Mismatched themes and expectations
-
@lithium said in MU* Gripes and Peeves:
@arkandel said in MU* Gripes and Peeves:
Although I agree with the sentiment regarding TS-shaming, the original tangent was triggered by the question of why would people go to a certain kind of game when they're looking for something else. So why a well populated game if they only want to play with very specific people? Why a diverse game if what they are after is a specific kind of theme (which could be sex, or highschool RP or hardcore politics or MLP or whatever else).
This sometimes causes friction since these folks try to introduce or overemphasize their desired tropes, overriding the intended theme.
Any theories on it?
Probably deserves it's own thread Ark
Go on, you savages. Theorize!
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
-
I find the premise itself flawed, and think that it can be attributed to gossip and assumptions, rather than an actual issue on these games. I think that putting the topic in game development lends legitimacy to the people who gossip like this, and think that it's contributing to a significant cultural problem that we are already working against.
-
Yeah, this doesn't actually seem like a thread for Game Dev.
-
Everyone takes their own thing away from fiction, and everyone sees a story in the presentation. These cannot always be accounted for. A mis-reading of theme is nobody’s fault; it’s the beautiful messiness of the human mind.
-
@sunny The only agenda I care about is civil discourse. If the consensus is indeed that this is a non-issue and that it's been used in the past to falsely portray trends or disguise them as something they are not then that's fine.
But for example I remember - I think it was @Cobaltasaurus - who was distraught on TR while she was trying to start then run a exploration/adventure based Mage sphere and it was forced into becoming a political one instead.
So this does appear to happen, and it has an impact on games, which seems to warrant a conversation.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
-
@arkandel Sure, and I don't mind that you did create a thread for said conversation! I don't find it inappropriate to say that the premise itself is flawed though, and feel that instead it is vital that this get included in any discussion of the topic.
ETA: I don't know the situation you're referring to, so I can't speak to it. I certainly cannot divine the motivations of the people participating in her plot, nor do I know if any of them told her directly 'I don't like the type of plot you're running, so I'm going to make it about politics' or anything along those lines, or if it was a miscommunication/misunderstanding/something else going on. Which is my point. Especially now, NONE of us can claim to be able to divine their motivations.
Unless you're going on the record saying that you do this and X and Y are why, or someone ELSE is going to do so, all we are doing is sight-unseen attributing vaguely malicious motivations to strangers.
-
It definitely happens, and it can be a real problem, if your theme is important to the game you want to run/play. Or even if it isn't - I think a lot of tension on WoD games can come from the fact that the theme of each game is pretty much "pick from this wide variety of possibilities" in the books, with the expectation that the GM will narrow down what KIND of WoD game it's going to be - and then MU* staff don't do that, which means everyone wants to play the WoD game that's in their head, and some of those games are largely incompatible with each other.
As to why? Mostly just that. Everyone has something that really revs their engine, and barring strong guidance from a GM, a lot of players will want to bring that into every game they play. And people want to play the popular games, so they have an incentive to not self-select out of an incompatible thematic desire, but rather to twist the theme around to their preferred play style.
-
Most themes have room for multiple areas of RP.
Not all of them, but most of them.
People like to prioritize what they enjoy the most but that does not mean that anyone else has to follow those expectations or priorities.
If the game says: Keep sex to private rooms' then they are explicitly saying 'We do not care just don't make it a thing' if the game does not care, then anyone else caring is violating the spirit of the game in a sense.
In the end sometimes it's just about enjoying the theme, but everyone enjoys it in their own ways.
As for why /I/ pursue TS on games not built around it is because of the three following reasons:
-
Character growth and development. It affects the character in sometimes deep ways, emotional changes, reactions to the individual, etc.
-
Continuity. Most sex MU's don't have any sort of continuity to them really, I enjoy the ongoing continuity that my character is living their lives in.
-
I enjoy the RP of it from time to time. It is /fun/.
That's it.
-
-
@pyrephox said in Mismatched themes and expectations:
As to why? Mostly just that. Everyone has something that really revs their engine, and barring strong guidance from a GM, a lot of players will want to bring that into every game they play.
Correct, and it's so hard to even inform your players what you would like to be portrayed let alone distinguish between them simply being creative and trying to think outside the box - which is a wanted commodity - and disrupting what you want portrayed in the first place.
For instance consider a post-apocalyptic setting. The idea staff have in their heads might be something hardcore, dealing with resource depravation and the trauma of losing their way of life, but I come along and I'm interested in playing out how to return to a civilized state; maybe I'm playing a scientist who knows how to make solar panels, and my goal is to turn the rough settlement into a Flintstones-like utopia.
How does staff reconcile the two visions, or should they? Is it better that I get The Talk, or to deal with it IC as I'm presented with the challenges inherent in such a difficult task? Should I be allowed to be successful and, if so, to what degree?
Ultimately where is the line between me trying to play out something I think is cool, and turning the game into something its runners don't?
-
@arkandel I tend to think of thematic mismatch as an OOC problem, and therefore one that needs an OOC discussion as a solution. Using IC means to try and "correct" what is ultimately an OOC misunderstanding of the purpose of the game usually just breeds frustration and resentment on behalf of both GMs and players, and can particularly feel very disrespectful from a player's POV, where it can feel like the GM is just shitting over all your cool ideas for no reason you can see.
-
Unless a game has a really, really focused theme and a system built around it, that's likely going to happen. And if there is, it needs to be pretty explicit: "This is the type of story we want to run, and we are only taking characters that make sense for it."
I like slice of life RP, social RP (this includes all the TS all the time), and character exploration in any given setting. That's my jam, regardless of everything else. Adventure, politics, etc, are all great and necessary, but if I don't have some kind of investment in the character, which is provided by the quiet social stuff, I just probably won't care that much. So at least I feel like there should be room for that, or I just won't play.
However, I am fine with the staff-driven plotty adventure stuff being very focused, and with staff asking players to work with them to enforce the themes they'd like to explore.
-
@pyrephox said in Mismatched themes and expectations:
@arkandel I tend to think of thematic mismatch as an OOC problem, and therefore one that needs an OOC discussion as a solution. Using IC means to try and "correct" what is ultimately an OOC misunderstanding of the purpose of the game usually just breeds frustration and resentment on behalf of both GMs and players, and can particularly feel very disrespectful from a player's POV, where it can feel like the GM is just shitting over all your cool ideas for no reason you can see.
I agree to my thought have the OOC talk and make sure you are on the same page there then go through with the IC if the player still wants to knowing the likely result.
Otherwise you really do risk creating an antagonistic situation on an OOC level. Player might have very valid IC reasons for doing X so keeps pushing forward and Staff might have just as valid of reasons for not wanting X so pushes back. Repeat until both sides get so entrenched that the fight matters more than the result.
Where if staff is upfront and says, You can try X but it won't work, the player then can decide to either adapt or leave both of which are better than the antagonism. -
Well I think the comment about verisimilitude was pretty accurate, and that a lot of people want to have a feeling that their RP matters outside of the immediate scene, and it's not something that is just lost and vanishes into the ether if the participants are gone. It's about playing off the world, and that needs a certain game to do that.
Now I do agree with @Sunny in that I think it's a dangerous topic because like, a lot of people are going to judge others unfairly and act like, 'That person shouldn't be on this kind of game, they are looking for something different', and that can be a super damaging and unfair assumption. I think that thing should be discouraged. People might be on the 'wrong' game in that it might not really suit their needs, but that's kinda up to them to decide, or if they are disruptive up to staff to let them know or part ways with them, but I think it's a bad idea to try to categorize people as bad fits if they aren't disruptive.
-
@arkandel said in Mismatched themes and expectations:
Ultimately where is the line between me trying to play out something I think is cool, and turning the game into something its runners don't?
I think the onus is on the players. Unless the game states otherwise, players shouldn't play out goals that change the game's central conceit. That's akin to being invited to a chess party and trying to strongarm people into playing poker. There's nothing wrong with poker, but that's not why everyone is here.
So if I were running a gritty post-apoc survival game and somebody wanted to make solar panels and turn it into a happy little utopia, or discover a giant cache of medicine or whatever, I would politely take them aside and chat about it. Maybe there can be an interesting plotline about how they're trying to do it but they end up running into insurmountable challenges. Or maybe the game isn't a good fit for what they are interested in RPing about.
I also think that sometimes games set themselves up for clashes of expectations, and that's where I feel this topic belongs in the game design thread. I think we all know that MUSHes are 90% social. BarRP, relationships, chats in the park, etc. When building your game, you've got to not only consider the plots, but what people are going to do between plots. Maybe a highly-relatistic post-apoc setting where it's 100% grimdark isn't a good fit for a MU and you should reconsider. Or make it invite-only for only folks you know share your vision and not the general "good-looking survivors who never die of dysentery and always magically have enough to eat..." Hollywood vision of post-apoc.
-
I think all games do this to some small extent, though it is typically subtle.
Things like 'all characters will be 18+' automatically rules out a lot of things like high-school setting RP, for instance. (Similarly, 'all of our characters are 16', like the high school setting game that came and went recently would rule out things like classic pickup-hookup BaRP, since I think we can reasonably agree that the replacement 'pizza parlor' or 'arcade' style replacement doesn't play out quite the same way.)
Things like Arx's 'we will not be accepting sex workers as PCs' as characters is similar: "this is not an area we want to explore or have as a PC focus".
These things are totally reasonable and are simple examples of basic policy already creating certain restrictions of subject matter or character concepts that don't even really touch on theme or setting directly. So on one level, this already does happen, it's just not so 'in your face' that it is necessarily obvious on first glance.
-
@arkandel I think that the player of any character who could threaten the vision that Staff has for the game should get some version of The Talk, whether it's recognized in chargen or after. If you're planning a long-term war game, you can't have someone wipe out the enemy in a single strike. If you're planning a hardscrabble survival game, you can't have someone creating a utopia in the wilderness. If you're planning a politically-charged CvC game, you can't have a someone whose first choice of actions is to murder their opponent.
This doesn't mean that the characters can't exist--so long as the players recognize that they will never succeed in their goal (okay, the last one still needs to be hit in the nose with a newspaper and told that that's not what the game is about).
I have no problem with PC action changing the story Staff originally came up with (they should, or else you're just playing on a train game), but they shouldn't change the theme Staff originally came up with, unless Staff is all behind it. I feel strongly that Staff gets to decide the type of game they want to run and to take every (ethical) action they want to in order to run that sort of game. After all, they're the ones who created the game. (Generic) You want to play on a different type of game? Find that game or make it. I think that I understand what @Apos is saying, and think that it's important to make it clear as Staff that (generic) you are saying "your idea/character is not welcome here for reason X" rather than "you are not welcome here."
I also totally agree with what @Pyrephox said--discuss the situation OOCly to avoid the player feeling like they're picked on when their IC actions fail repeatedly.
