Someone once told me (paraphrased) that the primary difference between maintaining OOC respect for your fellow players after a PVP/tense situation at a LARP and maintaining OOC respect and kindness towards your fellow MUSHers in the same situation is that MUSHers are not obligated to sit in a booth with each other at IHOP at 2am after we’ve finished our scenes.

I found that telling people, “We are pretending this is my living room. We may not all be friends, but we’re all gonna act friendly because it’s my living room,”
worked all right.

@somasatori said in Numetal/Retromux:

Someone once told me (paraphrased) that the primary difference between maintaining OOC respect for your fellow players after a PVP/tense situation at a LARP and maintaining OOC respect and kindness towards your fellow MUSHers in the same situation is that MUSHers are not obligated to sit in a booth with each other at IHOP at 2am after we’ve finished our scenes.

Anonymity can be a real motivator in being a serious asshole towards others – which is interesting, because I’m fairly certain we’ve all known each other (or of each other) for the better part of a decade (which is perhaps also what leads to PVP situations).

That said, PVP is a difficult one. On one hand, if you explicitly prohibit PVP in a WoD environment, it takes some of the bite out of inter-sphere relations. On the other hand, allowing for a no-holds-barred environment will make the game – from examples I’ve seen – into a tedious free-for-all. I’m not sure if it’s just my perception based on the people I talk to, but I feel like interest in PVP has dropped off in the last little while.

I used to be in a gaming club in college where a whole lot of people were Mind’s Eye Theatre players. For my money, I’d say there’s not a whole lot of difference in toxicity: lots of vicious personal enmity, gossip, blurring of OOC/IC boundaries, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and cheating. Having to look people in the face afterwards didn’t really seem to help any of it.

Fun Fact: The only time I’ve ever been reduced to literally hiding behind other people in order to get a man twice my age to stop leering at me in a public space was when I was in college, attending a campus Changeling LARP as an OOC observer to see if I wanted to join. He was, supposedly, “just doing what his character would do!” since he was playing a satyr. Again, I was an OOC observer and visibly tagged as such. As far as his ‘character’ was concerned, I didn’t exist. I was 19. He had to be in his 40s. No one seemed to think this was a problem except for me, my then-boyfriend, and the friend I’d gone there with.

So. Y’know. Do with that information what you will.

The Michael Jordan of drunk driving played his final game tonight.
Emburdened[sic] by his loneliness,
he wanted to feel alive;
His laziness built the pyramids
and his solitude was a knife.
The Michael Jordan of drunk driving played his final game tonight.

Someone once told me (paraphrased) that the primary difference between maintaining OOC respect for your fellow players after a PVP/tense situation at a LARP and maintaining OOC respect and kindness towards your fellow MUSHers in the same situation is that MUSHers are not obligated to sit in a booth with each other at IHOP at 2am after we’ve finished our scenes.

Anonymity can be a real motivator in being a serious asshole towards others – which is interesting, because I’m fairly certain we’ve all known each other (or of each other) for the better part of a decade (which is perhaps also what leads to PVP situations).

That said, PVP is a difficult one. On one hand, if you explicitly prohibit PVP in a WoD environment, it takes some of the bite out of inter-sphere relations. On the other hand, allowing for a no-holds-barred environment will make the game – from examples I’ve seen – into a tedious free-for-all. I’m not sure if it’s just my perception based on the people I talk to, but I feel like interest in PVP has dropped off in the last little while.

I used to be in a gaming club in college where a whole lot of people were Mind’s Eye Theatre players. For my money, I’d say there’s not a whole lot of difference in toxicity: lots of vicious personal enmity, gossip, blurring of OOC/IC boundaries, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and cheating. Having to look people in the face afterwards didn’t really seem to help any of it.

‘The Drunken Driver Has The Right of Way’ by Ethan Coen

The loudest have the final say,
The wanton win, the rash hold sway,
The realist’s rules of order say
The drunken driver has the right of way.

The Kubla Khan can butt in line;
The biggest brute can take what’s mine;
When heavyweights break wind, that’s fine;
No matter what a judge might say,
The drunken driver has the right of way.

The guiltiest feel free of guilt;
Who care not, bloom; who worry, wilt;
Plans better laid are rarely built
For forethought seldom wins the day;
The drunken driver has the right of way.

The most attentive and unfailing
Carefulness is unavailing
Wheresoever fools are flailing;
Wisdom there is held at bay;,
The drunken driver has the right of way.

De jure is de facto’s slave;
The most foolhardy beat the brave;
Brass routs restraint; low lies high’s grave;
When conscience leads you, it’s astray;
The drunken driver has the right of way.

It’s only the naivest who’ll
Deny this, that the reckless rule;
When facing an oncoming fool
The practiced and sagacious say
Watch out — one side — look sharp — gang way.

However much you plan and pray,
Alas, alack, tant pis, oy vey,
Now — heretofore — til Judgment Day,
The drunken driver has the right of way

@Pavel said in Numetal/Retromux:

@hellfrog Mage is also a problem. I don’t hear much about Changeling, but I don’t play much changeling so it’s not really in my echo chamber.

Changeling can be several different kinds of problem. Think Disney adults.

do you feel like they are equal problems

@hellfrog Mage is also a problem. I don’t hear much about Changeling, but I don’t play much changeling so it’s not really in my echo chamber.

Changeling can be several different kinds of problem. Think Disney adults.

To your point, though, I think large-scale antagonisms could well be a large part of the issue. At least in nWoD and CofD (which is a stupid name) the different supernatural groups don’t really care about each other all that much—because there’s no metaplot really.

That said, PVP is a difficult one. On one hand, if you explicitly prohibit PVP in a WoD environment, it takes some of the bite out of inter-sphere relations. On the other hand, allowing for a no-holds-barred environment will make the game – from examples I’ve seen – into a tedious free-for-all. I’m not sure if it’s just my perception based on the people I talk to, but I feel like interest in PVP has dropped off in the last little while.

I have not played WoD before but another issue with PvP or even RP that is PvP adjacent player interests clash, even with staff resolution, there may be claims that staff favoritism is involved or that they are part of the popular clique, that is why they ‘won’. PvP is extremely difficult to do properly in cooperative RP.

That said, PVP is a difficult one. On one hand, if you explicitly prohibit PVP in a WoD environment, it takes some of the bite out of inter-sphere relations. On the other hand, allowing for a no-holds-barred environment will make the game – from examples I’ve seen – into a tedious free-for-all. I’m not sure if it’s just my perception based on the people I talk to, but I feel like interest in PVP has dropped off in the last little while.

I would agree on both counts. Very little turns me off a game faster than players who think threatening murder is an appropriate first response … but there are some things that ought to get you killed in a WoD game. If there’s no downside for a vampire who feels like rolling up onto the heart of the local werewolf caern, then vampires who feel like it are going to do that, and there are a non-zero number of vampires who will feel like it.

On the gripping hand, there isn’t always clear agreement on what those things are. I’ve met people who felt that “I think you might have figured out that I belong to splat X” falls into the “warrants death” category, and people who felt that executing characters from a different splat did not fall into that category. Unsurprisingly, people tend to have separate standards for when they should be allowed to murder someone and when someone else should be allowed to murder them.

“Don’t PVP someone unless staff agrees with you that they have done something galactically stupid” is a little unsatisfying, and prone to the usual complaints about staff favoring one party over the other, but I find I still prefer it to either of the other two extremes.

Anonymity can be a real motivator in being a serious asshole towards others – which is interesting, because I’m fairly certain we’ve all known each other (or of each other) for the better part of a decade (which is perhaps also what leads to PVP situations).

That said, PVP is a difficult one. On one hand, if you explicitly prohibit PVP in a WoD environment, it takes some of the bite out of inter-sphere relations. On the other hand, allowing for a no-holds-barred environment will make the game – from examples I’ve seen – into a tedious free-for-all. I’m not sure if it’s just my perception based on the people I talk to, but I feel like interest in PVP has dropped off in the last little while.

But Lords & Ladies is also a special sort of disaster.
Original theme is a special sort of disaster, too.
Comic books, star wars, star trek, urban fantasy, even bloody neanderthals are their own special sorts of disasters as well, and don’t get me started on Pern.

The theme of any given game tends to suggest the sorts of disasters you’ll get there. Some are pretty universal - sex pests are everywhere, as are the power-hungry who believe that might makes right - but some themes lend themselves to certain behaviours.

I’ve seen as many horrific abuses of staff power in Original Themes as I have in Urban Fantasy; having The Character Who Is The Focus Of The Story lends itself to certain behaviours, whether that character’s actually on grid or not. Unwarranted OOC viciousness? Lords and Ladies wins there, hands down, because people who just have to be the prettiest princess can’t all be the prettiest princess, and if you don’t fall over yourself to worship the one right in front of you some of them will get very upset and think it’s perfectly justified to try and destroy you whether you’re a rival or some poor sod caught in the crossfire. Still, several of the other genres aren’t that far behind. It’s just that WoD is the thread that most of us have in common and WoD is where these boards started, so WoD is the shared understanding and the shared scars.

I do not think saying you generally have your work cut out for you when running a game with very, very dated social mores is lazy and reductive.

I was, perhaps, unclear. What I meant was that people (usually shitty staff) allow negative behaviour and then cover it up with the excuse that the genre is at fault. Which is, or at least has been, a common thing.

WOD was never designed for vampire and werewolf at the same table, much less Mage and everything else.

It’s not balanced for it

That’s not relevant on a MU unless you want to keep it short-lived enough that nobody can gain enough XP to be significantly more powerful than a new PC build.

WoD positions the players as monsters and oWoD even does things like having different morality as part of the systems of play and somehow I think that extra step removed from being a ‘normal person’, even a bad person, gives people that extra edge (heh!) to be horrible.

I think this is a whole different conversation, because looking at the documentation for all of the active WoD games out there, at least a couple of them have house ruled too much.

At one end of the spectrum, Changeling has so many unclear and sometimes self-contradictory rules that it’s difficult to avoid ending up with a lot of house rules, even if most of them are essentially just “and this is the interpretation we’re going with.”

At the other end is “We don’t like the way Vampire Disciplines work by the book and so we’re going to introduce a completely new set of rules for them.”

My extremely cold take is that if you’re advertising your game as using such and such system, you should probably make an effort to stick to the rules of game system as much as possible, and that the fewer differences your players have to learn, the better. But then again, two different people may have wildly different ideas about how that looks in practice for any given game system.

yam’s point is that there is necessary work that must be done to make different spheres work together on MU.

I’m not disagreeing with that. I’m saying that there are games claiming to be WoD games that have house ruled their mechanics and the overall WoD plot so much that they aren’t WoD anymore.

It’d be like if I claimed to run a baseball league, but baseball in my league involved driving modified cars down a quarter mile track.