Don’t forget we moved!
https://brandmu.day/
Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG
-
The sudden disconnection thing making it so people can harvest your organs and have a scene around your PC that you don’t know about is going to be a dealbreaker for me. Last night I was trying out some commands in the hotel room when I suddenly got disconnected (my network dropped due to a storm). I didn’t think anything of it since I’d been in the hotel room so was “safe” and didn’t connect again until hours later.
Where I found myself in a dump site. I contacted staff, who were very helpful and positive, and looked at logs to see what happened and assured me not to worry because there’s very few bad things that can happen and they’re rare.
Turns out that one of the commands I was playing with before I was disconnected started with a ‘d’ and since it wasn’t a real command (it was a skill name) the game interpreted it as separate letters, one of which was “down” and it dropped me in the hotel lobby. But because of the delay in movement, I had disconnected before I had seen that I’d moved and mistakenly assumed I was still in the hotel room.
I asked if waking up in the dump site was why I had a dark aura and staff said oh, no, that means the bad thing happened. Someone had harvested an organ and now had a trophy of me somewhere. The upside being that I now had a RP hook to find who did it. This made me uncomfortable and I said as much and they offered to retcon it since not being in the hotel room had clearly been a mistake. At the time I said no, I’d roll with it, then this morning I was given more information from another PC.
Apparently other PCs witnessed my body being brought in and dumped, then someone started to go through the pockets of all the sleeping PCs there and a couple PCs tried to stop them, but due to the lack of commands to actually do that to other people, let them get away.
It makes me even more uncomfortable to know that while I am disconnected and cannot consent to things people can pose doing basically whatever they want to my PC and honestly I’d never know unless a friend also happened to be in the room. Especially since I had taken care (or so I thought) to try to disconnect in a safe space.
It really seems like an odd choice that disconnecting or idling out doesn’t automatically transport you to a safe room. Maybe there could be an opt-in or opt-out to set something where you’re okay with your PC idling out and being “unsafe”, but as this was my first time on the game…I just don’t feel like ever logging in again. I want to be a part of the stories my PC tells, not have people tell me things happened to me when I wasn’t even around and had no say in it.
-
As one of the PCs in that scene:
There is actually code to ICly stop someone from leaving and escalate to physical conflict - only thing is that it appears to be blocked for the first seven days of logging in. To “protect new players from physical conflicts”. That block can be overridden, but I, at least, wasn’t quite sure what the ramifications of that were and so opted not to do it, which mean that yeah, the thief could slip past.
There is a weird disconnect between the urge to protect the players and to have a horror game in a town where Very Bad Things Happen, and it’s sending out some weird mixed signals for me that makes it hard to figure out appropriate responses and I think that’s going to be an ongoing problem moving forward. You can, explicitly, beat someone into unconsciousness and harvest their organs, or poison them, or eavesdrop on their TS without their knowledge or consent, but you can’t initiate any sort of romantic play for two weeks after meeting someone, or check what sort of things they’re comfortable with playing more than once a day. It’s pretty muddled at the moment.
I am enjoying the game and the play I’ve found so far, but yeah, the messages are deeply mixed about what/how we’re supposed to be playing the actual horror parts.
-
@Pyrephox I hadn’t even had a chance to RP. The only RP scene I was apparently in was a scene where my body was there and I wasn’t connected and I wouldn’t have even known happened unless someone mentioned it to me.
It left a really bad taste.
-
@Pyrephox said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
There is a weird disconnect between the urge to protect the players and to have a horror game in a town where Very Bad Things Happen, and it’s sending out some weird mixed signals for me that makes it hard to figure out appropriate responses and I think that’s going to be an ongoing problem moving forward. You can, explicitly, beat someone into unconsciousness and harvest their organs, or poison them, or eavesdrop on their TS without their knowledge or consent, but you can’t initiate any sort of romantic play for two weeks after meeting someone, or check what sort of things they’re comfortable with playing more than once a day. It’s pretty muddled at the moment.
There are a lot of things about this game that seem really, really amazing and are extremely impressive! I was pretty excited and had a character concept all ready to go. But there are also some things that make me a bit uncomfortable. (The eavesdropping on people’s TS thing is on that list, because my immediate reaction is that the creeps and the slut-shamers will abuse this the first chance they get.)
Hearing this story this morning, I’ve gone from “Kind of uncomfortable, but hey, it’s a horror game, right? That’s part of the point.” all the way straight through to “I am very uncomfortable and I won’t be playing this game if this is allowed.” Having terrible things happen to my character while they’re asleep is one thing, but logging in to a game to find that things were publicly done with my character’s sleeping body that I’m totally unaware of and now have to stumble around, trying to piece together from other people who were there watching…
That’s a little too close to being assaulted while drunk in college and waking up to things happening to me, only to find out the next morning that my roommates saw their friend go up into my room and didn’t do anything to stop him. Like I’m literally sitting here feeling my fingers curl up and trying to keep my breathing steady even typing this out.
Let me be clear: I am absolutely, positively, 150% sure that that sort of vibe was in no way the intention when building out the game and that, rather, it was based very heavily on the video game style play of “You have to find a safe place to sleep before you log off, or you might get attacked by wolves/ogres/whateverNPCs”, but. I would very strongly suggest rethinking this policy if the game has been around for a week and people are already abusing the bodies of sleeping characters without the player’s knowledge, let alone consent.
-
So going very RPI it seems from what I have been told. Getting some sindome vibes, sadly I have sworn off such games due to my mental health issues with them getting over-attached to games like this. Good luck with it! I genuinely wish the best for the staff and those playing it!
(edited due to trigger finger too early.)
-
This sounds like HellMOO.
-
I must be logging in at wildly off hours because I rarely see people on at all (one of the frustrating bits honestly because while I like exploration it would be nice to interact in a more meaningful way. I think my slow processing speed is an issue too because I don’t react on a dime.)
But that would certainly disturb me, not the act to be clear but the ooc nature of it. (You got disconnected and did not make the choice to be vulnerable and there’s no way to note that.) I wonder if there was some kind of tag (if you are choosing to disconnect somewhere different/risky/inviting that sort of play) whereas all other kinds of connection drop would not allow certain actions.
Since the goal is to have everyone have a good time, maybe that would help. I think in this game its okay to have people do that action but would hope in the spirit of the game if they found out that it was player mistake/ooc connection loss they’d feel pretty bad if someone was upset. So some kind of thing to give additional info might help all involved.
-
@shit-piss-love said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
This sounds like HellMOO.
Given how much of the content that could be found in HellMOO is just straight up barred from Silent Heaven, this is a pretty egregious and unnecessary exaggeration that doesn’t serve to do anything but stir up bad feelings and hate. Organ harvesting is a thing that can happen I guess, but that’s about it.
That being said, I think that it’d probably be fine if the “30 minute disconnect protection” that exists was just extended to be “if your client disconnects without quitting for any reason, you auto-pause”. If people start to “abuse it” (disconnect instead of using quit to avoid the Bad Stuff in town), I think that’s probably fine. I think there’s some (valid) concerns that people might use that to avoid consequences (going to mouth off at the Big Spooky Bad Guy and then DCing when they get got), but I also think that can come down to a mixture of bringing that to Staff attention when it happens, and then just choosing to avoid RPing with people who do that kind of thing.
-
@shit-piss-love said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
This sounds like HellMOO.
It definitely has smacks of Sindome/Cybersphere/et al kind of gameplay. Travel delay, character vulnerable while disconnected, etc. It’s definitely very different from the more consent-oriented play games of a more modern ilk tend to aim towards.
-
@mietze I think a lot of people don’t realize that to show up on the who list, you need to have set an echo. I’ve had some dead times but they’ve been certainly fewer – it’s a small, tight grid which helps. My hours tend to be late PST or during the work day, for reference.
It’s definitely a shift away from the MUSH world culturally, but the game is hitting most of my checkboxes.
-
@NotSanni said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
@shit-piss-love said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
This sounds like HellMOO.
Given how much of the content that could be found in HellMOO is just straight up barred from Silent Heaven, this is a pretty egregious and unnecessary exaggeration that doesn’t serve to do anything but stir up bad feelings and hate. Organ harvesting is a thing that can happen I guess, but that’s about it.
-
@Selira i have done that.
I am learning the tools, but thus far I’m not linking up with folks. I think part of it is not having great things to trade (if I’d known more I would have made different choices–but it takes me awhile to figure things out oocly as to the impacts) so there’s no real reason for people to interact much beyond greeting. It’s not that people are oocly unfriendly or anything like that.That’s why I was thinking about the process to scrap/start over as I now have more of an idea of how to interest folks. But I don’t know. Still learning. It may be that I’m not a good fit/not interesting enough tbh while I’m trying to figure things out.
Its okay, this is the first time I’ve tried this sort of game, its possible I’m just not cut out for it, that doesn’t mean its bad or that i am.
-
@mietze I honestly think it’s the game just getting its legs under it and nothing to do with you. Everyone is kind of in a struggle to get their heads around the mechanics, learn limits, etc, and figuring out how to get RP. There are wildly different styles, and a sort of ‘game meta’ for that hasn’t developed yet, nor really a culture of figuring out how to get it.
It’s the time of a game where cafe rp flourishes.
But yes also tailors are in crazy high demand right now holy shit.
-
@mietze Haha, yeah. I made a medical examiner before doing thorough reading, thinking I could do autopsies on people who got et by monsters and the like - turns out no one stays dead, so there are no corpses to autopsy. I have a very cool forensics kit, but I’m not entirely certain what use it is - certainly, no one is clamoring for blood tests or DNA samples in the same way they’re begging for…shoes.
-
i’m making myself underwear before any of you get shoes, #sorrynotsorry
-
@Selira Perhaps I’m reading too much into my perception of your tone, but I’m just expressing my personal experience and worries, it’s not a condemnation of the game or anyone in it. I’m enjoying poking around, and have enjoyed the people who have chosen to engage when I try to. However, for me personally, if it continues to be a largely solitary thing, or if people aren’t too interested in further engagement for whatever reason, I think the appeal will wane quickly for me.
I like some mechanics stuff (for example, all the non-RP systems on Arx while not the reason for me to be there were fun to do, as long as they weren’t the only things to do). I wanted to try here because I thought it would be interesting to have a good balance (and honestly, sometimes I like an ooc and ic masquerade, esp if everyone’s on the same footing). I have hung out in public places and always seek to engage with others when I see them. I would like to encourage others who are just starting out and are dealing with an ooc learning curve/adjustment that the weekends of course are easier to come across people (this isn’t that different from other places!)
Cafe RP is awesome. I’ve had some fun meeting people there, as well as on the street, and had a pretty funny scene the other night too due to some exploration that went badly at the end. But those were short bursts after hours of searching. I guess it’s not too different from MUSHing in general, that. Except for I can’t hang out in an area that lets me listen to whispers on the wind that isn’t also somewhat dangerous to idle off in!
@Pyrephox I too made a med pc, but have had little opportunity to use it, I think maybe because people can heal up on their own too (NOT that I am advocating for that to change, because I’m not!) Unfortunately my story answers at cg also have had a huge impact on how I’m able to navigate the grid on my own, so not only do I not have valuable stuff to offer (yet, I assume that might change over time as things grow and develop!) but it’s more difficult to be able to explore on my own and i haven’t been able to connect much with others. But it hasn’t been very long! I wonder if the forensics stuff will be more useful once things gear up!
-
@mietze My character’s more an investigatey PC than a med PC, by far. I leveled up their medicine just to not be wretched at it, but it’s not their thing.
As for activity–yeah, it can be hit or miss. I’ve had some very fun scenes, and honestly, everyone I’ve RPed with has been great, so far. But it can sometimes be difficult to figure out if someone’s looking for RP, or just wandering the grid - especially with the travel delay. Or if they’re just idling. I’ve posed at several people who were probably AFK but not set ‘pause’. Or turned out to be NPCs with limited/no interactions (which is fine, although I wish there was a flag for an NPC).
But there have been times when it’s like the grid (that I can reach - choosing ‘climb’ as my weakness was not a great idea) is empty, or the people who are there are just wandering around to explore things, not really looking for RP.
-
@mietze I really apologize if I came across in a negative way. I was writing distracted while moving around on mobile.
-
@Pyrephox said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
@mietze Haha, yeah. I made a medical examiner before doing thorough reading, thinking I could do autopsies on people who got et by monsters and the like - turns out no one stays dead, so there are no corpses to autopsy. I have a very cool forensics kit, but I’m not entirely certain what use it is - certainly, no one is clamoring for blood tests or DNA samples in the same way they’re begging for…shoes.
I answered a question without realizing that I was condemning myself to an in-game existence of typing a direction and then having time to make a cup of tea before entering the next room.
-
This kind of reminds me of when I used to play on TGG. The combat system was astonishing, in a quasi-RPI sort of way, but I generally played medical characters because I didn’t like the idea of being one bad die roll from death. Even then, one time my PC got shelled to death because there was an artillery strike on the hospital and I was AFK. Not particularly fun.
Lots of other folks liked that risk, though. For me, it was a dealbreaker; for them, it was a selling point.
I think the main thing is to just be clear about expectations. Awhile ago we discussed disconnections and Jumpscare said:
@Jumpscare said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
That can’t happen. I’m sorry if I misspoke and it came off that way, but your character can’t suffer any harm when disconnected.
That doesn’t seem to be the case from what’s been described here. It should be clear what you’re getting into one way or the other.
