provide inspiration when creating a character, I don’t really see the value in any continued association between picture and character once a character is created.

It was super interesting for me to realise that difference in opinion though, because I guess I just assumed (foolishly) that everyone with aphantasia would feel the same way about this stuff.

@junipersky Does that mean if I make a completely unremarkable person I won’t need to write a desc?

Please?

@Whisky I forgot to say thank you but thank you so much

@Pax Thank you for articulating all that in a far less frustrated and angry way than I could ever have managed.

Holy shit some people just have consistently the worst takes ever and when you compile all their various takes you get this really clear picture of exactly what kind of person they are.

But also, you know that nothing you say or do will convince them they’re in the wrong, there’s no point in debating them. There’s no point in being snarky because they’ll just use that to ‘prove their point’. All you can do is bite your tongue, swallow the abundance of venom rising in your throat and pray that they are not representative of humanity, right?

…right???

Can someone please post some cute cat pictures in the pets thread I really need them right now.