Our Tendency Towards Absolutes
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Also, I do believe something addressed to literally everybody reading something (including myself, ofc), is the complete and utter opposite of "getting personal".
I'm not certain that it's @Arkandel's responsibility to protect people from things they don't like to read.
Sometimes, criticism has to be firm, when it's been proven repeatedly that 'polite discussion' of things gets ignored.
I believe I am pretty firmly within the Rules of Engagement for this branch of MSB.
If you read into other parts of my post and took things personally, when they were addressed universally at a fundamental problem in the psychosis of the hobby rather than any specific person, I'm not sure that's my fault.
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To be quite fair, my actual point was that there should be standards of conduct that are applied equally to both staff and players. If its not something a player should be doing/saying/behaving, then the same goes for staff. And vice versa. I expounded on one possible reasoning for why there may be more vocal calls for more stringent policies regarding staffing, as viewed from what I've seen happen both as a player and a staffer, across multiple games through the past few decades. Because that is what @Sparks was talking about. The demand for more stringent staffing policies to cover possible-maybe's and fringe cases. Its been a long and rocky road between players and staff and it really only seems to get worse as we all get older.
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@Ganymede said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:
I'm not sure how any of this has to do with what I believe Sparks is talking about, which may be why she casually walked around what Too Old for This was saying. But I would approve and support of a measure that holds staff to a higher standard of conduct than players by virtue of their positions.
I wouldn't say a higher standard. The standard of conduct for Staff is inherently very different because they in many cases interact with the game in an entirely different way from the one that players do.You don't need rules against players giving magical stuff to their friends or forbid them from spying on their enemies because they can't do that in the first place however since Staff does have that power, I think it's important to establish up front what is considered appropriate for them to do.
In some games Staffers invisibly spying on scenes is considered appropriate because it makes it a lot easier for them to pop in NPCs or otherwise tie current events into the plot. In other games that's considered a terrible invasion of privacy.
In some games anyone with any kind of power is either staff or a friend of staff, in other games staff are expected to not be involved with IC politics.
The specific set of rules that are right for a specific game will depend a lot on the theme, setting and the kind of playerbase the game is expected to have. However regardless if you want to be able to consider yourself an 'ethical staffer' then you need to have the ability to pick a set of rules and stick to them and not make 'exceptions'.
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@Tempest said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:
So, the reasons behind what Sparks is talking about, have nothing to do with what Sparks is talking about?
I think Sparks is criticizing the mentality that all staff are bad by default, and how this is deleterious in the hobby.
I think Too Old For This is explaining that bad staffers don't get the boot as often or quickly as bad players, presuming an equal level of badness.
Both positions can be correct, so I wouldn't respond either, except to say perhaps that the observation is true, and if one's experience has been so bad that one cannot trust any staffer than maybe this hobby is more trouble than it's worth.
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@Ganymede said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:
Both positions can be correct, so I wouldn't respond either, except to say perhaps that the observation is true, and if one's experience has been so bad that one cannot trust any staffer than maybe this hobby is more trouble than it's worth.
I think that to a large extent the bad staffer problem is overblown. It's not too difficulty to avoid bad staffers once you spot them, maybe it means you have to avoid their characters or in the worst case you have to switch to playing a different game and while there has been some legendarily bad staffers out there, it's not like we have an actual plague of them roaming the world of MU*.
When you look closer at what frustrates players it comes a lot from their desires.
- They want a game that's active enough that they can easily get a scene whenever they feel like one.
- They want to be involved/feel important to the plot/other players in some fashion.
- They want the game to be 'fair'
The problem is that the first desire becomes easier the more players there are, since offers more opportunities for RP. However at the same time the second desire becomes harder the more players there are since only so many people in a group can be 'important' and Staff attention is a limited resource that doesn't scale up with players well. So they end up in a situation where they see these other players getting to be 'important' while they're not important and this is terrible and unfair and clearly the staff are all the devil incarnate etc. It's something that's bad for the hobby but I have no idea how to fix it short of Google making a version of deepmind that storytells for people so they can feel important.
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I'm gonna weigh in since I'm apparently Mr Opinion tonight in the StaffNPC thread.
I thiiiiink... (Metaphor time)
...If I walked into a club in high school and saw a room this divided, I'd back out.
Sally won't play with Fred because he's a psycho. Bill told a lie about having an extra ticket to a movie in sophomore year so Jake refuses to play chess with him. These people over here believe they do it right and everyone else is a fucking idiot. Everyone else feels they do it right and those people over there are fucking idiots. If you come to the club and dont behave one way then these 4 people won't talk to you ever again, but if you role play their way, another 4 people won't talk to you ever again, either.
I think recognizing the problem is the first step.
And I think that problem is identifying the fact that many of you simply don't like each other as much as you pretend to, and that years of infighting and bad memories with each other have made for one large, dysfunctional family.
I think that this MILDLY CONSTRUCTIVE board should be the anti-Hog Pit. Use it to build each other up and find your common ground again. For fuck's sake LAY OFF THE HOG PIT SO MUCH; it's only driving divisive wedges and aiding in this neverending melodrama of who's in this season and who's out.
What was it, 3 or 4 years ago? I called someone a cunt here and it snapped in me that this isn't who I am. So I just...stopped calling people names and am doing my best to not be cruel. We may disagree, you may not like my wording or ideas, but I will not be cruel. You may not like me, we may not always be in sync, but I want people to rely on me to not be mean, to be willing to listen to new ideas, and give them the benefit of the doubt that I don't have any fucking clue who they actually are as people, but whoever that is deserves a chance.
Even @Kanye-Qwest ...who I argue with but refuse to be cruel to, because I just don't want that anymore.
People talk a lot about blacklisting people, and other people live in fear of being blacklisted from games. Games and groups of players become secular. The people who try to be so inviting often struggle against near constant ooc issues to moderate at staff, mostly because people fight, sometimes over petty differences.
For many of you, this group is five to seven hours, five to seven days a week. Some of you talk to each other more than coworkers, and some of you talk to each other more than family.
If you guys want your hobby to be something awesome, then you have got to make a concerted effort to identify where you may be damaging others, and how you can find common ground to untangle the mess of cords behind the television.
If you don't actively start talking to each other with building something better in mind, then this hobby is always going to be a constant train of "I love it, but they're ruining it for me, so fuck them" from both sides of the room.
So, seriously, this mutually assured destruction stuff is actually making the hobby harder for you all. I dont know what the absolute answer is, but I have buried the hatchet with some people I had some major issues with and things are going well. It feels good. Maybe it's time to work on that, and working out how to start communicating with each other.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
@Ghost said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:
So, seriously, this mutually assured destruction stuff is actually making the hobby harder for you all. I dont know what the absolute answer is, but I have buried the hatchet with some people I had some major issues with and things are going well. It feels good. Maybe it's time to work on that, and working out how to start communicating with each other.
What mutually assured destruction stuff?
No, seriously?
@bored -- who I disagree like a million percent with on a million different things -- is one of my favorite roleplayers in the hobby, the actual act of roleplaying with him is INCREDIBLY fun
@Thenomain is an AMAZING coder and the guy has a heart of gold, even when we're bickering
@Wretched is pouring his heart and soul into making an absolutely amazing game, and I will probably play there even though I hate WoD these days because man, I may not agree with him, but he's doing a good job following what he says.
Like, all of the people I have argued with about these topics, here? We're discussing heated topics. I don't want anything BAD to happen to any of them. None of them want anything bad to happen to me!
There is NOBODY on this board (that doesn't get banned regularly) that I would not stop to help if I saw them broken down on the side of the road (and I knew what they looked like). Pretty sure that could be said for everyone here.
I know you think that this is some big realization, man, but we all had it like 5 years ago.
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I mean, I talk to y'all more than family but none of ya have threatened to kill me yet.
...but there's always tomorrow.
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Anyone that holds shit said here (that isn't particularly heinous) against people out in the wild is in for a world of surprise. We all disagree, sometimes loudly, about all kinds of things. Doesn't mean we hate each other.
You're really late to the party, @Ghost.
He/Him
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@Sunny said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:
What mutually assured destruction stuff?
No, seriously?To be clear, I wasnt being accusatory to anyone, so with that in mind, I'll clarify.
I mean the whole "X player doesn't play with Y player for this reason, Y doesn't play with players A C T V and X". For whatever reason it is, there's a lot of players with undisclosed/disclosed ooc issues with each other that can result in:
"X player can play with A M and F so long as U and T are there, but O doesn't like M, so they don't want M coming to events, even if M and F are both friends with O..."
I think on a long enough timeline, everyone is gonna have some kind of issue with enough people that you're gonna feel like the environment is polluted.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
@Sunny said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:
There is NOBODY on this board (that doesn't get banned regularly) that I would not stop to help if I saw them broken down on the side of the road (and I knew what they looked like). Pretty sure that could be said for everyone here.
The sad thing is, this isn't remotely true. (The bolded bit, not your statement about yourself! I believe you.)
I would really like to believe this is the case.
It'd be a much better world if it was.
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@Tinuviel said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:
Anyone that holds shit said here (that isn't particularly heinous) against people out in the wild is in for a world of surprise. We all disagree, sometimes loudly, about all kinds of things. Doesn't mean we hate each other.
You're really late to the party, @Ghost.
Handwobble. Maybe.
But I don't sense a whole lot of love, either.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
@Ghost said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:
@Sunny said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:
What mutually assured destruction stuff?
No, seriously?To be clear, I wasnt being accusatory to anyone, so with that in mind, I'll clarify.
I mean the whole "X player doesn't play with Y player for this reason, Y doesn't play with players A C T V and X". For whatever reason it is, there's a lot of players with undisclosed/disclosed ooc issues with each other that can result in:
"X player can play with A M and F so long as U and T are there, but O doesn't like M, so they don't want M coming to events, even if M and F are both friends with O..."
I think on a long enough timeline, everyone is gonna have some kind of issue with enough people that you're gonna feel like the environment is polluted.
This doesn't happen to the extent you appear to think it does.
ETA: I have not had to do a balancing thing like that for at least 10 years. Not once.
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@Ghost said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:
But I don't sense a whole lot of love, either.
Because we're here for the conversations, not simply the people with whom we are having the conversations. The handful of people that I talk to from this place, simply due to us having things in common, I give the love elsewhere.
The idea of this place is to talk about problems, and solve problems, and bring issues to light. Not to talk about the people talking about things.
He/Him
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@Tinuviel said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:
The idea of this place is to talk about problems, and solve problems, and bring issues to light. Not to talk about the people talking about things.
Eh, there's some of that in the non-game section. People are people-ing fairly well.
Oh fucking well.
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@Ganymede said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:
I'm not sure how any of this has to do with what I believe Sparks is talking about, which may be why she casually walked around what Too Old for This was saying.
Actually, it's because I took a very long time writing that post between doing various other things in other tabs (I got maybe a little wordy), and Too Old For This posted directly above mine while I was doing so; I simply didn't notice it before I clicked post and wandered off into another tab. I only noticed it just now when I came back to the thread.
@Ganymede said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:
I think Sparks is criticizing the mentality that all staff are bad by default, and how this is deleterious in the hobby.
Yes. Or even the mentality that all staff are bad in the same ways. Or even the mentality that because some staff are bad in a given way, we should assume that all staff might be and treat them as though they are.
@Ganymede said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:
I think Too Old For This is explaining that bad staffers don't get the boot as often or quickly as bad players, presuming an equal level of badness.
That's how i read that TOfT's post, too. And I actually agree with it. I think that viewpoint is completely correct.
I'm just not sure that assuming "because these staffers on this place did this specific thing badly, we need to prohibit all staffers from even trying to do a similar thing, and this rule should be applied universally to all games everywhere" is the solution to that problem. (Especially since I think a lot of actively terrible staff are really good at skirting the rules, obeying the letter while ignoring the spirit, so it still doesn't guarantee you can immediately point to a thing and say "you broke this rule, you are the weakest link, goodbye".)
So a universal one-size-fits-all response to things seems overly broad, overly restrictive, and I'm not even entirely convinced it solves the problem posed.
I am in no way perfect. I doubt anyone on this forum is, as we are all human. We all fail at things. I have certainly failed at things and fallen short at times. And I don't even disagree that some of the things that have been suggested are good ideas! I think they're great guidelines, and I would encourage GMs who feel comfortable with them to adopt them!
And if one specific MU* wants to forbid certain things in GMing? More power to them; rules can be great! Staff should absolutely stick to those rules that their headwiz lays down, in addition to whatever further restrictions they put on themselves with their own rules and comfort level.
But I don't think "we need a rule for all MU*s that no GM can use NPCs in a personal romantic subplot for a character" is necessarily useful. Just like I don't think saying "we need a rule for all tabletop games that no GM can use NPCs in a personal romantic subplot for one of the characters" is useful.
Some GMs do that badly, and it ends up turning into favoritism, no question. But try to demand a blanket ban on that, try to apply that rule universally, and you've just done away with all the wonderful story and interplay that came out of Matt Mercer bringing Yeza in as an NPC to flesh out Nott's backstory, over in Critical Role.
Perhaps I am overthinking this.
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@surreality said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:
@Tinuviel said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:
The idea of this place is to talk about problems, and solve problems, and bring issues to light. Not to talk about the people talking about things.
Eh, there's some of that in the non-game section. People are people-ing fairly well.
Yeah, that doesn't remotely alter my point. You want to do it, that's fine, but one can't expect everyone to be expressing outpourings of love, or whatever, when that's not the idea. We do the support and love thing by solving problems. The solving bit comes with a fair bit of arguing, but frankly I wouldn't bother arguing with people I didn't care about enough to want to change their mind.
He/Him
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@Tinuviel said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:
one can't expect everyone to be expressing outpourings of love,
especially from people like you who are incapable of such.
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@Sunny said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:
This doesn't happen to the extent you appear to think it does.
ETA: I have not had to do a balancing thing like that for at least 10 years. Not once.Fair enough. Not gonna fight ya on it. If that's your experience, then that's your experience.
I was just offering my perspective and my feeling about the absolutism topic and why I think it's a thing. I may be wrong, I may be onto something, but I'm 100% willing to help mend issues and not being shitty about it.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man
