MU Peeves Thread
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cringes me out a little when someone uses racial/ethnic identifiers in a character desc, but like only for characters of color? lots of ppl don’t seem to feel they need to specify if the character is white but then very pointedly emphasize if a character is black/Asian/etc. weird to me.
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@Artemis This was a habit of one of the worst players I ever met, whom simultaneously constantly talked about what an advocate and ally she is. Very handy for fingering her stealth alts. She also talked about her terrible marriage and sought comfort in others OOC. Talk about a messed up cluster of wrong coping mechanisms. She’s still out there, too. Deeply institutionalized.
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@Artemis I can definitely understand the cringe, but I think the general “people don’t feel they need to specify if the character is white” thing is why people may feel the need to specify that their character isn’t white. If white is the apparent default, I can see why folks may feel the need to emphasise the difference.
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@Pavel heard, but like that’s sort of what long-form descs are for? if im describing a black character for example i’ll include their skin tone, hair texture, etc and let people draw their own conclusions, same as i’d do with a white char. Otherwise, kind of gives the vibe that anything other than white is out of the ordinary and that feels sus and lame. Also worth noting that appearances can be misleading and ppl could maybe afford to assume less off visual cues alone.
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@Artemis That’s fair, but you’re also one of those weirdos who enjoys writing (and reading) descs. I much prefer concision, so I guess it’s just a case of different tastes and preferences.
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@Pavel Can we not call her a weirdo, man?
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I just remembered another one of my MU Peeves:
When the actual Staff of the game (especially any Builders or Builder adjacent staff) runs a major plot event in a Generic RP Room with no description.
WHY THE HELL DID THEY BOTHER DESCING A GRID ANYWAY?
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@MisterBoring That’s one of the bigger boons from Ares, to me. You can have your scenes off the grid so you’ve got some space but easily use a grid room and its description and all.
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@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:
You can have your scenes off the grid so you’ve got some space but easily use a grid room and its description and all.
Sure. My weird logic brain tells me that staff plots should ostensibly occur on the staff built grid, and if the staff runs 90% of the main plots in a nebulous area designed to be all the places that didn’t get grid rooms, maybe the grid needs a serious revisit as it’s not even meeting staff’s needs.
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@MisterBoring To be honest, much of the time I feel that games have grids purely because games have grids.
I’ve also seen (and been a part of) arguments that say if you want to restrict who can play in a room, you must take your scene off the grid – and I imagine staff would want to limit numbers on any particular plot related scene so they don’t get overwhelmed.
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@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:
@MisterBoring To be honest, much of the time I feel that games have grids purely because games have grids.
I’ve also seen (and been a part of) arguments that say if you want to restrict who can play in a room, you must take your scene off the grid – and I imagine staff would want to limit numbers on any particular plot related scene so they don’t get overwhelmed.
Ugh.
In one of my few stints as staff, had a couple of players throw a passive aggressive fit because I wouldn’t let them join a GM scene run on-grid: it was the climax scene of a plot that had been running with a specific group for a couple of weeks, and it was on grid because a prominent feature in a room’s desc was the focal point of the plot. It just really killed my enjoyment of that plot (and, honestly, game). Worse yet: I’d run private/tailored scenes for these players ON GRID before this, and they had no problem with it then, of course.
So, yeah, there are some incentives NOT to use a grid room, even if I prefer it, because I do not want to either have everything open to everyone or deal with people whining about being excluded.
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Sometimes you don’t know what rooms you’re going to need until you need them. If inspiration strikes and I really want this scene to happen in place A but I don’t have place A, I’ll just do it in a generic room and write the desc into the set.
If someone really wants me to build the room out for later use, yeah, sure. But it’s not going to be priority if I don’t plan on going back there for anything specific.
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@tsar said in MU Peeves Thread:
If inspiration strikes and I really want this scene to happen in place A but I don’t have place A, I’ll just do it in a generic room and write the desc into the set.
That makes sense. The point I’m trying to make is that it’s a peeve when the staff never uses their own grid for their plots. Doubly so if the grid is a huge maze.
I’ve been on games where staff use generic RP rooms in place of rooms that actually exist on grid because they couldn’t remember where the room is to begin with.
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@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:
The point I’m trying to make is that it’s a peeve when the staff never uses their own grid for their plots. Doubly so if the grid is a huge maze.
I can definitely empathise, and even agree. We just have to work to reverse the expectation that on grid means open to everyone.
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I think grids serve a different purpose today than they used to. Today, at least on Ares games, the grid is a showcase – it tells new people what the place looks like, what the atmosphere is like, and what staff thought was important to the stories being told.
Any pronouns. Come to Chincoteague. We have ponies. http://keys.aresmush.com
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@L-B-Heuschkel said in MU Peeves Thread:
what staff thought was important to the stories being told.
This is what I thought of grids too, so is also why I’m frustrated when I see staff not using the grid. If the grid is important to the story, why does the main story not happen on the grid?
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I’m kind of a fan of the Ares setup that has made grids less important. It’s really nice to me to be able to have a setting that overall for the game isn’t essential, but for a small plot or scenes absolutely is.
Like, one of my fave mini-plots I’ve played, the ST was running a story about haunted shopping carts in Winnipeg. A grid with 6 grocery store parking lots would have been bloated and no one wants to desc that. But the flexibility of just having the ability to type “Grocery Store Parking Lot” into the little locations box was perfect.
I don’t really care how large/small private/public the grid is. It’s there as a support for the stories told. But it’s not NEEDED to actually tell the stories. Sometimes, paring back the things that aren’t essential makes the fun a lot less gate-kept and ends up being a lot more easily accessed.
We're all mad here.
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Grids should be set dressing for the game and do exactly what @MisterBoring mentions. If you have a larger space dedicated to wilderness areas, then you’re telegraphing that you want to tell stories based around the wilderness.
I don’t really like the Ares model myself. I’m fond of abstract representations of grids because a lot of the grid space ends up as dead filler space. There are a few ways this manifests, but the current crop of WoD games are good examples of how this ends up working. Liberation has a lot of street/intersection rooms that see no use except to serve as a place for players to plop down builds. Those builds become hangouts, and no one will generally walk to the hangout they want to go to, they’ll use the +hangouts command (or analogous command). Dark Water kinda did this, in that it was largely just big sections of Port Angeles set up and connected up to one another.
This leads to a lot of questions: like why even bother having the highways around Los Angeles built out on the game since a) no one’s going to start scenes on those – what would that scene even be like if it’s a social scene? You’re not going to RP being in a car if random people show up; b) the storyline of the game kind of prevents players from running scenes on those (they’re controlled by the Technocracy in Liberation canon); and c) most players don’t have the authority to run scenes on the game, let alone using staff resources.
For DI and RM which arguably use the same grid method of nodal points based around neighborhoods, there ends up being a good deal of useless space that’s there to just for the sake of completionism. How many Houston wards get gameplay? Of those, what’s really crucial to the game?
It’s really frustrating to see grids get out of control rather than having like @Jenn is saying with regards to how rooms might be set up. I personally wouldn’t go so far as to desc out a parking lot for the grocery store, but jut have “Grocery Store” and either implement places (join the parking lot place) or have a scene set indicate that the scene is currently taking place in the parking lot.
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@Jenn I think you’ve missed my point. My point isn’t that the grid is required to tell stories. My point is that it’s frustrating when staff never uses the grid they spent weeks or months on to tell the stories they are claiming is the primary story on the game. It sends a signal to me at least, that staff is fully willing to abandon major projects on a whim and aren’t super dedicated to the game, or at least have changed course on how they approach it. And that’s regardless of how big the grid is. It could be 20 total rooms. If the staff isn’t willing to run plots on their own grid, why should I spend my time RPing on a world the staff doesn’t care about?
An example from a fantasy game I played in years ago: The main plot revolved around a stereotypical fantasy kingdom where the players were mostly heroes and civilians living in and around that Kingdom’s capital city. The King’s castle had a few grid rooms including a Throne Room where he was supposed to give proclamations and pass judgement on criminals and stuff, and through which a lot of central staff plots were supposed to pass. However, Staff regularly chose to run the events where the King would hold court in his Throne Room in “Generic RP #1” because staff couldn’t be arsed to walk or even use a teleport command to get to the Throne room.
