I think there's a difference between boycotting, not buying something and encouraging others to do the same. And cancelling which seems to involve more shaming people for not doing the same, is more likely to be targeted at people and not companies, and usually comes along with a lot more personal attacks in general.

My biggest issues with cancelling are:

• It only really affects small/midsized creators. Big creators or corporations who it would matter most to be held to account just shrug it off.

• It only works if you're cancelled by your audience, white supremacists authors writing white supremacists books can't be cancelled unless white supremacists don't like what they did.

• It almost always seems to lead into personal attacks and online bullying.

This is a video about the experience of being hated online I found somewhat eye-opening.

What areas do you find there's the biggest difference between what you imagine doing with your character before you start playing them and how things always seem to go once you're actually playing them?

For me, I think it's usually the conversations I'll have. I always imagine having deep and meaningful conversations where I explore my character's philosophies and morality and personality in relation to other characters, or just ones that are witty and fun.

In reality, it seems like most people are afraid to have any kind of conversation that might make their character look foolish/bad and so you end up with a lot of just, state things that have happened, talk about stuff they know, brag about things they did/have, or complain about other characters. Which are all things I find it so hard to get interested in.

There is a downside to adding more tools for people to remember, but it's a very similar downside to adding more policies for people to remember.

To my mind the benefits of a tool as opposed to a policy here are:

• It will be interpreted as staff caring more. The fact that staff went and messed around with squiggly brackets and weird indentation will make it seem a lot more like they care than if they add a sentence to a policy file. It will seem a lot more like concern for personal boundaries in RP is a core feature of the game that staff cares about and is making central to their design. That might be an unfair interpretation but it is how it will read.

• It can simplify complicated social situations. If I page you 'Do you mind FTBing this?' and you reply 'Well I'd rather not because la la la.' is that arguing back about the FTB? I may have intended the question rhetorically but you interpreted it, or claimed to interpret it, literally. There are millions of edge cases like this where people squeak around rules or policies or things get complicated. Different communities might develop unofficial standards for how you're supposed to ask for an FTB or respond to one. Maybe some people start responding to FTB requests with not just an agreement but also with checking on the person's OOC welfare, you don't know this and don't do it and now you're a 'bad guy' There's a lot of potential value to coded tools in the simplicity of use, if you're in this situation, you type these letters, you hit the enter key, it's done.

• It can have additional bells and whistles. Like auto-generating tickets with relevant info, maybe a yellow flags to staff so they know there might be something coming up they need to deal with, maybe red is logged so if you have accusations against a particular player you can check the logs and see a bunch of people red-flagged them previously, maybe the command whisks you back to your +home and stops all pages between you and the other person for the rest of the day.

Mildly offtopic, but I had a thought once that you could do a game based in three simultaneously played time periods. One where the characters were in some sort of 'war college', one where they were in a terrible battle against an alien threat, and one after they'd lost the war and were eking out some sort of existence in a post-apoc setting. Some technology had been invented to allow people to influence the past and the metaplot would revolve around the older people trying to change the past so the war never happened or was won which also explains why the older characters might suddenly remember being friends with someone in their youth when they weren't yesterday.

I guess my constructive suggestion out of this would be maybe consider putting some weird timey-wimey stuff into the setting to help explain why the newly written past doesn't always go exactly how previously expected?

Mildly offtopic, but I had a thought once that you could do a game based in three simultaneously played time periods. One where the characters were in some sort of 'war college', one where they were in a terrible battle against an alien threat, and one after they'd lost the war and were eking out some sort of existence in a post-apoc setting. Some technology had been invented to allow people to influence the past and the metaplot would revolve around the older people trying to change the past so the war never happened or was won which also explains why the older characters might suddenly remember being friends with someone in their youth when they weren't yesterday.

I guess my constructive suggestion out of this would be maybe consider putting some weird timey-wimey stuff into the setting to help explain why the newly written past doesn't always go exactly how previously expected?

I think there's a difference between boycotting, not buying something and encouraging others to do the same. And cancelling which seems to involve more shaming people for not doing the same, is more likely to be targeted at people and not companies, and usually comes along with a lot more personal attacks in general.

My biggest issues with cancelling are:

• It only really affects small/midsized creators. Big creators or corporations who it would matter most to be held to account just shrug it off.

• It only works if you're cancelled by your audience, white supremacists authors writing white supremacists books can't be cancelled unless white supremacists don't like what they did.

• It almost always seems to lead into personal attacks and online bullying.

This is a video about the experience of being hated online I found somewhat eye-opening.

What areas do you find there's the biggest difference between what you imagine doing with your character before you start playing them and how things always seem to go once you're actually playing them?

For me, I think it's usually the conversations I'll have. I always imagine having deep and meaningful conversations where I explore my character's philosophies and morality and personality in relation to other characters, or just ones that are witty and fun.

In reality, it seems like most people are afraid to have any kind of conversation that might make their character look foolish/bad and so you end up with a lot of just, state things that have happened, talk about stuff they know, brag about things they did/have, or complain about other characters. Which are all things I find it so hard to get interested in.

There is a downside to adding more tools for people to remember, but it's a very similar downside to adding more policies for people to remember.

To my mind the benefits of a tool as opposed to a policy here are:

• It will be interpreted as staff caring more. The fact that staff went and messed around with squiggly brackets and weird indentation will make it seem a lot more like they care than if they add a sentence to a policy file. It will seem a lot more like concern for personal boundaries in RP is a core feature of the game that staff cares about and is making central to their design. That might be an unfair interpretation but it is how it will read.

• It can simplify complicated social situations. If I page you 'Do you mind FTBing this?' and you reply 'Well I'd rather not because la la la.' is that arguing back about the FTB? I may have intended the question rhetorically but you interpreted it, or claimed to interpret it, literally. There are millions of edge cases like this where people squeak around rules or policies or things get complicated. Different communities might develop unofficial standards for how you're supposed to ask for an FTB or respond to one. Maybe some people start responding to FTB requests with not just an agreement but also with checking on the person's OOC welfare, you don't know this and don't do it and now you're a 'bad guy' There's a lot of potential value to coded tools in the simplicity of use, if you're in this situation, you type these letters, you hit the enter key, it's done.

• It can have additional bells and whistles. Like auto-generating tickets with relevant info, maybe a yellow flags to staff so they know there might be something coming up they need to deal with, maybe red is logged so if you have accusations against a particular player you can check the logs and see a bunch of people red-flagged them previously, maybe the command whisks you back to your +home and stops all pages between you and the other person for the rest of the day.

If it's any consolation, I want to agree with you, I really do. I worry about stuff like this a lot and if there was a clear answer to what the most responsible thing was to do I would love that so much, I would advocate for every game or rp environment to change and boycott those that don't.

The problem is, say you burn down Pen Des and anything similar, what happens? Do ageplayers disappear or do they mostly just go on to to do the same RP on discord and other chat environments where they're much more likely to encounter underaged players?

And that's just one of a myriad of problems and complexities.

If there's a book or blog post or anything by some really smart person who's considered all these things and more and come to some clear idea of the most ethical behaviour then I do desperately wish someone would tell me about it.

...Wow

I just thought it'd be helpful to correct a miss-assumption understandably made by people who haven't played the game or talked to anyone who've played the game. I'm not saying don't hate it, I'm just saying hate it accurately.

If you think it's the worst thing ever that's cool, just maybe appreciate that other people might not? Like at least for some people having a kinkslist doesn't mean every character and RP interaction is going to be sexual, it just means that if RP becomes sexual you know what the other person does and doesn't want you to do to their butt.

And while you can hate what you hate again at least for some people there is a difference between adults in physically immature bodies and underage characters. I know I'd personally find a 20 year old with the mental age of a 13 year old a lot more disturbing than visa versa, but hey, that's me, you do you man. Just maybe can we find our way to appreciating that people can hold a view like that and not be a worshipper of Satan?

This is my slightly more thoughtful opinion on the game for potentially interested people.

I think CyberRun is a game that most people should try, but probably only a few people should play.

It has a lot of really unique and kind of wild code that I think almost anybody interested in mush design would benefit from playing with, even if only to figure out what they don't like or think works. So, for instance, you can edit poses after you do them, nest video or pictures into the game client or have it send you a discord message if you miss a page while offline. It also has this code that lets players design then run their own mini-games which is amazingly useful for people wanting to host events as well as really unique combat code and just a bunch of other weird and wild code stuff.

It's also pretty aggressively designed around consent and privacy and those sorts of things, so again if you're interested in consent in RP or things like that it's probably worth looking at even if just to help decide what you think doesn't work.

If you're looking for something to be your new main RP hangout though I'd probably only recommend it if you feel a bit like other games are too much like work or if you are a very character-focused writer. The game has a load of tools for creating RP, but it's all very optional. So you can do plots about raiding corpie bases and other epic stuff, but you don't get 'left behind' if you don't and won't get special emits or anything about how cool you are if you do.

For me as someone whose favorite type of RP is frequently long, deep conversations between characters not having to worry about falling behind in any way when I indulge in that is something I really like, but for others unless you're willing to step up and make plots or are hanging with people who are willing to do that I can certainly see the game feeling pretty slow.

@Ghost Those ages are the ages of the Idents, not characters. Basically the sleeve if you want to think about it in altered-carbon terms. Profiles are Ident based, so one character could have multiple profiles for the multiple Ident/Sleeves they run around in. Idents/Sleeves absolutely can be under 18, just the character controlling them isn't, which I'm pretty sure is exactly what I said?

@Rinel said in Cyberrun:

@Ghost said in Cyberrun:

I think a good question to ask here is: "Why is it so important to play a legal minor on a sex-based RP game, and not an immature legal adult; perhaps even a teen 18-19?"

Bingo.

I think it's worth pointing out that CyberRun doesn't let people play legal minors. In that every character is age locked to be at least 18, you can just play an over eighteen year old in a physically younger body aka an immature legal adult.

I've played CyberRun, my experience was that it's a pretty fun Cyberpunk sandbox, it's perfectly viable to play it without TSing, but it requires more self-starting than most players probably can manage. So far the community is lovely though.

This is probably my favorite event from it if people are interested in what kind of things happen there: https://cyberrun.net/log/viewevent?id=66

What confuses me about these discussions is how binary wanting to do something is always described. I could be super weird but that's not how it works for me at all, there's usually at least a half dozen reasons why I do or don't want to do any given RP all conflicting in my brain at any given time and usually changing over the course of the scene.

It could be fun in the moment or boring or unpleasant, it could be good for my long term enjoyment of the character, for their arc etc, it could give me something gamey I want like xp, it could provide enjoyment for others which can be a very rewarding feeling, or can help make other people like my char/RP which is huge in determining how much fun I'll have in future.

So if I want to do something is normally more like 60% yes, but that will change wildly depending on how things are actually written or played out over the course of the scene. Also if you try and explain OOCly to me every detail of the RP you want to do, I probably will find that so much of a spoiler that I don't want to do it anymore.

I'm fully aware that I could just be a really weird, messed up person in my brain. But I just can't help but feel like these discussions don't connect with the reality of RPing for me personally.

One thing I've found works a lot better than people realize is just leaving scenes. You're on an adventure and it's getting boring or gross or whatever, just RP that your char tripped over a root and twisted their ankle and everyone else has to go on without them while they hobble home. People will assume you had something come up in RL generally and it avoids most ICA=ICC problems. Wouldn't work if you're locked in a dungeon I guess though.