Best posts made by Coin

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.

@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

@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.

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.

@Autumn said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Pacha said in MU Peeves Thread:

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.

This is more or less how I feel, also; I can’t think of more than one or two times in mumble years when being noticed by staff on a WoD game has led to something positive. Usually it’s at best going back to status quo ante.

So … suggestions for how could staff members behave that wouldn’t lead people to dread getting noticed by them? Other than “interact with players for reasons that aren’t taking things they enjoy away from them”?

• take notice when people do cool things, and tell them
• be a part of the culture of your game, not just its admin
• no, but
• know the characters and offer, unprompted, avenues for development
• react positively and without irritation to pages/jobs asking questions

That’s like, the bare minimum.

@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)

@Yam said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:

• Did I mention stability? I lose motivation real quick when I notice staff starting to fade off

This really goes both ways. It’s incredibly difficult as a storyteller, staffer, and/or game runner to remain invested and motivated in running a game and stories on a game when players fade in and out.

I’ve been running a game for the past year and I’m struggling. It can’t be up to staff to always pull the weight of keeping a game viable and active. Yes, they have to be responsive and keep things moving, but players have to drive RP too, start scenes, connect with each other, etc. It’s so common to see games where if staff has a bad month or something, the game just dies, when players could have stepped up and helped keep activity high and fun.

I dunno. Sorry to hijack your comment, Yam, but I wanted to make sure it’s clear this sort of demotivating thing is a two way street.

Unrelated to the above:

Toxic positivity.

FFS.

@catzilla said in Getting and Staying Connected on New Games:

@Kestrel said in Getting and Staying Connected on New Games:

• Excess OOC chatter about RL. I know some people like it, I don’t judge you, it’s just not for me. I wanna escape, and keep our private lives private. Interact with my character; you don’t need to ask about my day.

Does this include what I call “coworker chatter”? Like, I agree that I, for the most part, don’t want to hear a lot of people spilling every detail of their personal lives. Or like that one person over at other site who tries to garner sympathy by posting/talking about how very sad and terrible their life is. But, I like mild OOC chatter. Hearing someone share a cool trip they went on or they got a new pet or something.

I am sick right now so this may not make total sense, and this isn’t an attack at either of you, I did see the word ‘excess’ in ‘Excess OOC Chatter’ but it’s something that’s been gnawing at me for a while, so–

Nothing makes a game feel more dead than constant and consistently quiet OOC channels.

I can understand people not wanting to hear about one or two people’s private lives (either too intimately or too consistently) but there’s definitely a line where if people aren’t willing to converse about things other than the game in OOC channels, the surface-level rapport that players need to feel comfortable with each other playing the situations and content of the RP (regardless of what that is) is not going to be created.

The reality is that this is a hobby, and hobbies are meant as social spaces within which we interact with each other. As much as I understand people getting annoyed at those who overshare or constantly do deep dives of their own lives on channel chatter, we should also keep in mind that we seek communal, collective hobbies as a way of socializing, and expecting places where we don’t share out personal lives --despite there being people perfectly willing and able not to-- is counterproductive to keeping the hobby alive.

You can even see it in this forum, which is ostensibly focused on MUs and RP, but which has not a small bulk of its traffic having to do with commiseration and sympathy regarding mental health, our collective love of pets, what celebrities died…

It’s a hobby, and socialization can’t be categorized neatly; it must be allowed to bleed into different topics and tones, or else it turns stale.

@DrQuinn said in MU Peeves Thread:

Sometimes I feel like the only person who doesn’t pose exactly what I’m wearing in every single scene, down to my socks and shoe laces. Please just assume I have clothes on. I am almost never going to think to pose them.

I like posing my character’s clothing because it creates consistency within the scenes that I share with repeated other characters, so when I change something, because of some story element, or because it’s an occasion, or whatever, it pops out.

I have a character who tends to dress informally and in ratty punky attire; he has worn a suit once in like… four years. People noticed; the description in my pose popped out because they were expecting something else.

Similarly, back on The Reach, I had a character who I always stressed when he was wearing something with his Alma Mater’s logo or something on it, and it became a whole meme.

Now, do I make a whole PARAGRAPH out of what he’s wearing? Naw. A single sentence is more than enough. But I think how a person dresses says a lot. With women-presenting characters and male-presenting characters who cross dress is can be even more indicative since they have a broader choice for attire (skirts, dresses – long? short? – pants, jeans, pantsuits,. capris, etc).

I dunno. I think what bothers people is when it’s long and purple and “look at meeeeee!” but when it only takes up a sentence or two, it can often add something, especially for people who RP with you repeatedly.

@Gashlycrumb

I am, once again, asking for people to stop comparing MUs to any sort of paid work or actual businesses. It’s a bad comparison, the stakes and realities thereof are not the same, and it puts undue pressure and expectations on the staff of games who are trying to provide a medium through which people can experience free entertainment.

I also think that it’s easy to say

And “If you don’t trust staff, leave” is used as a hammer to silence people who ask for evidence of trustworthiness. There’s also a strong tendency for “trust me or gtfo” staffers to also be Police Vultures who show zero trust to players, and that can be hard to swallow

– but the same is true in reverse. As a staffer, I’ve given leeway to people I shouldn’t have because it wasn’t cool to ask for evidence of their trustworthiness. Everyone loves to say “trust is earned”, but that’s minimizing the beauty of actually trusting people. Trust is like Faith: if you have proof, is it really?