I’ve mentioned elsewhere that this game has sort of acted as a temporary replacement for MU*ing for me.

You get the full experience. Really!

• Gale: Banned from another well-known large game for alleged sex-pest behavior. He’s on his last chance here. Oh shit, it’s your first night in camp and he’s already paging you. Oh, he’s just doing so to tell you about his cat. That’s charming.

• Lae’Zel: Resident combat twink and self-appointed antagonist player, claims she does it for “roleplay reasons.” Exceedingly unpleasant to deal with IC’ly at first but surprisingly willing to deal with consequences and more of a collaborative roleplayer than you think. If you bother to scene with her.

• Wyll: Current Wyll grabbed this character on roster, isn’t really feeling it. People were polarized about the last Wyll, but staff booted him. Nobody talks about why.

• Shadowheart: She’s super chill but stoned all the time, might not respond to pages for days. Is async ok? She sure hopes so. Gets very excited when she discovers pics of her PB with different hair.

• Karlach: Everyone loves Karlach. It’s kind of unfair, she apped a little late after the main core of active players and missed out on some of the big plots and character ties, plus her main arc with Wyll got thrown for a loop when he got rostered. She posts a lot of great vignettes.

• Astarion: He’s an edgelord who already got warned once but seems genuine about trying to be better. Also he’s one of those guys who transfers the same character from MU* to MU* but somehow nobody notices. At least he seems self-aware.

• Halsin: Inoffensive guy who doesn’t get in the way for the most part, but isn’t really active. One of those people who apped a giant dude whose stats don’t make any sense. Also, he’s clearly just here for the TS.

• Minthara: Sure she died by falling down a pit but that’s ok, her player has a million copy-paste alts just like her. She’ll try to get you into a TS scene but it’s super-creepy.

• Jaheira: The legacy player from Alpha who’s just obsessed with getting their old alpha buddy (Minsc) back. Everyone else has moved on. Every conversation involves referencing a bunch of shit and people from ages ago.

• Minsc: Hasn’t MU*ed in years, Jaheira’s incessant pressure and his own frequent drinking habits convinced him to log back on, is surprised he’s having so much fun. It’s been so long the hamster schtick seems fresh again.

Just expressing a sigh of frustration at dancing around publicly asking for RP on a game when there are one or two people I just cannot fucking stand (not going to be spilling any tea here, sorry, my beefs are my own business) who seem to be omnipresent when I do so, and worse, tied up with a number of people I want to play with.

After a while it just gets fatiguing and this feels like was somewhat easier in the days of big games and lots of them (I fully welcome all accusations of rose-tinted glasses though har har).

Ok, back to Fat Bear Week.

Hands up if you feel like you’ve just hit a complete wall with social RP (and don’t get me started about bar RP)?

This isn’t really a “particular character” or “particular game” scenario, either. It’s in general.

Every time someone makes a reference to something I don’t recognize and I have to remind them I never set foot on Arx and I have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about –

And then they try to explain with another Arx-related reference

@sao Looks like you too understand Tortie Madness

@oknow said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

WTF has this thread DONE to BMD.

Jaysus.

This little board is all grown up now

@Evilgrayson

My absolute hate-favorite of a werewolf experience was playing a Get of Fenris who was unapproved by a new staffer after six months on the grid because they realized the character was black.

This was before the PB days so you had to, y’know, read descs and I very neutrally described him as such. I also made zero issue of it in RP.

Somebody thought this was un-thematic.

Decades later I’m still fucking mad.

@De-Villefort

As you’re someone who shouted out James SA Corey I wanted to note that the setting of the Expanse (which by the way I FUCKING LOVE) is pretty much a raging dystopia.

Earth has been environmentally wrecked and suffers from crippling inequality even with the existence of a paltry UBI (this is even before certain things in the show/books that happen to Earth later).

Mars is…uh, like some mad mashup of Soviets and Texas. Not the best standard of living there but I admire the Martians for their sense of communalism.

The Belters? Hahahahaha, hello exploitation.

This seting provides a shitty experience for a large number of people.

@junipersky

We only have the one. But she takes up the space of about three cats, in some intangible way.

Sure, she’s cute when she’s sleeping

Maybe Christmas decorations were bad idea

Markings inside and out

Sometimes she bullies her sister, too.

@mietze

I 100 percent have been feeling this and have had a very hard time adjusting.

My old MO was to hang out on a public grid til somebody wandered by. Sometimes they were interesting, sometimes not.

I’ve realized I’m just absolute dogshit at asking people for RP

The question I have is:

Have you gotten the Tom Hardy who’s 6’ tall, or 6’2”, or 6’4”?

And how much BEARD does he have?

As far as I go these days, I’m back in that “I’m wondering if this hobby is even for me” phase.

For one, I just can’t sit with an open client like I used to so Ares’ web portal has been a godsend but that artificially limits me to a single platform and slate of games.

For another, I find effort and focus are increasingly limited and I don’t really have it in me to go workshop another game character (let alone with backstory/shared connections) for some game that will fail-to-launch or just work out as an exercise in theme that fails to grab me.

I know I’ve said this before but I’m find it progressively more difficult to rustle up even a shred of inspiration for slice-of-life rp.
It probably doesn’t help that I’ve officially overdosed on supernatural* shenanigans/stories for the time being. To quote a wise man, there are too many damn wizards on my block.

*Please note this isn’t me slinging barbs at anyone else’s tastes. If you all prefer ghosts and goblins and vampires and witches and/or really specific genre stuff, go fucking ham.

I tend to fall into these long periods of inactivity and I’m right back there these days.

Right now I’m sort of struggling with the fact that the only game I’m even active on has me massively disengaged, working hard to avoid one massively toxic individual (who is a known quantity to many) and their tiny cadre of people whose bigtime "pick me " energy tends to suck the air of the room by virtue of their very presence.

Note, this is just a vent post, not a name n’ shame. None of these people have really gotten in my way directly but the general level of effort it takes to avoid extremely active and connected people is fucking exhausting and it’s just one of several contributing factors to me just not wanting to log in.

Time to fire up Baldur’s Gate 3 and talk to some birds again.

To be a little more verbose, I’ve just found that banking on shared backstory with others sight-unseen (particularly people you don’t know that well) is just an unreliable investment at best for all the reasons that the OP outlined, plus the “shit happens” effect where you just have to conceptually step around the idea that people will idle out or whatever.

Also, most of the best RP and character chemistry I’ve had I’ve just worked out on the fly after a couple scenes I’ve had with someone else on the grid. I’ll happily work on backstory with people then if I feel it fits but the above requirement is something that I would just not mess with. Similarly if I run into a MU* where every character already seems to know each other for ages and I feel like I just stumbled into a group of pre-existing friends at a party I’m strongly compelled to not crash it.

And as a side note, if gamerunners are that worried about “bad actor” problems (which is very much a thing), 1) How about making it a roster game (this is very much not for me but I know some people find this helpful), or 2) Why make a fully public game at all?

Again, if this works for people, good going and I’m glad you’re having a good time. This just isn’t for me.

This is probably a cheap shot and a pile-on, but when I got back into MU*ing this year this was one of the first places I tried.

So I figured, hey, I have a character idea in this setting that isn’t particularly speshul, has plenty of examples in the canon, and can probably generate a lot of cool factional/cross-factional RP hooks (if you must know, it was an ex-Imperial/First Order/whatever turncoat who was like “I sure am tir ed of these Star Warcrimes”).

So I log on, read some help and setting files. Ok, this is goofy and some of it doesn’t make any sense. But I did what I usually do and ask a staffer about it. That staffer was Cujo.

Cujo goes on a bizarre and self-conflicting tirade about how this isn’t possible because nobody knows anything about the First Order, a faction that has been on the grid for years apparently and is well-known within the setting because “Disney hasn’t published any backstory on it.” Which is confusing, weird, and contradictory to the whole setting and then some additional unnecessary greasy fanboy ranting bullshit about how it’s all terrible.

Bro. BRO. It’s your game. You know you can write theme, right? And maybe you can update help files to be less opaque. Or maybe if you hate this setting so much maybe you should run a setting you actually don’t hate, or retcon shit to somewhat make sense?

Anyway, after a confusing 15-20 minutes of talking to this guy I decided he was a fucking herb and logged off.

@Zephyr Not to hammer this into the ground even further but I’ve known Zephyr for years off and on and if Zephyr says they smell smoke, there’s probably fire.

tl;dr: Zeph is cool AF, always in good faith and reasonable.

Also, Cujo is a fucking herb

@DarthSmegma said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@DarthSmegma

http://www.swaoa-mush.com/wiki/Hadrix_Kora

Only look at this if you REALLY need a good cringe.

Oh look.

Let me recall this for a second.

Cujo: “You can’t play a FO defector because Disney didn’t publish anything about the FO and we don’t know anything about it”

Also Cujo: “Yeah Hadrix you can have anything you want. Why not be a Mandalorian while you’re at it”

Yeah I’m gonna beat this one to death because what an absolute fucking tool.

@Rinel said in MU Peeves Thread:

I’m being very vague on purpose here, and I’m not going to elaborate.

I play on a game where someone is playing a minority character. The way they are playing that character strikes me as not quite right. It feels stereotyped and almost offensive. It does not feel natural to me.

I’m not a member of that minority. I definitely don’t have the breadth of knowledge to even guess as to whether the player is a member of that minority. I have very vague vibes that make me uncomfortable, and because I’m not directly affected by the portrayal I’m unwilling to get others involved.

“But Rinel then why are you talking about it here—” Because this is venting and it’s a situation where I feel guilty for any action I do or do not take and I want to vent about it.

There’s been a long history of people playing what comes across as ethnic caricatures in this hobby and it’s more jarring nowadays because people in the hobby aren’t really drinking from the firehose of 90s WoD sourcebooks (This is a whole topic all its own) anymore. Sometimes they’re just innocently ignorant or a pose comes off wrong, but sometimes it’s a fucking minstrel show. This is a “know it when you see it” sort of thing. Plenty of us have acted out of ignorance in the past and a reasonable person will try to do their best when calmly taken aside and told “Hey, this comes across as demeaning or stereotyping because <X>.” Some people are more reasonable than others.

So anyway, Why feel guilty? I’m not asking this in a negative way, but IMO at the end of the day, the responsibility for maintaining a game’s environment falls upon the shoulders of staff. If something bothers you, bring it up to staff and gauge their response. If they’re on top of their job, they’ll at least make some attempt to address it, whether it’s clearing up confusion or correcting someone else’s behavior.

Now, staff may not be aware of a problem. Or the bad actor in question may have a history of doing this particular thing but is tight with staff, in which case, lolllll good luck. I personally wouldn’t touch that particular poop but now I’m starting to sound like someone with an axe to grind.

@Wizz

Rather than rehash everything you said which I 100% agree with, I also wanted to give a shout-out to extremely cool worldbuilding and cultural design in the locales in this series too:

Space Florida, Ferrix, the mountainous planet with the garrison and the Eye (and the characters who live there) – all of it’s new and all of it just comes alive.