@Apos said:
The Isles of Inferna really aren’t that warm. Pretty mild, actually, depending on the season. Nice sea-breeze.

sounds like a great place for cultivating mangos to make mango vodka

@Apos

begging people to at least try a single keyword search in the extensive documentation of the thing they’re always asking about

@Kestrel said in MU Peeves Thread:

I think it’s a good rule. It prevents a couple things simultaneously:

1. Newbies being hounded out the gate for TS
2. The game turning into a “sex game” because people join just for that and ignore everything else. A 2 week pause means you need to focus some on story first.

it’s not going to prevent either of those things, and people having shippy RP early isn’t what turns a game into a sex game.

plus now if someone even just mixes up dates and the other person gets super toxic on them, there is leverage hanging over them to not report bad behavior to staff.

That said, maybe I’m just prude, but I can’t help but victim blame Pat’s e-bedmates a little. Because you couldn’t be deceived about someone being on the game for under two weeks if you yourself were waiting at least two weeks to get to know another player/character before you jump to TS.

In terms of outrage if not enforcement, the spirit of the rule matters a little more than me than the rule itself. And idk guys. Like how indiscriminate are you being that you manage to get “tricked” by someone running through half the who list in half a month? When are you finding enough time for proper introductory scenes and flirting in between? For this to work, a substantial portion of the playerbase would already have to be treating the game like an orgy.

yeeeeeeah this all just sounds slut-shamey. you’re literally like “well if you hadn’t been so slutty to jump into TS so fast, you wouldn’t have gotten lied to.”

it’s super sketch and not okay to lie about anything to get TS

but simultaneously

@howyadoin said in MU Peeves Thread:

There is a prohibition on relationship roleplay with characters that have been in the game for less than two weeks. The rule applies even to returning players playing a new character.

this is a weird rule for a game to have

@Jennkryst said in Arx:

@Roz said in Arx:

populace had forgotten a lot of stuff

I think the neatest thing is that it wasn’t just forgetting about magic and history, but you could come down with a bit of amnesia, which my understanding is the whole reason for the journals, so you could write little reminders for yourself in case you forgot (and also so if/when you dropped the character and someone else picked them up, they obviously had a case of the forgets and the journals are right there to remind them of things)

i don’t think that was the thematic reason for the journals; the practice existed long before the Big Plot Point of Forgetting. it was a religious practice to honor wisdom and knowledge and such.

but also super duper useful for picking up a roster who had been played before, yeah.

@Juniper we don’t really know the big Arx 2 selling points at this point, since it hasn’t opened yet and apos hasn’t publicized details at this point.

but for the original arx, i’d say the biggest selling point was the very extensive lore and the sense of mystery in exploring it. the setting was built in such a way that ignorance was baked into the theme: there were magical reasons the populace had forgotten a lot of stuff about magic and their land’s history, so there was a very deep sense of discovery that i think was pretty addictive for a lot of people. and the really rich lore meant that the world felt very real, and thus very rich and rewarding to play in.

that was my personal favorite part of it, at least!

@KarmaBum said in Age Verification & Games:

He’s aware of MUSHing, has seen me do it, has even chatted with me and brainstormed a few times, but he’s not going to join a hobby full of middle-aged women pretending to be sexy vampires.

the contempt is dripping off your words

While I think our janky reliance on telnet is definitely a barrier to entry, my take is just that young people aren’t joining 'cause this just isn’t fun. If you were a young person, would YOU find any of this interesting or fun? Even those of us in the hobby lament that there’s shit-all for fun new games right now.

if the hobby weren’t at all fun for anyone, it would just die. it’s not dead. because people keep having fun

i think the biggest barrier to MU*s in terms of younger generation is just ignorance. they don’t know it’s around as a medium

@bear_necessities said in Staff Bits Linking Handles:

My two cents? If you don’t have a handle, you have something to hide, and my brows immediately raise. I feel that way about everyone, players or admin, but I give players way more grace because I know not everyone wants to slap their handle on right out of the gate and sometimes it’s nice to have a haven alt.

okay while i think what’s going on specifically on NP with staffers apparently being super weird about their own alts and pretend-interacting with them and stuff is very weird and offputting.

but i think the idea that someone is immediately sus for simply preferring privacy is — not it. the “what do you have to hide” argument about people’s right to privacy is consistently a bad one.

@bear_necessities said in MU Peeves Thread:

@helvetica what’s even worse IMO is that the staff alt will submit jobs under their alt and then they will answer themselves in said job as the staff bit. Which is just… lol crazy IMO

okay THAT is fucking WILD. what the hell

yeah, especially if the game setting is such that there can be a lot of ICly cycling in and out, people can get tired of doing intro type scenes all the time. but it’s good that folks are still trying to loop new PCs into plots.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

Possibly a new peeve of mine (I’m still mulling it over and trying to decide whether it irritates me or not):

When a player is trying to do certain scenes to help them establish a new character and get used to playing that character and speaking in that voice, but others are trying to handwave that stuff and just operate as though the character has always been around and has in depth IC knowledge of current events with no actual scenes to back that up.

has the PC always been around ICly? because i feel like that’s an important point. if the PC literally just moved to the place or something, then wouldn’t they just respond accordingly IC that they just got there?

but if they’ve been in the place ICly off-cam, then it makes sense for other PCs to treat them that way.

@Jennkryst said in MU Peeves Thread:

@helvetica said in MU Peeves Thread:

Is raising a skill mid-scene really that rampant of a problem that we really need to twist ourselves into knots over this? Like, do people do this for real or is this some mythologized outlier situation? Rather than preemptively punish everyone for one theoretical idiot, why not simply toss out that idiot if and when this occurs?

I gotta tell you, I was just in a scene rolling quite possibly my highest skill the entire time… and I still (hilariously, in a fun way) got my ass kicked by the dice. Specifically, basically a huge chicken attacked my ass. You can raise a skill all you want. It’s no guarantee.

Followup question - if a game makes it so you can only raise things via +job… do staffers processing those jobs also have to make sure you’re not doing any RP before raising stuff, lest THE DIRTY CHEATING happen, or whatever?

well i for one also hate XP spends only being allowed to happen via job. like if it’s because of code limitations or whatnot, i get it. but the sort of, like — staff has to approve each and every job because players can’t be trusted to spend XP even when those spends meat the mechanical requirements? hate it. (but i’m a hater.)

@howyadoin said in MU Peeves Thread:

If it wasn’t for the mid-scene “oh shit!” skill raise, my XP would never be spent.

this is honestly incredibly valid and i think probably something that is also forgotten. people can be RPing towards a thing and forget to hit spend until they’re reminded of the XP impact. which isn’t even people trying to cheese the system; it’s that people are naturally most reminded of the system when it’s the most relevant to them.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

Wouldn’t the easiest way to avoid mid-scene advancement be to keep the commands to advance only in one specific OOC room on the grid? An XP Room.

this is what got suggested up-thread and my god i hate this too. this feels like SUCH an overcorrection to a fringe issue.

tbh i just can’t bring myself to care that much about mid-scene skill raises. like, it’s not like they’re sneaking it for free, they’re still spending the xp. they’ve presumably been working on the skill, either on-cam or off. who’s to say that mid-swing isn’t when they break the arbitrary, artificial threshold of skill level 3 to 4 in swording?

i know there were absolutely mid-scene skill raises happening plenty on arx and i think it just wasn’t a big deal in the end. (although a vague memory of someone asking for a mid-scene train to make the cost cheaper was p funny.)

@Trashcan 5 weeks is at least more generous than i’ve seen elsewhere. i’ll just say that i’ve seen the cap hit people who are being actively engaged in the game and RPing and just sometimes lose track of how much XP they have. and i just think preventing those folks from missing out is worth the potential for some occasional cheesiness.

@junipersky Folks who prefer cooldowns on XP spends and caps to unspent XP tend to cite instances where a PC has spend a ton of XP all at once, to go from not having a skill to being an expert, particularly if the timing was particularly convenient, i.e., a situation arose where the skill would be useful so they spend their hoard of XP to suddenly be good at it. Some folks find this immersion breaking and obnoxious to deal with.

But I just can’t really bring myself to find it a compelling argument, particularly when weighed against the cons that happens: people getting behind where their PC could be due to entirely OOC reasons. Those reasons could be medical (very easy to forget for some ADHD folks), RL emergencies happening, even normal stuff like vacation. I just don’t think it’s fun, nice, or kind to turn this into a game of OOC homework just because of some potential edge cases that – aren’t really a practical problem other than temporarily bugging some people.

And you’d have the exact same impact from someone spending their XP regularly on raising a skill and just not really mentioning it/RPing it. It will look the exact same as them spending the XP all at once. Or they’re just not someone you know and RP with! Or sometimes someone IS RPing about it, but they miss a weekly XP spend cutoff, and then they lose out on that week of OOC progress even though it’s an active part of their story.

(And if the impact of raising skills is statistically negligible, as it can be in some systems…then it also doesn’t matter if someone raises it a bunch at once. If the numbers don’t matter one way, they don’t matter the other.)

i don’t want to be an asshole in the constructive space that brought the topic to mind, but omg i hate xp caps and cooldowns sooooooooooooooo much. they drive me nuts. the players are already limited by the rate of xp gain. all of the things that bother people about big xp dumps (a PC going from 0 to 100 in a skill in an instant) will still happen just from — PCs not talking about something on their sheet that wasn’t relevant in their scenes before.

sorry to anyone who was being perfectly pleasant and polite about this today lmao. I’M BEING PETTY. i just hate caps and cooldowns.

(to be clear: by xp caps i mean a cap on how much unspent xp you can bank, not overall game limits on how much xp a pc can spend total. and by xp cooldowns i mean being able to only spend a certain amount of xp within a given timeframe, no matter how much you have banked.)

@Ominous when i staffed on a mutant/superpowers game with freeform powers, we had no system. there was no dice and no rolling. there was no book. powers were defined by writing them out and defining whatever limits needed to be defined for that power, with the overall power level of the game just being controlled by the humans doing approvals.

as someone who played and staffed on an x-men-derived, OC-heavy game with freeform powers for years back in the day…

…i wouldn’t want to go back to appstaffing those lol. it got so exhausting defining limits. i think i’d like SOME sort of system framework nowadays.

@Kestrel said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

@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.

i don’t think this is really happening, though. people still remember. it’s just that now we don’t have the references to actually point to for accuracy.