Not yucking on anyone’s yum, you do you, this is just a me thing, but:

Personally, freeform>>>>>>>>>

I don’t even like roster games. Half the fun, maybe even more than half the fun for me on any game, is building my own character, my own concept, my own ideas, doing a lil worldbuilding, customising everything I can, I wanna flex those creative muscles. I like seeing what other people come up with, sometimes doing a lil collaborative improv (like hey seems our characters have some backstory features in common, what if they knew each other from before?) etc.

The more creative freedom I have, the happier I am. I’ve invented entire cultures/societies with a bit of an amateur conlang on games that let me.

@Roz said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

it’s times like these that i miss old threads from defunct boards because dang we had NUMEROUS threads of these games while the drama was happening

Part of me thinks it’s good that we’ve wiped the slate clean, and everyone gets a fresh start, because honestly 2 decades or however long is a long time to be holding grudges, people do grow and change.

But also damn if it isn’t astounding how much some people absolutely haven’t grown or changed.

@NotSanni said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

@Roz said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

NGL, to me RPIs are just a subset of MUDs that are particularly RP-heavy/focused

Largely agreed. My experience with most RPI focused players is that many (not all, but a WHOLE bunch) essentially trend towards wanting what amounts to a simulation sandbox game where they can go grind things and progress between fun little RP sessions.

I think the hard-line division likely comes from some form of elitism (RPI-ers going “well mine is more SERIOUS”, and “normal MUDders” trending towards “RPIs are full of toxic drama”), coupled with the human desire to generally put things into distinct categories.

Because even across the spectrum of RPIs, they don’t all agree with what makes a game an RPI. Ask the people who only or mainly played Armageddon, and you’d get a wildly different answer to the people who played only or mainly Atonement, or whatever.

The issue is further compounded by people having different definitions for what counts as “serious” or “heavy” RP.

From the perspective of an average RPIer, being completely immersed in your character, never communicating with anyone OOC, finding everything out IC, and following the edict of “it’s what my character would do” to the letter is what counts as the highest and most serious form of RP.

Whereas a MUSHer might look at what they’re doing and go “Wait, so it’s just bar RP? No plots? Hey why don’t we run an event, I’ll set one up — let’s all of us meet at the dojo for a training montage.”

To which some RPIers might be horrified at the prospect of prearranging RP and insist that no, they cannot just show up at the dojo, because they would be doing so using meta information, and you haven’t told their character in a scene that there is an event going on at a dojo. So they have to stay at the bar, since their character is a drunk, unless another character can organically convince them to attend the dojo. But they won’t tell you that they want you to do this, since again, that would be metagaming.

On a IRE MUD I once got chewed out by the game’s top PvPer who doesn’t really do any emoting, because he found out that a friend had encouraged me to log on for a scene in our guildhall that had no real impact on anyone else, it was just 2 people writing together for fun. From his perspective, that was not really RP, since our characters didn’t randomly bump into each other; it was basically cheating, despite no mechanical benefits.

So it’s like a bunch of elitists elitising at each other that each one’s RP is of the less serious variety. There isn’t really a hierarchy of elitism, it’s more like a spiderweb. (And I don’t claim to be innocent of any of it, I totally judge people whose RP style I think sucks.)

My point is, imho, to rank RPI as a more serious type of RP MUD is not really accurate, it’s a different type of RP MUD, but sure, RPIers would probably insist that it’s more serious (and I would disagree). I prefer therefore to define RPI by its familiar systems and policies; games like The Inquisition: Legacy, Armageddon, Shadows of Isildur, After Earth, Star Conquest.

@Faraday I wouldn’t consider your game an RPI because AFAIK it’s a MUSH, and a RPI is a type of MUD.

@MisterBoring said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

I’ve been in this hobby 20+ years now and I still don’t know what makes RPI unique. That’s what I learned from taking and reading the results of this survey.

I don’t remember whether I checked RPI as my favourite in the end. If I could, I would’ve checked all three (MUD, MUSH, RPI) because I like all of them for different reasons, and my ideal pie-in-the-sky type of game would be a mixture of all 3.

I think I might’ve picked MUD, but not because I’m less into storytelling/RP. I just consider RPI to be a very specific category with a very specific codebase and player culture; i.e., typically rules surrounding no OOC, non-consent permadeath, skills rise by grinding them out. And I actually tend to avoid classic RPIs because IME, they compromise RP/storytelling a lot in favour of gamification, grinding, and encourage behaviour that doesn’t make sense for the character.

Like I remember rolling into a post-apocalyptic RPI that was supposed to be a very gritty setting, and on the radio someone was asking who needed rubies/sapphires to train their jewelcrafting up. Took me right out of the setting lol. Why are people communicating “need” for precious jewels on the survivors radio for a supposedly dangerous wasteland?

Oh, and my character was a middle-aged doctor, but I was a newbie. I asked on the newbie channel how to use my stitches skill. People told me “find out IC :)” and then someone offered to show me IC. I later realised the reason they offered is that by doing it for me, they could get the skillup at my expense.

So, based on my experiences, I’m just not sure that RPIs really do deserve the self-proclaimed mantle of “RP intensive”. It’s more just that you have to communicate everything solely in-character, which leads people to communicate blatantly OOC nonsense through a thin veneer of IC, instead of hashing out the technical stuff separately so they can concentrate on only stuff that makes sense for the character in-scene.

@Colette said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

@SockMonkey Sorry, but this is going to be a really dull spectator sport. xD

As a spectator with 0 context, I’m having loads of fun here fyi

@Purplelamia

SuperMUD. It’s a DIKU-codebase MUD with a heavy focus on storytelling. (I know a lot of people on these boards tend to be sort of anti-MUD and more pro-MUSH, but the core community waiting on it tend towards paragraph RP.) They have a Discord as well, I’m not personally in it, but if people are interested I can nudge a friend who can invite. They currently have a test server up that people can poke around on, and I believe are planning to launch some alpha RP events within a few months or so.

@catzilla said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

Maybe one day we’ll have a superhero game not run by abusers.

I know of one in the works, but I honestly think there is something about the genre. I largely agree with Alan Moore’s perspective on it.

Close friend of mine isn’t in the hobby and has no creative interests. Nothing wrong with that. She’s not really a writer in any sense, doesn’t need those skills for her job, and typically sends fairly brief messages in imperfect grammar. We have other interests/values in common and she’s highly skilled/intelligent, just differently skilled/intelligent. Never in my life judged her for not being ultra verbose/articulate. We vibe in other ways.

This morning she messaged me a pop culture reference I didn’t recognise, so I misinterpreted it as her sharing her feelings rather than just quoting something. In response to my sincere attempt to engage with her accordingly, she sent (yes I counted) 10 perfect structured paragraphs that sound absolutely nothing like her, explaining in depth the pop culture reference, why she referenced it, and what the philosophical implications of it are.

And I’m just tired, boss. I thought people using AI to RP for them was bad enough. Now I got an RL friend delegating social interaction to ChatGPT too. I don’t consent to this shit. I don’t want to interact with pristine slop, I want my unique human friends back.

Just as an addendum to the above exchange, I’ve edited my first post on this thread to reflect that @voiceinthevoid and I ended up talking things through in DMs, and I do believe they were coming from an authentic place. I stand by the rest of what I said, and also appreciate them hearing out my discomfort and taking concerns on board.

Let us reframe that sentence into the following contexts:

“It also doesn’t make women look great to throw around false rape allegations, and can actually increase misogyny.”

“It also doesn’t make black people look great to play the race-card, and can actually increase white supremacy.”

---

I can’t be certain that you are who you say you are, and I will state plainly that I feel no compulsion to take at face value a post by a day-old account that, seemingly, created the account and posted solely for the purpose of discrediting an allegation of antisemitism.

But I will say that I take issue with this framing, that lying Jews cause antisemitism. Antisemites cause antisemitism. This sentence is either internalised racism, or dishonest in authorial intent.

Maybe it also really was an honest mistake to have created a whole new thread, and the intention was to reply directly to the comments in context. But I really wish this board didn’t now have a whole thread titled “Antisemitism Allegedly” about how, allegedly, allegations of antisemitism cannot be trusted. Did this need to be a topic here?

Maybe Wikibara really is a liar, I don’t know, I don’t know him from Adam. Maybe this is an attempt to discredit a game unfairly, I don’t know, I’ve never played it.

But this thread sets me on edge. If you’re being honest about why you made it, then hopefully you can understand why some people taking an interest in this topic might be on edge.

Because I have receipts I will gladly post of Actual Nazis in this hobby privately admitting in their crusty little Actual Nazi discord servers that they enjoy making false flag posts in the MU* community meant to stir up shit of this nature.

If your intentions are honest, then I really am sorry for what you and your family are going through.

I don’t know who any of the people in this involved are. Not the staff, not the accused, not the accuser, not this poster I’m replying to now, nor what events transpired.

@voiceinthevoid said in Antisemitism allegedly:

It also doesn’t make the Jewish people look great to say this dishonestly and can actually increase antisemitism.

But this sentence reads incredibly suspicious to me.

---

EDIT: FWIW, @voiceinthevoid & I ended up talking things through in DMs after this exchange, and I do believe that the post is authentic in its intentions. I appreciate the good faith & empathy extended in both editing the title and understanding where the suspicion was coming from.

Said it in the other thread and I stand by it: there’s no wrong or right answer to this, it all depends on the kind of game and the kind of playerbase. @Autumn gave some specific examples that I agree with above.

I think that one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve had in this hobby was some 20 years ago when I tried rolling into Shadows of Isildur. The application process took at least a week all in all and was highly involved. Since I’d never played a RPI before and really didn’t understand how the game worked, I perma-died a couple days in, and obviously never gave the game another chance. I’d probably do just fine nowadays as someone who knows how RPIs work, but eh.

But in contrast, I’ve played games with lots of PvP mystery features, which heavily rely on players actually filling all those details in so that there’s something for other players to uncover if they want to go digging into your character. I’ve spent weeks in chargen on such games and had absolutely no regrets about it; it’s been an intensely rewarding experience. In fact sometimes I’ve enjoyed creating even more than I’ve enjoyed playing. I treat it as a creative writing exercise, which is why I’m in this hobby anyway.

I have also had lots of fun on games with literally 0 chargen process. A friend of mine once ran a custom tabletop campaign where we didn’t even get to pick our characters’ names or powers or backstories. All of our characters woke up together in a lab, with an assigned number-name and amnesia, and discovered who we were and what powers we had as the game progressed. I would just as happily do something like that again, but it obviously doesn’t work for every setting.

My big chargen gripes aren’t about how long it takes, but when it’s designed in a way that seems arbitrary and frustrating. For instance, I hate having to pick between ten slightly different, identical-sounding options for a skill. Like if I have to choose between whether to put points into Karate, Krav Maga, Kung Fu, Taekwondo or Jiu-Jitsu, and I have no idea how badly that choice is gonna fuck me down the line if I pick wrong, I already hate your game before I’ve started playing. Just let me pick “Martial Arts” as a stat if that’s my concept, and maybe customise it in character notes with the specifics. I’ve seen this justified as “well we don’t want everyone to have the same build”, but idc, it just smells like a newbie trap. The chargen process should be as intuitive as possible, limit any mechanical advantages that a veteran player could have for making more meta choices, and not encourage/require more work than will end up paying off.

On the writing side, this also means not having too many “optional” customisation fields that feel like a requirement if they aren’t, or that are asking for subtle variations of the same thing. For instance, you shouldn’t multiple separate textboxes for backstory, history, summary, personality, quirks, hooks. Like … what? I just got finished writing all about how my character’s upbringing in a monastery instilled them religious fervour, now you want me to write another paragraph about their personality, and then repeat that in a catchier way for hooks? This could’ve been 1 box. Or, if the description section is broken up into a bunch of different fields so I can describe my face, eyebrows, hair, fingers, toes, butt, all separately, and then also my hoodie, what the hoodie looks like on the floor, what my hoodie looks like with the hood up, and what other people see when I’m putting it on and taking it off … but THEN after I put all that work in, I discover it’s actually some kind of faux pas to have filled everything in, and I should’ve just picked 1 or 2 of these fields … f u, ur community, ur game, this is also a newbie trap. Don’t put these fields there if filling in every single one isn’t an expectation; and ideally, don’t have these fields at all if they add nothing that RP won’t. I mean I can just write, as needed: “Kestrel walks in, bundled up in a loose hoodie. Shivering, she lifts up her French-manicured fingers to pull the hood up over her long, dark hair.”

Other than that, I am happy to take as long as needed to ensure my app is up to the game’s standards/expectations. I don’t see vetting by staff as a hindrance; if they’re willing to make the time for it, I often find it beneficial to get communicating early on about how to ensure the best possible experience with my character for both of us. This is often better than rolling in and discovering only after that your concept doesn’t actually work.

No comment on staffers I don’t know and a game I don’t play, I’m sure they’ve done lots of bad stuff that deserves the hate they’re getting here, but I do feel that a blanket statement that “X amount of time needed for apps is unreasonable/unfair” isn’t in and of itself a reasonable takeaway. Staff get to set whatever expectations and barrier to entry they want for their game, and can live with the consequences of whatever playerbase they cultivate as a result, for better or worse. Maybe they end up with fewer interested, but much higher-investment players, and they like it that way. I’ve played on games with lengthy chargen processes, and games with quick/painless chargen process. I like them both for different reasons, and think they suit different kinds of games and different kinds of players. There’s no right/wrong way to do these things. Not everything is for everyone. Not everything needs to be.

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.