I am always the most fun rper (and having the most fun) when I am a big fan of the characters of the people I am playing with. The things mentioned above about showing interest in my RP partner’s character and considering their hooks and everything is a lot easier when I am sidling up to them and metaphorically twirling my hair around my finger as I go ‘hey I think you’re cool want to rp after work today?’

To that effect, I actually start a lot of my efforts to be a good rp partner with how I build my character, because I want to be someone those cool characters might have a fun time with.

What are my character’s goals, and what things will they be unable to accomplish on their own? What ways can I make them reliant on the expertise of others?

What themes in the setting allow for shared elements of history, worldview, and trauma, that will give my character a chance to build meaningful relationships with others?

What traits will draw my character towards someone? What will push them away? How do I balance the character so that levels of interpersonal friction remain fun? How do I make it so I am not fighting my character to set up RP? (i.e. how do I find workarounds for the they wouldn’t go there/do that/talk to them shutdowns that might happen on my end.)

Most of this isn’t a formal checklist, but I know I’ve done a good job of it when I’m looking at other characters pages and going ‘oh it would be fun to have my character do x with them.’

@Kestrel

The way you prevent your game from becoming a sex game is just… Don’t make it a game focused around sex? I know L&L is popular and might be a place where you have to worry about people jumping into relationships but it’s pretty easy to make a game where the draw of themes and content of the RP itself isn’t just relationships. I get that your average MU player might try and make any random game into their personal sandbox regardless, but hassling people for relationships is bad behavior whether or not the target has been in game for 2 days or 6 years, so just make that the bannable behavior and keep open lines of communication with new players as they get settled in.

ETA: also in this age of slower RP a 2-week ban can still mean someone’s second rp scene is sex based, 2 weeks is nothing.

@Yam

Hey it’s me!

I had never touched a MUSH before, just forum RP. I got involved in MU*s because of a shared fandom with one of the gamerunners and advertising and an enthusiastic playerbase that was sharing stuff about their rp in places I frequented (tumblr). Granted this was 10 years ago, so I no longer count as fresh blood.

But yes, especially in the age where Discord is teetering on the edge of a profit driven enshittification cycle, I think MUSH formats could find a use among younger people! They just have to know it’s out there, and the current community would have to be ready for these places to transport their norms, communication styles, and preferences into their own mini ecosystem.

Part of the problem is that I bet those discord spaces that would get use out of it are just as closed off as MUs are, so they can’t find this place and the people here can’t find them.

I’m a person who often joins and becomes invested in a game on a whim - I can’t tell what the formula is, but if a game is hoping to attract people like me who just hop in without knowing someone, at least some percentage of the playerbase needs to feel open to interacting with, chatting with, getting excited about new characters and new people. Not every game has to be that - I don’t mind the existence of games that are built with a network-only approach and are meant for people who already have connections to have a good time together.

But as a new player approaching an open game, seeing people only rping with one or two others a lot sets off yellow flags that a game isn’t a place where people have the time or energy to open their circles to me. I don’t mind reaching out a lot when I’m in the shiny new excitement phase, but in order to feel welcome, it helps to see signs that it’ll be reciprocated.

I don’t think activity checks or a quota on interactions with people outside of your circle are meaningful solutions, because activity requirements can’t generate enthusiasm.I’ve roleplayed in forums like Dreamwidth where gamerunners often have monthly activity rules. The rules don’t actually stop a game from slowing down, or dying, or becoming a playground for one group. But I think the urge to implement them comes from the wish to have a particular game environment. Two people playing alone in a corner aren’t hurting anybody - but the more people who are doing that, the harder it is for new people to jump in and have a good time, and a lot of games want, at least in theory, new people to have an easy time joining, to buff up the population as people need to slow down or leave for various reasons.

And on a personal level, I find its important to my RP enjoyment to be open to new connections, because sometimes my old connections can’t RP any more! And it’s so much easier not to be bitter and discouraged if I’m not rebuilding my character’s network from scratch.

I’m going to phrase my thoughts on the general topic of this thread a slightly bit differently - I think it’s good if everyone is playing with their friends, so long as everyone doesn’t have the same friends.

@MisterBoring

Then it’s possible you need to look for other metrics to judge your or your writing partners on, rather than word count, when insecurity is gnawing on you. For example, maybe looking at what information your character provides, or how they move the scene along.

Given that the trend in MUSHing seems to be towards asynchronous rp more generally (I know there are mixed opinions on this but it’s still increasingly common) the ability to read, comprehend, and bang out a three paragraph response to a post in eight minutes is less a limiting factor.

That isn’t to say that physical issues or mental processing might not still be barriers of entry at the current pace, but it’s probably true that writing and refining a query to chatgpt and performing edits on it Is actually a similar mental and physical load to the process of typing out a short but meaningful response, because if you care about the scene and not just prompting your rp partner to feed you their next response, you’re going to care about what your character does, and how. And chatgpt won’t always get that right.

@Cygnus it’s not weird to dislike em, I’m just rolling my eyes at how you went into it. I’ll leave it there cause it’s off topic for this thread and you’ve made your opinion clear elsewhere that you can’t imagine having fun in a non pvp game and you can continue arguing it as much as you like there.

@Cygnus okay? It’s weird you went down a list of games and went “I have a long and detailed list of frustrations with this game and it’s runner,” “this game enables a transphobe and sex pest”, “no pvp :(”

It’s a silly criticism compared to the other ones. I get you’re looking for a game but cmon

@Cygnus you just shrug and move on like the rest of us do when a game makes a perfectly reasonable decision that isn’t to our tastes, maybe

@Cygnus you don’t need to performatively go into the thread to comment on it, though. It’s not like they’re going to change that just for you.

Image generation isn’t the only thing generative tech like this is being used for. It’s being used for animation, for voices, etc. Actors are fighting for their faces and voices to not be used as an AI simulacrum of themselves to put them out of work on a broad commercial scale. The creation of deepfakes and simulated representations of real people is another reason why I personally find generative learning algorithms deeply ethically concerning. That’s not necessarily a problem with Midjourney itself, and I can see why people might draw the line between a deepfake and a generated artistic rendering of an elf, or whatever. But there’s a reason I categorically dislike it.

Having played in a game in the past that probably could have been reskinned into a star trek game with a very small amount of effort, it worked best when it was a relatively small group, rank wasn’t several degrees of stratification (basically a few department heads and everyone else was about the same level, where most of the department heads traded off being STs) and players basically had free rein to propose a plot planet and put characters through hell on it.

We did some degree of bureaucratic rp, but there were enough interpersonal tensions due to factions present on the crew that there were reasons for conflict and consequences to that tension. The game runners occasionally threatened the ship itself, but some of my favorite plots there could start from a supply run gone wrong, or a investigation of a derelict station that was full of horrible monsters, surprise.

If a game is set in a tense environment where every PC is expected to have a competency or two that they bring to the table, then everyone has a good reason to go on away missions that put their life at risk. In fact, if part of the job of PCs is to go on those away missions, that solves half of the problem.

@Juniper

I’m sorry to say that this is just human behavior and can happen anywhere. There might be features of oWoD games that can make it easier for the perpetrators to get plausible deniability or excuse their hostility with IC factionalism, but creating an in group and an enemy happens because some people simply do not know how to operate without one.

@Gashlycrumb

This is part of why I prefer no dice for my personal rp, because I fine the conversational interplay fun! But if I have to use social dice for RP, my personal preferred order of operations is

1. OOC note of a social roll being needed and some discussion of what they’re attempting
2. Base roll
3. Socially savvy characters can use a buff to bump up their number
4. RP out the results. If it’s a failure, the player gets to decide how they fail. Maybe they offhandedly mention ties to someone the other character/npc hates, maybe they talked a bit too long when the other character prefers brevity, maybe they leaned a bit too hard on Intimidation and figured they could back it up when they couldn’t. That way you avoid the thing of “player makes speech but dice say no” thing, or the failure becoming out of character.

Then again I’m one of those people who enjoys playing out failure because I think how and why a character fails and how they react to it is absolutely fascinating

I think staff should be fine to have characters in any game, even a plotting one. I think on a practical level it’s not a good idea for the staff character to be taking the lead in a story plot they’re running, if only because in my experience it’s really hard to both GM and actually meaningfully pilot a PC! I’m sure it can be done, but I think it’s hard to do well. ime it’s much more likely for it to be ‘and staffpc was also there in the background’ than ‘this was actually the staffpc show’ but I am not surprised by the existence of the second.

In the hands of a conscientious gamerunner, i think a staff PC is another tool to help build game wide engagement. I think there’s a lot of little things those characters could do to encourage plot involvement that are hard to do with NPCs. A staff PC can “just run into” someone to organically bring them into a plot in a way that more formal NPC involvement could make favoritism, for example. “Passing along” IC gossip from other PCs is honestly a really important function in games so having a character on the ground to do that now and then is probably nice. Though I’m thinking of smaller games where it makes sense for everyone in it to be able to talk to each other.

Every few years there’s an absolute panic over a social media or art site’s ToS using legal wording to describe letting users host and reshare their content using the site’s built in reblog/retweet/whatever mechanics. The legalese is almost always being misinterpreted to be scarier than it is

@Jennkryst said in MU Peeves Thread:

Untrue! I disprove the very concept by usually playing them with conventionally adorkable women with fairly un-boob’d bodies.

She’s not like other girls!

@Snackness

This is a double edged sword when your plot runner starts taking your joke NPC name suggestions seriously and you end up with a villain whose name is ‘Stephyn with a y because the y makes it fantasy’

@RightMeow

My usual strategy at that point is to look at whatever info is available on their character, brainstorm 2-3 locations our characters could conceivably overlap, and offer all of them as suggestions.

Then once we’ve picked a spot and the scene starts, it’s just a matter of picking something that brings the characters into contact ASAP. Either that’s posting a starter the other person can directly respond to, or responding to their starter in a way that gives them something to work on. A scene can still be shaped a couple poses in - you’ve almost always got more time to figure out what you’re doing than the 30 seconds before you have to answer that question in your scenario. You’ve just got to break it down into smaller steps.

I don’t mind the dance of setting up RP, because in the same way I like to tailor my suggestions for location and event to the person who’s responding, mostly because I prefer smaller scenes to setting up an open thing in a location. The thing that does bother me is when people respond to an ask for rp in a way that doesn’t make clear whether they’re actually volunteering for RP in the moment or not. I have mixed feelings about a response that’s “I’m busy now but maybe some other day,” but it’s at least a clear response.