AI is ruining this hobby. That’s my gripe. It’s ruining my respect for players, staff, my interest in games, my desire to RP. I see old friends whose original writing I’ve always enjoyed, flaunting AI use in a way that makes me feel like they must have never even appreciated their own talent as much as I did. I see promising games lose all promise the second I step on grid and see a sea of AI slop. And I see younger generation, newer players defending it in a way that makes me feel like the future of this hobby is just dead for me, an old fogey whose love of authentic human creativity, warts and all, makes me old-fashioned.

I hate it. I hate it on a spiritual and existential level.

Had a friend who consistently talked shit about other people in the hobby, and wrote them off over the most minor provocations which were generally misunderstandings.

I feel like over the years of our friendship, I have accumulated hours of lost energy trying to smooth things over between them and mostly benign enemies they’d misinterpreted, but I did it because I knew that at least some of the time their concerns were founded. and so it made sense to be extra guarded even over times where concerns weren’t founded. And I’d consistently defend them to other people as being a genuinely good person and a phenomenal writer/RPer, just someone who’s a bit touchy and needs some patience/understanding.

I guess idk why I’d be surprised after all these years to find myself on the other end of the stick, discarded and written off and shit-talked to our mutual friends, but ouch, does the feeling of betrayal really sting.

My muddy chaos demon

My peeve is me. I want to get back into MU*ing, and have not one, but two games lined up that I want to check out. (Maybe even three if for whatever reason the first two don’t work out!) Both are run by friends whom I respect and admire; whose creative projects I want to support; and whose ability to run good, healthy games that I’d enjoy I have complete faith in.

It’s just been so long since I’ve fully invested in a MU* that I feel like I’ve practically forgotten how to. I’ve been in creative lulls like this before, and I know that if I just get my foot in the door, roll up a character and get myself into a scene, it’ll all come back in an instant, like I never left the hobby at all. I’m just finding that initial step weirdly harder to surmount than it should be.

To the multiple friends who might be reading this, and to whom I’ve made empty promises about rolling up to hang out with on a MU* in recent months, I’m sorry. It’s really not you, it’s me. (A phrase I know always feels like bullshit on the receiving end, yet is legit, in this case, true.)

Marginally related peeve that I’m sure other alumni of this game can relate to: I hate the extent to which PHSD (Post-HavenRPG Stress Disorder) lives rent-free in my mind. Experiences on that game have made me intensely skittish at the very first sign of red flags on any other game I’ve checked out since, and permanently damaged my ability to put faith in game staff on the whole. It’s not the main reason I’ve been flakey about checking out the two aforementioned MU* run by friends of mine, but it has made me bail a lot quicker than others deem reasonable, on other projects, recently.

When there are so many good gamerunners out there whose proven track record makes me feel safe to put my complete trust in, it just no longer feels worth it sticking around after the first sign of trouble anywhere else, hoping/expecting things might get better or continuing to make excuses for staffers displaying strong red flags. I did that for years longer than I should’ve on HavenRPG, and I’m not prepared to do that for a day longer anywhere else.

It also makes me feel much stronger appreciation and gratitude to those gamerunners out there who’ve proven their commitment to their players’ safety time and time again. And to these boards as well, which promote healthy communities & staff practices, and which hold the hobby to a higher standard than I’m regrettably used to seeing.

There are a number of posters here on these boards who don’t know me at all, whom I’ve never spoken to one on one, whose positive contributions to this community have meant a lot more to me than they could possibly realise.

Finding out someone I felt uncomfortable with, but not uncomfortable enough to openly voice my objections to:

1. Actually has a known history of much more serious permutations of this behaviour on other games
2. Was already shown the door on my current game without me needing to say anything

Thank u yes I knew I wasn’t just crazy, and I am so happy to know I’m now playing on a game with safe, healthy, vigilant staff.

I totally feel for people saying they don’t page people because they feel anxious etc.

My quibble is that, while I have no official numbers, I estimate that if I were to take a poll, 90% of this hobby would say they are anxious/autistic/depressed etc.

I hold it against no one for not making the first move. But I do think that past a certain point of familiarity, if you’ve been playing with someone for a long time, and you care about them, you are morally obligated on some level to force yourself to be the one who reaches out and initiates stuff from time to time. It’s the same with relationships. I’d be sad and insecure if my partner was always dtf when prompted but never initiated. I’d wonder if they actually like me or just like that I’m convenient.

Labour isn’t easy for anyone but you should still make the effort for people you value. Otherwise they won’t know you value them. You wouldn’t like feeling that way. That’s why you like it when they do the work, right?

Every few days I wake up feeling creatively inspired and motivated to start something new. Roll up a new concept, join a new game/community, maybe even start my own game. The ideas and plans really turn into these full-fledged beings and worlds just begging to be written. Sometimes I even reach out to friends on Discord and let them know that I’m warming up to dive back into MU*dom or that I want to embark on an ambitious project.

Unfortunately, then I look at the date and realise I’m already late to meet RL deadlines. In the background, my mysteriously athletic Siberian Husky (seriously, how and when did my pandemic puppy get this buff?) makes her stance clear that if I’m awake enough to be sitting at my laptop, I am definitely awake enough to be giving her the first of 2-3 hours of exercise she’s owed, and no amount of focus will be permitted today until she’s been tired into a coma. And so the muse continuously dies unspent.

I miss escapism and creative writing.

The inevitable paranoia I constantly feel when friends talk shit about our other friends, and then I can’t help but wonder what they’re probably also saying about me.

Part RL peeve I suppose, but we are a gossipy hobby.

eggshells 🫤

Feeling like … I can only scene with you as long as I am very polite and mindful and watch my step and am on my best behaviour. Which is a very reasonable thing to expect of anyone. But also I don’t like feeling tense like that, so if RP always feels like a first date or a job interview, I think I would rather just avoid and hang out with friends who take themselves less seriously and let me fart around.

@Testament said in Bannings:

@Herja While I realistically wouldn’t expect it, I however would not be surprised if they somehow did the mental gymnastics to allow either Cullen or Dropkick to start posting there(I’m pointedly not including DWOPP in that because I can’t imagine any MSB staff being so oblivious to be okay with that). I would rate the things that Cullen did and what Hella/VK did to pretty near each other. So if they let one of them there…

Like I said, I’m not expecting but, also my expectations are exceedingly low at this point.

I would just like to say, loud and clear, in case anyone missed or somehow doubts this memo, that Cullen’s player is an actual, literal, real-life rapist.

I would love to post receipts. Dearly I would. Unfortunately that would be A) doxxing him & B) not my story to tell, not my receipts to share, and not one of his victims’ duty to publicly bare their trauma for the satisfaction of sealioning, misogynistic chodes.

I cannot adequately express the degree of livid I feel at some of the insinuations made on MSB these past few weeks; or how much it sickens my stomach to imagine that anyone would argue he deserves to be allowed back into community he’s abused for years to do it all. Over. Again.

I do not believe in second chances, not for him. He’s had a hundred already and abused them all. No.

But I hope making that case, or at the very least making light of the notion, is worth the internet points that MSB’s new boys’ club gets to reap at the expense of other people’s trauma. A categorical fuck you. Check your privilege, “simplications”.

I think that a core problem is that upwards of 90% of players in this hobby want their characters to be Cool. There are players who enjoy playing weird little gremlins or satirical characters they see as totally separate from themselves, where they get to have fun at that character’s expense. These tend to be my favourite players, but they are in the minority. Mostly people have fantasies about being Sexy or Strong or Smart or Cool that these characters, and their wins, are meant to fulfil.

So as much as we can look down on people who see their character’s loss as their loss, for having trouble separating IC and OOC, the reality is that this is most people. And even if you are someone who enjoys playing the foil or the weird little gremlin, I’ll wager that at some point you’ve realised that what most people enjoy about your characters is they get to feel Cool in comparison, when they’re putting your character down or beating them up or being morally upstanding in contrast to your character. And you’re OOCly giving them the thumbs up that no feelings are being hurt in the process. That’s why playing what most people consider a “good villain” is basically a service you’re providing other players, because they get to feel Cool rooting for their own character against yours, while you’re always holding back just enough that it never feels humiliating or futile. This is CvC, but you’re serving the needs of P through a C veil, and if you stop doing that, the feelings that arise are PvP.

So staff can call it CvC, but they need to understand that it’s still ultimately a balancing act of managing player egos.

On a total tangent, I have mixed feelings about the term CvC and I don’t generally use it. Whilst I totally agree that conflict should be between characters and not players, I think that in reality it’s often messy in ways that aren’t necessarily obvious, provable, or fixable, and I’m not convinced that asserting there’s a distinction does anything to ameliorate these issues.

When players get salty over conflict not going their way, they will rarely actually say that. Instead they’ll say stuff like “I’m upset that this other player cheated/used an exploit/is being unthematic/is unpleasant OOCly/is hogging scenes/can’t write for shit/has a super generic character/only cares about the mechanical win” etc. even when whatever complaint they’re making is provably untrue.

Well, to clarify: if the sentiment being discussed is that pacifist characters don’t belong on PvP games and should always be disallowed, I don’t agree with that sentiment. I think you ideally want to cultivate a kind of healthy player ecosystem, where people with different playstyles can engage in ways that are compatible. For instance, I’m generally happy playing villains, but I don’t really care about winning or losing, I just enjoy drumming up excitement and giving people something to bounce off of. I don’t see a pacifist character as incompatible with that, because as long as we’re both having fun, me twirling my moustache and someone else going, “Oh my god! Someone stop that villainous scum!” can create good story for both of us, and solidify both of our concepts.

With that said, and with the explicit caveat that I don’t see outliers as inherently problematic, it can and often does become a problem when the outlier ethos gets normalised in the setting it’s supposed to be pushing back against. So if the theme is space war between humans and aliens, it can be cool to have one or even two guys on the ship going, “Have we even tried talking to them? There has to be a better way than killing each other!” And they can play at being morally upstanding rebels defying the majority consensus. But once one of two things happen:
a) The majority of characters aboard the ship are now Team Peace With Aliens
b) Players start to get very caught up OOCly in wanting to ensure their IC ideology wins, and get frustrated when the aliens still want to kill them or the staff-run space-guard can’t be persuaded against war

Then you will no longer be having a good time playing the Space War game. IIRC this kind of happened on The 100 MUSH, for instance.

This is also the Drizzt problem. One Drizzt is OK and shows drows can be different. But if every drow is Drizzt, then thematically what are drow even? What’s he rebelling against?

I have no skin in the game for whatever happened on SH, and I apologise if it seems I’m moving the goalposts; I realise this isn’t the point that was previously being made, I’m just broadening the discussion.

@bear_necessities said in Non-toxic PvP:

@Jumpscare That has nothing to do with these people playing pacifists. It sounds like you have some jerk players. But there are jerk pacifists and there are jerk combatants and there are jerk everythings. It’s not a pacifist thing.

In a thread about non-toxic PvP it seems pretty on-topic to bring up the issues caused by both jerk combatants and jerk pacifists? And I notice that people often discuss the former but rarely acknowledge the issues with the latter. No one is saying you can’t play a pacifist, pacifists ruin PvP games, any more than anyone is saying that all combat characters are domineering murderhobos. But problematic pacifists exist, as do problematic combatants. There are specific issues with each that healthy community management needs to account for.

I’m generally an advocate for broadening the definition of PvP for this reason. On the surface a lot of people will look at the scenario being described as MH being a meanie PvPer, and PP being a collaborative feelgood player. But actually, they are both engaging in PvP. PP is using social tools, MH physical ones.

I think that most of us will agree that it’s good manners for PvP aficionados to be selective about whom they engage in conflict and try not to bother people who don’t wanna be bothered. It’s obviously domineering arsehole behaviour of the geared up military man to challenge a low xp cafe worker to a duel at dawn. But subjecting the military guy just doing his job to moral shaming and social ostracisation after he shoved someone away from a security barrier is also PvP. And if he’s giving signals of, “I don’t really want to fight you, however I will have to per my role if you keep trying to sneak past the barrier” that is an attempt at conflict deescalation; ignoring it, and then socially persecuting him afterwards, is the same type of unsolicited ahole behaviour as trying to start a fight with a low xp cafe worker.

In text, hitting someone isn’t a worse offence than calling them names like it is in the real world. The latter is often a lot more effective at taking a character out of commission (by making them less fun to play).

So, PP is subjecting MH to unsolicited PvP, that’s just as bad as randomly attacking a character in any other way. A lot of bad feelings seem to arise anytime someone is attacked using something other than their weapon of choice, which they may innocuously pretend isn’t a weapon at all when it advantages them.

I don’t know the situation @Jumpscare was alluding to, but I immediately assumed — along, I think, with @Juniper — that the issue being described was actually a player who wrongfuns other people for engaging in the established conflict theme, rather than the other way around.

I’ve dealt with this type of player and it’s incredibly frustrating to have someone treat you like you’re a bad mean person OOCly for, say, trying to rob people while being a member of the Thieves’ Guild, lurking in a shifty alley no one is forced to go to. Especially when you’re being compared to other members of the Thieves’ Guild who don’t steal because stealing is wrong, and they just joined to vibe with their friends, but now everyone is treating them like established representatives of the Thieves’ Guild and saying no one is forcing you to be the kind who steals, that’s just you being a jerk. Expecting people to uphold the theme they signed up for isn’t wrongfun, IMO.

I thought @Jumpscare’s suggestions were pretty useful and I ended up making some notes: have clear expectations for how factions engage, and I think I might even write up an OOC newbie guide on “which faction should you join” that spells stuff out like, if you don’t like combat then Engineers or Cooks’ Guild is a good fit, and if you aren’t comfortable with high risk then don’t join the Militia.

@Juniper said in Tales of Zalanthas:

No ERP? What in the fuck is the point then?

Forbidden ERP >>>>>

It’s why I kind of hate that some games have banned in-game homophobia, I mean where’s the fun if I can’t secretly steal away my lesbian lover from her husband to a confessional booth.

One system I’ve been thinking about which I’d like some feedback on:

Would you play a game where:

1. Ordinarily, character death requires consent. Your character can get into serious fights and someone can even try to assassinate them in theory, but the setting’s magic prevents them from falling into the red without prior staff discussion/approval from both parties.
2. Players can permanently toggle a setting that makes their characters killable when they roll in; the flag is publicly visible and is intended as an “I’m up for anything do your worst” signal. In exchange they enjoy slightly accelerated XP gains (think in the realm of 10%), but obviously it means staff won’t rescue them from open PK unless there’s a very obvious/overt sign of OOC-motivated abuse.

I’m mainly interested in how people who wouldn’t turn it on would feel about this sort of system. Would it make you feel like a kind of second-class citizen that some people are getting more XP by being more willing to risk their characters? Would you feel pressured to turn it on even if the idea of open PK makes you uncomfortable? Do you think it would create a toxic subculture within the game’s wider community?

@Faraday said in Non-toxic PvP:

@KDraygo said in Non-toxic PvP:

Character vs Character is a much more accurate designation to use in my opinion.

I personally like the CvC designation, but I think it’s wallpapering over the fact that for a lot of people, it really IS the PvP that attracts them. They view the game like a game of chess, or a game of tennis or whatever, where it really is about “winners” and losers, being “the best”, etc. The fact that it’s another player involved is what elevates the stakes/conflict to a level they don’t get when it’s player characters versus non-player characters (which really when you think about it is also literally CvC).

You can call it what you want, but it’s not going to change their fundamental outlook, and that outlook is what causes a lot of drama on PvP games. (The other large chunk of drama is poor bleed management, and I really don’t know how you address that with a big group of internet strangers.)

To be honest, I think that even games which claim not to be PvP or CvC games tend to have elements of PvP that people don’t like to think about, which means they should always also be accounting for these same issues. You can never fully prevent them, because of what @Faraday says here.

The most common instance on otherwise chill “everyone is on the same team” MUSHes is romance drama. Like it or not, when a hottie who writes good shows up, there will be competition for their affection/attention/dance-card. It often gets ugly in subtle ways, and I consider this a form of PvP. The same is also true for staff attention and metaplot dissemination, etc.

This reply is to bits and pieces of other posts that mention transparency, namely @MisterBoring’s, but I don’t wanna get too scattered with the quote-texts:

One issue I have with very high transparency and OOC communication is that it negatively impacts more cerebral styles of conflict. So, if I’m playing Superman and you’re playing Batman and I’m planning for us to have a big epic fight in an alleyway, very little of substance is lost by tapping you on the shoulder to talk to you and the DM about it first, check if there’s anything you wouldn’t be comfortable with, like maybe no ball-kicking or teabagging after.

But, if you’re playing Vesper Lynd and I’m playing James Bond, the emotional and intellectual stakes aren’t the same if I know in advance, hey btw Vesper was actually working for the baddies the whole time, she’s gonna take the money from the hotel room and deliver it to the villain, also the tea she gives you turns out to be drugged. I wouldn’t want to know this information, because it changes how I parse my scenes with Vesper leading up to the reveal. Even someone who thinks they have perfect IC/OOC separation, if they’re invested in the idea of their character as a mastermind who can’t be fooled (a very common failing that can’t be realistically banned out of a playerbase), may then be influenced by out-of-game knowledge in their decision on whether or not to drink the tea, and overestimate whether they’d start to suspect without already knowing the answer. The outcome of physical combat with her boss after the reveal will still be organically determined, but it’s worth bearing in mind this isn’t the only approach to IC conflict — subterfuge and cunning is another, IME favoured by people who lean more towards character-building play than by-the-numbers competition.