I think staff should be fine to have characters in any game, even a plotting one. I think on a practical level it’s not a good idea for the staff character to be taking the lead in a story plot they’re running, if only because in my experience it’s really hard to both GM and actually meaningfully pilot a PC! I’m sure it can be done, but I think it’s hard to do well. ime it’s much more likely for it to be ‘and staffpc was also there in the background’ than ‘this was actually the staffpc show’ but I am not surprised by the existence of the second.

In the hands of a conscientious gamerunner, i think a staff PC is another tool to help build game wide engagement. I think there’s a lot of little things those characters could do to encourage plot involvement that are hard to do with NPCs. A staff PC can “just run into” someone to organically bring them into a plot in a way that more formal NPC involvement could make favoritism, for example. “Passing along” IC gossip from other PCs is honestly a really important function in games so having a character on the ground to do that now and then is probably nice. Though I’m thinking of smaller games where it makes sense for everyone in it to be able to talk to each other.

Every few years there’s an absolute panic over a social media or art site’s ToS using legal wording to describe letting users host and reshare their content using the site’s built in reblog/retweet/whatever mechanics. The legalese is almost always being misinterpreted to be scarier than it is

@Jennkryst said in MU Peeves Thread:

Untrue! I disprove the very concept by usually playing them with conventionally adorkable women with fairly un-boob’d bodies.

She’s not like other girls!

@Snackness

This is a double edged sword when your plot runner starts taking your joke NPC name suggestions seriously and you end up with a villain whose name is ‘Stephyn with a y because the y makes it fantasy’

@RightMeow

My usual strategy at that point is to look at whatever info is available on their character, brainstorm 2-3 locations our characters could conceivably overlap, and offer all of them as suggestions.

Then once we’ve picked a spot and the scene starts, it’s just a matter of picking something that brings the characters into contact ASAP. Either that’s posting a starter the other person can directly respond to, or responding to their starter in a way that gives them something to work on. A scene can still be shaped a couple poses in - you’ve almost always got more time to figure out what you’re doing than the 30 seconds before you have to answer that question in your scenario. You’ve just got to break it down into smaller steps.

I don’t mind the dance of setting up RP, because in the same way I like to tailor my suggestions for location and event to the person who’s responding, mostly because I prefer smaller scenes to setting up an open thing in a location. The thing that does bother me is when people respond to an ask for rp in a way that doesn’t make clear whether they’re actually volunteering for RP in the moment or not. I have mixed feelings about a response that’s “I’m busy now but maybe some other day,” but it’s at least a clear response.

I’m not the target audience for episodic games because when I get into an RP and a character properly, I tend to want to keep going with them for a couple years, and while I might take breaks, I don’t tend to get turned off by game or character plots continuing around me.

I think full stop breaks might work best when you know you’ve got a dedicated group who will be able to consistently follow the scheduled active and hiatus periods. For a broader population, being able to continue the momentum if they’re feeling it is probably pretty valuable, and might make the transition into a new setting easier if they’re building hype through the shared social activity, even if they won’t be carrying over the character or setting.

@Meg

Agreeing with this - considering the point that was being made earlier about this being unique as a way of handling this kind of ooc story, it doesn’t follow that such a particular solution wasn’t going to need any retcons. Maybe they don’t need to write a baby out of existence- fine. But it changes pretty strongly how I as a player would think of and interact with the setting. It’s pretty niche fantasy territory to go with this as your ooc population control mechanism, and not everyone who’s cool with playing in a fantasy lords and ladies with magic scenario may want to play in a ‘hey humanity is Different in this one unspecified way that could or could not have major effects that would shape this world’s culture.’

Like I said if this is the kind of story they want to explore, more power to them, but the rippling effects of this kind of decision on theme and culture feel like something it’d be good to have baked in to the initial idea.

I think Concordia mods have talked about not expecting to get as much hype as they did (wrt using chatgpt to make some of their theme files) so I’m guessing this decision is related to that - they’re figuring out something that accounts for it in retrospect. Which isn’t a bad idea in itself, it’s just one of the odder choices they could have gone with to justify oocly asking people to hold off on family building.

@real_mirage

If it’s the kind of story the players and the mods want to focus on more power to them, but it definitely is one of the more out there ways to handle a ruling of, ultimately, ooc practicality. Sterility is a sensitive topic to rp about, and an entire species’ sterility is a really big piece of world building to have an explanation this late, which can really change a pre-established vibe, if the assumption has been something less… actively controlled before. It might be that this was just buried elsewhere in the theme and is moved to its own page now, but if that’s the case it might have been really buried because I don’t know that there’s been much talk of it before.

@spes

You’re here now so please. We have burning questions about jam

I first started RPing in a forum/journal RP environment before making a switch to MU and MMO environments, and making the switch really helped me to work on things that had been a problem during my more async days - I had a bad habit of letting RP trail off into an endless loop of pleasantries and fluff, without addressing the thing that the scene had been started for. I also had a bad habit of overcommitting myself to a number of ongoing scenes and then basically dropping all of them when I got overwhelmed trying to respond to a bunch of posts every evening. Now I probably could go back to more async with a heightened consciousness of those things that made it harder for me, but I find it puts more pressure on me to do so, so I lean in on the format that helps curb those bad habits naturally.

Getting past inertia/nerves and just reaching out to ask people if they want to RP

The colloquial definition of PvP is broader, but when it comes to game classification PvP is a genre description in my experience, one that usually denotes a formalized faction system where the main draw is combat and warfare against other player groups. As such, games that classify themselves as non-PvP or PvE are drawing a distinction on their playstyle, not forbidding all degrees of player conflict, whether that’s combat or interpersonal conflict.

With regards to the colloquial definition, Ive spent basically all of my RP time in PvE environments. I’ve been on an RP game where the setting was a closed environment (a scifi spaceship crew) where the premise required explicit opt-in from characters. There were thematic tensions in the background between groups, but the premise was that everyone had agreed to the rules to be there, which included cooperation with their former enemies. I’ve been in other games where the setting was much more loose and cooperation was much more ad-hoc happenstance, and had a pretty sandboxy approach to storytelling.

I’ve engaged in the colloquial definition of PvP - IC conflict and opposition- in both of those settings, and had a blast with it. To my mind, the ability to engage in fruitful “PvP” in PvE settings just requires having enthusiastic consent on both sides, and an agreement on the stakes of the conflict. And PvE games can facilitate that in different ways.

@Prototart

Are you trying to victim-blame or was that just an accidental target of your vitriol there?

Like, I know I’m on the mild side here for critique of vaspider. If you’re trying to say “if you read all our discussion of vaspider and still think they’re not a shitty person that’s on you”, that’s one thing, but “anyone who falls for it” can be a bigger pool than just people who read a gossip forum for a niche hobby. To someone who is manipulative and seeking to take advantage of others in a consistent fashion, their strategy by nature is usually to seek out people who don’t know them or their reputation, once they’ve burned their bridges elsewhere.

@OnceWas said in City of Glass - Discussion:

The intention wasn’t to be rude; it’s to try to make it, if possible, something funny. It’s easier to make it a joke than an insult if I plan to stay, which I do

Which part was the joke? Because it seems like it did not land.

ETA: joking when you’re making a complaint actually has a higher quotient of coming off as an asshole, because it can make a comment sound passive aggressive instead of lighthearted

Yeah, what roz said. Effective warnings talk about specific incidents and dangers, or if they aren’t first hand, are specific about how well you know the people in question and the details of the incident. “I’ve heard a number of stories from the MU community about this person violating boundaries and pulling manipulative tactics including x y z, but I haven’t closely followed the person since then” is a pretty decent summary of this thread, and a decent enough warning without ascribing their actions to the present.

Obviously there are plenty of people who think he can’t or hasn’t changed, or who were impacted enough by his behavior that they don’t intend to extend the benefit of the doubt. The personal feelings of someone you trust are often a pretty good warning - personally I’ve trusted friends on their vibe checks plenty. But they’re clear what info their warnings are based on, and that I think is important.

I think it’s accurate though to say that the MU community and the members of it don’t have the most up to date examples of bad behavior from him, though. and so for any warnings to be realistic and not… intensely overblown to an outside observer, it needs to be qualified.

@Rinel

Having not been around when either was in MU but having come across them in their other contexts, my impression has always been like they’re bad exes to the community - they’re probably fine where they are now but the MU community will always remember them through that particular interaction. And at this point both are just either moved on from it or have come back under different handles and aren’t making waves.

@tsar

Outside of combat/large groups, I actually like the rhythm that comes of purposefully varying post sizes.

Dialogue-only does make me fidgety on an ooc level though. It works for a line or two when I’m doing it for effect but I struggle with remembering to describe physicality and setting as it is, so doing so for more than a quick exchange feels like sliding back into personal bad habits.

I think the length of the response time changes what feels rude to me a lot. In person, rushing past a greeting to tell someone what I want would be rude unless I specifically knew they didn’t give a fuck about a ‘how do you do fellow humans’ ritual.

When the communication is going to be offset by a couple of hours though, sending a message feels a bit to me like leaving a voice-mail or sending an email. I’ll still include pleasantries, but I’ll also try and bring up the context for my message - and it’s for me just as much as it is the other person, because I’m often sending a message to remind myself to do things later, like scheduling follow-up RP.

I also find that I’m more comfortable getting a contextless greeting from someone I know well, mostly because I already have a sense of their communication style and the topics they’re likely to bring to my attention. With someone I’ve talked with less, I’m curious what has them contacting me, so I’m more likely to follow up a message like that with nudging them to get to the reason for the contact, rather than continue casual chatter.

Some of it also is online culture specific, though - I’ve had bad experiences with unfamiliar people messaging me out of the blue with ill intent, so that makes online messages without context something I’m more inherently wary of.