Actually recommendable?
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This is also very much a thread for whinging about all the ways the answer may be no, but.
Is there any game out there you can, in good conscience, recommend?
Not, “Hey, come play here, it’s okay and you and I usually have fun,” nor “Join this game, a few more players and it might be good,” nor “I just heard about this new game, let’s try it,” nor, “It kinda sucks but there are some great players so it’s fun in spite of itself,” nor, “The chicken is good but avoid the soup, it’s got piss in it,” but an actual no-major-caveats recommendation?
Last couple years I’ve had, “This was a lot of fun for a few months, but some other player has shut me out of the plot I’d been working on all that time, and apparently game policy prevents GMs from putting the kibosh on that, and certain PCs can do way more in way less time than others, oh hey, those ones are staff alts.” And I’ve had, “Holy balls, I’ve been playing these things for 30 years, which is hard to believe, and this is actually the worst one I’ve ever tried, which is utterly incredible considering,” and I’ve had, “Some great players here, but they’re all bored and angry for several dozen valid reasons.”
I’ve actually felt bad for helping newcomers chargen instead of telling them to flee.
"This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"
– A. Bertram Chandler -
Off the top of my head, I can say that I’ve seen only positive comments about both Keys and The Network.
Game-runner of Silent Heaven, a small-town horror MU.
https://silentheaven.org -
@Jumpscare I am so happy to hear this.
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Los Angeles 2043: A Blade Runner MUSH is very good. Staff are responsive and helpful (though the Director is currently on a 2-week vacation to prevent burnout), the players are wonderful (you’ll see tons of folk come out of the woodwork as soon as your character is approved to arrange character connections) and there’s always something happening.
If dystopian classic cyberpunk is of any interest, I’d check it out.
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What @STD said. Been having fun there the last couple months.
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@Gashlycrumb said in Actually recommendable?:
Is there any game out there you can, in good conscience, recommend?
If you mean recommend without qualifications, then I’d certainly hope not. Games are complex ecosystems and how people fit into them is pretty personalized, based on a lot of factors. Even if I have a purely positive experience, my testimony would deserve an asterisk that my anecdote is only an anecdote.
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@GF Yes, but after a while, enough reviews of a place come in, and patterns can be identified, whether positive or negative.
@STD Vacations to prevent burnout are a very important and overlooked thing for staff members. That sounds great.
Game-runner of Silent Heaven, a small-town horror MU.
https://silentheaven.org -
@Jumpscare said in Actually recommendable?:
Yes, but after a while, enough reviews of a place come in, and patterns can be identified, whether positive or negative.
While true, I’d rather go to a 4.5-star place with 200 reviews over a 5-star place with 20.
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I second the recommendations of The Network. For full disclosure, I’m a combat staffer there, but I don’t do much other staff work besides updating the combat system for each Season.
Clockwork and company do a great job of creating as safe a place to play as is possible, dealing with creepers and stressors as they come up.
The setting is interesting and the rotating Seasons offer an opportunity to play characters and types that you otherwise wouldn’t, although I have to admit that I get a little bored by the end of a hiatus between Seasons – I can only RP the cruise ship life for so long, but others seem to really, really enjoy that time off too.
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@GF There are qualifications, and there are warnings. I don’t like feature characters. I do like having luck/rescue points. I don’t like the coded space thing that some TrekMUs had. And so on. I wouldn’t feel bad about it or refuse to recommend games that don’t happen to be run exactly to my preferences.
“It’s an Ethiopian restaurant, if you don’t like Ethiopian cuisine, you won’t be happy,” vs. “The marinara sauce there, isn’t marinara, it’s hot ketchup, and I got food poisoning from whatever that was they were calling eggplant.”
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Excelsior! is another one that I’d recommend, it’s a super hero roster game. But the staff there has been super awesome with getting plot out there, and making sure that everyone is able to not only just participate but to have a chance to shine as well.
