@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.

Aging, bald Jet Li is, I believe, objectively adorable. He says he’s not going to do more martial arts stuff because spinal injuries but I am struck with the desire for a show where:

Tiny venerable Jet Li is like Lu Tze the Sweeper in the Discworld books, but is in the order of real world history monks and goes around with his idiot apprentice of the season/week righting wrongs and introducing us to important people and events in Chinese history. He has a broom and smiles a lot and never actively hurts anybody, but attacking him causes them to hurt themselves in choreographed ways. Jet Li can’t do much flipping about but it’d be totally forgivable for him to have a double do it, especially if we get clips at the end of him coaching his double himself. His idiot apprentice does most of the martial arts show and apprentice and double both change regularly so we see new performers in spotlighty spots all the time.

@Pavel For me, pretty vague.

For my students, I’ve got to pre-approve their suggestion. but I’d go with, “If you can argue it, argue it,”’ 'cause. Fun.

@Pavel said in Minigames in MUSHes:

@Tez said in Minigames in MUSHes:

Video games give you sight, sound, real designed elements that work together to create a satisfying feedback loops that makes the grind provide the dopamine.

They even occasionally hire psychologists to work out the best ways to do this so they can take a lot of your money.

I am not sure the sight and sound stuff are the relevant bits. It’s just ordinary operant conditioning, and a simple trick to ‘teach’ at that, you don’t have to back-chain or anything. Still probably the kid who teaches the puppy training class at PetCo is better at it than most shrinks.

It’s very relevant to MU-running, what with how frequently good-player behavior is unrewarded and troublesome behavior gets reinforced.

Here, this will help: https://search.worldcat.org/title/Don't-shoot-the-dog-:-the-art-of-teaching-and-training/oclc/1085215000

@Muscle-Car Hehe! I think I loved that skull and the raven more than anybody else did. I don’t think people chatted in the OOC room enough to find out all the shit the raven reacted to.

I was working on another one, but I am shite at coding so that sort of thing always took me forever. It was a sort of, uh, senseless endless RIsk game where it emoted that the player turned a crank on the side of a map table, making music-box music and causing the paper pop-up of a random city come up. Then you needed somebody else to have a go. If it rolled you a city that was already popped up it’d cause the city to produce an army of <number between whatevers> <temperament related adjective> <profession> (200 jolly butchers, 475 savage street urchins) that you could direct. So the desc of the object would be some ever-changing silly stuff about it being a table with a map of Westeros on it and The North is controlled by the Crownlands using an army of 765 serene whores and so on.

I didn’t expect people to care about those toys, it was just for me to puzzle out how to make them and snigger to myself about them.

@Jennkryst said in Minigames in MUSHes:

@Third-Eye Generally, because ‘Pose, minigame, other person pose, I respond, minigame, repeat’ keeps my attention focused on this window. If I tab away, I could ADHD and forget to check back for hours.

Legit. But if you wanted to do it by making your client beep at you when a new pose comes up, that feature is probably there? Or no.

Once some MOOs had a @beep command, which was handy, but you couldn’t easlily prevent people making your machine beep and I’m sure you can imagine what happened.

@Yam said in Minigames in MUSHes:

Ideally they’re tools to kind of pad things out between RP.

I tend to pad things out between RP by watching Korean horror movies. (No, I don’t understand Korean, that’s part of the fun.)

I don’t want to need to play a mini-game for my PC to function on the MU, 'cause I’d probably rather not play a mini-game.

@Faraday said in Minigames in MUSHes:

I don’t actually care how the poker game went. I don’t personally enjoy poker. The poker game / basketball game / whatever is just a background thing for the actual connections between the characters. The code just got in the way.

Yeah, this. I liked the pool tables etc because they introduced a little random detail, and spare you from having to negotiate with another player about how the game might turn out. Waaaaay back when, on the original PernMUSH I used to show people how to insert the MUSH dice fuction into poses to roll a couple of d6 so we could play craps, and this is still a favourite for me, meshed right into the poses.

@Faraday said in Minigames in MUSHes:

Once the initial novelty wore off, I never liked these kinds of systems much. They either got in the way of creativity, or were annoyingly tedious, or both.

I never found the pool tables and stuff tedious. Some spewed more text than one would want, though, and I can see preferring to use fewer, simpler rolls. The decks of cards seem dated, since you can now use a web-based virtual deck of cards simultaneously with RPing.

My god those space navigation ones were tedious.

The vampire +hunt code that worked like a little choose-your-own-adventure game was less time-consuming than I imagined it would be, but not the ease of the usual convenient two-command hunt. The creativity-crush effect was legit. Dice is dice is dice and I love them, but I prefer to declare my PC’s actions, not pick them off a list, and I don’t want intense character-altering events in my PC’s life to be the result of picking the option nearest to what my PC would do and getting a machine-generated result. Foraging code that rolls for you and tells you how many mushrooms you found, okay, but not necessary. Foraging code that rolls for you and tells you that you tripped over a bear while foraging for mushrooms and it tore your left arm off? No.

MUDs were pretty much invented to be multi-user versions of Dungeon! and Zork, but I thought that MUSHes had largely eliminated those things because their players didn’t want that kind of game.

It occurs to me now that I made a couple of OOC-room games. They involved kicking a skull and it screaming something from a random list, hitting a random player in the OOC room, breaking, and renaming and redescing itself into a pile of bone bits which you could then glue back into a skull and kick again. Or figuring out which key-words would make the raven answer and trying to get it to say “George R. R. Martin is not your bitch.”

I’ve only seen the one that’s a narrative – the +hunt code @MisterBoring is talking about. It was fun.

I prefer the more typical method, where it’s just a roll and you can make up your own details, unless you botch and then you need somebody to run a scene with you.

Mini-games I’ve really enjoyed in MUs have been stuff like billiards tables and decks of cards. They’ll have commands on them to shoot, or deal, and show you your hand or change the difficulty to hit the 2 ball after your opponent moved it, etc. But they’re not a big selling point to have. Even just dropping a note that tells people what to roll to represent playing a tennis match can be just as fun.

@MayorMccheez The ‘went to headstaff’ bit was news to me.

I’m just saying that getting a nice present in the post can be a creepy thing and pointing out that it was a nice and not creepy present doesn’t change this possibility.

Honestly, we’re more friendly than friends. We’re not close. I had fun RPing with him. I would play with him again. I’m not on Retro, and a major reason for that is that there are players and staff there where my experience has been that they do have habits of being manipulative, gatekeepy, mean, dishonest, and likely to smear-campaign others. So that happening here seems plausible to me.

@MayorMccheez said in Numetal/Retromux:

I veto’d it because of the speshul snowflake behavior you exhibit. You are not a team player you are a ‘how does this benefit me and how can I be the brightest star in the sky’.

That’s not a bit consistent with @Cygnus as I’ve known him. It is consistent with the list of complaints that are so common that you can apply them to anybody and have a good chance of not getting questioned.

Oh, and for the people wondering what sort of ‘creepy’ things she sent him. Which, he obviously gave her his address willingly. I talked to her about it. It was a stuffed animal

This is odd, but. As somebody who sends fellow MUers things in the mail from time to time, I have always supposed that anything at all might be creepy if unexpected. This is why, if I ask your address, I will tell you I plan to send something, and also tell you that I will throw your address away after. I keep that promise (until/unless we agree that snail-mail exchanges may become a regular part of our friendship) and will never send you something out of the blue. Because that’s creepy.