There’s also a level of Catch-22 in it.

1:
Abelard, Bridget and Camille look out their apartment window and see a chupacabra digging through the dumpster.

Abelard screams, runs for the closet and curls up in there having a panic attack.

OOC, Bridget and Camille bitch about what an attention-whore Abelard is and how his reaction derailed the scene, as if it’s 1994 and he walked into their wedding scene, smelled a peanut, and went into anaphylactic shock.

2:
Abelard, Bridget and Camille look out their apartment window and see a chupacabra digging through the dumpster.

Abelard says, “Huh. It’s so ugly it’s cute,” and helps investigate.

OOC, Bridget and Camille bitch about how Abelard ought to be freaking the fuck out, he’s only a mortal after all.

3:
Identical to 2, except Abelard says, “HOLY FUCKING BALLS!” instead.

Not that the fearless, blase, too-cool-for-anything quipper PC isn’t a real thing and a tedious drag, but it’s also not bad to examine your reaction, see if really there’s just no pleasing you, or no pleasing you if you’re Abelard, and entertain the notion that maybe Abelard is playing his PC correctly. I’ve definitely seen both ways.

https://cowboystatedaily.com/2026/08/20/nevada-social-media-influencer-vows-to-kill-famous-yellowstone-wolf-in-wyoming/

Anybody want to travel to Wyoming with me to punch this “Kyri Ranch” fucker in the face?

@MisterBoring

What other methods have you seen used?

Official antagonists seemed to work pretty well. There was a regular thing where a new player would try to Leeroy Jenkins the antagonist for no particular reason except that they’re an antagonist, but the games where I played those roles basically just didn’t allow it. Or rather, the new player would get a chat explaining that randomly murdering the antagonist in the mall wouldn’t really be taken as heroism IC, and would piss everybody off OOC, because the antagonist creates a lot of fun.

@Roadspike said:

What you’re describing isn’t two players competing, it’s two players cooperating so that their characters can get RP that they enjoy. It’s also a) the minority of PvP/CvC RP that I see, and b) the kind of PvP/CvC that I really enjoy.

It’s not uncommon to meet people who say they love PvP. I don’t think I’ve seen them making characters who are in opposition to their PvP loving friends’ characters so they can play that out, but I would presume that it happens on games that are more PvP-friendly than ones I’ve been playing.

I enjoyed a period when I played a few official antagonist characters, with the understanding that the whole point is to challenge the good-guy PCs and be fun for them to hate, not mess them up as hard as you can. And the understanding that you’re gonna tend to lose.

If you wanna have a bad time, approach something thinking everyone understands that that you intend to fail to foil the other PC’s plan but want to give them a fun hard time, when the other player thinks it’s competitive PvP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_in_Cyberspace

I was there, and was quite chummy with both Mr_Bungle and his victim.

This may be my brush with history. That and how I used to buy pot from a guy who also sold pot to Hunter S. Thompson.

Lindaaaa is styled Lindaaaa even outside of MUdom in the GoT fandom.

“Blood of Dragons”, Lindaaaa and Elio’s MUSH, is specifically approved by GRR Martin. He even linked it.

George R. R. Martin began to write this epic series and did not make a concordance, bless him. There are interviews of him kinda bragging on this, tapping the side of his head and saying “It’s all in here.”

Westeros.org was originally the BoD’s game page and wiki. It expanded into a general fan-site with news and forums and a wiki that’s a really fantastic concordance. By 2000 it had gotten pretty good and L & E shared it with GRRM, who uses it. Or, if you take him literally in an interview, just telephones Elio about any continuity thing an author or writing team usually looks up in a concordance.

Linda and Elio didn’t work on the show, except for the Swedish subtitles. For five seasons of it they did do commentaries for every episode. As far as I know, they consisted mostly of casting complaints that came across as racist and complaints where the show deviated from the novels. It didn’t seem to go over well.

They did spend a lot of time trying to say that BoD being approved by GRRM means any other MU is disapproved. I doubt that GRRM, a TTRPG player, could fail to understand that some people might prefer another set of GMs and another in-world scenario and setting.

I had a lot of fun running Game of Bones MUSH and miss it, though it wouldn’t do now since inconsistencies with House of the Dragon would make a mess.

@Kestrel said:

Lastly, and this may be controversial because I know the hobby loves this genre, but I think I would personally avoid horror as a central theme, based on this metastudy. And again, going back to the big fat disclaimer, this isn’t a criticism of individual tastes

I want to pick at the metastudy, though. It seems like most of the studies it references had fewer than 200 participants. No study that includes ‘The Unholy Trinity’ (Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976)) should be generalised because the cultural response to those was just too damn weird. They don’t seem to consider horror sub-genres or the places where horror becomes ‘thriller’ and that bloodiest of genres, ‘action.’

From the MU angle, it may not track well because horror movie lovers and horror readers may not be the same group. Also, superficially horror themes might really be something else – WoD MUs are, like Twilight, romances with superheroes.

They did suggest that it’s a superhero-like power-fantasy + bloodshed that’s appealing to the younger and lower empathy sorts.

I do say no PC antagonists of the sort who are just going to rush into to-the-death PvP. No “I am a murderous murderer who likes to murder” character concepts, and I absolutely will GM-engineer terrible consequences to the careless murder of NPC goons.

Archive.org may have already captured some of your game’s wiki, but it’s not terribly clever about which bits it records.

Login-only stuff like the old WORA and SWOFA are probably just gone if the one or two people who made captures don’t share them or lost them.

I lament the loss of a collection of scanned drawings I had, from back when the internet barely had pictures on it and we used FTP to exchange character art. I still have the drive they’re on, somewhere, but no way to open it myself.

From a professional archivist sort of standpoint, this has always been a problem. People don’t record a lot of everyday life, and what they do produce is often the shit we call ephemera, and gets thrown away shortly after it’s used. TTRPGs produce a shitload of it. Researchers and museum goers love it. Inexplicably, my brother has managed to keep every concert ticket stub from every show he’s ever been to since Mötley Crüe in 1986 or something. In keeping with her character, a friend has every birthday card she have ever received. You know you wanna look at that shit. Alas, digital environments make it even more ephemeral.

Jackie the eagle.

@Pavel I getcha there.

But if the client is lying to you, you can’t really help them explore reality. And that’s not your fault. And one thing abusers often do is present things with the roles reversed so they’re the victim who needs validation. (My ex succeeded in doing with his therapist, and with a significant portion of my friends’ group. He soon began to abuse them, so they all went, “Oh shit, G was right,” and dropped him hard, but years later some of those friends are still ashamed and uncomfortable and this is sad to me because it wasn’t their damn fault.)

I think for therapists it’s kinda like that thing where opiate addicts try to sue doctors who prescribed for them based on their lies about pain. The doctors turn around and sue them for fraud. (This is why, in more recent years, those transphobes who think it’s a gotcha to ‘prove’ that gender-affirming care is over/wrongly prescribed by lying about their gender to a doctor and getting a script, as if not having magical truth-detecting powers is malpractice, have just written dumb articles about their fraud where they don’t mention their informed consent form, and not gone to court.)

@Kestrel The online support-groupies I used to groupie with. Some of them were, for whatever reason, unable to go no-contact, and of that set was a subset who played Emotional and Verbal Abuse Bingo. There were quite a lot of cards made up where each little square was some common hurtful behaviour. It was a Thanksgiving event to compare results and ‘win’ chocolate bars. You might play it with your family.

@Pavel said:
Yeah, that’s fuckin horrible, incompetent, and unethical therapy. Sadly common, but that’s not how it’s meant to be.

It’s horrible. I’m not sure what a therapist could do about it, though.

I would guess (maybe because I’m naive and actually tend to think well of people until they really prove otherwise) that ex’s therapist is competent and ethical, but what’s he gonna do when the client lies and/or withholds so much relevant information that it’s a lie all but technically? The complaint of “My partner got mad at me and kicked me out of our shared house for an hour,” sounds terrible and is believable. “My partner stopped me from physically abusing a cat and insisted I go outside and cool off,” would be accurate, but the therapist isn’t likely to guess that. Ex’s therapist totally caused harm this way, but I can’t blame the therapist.

Ex’s mom’s therapist did similar stuff, and helped MiL harm me, too. Eventually that therapist did figure it out, and the result was really classic. MiL actually said, “My therapist says I have Borderline Personality Disorder and described it to me. It’s true, but it’s really disrespectful for her to have said that, so I fired her.”

There’s probably some super-expert therapist out there who teaches other therapists how to deal with this, but it does sound like a hell of a challenge and a special skill.

@RightMeow What @Aria said.

Also because you are probably at least somewhat aware that therapy generally does not teach abusers not to be abusive. It teaches them to use concepts and terminology from therapy to be better at abuse and victim-blaming. The therapist’s job is to improve their client’s, in this case the abuser’s, well-being. The therapist isn’t working for you or everybody else around this guy. So “I will reach out to my therapist about this” is pretty much the opposite of addressing the problem. Really it goes, “I will talk to my therapist, who will almost certainly give me reasons I am not really in the wrong here and help me more effectively reverse our roles so you’re wrong and what I did is no big deal.”

Returning to @Wizz’s mention of narcissists, that’s what mine did. And came home to tell me that his therapist said he was healthy and I was the abuser. Because I was “withholding affection to be manipulative” (ex evidently didn’t tell therapist that the reason I slept on the couch every night was because ex was too damn clingy and I can’t sleep when I’m being crushed and coated in sweat, and because ex would sleep with his hand on my junk and then randomly SQUEEZE in his sleep, which was fucking intolerable, and because ex snored and refused to even try anything to stop it but just denied it, and because ex would hit the ‘snooze’ button a dozen times every morning, resulting in an hour-and-a-half of non-sleep for me regardless of if I had to get up that morning. And so on. My furiously yelling at ex to get out of the house and take a walk one day was also listed as abusive behaviour on my part, and of course ex didn’t tell Therapist that I did that because ex was holding the cat by the scruff of her neck and punching her and my failing is really that I didn’t try to beat him senseless, which would have at least been slightly fair, since he had only 35 lb on me rather than the 145 or so he had on the cat.

Anyway, yeah, that’s some ol’ bullshit, this guy shouldn’t get away with this crap.

I don’t think deleting the photo makes the harm not real.

@Wizz BTW, you are not alone. Drop me a line if you want to compare recovery notes and such.

I swear to god I am so sick of living with people who want me to cook but won’t tidy up after themselves or leave the damn kitchen. I love to cook, but I don’t want to do an hour of cleaning before I can start cooking. I love to cook, but if I have to negotiate to get to the sink, the stove, the counter, the drawers, why the fuck are you even in here and why does asking you to find something else to do result into you being back in here one minute later? Fuck it, I’m going out.

@Artemis I think lots of people want to talk about that. The community-entity makes it rough.

Like, eh. Sometimes I read Elizabeth George mysteries. I adore Barbara Havers and actively dislike(d) Inspector Linley. I enjoyed disliking him and used to want bad things to happen to him. When the worst thing ever happened to him, I felt guilty about it, and I have a new set of feelings about Linley.

If something like that happened on a MU, I’d have to be damned careful who I talked to about it. I’d fear that Linley’s player and/or friends thereof would equate me disliking Linley in the first place to me saying that Linley’s a bad character, and the player not just a bad player but a bad person.

And if it was public, people with no connection to that story at all would pop up to tell me that my level of emotional investment in the game is unhealthy, and that I should quit. This feels bad.

I say that games-of-emotional-regulation are part of why RPGs and fiction in general exist, and we should support the feels a lot more.

@Yam The abundance of this sort of thing is why comedy-themes give me The Fear even when they’re totally great game settings. Discworld comes to mind. (Though I guess that short-lived Discword MUSH was actually pretty good, and my fear unfounded in that case?)

@MisterBoring

It really just doesn’t bother me. It’s like @jenn said. Last weekend I learned that a friend of mine (a) is Ojibwe and (b) speaks Norwegian. I’ve known him for nearly twenty years,

My immediate reaction to people spending XP in the middle of a scene is “Noo! Wrong!” but after taking a moment to contemplate how this relates to that all-important question “So fucking what?” I don’t see it as being a real problem.

@MisterBoring

Suddenly Always Knew That

My father lived in Rome for about eight months once, but he’ll complain at restaurants if the pasta is not overcooked.