@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.

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.

@Faraday said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

I’ve just literally seen too many cases through the years where people will do something like RP the worst line imaginable and think that a +roll Con or +roll Seduction should somehow make that work. For me, it doesn’t. If you can’t even get in the ballpark of portraying a convincing con artist, maybe that’s just not the right role for you.

Exactly.

In tabletop it’s pretty ordinary for a GM to say, “Woah, hold on, roll intelligence,” and then inform the player (on success) that their scheme is flawed and why, and help them come up with a good one. It’s harder to do that on a MU, where play continues without the GM watching.

I’ve had this experience where some PC was supposed to be, and statted to be, incredibly observant and cunning. The player, however, wasn’t, or wasn’t paying attention. So the PC did dumb shit. Then the GM fudged things so they worked out. Sounds kinda fair, and it’s not even PvP. But like Faraday says, it’s jarring. And hard to RP around. The PC is supposed to be Machiavelli, but what I see is Mr. Magoo.

@Gasboy said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Cobalt I have told some that it’s okay to go have a good cry. Get it all out. They’ll feel better. And if they aren’t feeling better afterwards, perhaps they should reconsider playing on that particular text-based game.

I’m pretty sure most of us have cried, or felt like it, over MUSH crap.

But if we tell people about it, it’s “you’re my friend and I wanna talk about my feels” and not “Cobalt, you’re makin’ me cry by not making the game do what I want” stuff.

I’m peeved over past experiences where people thought I was really upset when I was just like, “Y’know, this is kinda a drag.”

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Meg “your secrets are safe with my indifference”
you can put it on your business card

I’m tempted to do just that.

I’m an archivist and sometimes end up processing the crap you left in your office when you died, and the shit on your hard drive. Part of me lives in shame because I am influencing the historical record, but it’s also standard practice: I remove your porn and any evidence of extramarital affairs and consign this information into the ‘to be forgotten’ section of my brain, where it gets disconnected from your name.

Except in the case of my own uncle, where my aunt found some CD-ROM labeled “Dom Karen” in his desk and asked if that was a kind of wine or something, and I said, “Nope, that’s probably the kind of thing that makes family memories that last a lifetime, give it over,” and got rid of it.

@L-B-Heuschkel I hope you get joy of it. Figuring out that I’m autistic and connecting with autistic community has been very good for me.

I don’t want to derail or dismiss the sexual abuse aspect of this thread, but it might be good to talk about this kind of thing in non-sexual friendships. That can be very damaging too. Also, the patterns of behavior tend to include manipulating entire friend-groups to turn on and isolate victims, and not getting lassoed into participating is probably one of the best things a person can do to prevent abuse of others.

Adviising students visiting the US for a short class to keep in touch with their nation’s consulates, and providing them with addresses and telephone numbers for the consulates closest to the cities the students will visit. Feeling like this is a necessary precaution. Want to cry.

@BloodAngel

Staff should be allowed PCs.

Everyone should be required to disclose their alts.

The frequency and harmfulness of the fuckery that is immediately squashed by requiring and enforcing alt-registration is great.

@KarmaBum I rather like meeting NPCs. But I hate deals where I get the impression that the lion’s share, no, the giant fucking manticore’s share, of significant action is between metaplot NPCs, and/or where those PCs who have plot related agency are all doing it via NPC retainers.

If I wanted non-interactive situations where I can’t see what’s going on, well, there’s shitloads of teevee that fits the bill and is a lot more entertaining. If I wanted a play-by-email I’d have joined one.

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

I don’t really care to go into details either. Suffice it to say I’ve been trapped in friend-relationships at least three times who turned out to be narcissist abusers. Apparently, I’m a sucker where these people are concerned – too autistic to tell that they’re lying, I guess.

Autistics are often targeted by abusers, but it’s probably more because we come pre-isolated and pre-groomed to accept the idea that our feelings and behaviors are inappropriate. We’re also probably extra-satisfying, because our attention can be extra-intense or something.

But often nobody can tell when NPD/BPD abusers are lying, because they don’t think they’re lying themselves. I used to have to take notes about shit that happened because ex would say it hadn’t, or had happened once ever when it happened twice weekly. What he’d tell and what he’d omit to his therapist projected his own emotionally abusive shit onto me.

This is just how it goes. I did a couple years in support groups about this stuff, and all of these stories would get yes, this is how it goes reactions there. Nobody here is alone.

Emotional Support Wolf says, “If they think you’re their territory they’re gonna piss all over you.”

(It’s way more complex than that, but they is lil puppy.)

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

the problem is absolutely players. what’s easy and fun to spin for 6 people is probably unmanageable for 20, 30, or 100. everyone wants to take down The Man! everyone has different ideas for how to do it and wants the credit

Back in the reality of the vaguely sane, people manage this unmanagable thing regularly. They use an ancient method called “taking turns.”

Admittedly it means that you or your best buddy will have to endure times when it is somebody else’s turn. This is indeed a terrible problem caused by other players existing.

And of course it’s players that create the problem of there being too many players, by showing up, often in response to an advertisement or other form of invitation. Gamerunners who accept new PCs when they have more than they can handle are not the cause at all. It’s those ‘extra’ players who keep messing shit up with their refusal to play extras, and their entitled expectations of having their PCs be significant from time to time.

Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s a joke. Except the joke about how you spend ten hours writing an awesome adventure and the PCs immediately kill the NPC guide, pawn the McGuffin and TPK each other fighting over the profit has an amusing element of truth to it, while the BMD/MSB refrain of “the problem is players” almost always comes across to me as blame shifting rubbish.

I was excited to hear about a new sin, but I really do wonder how the killer will handle this one in the remake of Se7en, which will have to be called Ei8ht.

@spiriferida said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

If you want your character to be perceived a certain way but can’t make people see that… it’s going to become frustrating.

Yeah. And there are levels of reasonableness for this response. There’s Darke, who wanted other PCs to have a complex and unlikely response to his - to be intimidated by him yet long for his approval and/or sexual attention (no homo) - and was constantly in a snit that it wasn’t happening. And then there’s that time I was playing the chief of police and one PC cop was just horribly off the rails and would say a snotty one-liner or two and walk out on the reprimands, but staff would not allow me to ICly fire him. I’m sure most games where there’s a chain-of-command have regular exercises in that one.