I'm not saying that this is the hurdle you're facing, just to be clear, but...I consistently see people doing things that are either ineffective or straight-up counterproductive to getting RP.

Vaguely saying in a lounge, and sometimes even saying on faction channels,

Player is trying to decide if they want to RP tonight!

or,

Player feels like RP!

--I almost never respond to this, for a whole boatload of reasons. I'm not an elitist, and I don't just like to RP in a corner with my friends, though that's often how things go, because my friends actually specifically ask me if I want to RP, and usually they have an idea as to what we might do. So many of the people I see complaining about cliques and being left out of plots never actually page a scene-runner and say, 'Hey, your plot looks awesome! Is there a hook that would allow me to get involved, or somebody I should talk to about doing that?' Most of the people I see in lounges who announce they are debating RP tonight never actually go so far as to ask anyone specifically for a scene, or put in the thirty seconds of time to check someone else's character info and suggest a scene that might appeal to them, or check the +events board and ask people running plots if their character could follow up on something that happened, or propose something they could get going on the grid, no matter how simple -- or any number of other proactive choices.

Which almost inevitably seems to lead to this kind of player disconnecting after making some kinda passive aggressive remark like, 'Player guesses they'll just give up for the night, then.' And while I totally understand that it can be frustrating not to get traction on a game, this behavior is not endearing. That person becomes someone I sorta plan to avoid.

Which kinda leads into the other thing I think people don't keep in mind: many people still doing this are grown adults, many with children and full-time jobs. Some of us enjoy ST/GMing, particularly large-scale, long arc plots. There have been times mid-plot when my free time for RP is booked up for literally two weeks with people who need scenes with me, in addition to whatever funsies I'm doing for myself. It gets difficult to do spontaneous RP for scheduling reasons, and certainly there's only so much creative energy anybody can put into this stuff without going insane and burning out. Sometimes, it's very much a kindness to very specifically ask someone for a scene, suggest something you think might be fun, and then plan a day to do that. I sort of miss games where the culture leaned into 'random grid RP,' too, so I get where you're coming from there...but, that's just the way things have trended, so all you can really do is try to be more direct.

People do not page, though. I sure can attest to that. I've run enormous plots on numerous games, and more often than not I wind up hearing about salty players who say they can't get involved, who have never once actually paged me to ask me how they can do that. I'm a very not-scary person to interact with.

Honestly, I think most people are flattered if they're approached for RP by a polite person who has an idea as to what the scene might be.

Many people doing this are

a) older now, and in accordance with that change in time of life tend to have more commitments and less time

b) and less patience for bullshit behavior on the part of others.

They have to pick and choose how they spend their time, and naturally want to have as much fun as possible in the limited time that they have. Family obligations, careers -- sometimes scheduling way out is the only way to make that time. Many of us have been doing this since the nineties, and have favorite friends to play with, too.

I've met brand new people in the last few years that I'd never met before who have become routine favorites on my list of people to play with, and all it took on my part was going to events and inviting people to do things that I thought might sound fun for them. Paying attention to what people like doesn't mean you have to become lifelong friends or pitch your character as something they are not, but yeah, if you want someone to block out time for you, it makes sense to have an idea of what you'll both find fun. That's courteous, and more likely to get you the long-term options for RP you want, anyway.

The hidden difficult truth here is that sometimes I hear people talk about how they cannot for the life of them 'break through the cliques' or get RP, and I'm not sure how to tell them that it's because they're incredibly irritating human beings, either through selfishness or some other unfortunate quality. Nobody's got time to life-coach strangers. (I'm not saying this is you. I don't have any idea who you are. I'm just saying, it happens a lot.)

tl;dr: Things changed because a lot of us grew up, and some of us did not.

I don't buy the 'no conscious logic' thing. Of course there is. A person sits down at a keyboard and types out threats, lays out statements meant to upset people, that is absolutely a conscious choice. Maybe the underlying impulses that drive a person to become like that are debatable (and probably not worth debating as far as what it means to this community) but it's frustrating when people write off choices as being anything other than acts of intention, regardless of whatever compels them.

When you can tell after the first round that you and the person you're in a scene with are both on point that day, and the whole scene is going to be SO GOOD.

@Sparks said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

Okay, so. I think I've finally managed to actually figure out why this topic is bothering me.

Bless this post.

There are middle grounds between the two, too.

I fall in the 'I don't want to share my NPCs and don't feel that I'm obligated to lend them out for people not in my timezone who can't engage with my plot, but I'll work with them in @mail or a gdoc/Areslog scene, or via legwork, or in some other way that acknowledges their interest without murdering something important to my enjoyment of storytelling' camp. I also fall in the 'I find TSing players on an NPC pretty weird and wouldn't want it happening on a game I ran' camp. For me, the apparent benefits do not outweigh the apparent drawbacks. And in spite of that, I'm admittedly in the 'yeah, staffers are going to have favorite players to run plot for and that's not an ethical issue' camp because, I run stuff, and of course I have favorites. They make my life easier instead of harder. They aren't entitled. They contribute. They share plot points with fellow players. They do cool shit with story.

@bear_necessities said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

It is that fred and sue should have the same opportunity for staff npc time. For example, if you are running a scene to get the mcguffin that sue and fred are both capable of getting, you shouldn't immediately go "nah" to fred because hes boring or leap on the opprotunity to give it to sue because she isn't.

I get it. I get you have people you enjoy GMing for. But those people shouldn't get all of your attention. Maybe fred just needs a different plot to come alive in. Or maybe fred is just super boring forever but he still plays your game and deserves the chance to be apart of it.

The trouble with this is, players don't all pursue plot to the same extent, and there are only so many effing hours in the day. If Fred and Sue are both in my scene and they both engage and they're both making choices, taking actions, contributing, then they're both going to get traction from me because as a storyteller that shit is my favorite thing. But if Fred is sending me legwork, showing up to scenes. RPing about the plot with other players, giving them opportunities at the spotlight, etc., and Sue doesn't really contribute but thinks she ought to be included in every plot development regardless of the fact that there might be 10 other players like Fred that want my time and attention...

This happens all the time. All the time. I once had a player send me an @mail on a game to tell me she felt 'sidelined' in a plot I was running as a player, non-staff ST, because she had a magic-oriented character -- but that @mail was the first time she had even spoken to me. I know it sounds far-fetched, but it's constant entitlement.

I have limited time and energy. I spend it doing what I enjoy as an ST, which is usually in large part about making players excited about the story I'm telling -- but also because it's exciting to tell that story. You seek a balance between the two. You have to.

My solution to the problem of 'who gets my time and attention' as a staffer is usually to run periodic public event scenes that literally anyone can go to, provided they're around, and in between these, motivated players who continue to engage with the plot get my priority.

Lots of good stuff in this thread. A couple of things by way of response for me personally:

@egg said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@juke Not everyone has the luxury of a decades-long RP superfriends group.

That's true, but what I said still works. Like...I recently went off on an adventure of curiosity to a game without telling a single one of my usual crew, just because I wanted to try something different, on my own. It was @faraday's BSG: Unification game. I didn't know a single soul there (or at least, I didn't know that I did, even if it turns out that @Seraphim73 and his wife were there, hah). I still didn't have trouble getting into RP, though. It was toward the end of the game's life cycle, but I had a marvelous time and met a lot of lovely people, and produced a whole lot of logs in a very short amount of time. I find I rarely ever struggle to get RP unless there are extenuating factors on a grid contributing to people's availability, etc. (or my own inconsistent availability creates problems).

It's definitely not because my shit doesn't stink, or that I'm any more fun to RP with, or something. It's just that I've figured out a way to engage people that usually makes them interested in/willing to give me some of their time and energy, which are not small requests, these days, to make of people. And I try very hard to make sure that they come away from it feeling like that was worth it. Related to which:

@egg said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@krmbm Iif you are a more of a pantser than a plotter, as I am, you might not have an idea until specific characters are thrown together in a specific setting.

I think I'm a middle-ground person. I'm a pantser-plotter. I will have a very simple kernel of an idea that I think people involved will be into, and then we jump IC and see where it goes. My favorite players to play off of are people who do really interesting things with that, surprising me and taking it in unexpected directions, and we can riff story with one another all day long. It's a joy to see where a simple thing will go, with them. But, you still have to have a place to start.

And I'd talk about that, but I think a lot of people in the thread have already given a lot of solid suggestions about how to do that, anyway! Sometimes it's enough just to tell somebody you think they look fun to RP with and ask them what kinda scene they might enjoy so that you can come up with a reason to throw your characters in a room together.

Bar RP is like any RP. It can be the most spectacular scene imaginable, it's just down to execution.

Incoming blathering .02 with a dash of personal RL perspective...

@Ganymede explains perfectly why most of the people I hear talking about not getting RP will not benefit from additional tools. They cannot bring themselves to use the ones already there, so they're not going to use a +wantrp command, either, because what if the other person says 'no' anyway?

Which is a thing I didn't see mentioned, but wanted to throw in here: the flip side of the coin is, some people have RP they want very much, story beats for character development and etc., but won't trust in the hands of just anyone. It's never going to wind up on a public wantrp command. People are still going to feel left out. OR, as people said earlier in the thread, they literally cannot plan their RP fun around random stranger RP, because they are time-poor or exhausted because work/family/whatever.

I loved Faraday's 'RP wish list' on BSG so much that I am totally stealing it for a thing I'm working on, but I don't remember seeing much of it get run by players, if any at all. It doesn't hurt to have it around. It might only help. But it won't fix the problem.

I really think people have to learn to engage. Besides, these are useful interpersonal skills to have in any arena of life, and this setting is pretty consequence-free as a place to try it on (I'm talking like real, serious, lasting consequences, not MU* drama). There ARE good, kind people out there doing this. I have met many. They'll respond well to honest efforts that have everyone's enjoyment in mind -- whether it's social anxiety causing the speedbumps, or a lack of experience with storytelling, or just plain shyness, or whatever. Even figuring out how to approach people and create a good connection from which to work together is pretty useful daily life stuff...you know?

@Thenomain said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

So, a staffer playing an NPC versus a staffer playing a PC.

Is there really a difference?

Can an NPC without extensive documentation exist?

When does an NPC become a Staff PC?

Fight.

I understand why you're asking, and I think most of us have seen instances where these things were unethically used, but if I'm honest this line of thinking still makes me a little bit nervous, for all of the reasons @Wretched mentioned. When people create a game, pouring their time and energy into a setting that excites them, nine times out of ten they're creating the place they want to play in because it doesn't yet exist. If you're like me, you're already hyper-aware that there are limits being put on what you can do with your PCs in order to stave off player perception of taking liberties. (This is true of anywhere that you're intensively storytelling, too -- the juiciest plot bits are probably getting dispensed to other people.)

You're already sort of in the crappy position of finally having the game you want to play on, but at the high cost of spending a significant chunk of your time doing things that aren't RP (and are often frustrating), and when you do RP, you're more limited than you would be as a regular ol' player.

I use NPCs as a player storyteller and as staff. They work the same way in both cases. I make them up on the spot all the time. They're Supporting Cast. Sometimes they become important to a plot, emotionally or otherwise, but their fates are governed by the actions of actual players. That's a subservience of purpose I would never want to feel my own PCs are beholden to.

Sounds to me like he's trying to make mountains out of molehills in an effort to be sooOOoOOo threaaateninggggg, oh nooooOoOOo. SECUUUURITY FAULLLLLLTS, I USED FARA'S REAAAAAAL NAAAAAME, I'M SUPER SERIAAAAAAL (even though she freely puts it on Ares-related content)...

They're just a creep and they thrive on engagement and attention. Using her name, talking vaguely about having encountered you before, vaguely threatening to redux this whole mess...this person just wants to feel they can control other people and these are all painfully juvenile, transparent manipulations.

The absolute worst thing anybody could do to him would be to insta-ban him as soon as there's an ID and not interact with him after the fact, because if you don't care, he's got nothing. All he can do is inconvenience you.

The ability to sneak around IP bans and stuff makes it hard to whack these moles for good, for sure. It would be lovely if we could come up with a system to not. But he's probably reading this thread and jerking it to all of the @ mentions he's getting, and I am mostly wondering why this person is even allowed here. (Unless I missed something and the @ mentions of his MSB handle are just leading to a dead account in which case, excellent, very good, carry on!)

@mietze said in I owe a lot of people some apologies.:

With boundaries people who have tendencies towards behaving badly can actually be enjoyable to RP with. [...] The problem is that few people want to set up or enforce those boundaries because it's a lot of unpleasant work with an uncertain payoff.

I wanna make it clear I'm just responding to this post and not as a broad commentary on the whole thread, but:

I know this happens, but I think it's the craziest shit ever. There are a lot of people out there who are fun to play with who aren't also crazy assholes who would abuse people if they were given the inch to do so.

get rid of them

I don't buy the 'no conscious logic' thing. Of course there is. A person sits down at a keyboard and types out threats, lays out statements meant to upset people, that is absolutely a conscious choice. Maybe the underlying impulses that drive a person to become like that are debatable (and probably not worth debating as far as what it means to this community) but it's frustrating when people write off choices as being anything other than acts of intention, regardless of whatever compels them.

@Groth I tend to agree with you on the latter half of what you're saying, though a banlist only goes so far, because harasser MO tends to be to use workarounds and try to sneak under the radar.

The first part definitely doesn't apply here, though. These are well understood abusive behaviors, and they're not even a little bit subtle. That slim margin of doubt is what people like this rely on, which is why there's a strong negative reaction to that line of discussion -- it's why they're able to do what they do for so long, and why it often takes so long to ID and oust them. Alas.

@L-B-Heuschkel said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:

It's still worth it to let him have that satisfaction, though, if it means that the various games don't have to deal with the fall-out of each having to go through 2-3 harassment cases before the jig is up. Any harassment case avoided is a good one.

That was me, and I 100% agree with you. Now people can keep an eye out and a banhammer at the ready. It's just good not to engage beyond that if at all possible.

@GirlCalledBlu said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:

Every time he calls Faraday, "Lynn," it creeps me out.

Then it's working as he intended.

Making it personal, erasing conventionally polite buffer zones -- these things are the equivalent of getting into someone's personal space uninvited. It can feel threatening and still be plausibly deniable, and that gap is where these assgoblins try to live, and unfortunately where they thrive. They want to make people uncomfortable to create a power imbalance and they'll do it however they can. The number of attempts to control how you feel in the thing you pasted is absurd.

Good on you guys for protecting your players. I'd block any communications you get going forward, and keep the banhammer ready. Maybe he'll get bored eventually.

Sounds to me like he's trying to make mountains out of molehills in an effort to be sooOOoOOo threaaateninggggg, oh nooooOoOOo. SECUUUURITY FAULLLLLLTS, I USED FARA'S REAAAAAAL NAAAAAME, I'M SUPER SERIAAAAAAL (even though she freely puts it on Ares-related content)...

They're just a creep and they thrive on engagement and attention. Using her name, talking vaguely about having encountered you before, vaguely threatening to redux this whole mess...this person just wants to feel they can control other people and these are all painfully juvenile, transparent manipulations.

The absolute worst thing anybody could do to him would be to insta-ban him as soon as there's an ID and not interact with him after the fact, because if you don't care, he's got nothing. All he can do is inconvenience you.

The ability to sneak around IP bans and stuff makes it hard to whack these moles for good, for sure. It would be lovely if we could come up with a system to not. But he's probably reading this thread and jerking it to all of the @ mentions he's getting, and I am mostly wondering why this person is even allowed here. (Unless I missed something and the @ mentions of his MSB handle are just leading to a dead account in which case, excellent, very good, carry on!)

@Wretched said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

Motivation.

Good pick!!

So many of those videos helped me to feel validated about things I struggle with, like @Kanye-Qwest described, with her diagnosis. Community definitely helps me to stave off the impulse to beat myself up for things that aren't really under my control, and it's hard to measure the difference that can make!

My ADHD isn't going to let me read all 20 pages of this (lol), but I wanted to mention How To ADHD in case nobody has yet. It's a youtube channel, and she also has a Patreon, along with a Discord that has a supportive community of people who have not only ADD/ADHD, but often all sorts of comorbid combinations of things (depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, and so on). There are a lot of resources there and a lot of support. I can't pay attention to that throughout the day either, but it's nice to have.

I'm all for people trying for testing. I just wanted to mention that there is sometimes a possible downside to taking the tests. Outside of observing your actual brain activity, the currently available tests are a pretty poor measurement of need for some people, and taking a test and being told you do not have ADHD can actually make it more difficult to get a reassessment and diagnosis. I would very probably not show up as ADHD with most tests available, but adding concerta to my meds has made a phenomenal difference in my life.

It's pretty easy to tell whether or not you need the medications, anyway. If you don't, you will know right away, because you'll probably feel like you're about to blast off into low orbit, instead of suddenly able to focus. Some doctors can be reluctant to try them without testing, but often, at low doses, they aren't. It can be worth asking, depending on how you feel about medications in general, your current needs/stability, etc.

A lot of things play into this aptitude (or lack of). How we spend our time, what we use our brains for, compounds weaknesses and strengths a great deal. I read a fascinating book not long ago called Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf about how transitioning from a society that reads 'deeply' -- with books -- into a society that consumes a larger quantity of digital information in other formats has very literally changed how we think, in the same way that the emergence of written language changed how our brains worked when that became a thing. That won't surprise anybody with any layperson understanding of neuroscience, but it's a thing we don't talk about or consider.

Which is not to say that I think aphantasia is down to 'did you read books as a kid, and/or are you of an age that consumes media very differently' or anything so reductive as that. It's always much more complicated than that. It just makes me wonder what patterns or commonalities you would find, if you were able to profile people who did or did not have aphantasia (which would require even knowing which factors to look at in the first place).

I have a hard time imagining what it would be like to have aphantasia -- somewhat ironically, I guess, since the thing that makes it hard is that I have a vivid and really sensory, detail-oriented imagination. Heh.

I've always written. It's where I excelled, and I enjoyed it. I mean...my early writing is trash, but that's true of 99.999999% of mere mortals who take on a new pursuit, because you have to start somewhere, right?

And I still write trash. All the time. It's a better class of trash than it used to be, but you never stop writing garbage. Photographers take hundreds of photos and might pluck one golden image out of the lot. Fine artists draw and paint a lot of studies and sketches they'd never show anyone, in and around their finished works.

I think some people find different aspects of the creative process easier than others, and it can come more naturally for some, but I get uncomfortable with phrases like 'can creativity be taught,' because a lot of what people call 'creativity' is actually just 'work.' Like...the head down, butt-in-chair, wringing-blood-from-a-stone, frustrating, self-doubting, out-of-love-with-everything slog that you can't even objectively evaluate for yourself because all you know is that you're not satisfied with it and it isn't singing for you.

Muses aren't real. If you only ever produce work on days when you're feeling inspired, you won't get very far.

That is the scenic route to get to what I want to say, which is that I think anybody can get into anything. The limiting factor is how much of the work they're willing to do. Somebody for whom writing comes naturally can be paralyzed by their own dissatisfaction with their work, and never finish anything; their neighbor might struggle to put one word after another, but invest enough butt-in-chair time to be published first. Prolific, even. They say 90% of writing is editing, anyway, but if you never get the first draft down, it doesn't matter.

And as @GreenFlashlight said above (and other people probably said elsewhere in the thread), getting the work down means being able to accept failure. Which is, in turn, partly because there are more Slog Work days than inspired ones.

As an RP-related side note, I don't think much anymore about how RP helps or hinders my writing. I try not to think about RP at all when I write outside of it. What matters infinitely more than that is what I'm reading. If I'm not reading, and I mean reading widely, outside of specific genres and voices, my writing gets cramped. My language stagnates. I don't have ideas, because I'm not putting fresh, diverse thoughts into my head and letting them roll around in there and bump into each other in unexpected ways.

Mom was not a nerd, and at first glance neither was my dad, but dad was a stealth nerd, actually. He was a track and field jock, but he also: worked for IBM in the 70s, read sci-fi and Conan, is the reason I saw weird stuff like Eraserhead or Tetsuo: Iron Man before I was even a teenager, owned IF games like Zork and HHGTTG, had an Atari 2600, subscribed to the Skeptical Enquirer, got really into specific sciences, etc.

So, that. Then reading his sci-fi and playing his video games turned into an interest in computers, which led to an AOL account, and RDI was a thing for a bit but I wound up hanging around a sci-fi chat room instead: Red Star Station. Never heard it mentioned since. Must have been a small group. I think I was in middle school. My generation was the right age for the NES, so I grew up gaming and never really stopped.

I think I discovered MU* because AOL used to offer Gemstone III, the only MUD I was ever on, and the leap between that and more RP-focused stuff was probably inevitable.