There’s no joy to be got in posting over there. A known bad actor with a thread hundreds of posts long came in spewing her bullshit and they not only treated it credulously but started making up narratives that could paint others in a negative light.
That site is the grease trap at the bottom of the MU* community. Everyone who is not a complete piece of shit has moved, and posting there is just for that clown show to pick apart in a safe space for them.
simplications if you’re reading this:
No hard feelings. I felt awful that you got banned. If I’d read what I wrote from the perspective you had, I would have wanted to scream at me too.
I didn’t really understand what I was getting involved in. I’m not gonna say y’all over here are nice, but you don’t seem like you have malice.
Whenever I hear that awful people like Macha have friends I just wonder what kind of person stays in the orbit of someone like that. Ghost answers that question. Imagine being a simp for Macha.
lol set the record straight to the five people that still use MSB
I don’t think anyone here wants to play a bigot or have bigotry-related RP. I do think there is a meaningful difference between This is the real 1920s with everything that means but we’re not going to have themes of bigotry in scenes and This is a different 1920s where bigotry has been solved. That distinction is going to be important for some groups of players (either way).
@RedShoes said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
The game’s goal right now is to focus on the Time Jump in to the future, and that’s what we ultimately hope to keep the game’s direction entirely aimed toward.
lol this absolute narcissist shit right here. Kind of had to expect it since we had an actual flying monkey show up in real-time in a thread about a missing stair. It’s got to be wild being on the inside of a cliche and imagining you’re going to gaslight an entire forum full of people with finely tuned bullshit detectors.
I really like that you laid out a narrow focus for the themes and tone you want in the Thematic Integrity section. Nothing takes me out of the gritty futuristic economic horror or whatnot faster than getting a message delivered by Fluffles the Rainbow Colored Corgi.
I think it’s impossible to approach this issue without first deciding what you want to incentivize, most importantly whether you want to see generalist or specialist characters. The mechanical solutions for each are going to be complete opposites.
@Roz said in ETO Drama Fork:
@shit-piss-love You can find all the context starting here! It was a wild conversation spanning many pages, but it was at least a contained conversation.
What I needed in my life today was a half dozen full on belly chuckles and this delivered, thank you.
edit: I had almost stopped at him trying to shame people for having boundaries with “Mind you, you have to soft verify you’re over 18 to play on this MUSH.” and I am glad I didn’t because it just got better and better. Don’t you love it when you can smell someone’s belief structure through the internet?
double edit: Holy shit I need to find a way to work “I wouldn’t have to mainsplain if ya’ll would stop being wrong about the facts.” into my future conversations.
I got the bug to work on a new Evennia MUSH project. Help me workshop some ideas. I’ve got two that are fleshed out enough for elevator pitches at the moment. Would love any feedback.
Do either of these sound like things you would want to play? What questions do these pitches inspire? Do these get your creative juices flowing? What kind of characters could you see yourself playing? Any and all thoughts are welcome.
=======
Ten Thousand Burning Stars
A Sci-Fi Epic About Identity and The Use of Power
A massive starship drifts through interstellar space until it is caught in the event horizon of a lonely sun. Light and warmth touch the hull for the first time in untold millenia, and it comes alive in fits and starts. A handful of ancient stasis pods disgorge their occupants, shivering and afraid. They have no names. No histories. No understanding of the labyrinthine vessel that is their new birthright.
Inspired in part by Xenophon’s tale of the Ten Thousand, this is a science fiction game about building a community from nothing. Of forging trust between strangers and working together to overcome even stranger opposition. And of how struggles for power test the strongest bonds to the point of breaking.
Unfolding in distinct seasons each with their own theme and focus, PCs will play starfarers that struggle constantly with concepts of Identity. Their own, surely, but also those of the communities they form. And, ultimately, that of the transformative force that is The Ship. A rising power that cannot help but alter the fates of the worlds lying in its path.
Touchstones: The Foundation series, Farscape, Event Horizon, Dune
=======
Liberty
A Transgressive Inversion of Lords and Ladies Genre
A game of political intrigue in a fantasy realm where the corrupt domination of the ruling class has set a course toward events mirroring the French Revolution. Rather than taking on the roles of the society’s noble movers and shakers enforcing the cultural hegemony, PCs are instead limited to roles that place them at odds with the prevailing social order; lower classes, criminals, members of oppressed groups and the very few with a little bit of legitimate power that are trying to walk the line between duty and compassion.
This game is about Punching Up. It is about hopeful people trying to shape the future into something less hopeless and it is about angry people taking vengeance upon those who have kept them in bondage. Lords and Ladies are primarily antagonists, the religious orders are bulwarks of ignorance, and the aftermath of a devastating war has left a generation of haunted soldiers standing apart from civilization.
There are other games that offer an escapist experience of historical fantasy roleplay in a world that subscribes to our modern sensibilities. This game’s escapism is about the spilled blood, fire, and ruthless commitment that it might take to make such a world.
Touchstones: The Handmaid’s Tale, Black Sails, Turn: Washington’s Spies, The Assassin’s Creed franchise
@Testament said in What Makes a Healthy Community and How to Deal When it Isn't:
@Mourne I get what you’re sometimes, but I think you need to have a perception of what situation you’re walking into where you need to consider where civility or emotion is the route one should be going with.
Right. I want to be civil around people in my safe spaces, people who are vulnerable, or those I know have actual real, visceral reactions to being party to negative emotional charge.
I want Nazi punks to fuck off and I’ll fuck them off with a sharp tongue real fast.
Context matters.
@Zephyr Thanks for coming by to clear that up. We all smelled flying monkey on the people who showed up here to try to do damage control for AoA and it’s nice to have the real scoop.
@Ashen-Shugar There’s an Atlantic-sized gulf between “TCP capture is possible” and “this game server I am playing on has developed a specifically coded feature that enables me to view log data at will”. Like no I’m not concerned someone’s gonna wireshark my TS or whatever but I am concerned that someone’s got a tool running that pipes all synonyms for pee-pee and hoo-ha to their terminal.
Admittedly new to this whole tracking MU* sex pests stuff that y’all seem to be very accustomed to so maybe this is newb question…
Is there a reason these call-out posts don’t include a list of the characters/games these people have played on? Like y’all have varying levels of familiarity with this and other known bad actors that those of us on the outside don’t so maybe it doesn’t register for you, but it would be way easier to make the connections to past experience if I could read who they’ve played and discover it was someone I encountered. That’d really put the pieces together.
@Coin said in MU Peeves Thread:
Yeah. I kinda wish we couldn’t see who was in private scenes or how long ago they posed and whatnot.
The main draw of having a page for ‘active scenes’ is that it tells you ‘there are people rping on this game, look, see?’ Anything beyond that, like knowing how long it’s been since there was activity, or knowing who is in each particular scene feels more detrimental to the collective psychological stability of a game’s playerbase than anything. I could make a case for staff-run events so that new players and guests can see how active staff is in running stuff, but otherwise… it’s just food for the brain weasels.
Okay I felt petty for it so now I’m glad someone else said it.
I have tried to get into Ares games a couple times now and the giant list of private scenes has, and I am using no hyperbole here, taken the wind out of my sails psychologically on both occasions. It makes the game feel impenetrable to me, as if putting all of the RP I’m not involved in on display makes it feel like my part in it is going to be insignificant. I can easily pick apart this in a number of ways that make it feel uncomfortable to complain about, but it’s there.
@GF said in New Concept:
My intent was to say that the selectiveness of the ability to suspend disbelief doesn’t make sense to me, because it’s so easy for me to imagine a world where slavery was a thing without racial animus* that it confuses me why other people can’t. That doesn’t necessarily imply evil to me, just a rigidity of thought that I can’t quite wrap my head around except by thinking of it as an intrusive thought.
NB, Warning, Disclaimer and Plea: I am not saying that games where people are safe from being victimized or re-traumatized or otherwise subject to things they don’t want to be are dumb, bad, or wrong. I am glad there are games that function this way, think they are necessary, and celebrate their existence regardless of my enthusiasm about playing there. My opinions should not be construed as an attack on the existence of such games.
Everything is intersectional. People who are collectively oppressed but in different ways make for the liberal alliances that have improved society over the ages. To take just the 1920s in question as an example the labor advancements of the early 20th century would have got nowhere without the significant involvement of black labor organization finding common cause with Socialists and driving things like the split from the AFL to form the CIO, which had significant effects of pushing those movements away from traditional conservative power structures. Erasing racism undoes such historical reference points. Sure, it could just have happened without the contribution of those black Americans who were motivated by fighting the personal oppression. But it happened the way it did and it’s the kind of story that, to me, makes human existence beautiful despite the darkness.
Our fights for liberation are, to me, the most personally inspiring aspects of our collective history. To snap the fingers and say those struggles didn’t need to happen, or that they happened in the past and it was all wrapped up nice and neat, just takes the arc of society’s development so far from where we are even today that it feels false (to me). There is also something personally troubling to me in the act of defining which forms of oppression have been eradicated and which ones are not. This is why I do not play on Arx, a game where the premise includes eliminating forms of racial and gendered oppression, leaving the caste system and economic horror of the feudal world intact.
These are all just the opinions of someone who defines their life in very political terms. Activism and the study of the philosophy of resistance and has been a big part of my life and the lens I look at the world through is one of critical political and social analysis. I can’t see a world where we’ve “won” because I don’t think such a state is possible. I think the human condition is primarily defined by struggles for agency and liberty and the fight is never-ending. I think those fights are the most important work humanity can engage in and that colors my recreational preferences as well. If I were on a game and met a Dragon-Riding Elf Knight I think the most interesting thing I could do with that has nothing to do with their ear shape or mode of transport. Let me get them in a deep conversation about the morality of the knights serving the feudal class that holds the monopoly on violence in exchange for the privilege of rent farming.
Again, I have no contempt for folks who do just want to enjoy the fantasy of a world without some of humanity’s darkest sides. That organizing a game like that and providing a safe space is a popular enough idea to make for a tenable game is a wonderful thing and a sign that previous struggles have made forward motion. I just want to tell stories of struggle, and I want to explore the human condition, and I want to be able to do so with all I know about what good and evil humans have done.
Walking into that place blind was a trip. Gaslit at light speed. I’m still reeling.
I have a lot of good memories from Arx. And a handful of really great ones that I will treasure forever. I met a non-zero number of treasured RL friends there. It is however impossible to savor that nostalgia for more than a minute or two before a mountain of frustrating, disappointing, and sad experiences ruin the after-taste. So I guess news of its death leaves me feeling like pouring one out for my homies who moved on before I did, one for those I moved on from, and one last for the messy, murky spectacle itself; which occasionally approached the sublime.
I’ve never played in a WoD MU* but I spent MANY years running oWoD LARPs. This saved me from most, but not all of the worst sex-related shit that haunts the aesthetic. Like do what you folks want as long as it’s enthusiastically consensual but I’m gonna go run another scene and you can just let me know how it turns out later.
In a MU* context tho this actually sounds kind of hilarious. I’m the wrong ST for that though. You’re gonna end up with a gang of hunters coming through the windows just when you finally got the goat lubed up.
edit: the goat is a shifter too and has a safe bleat. don’t @ me