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.

@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.

@untitled said in Underage Players:

because I’d be unhappy if I found out my kids were

That right there is the ultimate point. Policing children is the job of the parent, not any game they would seek to join.

Establish rules that state, outright, that the game is for adults, will contain adult themes, etc. If it is revealed from a trustworthy source that there is an underage person, remove them. That is all you can do.

These days, children on these kinds of games are very much the exception. There’s a high barrier to entry and far more free-to-play games around than there were in the early years when a lot of us first started. So don’t stress over it too much.

@kalakh said in Unspeakables: The Politics Thread 2024:

@NotSanni said in Unspeakables: The Politics Thread 2024:

@Kestrel said in Unspeakables: The Politics Thread 2024:

One side is accidentally doing Nazi salutes twice

And the other side suddenly cares now that it’s not their side’s cause du jour doing it

I’m stressed. I’m concerned.

lol “accidentally”

Look, sometimes you just caught up in the moment and invade Poland.

I mean there are currently German tanks pointing towards Poland (maybe even driving through it, I’m not totally caught up on the minutiae of the movements) but it’s not what it looks like.

@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:

I’m always trying to solve for the issue that there seem to be more people who want to be in stories than people who want to run stories.

Hey, if you solve this, can you post it all over the internet? TTRPG groups the world over have been trying to solve this since the 60s, and the best we have is cool ranch Doritos.

On a serious note, I’ve not done it on MU-scale, but I have designed plots (both meta and non-meta) for MU groups, tabletop, published works, etc. @Faraday is correct in that there’s no one size fits all: What works for you and your group won’t work for me and mine. But I can offer some design-related advice:

Start with themes rather than story beats. It’ll feel a little mad-libby at first, but write out something like Tez’s Super Awesome Game is about <genre> with <mood> and <tone>. For myself I’d say “Pavel’s Super Awesome Victorian Vampire Game is about personal horror with dread-filled tension and sardonic nihilism in the face of bleak futility.” Then you take that and expand upon it here and there, while throwing your ideas at trusted people. Not players, but cheerfully underpaid co-authors like Roz. Because:

Don’t write it by yourself. You need editors, critics, and people to tell you that they love you but your idea sucks because… If you keep it inside, (a word document only you ever read counts as inside) it’ll be shit, and you’ll stew in it, and you’ll come to resent it, and then you’ll throw it away only to discover it ten years later in a Dropbox folder…

And always remember that your metaplot isn’t important. A metaplot may be, depending on the game, but the metaplot you have now and the metaplot you end up with when the game closes are not going to be the same. It’s going to break, twist, bend, flip, translate itself into Greek and then Portuguese before finally settling on an Anglo-Sindarin creole. And nobody is going to remember the handful of events that ran long because you had to think things up on the fly, but they will remember slaying the dragon and meeting up at the tavern after for a pint.

ETA: tl;dr: Stop. Collaborate. And Listen.

@MisterBoring 3. People exist outside of staff’s availability, so don’t have the opportunity to join staff events. The metaplot has a thing happen, and it changes the game universally without the input of those unable to participate. This requires either empowering player GMs/DMs/STs to influence the metaplot with their PrPs, or having staff available for larger swathes of time.

@Faraday said in Staff and playable pcs:

Just maintain a healthy balance and most players aren’t going to care

Unfortunately, for every Faraday there’s ten… you can fill in the blank yourself. So for staffers just starting out, “it’s probably best that you just don’t” might be solid advice. Until your players have worked out whether you’re a Faraday or a James Watson, at least.

@Roadspike said in Staff and playable pcs:

I also think that a staffer’s PC should never be “out in front” of a story.

I keep going back and forth on this idea, though I think I agree with it generally. I know it makes me grumpy when staff seem to be hogging the spotlight. But, I also know that our perceptions of things like participation are terrible (in general: studies have shown that men see women as more talkative/participatory than they actually are (Crombie et al., 2003)). So I’m more cognisant of the fact that just because I think staff are participating in the plot a lot more, that doesn’t actually mean that they are.

Additionally, given the limited number of games in any given genre, I’m a lot more forgiving than I used to be about “letting” staff take the lead in a plot run by a different person. It’s not as if there’s a hundred WoD games out there these days, so if you’re staffing on the only V20 game, it’s likely you really like playing V20. So it’s only fair that you get to shine occasionally, too.

Reference

Crombie, G., Pyke, S. W., Silverthorn, N., Jones, A., & Piccinin, S. (2003). Students’ Perceptions of Their Classroom Participation and Instructor as a Function of Gender and Context. The Journal of Higher Education, 74(1), 51–76. https://doi.org/10.1353/jhe.2003.0001

@STD said in MU Peeves Thread:

go the Old Man Henderson route

For those unfamiliar, here is an excellent audio rendition: The Tale Of Old Man Henderson

A. Staff should play on their games. That’s not even optional, they must play on their games. Especially as the game gets larger, they’ll lose touch with the average player’s needs and wants if they’re not down in the dirt with them. (ETA: Specifically staff who make the decisions. Coders can just code, if they really want.)

B. It depends on how staff is organised. If you are the Starfleet staffer, and you have a Starfleet character, then you should have that information publicly available. There are likely other instances, but I can’t think of them off the top of my head.

While I acknowledge the desire for privacy, I think the playerbase’s right to staff transparency is more important.

My problem with backgrounds is that I constantly do the thing where I put all the interesting bits of a character’s life in the background, and leave very little room for interesting stuff to happen on the game. But nobody wants my 125,000 word fan fic of a fallen Ottoman prince-turned-vampire.

@Lemon-Fox The colours themselves are skin dependent, which can be found in the User Settings section (click/tap your picture at the top, then ‘Settings’). But from my limited testing, all the skins seem to have some level of difference between quote and post body.