Sometimes there’ll be a player you really like that you just kinda lose touch with after you both lose the connective tissue of the game you were on at any given time. MUSHing is a transitory hobby, I try not to get too down about it.

Then 15 years will pass.

Then you meet a player you really like a new game and you both think you’re a TOTALLY NEW FUN PERSON.

Then one day you’re talking about old games and you realize that, in fact, you played together quite a lot on that one random game 15 years ago, and the internet has now brought you back into proximity for the first time in this decade+.

Sometimes the smallness of the hobby is actually nice.

Thank you BMD mods for making it easier to rubberneck and preserve this trashfire…I mean stay informed.

NGL the thing I’m trying to wrap my head around is this pile of refuse passing as a game not having a WORA/MSB thread prior to this.

I voted no due to the potential for abuse by bad actors but get why the Magicians guy deleted his post and think the kind of reception is worth reflecting upon.

@mietze said in MU Peeves Thread:

I wish people didn’t always turn this into “if you’re not in action/plot its because you just prefer social things” that is honest far from the truth a lot of the time.

I was once told - by someone in control of plot stuff - that because I was a ‘social RPer’ and in a decent number of scenes (many of which I asked for) that I didn’t need plot involvement. It was a hell of a thing and like five years later I’m still mad about it.

@Cobalt
Whatever worked or didn’t work about The Pack, I really hope the experience wasn’t too discouraging for you. Like I said lots of posts back, it DID seem like a game a lot of players responded to in positive ways, and I am really impressed with how you responded to an atmosphere that you didn’t feel good about being the gamerunner of anymore, because that was obviously really hard and Unfun to deal with this directly. I think it’s always constructive to reflect on why something didn’t work, or didn’t work for you personally, or get across what you wanted to get across, but I hope that doesn’t mean it was as wholly negative experience because you are a gamerunner lots of people like and respect and it’d be awesome to see another project from you in the MUSH space when you were excited to do it.

@Narrator
lol my dude did you just compare yourself to Jesus on a message board? Is that where we are now?

My beast from the Black Cat Army. She is the night.

@Selira said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:

I’m still pretty shocked Derp made up a multiparagraph theory wholecloth and tried so hard to sell it. Why? What was the benefit of that kind of speculation? I realize I’m speculating here, myself, but he’s more than welcome to come here and provide the answers.

That was the first moment I was sorry I was banned (apart from every time I try to find something on that mess of a board because the bad search is even worse if you aren’t logged in) because I would’ve enjoyed enthusiastically and repeatedly reporting Derp’s own post for violating his ‘you need to bring receipts’ and ‘no personal attacks’ rules.

I thought about going back but end of the day I came to the same conclusion I did a while ago: I left my most active period on Arx on a really good note and that’s the experience I want as my strongest memory of the game. It’s cool to see a chapter of it get a conclusion, though, a lot of MUs don’t, and I’ll be interested to see how it ties it up.

@Trashcan said in Historical Games Round 75:

Regardless, the expectation should be that a game clearly state on the tin exactly what unconscionable things might occur to your character in the course of play. Do not leave players to discover this through play. If my guy could be killed, say they could be killed. If they could be sexually assaulted, say they could be sexually assaulted. If they could be discriminated against, say they could be discriminated against and how it could look. Gritty Games are allowed. Please put the Narrative Facts on the side. I can choose if this is right for my diet.

I had a really good experience with a Social Contract on the last game I had any staff involvement in, mostly for expectation-setting. I never viewed it as a thing that flattened RP so much as one that set some baselines for what the world was and wasn’t. Players are, in my experience, often spotty on internalizing thematic realities that are even slightly different from their RL experience. Like, I spent a lot of time doing BSG RP back in the day. The amount of people who couldn’t wrap their brains OOC around the treatment of gender in the show and lack of sexism was…not incidental.

@Tez said in Historical Games Round 75:

I think maybe more isms should be included again and we’ve gone too far to remove them. It is possible to tell stories – good stories, fun stories – inside of that structure as long as people have full awareness of what they are engaging it and the chance to opt in or out. Let players play bad guys if they want, so that other players have something to play against.

It’s partially the cultural moment we’re in, for better or worse, but I think part of it is just the audience for historical games is small in the first place, and within that small audience the population of gamerunners is even smaller. I enjoyed straight historical games back in the day but they had like 10ish players. So, yeah, there’s an element of people not doing it that is people not wanting to deal with it, but it’s also just…a very small number of people who may or may not want to support a MUSH at any given time.

My first MUSH was the old Tales of Ta’veren Wheel of Time place. I’d dipped into some MUDs before that but they weren’t really RP places. My mind was blown by the pose command.

Another fine year, with the fine bears.

@Ashkuri said in Character Death:

Killing off your beloved character and making yourself and all your friends cry is some of the best fun you can have out here.

@somasatori
Nah, it’s understandable, it just comes up from time to time and sometimes it seems to be an actual misconception about how the game operated. I assume people equate PC death with PVP. The relatively quickie CG did make spinning up a new character less arduous, but you still had people who were so invested in their particular PC they quit after they died.

@Roz said in Factions:

I only played a couple different characters on it during its runtime - and there certainly wasn’t loss without drama - but one of the things I remember from The Greatest Generation’s gameplay was that it was pretty easy to join the game, get enmeshed and equally very easy to die. It was a bit of a bummer if your medic died because the place you were in got (suspiciously specific reference here, hmm), but there were other options you could jump into. I think TGG was less of a true RPG as we know Star Wars, WoD, Pern, Arx/L&L games more in the vein of a combat simulation a la (what I’ve heard about) BattletechMUX, so maybe that’s part of the difference too, as you kind of expected the characters to be short-lived.

I wasn’t on The Greatest Generation, but my impression of how people have talked about it really points at the expectation aspect to me. People went in knowing their characters were almost surely going to die. That was, from everything I’ve heard, kind of core to the game’s conceit: there were limited-time campaigns, and PCs would die. When players expect to lose their characters, it reframes our entire approach.

Oh, hey, TGG has been invoked. This was one of my favorite RP experiences (bolded for emphasis). Some players were mainly there for the combat, but there were also a handful of us who treated it liked Band of Brothers MUSH and that was very rewarding. I’d say the probability you’d lose your PC made certain little character moments more impactful, as did the short-run campaigns, yeah. The headwiz referred to it as a ‘game of two halves’ and I was always more into the RP half than the combat, though the combat was fun or I wouldn’t have played it.

It was also, and I think sometimes people who didn’t play it don’t get this, a purely PVE game. Everybody was a soldier in the same unit. There were no opposed factions in-play at a given time. It’s not really applicable to this conversation.

Man, Chunk had a broken jaw this season and still looks beautifully massive.

These bears

IT’S TIME IT’S TIME IT’S TIME

@Yam
MUDs absolutely suffered more from the rise of MMOs than more RP-centric games did. You CAN RP in WoW but it’s a real different experience than logging onto a MUSH and posing with other players. There are still players left because ultimately some hobbyists will always stick with Their Thing but you saw the impact more in that space than in MUSHes 15ish years ago.