@Warma-Sheen said in Re: Dies Irae:

Of course, there could also have been major drama that wasn’t made public to players or other staff.

@Faraday said in RPing with Nobody:

@somasatori said in RPing with Nobody:

I forgot that this was a thing on Ares MUSHes

It’s not really Ares-specific. I first encountered this with people posting solo vignettes on LiveJournal way way way before Ares. More recently it was a thing on various games with MediaWiki/Wikidot wikis. I think it just gets a little more formalized/visible on Ares games because of the scene type tagging.

Maybe not Ares specific. I meant more that other platforms typically don’t have a built-in journaling function.

@Muscle-Car said in RPing with Nobody:

There was this one very sad sack on a game I used to hang who would join group scenes then post themselves doing stuff solo, not involving or inviting anyone. Even to ignoring invitation. They’d get real miserable and start adding editorial in their own posts like “because she is not needed.” They had very bad traits in addition to that, but I’ll never forget how performatively alone they loved to be.

I guarantee that this person deeply wanted someone to be like “oh, no, you’re a critical part of our group!!! you have to stay!!!”

Ugh, haha.

(Thanks @watno)

I forgot that this was a thing on Ares MUSHes. Most of my experience with solo roleplay has been with solo TTRPG games. Speaking of which, there’s a new sourcebook for Cyberpunk RED called Single Player Mode, which has solo rules for play.

I think there are some useful things with journaling in games, but it’s one of those things where you have to consider the point, perspective, and tone of what you’re writing.

1. Is the actual point of the writing to be a journal for you? If so, it’s probably not going to be any more useful to have it on a website or wiki or something so that other people can read it. Having that is essentially a way to say “Hey, check out the depths of my character, wouldn’t it be cool to RP with me” rather than free creative writing.
2. Is your perspective from your character’s internal thoughts related to something they’re witnessing, or are you mentalizing another character’s perspective? Even if you are taking a relatively positive view of someone else’s character’s perspective, it’s likely best to have a scene with that person.
3. Is this journal going to make you feel worse about a situation that you’re in with your character? Is it going to cause an amount of bleed that would be unexpected beyond a standard scene? If so, for your own mental health’s sake, do not write it. That’s not to say “don’t write sad things,” but more “don’t get yourself further stuck in a rut if you feel your character is having problems that are causing you to relate too heavily to their struggle.” (i.e., consider the tone of what you’re writing)

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Strike Systems:

It’s fine to discuss politics. It’s not fine to propagandize –

At this point in our digital society, any discussion of politics in a mixed space is vociferous propaganda. No one is changing their ideological opinions based on an Internet conversation. Discussions about politics are only civil when a) everyone agrees with what someone is saying; b) everyone is silent or ignores the topic in the general hope that it goes away; or c) everyone has been friends for many years and knows each other’s politics, which largely predate their friendship. Option c is becoming a rarity these days.

RIP Max Horkheimer, you would have loved to hate the Web 2.0 era internet.

Edit: the above applies to discussions about United States politics and may not apply to other countries.

Given my current schedule, I’m waiting for the “RPing with Nobody” thread

(all good points from Gashly and LB)

@Jumpscare said in Strike Systems:

Some people can change. Others can’t.

Man, at this point I’m willing to believe that we’re all pretty firmly set in our behavioral ways when it comes to MUSHing and would argue that most, if not all, people in the hobby will resist changing. This might be due to my WoD-brain. It seems like the vast majority of the WoD MUSH sphere of influence has operated with deeply flawed and bad actors for such a long time that there’s this assumption that having the worst possible personality traits manifest and cause problems are just part of the hobby.

Look at any recent shitty MUSH drama and you’ll see ghosts of the past in there. Recently I saw a game give a lot of chances to a player that multiple people insisted was different, had changed, etc., when they were up the same old shit in private. From overstepping boundaries to people on weird narcissistic power trips to people attempting to manipulate others for their own personal gain, it’s this long series of intergenerational MUSH trauma that’s persisted. And not to be a doomer, but it will likely persist until the end of the hobby because there’s this psychological ecosystem that provides a kind of parasocial and quasi-social connection where very emotionally abused people think this kind of behavior is normal from your text-based friends.

@Ashkuri

I have a question. What do you get out of MUSHing, a hobby wherein you write paragraphs at people in a turn-based format, when you’re not actually doing the writing? What’s the end goal there?

Unrelated to Grounded 2 (though I’m very excited about that!) is The Demons Told Me to Make This Game. It’s early access and only the first chapter is available, but it’s a Disco-like wherein you’re a demon(?) who possesses a couple different people to advance a storyline. Here are some screeners!

And (spoiler for plot stuff)

Spoiler

It’s so funny and very well written.

@Hobbie said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

the reality of housing shortages

I’ll have to make a note to include that when I launch my Vampire the Masquerade: Sydney by Night game.

Oi just be daring and set it in somewhere like Campbelltown. People can still afford to buy there.

Not that they want to.

Not that they should.

Would love to sit here and have a whinge about this very topic but that’s a whole other… topic lol.

Well, it’s not California or Texas so that in itself would be a draw.

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

@somasatori said in MU Peeves Thread:

The worst options are deeply reactionary (buying mundane equipment with XP to keep your thumb on the players)

Referencing any games in particular there, Soma? >_>

No, no, not at all

@Pavel said in AI PBs:

Alas, most research I’ve seen thus far has been on clinical applications of LLMs rather than their clinical impact.

“I don’t need a therapist anymore, I talk to ChatGPT and it helps” - BPD patient I was working with

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

when people left their houses and businesses stayed in place to be sold/rented out again. Buildings didn’t just disappear, but there weren’t that many empty ones either and I sort of hoped that the PCs might fight over some of the best houses in the city.

From a game design perspective, this works better if there’s a concrete economy rather than the usual abstract ones that are representative in most MUSHes. Not sure what type of game you were running, but something with discrete numbers to represent your characters’ cold, hard cash makes this more worthwhile. Systems like WoD, GURPS, and others that have a merit/perk/boon referring to wealth flatten the experience since there’s a lot of room between (in WoD) Resources 2 to Resources 3. That could be a small luxury apartment or a nice rental house in a not-so-rich part of town.

Same with resource trading. Most smuggler or equipment-provision characters in abstract wealth games don’t have any real mechanical function, as you can usually just buy stuff up with your Resources background/merit/whatever in your own stockpile so long as it doesn’t require additional skills or black market connections or something.

I’m going to mark my own MU peeve and say that resources and equipment house rules always fucking suck. The worst options are deeply reactionary (buying mundane equipment with XP to keep your thumb on the players), but even the best ones become super weird. If you have 2 dots of resources worth of stuff to buy every week or month, I always feel like I’m wasting it if I’m not getting new stuff.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

but have those set up so that they are turned invisible and locked if the character that ‘owns’ it goes idle.

This is a good solution to the dead grid issue that a lot of older games face. Something I tried to do, which I didn’t do well because I’m not much of a coder, is set up the housing system in DI to be linked to your approval. If you were set to unapproved either through staff freezing your bit or the idle freeze, you’d trigger a script that checked builds linked to your bit and then cleared them. I couldn’t get this to work for builds that weren’t created by the rental system since that operates differently.

Grids should be set dressing for the game and do exactly what @MisterBoring mentions. If you have a larger space dedicated to wilderness areas, then you’re telegraphing that you want to tell stories based around the wilderness.

I don’t really like the Ares model myself. I’m fond of abstract representations of grids because a lot of the grid space ends up as dead filler space. There are a few ways this manifests, but the current crop of WoD games are good examples of how this ends up working. Liberation has a lot of street/intersection rooms that see no use except to serve as a place for players to plop down builds. Those builds become hangouts, and no one will generally walk to the hangout they want to go to, they’ll use the +hangouts command (or analogous command). Dark Water kinda did this, in that it was largely just big sections of Port Angeles set up and connected up to one another.

This leads to a lot of questions: like why even bother having the highways around Los Angeles built out on the game since a) no one’s going to start scenes on those – what would that scene even be like if it’s a social scene? You’re not going to RP being in a car if random people show up; b) the storyline of the game kind of prevents players from running scenes on those (they’re controlled by the Technocracy in Liberation canon); and c) most players don’t have the authority to run scenes on the game, let alone using staff resources.

For DI and RM which arguably use the same grid method of nodal points based around neighborhoods, there ends up being a good deal of useless space that’s there to just for the sake of completionism. How many Houston wards get gameplay? Of those, what’s really crucial to the game?

It’s really frustrating to see grids get out of control rather than having like @Jenn is saying with regards to how rooms might be set up. I personally wouldn’t go so far as to desc out a parking lot for the grocery store, but jut have “Grocery Store” and either implement places (join the parking lot place) or have a scene set indicate that the scene is currently taking place in the parking lot.

@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.

After reading through this I see why you titled it as if you were submitting it to a conference @Pavel.

I have a ton of thoughts which I will work on writing out, but this is a very good discussion that needs to be evaluated further. Honestly, an social psych analysis of MUSH trends wouldn’t be a terrible idea for a legit academic paper.

Hey Eddie, I was Charlie. Nice to see you again!