@Floof said in MU Peeves Thread:

I’ve been trying to just be like fuck it guess I’ll just be awful then! But it’s SO HARD.

Cheering you on. This is why my mother wrote “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly,” on her piano.

It’s irritating that “It’s only a game,” so often comes up in the context of, “You’re wrong to have hurt feelings about it,” but seldom in the context of, “Relax, you’re allowed to suck, it’s not your Ph.D. dissertation.”

Play for fun. With typoes, grammatical errors, and another beer if you want. You don’t have to impress people. I’ve had a lot of fun with people whose characters have orbs. Some of them have even been limpid pools. I’ve had fun with players who have limited English vocabularies and used me as a thesarus. I’ve had fun with players who regularly fall asleep at the keys. I’ve had fun with players who are emergency services workers and just dissapeared mid-scene.

And also, give people a break. Don’t dismiss them as sucky just because they don’t impress you the first time you see them. Let people enjoy the hobby instead of feeling like they shouldn’t show up if they’re not at the top of their game that day.

Also, people. You don’t suck. I’ve been playing these silly things since, uh, 1994 and I have yet to meet a MUer who could not write bestselling novels for John “See Jack Litigate. Litigate, Jack, Litigate” Grisham if they’d just get paid enough to try. I have RPed on MUs with Jim Butcher and Neil Gaiman and neither of them developed the gushy “they’re just the best RPer” groupies that your average staff-alt gathers. Hell, Gaiman essentially said it was too hard.

Hateful bigot James Dobson.

My dear friend who, one Sunday morning while working at a Denny’s, deliberately poured hot coffee directly onto the crotch of hateful bigot James Dobson, is quite well.

Ahhh.

Heh. My peeve is this idea that long = good when it comes to writing.

Having genuinely worked as a professional editor, I assure you, it ain’t so.

The other problem I have with the people who write novels is that they give too much to react to, they advance the scene so much with their poses, that I’m left being like, I wanted to explore this one thing in this pose, but they’ve already moved on past it in their own pose that posing back an concentrating on that thing when they’ve already moved on from seems pointless.

In RP, this. Very much this.

Abelard looks down, embarrassed, and carefully sets his beer glass back in the ring of condensation it left on the table. “So, yeah,” he says, biting his lip, “That’s why I fucked the ocelot.”

Camille has arrived.

Brigid is sitting with Abelard at a table. She looks at him with compassion and says, “That must have been awful.”

Camille comes in and makes her way across the dance-floor, attracting attention with her boss moves and demonstrating all the latest steps. After the song ends she sashays swishily over to where Brigid and Abelard are sitting. With catlike grace she springs onto their table, kicking over a glass. “Fourscore and seven years ago,” she declaims loudly, “I started typing this pose, and civilizations may yet rise and fall before I am finished!” Twirling gleefully, she leaps away, singing, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum! Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum! "

Abelard stares as time collapses to a pinhole. When his inexplicable lethargy passes and he is able to react he picks at his shirtfront, noting ruefully that the beer splashed on him by Camille’s kicking feet has dried to an indelible stain.

Brigid says, “What the fuck.”

Very often either all the other PCs are frozen in time while the “great writer” fillibusters, rendering the dialogue disasterous, or it’s five hundred words describing how the trail of smoke from Camille’s cigarette swirls slowly and majestically about in the still air of the stinking and stuffy dive bar until it forms an elegant Rorschachian type image that resembles a tiny man standing outside a giant vagina wondering if he should go inside or not.

Edited for typoes and to add: Don’t feel bad for writing badly while gaming, either. Have fun, this is play-time. You’re probably not even close to as bad as you think, anyway.

For fuck’s sake, if you are using a published RPG, don’t make a fucking house rule that directly contradicts the published rules after some poor player made a choice based on the published rules, and then force them to live with their “IC consequences.”

Peeve of the Day: When you don’t even want to be in a scene half that big and probably wouldn’t join if you had a choice, but you still feel bitter that your character can’t go. WTF, brain.

I wear a glittery enamel pin-badge that says ‘MAKE IT GAY YOU COWARDS’ on my hat.

Today a stranger started some sort of right-wing rant at me, assuming I’d agree, but then spotted this delightful bit of flair, shut her mouth, turned around and walked briskly away from me.

What joy!

The worst thing about social RP is that tedious twit who responds to your channel-chat call-for-RP by paging you a lecture about how they don’t like social RP, implies that it’s your very favourite and that you’re an inferior player for liking it, and gives you a weird sort of ultimatum to the effect of ‘I will RP with you but only if you keep it at least seventy-five percent plot and less than twenty-five percent social or slice-of-life’ and then refuses to bring any plot-elements to the table. You want to say, “If I wanted lazy and demanding I’d set myself up as a dominatrix and be on FetLife, not MUs, go fuck yourself,” but you’d get banned.

I feel very fortunate that the comic-book and gaming store of my teens did almost always have a woman at the counter.

And very fortunate that now most of the gaming stores in town are places where hot trans girls want YOU to play Magic: The Gathering with them.

I like descs. I like writing them. I like reading them. I hate it when it’s a link to a picture.

But as a staffer I wasn’t looking for writing quality in your character desc or your BG. I just wanted them to show that your character belonged in the game world.

I don’t think you can do Chekhov’s Gun on a MU, you never know what will become relevant. Or what major super obvious thing you’ve been pointing at with your whole character-concept will somehow, against all the odds and the conventions of fiction, never matter.

@bear_necessities said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Jumpscare said in MU Peeves Thread:

Yes, her eyes may harken back to bygone timeless memories hidden within pools of mystery, but what color are they?

IDK about you but eyes harken back to bygone timeless memories isn’t an automatic AI flag to me. I’ve seen descs like this since the late 90s?

Yeah. Back in the early '90’s there was a WORA thread challenging to people to spoof this – write the most unweildy, long, screen-scrolling purple desc you can write, without it including any basic information. Hair colour, eye colour, skin colour, height, weight, age, and if you were really good at it, appearant gender, all obscure. Actually I doubt ChatGPT could do it so well.

@Trashcan It is part of ‘Turnitin’ which is pretty widely used. I have no idea if it’s one of the ones you’ve listed here, or which one if it is.

Part of what’s exasperating about it is that it doesn’t give me any clue as to why it is tagging segments as “likely AI generated” so even if I don’t spot some way that makes it seem likely that it’s wrong, what possible use is it?

It would be ironic to the point of grotesque in the context of a class where I spend the whole time saying, “Why do you believe that?” and “Prove it,” and “Where’s the evidence?” and “Does that research methodology work? Do you think the result mean what the reaseachers say it means? Did the newspaper report say it means what the researchers said it means?” and so on. After that I’m gonna roll up and say, “Hey, a computer program using semi-secret methodology to detect AI says you cheated, so did you?” to a student?

I get @Faraday’s comments about people trusting computers in a weird way, but I guess I don’t share that, because I feel like I may as well draw tarot cards and just say anybody who gets an inverted swords card cheated.

I’ve got this AI detector thing and I hate it with the hatey black hate sauce.

No, you stupid thing, 100% of this student’s paper isn’t likely to be AI, I’ve watched him building this argument for twelve weeks.

Say, what, this one’s paper is also likely all AI? Who the heck tells AI to do APA formating so creatively wrongly?

Yeah, right, this is so likely all AI, the student fed the assignment into AI along with the instructions, “Write this in the style of someone who doesn’t know how to write an academic paper trying to write an academic paper.”

I really hope other instructors are not taking this daft thing seriously.

Oh, it’s a troublesome character even if you remove the ableism.

Deep in my little black heart I have this desire to app a comics game as the demon Baytor, a sort of tube with teeth that shouts “I AM BAYTOR!” a lot and does little else.

This is a bad, bad idea, obviously bad. It might be okay if I made sure Baytor could only be found where it’s found in the comics, working as a bartender at a certain pub, completely easy to avoid, and treated it as a sort of NPC I depict while playing a reasonbly PC-written-PC primarily.

Aside from brain damage not being very funny, this person did outright say that they wanted to RP an obnoxious character.

Boiled down, the conversation seems to amount to:

PeeOften: I want to RP a disruptive and annoying character, specifically. But you won’t tell me how to RP a disruptive and annoying character without it being disruptive and annoying, you big meanie you.

@SockMonkey I’m strongly with that living room model. They say it’s wrong to compare a MU to a tabletop, and there sure are big differences, but the living room gaming sessions of my young-adulthood are what I’m aiming for in text-format.

It’s your living room, you provided the space and the bog-roll. You make the rules and so long as you make them clear or they’re just aligned with general and MU-specific norms, you’re not doing it wrong. Not letting people you actively dislike in is natural and will spare everyone trouble.

I tried to insist that players who couldn’t stand each other avoid each other with grace and not snipe at each other, because we may not all be friends but we’re going to act friendly in my living room. And tried to encourage OOC socialising and be available and friendly for it myself, since to me this is the real meta-game of RPGs (what you can win is friends) for Gary Gygax is the godfather of most of my oldest and most treasured friendships.

@Ashkuri I’m sure I didn’t imagine it would make them happy, but yes, actually.

If my RP is halted because I need some answers from a GM, and I have asked and each time the GM stops responding to the conversation before giving those answers, then yes, in a reasonable world I would be able to say, “Hey, can we have a conversation you don’t ghost so I can get this cleared up?” and have the GM recognise that I am not asking that to offend them, but because it’s a legitimate problem.

I say things like that at tabletop all the time and nobody gets into a tizzy about it. “C’mon, quiet, I can’t hear the GM answering my question,” and, “Yeah the party isn’t getting much done because you guys never actually declare an action, you just make a plan and then another plan. Do you mean to be declaring actions I’m not picking up on?” and so on. I’m actually getting pretty close to, “Could we maybe have the whole group stay at the fucking table for more than five minutes at a time?” some sessions, and I could say that, too, without drama.

What is one supposed to do on a MU? People say “vote with your feet” but honestly, I’d be hurt if one of my tabletop players left because they can’t hear me over the chatter or I keep accidentally skipping their turn, or whatever, without them first at least telling me there was a problem. Even though this implies that it’s, like, my responsibility to do something about the problem in spite of all the other work I already did to GM…

ETA: And indeed, I was bummed when players left my MU over stuff I could have/should have fixed. if I ever found out about it. Though I assumed that people usually left for other reasons.

If you can’t stand them and don’t want to deal with them? Yeah, ask them to leave the moment they show up.

@Tez said in Tough Calls:

That’s actually a really interesting point. You’re totally right. I would tell my friends to knock shit off in a way where it doesn’t register as a warning as such to my brain – which probably makes me more likely to do so.

I just don’t have the same sense of needing to be cautious or delicate with them, because I know that they will take what I say in the spirit in which it is intended, and change behavior.

Yep. That’s a thing.

Really it can be a major fairness issue.

If staff is a friend and we chat, I know more about the game and they know more about my PC. They’re more likely to make story that has a place for my PC.

Also, I tend to know when it’s a good time to ask them for something and when they’re tired and pissed off.

And more closely akin to what you’re saying – they might tell me to cut it out without considering it to be a ‘warning.’ They are more likely to tell me to cut it out before they wish they’d never approved me.

AND I am more likely to be permitted to tell them to cut it out without it being taken amiss. This ‘need to be cautious or delicate’ thing is, I think, largely overblown with MU staffers. You think you need to be delicate with players? Remember how delicate players feel they must be for staffers? For example, from what I see this thread was at least somewhat in response to a player asking a staffer when it’s appropriate to poke a +request, and the staffer feeling attacked because the player said their +request had been ‘ignored’ when it had, indeed, been ignored, just not for very long. Or there was the time I requested to have a conversation with a staffer where they didn’t stop responding with no warning before the discussion got anywhere, and instead of taking my point (that this was chronic and problematic) staffer appeared to be more interested in being offended at how I phrased this. And probably I couldn’t have phrased it right, because seriously, the whole damn trip is about erasing context and flattening nuance in order to feel attacked. Or feeling attacked and finding some reason to run with that feeling rather than taking a moment to give consideration to what the other person is saying rather than the ‘tone’ that is probably a blank you’re mostly filling in yourself.

Fellow players may not be your friends, but for a game to not suck, people need to at least act as if they are friendLY. This includes putting down the scepter, taking off that shiny hat, accepting that it’s not an insult when people notice that you’re not perfect, and having an ordinary conversation.

@Jumpscare Having actually looked at the other thread and read their paged exchanged, I don’t see it either.

Seems to boil down to one of those ‘if you have a problem you’re the problem’ exchanges, topped with tone-argument.

@Yam said in Banning Bad, Actually?:

It’s okay for them to expect some kind of service, and when they don’t get it, deride someone’s hard work,

Well, yeah, it’s okay to expect some kind of service when that’s what’s written on the box. The idea that everybody gets a turn is pretty built in.