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@Cobalt said in MU Peeves Thread:
I’m old, my health is shit, and I’m tired. I love a great deal of people in this hobby but this hobby became a chore for me. I’m sure I made interacting with me a chore b/c I was too stubborn to realize that after 15-20yrs of active mushing I was burnt out.
@bear_necessities said in Tips for GMs:
@KDraygo said in Tips for GMs:
Try to keep the scene moving,
Please. Please keep things moving. I’ve been in GM’d scenes where we haven’t even finished “posing in” and have already hit the 1 hour mark.
I know this is a few days ago, but this irks me so bad. It is why in the last few years that I was GMing for people, I instituted a rule that if you had not posed after 5-10 minutes when it was your run and not responded OOC your turn would be skipped.
But scenes moving so slowly that I’d lose all focus on them, is a big reason why I stopped GMing and RPing altogether.
I would be unlikely to join a pay for play game. If it was run by someone I know and trusted, I might if my budget allowed it.
In theory, if I did not have a job, wasn’t burnt out, and thought it might work; I’d consider running some sort of pay-me-to-GM for you scheme. But it would have to have strict rules on what the money was exchanging hands for. And that is … something I don’t even know where I’d start with the rules. I also wouldn’t be comfortable doing it while working a full time job, because I’d want to provide something professional that was worth the money I was receiving for it, and that then becomes a case of “would this even be enough to pay my bills” type of question.
All of that theory aside, I rarely ask anything of other people that I’m not willing to do myself. So, if I’m not willing to pay for someone to GM for me… It would feel bad to me to be willing to be paid to GM for someone else.
I think there are ways that it could work for the people who have the funds for it-- like people who pay for D&D. But it wouldn’t be something for me personally.
@howyadoin said in MU Peeves Thread:
You will be miserable trying to demand attention from people who either can’t, or don’t want to, give it to you - and you will make them miserable in the process.
+100000000000000
But also…
If you aren’t having fun then leave. If you find a problem on every game you play? Stop MUSHing.
I’m old, my health is shit, and I’m tired. I love a great deal of people in this hobby but this hobby became a chore for me. I’m sure I made interacting with me a chore b/c I was too stubborn to realize that after 15-20yrs of active mushing I was burnt out.
These days I play video games, write, and spend time with my spouse. None of these things make me feel frustrated or like I’m pushing myself to do something unrewarding.
Frfr, if you are finding that everywhere you go there are problems? You are the problem. I love being around a lot of people in this hobby, but I am so burnt out that I could no longer enjoy spending that time people that I genuinely believe are amazing. This wasn’t anyone’s fault but my own.
Unless you keep running into notorious bad actors in our community, it may be time to take a break.
@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:
If I have become an insufferable chore recently and this is the reason I’ve had this experience, then staffers have developed time travel. You really can’t say staff is refusing to interact with a player because the player is a chore when there was never a period when they did actually interact with that player.
A lot of people don’t realize they’ve become a chore until well after the fact. We’re not often conscious of annoying social behaviors because we’re used to acting a specific way, even in an online text form.
Coincidentally, Lewd Zork was my runnin’ around name in my 20s!
@Gashlycrumb said in Paid Role-Playing:
a pay-to-TS-people MOO
Like one of those sexy time chat lines that were so popular in the 90s, advertised on late-night TV?
Regarding solutions to things, my suggestion is to have a tentative solution to a problem and do not, under any circumstances, rely solely on that solution/story thread to move to your next plot beat. It’s important to be flexible and be able to incorporate the emergent fiction of the game into your story.
One thing I usually do when I write out plots is use a mind map. I’ll put the inciting incident of the plot on one side and my tentative eventual goal(s) on the other side of the map, then start filling in possible avenues that could be taken to reach the goals. Next up, I create two sections for players: an active section and a bullpen section. If I know the players fairly well, I can usually anticipate the course of action the players take, which is important for developing potential story beats. Usually I’ll make a note of the characters’ primary abilities or, if I am not staff and have only observed the players, I will make a note of what I’ve seen them do most often. I’ll ask, but people are often really weird about their stats, or they used to be anyhow. Failing either of those, I’ll base it off whatever data I can mine from their wiki pages or stereotypes about those types of characters (e.g., Brujah vampires are likely going to be pro-combat).
Being a (primarily) WoD storyteller, I will also create a three-part approach to stories, with a focus on what will happen if someone attempts to develop a solution to a problem socially, through research (mental skills), or through combat. This will spin out to consequences and forward momentum, which will move to more story beats.
Since this is a largely living document, it also allows me to course correct if things are getting too wildly off path. Something that’s a bit out of left field or way out of bounds of what’s in scope for the plot might be its own spin-off. When that happens, if I can’t run that at the same time I’ll provide the player with a timeline of when we can approach it, then do some redirection if possible. Usually, but not always, those players have followed the plot to their own personal satisfaction at this point and are more interested in this sideline piece. Those players will get shifted down to the bullpen which helps me adjust the weight of some of the other possible outcomes that might come into play given the existing scenes/story beats that I’m going to be running. Do this enough, and you start to see a pattern emerge, and you can usually predict what course the story will take. Despite that, it’s important not to be reliant on your own internal narrative for the story, even if you have a fairly conclusive “big showdown fight at Important MUSH Location #1” ending.
All of that is, of course, for a longer-running thing. For shorter plots or one-shots I generally will have no ending plotted out at all, and will usually just build a few responses based on the approach type of the players: either that three part physical/mental/social, or if I’m very aware of their capabilities and reasonably sure they’re all going to show up, a set of more personalized challenges that the players will overcome based on their strengths and limitations.
This is a lot of work to do and I don’t anticipate that it’s something a lot of people want to do, but I feel like it’s been the path to success for me.
One time @Roz’s character unironically played Wonderwall to my character on an acoustic guitar.
