@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.

The Major Oak né the Cockpen Tree.

Edited to Add:

Historian Carlo Ginzburg.

@hellfrog said in When is the last time you played?:

not incentivizing people to do it but finding a way to make the stories told by players agree with, or more troublesomely, feel on par with the metaplot/GM stories.

If staff alone may touch the Myth Arc and PRPs must all be Monster of the Week episodes, then players will never see them as on par, because they aren’t.

You can make them agree by doing this:

@Pyrephox said in When is the last time you played?:

3. Work with me to figure out HOW it will change the world. Don’t just stick the results in the memory hole, OR make all the consequences bad ones. I’m not going to run things if “change the world” always means “screw over the PCs or make the world worse”.
4. Honestly, just…work with me. I’d love to have staff to talk with plots about, brainstorm with, or just have an idea of things they’d like to see PCs have opportunities to do.

Also add deliberate continuity creep by including elements from the PRPs in other stories.

Most of the time it seems like PRPs are intended to take the pressure off staff by giving people who are clamouring for something to do something to do, while the staffer spends their time and energy GMing the Myth Arc. That tends to mean that the staffer is not going to work with @Pyrephox.

I’ve really enjoyed acting as Arc Welder/Continuity Bastard/Keeper of the Concordance/Plot Approver and Overseer and would totally run a game that way. Not exactly running plots myself but having an outline and working with plot-runners to drop the long-haul story plot-points into their stuff, I mean.

@bear_necessities Probably people would play more, too, if they thought that people would tell stories with them instead of having to convince somebody to tell stories for them.

Jane Yolen

https://cirquemaceo.com/

See this if you get a chance, it’s pretty awesome fun.

Marjane Satrapi

@RightMeow Never! It was before Firan, I think. When did that place open?

@RightMeow said in MU Peeves Thread:

I use to write these five paragraph purple prose descs to try and get on that page. I was successful once. Now I’m like: It’s a tree or It’s a costume - yay.

The real contest was to try to write a desc that would scroll anyone’s screen, contained as many treasured cliches like ‘sparkling orbs gaze into your soul’ as you could pack in, yet did not tell the reader anything about what the character actually looks like.

Eyes: Sparkling, soulful and impid, but of undetermined colour. Hair: Luscious and cascading, but of no particular colour or length. Skin: Flawless. Height: Graceful. Shape: Exquisite and touchable. Age: Blooming.

@RedJellyBean said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Prototart Didn’t she run a game? I vaguely remember all that. She’d post on WORA, pitching a fit at anyone that posted her description making fun of her.

That desc was on WORA itself, in the ‘Tasteless Descs’ subforum. The player did threaten to sue, repeatedly, which disturbed the server owner, and is why WORA was hosted in Malaysia for a while.

She still runs a game, it’s Blood of Dragons. George R. R. Martin did indeed give her and her spouse permission to make and run one. They have claimed that this means that any other one is specifically not allowed. So when I was running a Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire MUSH she had posted on hers that mine was such a criminal disrespect to GRRM that any Blood of Dragons player found to be playing Game of Bones, or even talking about it, would be banned from BoD, and possibly driven naked through the streets.

GRRM does not care, trust me.

She and her spouse co-wrote The World of Ice and Fire and you can tell which bits are hers.

She’s a bit of an embarassment to the fandom, having spent the entire run of the Game of Thrones teevee series bitching about the casting of any actor who wasn’t white. And for a while was going around telling people who disagreed to “eat n**** balls,” and then claiming it wasn’t racist because she’s Swedish and that’s the direct translation of the Swedish name for a kind of chocolate confection that people in Sweden long ago renamed to “chocolate balls” like one would expect.

Probably the real underlying situation with this couple and GRRM is that GRRM started writing this 5000+ page epic and did not make himself a concordance. But those two and the BoD players made A Wiki of Ice and Fire, and GRRM uses it.