Sadly, I don’t think it’s a gag. Was posted over the weekend.
https://concordiamu.aresmush.com/wiki/society:ferility_children
"Laypeople are not permitted to grow the Evenplum tree, ensuring that the clergy maintains strict control over the fruit’s availability and distribution.
That said, it is very likely that many Untamed tribes have access to or have their very own trees."
I guess the “savages” can do what they want, and have unregulated population control?
Horrified that in this day and current world climate, a game would implement “every character is infertile and the priests have control over granting fertility by giving you a magic fruit to eat” approach to what I presume is a problem that could be easily solved by “both parties need to OOCly consent to a pregnancy”.
Like, there is so much ICK behind the idea of that level of control over reproductive rights.
@MisterBoring said in Song of Avaria:
I don’t play Arx, but I’ve read enough of the Arx wiki to ask…
How is this scratching the Arx itch?
That Alveraxus game that just popped up on Ares is like a wish dot com version of Arx. It stole a couple of the mechanics, diced up some of the theme, and boom.
@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:
Hasn’t it been, like. A week? Since the holidays? It sounds like this was just the first thing up on the docket. This whole post feels very “a valiant group of players KEPT THIS GAME ALIVE [through a very common MU* lull period during the holidays when activity is expected to be quieter], staff now OWES US.”
Yeah, look. I’m not trying to argue here, but since you’re ascribing some “feel” to my comment and making a few incorrect assumptions, I’ll offer minor clarification and then bow out of this. It’s a good game with good people, but I also think what I said was not as “entitled” as your summary makes it out to be.
With the exception of one open scene in late December and two scenes for a specific group to advance their plot in October, the last staff run scene of any kind open to anyone who wanted to join was in the middle of September. It introduced a really great plot twist that players were eager to engage with, but unfortunately staff had various things happen and so it kind of went dormant since September.
So it’s not really a “since/through the holidays” thing, it’s a “staff took a break for almost four months thing”. Which again is TOTALLY ok, and I prefer that to burn out, just clarifying I’m not whining about “the holidays”.
I don’t think any ‘valiant’ group of players is owed anything and I’m not one of those anyway, but a bunch of different players ran events in that time span keeping the game going for new players coming in, getting them engaged in RP, etc. because they love the game.
I think the word “owe” is a really charged term in a hobby where everyone is a volunteer and RL happens, so no one is OWED anything.
But I also think it is fair to say that players of an active game that averages 30 players at any given time might reasonably expect that after almost a four month hiatus, there might be something that they are allowed to participate in, instead of a month of scheduled scenes closed to a couple of groups.
OR (to invoke telepathy again) a post saying “Hey, we are trying to get back on our feet, we have exciting plans for everyone, but we are going to clear out a backlog of some small player specific scenes ones” instead of dead silence other than a bunch of CLOSED events getting slapped up without comment.
Communication goes a long way, and there just wasn’t any to the player base in general (unless I missed it, which I admit is possible, I’m not on every day and there’s no forum post), which I think is a fair thing to point out.
Lol it was a very specific scenario to say it was a generalized peeve. not saying “don’t peeve,” but people are gonna put it together to the obvious specific scenario it’s referring to. If you want that to not happen, you usually have to give it more time or genericize it more.
Yeah, I don’t often engage here, and honestly just thought I could vent about something generically (and I really thought I was vague enough) without naming anyone and go on about my day since I wasn’t (trying to) attack anyone or a game.
I’ll go back to being a lurker. 
@Pacha said in MU Peeves Thread:
I genuinely do not see what more I could reasonably have done to include people.
I wasn’t going to comment again because my point was made, but I want to clarify that my post wasn’t directed at you, my dude. We haven’t RPed, but you seem like a nice and inclusive player, and I apologize if you thought I meant to be critical of you as a player. I didn’t even think that all of the scenes were yours specifically, although that does kind of go to my point because I know you’re not the only player asking for help on things (as someone else said, having a bunch of IC leaders roster has been rough on folks).
There was definitely a long delay with staff being unavailable and then the Christmas break. I will personally say that I am not a great fan of “closed” events being posted publically (I also play on Shattered, where they do that a lot, and I really dislike it). Still, I get it is a useful organisational tool.
This was really my only thing. It was just frustrating after having the game go dormant other than a handful of players who struggled to keep events and activity up over a two or so month period while staff was burned out (only to see a bunch of THOSE players get burned out and quit after picking up that burden), to see staff make a triumphant return and only address a portion of stuff in the same corner. But looking at it from their perspective I suppose it’s easier to bring things back in clumps and all those scenes were interrelated, but this is where “telepathy” comes up with communication to players that their stuff is coming, too.
To bear necessities: I wasn’t trying to vaguebook to be edgey, I was just trying to post a general MU Peeve as the thread is called, not “name and shame” a particular game on blast just because that happened to be the the most recent place I saw this thing (which others have agreed is a peeve) happen. It wasn’t meant as an attack on the game (it’s a fun concept and has awesome players and a very dedicated head staffer), just something that kind of sucks when I see it happen (and this isn’t the first or second MU I’ve seen it happen on).
Playing on a game where staff ardently vows to the player base that their entire goal is to prevent gatekeeping, waiting for weeks while all of staff takes a break at the same time grinding plot to a halt leaving the players to pick up the slack and run a bunch of open events involving everyone and being inclusive, and then have staff come back and immediately launch a ton of events that are all “closed” to very small groups of seemingly the same few players again.
It’s not gatekeeping I guess if you’re the ones inside?
@Pavel said in How to mitigate Bleed (player vs character emotional response):
Naturally, I agree. I think, though, that in MUing, that has to come from the player themselves rather than something that could or should be expected from the game runners.
Honestly I think just providing info about it and normalizing it as something that happens is probably enough.
I think we saw enough in this thread to basically come to the conclusion of “people have this on a spectrum, but a lot of times people say it is bad”. And so people sometimes think that they are “wrong” or “bad” for feeling it, or that it somehow makes them different.
Speaking from my example, until I was at a LARP and someone actually SAID this to me at the first workshop it was introduced to me at, it never occurred to me that it was a thing at all. But once they said it it all made sense right away. So that would be my best thought - put throw up an article or a brief paragraph somewhere. Maybe along with suggestions like “ICA=ICC” and “Ask for consent before RPing intimacy”, except this guideline is more self-directed than the others.
So it’s not like we need to have staff actually DO anything to help**. But it would be nice to just throw up an article or something that references it. I like how on the Ares games at least there are links to articles that talk about what good RP is, how give and take works, etc. Something like that would be good.
** I mention this because a few people called this out. LARPs actually will frequently have paid mental health professionals on-site to help with any of these things that come up during the game or after. I am NOT saying that’s anywhere close to what is needed here.
@eddie said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
I invested those things into the person I was playing opposite of only to have them pit me against another player to compete for their attention. Not just the intimate rp, but story we had spent hours developing and writing out. It all got thrown away in an instant, and the assets I invested with walked away with no ROI because I refused to compete, on an OOC level, with another player for something I felt I had earned and put the time into to warrant.
Did you really just use the term ROI when talking about spending time building a story with someone?
I apologize for dropping off the thread a bit, but I do want to comment that what a few folks said earlier is really the key to the conversation.
Bleed and Alibi are both good parts of role playing. With a lot of things, it’s the excess of one (or the other) that can be an issue, and how we handle them.
To use the example of a movie, if I go and watch Beaches and have myself a good old cry during the movie, and then go on with my life, that’s ok. If I keep crying for three days after, then that’s a problem.
Do I expect to cry or have tears when I am in an intense scene on a LARP or on a MU? Yes, I do. Should I be crying next week when thinking about that scene? Probably not.
So having a good mechanism for moving past that is part of what I was referencing when we talk about mitigating it. Just like there are workshops at the start of a LARP to talk about how making bad IC decisions lead to fun RP, there are also some afterwards to talk about how to prevent Bleed once you leave. And then there is DROP, which is a whole other issue (but I imagine one that doesn’t come up much with MUing unless a game ends or you quit for some reason.).
So much this. The past few years have exacerbated it, too. Out of sight, out of mind, and it contributes to the spiral.
One of my 2023 resolutions is to go through and try to rekindle any that have kind of flamed out in the past three years that may be attributable to this. I think it’s going to be hard, but worthwhile in the end.
@Pyrephox That’s a VERY effective tactic, actually, and kind of goes along with what I mentioned about Alibi.
A lot of times players might use a LARP character to get some kind of catharsis about things they went through but on the other side, and it lets them work out some feelings. Particularly if they fail.
That’s, I think, one of the main things that separates the Nordic style of LARPing from conventional RP (like combat LARPing or more common RP) - there seems to be a lot more willingness or even emphasis on losing. I have a philosophy that I teach when I am doing a workshop that losing can lead to better RP, and one bit of guidance that I give players is “If your character is presented with a choice and you as a player know one is the wiser one, pick the other choice and have some fun with it”.
I haven’t had enough experience with MUing to draw any kind of real conclusion, so take it with a grain of salt, but it SEEMS to me like there is a greater emphasis on winning and characters coming out on top (as you mentioned) here. Which isn’t surprising because your character winning is a core element of almost all RPGs. It’s not a BAD thing, per se. We all want to be the heroes of our own stories.
But what I think about is that if we want to win, we have to succeed at various things and other players may be opposed. If we want to LOSE, we can make sure we lose on our own, and failure is more often guaranteed.
So (for example) if you are in a LARP set in high school and you want the catharsis of overcoming a bully, don’t play an analogue of yourself and hope to overcome the bully. Play the bully and make sure that someone else’s analogue of yourself overcomes YOU. You’d be amazed how well THAT leads to a Golden Moment or something like that where it helps you release your pent-up inner emotions.
(Yes, I realize this is a direct counter/parallel point to what you said about MUshers trying to have their characters have a “better” life than their players. I’ve found that having your characters have a WORSE life than their players can help exorcise negative feelings through proxy.)
@icanbeyourmuse said in How to mitigate Bleed (player vs character emotional response):
. It is when they let it cause them to lash out at/get overly attached to the player(s) involved that it is bad.
This is one of the biggest issue with bleed. You see it a lot if there is a romance plot where one player reads a bit too much into the RP from the other or starts to cultivate RL feelings that aren’t necessarily reciprocated. One player has a lot of Alibi, one player has a lot of Bleed, and it causes MAJOR issues.
It’s ok to feel sad if a character dies. It’s ok to cry RL and mourn them. There’s a certain catharsis that happens (another phrase we use is Golden Moment when something you RP lets you outpour emotions that you have built up from RL stuff and in a safe way). That’s part of what makes RP in any medium a good and enjoyable exercise.
Like with anything else, it’s only bad in the extremes. But if there is a stigma attached and people don’t know how to process things, it can get messy.
@Roz Yeah, you have it right (at least in this context).
Trying to OOCly manipulate things for your IC benefit is being a crappy player.
Sitting at home RL crying in your room because you lost an IC election is Bleed.
ICly exposing an embarrassing secret about the person you are campaigning against that is going to ruin their IC life but win you the election and not feeling bad about it is Alibi.
@BloodAngel The problem is that some of the skills that make someone a good storyteller or role player (knowing how to evoke an emotional response in someone) are the same ones that can be used to manipulate someone OOCly as well.
So at least in the communities I run in, you can end up with a Magnificent Bastard who is adored by many because they are REALLY EFFING GOOD at what they do, and are also really good at hiding who they really are from the people they are not being kind to.
Which is in some respects what it sounds like here - someone good at running scenes is “popular”, which makes criticism of them harder or not as impactful.
It’s always intimidating to try to bring up an accusation against someone who is perceived to have a lot of friends. Especially if the victim is going to be expected to bring receipts and justifications, because you will often get a cascade of “Well he was always perfectly nice to me” to counter balance what the victim is going through. Just because someone is nice to you doesn’t mean they aren’t a rat bastard to someone else.
@Roz Yes, so much this!
I think the idea of talking up front about bleed is to do exactly that - destigmatize it. Because I think people are (generally) pretty good at REALIZING that they are having bleed, but often think it’s a reflection on them and their mental state, and that it is something bad. It’s not.
If you are not experiencing at least SOME emotional reaction to RP you are doing, then in some respects what is the purpose of it? The same way we go to see certain movies and we expect to get “tugged in the feels”.
And yeah, you more or less nailed the purpose of alibi. It might not be the best term since it’s general use implies an intentional evasion of accountability - I prefer to think of it like “detachment” but even that is a charged word.
Like everything else in the world, moderation here is the thing. If you are having too much bleed, or too much alibi, then you are likely adversely impacting your own mental state or those of others.
In the LARP community there are generally safety precautions put into place - hand signals to indicate that a scene is becoming “too emotional” that can signal to other players to tone it down (example: Someone is screaming at me ICly because I did a bad job with something, and it reaches a point where I am feeling strong feelings about, so I could use a gesture to tell them to scream less to lower the temperature OR a different signal to say stop) as well as general guidance to check in as well. In that same example, the screamer could do a signal and I could respond with another one that says “Hell yeah scream at me more”.
But that’s also because there is not an easy escape route for an intense scene when you are face to face in person. On a MUSH, I can just get up and walk away from the keyboard to end the interaction and deal with it my own way.
There also tends to be a lot more OOC communication I think in LARPing than I’ve seen even on consent based MUSHes. I don’t necessarily think that’s a problem, but it’s an interesting dichotomy.
@BloodAngel In the LARP community, we do something called “flagging” before a LARP in which we circulate the info about the players ahead of time and generally ask for people to weigh in with one of three flags:
Yellow Flag - I don’t believe this person is generally unsafe, but I don’t want to interact with this person (Staff can make sure that there are no ties between the two and do their best to avoid even secondary connections)
Orange Flag - I don’t believe this person is generally unsafe, but I will not play the game if that person is there. (In cases like this, as the players are pulled in to fill the slots from the applicant pool whichever gets in first gets in)
Red Flag - This person is unsafe to play with. (Investigation to determine whether the person should not be allowed to play.)
No receipts are ever asked for the first two, and no receipts are required for the last one, although a brief explanation helps so they can determine how to move forward. There are cases from time to time where someone will false red flag someone, but those are very few and far between and word of that gets around. If someone takes the step to Red Flag someone, they are usually on point and often for reasons they don’t want to relive.
The sorts of people who need to get Red Flagged are also generally the sort of people who are VERY good at manipulating, and so they will have counter receipts anyway and sometimes those are more damaging than the initial offense. So receipts are a very tricky subject.
Caveat: I’m newish to the MUSHing community but have a longer history of LARPing, so my perspective is slightly different, but I am curious how MUSHes take steps to handle bleed.
https://nordiclarp.org/2015/03/02/bleed-the-spillover-between-player-and-character/
Bleed is a really big topic in the LARP community to the point where most standalone LARPs will have workshops sessions before and after focused on it (and to a lesser extent Alibi). Nutshell version is that Bleed is when a player feels the emotions of the character (and vice versa), whereas Alibi is the other side of that axis (it’s the CHARACTER’S actions, not the PLAYER’S actions, so don’t take it personally!).
In my somewhat limited MUSHing experience I’ve seen that both of these can go way stronger on MUSHers than in LARPs. And I get why that might be. Bleed is easier when characters are around long and interact more, Alibi when folks are separated by keyboards and not seeing faces and reactions, etc.
Just curious if any games out there have taken some measures to education their players about bleed and how to mitigate it. I’ve been RPing for YEARS and can remember back in my junior high school days a time when a friend of mine got super pissed at another friend over an action they took in a D&D game and that lasted weeks, but I had never seen the term articulated and explored in such a way until I encountered it in LARPing a few years back, and I think it was incredibly helpful to see actually written out.