Fuck it.

I got published.

“Lanterns” is free to read on IZ Digital.

Hope you degenerates enjoy it.

@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.

@Pacha said in MU Peeves Thread:

I have realised that from years of playing in WoD MUSHES, I am so conditioned to staff wanting to breathe down people’s necks about every little thing that I get incredibly anxious when I see other people RPing about something my character did—even something super innocent. It brings me out in hives that someone is about to send me a shitty job to tell me I am WRONG and BAD.

I think it is nice that games are a lot more chill these days, but I think it probably speaks volumes about the general state of WoD games that my most comfortable state is to be completely under the staff’s radar because staff on a WoD game paying close attention to what you’re doing is almost universally bad.

@Sillylily said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Pacha I feel this so much… (incoming rant to commiserate not detract)

I try to play ‘off the radar’ i.e, ‘As little contact with staff as possible’ with the idea staff is only there for paperwork and banning. This includes being extra careful around staff alts and their packs/coterie/club/org/cults. If they make a ruling: I accept it as if I were sitting at their GM table. Arguing doesn’t serve anything but to get me on a shit list… and that’s no fun. (I don’t want to leave and lose the quality rp I’ve found in the shit show. I’m willing to put up with a lot for good writing. )

Largely on WOD games it keeps me able to rp and I’m a lot less stressed …

It’s not the best strategy (so maladaptive) on Mu* but its definitely an effective way to exist in a online gaming setting.

Unfortunately that has screwed me on non-WOD servers…

Upside for nonWOD mush: I only rely on me for rp and it has allowed me to rp with as little help from staff as possible. I can rp without touching the plot or npcs. This is nice if not effective for getting involved in plot.

Downside: I literally avoid staff and trip all over myself to make sure I’m not bothering them if i do have to interact… this includes with staff bits and npcs or even just ooc saying ‘Hi’. This makes involvment difficult and anxiety inducing. And I get the feeling that I’ve missed interacting with some pretty awesome people.

The fucking trauma, y’all.

I talk about this with my fellow staffers/game runners alla time. I feel like I have to do triple fucking work to unweave the trauma so that I can actually RP with and tell stories with the players who come to my game.

Like, I understand where y’all are coming from but as a staffer who tries to be as chill and open and friendly as possible… lol, it’s disheartening, especially because the few people who do engage then seem to be “favored”, but no, it’s just they aren’t actively avoiding me.

Apropos of nothing:

I think if people are gonna use AI to write their poses, they should disclose it on their character profile or +info or whatever. Give the rest of us a heads up, y’know?

Yikes.

@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

People who think staff have so much power that they have to be always polite and obsequious to players or it qualifies as abusive.

Fucking weirdos.

@Raeras said in The Lost Realms Discussion:

@tighearna
Genuinely curious question. I’m not extremely familiar with Hobbit/LotR lore and I know it’s not D&D so

I can understand on some level why your policies say to keep romantic rp between the same species but is this primarily aimed at the physical aspect?

Or is this just across the board because it’s not thing at all in the lore? (Again, I can see other reasoning for wanting to keep things separated on the physical aspect)

This is the one at least a few people are going to deliberately flaunt in private scenes, guaranteed, lol.

It’s a problem created by the nature of a MU.

In a work of fiction, the protagonists, deuteragonists, and antagonists are, a lot of the time, people whose circumstances are somehow special. In settings in which things like cross-species reproduction is rare but possible, that’s an easy way of making a “special person”.

In a tabletop game or a small group, your characters are the protagonists of the story, so them being special is not a big deal; you can play a half-elf because, despite being vanishingly rare (which automatically makes you special) there’s a lot more control over who can and can’t be that specific version of special, as there are only about 3-6 protagonists.

MUs, unfortunately, break this by catering to a much, much larger playerbase. Suddenly, if one out of every five characters is a half-elf, then being a half-elf isn’t special because it ceases to be vanishingly rare.

Do I agree with this policy? Ehn, not really. I think once the characters hit the grid they should be able to fall in love and have the lives they choose (if they are rosters, they should probably be played by the same person for a long-enough period of time before they can do things like get pregnant or married or whatever, just to avoid people doing that and then bailing on the character).

This is especially true given that the game has a policy of one character per player, which means the pool wherein you can find someone to play a romantic storyline with is extremely limited. Even aiming high and saying that you’ve got 50 players, lets say you’re playing a Hobbit… but most people are playing Humans or Elves, there’s maybe at BEST another 9 Hobbits on the game. Let’s say your character is bisexual/biromantic, that’s 9 people – once you start eliminating through schedule, chemistry, RP preferences… yeah.

I personally would bend a little and let interspecies relationships just be more common, but that’s just my take. Clearly @tighearna has their own vision for their game, which is how it should be.

Much like @Jumpscare and Silent Heaven, and Clockwork and The Network, Andruid over on the blog Writing Games has put up an interview/review of Excelsior!, and we’re super stoked about it.

@Ominous said in Coded Systems vs PDF Sheets:

@MisterBoring said in Coded Systems vs PDF Sheets:

At this point, it should be pretty simple for the staff of a game to create a Google Drive folder or something equivalent to hold the PDFs in a fashion that each character’s sheet can only be accessed by the player of the character and the staff of the game.

Everyone has to be able to see the stats if you’re just doing pdfs; otherwise, how do they know you’re rolling right? “Yes, I totally have five dots in every attribute and skill. You can’t see the pdf, but it’s totally there.”

At this point in the hobby, if I don’t trust the other players on the game I’m on, I’m unlikely to give it much importance. Like, are we not past lying about stats? FFS.

@Colette said in Freeform or Systems?:

@Coin

I think this would be a better approach than the more vague soft-limits people often go for, which just tend to cause more arguments if anything (“Blasto-Man has a strength level of 20 tons, it says so on the official website” “But in this iconic scene in Blasto-Man #274 he’d be generating 3978.6 kilonewtons of force…”)

The problem I have with any kind of stat system is what I call the Batman problem. Batman has shit stats compared to Captain Randomthrowawaycharacter and if you play to the stats, Batman becomes a joke,

I keep mooting the notion (as a thought experiment, I don’t think it would actually work) of a system which has one single stat: Narrative Weight. Want to app that one paper-thin character who once appeared in a Superman comic 30 years ago and was created purely to be a threat-of-the-week able to knock Superman around easily? Sure, go ahead. Narrative weight 1. She can knock Superman around easily for a while, but she’s always going to lose any important conflict.

That’s why any game I run promotes joint narrative storytelling; Batman doesn’t become a joke because everyone works to make Batman be Batman. I also typically do not allow villains and any PvP is strictly plot-dependent.

For Excelsior! (and Better Tomorrow) I worked out a sort of tier/scale system for powers/skills but it was mostly more of a guide as to what was possible; the system itself was still consent-based freeform.

@catzilla said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

@Coin said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

@catzilla said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

Maybe one day we’ll have a superhero game not run by abusers.

Damn, why am I catching strays over here?

Which one is yours?

Excelsior, specifically. I also helped with Better Tomorrow (who were not abusive) and With Great Power (again, not abusive).

@sao said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

Pretty sure in any hobby, any undertaking done by humans on this planet, if there is a way for a person to have even imaginary authority and/or influence over other humans, there is going to be an issue with sex pests.

I mean, yeah. I don’t get this whole “man, that one genre, those people, so bad!” And it’s almost always someone who plays in that genre, too; like, you counting yourself, or are you the pristine exception, my dude? lmao

@MisterBoring said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

@Coin said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

This largely implies that World of Darkness games or Star Wars games or Lords and Ladies games don’t share the same issues and, uh, lmao.

Yeah, the issues are tied to the hobby and not a specific genre. There might be some validity to the concept that some genres attract more of them than others, but I would argue it’s probably not a giant gap.

It’s the same with “man, WoD players” or “man, comic book players”. The venn diagram of MUers who play WoD, Sci-Fi, Horror, Comic Books… might not be a circle, but the overlap is so much larger than anyone really seems to think.

@Kestrel said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

@catzilla said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

Maybe one day we’ll have a superhero game not run by abusers.

I know of one in the works, but I honestly think there is something about the genre. I largely agree with Alan Moore’s perspective on it.

Double post but what? This largely implies that World of Darkness games or Star Wars games or Lords and Ladies games don’t share the same issues and, uh, lmao.

@catzilla said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

Maybe one day we’ll have a superhero game not run by abusers.

Damn, why am I catching strays over here?

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Coin downvote

@sao said in MU Peeves Thread:

STOP VAGUEBLOGGING IT’S 2026

no