I also come from a WoD background and know that non-consent doesn’t invalidate fade to black, and especially doesn’t allow forcing someone to play through potentially traumatic stuff. So, with regards to “I come from WoD where you’re lucky to have staff even acknowledge you before doing what they want,” I feel like this was a pretty old perspective even 15 years ago. IMO, one thing most successful/decent staff took from places where staff acted with impunity about your character’s consent was to at least check in on certain things. Even just a heads up of, “hey this is likely a combat scene, are you cool with that?” was pretty standard on several games which were non-consent MU*s. Player side, most games had a +warn system. All you’re doing is taking the worst elements of past WoD staffing habits and bringing them into a new generation and setting.

Edit: Also this wasn’t intended to be a reply to helvetica, but the log output from inuki lol.

@Pacha said in MU Peeves Thread:

I always find it a bit creepy when it is clear someone has someone else on watch and they start gushing over them on the channel when they log in, but haven’t even ; waved or said ‘hi’ yet.

It also kind of bums me out if I end up logging in day after day and get tumbleweeds, but there is very clearly a group that are friends and treat each other logging on like the second coming of Jesus or something.

Obviously there is nothing objectively wrong with these behaviours and people can say hi to who they want. But, it is a peeves thread and I am allowed to find the behaviour personally irritating, also!

Seconding this. Sometimes I just need a minute to get my bearings, especially if I’m coming from work, dealing with the kids, trying to settle down myself. We’re no longer in the glomps era. The age of glomp is over, the time of “hey” has come.

I hate my first week of trying to engage people on a new character. It brings me straight back to that feeling like when you switch schools, and on top of that I’ve learned that it takes me more than a handful of poses to find my character’s voice, with the end result that my ancient reptile brain tells me how awful I am while I’m trying to roleplay a social scene.

Edit: Also, I am deeply anxious about asking for RP on a channel. Intellectually I know that if no one responds it’s not a big deal, but ancient reptile brain says that all of them secretly despise me and wish I would go away.

So truly they become HannahBANanna.

I just fully finished a really tough clinical rotation today. I’m not exactly sure why I expected I wouldn’t, but I had a pretty rough time of this whole exit process. For context I worked as a clinical psychology extern at a VA residential facility for homeless veterans who often had substance abuse issues loaded on top of PTSD, depression, anxiety (typically) and serious mental illness (more rarely). Since my emphasis is in trauma, I worked with people who were highly traumatized using primarily cognitive processing therapy, but occasionally prolonged exposure in addition to substance abuse treatment. During my final staff meeting, they did this thing called Thanks & Goodbyes (T’s & G’s) which is usually done with residents graduating from the program.

The thing that got me the most was that I kind of assumed I was a background player, largely unnoticed and just nose-to-the-grindstone working with my patients. I had a large-ish case load and only taught a couple classes (dialectical behavior therapy, and CBT for Substance Use Disorder). It hit me that I kind of internalized this idea that I was separate from the team, so when people started expressing gratitude or talking about how they appreciated this or that about me I had no idea how to hold it and felt extremely awkward in the moment. I also have a history of substance use, and was very grateful to be able to help people who were currently in a material position that was similar to how I’ve lived in the past. A couple of my patients this year relapsed upon release from the program, and at least one of them died as a result of overdose following relapse, so I won’t say I did a perfect A+++ job, but I always did the best I could and advocated hard for everyone. Having been in that world, I know what it’s like to go through the sobriety/relapse cycle, and fall into an old habit that might be beyond your old tolerance.

Anyway, due to a lot of other things in my life (child, spouse, research, work), I generally feel like I don’t have space to hold the kinds of emotions that I need to have about this experience, and I need to get it out somewhere else I fall into bad negative patterns (see above). So, here I am writing about it, I guess.

People who actually act like a welcome wagon when you’re new and don’t know anybody and ask “do you want to meet so-and-so? They match your concept in such-and-such way.” It makes me feel like I joined a more natural community.

@Aria said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

@Wizz said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

@Rinel said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

Very few people who did not grow up as girls are fully aware of this problem.

I am not going to go into a lot of detail as I find it honestly upsetting to remember, but I did want to say that both my own experiences with older players who knew sexually explicit discussion/roleplaying with me was not appropriate given my age – which I openly admitted to anyone I regularly RPed with – were with women, or at least players that presented as women.

I am not trying to dispute ratios or anything like that, but I did feel like I should represent the fact that men typically vastly underreport sexual abuse in RL and it’s likely the case in the hobby as well.

I shouldn’t need to say this, but…

Yes, I can vouch that this is 100% true. On more than one occassion, teenage me offered to play the role of “weirdly territorial girlfriend” for guys I knew. It wasn’t a good way to handle it, but teenagers. We didn’t exactly have much in the way of appropriate skillsets for addressing the real problem.

I was thinking about this yesterday, and I imagine that a lot of why my own experience was able to advance so dramatically (flying across state lines, and part of the ocean besides) was due to my being male. My dad did a decent job in protecting my sisters from abuse but there was that gender-enforced blind spot, I think. It makes sense, given that for a long time the prevailing attitude – which is thankfully on the decline – is that men/male-bodied people can’t be sexually assaulted, or it was often played for laughs in media. Gets a litle rough behind the tag.

Spoiler

I wanted to say: I’ve talked about these things in therapy before but for some reason I feel a stronger sense of catharsis from this group discussion/topic. I guess I always felt alone in my experience, even though I knew I wasn’t, so thanks to everyone for being as vulnerable as you’re comfortable with here.

Our cat has been limping for a few days (we recently had to move some furniture around and I think he might have knocked something over onto himself) so we finally took him to the ER. He’s a big indoor/outdoor boy and usually if he limps for a bit he gets better in a day or so if we move his stuff into a place where he doesn’t have to leap around. They had to have us do a drop-off and he was not having it.

Oh, come on. Even if the story of Robin Hood could be boiled down to “nobles fighting,” there is clearly a depiction of class conflict within the narrative. It’s not “medieval Elon Musk vs. Jeff Bezos” because of the structural differences between the Loxley family and the stratification of medieval English society in terms of the ruling class’s power in serfdom.

I’m certainly not going to say that Robin Hood wasn’t a member of the bourgeoisie – he held many privileges that his outlaw companions never had and could likely send himself back into upholding western imperialism in the crusades if he wanted, but he achieved an understanding of class consciousness within the context of the story.

Even if he hadn’t stolen from the rich and given to the poor – and indeed, he does not in some versions – a guerrilla force standing against the monopoly on power that the state (in this case, the sheriff of Nottingham) held over the proletariat would serve as an appropriate propaganda of the deed which, in many ways, can be its own reward. Robin Hood even wholly being a selfish hero (e.g., get back my stuff so I can do a feudalism on the locals, save my girlfriend), does not detract from the material symbolism involved which is why it became an enduring myth in the West.

After reading through this I see why you titled it as if you were submitting it to a conference @Pavel.

I have a ton of thoughts which I will work on writing out, but this is a very good discussion that needs to be evaluated further. Honestly, an social psych analysis of MUSH trends wouldn’t be a terrible idea for a legit academic paper.

Hey Eddie, I was Charlie. Nice to see you again!

I quit! I am going to continue working on the WoD20th code on my own, and I might run a Mage ttrpg using it, but no more staff at DI.

My main focus will be finishing up my Cyberpunk Red game.

@Pavel said in Re: Dies Irae:

Another thing I’ve noticed is that some members of staff immediately jump on the defensive when someone makes an often justifiable complaint.

Yeah, can’t say I’m a fan of that. Especially when it’s defensiveness about code. I often joke that I’m a clinical psychologist who is hobby coding python here, but that’s exactly the case. I know I’m not going to be as good as bitMuse, Theno, Kumakun, Volund, etc. I definitely don’t need any white knighting on behalf.

“Well we’re in beta these things happen” is fine and good, but there’re repeated instances of players being unable to actually see each other, much less actually RP together.

This is such a weird bug. There’s this one and that ooc room one where going if from the ooc room will occasionally keep your account linked to the ooc room while your puppet (in traditional MU terms, your bit) goes on to wherever it is you’re headed.

I’m definitely still working on both of these, but they’re real weird because there’s no discernible pattern as to when they happen. My weekends suck due to childcare stuff, but when I was looking at it on Friday I found a quirk in the character typeclass that stored a previous location attribute (used for commands like +return) using the same name as the location attribute (I just used “self.db.location”). The kicker is I can change this and it’ll just be a bunch of waiting until whatever random assortment of commands occurs that causes the bug to appear.

As for the other one, they have to be linked! Maybe! It’s also possible it’s a reality level thing. In hindsight I should have just created typeclasses for umbra rooms so stepping would just teleport you to another room with a different room type, but instead I made it place a tag on your character that changes what you can and can’t see. Then doubled down and did the same thing with fae stuff. I need to code review that one. I really want to get it to a state where there’s nothing super game-breaking so that it can be released. Then more people can make MUSHes to keep the hobby buoyed a bit.

So when a new person complains about that, and mentions their irritation at the round-a-bout way of fixing it, just say it’s being worked on and then shut up. You’re staff, if you’re whining on the Newbie channel, you’re doing it wrong.

It’s not only the newbie channel though, there’s a lot of immediate defensiveness in the Discord that just doesn’t need to happen, aside from that whole meme about what belongs on what channel. I feel like I say “not everything deserves more than an acknowledgement” more often than I should be, because there are full fledged arguments that occur and it drives me nuts.

It’s fine to just be like “thanks!” or “thanks.” It’s also fine to just say, “Ah, good suggestion! Sounds like it would be interesting.” even if you never plan to consider it. Also, like… In the instance that someone does aggravate you to the point that you get actually angry it’s far easier and less personally disruptive to just step away and ignore them than to keep the cycle going.

Not much to be done about it, though. At this point it feels like staff culture. Maybe a bit too defeatist, but – well.

@Roz said in MUX/MUSH Code Repositories:

Not a repository, but a tool! This got posted to Reddit just today: Visual Studio tools for PennMUSH

There’s also this one by Kumakun for rhost!
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=digibeario.mushcode

@Pavel said in Re: Dies Irae:

@somasatori Good. Now go back to finding vamp staff so I can actually do things.

I wish we could get those original vamp staffers back. I also have a vampire character, but I don’t really end up playing on DI very much on account of the coding.

Where’s that-- oh yeah

We opened with too much shit going on at once, is what it is. And then we had people jumping into these sort of half-baked spheres that didn’t have all their plot or lore written out, which is very stressful. I’m glad that Scylla’s cool with us doing a temporary shutter of the vamp sphere until we can get things tighter and more consistent.

@Pavel said in Re: Dies Irae:

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

Storytelling coordinator, to me, means that I manage the theme elements of the game.

Then I’d probably recommend “theme coordinator” then, rather than a title that evokes the storyteller-as-decision-maker role.

Good idea!

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

I did want to note, btw: I’m not headstaff there, really.

…who is? That could be a substantial part of the problem.

We kinda don’t have them? I mean, there are some folks whose words are probably more listened-to than others, like Scylla, me occasionally, and Charybdis, but we’re ostensibly supposed to be doing things democratically.

Edit to add more context: For instance, when we banned Polk, we deliberated about it. I think this probably is not the best way to go about it, especially if there’s someone who’s doing something imminently bannable. Polk didn’t actually do much on DI which would have been considered harmful to anyone, which is why there was a lot of deliberation on the topic (and for transparency’s sake, I abstained – not because I have a particular love for Polk, but because I haven’t had much interaction with the guy outside of “wow, he sure loves crashing games”). He was banned for being Polk, which didn’t sit well with some folks, and that’s okay. I mean, the democratic process is such that it allows for that kind of thing. People are allowed to disagree and voted as such. The vote to ban him won out in the end.

Super worried when we do have an immediately harmful or threatening player, though. Deliberating over the course of a week and a half when Johnny PKGriefing-SexAssaulter is going around committing his namesake is not grounds for a good MUSHing experience.

@Pavel said in Re: Dies Irae:

Yeah, I must have missed reading that previously, @somasatori. Your title of “Storytelling Coordinator” sure as hell sounds like a headstaffy one.

It does, I agree. So the project was originally started by Scylla back in June, around the time NuMetal got crashed (I guess the first time now? The Polk time). I was asked if I could come on to do the Mage stuff and write metaplot details for the game as a whole. After a time, there was a clear indication that we needed some additional guidance in the back end, or someone to be an arbiter, and a vote was called. Charybdis and myself were elected. This was before Kuma had his life explode and couldn’t do code anymore, which is when I inherited that role too. Then I somehow got looped into being a co-lead for Werewolf and Fera.

though I’m fine with my side of the Fera. I handle Mokole, Rokea, Ratkin, and Ananasi and I like my weird little gross/slimy/fish-scented dudes. Nagah’s in there too, but it requires a group app (3), and we all know how easy it is to get a group of people to get rolling on a game.

Anyway, I didn’t really want to be headstaff, especially not in the administrative sense. Storytelling coordinator, to me, means that I manage the theme elements of the game. To paraphrase Hephaestus’ description of how he’s seen it on other games: the role is to ensure consistency and fairness across different groups, that players have adequate hooks into plots and that there are enough staff to run them (HA!).

I’ve done the administrative headstaff thing on three places now (Metro2 [Saturnine], The Reach [Roanoke], Fallcoast [Toska]), and I 100% get burnt out so fast by having to make all of these quibbling little rule calls. It’s why I was cool with Storytelling Coordinator, as it feels more vibes based: coordinating plot, making sure there’s a cohesive story, making sure equal attention is had by all, all that jazz. Sometimes I wonder if I even like WoD all that much anymore. I certainly don’t play it as a TTRPG; I tend to do more PbtA or other hippie-dippy story games. Sometimes I will break out things like Cyberpunk 2020 or Shadowrun.

That said, I have also been playing WoD games (and all of them, really: Vampire, Mage, Werewolf, Changeling, Wraith, Hunter, Demon, KotE, blah, blah, blah, and then all the CofD variants) for something like 29 years now, and remember the rules better than I remember most of my undergraduate classes. So, it’s a path-of-least-resistance thing.

Prior to this, I was writing a Cyberpunk Red game using Evennia as my base. It’s even almost done. Edit to add: That doesn’t mean I’m leaving! Just that it’s been nearly finished for a while now and I might one day go back and finish it up and release the code with an install.sh installer file for folks to run Cyberpunk games.

That’s a lot of words to say: <begrudgingly> “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” If I were the actual headstaffer, as in quasi-benevolent dictator, I’d probably do that San Diego Zoo of Darkness thing I mentioned (stealing @labsunlimited’s term there).

@Pavel said in The 3-Month Players:

@Faraday said in The 3-Month Players:

TV shows and novels don’t tend to have much (if any) BarRP

… what about Cheers?

How can I play my mysterious, be-trenched, katana-wielding cyber drifter if everyone knows my fucking name??

@Pavel said in Re: Dies Irae:

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

Thanks for reading this long-ass bullshit lmao

Who let you out of the code mines?

I get 45 minutes leisure time per day