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.

So I am someone who generally enjoys PvP in my text-based roleplaying games. I tend not to care very much about combat, but I like political systems, ideological debates about the ethics of magic or what-have-you, mysteries where there are some stakes to being the one to solve a puzzle, and an intelligent, player-controlled opponent.

The problem I find is that it’s very hard to have any system of this kind that doesn’t devolve into player resentment and envy. Even if it doesn’t involve character loss or anyone being beaten up or bullied, if the game features some sort of prize that only one player can get, then no matter how fairly it’s earned, it seems inevitable that those who lose out will grumble about how unfair it is that player one got it and they didn’t. Likewise, if you have Team Magic is Cool and Team Magic is Evil, as fun as it is to design characters with ideologies that can participate in an IC debate club about it, inevitably players on Team Cool start projecting assumptions about Team Evil’s OOC ideologies and comparing fictional themes to sensitive RL politics.

Naturally a lot of games choose to sidestep this entirely by just not having PvP, and putting all players on the same team. But this puts a lot more onus on the DM to provide challenges and conflict, and I think it’s impossible to have truly three-dimensional villains in this kind of setting. It also lowers the stakes considerably, because you know that the NPC team isn’t supposed to have an equally fair shot at winning as the PC team.

So, if you were designing a game where PvP is meant to be part and parcel (it doesn’t have to involve actual combat or risk of character death), how do you go about mitigating any risk of OOC toxicity?

@Gashlycrumb said in Celebrities We've Lost 2026 Edition:

Desmond Morris zoologist, ethologist, sociobiologist.

One of the most influential and underrated thinkers of our time. I always link this short opinion piece of his from +20 years ago, still relevant today as we continue to learn more about animal sentience and linguistics. RIP naked ape, your understanding of how unspecial we are as a species made you special among our kind.

@howyadoin said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Kestrel Would you be comfortable naming who it is? Some of us might have similar stories about this person, too.

Nope. I wish them well.

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.

@catzilla said in MU Peeves Thread:

I may be wrong to assume this site is anti-Nazi/etc.

SO!

Pet peeve, when the CWOD discord server you’re on decides to open a politics channel and you see not only the host of the server refuse to say they’re anti-Nazism but also a bunch of people supporting Nazism in the server… Many sads that there’s still people clinging to all that nonsense in the RP world.

It’s en vogue now.

@MisterBoring said in AI In Poses:

We have people using AI to write poses, which is pretty gross.

Somehow this also makes the continued existence of people who don’t spell check their posts even more annoying.

I’m honestly at a point where I treat obvious typos and grammar errors in a person’s writing on a MU* as a massive green flag, because it proves to me they didn’t use AI.

@bear_necessities said in AI In Poses:

I’m not saying it doesn’t happen but could someone post the pose in question? I just want to see how we know it’s AI.

I’ve encountered multiple people who’ve openly admitted to using AI to write their poses. What they get out of it I’ll never understand/know.

@MisterBoring said in AI In Poses:

HOWEVER, it does dawn on me that one group of people might be using it for a noble reason that we haven’t really touched on here that I can see. I can totally see the use of ChatGPT as an assistive tech for a person with a physical disability. Perhaps there are people out there in our hobby with some physical limitation that would drastically slow down their pose speed, and the use of ChatGPT helps them keep up with the others on the games they choose to play.

I don’t think this is a noble reason. A combination of ADHD + anxiety + perfectionism + trauma means that I can be very slow, especially under specific circumstances. Like TS/romantic scenes will sometimes take me 50 minutes between poses and it’s not because I’m typing with one hand, it’s because I find that very nerve-wracking and can only do it with people who are very patient and understanding. Likewise in general, when it’s a scene partner I’ve put on some kind of mental pedestal, and really care about impressing. (The less I care, the faster I type.)

If I got to the point where I just used AI, especially without disclosing that, then I kinda think what’s the point. FWIW even when I’m slow, I give it my all; my very best effort to write something I’m proud of (which is why it can take me so long, especially if I’m experiencing some performance anxiety). And I think knowing that is why my friends will put up with me, even if I take forever. To them at least, I’m worth it.

We all have difficulties, but that’s part of the magic. You should push through that difficulty, not give up. From my perspective, that’s what AI usage is, it’s giving up, it’s choosing not to write on a writing game. And at that point, just play something else? I don’t think it’s ableism to say that writing games aren’t going to be for everyone; they’re obviously not going to be for people who don’t care enough to write. They can absolutely be for people who struggle but still want to write; you just need to find the right people who support you, and I don’t think they’re that hard to find. Most people don’t want a perfect writing partner, they want someone with a positive attitude who’s trying their best.

@Jennkryst said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Prototart what ever happened to bribing players with XP for desc work?!?

Perverse incentives are a big part of why we have an AI slop problem in this hobby.

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.

Kfir Bibas.

I binged the first two seasons of Yellowjackets in a single weekend and can’t stop thinking about it. Can’t believe I have to wait a whole week for season 3 now.

Anyway here’s a flawless ad for it I found in a YouTube comment section: