Obviously, receipts are handy but they’re not a requirement. And I’d (speaking only for myself, though with a polite nod in the direction of that Admin tag) rather not make posting every shred of evidence possible the expectation here.

Client: Well, I’m gay.
Me: Mhm…
Client: And… that’s okay?
Me: slow swivel in chair to look at giant Progress Pride Flag on my wall
Me: slow swivel in chair to look back at client
Client: happy tears

Being a client’s safe space to come out is a gift that keeps on giving.

@Jumpscare said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

That means that since the birth of BMD, no other game has negatively affected MU* players as broadly or as painfully as Star Wars: Age of Alliances.

A board of women, queers, and allies reacting strongly against sexual misconduct and anti-reporting prejudice… Isn’t that how we started in the first place?

For posterity, I present thus:

Tracy is a man and he is a very hansome and manly man.He likes women a lot and women like him too but men think he is compitishion.He has very long brown shiny hair everywhere and a little blue eyes that are mostly green but very hansome anywya.You can tell a lot of things from his eyes.He has a very big bulge in his jeans where the dick would be and it is not a sock because it makes all women almost orgasm with desire.Behind him is a very firm muscled ass that makes you want to slap it and play with it in lots of ways but only if your a women.If you are a man you will die if you touch it because Tracy is strong and very not Gay.If you are a women he winks and smiles at you and thinks you have a nice personality.If you are a man again he frowns at you and it makes you not hit on him or on any women when hes here.He likes lots of women very much and likes very few men but not as boyfriends.And he has a shitr which is nice and blue.I mean shirt sorry.

@hobos said in Bannings:

From what I’ve seen, you are a people with boundless empathy, but you choose who to direct that towards.

Not to really engage in the debate, here, but that’s literally the same as everyone else.

Me. I’m a good thing about mushing.

And this isn’t a throw away joke, or an ego thing, or whatever. But I’ve finally been able to arrive at the conclusion that yes, my RP is good. My events are good. My being present on a game is good. And I’m finally free to feel that I am good enough.

So there. Me. I’m a good thing about mushing.

So obviously it’s a very dark time, horrid things incoming and so forth…

But did anyone actually have The Onion buying Infowars on their 2024 bingo cards?

@Warma-Sheen said in Los Angeles 2043: A Blade Runner MUSH - Discussion:

Just because you can open a game on your own doesn’t mean you should.

You should. It might last, it might not, but at least stuff’s being made even for a moment.

@GF We’re for taco Tuesdays, no-pants Fridays, and the violent and utter overthrow of the capitalistic, white-supremacist patriarchy. And tea.

@CuriousGamer said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:

@Tez There seems to be a few bad actor threads now, would it make sense to put them into their own ‘Bad Actor’ kind of topic at this point? I know there’s been a couple discussions of others in the not too distant past as well.

No. We don’t need a whole section of the forum devoted to talking shit about specific people.

One of the better things I’ve seen to counteract this is what Arx did with leaders and their “voices.” A second-in-command-type person who carried all the same weight as the leader for when said leader was inactive, unattentive, unwilling or unable to deal with you, etc.

Generally, I prefer IC leadership to be a mix of staff and players (players can be the deputy personal private secretary, but the prime minster will always be staff), but if there’s a built-in fuckery-avoidance mechanism like Arx had, I’d be more amenable to player-oriented leadership.

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Strike Systems:

It’s fine to discuss politics.

Frankly, I’m sick of the idea that politics discussion needs or should be allowed a space to happen wherever we go. The internet is fucking infinite (I’m being facetious, but you know what I mean) if you can’t stop talking about political events for five fucking minutes while you’re tabbed over onto the game window you need to pull the hose-o-news out of your ear.

Is political discussion, especially political discussion outside of one’s narrow bubble, important? Absolutely yes, and it should happen frequently and diligently. Should it happen on GarouFuckers By Night or Men in Tights the MU? For all that is sacred, no.

If we expand out from the MUniverse I can recall solo RPing a lot on play by forum games. But that, much like the vignette most recently demonstrated and expanded upon in the Ares system, was… it was sort of like RPing for an audience, rather than RPing solo. Does that make sense, or make it different?

Aside from the above-mentioned writing of vignettes the only time I’ve ever done “solo RP” was… I can’t even remember what game it was, maybe Serenity? It had a space and cargo system, cargo hauling made money, but you only got XP if you were actively posing? I don’t remember the details.

But there I was, elbow deep in a solo flight from one place to another, hauling my mystical space crystals or whatever trying to make an extra spacebuck, posing “Pavel continued to stare blankly out of the main window. Occasionally, he was tempted by a thought, but he was never one to let himself be distracted from his duty.” Etc, etc, etc. I made it a challenge to myself to become as weirdly Douglas Adamsian as I could in my writing style.

@Faraday said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

I don’t think that players should be penalized just for playing with their friends.

Agreed, indeed I’d much rather see some nature of reward or encouragement for the opposite. But at the same time I’d want to mitigate people doing the thing just to get the reward and then leaving the newcomers floundering.

@MisterBoring said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

Wouldn’t that by nature include avoiding interaction with staff, because it’s part of their job as staff to act as a welcome wagon for the game?

Not in my specific instance, since I’m talking specifically about player-led initiatives similar to those I’ve seen in the past – I’m keeping my remarks, generally, about players rather than staff. Though I do believe that staff need to take an active hand in ensuring people are included and, potentially, investigating why they’re being excluded.

@Third-Eye said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

kills a person’s desire to RP broadly and inclusively than turning it into a clock-punch gig

Hey if you could get your quarterly RP KPI report done by the end of the day that’d be greeeeeeat.

@Ashkuri

Well first I want to ensure that it’s clear precisely what I mean when I remark upon a distinction between dislike and not liking, just so as to ensure I’m understood. To me, liking and disliking aren’t two sides to a coin but two ends of a spectrum, with very few people assigned to either end and the vast majority of people in the middle. It’s the middle of that middle that I generally describe as “not liking.” So it’s not people that I dislike, but people for whom I have few (if any) feelings whatsoever, be they old acquaintances or total unknowns. It’s also not a judgement call on the kind of person they are, saints and sinners both sit there in perpetual unexamination.

As to the topic at hand, I go back and forth with my views on it, particularly as my energy levels or general ability to participate waver. I will never say that one owes the entire game’s population anything; however, most games are split in such a way that one is primarily associated with a particular group – vampire or garou, noble families, boarding school houses, people who like using colour codes in their descriptions and those who don’t – and I will argue that one owes a modicum of attention to that group outside of the niche one carves for one’s self. It doesn’t have to be anything arduous, but simply ensuring that newcomers to the group are made welcome, included in a scene or two to introduce them to the game, and so forth. Obviously, it’s not a mandate that everyone must immediately draw in every new fish they see, but if you’ve been in a community for a bit and you see a newcomer or two who haven’t yet found their niche then one might feel behoven to invite them to a scene or two.

That said I would personally avoid any formalised ‘welcome wagon’ team. Purely due to experiences in the past where bad actors have used such a “thankless” and “honoured” position to act badly and draw people in to unhealthy cliques or harems. Formalising the role can also lead to burn out and frustration, especially as we remember that most of us are in our early-to-mid soon-to-be-deads and we don’t have time to sit and work out the roster for who’s sitting at the park gate to welcome the newbies this week.

@MisterBoring I’d think it depends on where the emphasis is in that sentence. If one refuses to RP with people they dislike, that’s fine, but avoiding RP with people they don’t specifically like can make a game feel very unwelcome indeed if it’s the norm.

That said, no individual player should be expected to carry the weight of being the welcome wagon and intake machine.

To sort of follow on from my previous post I’d like to raise a question for the group: Is there a line at which you draw a distinction between “this seems like X” and “oh this outright is X in a new dress”, or is it generally more a vague evolution?