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.

@MisterBoring Hah. Yeah, I’ve scheduled events where nobody shows up, but I’ve never felt like it made me a nuisance. Usually it just means that the game’s been dragging, I am trying to help it pick up, but player enthusiasm has waned severely.

I do feel like it’s different with +events stuff – I put up a +event, you sign up but you don’t show up? No biggie. I send a personal invitation specifically to you and you RSVP yes, but then don’t show up? Still not really a biggie, but it’s gettin’ towards a mediumie.

ETA: I mean I think it’s fine to sign up for +events you’re not really sure you can make. Maybe you want the updates just in case you can, and just want to express interest. “Don’t sign up if you are not sure you can make it and join on time/within x period,” would be something the organiser would specify if need be.

@MisterBoring I recollect a staffer doing this, with five people waiting around for the scene said staffer had scheduled themself, with all the players evidently too afraid to page, me doing so and getting “I will not be doing that tonight,” as a response to me, and evidently complaints to others about my horrible soul-sucking behavior.

@Ashkuri said in "My Guy Syndrome":

The My-Guyer’s actions

Such a person shall henceforth be called MyGuyver.

@Kestrel said in Numetal/Retromux:

Maybe they end up with fewer interested, but much higher-investment players, and they like it that way.

An aside: Almost certainly not.

That was the stated reason for arduous chargens in the past. But my observation is that the quicker a player gets into RP, the more likely they are to stay. 30 minutes to chargen, fast approval and you get into a fun scene right off? You will connect again. A few fun scenes in as many visits? You’re hooked and likely to play for a pretty long time. Six hours of work to chargen, days waiting for approval? That’s where you get the people who stop logging in before they even know they got approved. It seems counter-intuitive that they’d not be invested after all that time, but ask B.F. Skinner.

@MisterBoring Not at all.

@MisterBoring That post came up while I had the editing window open, so I didn’t read it 'til after I’d posted, yes.

There’s nothing about being a MU staffer that makes a person more honest. I don’t know if I’ve dealt with @Wikibara before. I have been told that one of the Retro staffers is a person I have dealt with whom I find untrustworthy.

And the forum seems, to me, to often take an automatic position on the brown-nosed side of things.

@catzilla Yeah, I can see that. But I can also see just mentioning that because it was another weird part of a weird experience.

@MisterBoring Yeah, or they could have been, as they said, asking for clarification on incomprehensible feedback, or pointing out catch-22 feedback, or pointing out that they corrected as the feedback requested but the staffer is still giving the same complaint. (Indeed, I’ve been made familiar with the experience of changing what’s asked and having staffer continue to complain about the thing that isn’t there now, and of having staffer complain bitterly that I don’t just say “okay,” and do things that aren’t really possible.)

@MisterBoring said in Numetal/Retromux:

@Wikibara Let’s return to the issue then. It sounds like you weren’t writing in a way that jives with the Staff there in the way that they’d prefer, so they showed you the door. I’m sorry it didn’t work out for you, but at the same time, if they had approved you, it sounds like they’re just trying to avoid headaches all around and you’re slightly upset by it.

Sounds to me like they’re trying to “avoid headaches” by having unclear requirements for apps and going by the vibe, and then fucking with an actual person by pretending that it’s a problem with the app instead of admitting that they just don’t like @Wikibara’s eyeliner or something.

I don’t know about “slightly upset” but once upon a time a review of this sort was considered valuable information for the community.

Desmond Morris zoologist, ethologist, sociobiologist.

@somasatori said in Numetal/Retromux:

Someone once told me (paraphrased) that the primary difference between maintaining OOC respect for your fellow players after a PVP/tense situation at a LARP and maintaining OOC respect and kindness towards your fellow MUSHers in the same situation is that MUSHers are not obligated to sit in a booth with each other at IHOP at 2am after we’ve finished our scenes.

I found that telling people, “We are pretending this is my living room. We may not all be friends, but we’re all gonna act friendly because it’s my living room,”
worked all right.