I continue to be amazed at the way some people approach MU*ing. Its a hobby, yes, and it shouldn’t feel like work…but when options are offered that don’t involve so much (or any) work, why complain about the options that do involve some? Lets start with the background, and then I’ll dig into today’s little mini-rant. ;)
After lots of tweaking based on player input, Blood of Dragons now offers several different ways to get started on the game.
First, you have the choice between a CGed or an unCGed character. Our CG does involve a fair bit of work, no question about that, but that is why the option exists to start with a fully created character. I think those are two pretty good options. Of course, we still get guests who complain that they don’t want to play a CGed character, but they also don’t want to go through the work of CGing a character themselves. In fact, most of them want a wholly original character that isn’t from our pre-created family trees. Which I can understand, absolutely, but we can’t and won’t offer that. That doesn’t mean there’s a lack of options, it just means that particular option isn’t available. But even so, it often turns into a complaint about how restrictive things are.
Apart from offering a choice between CGed and unCGed characters, we also offer several character types, where the type determines the application needed. For Open characters, the application consists of two questions (regarding whether the player has any MU*ing experience or theme knowledge, just so we know what sort of help they might need) and an entirely optional concept write-up. Skip the concept, and you’re ready for CG in a few minutes. And if the character is already CGed, well, then you’re pretty much all done. In addition to Open characters, there are also Restricted, Limited and Elite characters. They’re basically different levels of what would be features on other games, so we ask for a bit more of an application for these. MU’ing experience and theme knowledge is required, the concept write-up isn’t optional, and we also ask for logs of prior roleplay. However, if there are no logs, we can also offer a probationary period where we’d ask for some logs of roleplay on the game to be sent in.
So, enter today’s first guest. He looks at a character that is CGed and Restricted, and after a while comments that Restricted sounds like too much work, and that he will look at another character. We explain what Restricted entails. He then questions why we ask for logs, saying people could forge those. We agree that yes, they could, but we prefer to assume they won’t. Plus, we note, we would probably notice if someone can’t roleplay at all even if they sent in great logs. He then suggests we just drop the logs and keep an eye on how people roleplay. We note that we do have the option of a probationary period as well, but then the guest says its all too much work, and takes off.
To start with, what happened to looking at another character? And why does everything become too much work if its just for certain characters? Do people really expect to join a new game and get a feature-level character without any more effort than a regular character? It seems as if as soon as you have feature-level characters, regular characters become low-level. They’re not, at least not in our case, as we believe all PCs should be above average. But as soon as there are levels, only the top level counts, and you’re mean and evil if you ask people to in any way demonstrate why they should be getting such a character. Because they all see themselves as entitled to it.
And still, I doubt most people would want to play on a game where everyone is like Jaime Lannister or Loras Tyrell.