To be honest I feel like TS is probably the #1 thing MU*ers lie OOCly to get, I don’t know why this peeve would strain credulity.

@Juniper said in Age Verification & Games:

Not to mention most adults don’t meet my standards for literacy, let alone some undercover minor. I won’t find out someone I was hanging out with is a kid. It’s just not gonna happen.

I think you would be surprised. The 17 year old I mentioned in a previous post could write better than most 30 year olds, and ended up attending a university that consistently ranks in the top 10 globally. Though obviously emotionally they were still a 17 year old, which is really the main issue with kids on these games, not poor literacy.

Obviously literacy rates are in the gutter these days, but wanting to play a text-game was already weird when I started it, and we’re probably around the same age. These have always been weird nerdy games, and there will always be weird nerds.

@Yam said in Age Verification & Games:

Gosh, are there any NON 18+ games out there? I figure maybe some MUDs?

I’d say most MUDs. I grew up on Iron Realms Entertainment, personally. I recall that when Starmourn launched, the founder actually surprised me by saying it was “rated R”. Previous games made by that company have had more explicit PG-13 regulations for stuff like crafting, but then again also no rules surrounding TS/mudsex. Either way, none of those games have any kind of “you must be 18 or over” disclaimer anywhere. Considering those games are actually professionally produced and for-profit, looking back I actually can’t believe they’ve managed to avoid lawsuits given the amount of serious abuse stories I personally know to have occurred on those games. And like I’m not talking someone said something naughty to someone, I mean indecent pictures, blackmail, bad things happened after meeting IRL, etc.

I guess maybe I should look back on this Wild West era of the internet with some nostalgia, given that nowadays we have AI undressing images of minors on some of the biggest public platforms on the planet.

@Jennkryst said in Age Verification & Games:

1. They also had a big colorful sign that was basically ‘this player is a minor, do not even consider stepping out of line around them, we will ban you immediately’. Basically, it was the boiler plate ‘if you’re under 18, you can play with a parent’s permission’ that actually got the permission, instead of just lying about their age as others might do.

2. Anyway, TLDR: protecc the kiddos from the creeps by keeping out the creeps.

Couple issues with this. I’ve numbered your points for ease of response.

1. I, an adult, don’t want to have to monitor/censor my own language out of concern kids might be observing. I don’t want to feel guilty when I jokingly quote a Chuck Tingle title. I also may want to play in a game that grapples with adult themes (not just sex.) It’s also not just about controlling my own behaviour; any time I play games with public lobbies like Among Us, or hang out in a public Discord server, I end up having children hitting on me. I obviously tell them to knock it off, but every time it happens I find myself thinking about the next person, who doesn’t tell them to knock it off, who likes that attention and encourages it.

2. I’m immensely sceptical of anyone who believes their game is creep-free, or that they have foolproof creep-radar and always know how to deal with creeps. You just don’t know. Creeps can be extremely nice, friendly, respectable. They can have great public decorum, and then be a different person in DMs. It’s not even just sexpests we need to worry about, but more subtle things like cyberbullying. This hobby is well-known for dogpiling, hate/smear-campaigns, etc. And while I’m not going to lose sleep over an adult being made fun of for their awful desc-writing, I do think that can have a much more serious and long-term impact on a developing brain.

So if you wanna have, say, a LotR-themed MU* that’s explicitly child-friendly, that’s fine, but you need to commit. That means no Discord, no DMs, no TS, for anyone. If it’s intended to be a child-friendly game, then there should be no adult content on it for anyone, and no encouragement of private communications that enable predators to target and groom children. Strictly anonymous, public channels, should be kept free of adult humour, etc.

But if you wanna have a GoT-themed MU* that includes mature themes, then I think you need to commit to that too, and you just cannot allow children to play that game. You can’t have a game where adults are openly discussing rape, gore, torture, where players are given both adult freedoms and expectations/standards of behaviour, and expect that to be a safe or healthy environment for teenagers.

Even if an adult joined this kind of game with their teenager and said they’re fine with it, I still wouldn’t be fine with it. Because while you have the right to decide you want to be responsible for your own child, I don’t want to be responsible for your own child. I don’t want to feel helpless and unable to do anything about the brothel PC hitting on your teenager and sending them weirdly affectionate DMs or selfies. That’s stressful for me.

I have encountered multiple confirmed underage players on MUDs.

In one incident about 4 years ago, the game had a Discord server with an active voice chat. A player told us openly they were 17 and applying for university the following year. A second player whom I believe was roughly my age (Millennial) then proceeded to repeatedly and frequently hit on the underage player. What frustrated me is that when I tried reporting the issue, I was told that the underage player had a reputation for acting horny and liking that kind of attention, so it was probably OK. I spoke to the underage player directly about the issue, who made clear to me that the older player hitting on them made them extremely uncomfortable, and that they wanted it to stop.

It does happen, and people should be extremely vigilant about it.

In all candour, I started playing MUDs when I was 11. Stuff did happen. I recall a 12 year old girl on the same MUD had that same kind of “reputation” with older male players in the community, and in hindsight, I genuinely can’t believe staff just let that happen. Dark side of the freeze-peach crowd, IME.

Personally, I am fully in favour of age verification laws, based on these experiences. And I’m in the UK where they’ve already been rolled out.

The issue generally isn’t TS. Like, whatever, teens masturbate. It’s that people tend to take these conversations OOC, where there is a power imbalance between younger/older players, which enables predators. Particularly on games which tend to be rife with mentally unstable individuals, and settings which tacitly promote all kinds of fetishes (and I’m not just talking about sex games), I don’t want these to be the formative sexual experiences of any child.

Growing up on this hobby has unironically given me everything from literal trauma I’ve been in therapy for, written skills that have served me exceptionally well professionally/academically, and inadvertently introduced me to the love of my life. I get it, @RightMeow. I also feel that mix of nostalgia/craving and fear/disgust/anxiety for the rollercoaster of very good times and very bad times I’ve had with it.

@Autumn

An idea I’ve been toying with is more of a carrot over stick approach, because I actually tentatively agree with you that stat/skill point-based systems can often incentivise approaches to progression that feel a bit silly.

But I feel that players often don’t respond well (myself included) when there’s a lot of restriction. I mean even knowing myself, if I’m playing in a game where something is on cooldown to prevent overuse, it will actually incentivise me to immediately do it on cooldown, when maybe without that cooldown I would’ve happily waited a lot longer than the cooldown period for story/realism, most of the time. The cooldown makes me feel like I have to do it ASAP regardless, so I don’t miss out down the line. So, by trying to hold off the worst players, I think it often actually brings more normal players up to their level and discourages a more intuitive, story-focused approach to that kind of decision-making.

The idea I’m workshopping right now is to have in parallel both a more conventional progression system (get XP, spend XP, progress) alongside free, event-based skill distribution.

So, if you don’t want to attend events, and just wanna up your strength one point a week, go ahead. But alternatively if you attend a training montage event at the dojo, staff reading the logs may just toss you a +1str that week as a freebie recognition of the RP you’ve been doing. With lower frequency and less guarantee for those sorts of casual social events, but a more explicit expectation for big season finale type events and boss fights.

Ideally my hope is that maybe people will stress less about the progression-over-time aspect if they know the story will organically reward them with progression that reflects their RP. But also keeping the more conventional progression track for people who either can’t or just don’t want to always feel like they need to prove their progress in public scenes, albeit a little slower.

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.