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MU Peeves Thread
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I’m not currently playing anything so I mean, maybe things are different now and better than I remember them being.
I’ll say though that I’ve often encountered the opposite problem — where you really want more people to get involved, but they’ll say stuff like, ‘Oh I don’t know if I should! I took part in a plot just last week and don’t want to take up too much space.’
I caught myself thinking to myself as I was reading some of these posts, ‘Is it me, am I like this?’ But then I also remembered the common struggle to encourage proactivity, and combat this common introverted shyness/anxiety seen in MU* players who feel obliged to toe the line more than they really need to.
All this to very vaguely say — there’s a Goldilocks Zone here. All things in moderation, including moderation.
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@mietze Once upon a time, I accidentally licked my friend’s plot because I was just so excited about it and didn’t realize that I was stepping on toes. It was new and shiny and I wanted to participate and…
And people clued me in that I’d gotten slobber everywhere, and I apologized to my friend who didn’t want to bring it up with me out of fear that it could make things awkward. Which, naturally, made things awkward when I realized I’d gotten drool all over this nice plot.
My friend was glad that I understood boundaries and that I didn’t want to be an inadvertent plot-licker. And our conversation gave us the opportunity to figure out the best way to engage together on the plot. Because in the end, my enthusiasm was appreciated! Just within reason, right?
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@Tributary You truly are and continue to be one of my very favorite interwebs people. I know I say that to a lot of y’all, but. I MEAN it to every danged one of y’all.
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Lots of MUs have controlled cliques since somewhere shortly after the year dot. It’s really normal and done in a +R way. Games that have +votes and XP (or some other mechanicy-reward) linked to votes tend to also not let you vote for the same person over and over. Maybe you can vote for them once a day, or once a week, or once a month. Players who get out more will earn more XP.
(Cliques will break this system if you let people award each other bonus XP for PrPs. But really, the gaining extra XP for getting to do stuff is like giving you an ice cream cone for doing such a good job eating your hot fudge sundae and isn’t a great plan.)
One might try a setup where instead of resetting after a period of time, it resets after you vote for the nth different PC. You either need to form a clique with more than n members, or you need to play outside your group. I would guess that people wouldn’t object to that, mainly because it’s not a punishment or a critique of their individual behavior. (And they’re quite justified in disliking being punished or criticised for RPing with whom they like.)
There’s also the possibility of not only spreading your plot hooks/story seeds across a wide variety of laps, but also purposefully dropping those seeds to people who actively spread the fun around. And seldom dropping them them to people who won’t, as it is a less efficient use of GM time.
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When a player returns to a game your active on who directly lead to you being verbally abused RL. And then shortly after one of their buddies returns who outed another player as trans to you that would probably be uncomfortable with people knowing it IF it was even true.
Really kills all desire to continue playing.
Also, yes, I know I’m vaguebooking.
Cobalt@Under the Stars
cob.alt@Discord
Cobalt#3811@mas.to -
@Cobalt So much feels.
Joined a game after a player who likes to attack me said they had quit. They hadn’t. Avoid interacting with them. Know full well they undermine my IC efforts without any IC motivation, and have made up a ‘prophecy’ about my PC that sentences PCs who work with him to DOOOOOOM.
Now watching player decisions turn what was a fun action scene into PC-destroying disaster and it’s very hard not to wonder how very much of that was OOC hostility.
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My least favourite encounter in stories/plots is the Main Character Syndrome player. The one who rushes ahead without bothering to wait for anyone’s emote and grabs the MacGuffin to take home and try to interact with the plot to the exclusion of all others. The one who gets up in front of everyone and “volunteers” to be the most important person who shall charge forth alone to solve all the problems and actually expects a pat on the back for this behavior. Basically constantly looking for a way to elevate themselves above the rest of us peons who showed up to participate.
I’m dealing with one in the current game I’m playing and I’m so fucking done with it. A decent amount of plot licking means they’re somehow constantly in the center of everything and there’s very little to do that doesn’t require going through them in some way. And they have a history of OOC aggression towards people trying to get involved in plots they’ve already licked.
Like, have friends if you want, put them first if you want, I consider this all fairly normal behaviour. But if you can’t stop acting like a monster to everyone else that’s where I draw the line. Fuck off with that shit.
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@Juniper said in MU Peeves Thread:
My least favourite encounter in stories/plots is the Main Character Syndrome player.
I’m dealing with one in the current game I’m playing and I’m so fucking done with it. A decent amount of plot licking means they’re somehow constantly in the center of everything and there’s very little to do that doesn’t require going through them in some way. And they have a history of OOC aggression towards people trying to get involved in plots they’ve already licked.
When this is allowed to run rampant, it’s one of the fastest ways to get me to disengage with a game. I don’t feel the need to win as my character (I actually prefer losing more often than not as it leads to better character arcs IMO), but if the same person or few people are the ones always doing everything and I feel like my character is just a side character in their story, and staff lets that happen? Yeah, I’ll take my time and energy and go elsewhere.
The issue I find is it happens more often than not. I’d say that most of the places I’ve played in the past year or so, if you were to do a straw poll of players and asked, "Who seems like the ‘main character’ of this game?', you’d see a vast number of players answering the same person or people. That’s a problem.
Staff needs to be cognizant of these things and while it’s hard to tell a player “please don’t get involved in this plot”, there are ways that you can urge things in other directions and not get into a confrontation about it.
But as a player? If you don’t want to share your ball, I’ll go find another sandbox to play in. There are plenty of them out there, and none of them are SO GOOD that they are worth the mental energy of fighting with bad players over it.
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I think it’s gonna be a two pieces of cake sort of day today.
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Playing on a game where staff ardently vows to the player base that their entire goal is to prevent gatekeeping, waiting for weeks while all of staff takes a break at the same time grinding plot to a halt leaving the players to pick up the slack and run a bunch of open events involving everyone and being inclusive, and then have staff come back and immediately launch a ton of events that are all “closed” to very small groups of seemingly the same few players again.
It’s not gatekeeping I guess if you’re the ones inside?
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@mangosplitz Those events are in response to requests made by groups of players poking at plot, and there’s a staff-run plot guide explaining how to do that.
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@helvetica I get the complaint assuming @mangosplitz is talking about Concordia (bc really dude just name names already, vaguebooking is so 2023). Four events, all featuring the same 4 characters, is a bad look. But considering the last large plot was in October, I assume 90% of the people in those groups that did the requesting are idle or have quit?
IDK you’re never going to please everybody.
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@bear_necessities word. for my part on playerside, I tried to invite people I had connections to and got fatigued by them reading the mails and not responding, so ~~the group that’s there is the group that responded before I ran out of steam. c’est la vie.
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@helvetica 100% not on you as a player, other players suck and it is fucking exhausting as a person to try and be inclusive and get 0 answer from anyboy.
Just giving my “from the outside looking in” perspective on the situation. But also lol @mangosplitz just from my time on Concordia I 100% believe if you asked the head GM there to be involved, you would? So idk you get what you give in any situation.
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Passive participation results in passive inclusion. We can’t know you want to do something if you don’t tell us you want to do something. That’s not gatekeeping, it’s just a lack of telepathy
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@mangosplitz said in MU Peeves Thread:
waiting for weeks while all of staff takes a break at the same time
Idk but I get sucked into holiday/kid events from pretty much mid-october to January these days. So like… staff taking a break over a commonly bust time for many doesn’t seem bizarre???
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The visibility on this is really unfortunate sometimes on ares games, since you cannot have truly hidden events (and unless things are customized, you can see how many private scenes there are and who and timing too, which I personally feel contributes to a lot of feelings of FOMO/left outedness if someone ISN"T used to that kind of transparency until they recalibrate). Once people do realize that’s all it is, it gets easier to ignore unless there’s other difficulties.
But that’s going to happen on any ares game unless it’s heavily customized. One of the things that I LOVED about Wyrdhold is glitch making private scenes truly private (I think there was notification of how many but that is all). I don’t remember seeing any You Are Not Invited events but I don’t know if just planning happened privately (I participated in some that were handled like that!) or if there was some switch that made it happen, Glitch is like super awesome so I could see that being something they could do!
On places like arx and other places if an event is toggled private or limited it won’t even show up for people who are not eligible. I don’t think that Concordia has an unusual amount of private STed responses to requests, if anything there are a lot less. They’re just visible to all. It’s one of those things that you can’t take personally as a player, though at the same time I think staff probably shouldn’t take anything personal about about player worry when they see things they’re used to being hidden/out of sight.
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For concordia specifically, I find that once you are able to get yourself over the threshold to put in a request, it’s pretty easy and friendly. You do not need to involve other people at all (though I believe working with a group nets a bonus). I’m not gifted at paperwork and my brain organization is different than the norm, so at first it was disorienting to have things get closed or shifted quickly with a quick turn around time–BUT one thing to remember about ares at least on this game is that you can ping to reopen very VERY easily just on the web portal, it’s not “final” if it’s been closed because response time took too long and you totally don’t have to start from scratch.
None of that is personal, it’s just a style and applications thing. I know for me, when something is CALLED the same thing (request) I tend to think of it in the same terms of what I’m most used to (which in my case is not ares or a system where a paused request can be popped right back open at will. So that’s an adjustment too.
There are some super friendly folks on the game that will totally help you if you need help brainstorming on how to approach a request, ect. Or even if you post on the forum or ask on channel about feeling out of the loop! So I’d really encourage you to do that too. If the request thing is intimidating I totally get that, I’m much better at RPing than I am at organizing.
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@mietze said in MU Peeves Thread:
One of the things that I LOVED about Wyrdhold is glitch making private scenes truly private (I think there was notification of how many but that is all). I don’t remember seeing any You Are Not Invited events but I don’t know if just planning happened privately (I participated in some that were handled like that!) or if there was some switch that made it happen, Glitch is like super awesome so I could see that being something they could do!
I fucking loved that too. I looooooooove Ares but the FOMO of some of the pieces of it can hit pretty hard sometimes. First thing I do on any Ares install is turn off featured scenes. MY GOD.
FOMO can be rough in our community, but no one is a mindreader and staff can’t be expected to be either.
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I will say that I don’t think anyone should expect staff to be mindreaders but also the players shouldn’t expect to be mindreaders also - and it can be extremely hard to “know” that stuff is Happening after a long break, especially if you are not connected to certain groups. Specific to the interrogation, I recall an OOC conversation where people were asking to be involved months ago and the tone was not having a ton of people in the room or something similar to that, and while I think that came from a player rather than staff, it can be super intimidating to even the most proactive of players to hear stuff like that and still try to be involved. And IIRC didn’t a lot of the people suddenly thrust into leadership go pretty inactive immediately afterward? It’s sort of a “sucks all around” sort of situation.
Anyway I do think we have a tendency to believe staff should come to us when we’re being proactive to reward us for good behavior or whatever and ehhh I don’t think that’s a good way to go about getting involved in things.
