Today’s peeve is:

If you have played somewhere for years and you’re not happy with it anymore, by all means, I will listen to you vent. I get it.

If you just joined a game and all you want to do is bitch about it…

maybe…

simply do not play there?

In this the year of our lord 2025, why are people still allowing bad actors in their game community? Why is there a concern with “we have to be fair” to people who are toxic to staff and other players, totally obnoxious, or otherwise a bad fit? It’s a mush, not a constitutional right, if they’re no good for the community then EVICT THEM.

If it helps people orient themselves in the scene and approach others, IDGAF about walking in and introductions.

What I hate is when I set and then the person poses in and doesn’t interact with me. Get the fuck out with that what are you even here in this scene for, why did I set for you, stop being the worst.

The facts are what they are and they’re never going to change. It’s a Star Wars game! They’re doing stuff. Some is ok. Some is really stupid. The good guys and/or bad guys have the upper hand this week. There’s some spaceships and some guns. If you are unlucky enough to have an issue with someone, especially a harassment issue, no one will help you.

That’s the only thing to say about this place. It does not matter what the theme posts are. It never did. I think it’s ok if we don’t give them free publicity for every single bbpost.

Today someone AMBUSHED ME (idk if you’re on the forums but you know who you are if you read this) with a link to a website for a game I played around 2012-2018. It was run by a head wiz who became a close IRL friend and who passed away in 2019. I had no idea the site was even still up.

What a kick in the feels. All the old logs are there, and our snapshots of funny ooc moments, and our pictures and playlists. There are lots of captures of jokes and stories and fun moments of my friend who’s no longer with us, and other friends as well, some I still talk to, some I don’t.

I am so grateful and I am so sad. MUSH is such a strange medium in the way it can feel so all-encompassing at the time, and then enough time goes by and it’s just a little snapshot of how things were, and who you were then, and all the fun times you had writing stories with other people way too late into the night.

Really, really grateful and sad.

I feel like the gist here is “Social rp is fine if it doesn’t suck” which… I mean yeah, that’s true of any form of rp, isn’t it?

I feel like this sums up several many MUSH interactions I’ve had with people over the years

This thread has everything. False dichotomies. Hyperbole. Hot takes on literature. Viking hygiene. MU RP is Dying️. Class struggle. Book recommendations. Furries.

Playing a young/teen character is less about nailing the slang du jour and more about being vulnerable, inexperienced, confident about things you have no real clue about, unconfident about things that really are okay, feeling Big Emotions and maybe not knowing what to do with them, and discovering Nietzsche and then explaining it to people 25 years older than you.

I think it’s tricky for players because believable teens get so much “wrong” as they flail into adulthood (and players don’t like to be wrong), not so much because it’s hard to know when not to say yeet.

@somasatori that is my point, though. It’s not upfront until AI starts really being asked about. In your own snip there, Catzilla is thinking you didn’t use AI based on the content of your previous posts. It’s not clear.

AI is a personal choice. You can use it or not. It’s just good to be clear about its use.

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

this is sort of where it comes from, being honest. I hadn’t taken the time to figure it out and Claude said it would be fine

Okay

Why did you lead off with this then?

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

From what I’ve heard other people say, and based on what was said behind my back, all I did was boil a bunch of water and churn toxic sludge out of an AI data center.

If you want to use Claude the AI, good. If you learned a lot with your experiences using Claude the AI, good. Just be honest about it upfront. These tea sipping winkyface comments early in the thread land awkwardly when there was demonstrably a major problem with AI that had a major impact on everyone’s experience with the game.

Don’t wait for someone else to have to ask into it before you go “oh, yes, I did use AI.” Just be upfront, man.

When I RP’d a preacher on good ol’ Fort Bloodshed I had a tally of how many weddings I did vs how many funerals. Weddings were ahead but just barely. The funerals were far and away the better RP of the two.

What currently-active MUSHes have a risk of non-consensual character permadeth?

Retromux/Numetal I guess? I don’t know of any other ones, and I don’t play that one so I don’t even know if it’s the case there.

Killing off your beloved character and making yourself and all your friends cry is some of the best fun you can have out here.

I’ll die on this hill (which is also good character death)

I have so many Feelings about this, haha

Can it be done elegantly? I have no idea, because the places I’ve seen it done or tried to do it myself were not particularly elegant games to begin with, and also inherent in running adversarial factions is the feeling of loss.

These are my main thoughts about it:

1. It’s fun to win and it sucks to lose
2. The amount of empathy, perception, and emotional intelligence required to navigate point #1 is vanishingly rare in any group of humans who compete for fun, be that mushes or video games or dog sports (did you know there are hobbies with crazier people than MUs) or anything else.

People spend a lot of time on their characters, a lot of time on their games/factions, and RL is hard and shitty. All of that means that nobody wants to come home from work after a long shitty day and fail to achieve whatever it is they wanted to do because the other faction won today. It feels bad in a way people don’t like and sometimes have outsized reactions to. Sometimes it feels bad in a very personal way, and people do lash out against that.

How do we keep it fair enough that people will accept a loss without thinking it’s the end of the world? I don’t know, honestly. A few things can be tried, all with their pros and cons.

Pre-determined Staff Verdict: X will win the contest of this particular goal/fight and Y will lose

• Takes away some of the drama around player machinations
• Is somewhat boring
• People complain about staff favoritism
• People complain about railroading

Organic Player Clash: X and Y just run into each other/into the same goal they both want, and go for it via whatever measures are at least sort of understood

• Exciting
• Total fkn chaos
• If something is unclear about how to resolve a conflict, this is really going to become apparent
• People complain about the other side being unfair

Arranged Events with Strict and Orderly Rules: Staff has set specific parameters within which X and Y can compete and determine an outcome

• The rules need to be spectacularly clear with no room for doubt
• People complain about staff favoritism anyway
• People complain about any possible reason the other adversary could be better: More active players, timezone favors them, dino characters/FCs with better sheets, they have better gear we can’t get, etc etc

You can navigate around this stuff as best you can by trying to have those very clear rules, lots of transparency, and as much give and take between “winners” as the story will support. It’s just hard.

In terms of everyday RP, adversarial faction encounters are some of the best fun and the worst drama IMO. Everyone wants to look cool and come out on top, nobody wants to “lose”, even if it’s just social banter. Some of my favorite scenes of all time have been with opposing factions, but no amount of carrying the idiot ball, pulling punches, making sure people aren’t taken out of action, and being kind and sensitive OOC ever got everyone on board with me. Some people hated me because I was on the adversary team, and there was no way to change their minds on that.

Adversarial factions are really fun, really exciting, and I honestly do love them, just as I love PVP. But like PVP, it’s extremely hard to separate those big feelings from the drama that ensues.

I would love to see it work without the drama. If there’s a game that can do it I’d be there. Humans are messy though, and that can be difficult to sort out online. Or anywhere, lol.

@Roz said in Re: Dies Irae:

You’re not THAT old, this meme started almost 20 years ago.

TIL I have been wrongly assuming what a “pickme” is for almost 20 years

@Trashcan As if you’re just going to gloss over my coded soda machine in the rest of the list like that wasn’t the best piece of minigame on anything ever, the most outstanding and revelatory achievement of all time

@Faraday said in Minigames in MUSHes:

Once the initial novelty wore off, I never liked these kinds of systems much. They either got in the way of creativity, or were annoyingly tedious, or both.

This is true though, soda machine included lol

@Yam said in Minigames in MUSHes:

Please explain how the coded bounties for players worked.

There were bounties for me on there all the time, and I let people collect them from time to time. However, me putting a bounty on anyone or anything else was huge drama 100% of the time. I don’t want to get into PVP, we have another thread for that, but the bounty minigame definitely emphasized that different people have different tolerances for it.

My favorite minigame of all was when we ran Space Cargo on Into the Black MUSH, but the flight was not automated, you just had to sit there and be ready to navigate the proper coordinates at the proper moment for an hour. If you failed to do it properly then you flew off (into the black, I suppose) and ran out of air and died and staff had to resurrect your entire crew from the dead room.

That sucked. lol.

The code was so broken on Dies Irae that people could not RP because it just fundamentally didn’t work. People couldn’t see each others’ poses, couldn’t see when someone else came into the room sometimes, couldn’t see OOC messages in the room sometimes, it was very difficult to get even simple scenes done.

Staff was as stressed out about it as anyone, but the issues were (apparently) far reaching and difficult to determine due to the hallucinations of AI code which had been applied to the game. The fatigue of trying to deal with this, and being unable to fix this, surely burned out staff and players alike.

I don’t have the facts or knowledge to say who applied this AI code to the game or why, or if that is really what happened. I do know things were very, very broken though, and that the message given to staff and players was that AI code was the reason.

@Yam said in Strike Systems:

I’m curious if anyone has actually legitimately witnessed a fundamental change in someone with regards to MUSH behavior

I have encountered:

• People behaving very differently to me from one game to another game, in that the game structures and communities themselves brought out the best or worst of that person
• People making a big effort to change their toxic MU behavior after fucking up so bad that they realized they need to get their house in order. This would probably be the ‘lost friends’ or fallout aspect you mentioned above
• People who went on mental health medication and/or therapy and as a result developed more community-friendly and cooperative patterns in their MU spaces