My general guide for Not Being Creepy On Games, which is by no means inclusive, but will catch…at least 80 percent of basic creepiness:

1. Be honest and straightforward about what sort of play you are looking for. There’s nothing wrong with being there primarily for the TS OR primarily for the combat OR whatever, but:

2. Accept without complaint or attempt to ‘win someone over’ when someone is not interested in the RP that you want.

3. Do not solicit real life details from other players. If they want you to know, they’ll volunteer it.

4. Do not share more than basic RL details to anyone who has not specifically asked. Freely shareable details may include the general line of work you’re in, what region of what country you live in, or the sort of hobbies you would tell your grandmother about. Details that no one needs to know unless they’ve specifically asked and you feel truly comfortable sharing with them may include but not be limited to: your address, your real name, pictures of any part of your body, your kinks, your salary, and any hobbies that you would not be comfortable explaining to a ten year old in front of their loving parents who are also holding shotguns.

5. No is a complete sentence. If someone says that they DO NOT want to do a thing, no matter what that thing is, then they do not have explain themselves and you should not try to persuade them to do the thing. That includes ‘talking to you’ or ‘playing with you’.

6. If someone says “Stop”, OOC, then stop. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. If someone says “Stop”, IC, then stop, and make sure OOC that they are enthusiastic (not just ‘will tolerate’) about the direction a scene is going in, and let them know that if the scene is not fun for them at any time, you can absolutely do something different or end it without any sort of argument or retribution. Then follow through with that.

7. If an IC event is going to involve harming, humiliating, dominating, punishing, or otherwise doing something painful to another character, check in proactively with the player, and work out boundaries for the scene OOC. This doesn’t have to mean planning out every moment, but you want to establish early and often that communication is good, and that just because someone’s PC is on the bottom of the IC event, it doesn’t mean you’re trying to harm or punish the player. It’s a game. Everyone should have fun.

8. Remember: Nobody on a game owes you anything. Not other players. Not staff. They don’t owe you scenes, or benefits, or specific relationships. No, even if it is written into character backgrounds - it’s a game, and people change. If someone doesn’t scene with you for a while, don’t assume that it’s because they’re avoiding you, or they hate you, or because they’ve been stolen away by that TS hog over there. Usually, it has nothing to do with you, but if you throw a tantrum over it, it WILL. And also, you will be creepy.

9. Helping a new player is not an exchange. Do not do it if you think you’re going to “get something” out of it, or that the new player’s character is going to owe something to yours. Especially do not page new players to see if their character is available for relationships for your desires - and if it is not, do not advise them on how they ‘should’ change their character so it is.

10. Comments on PBs or descs should be family friendly. Again, imagine the ten year old and the parents with shotguns. Do not volunteer the various sexual things you desperately want to do to the actor whose face a character has - or anything you’ve done to your self while looking at a gallery picture or desc. Ten year old. Shotguns. Don’t.

Hey all,

Putting my mod hat on for a moment. After talking with the rest of the mod team, we’d like to ask that you not include screenshots or links from MSB in this thread, or use this thread as a method to encourage, cheer, or organize action towards the other board. We know that people are sore about what happened, and this remains a place to vent about those events, but not to create or continue an atmosphere of cross-board drama. Thank you all!

As always, please feel free to discuss this decision in the discussion thread.

I wish I could get into something. There are several games that are, theoretically, up my alley, run by people I like who do things I enjoy.

But just can’t muster the energy. I feel bad, because I want to play with people and I have fun. But just nothing sticks to me right now. Hoping that if I don’t force it, I’ll rediscover my mojo at some point.

Another random thought:

PCs should not be at the highest levels of power. There are a few reasons for this, mostly related to the nature of players.

1. The people who most want to be “in charge” of other PCs are generally not the people you actually want to have that power. And often, they want it as an achievement…and once they get it, they disappear.
2. If your game relies on themes (like, say, conflict between factions or internal societal tensions) then you should not rely on PCs to enforce those as leaders. Most players won’t enforce theme, and the ones who do often end up burning out and miserable because they’re thrust in a position of “fun police” that isn’t actually very fun (ask me how I know).
3. “Good” leadership is actually not great for the game part of the game. Leaders who try to make friends, decrease tensions, and set up long-term successes push things towards stagnation. PC leaders who lean into creating thematically-appropriate conflict often catch whole loads of shit from other players. NPC leaders only have to make decisions that are aimed at making the game fun/exciting/tense for everyone - PC leaders often make decisions based on what they feel will make other players like them, or just get off their back.
4. Likewise, absent or rapidly rotating leadership makes it hard for players to have continuity of play, and PC leadership positions usually exist in a state of either functionally absent or flipping through PC leaders like a rolodex as new people show up, burn out, leave.

foksthery said in MU Peeves Thread:

@bear_necessities your friend is a fucking gaslighter who was really weird to me elseMU to the point where being on the same game as them made me super anxious and I was doing my best to respect their boundaries and drove myself batty. I should have left on my own. That was on me. You were right to boot me. No quarrel there.

I’ve removed the ‘at’ for foksthery because she’s said she’s not reading the forum anymore, and it doesn’t seem fair to ping her.

However, by context, it’s pretty clear that she’s referring to me, here. Because the previous incident of me being “really weird” and “gaslighting” her is on MSB, I’m going to summarize it here, in case those things go away from MSB at some point. You can find the details - including quotes of logs - on MSB if you care to.

The previous game was The Network. I was playing a character with wings, her character indicated that she was going to take his feathers without permission to put in her pillows. I OOCly mentioned that I found that a bit creepy, she said she didn’t care, her character was doing it, and I just decided not to argue about it. Later, a couple of people were making jokes about stealing my character’s feathers, and I asked people to stop - I freely admit it’s a stupid thing to get weirded out about, but it just hit me wrong and I didn’t want it to be a running joke. She said something about not realizing it upset me, I pointed out that I’d mentioned that in the scene.

She paged me with this big, anxious apology, and followed up with something like, by the way, don’t ever call my character ‘exotic’ again. Then vagueposted on MSB about it. Problem was, I’d never done that - and it being an Ares game, I had the logs to prove it. She tried to backpedal about how it wasn’t about me, so I pointed out that there’s no logs backing up the idea that anyone had done so. At which point she broke down, apologized (almost exactly like her apology earlier in this thread) and I figured it was over.

Later game, Santa Rosalia, I realized she was on the game. I had advertised for a play group I was putting together, and she signed up. I reached out to her, let her know who I was (I don’t have an Ares handle), and that I really prefer not to run anything for her or play with her. She was very understanding, and we avoided each other from then on. I gave a head’s up to staff so that they wouldn’t put us in any GMed scenes together if it could be avoided. I genuinely thought that was the end of it, and didn’t much think about her after that.

So, that’s the story, as far as I know and understand it. Whether I’m manipulative or a gaslighter, I guess I leave to everyone else to decide.

I’ll also say that you really do have to separate out two concepts:

In-character conflict, which may be between player characters

and

Player vs player conflict, where the PCs are mainly proxies for beating ‘the other guy’ on an ooc level.

I’ve had far more rich, rewarding, and intense conflict and competition between characters when there is no OOC masque, when players OOCly communicate about stakes, outcomes, desires, than when that conflict is treated as a competition between players. Like, I’ve had intrigue and espionage plots/scenes that could only happen BECAUSE we were talking OOC and cool with things happening. Also, being able to chat with people OOC about how we see this conflict helps me identify at a much earlier stage if this is a player who can handle conflict, or who it’s just not going to be fun trying to have these sorts of scenes with.

A secondary issue is something I learned as a newbie GM and which has never steered me wrong in the days since: “You can’t solve an OOC problem with an IC solution.” If the problem is “this player is playing their character in a way that makes the game unfun for other people”, then punishing/beating up/demoting/killing their character is never the solution. Having an adult conversation with them OOC about the effect their play is having on others’ fun is, and if that conversation doesn’t go well, then removing them from the game is.

Killing someone’s character because you’re OOCly annoyed with the player is one of the ways PvP gets real toxic, real fast. It’s not ‘policing the community’, it’s just taking your frustration out on someone who you usually know that you can beat and have often taken every measure to make sure that fight is as one-sided and humiliating as possible, because you’re there to ‘teach the player a lesson’, not to have fun with them.

I won a writing contest and will be paid for my fiction for the First Time Ever.

I think this thread is valuable as a venting thread, but I also think we should be careful that we’re not encouraging or organizing trolling on the other board from it.

It would honestly be better for everyone if we just left them to…whatever thing they’ve got going on there. With only themselves for company. That’s probably consequences enough.

There’s nothing quite like running a session where every player is engaged in the scene and having fun, even when things don’t go perfectly. Tense IC, chill OOC, and just a whole lot of fun from start to finish. It reminds me why I love to GM.

@Sam-Hyde said in Bannings:

I’ve been a pretty long-time lurker on MSB, logging in occasionally just to see if a new game got advertised (increasingly rare), and I must say that it’s a good thing you had a split. Also the people who make new games tend to get run off for various reasons. Not sure how much of a fan I am of that.

This is something that has concerned me, as well. If I have any ‘hopes’ for this board, it involves the Helping Hands subforum, and that there will be room for people to talk about interesting ideas without having those ideas instantly shot down by people who have very specific ideas of how MU*s ‘should’ work and are all too gleeful to talk about how trying anything else is doomed, DOOMED and will never survive.

It’s something that I’ve heard game designers and potential game designers talk about for years and when people are already considering putting hours and hours of work into something, having a bunch of people all too ready to pour buckets of cold water on any idea that isn’t exactly like five hundred games that have gone before is very discouraging.

And all of those very good comments are the flip-side of the issue:

Players/staff aren’t necessarily GOOD at dealing with these kinds of issues. No one wants to play a game with That Guy who is drooling at the thought of playing a Klansman. Not a lot of people want to play on the game where staff are like “women can’t be anything but mothers and wives because That’s Historically Accurate” (when it never has been). It’s exhausting to try and build something authentic that is actually fun to play, so I don’t honestly blame anyone for saying “I want something that’s got the fun parts and not the unfun parts”.

I just mourn the kind of stories that could be played if more people could be trusted with these kinds of subjects.

I admit, I am a person who wants historically accurate -isms and resistances in historical games. Does that mean I want to see a bunch of racist, sexist, bigoted PCs? No, of course not.

But these societal forces shaped the era and had a lot of impact on the culture, the structure of society, and the pressures that drove people to accomplish amazing and heartbreaking things. When you remove, for example, the fact that suffragettes could be and were tortured and murdered by law enforcement for campaigning for women’s rights, then the courage it took to be a suffragette is diminished. If you’re talking about union-building, I think you have to include the fact that union-busters used racism to try and drive working class groups apart, even if that effort fails in the context of your game. If you’re talking 1920s-30s, it’s a bit repugnant to me to not make it clear that it’s an era when the people who made some of the defining music of the era couldn’t have a drink in the “respectable” clubs they played in. It also helps contrast some of the speakeasys which were integrated and even havens for LGBT folk of the era, etc. The fact that people had to find refuge in criminality because the laws were bigoted and unjust is a huge part of the story of the era.

I just finished reading Last Night at the Telegraph Club (excellent book), and it’s a lesbian coming of age story that could not exist if you took out not just the anti-LGBTQ prejudice of the 40s, but also the harassment and abuse of Chinese immigrants by immigration officials on anti-Communist witchhunts.

Does every game have to include this stuff? No, of course not. It’s your game, make what you have fun with. But there are valid reasons for including major societal pressures that have nothing to do with wanting to abuse other players or PCs by playing a bigoted character.

Valdemar.

Valdemar is really made for MU*s. You’ve got several different kinds of magic powers, Heralds are canonically pretty promiscuous, there’s light lords-n-ladies action, with familiars and Companions and bondbirds you get all the special magical animal friends you can stand, and it can be as adventurous as you want, depending on when in the timeline you set it.

I was 22, I think, and my mom had recently died, so I was sort of–floating, I guess. Looking for something to do, I was hoping to find something online relating to In Nomine, a game I love with all my heart but could never find anyone local to play with.

I found Brass and Steel, an In Nomine MU. I connected on raw telnet, and played on raw telnet for a full year or more, because I didn’t know that “clients” existed. There were only a few players on, but several of them became great friends, and one of them became my best friend, a friendship that has now lasted more than two decades, even though they don’t MU* anymore.

It was a fun game, and still has some of my most fond gaming memories.

@MisterBoring Any deets you can spill on why not? I admit I’m super intrigued by the system, but wasn’t a backer and haven’t done any real dives into the mechanics or theme.

I think that it’s generally a much better system than CoD 1st edition or oWoD. There are some places where I think the ideas were better than the execution, mechanically, but I enjoy the theme and the vibes way more, and even most of the mechanics are an improvement.

A couple of places where CoD 2E stumbles:

1. Investigation sub-system. I’ve seen very, very few people even try to use the Clue system, and when I’ve tried to run using it, I honestly find it badly explained and pretty finicky. I like the IDEA of it: there’s an intent of letting the players guide the investigation, of being able to use a clue you find to mechanically help you out with further inquiries, of your characters’ strengths and weaknesses affecting what they’re good at finding…and all of these are appealing. But again, execution.

2. Doors sub-system. I love the idea of Doors (you’ll read that phrase a lot), but again, the execution. In this case, it’s not necessarily the straight mechanics of it, but more the intent. Doors are intended to be used against NPCs to win favors/concessions over an extended basis. The thing is that very few of the things PCs want from NPCs actually work on that basis. Players, honestly, don’t tend to think that far ahead, so when they want someone to let them in a door, it’s usually three minutes before they have to be somewhere on the other side of that door, so “this will take a week and three attempts to influence the NPC” just doesn’t work. Ironically, it SHOULD work better in a MU*, but few games flesh out important NPCs to the extent that players think about earning favors/concessions from them for the future. I’d suggest taking the concept of Doors (favor for favor, being able to use skills other than social ones for manipulation, leveraging vices and leverage) and cutting it down to something that can be resolved in a scene.

3. Combat declarations. Honestly, this is just a failure by GMs and players to use this system or take it into account when planning things. It’s a SOLID mechanic. But yes, in CoD 2E, you’re supposed to start any combat by having both the PCs and the antagonists (or any other factions involved) declare their win conditions, what they’re trying to ACCOMPLISH with the combat, and if someone gets to it, they win whether the other side is dead/injured or not. It’s a great way to design combats that are more interesting than ‘let’s you and him fight’ and I really wish it was used more often. But the fact that it ISN’T suggests there’s a design flaw there, either in how it operates in situ or how it’s explained to people.

@catzilla If it makes you feel any better, I had the exact same issue. I wanted to set up an original theme Ares game and just could not figure anything out, even the really basic stuff. Tried to go step by step in the tutorial, but didn’t understand what I was doing, and eventually gave up in embarrassment.

@Yam On a colonized planet, the descendants of the colonists bond with genetically engineered, psychic dragons to protect the planet by fighting all-consuming spores from space.

While I vastly prefer 2nd Edition Lost in 90% of everything…the complaints about pledges are absolutely valid.

There’s some good things: bargains with mortals are better in that they serve a specific purpose that mechanically explains HOW they hide you from the Gentry and how that can be useful.

Likewise, Seasonal bargains are better (but badly organized - it is a badly organized book overall, with a lot of weird things hidden throughout).

But I really miss being able to strike mechanically detailed pledges with other characters outside of the few defined bits in the core book. YES, the pledge mechanics were overly complicated and desperately needed some streamlining, but they threw the baby out with the bathwater.

@somasatori Pardon my code ignorance, but it feels like you could use a variation of this to have plot attributes - i.e. someone signs up for Plot 13: The Square Bullet Hole Murders, gets an attribute like square_bullet, and could be eligible to find any of the clues for that plot…but it also might open up things like a plot command that auto-mails everyone who has signed up for that plot, or that lets GMs easily pull up how many people are involved in a given plot (or even plots as a whole, and how many people are involved in, like, 4 plots, if they want to do some quick analysis of how interest/involvement is distributed across the playerbase).

I’m not saying you want to, or that’s even the point, but it’s something that intrigues me, as a way to have a decent understanding of activity levels beyond log-in numbers, and maybe recognize if there are people who might appreciate being drawn in.