ON MISCELLANEOUS ADMINISTRATIVE ISSUES [PAGE 2]

ON THE PURPOSE OF A MUSH

ON THE ROLE OF A TINYPLOT COORDINATOR

THIS PAGE

ON THE USE OF RETCON

ON GROUP ACTIVITIES

ON MANDATORY DEAD TIME

PAGE 3

ON MANDATORY E-MAIL REGISTRATION

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"Retcon" comes from the phrase "Retroactive Continuity," which is to say, rewriting a story that has already "happened." Just in case any of my readers aren't sure what that means, I'll give a classic example from comic book lore before discussing the use and abuse of retconning on a mush.

Superman's origin story has been rewritten various times since his first published appearance in 1938. In his first story, done by his creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, he made what was clearly the first public appearance of "Superman." He was already a grown man as he first donned the red-and-blue costume. Incidentally, I seem to recall that there were indications that he had gotten considerably stronger and tougher (virtually invulnerable) as he matured - he didn't become a bulletproof baby the instant he arrived on Earth, if memory serves.

A few years later, someone decided to appeal to the younger readers by doing a separate series of stories about Superboy, the younger Clark Kent. All of a sudden the first origin story (the one where he kept his gradually developing powers secret from the world until adulthood) went down the tubes as readers learned that Clark had actually been using the costume and the name "Superboy" to fight crime since his early teens - and all that time, had been faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a charging locomotive, etc. This was a perfect example of a retcon, even though the term hadn't been invented yet.

Various little changes and additions to his basic origin story (and the range and scope of his powers, and his self-made rules on what he would permit himself to do with them) occurred throughout the next 40 years, but the next major overhaul took awhile to come. Finally, in the mid-1980s, Writer/Artist John Byrne did a reboot of Superman in which it was declared that his powers only developed gradually throughout his childhood and adolescence, and he kept them totally secret from the world - even when doing anonymous good deeds - until he was in his mid-twenties, when he put on the costume for the first time. This was, in effect, a retcon of a previous retcon, changing things back to something much closer to the original vision of Superman's creators and starting over from scratch. An awful lot of his established continuity of the past several decades was now erased as never having happened (and I haven't even mentioned the parallel worlds problem).

So that's what a retcon is. Now, in the world of mushing you don't often try to erase 40 RL years of RP in one fell swoop - or even a single year's worth of RP. No, our retcons are usually done on a much smaller scale - just trying to cancel out a recent scene or two of RP that somebody disapproves of in retrospect. There are three ways the idea might arise:

1) All those who participated in the scene or scenes in question are in agreement that this would be a good idea.

2) At least one person who participated now thinks the whole thing ought to be retconned, but at least one other who was also directly involved does not agree. Conflict!

3) An outside authority (such as a Wizard) has decided something ought to be retconned, and is prepared to shove it down the throats of the actual RPers who were there when it happened.

In Situation One, let's face facts. It's going to be awfully hard to "force" RPers not to retcon a scene if everyone involved is in agreement that they should. Their reasons may be specious, but then you may never even hear about it either, unless it's a scene involving really earth-shattering events (such as a Prominent Feature proposing marriage and being accepted, or somebody dying or losing a body part, or that sort of thing).

This doesn't mean that you aren't justified in trying to stop a retcon, under certain circumstances. I just point out that your interference isn't likely to have a positive result on the Roleplayers.

In Situation Two, the only thing to do is call in an Arbitrator, a Judge, a Local Admin, a Whatever-You-May-Call-It - someone with a bit of authority to say, "THIS is the way it's going to be."

REASONS FOR CONSIDERING A RETCON

1) A scene has been RPed which was grossly unthematic.

Example : In a Medieval Fantasy Mush, one character poses the use of homemade explosives to blow up somebody's castle and starts calling himself the "Unabomber."

2) A scene has been RPed in a fashion which broke the local rules.

Example : Somebody powerposed the use of a magic spell in an attempt to force a victim to fall asleep, or be maimed, or some such thing, even though your local rules say that such extreme use of magic against another person MUST be done with explicit Consent, but the victim didn't realize that at the time and would not have Consented to having the spell hit him so hard if he had known what his rights were.

3) A scene has been RPed which led to nasty consequences ICly which someone now wishes to reverse.

Example: A character deliberately committed a major crime in front of witnesses, and was captured and tossed in the dungeon. He wants to retcon the whole thing.

4) A scene has been RPed which went in a direction contrary to someone's desired outcome for an ongoing TinyPlot, "Therefore [he says], the scene never should have happened!"

Example : A Wizard had special plans for a character called Parsifal in an upcoming TinyPlot the Wizard has designed, but Parsifal went and Rped his own death (deliberately - he wasn't tricked into it or anything). The Wizard wants to order Parsifal and his friends to retcon the whole thing to suit the Wizard's person agenda.

5) A scene has been RPed which was to serve as part of a TinyPlot involving the participants, but one of the participants has disappeared from the mush unexpectedly and unless you retcon to edit out his part (perhaps replacing him with a volunteer) the TinyPlot is dead in the water.

Example : Suppose several people had agreed to reenact the classic plot of "Romeo and Juliet," and all of a sudden (with no warning or explanation) the player whose character was serving as the "Romeo" type suddenly drops off the Net and isn't heard from again during the next week or two? It might be advisable to retcon such romantic scenes as had already been done and agree that volunteer replacement "Bannio" was now the one who had flirted with "Juliet" at a costume party and they had fallen for each other at first glance - so just read "Bannio" for "Romeo" in any logs that were circulating - and would shortly be appearing below her balcony in another scene, etc.

6) A scene has been RPed which was (probably by accident) terribly inconsistent with other things that have already been Roleplayed - or were being done at the same time - due to a communications error somewhere.

Now the question is : What policies will you have about Retcons? I strongly recommend that you permit them in Situations 1, 2, and 6, since these involve cases where something went terribly wrong and the Roleplay involved "cheating" (obvious violations of your local rules or theme or continuity derived from previous Roleplay). I also recommend that you at least give some serious thought to each of the other three Situations and have some coherent guidelines on the Retcon issue prepared - in writing - BEFORE Players start asking "Can I erase that big scene we did last Monday? I didn't really want to do it that way, now that I think it over."

On the other hand, if you get in the habit of FORCING retcons on Players who don't see any need for them - which has been known to happen - you only alienate them. Of course, this goes hand in hand with the idea, as I suggest in other chapters, that you make your local policies on Theme and Consent and the like crystal-clear, in writing, BEFORE scenes can arise which - in your opinion - violated some idea or other that the Players should have respected, only you forget to tell them about it first and now you intend to punish them for not reading your mind.

ON GROUP ACTIVITIES

Group activities can be very useful in promoting a feeling of esprit de corps amongst the mushers. Three basic categories have come to my attention.

1) THE FLOOR SHOW AND THE AUDIENCE

These are the Activities where a small set of characters are generating the publicly available dialogue - such as a Court session in the local ruler's court, or a formal stage performance by professional entertainers, or a wedding ceremony. In these cases it is generally understood that "public" speeches and poses are only to be made by invitation. The remainder of the characters in attendance, constituting the audience, are silent observers unless something really unusual happens. However, a foresighted Wizard will make sure that there are various Places in the Room where characters can quietly chat IC in small groups (tables in a restaurant, benches in a courtroom, secluded corners in a Throne Room, etc.) about the events they are seeing, without disturbing anyone elsewhere in the room. Expecting them to just stand there like statues for an hour or more is a bad bet (unless you don't care if they go truly idle and spend that hour working on a term paper in another window, then check back to read their buffer and see what's been happening. The problem with this one is that if you actually want them to take an active role in a hurry, and you frantically page them . . . you may find that 30 minutes ago they lost interest and aren't watching their screen at all).

2) THE GENERAL PARTY

Everybody is milling around in a single room doing whatever comes naturally. This one is often combined with the use of the Multi-Descer system (if any) to create a Masquerade Ball where half the fun is trying to guess who you're really talking to. Every character is free to say and pose whatever occurs to him, as long as he's prepared to live with any consequences.

At the same time, the person(s) organizing the party would do well to plan out, even precode, a few special events to add flavor to the occasion. Having one character play an obnoxious drunk (usually by prearrangement) is one way to spice things up. Hiring (or creating a puppet of) a professional entertainer to do a quick humorous skit, play a few songs (a few lines at a time to avoid excessive spam), etc., is also workable.

3) THE STRUCTURED INTERACTION OF SEVERAL CHARACTERS WITH ONE ANOTHER AND/OR THEIR ENVIRONMENT

This is the kind of thing that really and truly requires a "Dungeon Master." Carefully choreographed Quests, for example, very much in the Dungeons and Dragons mode, where a group of intrepid adventurers strike out into the wilderness hunting something or someone, overcoming monsters, natural disasters, treachery, and other obstacles on the way to victory (or wherever they end up). You really need someone to be lurking behind the scenes generating these problems, controlling the slimy villains they encounter, that sort of thing.

All this can be a great deal of fun, properly done, as long as you remember a few things :

1) You'll have to be prepared to deal with people who come in late and want to join in, no matter how ICly impossible it would be at this point to incorporate somebody else (if it is).

2) You're in danger of spoiling people this way. Too many newbies seem to feel that if any of these "TinyPlot thingies" are going to happen to them, it will happen because somebody else plans out the whole TinyPlot from scratch and invites them to participate. In other words, they have the Dungeons & Dragons mentality of waiting for a Dungeon Master to come along and lead them around by the hand. Very understandable, that being the way most RPGs work when played as tabletop games, but mushing takes a noticeably different approach. This will probably need to be explained clearly, in detail, and more than once for the benefit of many of your newbies (while at the same time you should seek to actively help them network with other players and give them a helping hand in getting their own little TinyPlots up and running).

NOTE : OTOH I should mention that some people set up what amounts to a private mush and then only use it for the online equivalent of a tabletop RPG group, with weekly meetings at the same hour of the same day, week in and week out, membership restricted to a convenient number such as 8 or 10, and no further applications accepted unless one of the originals has to drop out, and a single Game Master controlling the destinies of all the rest. I have been assuming that this is not the case in the mush my target audience intends to run, but if that's exactly what you want to do, go right ahead and don't worry about the risk of "spoiling" the players as outlined above.

ON MANDATORY DEAD TIME

"Dead time" is herein used to indicate time a Player spends logged onto your mush, but neither roleplaying nor doing other activities important to the preparation of roleplaying, such as coding special objects to use in a scene he is planning to RP later on. Mandatory dead time, therefore, means any situation where a Player is logged on, and may WANT to RP with somebody, but finds that the local IC/OOC rules prohibit him from doing so (except, in some cases, if he can find somebody willing to go out of their way to come visit him wherever he is, but he isn't allowed to move to a well-populated public gathering place and try to start something).

There are at least four situations the Player could be in that might prevent him from doing anything interesting ICly with other people who are online and probably willing in principle to interact with him, if the rules permitted. He could be:

A) In the Recovery Ward.

B) In Durance Vile.

C) In a Far Country.

D) In a Flying Coffin.

IN THE RECOVERY WARD

Some mushes have mandatory hospital stays for PCs who have been severely wounded . . . or perhaps even a sliding scale for a range of different types of wounds.

IN DURANCE VILE

If the last IC activity of this PC was spent in a prison cell, where his captor was interrogating him or something along those lines, and he logs on again to keep an appointment with his captor to continue the TinyPlot, except the captor isn't online, what is the PC supposed to do?

IN A FAR COUNTRY

See ON THEMATIC TRAVEL TIMES for a full discussion of such problems. Basically, the question is this : does your mush have farflung IC areas that are supposed to take RL days or weeks to travel between? If so, what exactly do you expect a PC to DO when he is in such an Area, and either A) nobody else is online and ICly near him, or B) a few people are also in that area and online, but are busy with something private and refuse to let him join them? Especially if this happens over and over?

IN A FLYING COFFIN

Some mushes have used a transportation system where you are required to travel from place to place (between planets in a SF - themed mush, for instance) by climbing inside a coded vehicle, punching in a destination . . . and being forced to spend the next few RL hours of online time waiting for the vehicle to get to its destination before it will release you, this being considered a way to keep you "honest" about your travel times. If you log off two hours into a four-hour voyage, when you come back you STILL have to put in two ONLINE hours before you can disembark at Alderaan, or wherever you were going.

If you have never actually encountered this system before, and don't have any friends who have done so and told you about it, you probably think I'm pulling your leg. I admit it's insane, but it wasn't my invention!

Now, you may have different viewpoints on the thematic necessity of these possible Mandatory Dead Time Generators. For instance, you may feel that the Flying Coffin idea is utterly insane, but that forcing people to spend a few RL days in a hospital after they are sliced open in a swordfight is a perfectly sane idea which ought to add a touch of "realism" to your game. But what you have to realize is this: from a dedicated Roleplayer's perspective, ALL FOUR OF THESE SITUATIONS ARE PRECISELY THE SAME. In each case, he is online and ready to roleplay, but is being ORDERED not to do so.

Put him in such monotonous circumstances repeatedly and you can find some of the following happen:

He flat out ignores your general rules on this topic on the theory that you were drunk and/or insane when you wrote them.

He spends a lot of time OOCly agitating for a change in the rules so that he won't be stranded all alone on Planet X for days at a time.

Or (and this one is particularly tragic): He gives up and quits your mush entirely, going to one where he can theoretically find roleplay any time of day or night, without having a Wizard slap his wrist and say, "Bad boy! You can't come out of that cage to roleplay until next Tuesday!"