Positivity revisited. Explain your addiction.

[slvrmoontiger]

I find awesome PCs everywhere I go. I keep planning my next PC and it will be impossible to decide where to play.

Would have to be somewhere other than where your current PC is playing.

I almost always play in the same place, haven't had any problems, to my knowledge, of my PCs becoming friends with my old PC's friends, although it has happened, it wasn't like I sought it out, and it actually happened after an IG month or two, and maybe just one or two. Usually my PCs differ from eachother enough they end up enemies with my old PC's friends, or my old PC's friends are dead by the time my new one would have a chance to be introduced to them.

Odd, staff told me that it's frowned upon to play in the same place all the time.

[Barzalene]

More positivity please.

[QuillDipper]

I like all of you nerds and all of your nerd ass characters. That's all.

[BadSkeelz]

I like that there are so many unique, well-played, and interesting characters that even years later I feel bad for causing their deaths.

[Norcal]

I like that there are so many unique, well-played, and interesting characters that even years later I feel bad for causing their deaths.

I had to laugh. I lost some well loved chars to PK in the last year or so, and I like the fact that knowing what they meant to me, now makes me think twice before attempting  to PK another.  It gives Zalanthan  life some worth and makes PK much more weighty and realistic.

[Mooney]

Being constantly surprised. Movies and tv shows nowadays are so predictable, you quickly become smug at your ability to categorize the characters and the twists.

I come to Arms to be put in my place.

[Kol]

I love the fact this game is always evolving. The stories, game-world, the characters.

But mostly, I keep playing because of you guys. 

[Barsook]

But mostly, I keep playing because of you guys. 

*hugs Kol*

[Kol]

But mostly, I keep playing because of you guys. 

*hugs Kol*

Dawwww, shucks.

[Hicksville Hoochie]

I've had some rather amazing interactions with the staff as of late, both in game and out. The area I stay in plays pretty consistently busy, and I've been finding a majority of the pcs that BadSkeelz doesn't kill before I get to know them to be pretty well-done and very fun to play with.

The amount of newer-seeming players I come across as well has me feeling positive about the future of the game also, and looking forward to them taking my boots once they get a handle on things!

[Eyeball]

I love trying to get alllll my skills to master level. And getting at least 10k in the bank and making pointless bounties on people's heads.

But what happens when you win at life and find out no one cares?

[Zoan]

[valeria]

I feel completely physically like shit and could really use some escapism and... here it is!  Jump in character and stop being miserable.  Got to love it.

[Zoan]

But...Armageddon is the most depressingly grimdark game ever...

[Norcal]

I like how some players are really really good at the whole plot and betrayal thing. I am sometimes amazed at how slippery they can be and I get taken every time.  There must be a lot of used car salesmen playing this game.

[Marauder Moe]

For all my technical knowledge and talents, I may be an artist at heart.  The thing is I've never had much interest in static mediums (painting, sculpture, poetry, etc).  Instead I've always been fascinated by things that move.  Things like clocks, machines, robotics, and eventually computer software.  I see beauty in the motion and the chaos of them.

I like creating little virtual people.  They're really not so different from robots or programs.  I design them with rules and traits, based upon which they react to inputs from the game world and from other people's creations.  It is my hope that I've designed them to appear life-like, to be effective, but also to be surprising to both others and even myself.

[Delirium]

But...Armageddon is the most depressingly grimdark game ever...

I guess it's a nice reminder that things could always be worse...

[LauraMars]

For all my technical knowledge and talents, I may be an artist at heart.  The thing is I've never had much interest in static mediums (painting, sculpture, poetry, etc).  Instead I've always been fascinated by things that move.  Things like clocks, machines, robotics, and eventually computer software.  I see beauty in the motion and the chaos of them.

This reminds me of your complex minecraft inventions like the automatic tree de-leafer.

[Marauder Moe]

It didn't just defoliate the trees, it stacked the logs into a nice neat 10x10x10 cube for easy harvesting!

[Kevo]

This is the only multi-player game that doesn't constantly piss me off. This is also the only place where I have friends.

[BleakOne]

This is the only multi-player game that doesn't constantly piss me off. This is also the only place where I have friends.

Totally this.

Strangely enough for a game with the tag line including 'corruption' and 'betrayal', this is one of the few games on the internet where I feel I can trust others to act as the game was intended and not to cheat, play the code, or grief for no reason, for the most part.

The setting, admins and perma-death are other things I like. 

[Kevo]

I was thinking about this all day yesterday. I didn't say enough, I didn't elaborate to the extent that I could have, and I didn't coherently share ENOUGH of my reasons for loving this game. Loving it.


I know most of us here can associate with being different, outcast, and 'weird', I'll even go so far as to say alienated, isolated, and depressed. This is, after all, a community of 'text-based role-playing gamers', and how unusual is that? Anyways, I don't know if all of us here have had as much trouble as I have fitting in, and socializing. My middle school actually forced a mandatory psychiatric evaluation on me in seventh grade, then, while I was gone and suspended, there was a school-wide seminar/conference/assembly-thing about columbine, and me. Me, specifically. I never got to know what really went on there, but the rumors escalated into just plain absurdity.

Sometime around eighth or ninth grade, my brother introduced me to Achaea, and I was like, oh, cool, a game that I can afford to play that seems to have a fantasy theme, I love it. Nope. Awful stuff. Through Achaea, and discovering what 'MUD' was, I discovered Armageddon, and it seemed amazing. I thought I had this, that I could really rock this game, and beat it. Heh. Poor naive dope. My first application was rejected because I had the character have a 'tattoo with the letter MK + AS' (I can't remember the exact letters) in a heart on his bicep. Looking back, I am so ashamed. Well, after a year or so of playing, my style got a lot different, and I got a lot better at this, in many respects, but here's the cinched, here's part of why I love Armageddon so much, even respect it, and owe it something. My REAL life got better.

Most of the time, one doesn't always consciously think about body language, tone of voice, and facial expression when walking into a room, hanging out with others, or presenting your work to the class. At least I didn't, but Armageddon made me severely aware of these things. When my chars got the worst kinds of reactions from other characters IG, I stopped and examined the text for what was going on, the inconsistency. What made this buff, muscular man and my muscular, buff man so different that the current tavern's response to supposedly similar actions was so different? Why does this introduction work, and this one not work, when they're logistically the exact same thing? Why can a female char say this, but a male character can't? What's going on here?

You, the player base, helped me test out who I wanted to be, and learn how to communicate with what I call 'humans', in a safe environment. An attack on my PC was NOT an attack on me, as many of you have so helpfully, and kindly explained over the years, and a game death was not a physical death. This game may have, if I dare say, saved my actual live many times. Arm gave me a safe place to experiment. Using the tools of character creation, I learned how culture, family, social status etc shaped people, and made them different, when foolish me thought we were all people who all deserved the same things, with all the same 'given rights'. RL people don't always agree, in my experience, but Armageddon taught me how to communicate in a effective manner, what body language was appropriate, what tone of voice is okay with friends, and with authority figures, so that I could convey that in a productive not destructive manner. I examined other people's daily habits, and turned them into textual representations, and understood them much more easily. I watched from my computer as PC's made friends, socialized, and even romanced others, and using those examples was able to become a high-schooler who could interact with my own peers soooo much better. There were a few girls that actually liked me, people who were actively being sarcastic instead of complimentary, and, most importantly, people that were going through tough times too and needed either a friend, a protecter, or a confidante, and Armageddon taught me how to recognize and provide all of those things, while still offering an amazing and fun atmosphere, an escape from my devastating homelife, and an outlet for my creativity all at the same time.

I can't play the GDB like everyone else, and I'm trying to 'participate' more in the community as myself, and not a character, but being able to BE a character helped me participate in life. Thank you, staff and players, former and current, for contributing to my addiction.

[manonfire]

I'm here for the ultraviolence.

[Harmless]

I'm here for the ultraviolence.

I am here for this too, even if it's just happening around me and not directly to me, and I enjoy it just as much when I am enacting ultraviolence on others as when it is being brutally enacted on my own hapless PCs. It's always a good thing.

[Beethoven]

I love making up ideas for stories and playing them out in my head, but I'm not actually very good at the writing side of things, at least when it comes to structure, pacing, knowing when to describe something and when to leave it up to the reader's imagination, et cetera. I can write prose and all, but actually crafting a well-fashioned story from start to finish is not one of my strong suits.

So for a long time, I was extremely frustrated because I felt I had a lot of drive to write and tell stories, but I didn't really have an outlet for that creative energy. I was stuck with talking to myself in the shower, inventing dialogue between fictional characters I knew I'd never pen down.

When I learned about roleplaying-required MUDs, I was excited because it seemed like exactly the kind of medium I'd been looking for. I could devise a character, describe him/her, and play out his/her life, all without worrying about those structural issues that I struggle with when trying to write something from scratch. On top of that, surprise and mystery could be present in my character's journey in a way they couldn't if I was writing the entire story, start to finish. My expectations could be shattered, or surpassed. I loved the idea.

The problem was, the MUDs I tried never "fit." Either the theme wouldn't suit me, or the players would be way too focused on skill-maxing and player-killing while scraping by with the bare-bones minimum RP, or there'd be no playerbase worth speaking of...there was always something. I tried a MUSH or two, but I never got used to the syntax, and the idea of having almost nothing coded in turned me off. If that's your thing, fine, but to me, MUSHing reminds me of roleplaying in a chat room.

If I recall, I looked into Armageddon a few times before actually jumping in. I think what held me back in the beginning was the character application/approval process. I should have been gung-ho about it, given the standards of RP I was looking for, but since one game after another had disappointed me, I was reluctant to put a lot of time and effort into any particular one before I had a good concept of what it would be like. I don't remember what eventually nudged me into trying it. I think it might have been some of the posts on the GDB providing examples of good roleplay and emoting, which demonstrated to me that the community here was actually serious about RP. The docs were intimidating, but enthralling. I apped a character, and I've been here from now on.

I realize now that Armageddon has things that I didn't even realize I was looking for. In so many H&S MUDs, mages, priests, rogues, and warriors are equally common, and all the choice really amounts to is whether you specialize in offense, status effects/healing, utility, or a balanced approach. In Armageddon, magick is rare and terrifying. Magic in most other roleplaying games comes across as a profession about as exotic as blacksmithing, and as a result, seems just about as mundane. I never realized I was looking for a harsh and oppressive society, until I played here and realized in retrospect how devoid of culture and unrealistically run the "societies" in other games were. And I was definitely turned off by the idea of a desert world, until I tried it and realized how much more interesting it was than the cookie-cutter enchanted forests and fairy marshes and snow-covered tundras that were somehow only a handful of rooms away from each other.

Best of all, you don't have to be "good" (in a coded, non-RP sense) to play Armageddon. Playing a person that makes mistakes, who needs an escort in the wilderness, and who doesn't know where all the super-sekkrit water/jewel/abomination caves are is perfectly viable and doesn't get you branded as a noob. Everyone doesn't wear the same gear just to maxx out. And thank almighty Tektolnes for that, because I am not the kind of person who cares to memorize where all the phat lewt is just to have a bit more "success" with my next PC!

Anyway, that's my long-winded explanation for my addiction. I like to tell stories, and Armageddon helps me do that in a unique way that plays to my strengths.