@Misadventure said in Stranger Danger?:
Know, learn or guess what your personally vulnerable roleplay topics are.
I liked that one a lot.
For me, I learned after a certain point to do what I call "guarding my space". I decided that only the 1 or 2 people I was actively friends with (friends as in "not an acquaintance but someone I'd known long enough to be sure who they were), but even then I tend to be vague about my personal life issues. I started holding back on personal details after an incident where I had to put some distance between myself and someone oocly who i was somewhat close with, and their response was to tell everyone my private business and that I was some kind of leech. People are absolute dog shit sometimes. Weaponizing someone's RL issues as a means of retaliation is pretty bad. Then again, it could have been way, way worse.
But in terms of "guarding my space", I took a deep look at where my "blind spots" were. It's hard to be honest about that kind of stuff, but it did me well. I reminded myself that people in the hobby were strangers in the actual sense, and like most people they tend to present an idealized version of themselves because ultimately they're text, strangers, and could really be anyone. Even that person who fucked me over was really a stranger then, too, and who the fuck knows why I shared personal details.
At some point (lol) I just stopped even caring or thinking about who I was RPing with and just accepted them as "stranger who roleplays well". I have it on good authority from the gay community that some gay men tend to present as female to get solid TS from assumed actual men, but then something in my head tripped and I realized I could have at any time done the same if I wanted to.
I mean, fuck, it's theoretically possible that people have unknowingly TSed family members or celebrities. Even Bin Laden was allegedly super active on Xenoverse/Xenoverse2, and definitely under an assumed identity.
Now, my approach ultimately led me to caring less about game stuff and stopping MuRP altogether because whatever attachments I had kinda disintegrated into "fuck it they're strangers, I have plenty of RL friends", and whenever drama started I just...stopped giving a fuck. This worked for me, but probably not everyone, but that's my big tl;dr suggestion:
Guard your space.
These people are strangers, and it's better for you to guard your information going out (Pii that can get you stalked, harassed, abused, put in danger, public ridicule), than to find yourself trying to wrestle control from someone who has taken it from you due to them knowing too much.
After all, it's pretty possible that at least one (or more?) of the dozens of people in the community has catfished their "persona/identity" on an ooc-level, for good or bad reasons. Just be careful.