@Faraday I think these war stories are profoundly important to relay, because it’s pretty easy to discuss approaches in abstract, but when you’re down there in the trenches, you see how things unfold in ways that are difficult to predict, and you’re there in the crossfire feeling the heat of just how bad things can get.

That heat fades after a while and people may forget the details. We don’t need to wonder too much when there are actual cases. Players can have good experiences, but staff might be sitting there shell-shocked about it, and that should be a factor considering we generally need staff to run games.

ChaosMUCK. SANIC THE HEDGHEG!!! As a young starryeyed idiot, the concept of feature characters was new and insane and extremely exciting, even if MU*s were intimidating. I may as well have been RPing (poorly) with THE REAL ACTUAL SONIC. FC Sonic RPer, if you’re out there, thank you for being kind and patient and cool to someone who could barely string sentences together.

@somasatori At that point it should’ve been pulled out the IC realm and dealt with it like it was player problem. I think the… GTA RP server people call it failRP? << Sometimes people do such wacky shit that it cannot be resolved ICly. There’s a threshold of “oh, I see, this is not RP related at all”. You wouldn’t punish a player like this by killing their character. You’d punish a player like this by banning them.

@catzilla WHAT

@Ashkuri I really can’t think of any. Is non-consensual permadeath actually a thing anymore?

Curious if anyone has actually seen a PC death play out where the player certainly didn’t intend to die AND didn’t consent to being in a situation that warned the risk.

Someone explain pern to me in 1 sentence.

@helvetica The menchies!!!

I wonder how this plays out in oWoD games where these factions are absolutely enemies. From what I gather, that’s what the layer of secrecy is for. You just have to live with the possibility that it all might go to shit if people find out. Maybe that’s part of the thrill.

My only experience, as stated, was punchy campy Transformers games. And they managed factions just fine. I think people more or less accepted that things wouldn’t always be fair, and the enjoyment they got out of doing flashy signature moves outweighed most negative vibes. The only dramatic ooc blow ups I recall were purely player-based over staff decisions, rather than anyone getting upset that Megatron and his gang got away with stealing a national monument or something.

Settings where there are adversarial factions! Perhaps more than 2! Where have you seen this done elegantly? What made it work? Was it baked into the theme, or just a byproduct of having more character type selections?

Is it a fundamentally flawed approach in modern MUSHing? Can it be managed in a properly collaborative environment? Does it depend on a carefully curated playerbase?

I’m not quite talking about PVP, because in my mind, this is something that involves narrative clashing but no one generally gets KILLED. Plus I see PVP as kind of separate from adversarial factions.

Like in Transformers 2005 and TFU, it was kind of built into the theme to do punchy coded beat-em-ups very often that resulted in no death.

I’m gathering that this person might be what some people would grudgingly call a Bad Fit, which is generally a summary of someone being kind of a bummer to be around, or exhausting, or non-collaborative, or just straight up rude. There’s usually some list of smallish slights (as shown above) rather than some kind of wild, explosive crashout on pub chan (to my dismay). General Bad Behavior that you don’t want on your game.

Of course… there may be hot spicy deetz we’re not privy to. You really have to be a certain something to get barred from multiple games.

@Tez This does kind of make me wonder what MUD players get out of it, lol. I mean I imagine they’re trying to replicate MMOs. Or, well, they were the proto MMOs I guess. I see that people still play them! At least on r/MUD

Lately I’ve been enjoying the element of chance when it comes to the narrative. Sure, narrative above all else. That’s given. But sometimes, sometimes, it’s nice to be a bit surprised by the system that was originally built with the fiddly bits in mind. And I think, judging by the responses, other folks have had decent experiences. Ideally they’re tools to kind of pad things out between RP. Hanging out in your room, everyone’s gone to bed, now I can work on descing my glorious wardrobe.

@Trashcan Please explain how the coded bounties for players worked.

SHUCKED RIGHT TO DEATH

They’re as rare as coders these days, but still! Are there any minigames you’ve played with, within the mush setting, that really stuck out to you? That you found engaging but not too distracting? Maybe a better world would be narrative mechanic.

I’m talking about like… perhaps animal breeding or crafting perfume or modeling an outfit. Some of this might bleed into MUDs but I understand there was some kind of hunting system in Firan. I guess oyster shucking would count?

@Tez 1 strike for you, expires in 4 minutes.

@Muscle-Car said in RPing with Nobody:

They’d get real miserable and start adding editorial in their own posts like “because she is not needed.”

Encountered this. They added aggressive meta and moodily (ICly) sulked on the lawn to pluck blades of grass, like an unhappy grade schooler.

@somasatori said in Strike Systems:

@Jumpscare said in Strike Systems:

Some people can change. Others can’t.

Man, at this point I’m willing to believe that we’re all pretty firmly set in our behavioral ways when it comes to MUSHing and would argue that most, if not all, people in the hobby will resist changing.

I’m inclined to agree. I’m curious if anyone has actually legitimately witnessed a fundamental change in someone with regards to MUSH behavior, perhaps due to some fallout, maybe in the form of banning or lost friends.

@L-B-Heuschkel Yeah, for me what comes to mind is RPI muds. I recall having to salute my captain on channel every time I logged in. It was just in the rules. I signed up for those rules. I can also sign up for enforced engagement (I think?) but the reasoning intrigues me.

I’d basically like someone to explain to me why having a truly, TRULY neutral player who generally RPs with 1-2 people is a NET LOSS to a game. I’d argue that this is even better than a solo player who just lurks. For THAT, you could make the case that they’re just farming XP or something, but personally I wouldn’t care. From what I can understand, ya’ll want a No Dead Weight policy, which seems like it’s usually applied to staffers.

If they are doing anything that somehow reaches you and informs you that they hate the theme and the setting sucks and everyone else sucks, that’s a player problem, not an engagement problem. As ever, it always comes back to the player problem.

I think we can all agree that it is perfectly acceptable for staff to create their own rules. I’m just trying to figure out why games might think a player engaging in this specific manner is a net loss, like they’re somehow taking up a slot that someone else more engaging would be utilizing.