@Nobody-0 Receipt or no receipt, showing up on a game just to fuck with a place is not cool. If someone has an issue with a game, then stay far far away. Logging onto a game maliciously is a cancer to the community.
People taking their grievances to extremes is never okay.
@Polk said in Ruiz Thread:
she’s not in the past been afraid to take action.
Yes, she absolutely has. That’s an outright lie. And he knows that personally.
When @Polk pissed all over the game rules while she was away busy with heavy RL stuff and took advantage of her absence to abuse players he got a complete pass. She traded in her integrity on a silver platter for his help running the game when she couldn’t be there, because in comparison, a few players weren’t worth it to her to do the right thing.
She tried to offer solutions and undo the mess that he made, but the damage was done and @Polk got zero consequences.
So it depends on who you’re complaining about. If Addison is more useful to her game than you are, you will probably be shit out of luck.
Adjust your expectations about complaints there accordingly.
@GF said in Good things in Mushing:
Staff who take action when action is called for.
Especially when it benefits them to overlook at it.
Having a back bone should not be underestimated.
@Roz said in Liberation MUSH:
- Up to now, he had chiefly been someone who could save me a little time (which adds up considerably) by managing the wiki and website updates. Polk’s social IQ problems were not unknown. It’s why he only became Mage Director when Tris stepped down and there was no one else. And it’s why he was removed as Mage Director a year ago, and was relieved of any player-facing responsibilities as sub-director a while after that. He never did anything unethical (as a Director anyways) - but he could not deal effectively with people.
Well, that’s just not true. He very much did unethical things as Director.
Sundance(sun) pages: There’s two elements to this. The first element is 1) Polk should absolutely not have disapproved you on his own initiative. He knew that the moment he did it, and he already apologized to me in page about it, before I sat down. I had him immediately re-approve you, since I’m the only one who can carry out OOC discipline here.
I won’t say she’s just flat out lying. Maybe she just forgot, but he was definitely unethical as Director. Maybe she didn’t consider that situation because, in her view, she fixed it? (She didn’t actually fix it, she just reversed his decision, which still left a host of problems. Not the same thing as fixing it.)
But…
If she did just forget, I gotta tell ya, it sucks to have been so severely fucked over by Polk in the exact same temper tantrum, table flipping way and then forgotten about by Sundance like you never existed and didn’t spend months of your life researching, writing, and on a few occasions driving through LA in order to desc half of her ginormous, unnecessarily large grid to give her 200+ grid spaces and builds so that as many spaces and builds as possible were as accurate to the actual RL locations as they could be, all the way down to neighborhood blocks that had no notable features except for how much graffiti and trash were visible or how many and what types of cars were parked on the street. Granted, I did all of that willing and no one asked me to do the extras, but it is too much to expect that you and the reason you left the game not be forgotten about? Apparently, that might be.
So… hopefully it wasn’t the latter. That would blow.
Every neighborhood in a city to desc the grid, down to Google street view in VR. Done most recently for LA, but previously Chicago, and Manhattan.
Definitely don’t take the player option of of RPS, otherwise there’s no reason to use RPS. That would turn people away.
My biggest issue with character progression is that the only way most characters progress on a game is through xp and stats.
XP and stats should not be the only way a character progresses. There should be other achievables like rank or resources or territory or a combination of all of them that allows a character to progress without simply racking up xp and spending it.
If people had more objectives to achieve besides MOAR XP, then a game wouldn’t need to give out so much xp per week to keep people interested and uber stats become much less of a problem.
But handing out scads of xp is the easy, traditional solution. It takes very little monitoring and is often completely automated. So that’s what most games do.
Not saying that is bad or wrong, just that it really puts the burden of character progression on xp if that’s all the game has.
@junipersky said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:
I feel like one of her most defining traits is the way she talks about her OOC life. She could very legit have all the issues she talks about, but the way she phrases it is very much in a way that digs for sympathy and pity from others. She emphasizes her disabilities as reasons why people, especially those in authority, are out to get her.
I haven’t had much contact with her directly, but her constant RL overshares are one of the most awkward and uncomfortable and unavoidable things about being in the same play space as her.
Before I respond, just remember that this is a Star Wars game with kaiju that eats planets and the Death Star was being built to stop them, but the Rebels blew it up so now the whole galaxy is at risk of being nom nom nommed because of them. The top Jedi is an openly force-lightning wielding darksider (who leads with Luke Skywalker’s blessing) who also leads the New Republic’s military, even though they’re totally separate entities, who is prone to snap and yell at his subordinates for little reason because of the dark side and the brain pains he gets because the entirety of the Jedi Archives was placed inside his head before Order 66 - and everyone knows and is cool with all of it. No one leading things in this SW universe sees anything wrong with any of this. All perfectly fine.
SO. When you ask, ‘Why would they make X decision?’ Just know, that might not even rank of the list of jacked up decisions made at this place.
@Wizz said in Requring Character Connections at Chargen:
Works great at a table, but does not translate at all to MU*s IMHO.
How it translates on this game is new players show up and get to that section of chargen and say ‘I don’t know anyone!’ and the staff says, ‘Well you can use my player bit as a connection’ and then all the players have all their connections to the staff’s PC bits who are at the center of everything and everything revolves around them.
@Faraday said in Requring Character Connections at Chargen:
That’s interesting, because I wondered how using NPCs would actually accomplish anything. Are staff going to run these NPCs regularly?
Nope. Not for other players, anyway. For other staff characters yes. Everyone else, you’ll probably never see them again. If you do, do you think staff there will remember your character’s connection to them? Good luck.
@Faraday said in Requring Character Connections at Chargen:
If not, what’s the difference between saying I trained with the one special NPC jedi master, or some other one I invented in my BG?
Absolutely nothing. Well… except that with established NPCs they can tell you how wrong you are about what you wrote and how they wouldn’t do X, Y, and Z and make you go back to change your background to how they view that NPC.
@imstillhere said in Social/Bar RP:
I feel like “bar rp” picks up a lot of smoke as a bad thing though.
Why’s it got such a terrible reputation?
“Bar RP” is a colloquialism that many people use in the community. It means boring, trite RP without purpose or consequence.
It isn’t meant to be literal. It doesn’t mean that all RP that takes place in a bar is bad. But many scenes where people reach out to random players for RP has taken place in bars, likely because that’s were players thought was the most likely place for their characters, who did not previously know each other, well or at all, to have met. That was usually followed by random small talk that neither party was actually interested in because one or both was hoping the other would bring something interesting to the table and that doesn’t happen. What follows is usually forced or painful or unfulfilling or some combination of all three until the scene finally ends.
That is “bar RP”. And that’s why the phrase has such a terrible reputation.
As many have pointed out, the location of a bar is not the problem. Neither is social RP. It is the content of the RP that is the issue, which some people can make happily interesting, even with characters who do not know each other, and others cannot.
@Faraday said in The 3-Month Players:
People MU for all kinds of reasons.
This. There’s no one magic bullet to MU success, 3 month or otherwise. It takes a number of things. There are a lot of things to be handled to address all the many reasons people join a game, some of them mutually exclusive. It is a delicate balancing act. Not everyone can do it. Not everyone wants to do it. Some people want to and can do it, but not forever.
A lot of the games that get trashed often handled all this better than others. People tend to focus on their complaints about a game without acknowledging all the things done right and the reasons games keep going strong for years, despite the problems. I’ve been guilty of this as well, especially when it has affected me personally, negatively, or unfairly.
But it doesn’t take away from the fact that running a successful game is a daunting feat, however one defines success.
@spiriferida I prefer no dice when I play with people I know well. Otherwise, I prefer the dice because generally I don’t trust other people I don’t know to play in a way that keeps it fun for everyone.
@Artemis It could be that no one is going to try to live up to Arx. Everything else might just be a lackluster comparison. I never played there but I heard people talk about it for years.
@Gashlycrumb said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:
Yep. I dislike the sphere system because (among other things) it makes it super easy to let this happen. Frankly, it regularly happens within spheres anyway – the magical tank vs phone call thing really happened, though my character was actually taking a forty-five minute bus ride, not making a phone call. The tank-builder was in the same sphere as I, same GM, it was just, eh, indifference to the issue, or favouritism. It was not actually as frustrating as spending five RL weeks waiting for twenty IC minutes to pass while the staffer I needed to tell me what happened in those twenty minutes was having weekly adventure and daily sphere-baRP with their PC.
It kinda blows me away that gamerunners don’t all acknowledge the timeliness problem and have a stated course of action to deal with it. In my long experience, if you want to lose friends over an RPG the easiest way is to SKIP SOMEBODY’S TURN A LOT. That’s pretty much the simplest way to be a shitty GM. (If you want to really guarantee that friendships’ death, skip their turn a lot and then have a hissy fit when they point out how unfair and shitty it is.)
An aside, I wish we’d all get over the idea that MU staffing is volunteerism. Yeah, sure, it’s voluntary. But volunteerism implies community service. And okay, yeah, sort of, technically, but also, no. GMs are players playing a different role in the game. Yeah, we need them or we can’t play, but. Weellllll. You need a pitcher to play baseball, but you can play without a left fielder if you must. This does not make the pitcher a volunteer whose services you must constantly applaud and the left fielder a mere player who owes the pitcher. (For the same reason, gamerunners and players should all remember that GMs are players too, and they, too, should be having fun.)
It sounds like your bad experiences with MU staffing have soured you on staffers and their value. But don’t let your bad experiences with bad staffers blind distract from the importance staffing has on the hobby or the value in the service they’re offering the community. If anything, your bad experiences should show you just how valuable staffing is and how damaging it can be to have someone stepping into that role who won’t/can’t do it well. They should show you why good staffers should be applauded whenever they can be. Because good staffing is invaluable, even though many people take it for granted and are happy to sour on all of it because of the bad apples.
I thought I was relatively safe in California, but I was very wrong. Watching Trump operate unchecked following the Project 2025 playbook has been a surreal horror.
@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:
@L-B-Heuschkel That’s a great set up for that kind of play. I’ve mentally filed that kind of thing under ‘Stargate games’, and I think it can work VERY well for games set up for it.
I’ve tried similar things on games I’ve run, although less as a literal portal to other universes structure and more as in there is a homebase and people can go out and run missions on other planets. (Because my bias was scifi rather than fantasy. You could call them portal games too!) The idea being that the distance should empower people to freely do what they like. I think Spirit Lake played with the portal thing too.
The problem I’ve run into is that players don’t necessarily feel that it connects back to the metaplot if there aren’t changes to the homebase region or overall story. Is that just out of the scope for your game?
Respectfully, IMHO, that’s because that example doesn’t really sound like a metaplot. That just sounds like a setting. Stargate’s setting was that there were portals to other universes and the team could go through them and do stuff. You can run a bunch of scenes off of that setting and have a bunch of fun with it, but that’s not a metaplot. Plots in general usually have a conflict (a problem that drives the story forward) and causality (where one thing affects another). Stargate’s metaplot was some action being done by individuals (or forces) over a larger span of time (usually over a season, or multiple seasons which makes it “meta”) that affected things in the universe (causality): like a rebellion forming across multiple worlds to take down Apophis and be free (I’m actually not a Stargate fan, so don’t quote me on accuracy here). The main characters would sometimes be involved with that or sometimes not, same as on a game, sometimes players can have stories involved in the metaplot, sometimes not.
If the metaplot can’t be affected by the players in any meaningful way (or at least work towards being able to affect it), that’s not a metaplot (usually). Its just a setting.
@Roadspike has a great example with The Fifth World. That’s a metaplot. A thing is happening in the game over a long(er) period of time. Characters can be involved in it or do things not involved with it directly. But the thing is happening and the characters can touch that story, but not enough to shut it down right away or overtake it until they’ve built up a good amount of momentum. Some players want to be involved, others not. But a metaplot tells a larger story that’s happening besides the day to day.
A metaplot can sometimes change the setting. I personally think a good metaplot WILL change the setting, even if it is in minor ways.
Players can ignore the metaplot, but not the setting. If the setting changes because of the metaplot, that’s just the game.
Aside from that, players grumbling about the metaplot and setting and changes are a different beast, though. People are unhappy for a variety of reasons on staff and player side that just have to do with people being people and the limitations of MU*s.
@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:
My problem with backgrounds is that I constantly do the thing where I put all the interesting bits of a character’s life in the background, and leave very little room for interesting stuff to happen on the game.
I don’t think that’s only your problem. Its a problem built into the system that you have to self correct for. You’re told to make a background and usually told that you have to justify your stats. So you come up with whatever ridiculousness you need to to justify the stats, then after approval, you’re not actually allowed to do half the interesting stuff that was approved in your background for various reasons, many of which are completely valid. So you end up in this weird twilight zone of having this very cool character who will not likely accomplish anything near as interesting as what you had in your head. As a result there’s more than a few people who have made characters they really liked, but then have done little to nothing with them before fading out completely.
@Kestrel said in MU Peeves Thread:
I don’t think we shouldn’t describe stuff. I just think we should only describe stuff that matters, when it matters.
It’s the Chekhov’s Gun principle. If it’s not going to go off in the second act, it doesn’t need a paragraph describing it in the first.
I agree completely, which is why I hate writing backgrounds now - when they are mandatory. All things being equal, I’d love writing a background for a character, but when I know that every letter I type is one more letter that is going to be ignored by staff it just kills it for me. But on games where a full background isn’t necessary or only a few bullet points are necessary, I will usually write out the full background all on my own and enjoy the process.
That said, I also don’t hate AI the way so many other people seem to, as long as it is used well. Everyone shows up to the hobby for different reasons and that has a lot to do with why different people feel certain ways about it. And I would love if people kept an open mind to the fact that not everyone shows up for the same reasons as they do. When people don’t do that, I guess that would be one of my MU peeves.
@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Third-Eye I wonder how long it’ll be before staff start requiring people defend their applications like one does with a dissertation, just to weed out those who wrote their backgrounds with an LLM.
This is what they get for still having people write out backgrounds that will never again have relevance once the app is approved.