@somasatori said in Neitherlands:

I also come from a WoD background and know that non-consent doesn’t invalidate fade to black, and especially doesn’t allow forcing someone to play through potentially traumatic stuff. So, with regards to “I come from WoD where you’re lucky to have staff even acknowledge you before doing what they want,” I feel like this was a pretty old perspective even 15 years ago. IMO, one thing most successful/decent staff took from places where staff acted with impunity about your character’s consent was to at least check in on certain things. Even just a heads up of, “hey this is likely a combat scene, are you cool with that?” was pretty standard on several games which were non-consent MU*s. Player side, most games had a +warn system. All you’re doing is taking the worst elements of past WoD staffing habits and bringing them into a new generation and setting.

Not only that, but someone saying "you’re lucky [this thing] is not as bad as [this thing before]’ is some of the worst type of justification tactics for abuse.

“You’re lucky I only open-hand slap you, my dad beat my mother with a bat.”

I mean, yes, extreme comparison, but that’s essentially what it is: ‘I’m not as bad as what you would have had to deal with, so don’t complain’.

Fuck that, lol.

Losing players and not knowing why. Like, it’d be nice to just know if it’s personal, if the game isn’t jiving, if if if if if…

Also, the MU player trauma that makes them not talk to staff. Holy shit. It is really hard to convince people you want to help them out and aren’t annoyed or mad that they misunderstood or misinterpreted a scene set or something like that. Players will 100% delete a 500-word pose to write a “standing in the background” pose just to not incur some imaginary wrath.

Some people have been treated like shit and it shows, fuck.

@mietze said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

I do not know if this will help. But my experience with predatory people is that most of the time they don’t hone in on one/their group of targets right away, but cast a wide net. They actually don’t always go after the easiest targets but the most rewarding personally for them–which for a lot of the worst means breaking down people who say no or express discomfort. I think a lot of people like to believe that the only people who get targeted are those who have signaled something, but I don’t think that’s true, especially in what happens in our community.

Are there some that seek certain markers (like age, people who don’t shut off inappropriate communication the first time, ect)? Yes. But there are so many for whom that’s actually not a barrier and just adds to the excitement of breaking down someone who isn’t the stereotype and especially if they can get that person to fear that other people are going to see them as that stereotype and that they ‘deserved’ this sort of transgression. Those are the sick fucks and they rarely are manipulating and hurting just one person at a time, or the same type of person at a time either.

I think this is why destroying slutshaming and ‘well you shouldn’t have given that contact info’ type of shit is so important. It makes the collective us feel better to be able to feel “well, that wouldn’t be me, because I’m not 16/I don’t do discord/I draw the line with others all the time” but the truth is I think a lot of people are vulnerable to the the right manipulator. You see it all the time even outside of our community.

I think it’s also important to remember that just because they’re vile human beings doesn’t mean they’re stupid or unskilled, a lot of them are very socially apt and very smart; being a victim of them doesn’t make you stupid or easily manipulated, and believing yourself “too smart” or “too savvy” to ever be victimized by those people is a great way to find yourself a victim when they take advantage of that overconfidence.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. I fuxking hate people. I fucking hate this society. I fucking hate every molecule of every fucking piece of SHIT that has decided to torch my country to the fucking ground. Fuck

Yeah. That was def Ruiz. This isn’t an opinion. I just got sources.

I’m like April O’Neil or some shit.

Edited because I’m late to the party due to unforeseen connectivity issues dammmmmmit

I’d say Ghost is showing his true colors but the dude’s always been transparent af

@KarmaBum said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:

@Cobalt just jumping on the bandwagon.

Derp’s knee-jerk assumption was that YOU are the bad actor in this scenario, and everyone agreed - right up until you walked into the room, when suddenly they realized they weren’t just talking about someone who couldn’t defend themselves. Then Ghost and Macha did their frantic back-pedaling, and Derp of course ignored the fire he just started.

They’re not there for discussion. They have BANNED everyone who actually wants to discuss things.

Except me. Ganymede missed me the most.

@mietze said in Neitherlands:

Yeah I’m stupid and its all ic stuff and all that but…ugh.

I think the point is that it’s not IC stuff. It’s motivated by OOC pettiness and vitriol; it’s an OOC retaliation. It makes sense that you’d have this visceral reaction.

@Wizz said in MU Peeves Thread:

He’s just like, an even shittier Ghost, imo, because he seems self-aware about it to some larger ambiguous degree and it comes off as intentional.

Ghost is 100% aware and it is 100% intentional.

@Sammich said in Asking for RP:

@Pavel said in Asking for RP:

whereas I’d much prefer 30-45 minutes of solid RP than three hours of drek.

It takes me like 10 minutes to write a pose, so 30-45 minutes of solid RP is like me making 2 or 3 poses.

I envy people who have the creativity and writing skill to crank out a good pose faster than that.

Sometimes a scene can just be 2-3 poses each.

This actually ties into the topic in a roundabout way because a lot of people seem very reticent to have quick, short, to-the-point scenes, and I think it’s because it takes so long to work yourself up to asking, then getting a response, then setting the scene, that if it’s over too quickly it triggers the Sunk Cost Fallacy (i.e. ‘I put X amount of effort into this, it should last at least Y amount of time’). Except a short scene, in my experience, can be so satisfying, too.

I dunno. Maybe I’m weird. I like short scenes. I also think if more people were willing to engage in short scenes, we’d have broader networks of character interaction in games and things would be less cliquish, because people wouldn’t feel like ‘that person never interacts with anyone but them’ when the truth is they’re probably just keeping to their friends because RPing takes so much time.

But that’s a rabbit hole.

@devu said in Neitherlands:

@YetiBeard what, like this approved character who was renamed, altered and turned into a roster?

(Not my character, but this is… so confusing. Literally more work than just making a new roster bit.)

Spoiler

>

That was Clockwork’s character, too. They actually called Wizard out on this on the Ares Discord server.

[1:11 AM]NeitherlandsMU: FRAAAAAAAAAAAACK
[1:11 AM]NeitherlandsMU: 5 days!
[1:11 AM]NeitherlandsMU: IT ONLY TOOK 5 days before some player threw a shit fit and had a conniption fit on channel and had to be banned
[1:11 AM]NeitherlandsMU: DAFUQ PEOPLE
[10:30 AM]NeitherlandsMU: how do you ‘retire’ a character
[10:30 AM]NeitherlandsMU: to move them from approved to gone?
[10:32 AM]Tat: options are in ‘help manage idle’
[11:27 AM]Emblem of Ea MU: MU attracts more than its fair share of crazy. One learns to live with it. ¯_(ツ)_/¯* (iiiiiiirony)
[9:16 PM]NeitherlandsMU: how do you set someone to DEAD?
[9:18 PM]Faraday: Same way Tat said - help manage idle. Explains the whole idle system.
[9:33 PM]NeitherlandsMU: i don’t see an option for dead
[9:35 PM]Tributary: idle/now <name>=<status> - Sets someone’s status without running through the idle queue. Only ‘None’, ‘Dead’ and ‘Gone’ are valid options here.
[9:36 PM]Faraday: Also in help manage idle it lists ‘dead’ as one of the status options in the list near the top of the article. And it’s an option in the status dropdown on the idle sweep web portal screen.
[9:47 PM]Clockwork: By the way, when you destroy a character in Ares, it does not reassign the “dbref number” like in MUX. It creates a new number each time you create a character. So when you went into Carter and renamed him and changed him into a different character for the roster, his scenes stayed linked to your new roster, Topher. And I would have appreciated you not logging into my character and just removing it as requested.

(the “shitfit and coniption” mentioned at the beginning is the incident @Aria was referring to in her earlier post)

@junipersky said in Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent:

WHO APPLIES FOR A KITTEN WHEN THEIR CAT IS MISSING?!

WHO DOESN’T FREAK OUT ABOUT THEIR MISSING CAT WHEN IT IS FREEZING AND SNOWING?

probably someone who feels the need to take care of something when they are stressed and in mourning? just because they applied for a kitten doesn’t mean they AREN’T freaking out about their missing cat.

@Pavel said in Ascension Sojourns:

@Jennkryst Are Possessed in WoD20?

I don’t think they’re in WoD20, but they are in the oWoD. There was a book that covered them (titled Possessed) and it covered Fomori (Wyrm-possessed), Drones (Weave-possessed), Gorgons (Wyld-possessed), and Kami (Gaia-possessed).

@mietze @sao come back, we youse

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. I fuxking hate people. I fucking hate this society. I fucking hate every molecule of every fucking piece of SHIT that has decided to torch my country to the fucking ground. Fuck

@renaveleigh As said above, we were under the wrong impression as to how viewing permissions worked. Thank you for pointing it out so we could fix it.

@mietze said in Discussion - Excelsior:

I dont know anything about comic characters other than movies. So when I looked the people seemed fine to me! But that brings up the second concern/bad experience that I’ve had with comic games, will people turn up their nose at rp with “lesser” characters.

Not that it doesn’t happen on every game that people think that your lower rank/whatever pc couldn’t possibly know anything neat/be able to contribute anything.

It’s one of the things that really focusing on the backgrounds as we wrote them has given us a chance to address. When we write the backgrounds we think up and work into it potential storyhooks and fun things for them. No one is going to miss out on story because they aren’t a ‘big name’ (and in fact I am a huge reason why some obscure names – Carmella Unuscione, Sleepwalker, and some others – are so prominently on the game, and nothing makes me happier than seeing them around).

I would love to see people pick up the ‘less popular’ characters, as there is plenty of story and opportunities to go around.

@Popes said in Discussion - Excelsior:

@sao said in Discussion - Excelsior:

The thing is that a lot of the more popular characters are played, not that they aren’t in universe, so that’s just kinda what happens when a no OC game is active, I think.

I mean, the easiest solution is to let people pitch characters. Not open creation, but ‘Hey, how about <Insert Here>?’ and staff can say yes or no, rather than locking hundreds of characters behind whatever gating system there is and rewarding people who were quick on the draw. This way just foments nothing but FOMO from the outside.

To add to Sao’s reply, when we bring a new-to-the-game character, it is announced two days prior to their availability, and for the first week are available ONLY to new players who do not have characters already. And the former 48 hours of pause applies to ANY character going on the roster. So there is usually plenty of time for people who are on the lookout to both check out who’s coming and for new players to claim new coming characters specifically so that existing players don’t snatch characters up.

From our General FAQ:

Q: How do I get that one character I always play/have always wanted to play?
A: It depends. You can always ask us if we have plans for a specific character. If we do, we’ll let you know; if we don’t, it might be a character we’re really not interested in including. On the other hand, it could be a character we’re not too invested in but don’t mind bringing in. It’s a toss up. You’ll have to ask. Just remember that either way, the character will be written to fit in our world.

@Popes I disagree with the application of ‘lackluster’, I think they shine pretty well! They just might not be the popular picks.

In any case, our roster is ever growing, but we add to it at a pace we can handle and still enjoy the game and run stories and not burn out. Hopefully you’ll see someone come up on it eventually that interests you. We always encourage people to try new characters; you never know what sort of experience you might get.

Thanks!

Today, Excelsior is one year old!

Galactus is about to get to Earth, the Mutant Registration Act and Sentinels are in full swing, and everything is going to shit, just before new characters are being introduced to the Roster!

If you’re interested in a whole ton of comic book fun in a twisty Marvel Universe, check us out!

(Special thanks to @Zz for the fantastic anniversary banner.)

The most important thing here is degrees. Every medium has it. Movies/Television/Novels and other classically structured storytelling (like comic books, whatever) have less fluidity in how much agency to give the audience – the story is told and we experience it without much say. Some types – mostly those that attempt to give some leeway via Choose Your Own Adventure-style interactivity or, more recently (relatively), social media-centered storytelling where the audience can interact with characters (pioneered by such darlings as lonelygirl15) – are more interactive.

For video games, you start to get into a bit more hands-on from the audience because the player is actually in charge of a character. Sometimes the video game allows you to make many choices, decide what kind of person the character is, be evil or good (Fallout, Skyrim) or give you throughlines you can explore and combine (Mass Effect) but which are still written out; and still others are basically a story that you play through and the only real thing you decide is which sideplots to take part in and your actions in combat, but the story won’t change (Last of Us, God of War).

MUing is similar, when it comes to the way people run the game. Some games are very laisse-faire: you make a character and react to the world and have relationships and take part in the action, yay. Other games are more focused on the stories and moving characters forward. Other games have actual stories they want to tell with those characters you’re choosing to play (roster games are big on this) and you have less (not ‘none’, but ‘less’) of a choice over what you’ll be involved in storywise (especially in character-specific plots) and it’s important to communicate even more with the STs and staff to make sure everyone is having a good time.

My point, though, is that (though it may not be everyone’s cup of tea) MUing is perhaps the most nuanced of all of these because it can run the broadest gamut between ‘do whatever’ and ‘look, this is the plot’.

There is probably a lot of comparison to be made with storytellers with railroad and stuff, but the important thing I think is for the game and staff and STs to be open and forthcoming about their expectations (the same as players should be) and everyone to find a comfortable way of telling stories together.