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.

I hate AI PBs. I hate them so much. All the reasons @Roz said, plus the fact that I am somewhat face-blind and AI created PBs are so generic that it’s nearly impossible for me to grasp the likeness in a meaningful way. They’re just face soup to me.

Again because face-blind, my PBs are actors I can recognize and who stand out to me either by unusual appearance or by “this person is a lunatic” vibe or both.

Not a peeve and I have full respect for demanding RL, and RL coming first.

But

I miss Scraps.

re: special snowflake characters

There are two north stars for Mushing

1. Don’t be boring
2. Don’t be a dick

If you can’t figure out how to do 1 without doing 2 then you’re going to get mocked.

I don’t like it when I’m meeting a new character and their way of engaging with me is that they will magically solve all of my IC problems. Like I see you are doing a task? I will do the task for you right now. You mention you can’t find a Whatever lately? I happen to have three Whatevers right here with me at this moment.

It’s not the worst trait. I just don’t like it.

I have run a lot of PVP as a villain faction head! Some thoughts:

Death was not involved. We did what was called “cinematic defeat”, where you can lose a limb if you want to or fall down a reactor shaft or topple over a cliff. Whatever thing happens and just removes you from the action. “Full loot,” or losing all the items you had on you to the opposing party WAS possible, but rarely happened.

So even in this not-losing-your-char PVP environment, some observations:

• PVP is more exciting than PvNPC. It always is, full stop.
• PVP espionage is an unmitigated disaster. Even if you do everything perfectly in your secret covert actions, someone OOCly assumes you’ve cheated and raises hell about it, and it’s hard to speak to the accusations without blowing the successful spy’s cover. If you’re transparent about who the spy is from the start, no one will allow themselves to be spied upon.
• PVP “outside the box” actions that aren’t “direct attacks” are an unmitigated disaster. Trying to pin down exactly how much advantage a sneaky plan or trap gives and how to weight it is a losing game. People get mad when you don’t let them do their Super Genius Plan exactly the way they saw it, they get mad when it doesn’t obliterate the enemy, and the enemy gets mad when it has any effect on them whatsoever.
• Even when you plan specific events so that your own villain self will take an L, so that people can beat you up and capture you, people find something to be mad about and find a million things you did wrongly and badly. Even when you lose to them completely.

My PVPs were really successful, exciting, and fun. People did love beating me up and some loved the threat my group and I posed. Some gentle players participated in the PVP, and told me they were never brave enough to do PVP before mine. Some of them are still memorable to this day in a way PvNPC generally isn’t.

However

I recently cleaned out my discord and it was full of crazy abuse about how I suck, I’m a cheater, I’m a dick, I’m unfair, I interpreted the mechanics or rules wrong, I played favorites. That’s just the discord, never mind the smoke I got on-game, like people freaking out when I walked in a room or abusing me on channels and in pages for existing.

I would never, ever run a PVP game/faction again. The excitement is fun but the toll it takes on me just isn’t worth it.

@Floof Just reply to “We need to talk” with “Yeah, we do.”

Now they are ALSO anxious.

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.

This subject has come up with a few people lately, but the real peeve is how much garbage media/tv/movies I have consumed solely because my played-by was in it.

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)

Here’s the thing for me about the AI writing.

It’s never em dashes, semi colons, and oxford commas that make me think something is AI. Here are the traits I’ve seen that indicate AI:

• The sudden arrival of stylistically different content that is unlike anything this person has ever been able to produce before (like a poem sent in 2 minutes from a player who doesn’t usually write poems)
• A lack of that person’s usual writing quirks (or any writing quirks), smoothed out into something that sounds very generic and is devoid of typos and human mistakes
• A weird regurgitation of theme content in an “in this essay I will” sort of manner, often using sentences directly lifted from the game website
• Bizarrely positive/cheerful content that doesn’t particularly fit the character/situation and is somehow boring at the same time
• Use of the second person, especially in descs: ‘you see this, you feel such a way about this person’ or other types of vaguely power-posing comments that are out of vogue in MUSHing, like ‘he intimidates everyone who sees him’
• More thought-posing and metapose than is common in mushing. People do of course metapose in RP, but the AI will churn out poses that sound like a novel or fanfic, as though the reader can and should be expected to extensively know what’s happening in a character’s mind by listening in on their unspoken thoughts and motivations. We don’t do that in MU. AI doesn’t know that.

Check enough boxes here and then put it through multiple AI detectors and they all say 99-100% AI likely? Not 40-50%, but 100%? It’s AI.