I also come from a WoD background and know that non-consent doesn’t invalidate fade to black, and especially doesn’t allow forcing someone to play through potentially traumatic stuff. So, with regards to “I come from WoD where you’re lucky to have staff even acknowledge you before doing what they want,” I feel like this was a pretty old perspective even 15 years ago. IMO, one thing most successful/decent staff took from places where staff acted with impunity about your character’s consent was to at least check in on certain things. Even just a heads up of, “hey this is likely a combat scene, are you cool with that?” was pretty standard on several games which were non-consent MU*s. Player side, most games had a +warn system. All you’re doing is taking the worst elements of past WoD staffing habits and bringing them into a new generation and setting.

Edit: Also this wasn’t intended to be a reply to helvetica, but the log output from inuki lol.

@Pacha said in MU Peeves Thread:

I always find it a bit creepy when it is clear someone has someone else on watch and they start gushing over them on the channel when they log in, but haven’t even ; waved or said ‘hi’ yet.

It also kind of bums me out if I end up logging in day after day and get tumbleweeds, but there is very clearly a group that are friends and treat each other logging on like the second coming of Jesus or something.

Obviously there is nothing objectively wrong with these behaviours and people can say hi to who they want. But, it is a peeves thread and I am allowed to find the behaviour personally irritating, also!

Seconding this. Sometimes I just need a minute to get my bearings, especially if I’m coming from work, dealing with the kids, trying to settle down myself. We’re no longer in the glomps era. The age of glomp is over, the time of “hey” has come.

I hate my first week of trying to engage people on a new character. It brings me straight back to that feeling like when you switch schools, and on top of that I’ve learned that it takes me more than a handful of poses to find my character’s voice, with the end result that my ancient reptile brain tells me how awful I am while I’m trying to roleplay a social scene.

Edit: Also, I am deeply anxious about asking for RP on a channel. Intellectually I know that if no one responds it’s not a big deal, but ancient reptile brain says that all of them secretly despise me and wish I would go away.

So truly they become HannahBANanna.

I just fully finished a really tough clinical rotation today. I’m not exactly sure why I expected I wouldn’t, but I had a pretty rough time of this whole exit process. For context I worked as a clinical psychology extern at a VA residential facility for homeless veterans who often had substance abuse issues loaded on top of PTSD, depression, anxiety (typically) and serious mental illness (more rarely). Since my emphasis is in trauma, I worked with people who were highly traumatized using primarily cognitive processing therapy, but occasionally prolonged exposure in addition to substance abuse treatment. During my final staff meeting, they did this thing called Thanks & Goodbyes (T’s & G’s) which is usually done with residents graduating from the program.

The thing that got me the most was that I kind of assumed I was a background player, largely unnoticed and just nose-to-the-grindstone working with my patients. I had a large-ish case load and only taught a couple classes (dialectical behavior therapy, and CBT for Substance Use Disorder). It hit me that I kind of internalized this idea that I was separate from the team, so when people started expressing gratitude or talking about how they appreciated this or that about me I had no idea how to hold it and felt extremely awkward in the moment. I also have a history of substance use, and was very grateful to be able to help people who were currently in a material position that was similar to how I’ve lived in the past. A couple of my patients this year relapsed upon release from the program, and at least one of them died as a result of overdose following relapse, so I won’t say I did a perfect A+++ job, but I always did the best I could and advocated hard for everyone. Having been in that world, I know what it’s like to go through the sobriety/relapse cycle, and fall into an old habit that might be beyond your old tolerance.

Anyway, due to a lot of other things in my life (child, spouse, research, work), I generally feel like I don’t have space to hold the kinds of emotions that I need to have about this experience, and I need to get it out somewhere else I fall into bad negative patterns (see above). So, here I am writing about it, I guess.

@thrax said in Numetal/Retromux:

To the playerbase of Newbetal/Retromux

An Apology to the fullest.
It is true The player behind Kahula overstepped a non contact request.

This is really all you have to say. It doesn’t really matter what you do or say to someone, if you’re explicitly hiding your identity to trick someone into interacting with you, it is (imo) bannable. There are some people out there who have completely destroyed their reputation in the hobby and often that infamy is not the kind of thing that people would just straight up forgive. I’m sure anyone reading this can come up with a handful of names of people that would immediately ruin the experience of a game if they were found to be there.

I have no idea who Kahula is or was so I’m not going to speculate on whatever their reputation might be, but befriending someone on a separate platform without mentioning that you know each other – especially when they’ve invited you to a game which usually prompts a “oh, what MUSHes have you been on? Have we played together?” conversation – is such a red flag that it’s a specter haunting Europe.

People who actually act like a welcome wagon when you’re new and don’t know anybody and ask “do you want to meet so-and-so? They match your concept in such-and-such way.” It makes me feel like I joined a more natural community.

@Aria said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

@Wizz said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

@Rinel said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

Very few people who did not grow up as girls are fully aware of this problem.

I am not going to go into a lot of detail as I find it honestly upsetting to remember, but I did want to say that both my own experiences with older players who knew sexually explicit discussion/roleplaying with me was not appropriate given my age – which I openly admitted to anyone I regularly RPed with – were with women, or at least players that presented as women.

I am not trying to dispute ratios or anything like that, but I did feel like I should represent the fact that men typically vastly underreport sexual abuse in RL and it’s likely the case in the hobby as well.

I shouldn’t need to say this, but…

Yes, I can vouch that this is 100% true. On more than one occassion, teenage me offered to play the role of “weirdly territorial girlfriend” for guys I knew. It wasn’t a good way to handle it, but teenagers. We didn’t exactly have much in the way of appropriate skillsets for addressing the real problem.

I was thinking about this yesterday, and I imagine that a lot of why my own experience was able to advance so dramatically (flying across state lines, and part of the ocean besides) was due to my being male. My dad did a decent job in protecting my sisters from abuse but there was that gender-enforced blind spot, I think. It makes sense, given that for a long time the prevailing attitude – which is thankfully on the decline – is that men/male-bodied people can’t be sexually assaulted, or it was often played for laughs in media. Gets a litle rough behind the tag.

Spoiler

I wanted to say: I’ve talked about these things in therapy before but for some reason I feel a stronger sense of catharsis from this group discussion/topic. I guess I always felt alone in my experience, even though I knew I wasn’t, so thanks to everyone for being as vulnerable as you’re comfortable with here.

No one asked about this but one of the reasons why Luddites are so maligned as just anti-technology morons is because of pre-Marxist class struggle, which was won by the burgeoning industrialists and capitalists of the early Industrial Revolution period. Many of the luddites, as labsunlimited mentioned, were professionals who knew their craft well. Many of them had probably grown up being taught the craft by parents who had apprenticed them to other expert crafters, and had a great deal of generational knowledge about a specific handiwork. The Luddites weren’t protesting technology, they were protesting the development and financing of machines that created cheap, replaceable, and easily manufactured versions of handcrafted things. I think the main contingent were weavers, but I could be misremembering that. On one level, you could view it as bourgeoisie vs. petit bourgeoisie (industrialists/capitalists vs. small business owners), but many artisan crafters of the turn of the 19th century often lost their business due to cheaply manufactured goods and ended up working in those same factories. Or they wound up in poorhouses, I guess. In the US they probably just starved to death because we’ve always been who we are.

Engels talks a little bit about this in The Condition of the Working Class in England, which is a good historical reference regardless of one’s personal opinions on Marxism or socialism, as you can see elements of this same conflict between the advent of new machines to perform traditionally human labor in our current conversations about AI.

@tsar said in MU Peeves Thread:

If you’ve been turned away from a game, or know that you’re probably not welcome on a game-- DON’T SNEAK ONTO THEM.

@Pavel said in Warma-Sheen:

@hellfrog said in Warma-Sheen:

I just wanted to know what the mindset is that makes someone sock puppet on a new game instead of, idk, trying to rp.

While I obviously can’t speak to anyone’s inner world without having many a chat with them, I can speak to mine back when I did this kind of thing in my very, very, very younger days: I wanted to Be The Best. Probably from a lack of validation at home, I sought reinforcement and attention elsewhere, to that end I wanted to be the richest character, or the combattiest character, or the bestest starfighter pilot or whatever.

For a lot of (hell, probably most) folks, the first RP experience is the character they play and the second is the persona they’ve cultivated. In my youth in the hobby I was a borderline functional alcoholic hipster and would frequently overstate things and blow them out of proportion in a fake-bad kind of way, mostly for attention. Now 13 years sober, I definitely am very embarrassed about this, but it is what it is and I’ve largely tried to make amends where possible.

Anyway, likewise I can’t speak to the actual inner experience here outside of base speculation, but RPing is, for many, part of a larger power fantasy which can easily extend to one’s OOC presentation. Being respected IC can also be a very, let’s say maladaptive, stand-in for feeling respected OOC, which is probably what leads to most of the major crashouts we’ve seen in the hobby.

The hobby is more or less reliant on people being trustworthy actors within the scope of our OOC interactions, indicating that we’re trustworthy RP partners. Breaking that trust - by, for example, draining all of the resources out of your IC organization after being given a position of authority, or by breaking your word to someone in an OOC context or other similar betrayal - could lead to an attempt to manage or spin the situation so as to prevent being seen as untrustworthy. Whether the “significant other had my password” thing is real or not*^*, it’s important to take accountability and responsibility for those negative behaviors and, if unable to do so, identify why without resorting to blame.

I don’t recall Hollywood; I think they were very much after my tenure on TR, but based on this entire thread no one is particularly leaning on anything from TR being very problematic outside of the initial misidentification of Saulot; the focus is on recent behaviors rather than ones from 15 years ago.

^ Inner Soma’s reaction to using “real or not” here:

Our cat has been limping for a few days (we recently had to move some furniture around and I think he might have knocked something over onto himself) so we finally took him to the ER. He’s a big indoor/outdoor boy and usually if he limps for a bit he gets better in a day or so if we move his stuff into a place where he doesn’t have to leap around. They had to have us do a drop-off and he was not having it.

Oh, come on. Even if the story of Robin Hood could be boiled down to “nobles fighting,” there is clearly a depiction of class conflict within the narrative. It’s not “medieval Elon Musk vs. Jeff Bezos” because of the structural differences between the Loxley family and the stratification of medieval English society in terms of the ruling class’s power in serfdom.

I’m certainly not going to say that Robin Hood wasn’t a member of the bourgeoisie – he held many privileges that his outlaw companions never had and could likely send himself back into upholding western imperialism in the crusades if he wanted, but he achieved an understanding of class consciousness within the context of the story.

Even if he hadn’t stolen from the rich and given to the poor – and indeed, he does not in some versions – a guerrilla force standing against the monopoly on power that the state (in this case, the sheriff of Nottingham) held over the proletariat would serve as an appropriate propaganda of the deed which, in many ways, can be its own reward. Robin Hood even wholly being a selfish hero (e.g., get back my stuff so I can do a feudalism on the locals, save my girlfriend), does not detract from the material symbolism involved which is why it became an enduring myth in the West.

@Wizz said in Liberation MUSH:

but like if your default state is “shitty unless” your problems are much, much deeper. It took most of my 20’s to realize some dudes in my tight-knit group of friends didn’t need long talks about how we were raised to think a certain way, because they were beyond talking. They actively thrived in and enjoyed their shitty views, and that is just the unavoidable depressing truth about a lot of “proud nerd” men.

Along with their probably life-long misogyny, “proud nerd” men are also, at least in my experience, extremely hostile towards LGBTQ+ people (and I would say especially towards their male friends/gaming partners who come out to them, I’ve gotten the “oh gross! are you going to hit on me” reaction from them more than anyone else that it made me zoom back into the closet), and there’s definitely a certain cohort of dudes who really love to say they’re not racist, but…

I always come back to this time when I was just starting college in the early 00s and joined a D&D club, where someone cornered me to tell me about their homebrew world that had an “only humans” gimmick, but there were still racial modifiers. That certainly wasn’t the only time that I heard some fucked up racist shit from gamers, but it was definitely the most egregious outside of WORA.

In the spirit of Raistlin’s post, I’m also not starting a new game but I wanted to see what I could do with Evennia and nWoD/Chronicles of Darkness. See, I kind of dislike oWoD and am not entirely sure why it’s currently in the zeitgeist to run on WoD MUSHes (with the exception of City of Glass most recently). I could go into why that is, but that’s not the intention of this post.

Okay! So PyReach is intended to be a setting-neutral and system-focused Chronicles of Darkness (or nWoD 2nd Edition) code system. It’s not remotely ready, but I do have a public repo for it. One day if I figure it out (or ask other, better python coders I know very nicely) I’ll set up an installer file for super ease of use.

Someone once told me that all you need to get a game started is a sheet and a rolling system. Well, we got that!

Excuse the dice spam, I was trying to get an exceptional success:

Mainly it’s a modular system. Because I don’t have a particular game in mind (though I have some ideas, but I don’t really have time to run anything), I set everything up to be templates and modules that you install into the system. For example:

If something is marked “System” it means you have indicated that it cannot be uninstalled. If I wanted to, for instance, uninstall Promethean and then install Demon, it would look like this:
(ignore my own syntax error there)

Demon isn’t really set up, as in I haven’t really entered any of the powers or anything into the system, but now we can change our character sheet over to Demon and it’ll update our bio information and clear out the section that shows our vampire-specific powers. the sheet code doesn’t know to look for Catalyst, Agenda, Ring, Cover Identity, or Incarnation, so it will ignore that in favor of the vanilla mortal stuff.

Let’s see… other stuff. Health is in there, as you can see it updates live on the sheet. I’m still working out the kinks about getting it to subtract a health penalty. Spending & regaining WP is set up, but I haven’t set that up for other power points like Vitae or Glamour. I have a rudimentary room template based on the way The Reach (and Fallcoast) rooms look:

and… yeah! Still working on it, no idea when it’ll be done. It’s a hobby project. There’s some other stuff, but it’s probably not as interesting as these more essential pieces.

@HannahBananna said in Silent Heaven: Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss:

@Adora said in Silent Heaven: Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss:

Pffft… ffffft… HAHAHAHA
This ain’t RuPaul’s best friend race, and just because me and you both fit under the Rainbow Umbrella doesn’t mean we’re gonna be besties. I support you in that you should be able to love or fuck whoever you wanna love or fuck (or NOT love or fuck, if you’re aro/ace, you belong) but you being LGBTQIA doesn’t mean you don’t get held to account for your bullshit by other LGBTQIA people.

YOU ARE BEING HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR YOUR ACTIONS. STOP BEING BIGOTS, BE REAL PEOPLE, STOP INSULTING THE LGBTQIA+ COMMUNITY BY PRETENDING TO BE PART OF IT WHEN SOMEONE WHO REALLY IS DECXIDES TO HOLD YOU ACCOUNTABLE FOR YOUR DUMBFUCK ACTIONS, TROLL.

YOU ARE WHY I HATE STRAIGHT PEOPLE.

Fuckin’ LMAO.

I feel like Hannah set a new record in going from zero to showing their whole ass.

I have a quick suggestion for the Empire devs:

Right away in the very first section of the introduction to your world information, make a lexicon of your terms.

I still am not entirely certain what a Greytide is, despite looking through the introduction to the Empire, the explanation on magic, etc. I know there are three of them, that the empire was formed as a reaction to the third, and that according to the “ideas behind the game” document “The Greytides were somewhere between the Blights and Chaos, and an early iteration looked more like the scale of Tolkien’s War of Wrath.” That still doesn’t entirely tell me what happened. Chaos in Warhammer could be a surge of cultist humans and champions of chaos, or it could be demons. The War of Wrath had orcs. Is the Greytide all human-based, or are there other species of humanoid creature involved? I don’t need to necessarily know why or how they occurred, as I assume that’s part of learning the story, but having the basics in a central section would be great.

I’m assuming demons because of the Grey Below (referenced in the Magic document), but did my ancestors fight demons or just demon-obsessed barbarian tribes?

Some of the locations are kind of like this as well, like the Scorchlands. It’s where the Cinderkin come from, and they’re clearly distinct from the Red Waste, and it sounds like they’re very close to Wend, but I’m not exactly sure what they’re supposed to be in general.

It’s very interesting information and clearly a lot of love went into the world building. I mentioned above about the too many proper nouns. Generally people are going to look at the bare minimum they need to play their characters, so their house information, the intro to the empire, and maybe the document on magic and one of the religion documents. There are some mentions within these that don’t quite make sense if you don’t cross reference into other things and I might not necessarily know where to look (good on you for having a search feature). Being able to quickly reference a layperson’s guide to basic information on things is extremely useful, especially if someone referenced something in RP.

I guess it’s heartening to know that WoD games have remained consistent over the years.

@Wizz My daughter is about 2 and tells me “piggy back” so I’ll kneel on the ground. Once I’m down there, she hits me over the back with her little plastic baby chairs. I’m anticipating she’ll have a wonderful career as a professional wrestler.