Nepotism versus restricted concepts

[Arkandel]

@bored said:

It's not agitation, its lack of equivocation

Let me try to be more specific if you don't mind.

There's a lot of 'oh well good staffing can make anything work' in this thread, and on this forum in general, but I think that's BS. The sort of thing @Ganymede is suggesting is a) not actually different from how MU* have always worked and b) fundamentally terrible, as the history of this stuff tells us.

Aside from personal experience, if reading these forums can demonstrate anything it's that there's absolutely no 'how MU* have always worked'. We've seen so many different approaches by games - some of which failed spectacularly - there's no way to realistically stick any label on them all and call it a day.

In this case I'd argue you would have a hard time showing either that every MU* has tried to engage in favoritism (for instance, RfK seems to have gone to extremes to avoid exactly that, and was actually criticized for it at times) or that history tells us they've always failed - since even say Firan lasted for many years and engaged hundreds of players. If only every game failed like that!

I think the debate of whether games should be run for fairness or for fun is a far more interesting one than whether Gany is a tyrannical despot, you know? ... I mean obviously she is, but she's our tyrannical despot.

[bored]

@Derp

Where is this personal attack (aside from, amusingly, most of your post)?

I don't think (nor have I said) that most people are hugely unethical or 'bad', but I think most people do have giant blinders when it comes to their friends as well as some 'flex' in their standards where such things are concerned. We've seen @Ganymede's approach time and time and time again, and my sense is the results being bad far more often than good.

MU's are not democratic organizations, in many cases. Therefore, you also have no right to expect to be treated the same as everyone else, or have access to what everyone else does regardless of reputation or personal history. If that's not a concept you can handle, then this hobby is not for you.

I think you're making a huge leap here, as well. I'm not suggesting that you need to make your game open to all regardless of shitty behavior. If a player is bad, by all means do not welcome them at all (I have people I would absolutely never knowingly allow on a game I ran). But the idea that some people are 'ok' enough to play on the game, but only in some intentionally marginalized role, is silly. If you think that little of them, just get rid of them to begin with (hence my initial suggestion of invite only). Beyond that, quality players will do better on their own, so giving them 10x the stats of everyone else seems fairly unnecessary.

IE, if you want elder politics on your game, set some basic elder statline that anyone can get, then let the player politics sort out who is Prince. This is opposed to just statting some guy (who you happen to think is SOOOO amazing) as a so ungodly powerful they can hold the position by force alone, which will tend to make even genuinely amazing players act like douchebags and stiffle meaningful competition anyway.

@Arkandel

It's obviously beyond scope for me to try and argue or prove 'how games are' in general so I'm not going to try I will acknowledge that nothing is 100% and my experience doesn't include all games, although despite @Derp's certainty that I'm not suited to the hobby, I've been in it as long as any of you, on many of the same games. So if we have totally different recollections of these places... well, I dunno what to say about that. Maybe I'm bitter, or maybe some people have rose colored nostalgia glasses.

My sense is that @Ganymede's method is basically the rule more than the exception for allotting features and that features have been bad (stomping on people and hogging plots) more often than they've been good (unselfishly promoting fun for all). On the contrary, I've usually seen more open and equal CG systems not create THOSE precise problems. This is not to say that they create perfect games, I just have a lot of trouble seeing the advantage that is gained out of the favoritism, justified or otherwise. You will have a host of other problems to deal with on a MU, why add huge disparities in character ability based solely on personal connections to staff?

I will stress, since you again seem to keep making the point about success/failure that I don't think it's tied to that. There have been long running open CG games too. If the purpose of this thread is to figure out what's likely to get you the most logins, I don't even really care.

[Ganymede]

@bored said:

Its fine to make adjustments in game, as I hope I've clarified, but the 'casting' analogies are just kindly euphemisms for nepotism. If you don't promote equality at the fundamental first step, when people are joining your game, you set a precedent of favoritism and bullshit permanently.

Again, you show a basic lack of appreciation or knowledge of "casting" for a community theatre.

When you cast a show, you have open auditions. People come out to try out for roles. For some roles, there will be many prospects; for others, none. For the roles with multiple candidates, you pick the one that fits the role best, and that someone may be the person with the fewest rehearsal conflicts and a good reputation rather than an unknown commodity who puts on a spectacular audition (although this is not always the case). For the other roles, you try to convince the other actors and actresses to take one of them. But, above all things, if you know that a person is difficult or impossible to work with, you don't put them into any role.

What does this mean? If you want your sphere to work well, you let everyone come in. When it comes time to give them hats, make sure that the right hat goes to the best candidate. Use your personal experience and judgment to guide you in that decision. For the open roles, see if others want it, and try to encourage the "best" person into that role. If you have difficult people, keep them out of those important roles.

If you're a shitty director or producer, it won't matter what you do: you're shitty at it and until you become better, more thoughtful, or more reasonable, whatever you do will result in a shitty production. You should probably take up another hobby.

I fail to see how the above is fundamentally terrible. Please explain.

And @Arkandel, I'm not a tyrannical despot. I'm just ahead of the curve.

[bored]

I may or may not have misunderstood you. I'm not 100% sure. I took:

@Ganymede said:

Fair? In a way, yes. Earn a good reputation, and doors will open. Don't expect to waltz into a game and be made Prince.

to mean, at game opening, you make so and so Prince because you knew them on Starbucks by Dimness MU and man were they awesome. I think it's fairly obvious why that's nepotism and sets a standard of favoritism from the get-go. Not only does it put those players way ahead, it does a good job at making it much less likely you'll notice quality players you don't happen to know, because they're likely to be boxed out by their preassigned inferiority.

If you think its just good sense, we disagree and I think your method is a major problem in the hobby.

If by

What does this mean? If you want your sphere to work well, you let everyone come in. When it comes time to give them hats, make sure that the right hat goes to the best candidate. Use your personal experience and judgment to guide you in that decision. For the open roles, see if others want it, and try to encourage the "best" person into that role. If you have difficult people, keep them out of those important roles.

you mean more of a situation of sorting out in game leadership after the fact (ie, Vampire titles, promotions to some high office in your theme, whatever) then I have no problem with it.

There are also probably other variations of this. Some games will have by their nature have tiers of power and influence that are part of the theme. I don't think everyone needs to be equal in the sense they all have to have the same rank, but generally on games like that, I feel it would be preferable to use a CG method where people are paying for that rank, so Prince Shinypants is not also a better fighter than Soldier McFightsHisWholeLife.

[Ganymede]

@bored

I might not have communicated well, but what you cited first is an accurate statement. You should try to maintain a good reputation, and, if you do, doors will open regarding whether you will be trusted with certain concepts or positions. It is entirely unrealistic to waltz into a game and be made Prince, but some people think that it would not be fair otherwise, and those people would be stupid.

Also, if I were to open a vampire sphere, I would not install a PC Prince to begin with. If I were forced to, then you're damned right that I would put it in the hands of someone I know I can work with, who isn't going to flake out on me, and who I can trust to not let things go down in flames and laughter. But I would only do that if I were forced to.

I suppose it depends on how you look at "concepts." I'm all for the idea of making CGen open, and making sure people have equal access to X, Y, and Z stats. I'm opposed to the idea of "restricted" stats, unless those relate to IC status, reputation, and position. If you don't like people having Iron Will, then don't let them have it period. And I don't consider "Seneschal" or "Sheriff" to be a concept; that's a position you can be appointed to.

But if there's an open Court position on a Vampire Sphere game like Seneschal or Sheriff, I will likely not approve of any player's PC taking that position if I know the player to be a shitbag or flaky. It does not serve the game's interests to allow any such player to have a PC in a power position. By the same token, if there's an open position and I know a player wants it who, in my opinion, is an asset to have in the sphere, then I will give it to that player over the unknown candidate.

Also, yeah, I'm all for having to spend XP or whatever to get the higher Status. And if you lose the position, that gets refunded, as per the Sanctity of Merits doctrine.

I hope this post clarifies my position.

[TNP]

@bored said:

. The sort of thing @Ganymede is suggesting is a) not actually different from how MU* have always worked and b) fundamentally terrible, as the history of this stuff tells us.

So just what does the history of this stuff tell us? Let's see... In the last 20 years or so, there's been a hell of a lot of Mu*s out there. Some lasted for years. Some lasted much less time. Some have been up and running almost all that time. And a very, very small percentage of them ever got mentioned on WORA. Most games in those two decades went completely unremarked on because, one assumes, they ran well and without any major insanity and asshatery.

So the history of this stuff tells us that the majority of games have been pretty successful and only a proportionately few have been terrible

[Apos]

@bored said:

Serious question. If you were the one running Firan in an imaginary scenario where you somehow had the game and were in complete control, how would you have handled their roster system with its playerbase at peak?

The full answer to this is beyond the scope of this thread I think.

Relevant to this argument, not designed it with 3 tiers including characters that were purpose-built to be shitty nobodies who could accomplish nothing?

I get what you are saying there, but I think it's important to note how wildly different the goals of players could be. You're looking at it clearly from a comparison of characters power in how much stats they had compared to like their social influence. A significant portion of the player base couldn't have cared less about either of those and looked at characters from an roleplayer's perspective of whether the character personality and background interested them. So you get into a case where you say, 'Well if players want to make characters that are intrinsically worse, let them CG them themselves and handicap them' but then players complain about story aspects or slice-of-life characters being overlooked, and I'm not totally sure how to balance those demands from groups that want much different things out of CG. Firan's was very flawed imo, but can't overlook how popular some characters are that would have been seen as useless by others. Put another way, look at how popular mortals are in WoD games, and eliminating the IIIs would have been a blanket 'no mortals' rule.

If you talk about the whole casting bias thing, I remember on Firan some of the app approvals for characters were judgments on the personality of a player and how well they thought they could play the role from a story perspective, which is a way, way different set of standards than like, 'Is this person a fair choice for something powerful'. People making 'casting' decisions in something based on artistic merit where they'd be happy in a totally statless system vs something more like a wargame have really different metrics.

[bored]

@Ganymede said:

I hope this post clarifies my position.

I think so, and I'm mostly in agreement with your last post.

My big thing is that I wouldn't want to name a Prince from the get-go, which we seem to agree on. If for whatever reason you are forced to (we're obviously moving away from game creator to average sphere staffer now, and I've been assuming the former), naturally you would prefer someone with a good reputation to the alternative.

I still think that the MU (and WoD MU in particular) culture is waaaaay too attached to the notion of feature characters as necessary to begin with, and that generally they're a net negative for the hobby, but that doesn't seem to be your issue.

@TNP

I don't think that's how sampling works.

@Apos said:

So you get into a case where you say, 'Well if players want to make characters that are intrinsically worse, let them CG them themselves and handicap them' but then players complain about story aspects or slice-of-life characters being overlooked, and I'm not totally sure how to balance those demands from groups that want much different things out of CG.

I don't get what you're saying here, or rather, I don't understand how you think the part you quote as not solving things doesn't actually solve things. Why isn't leaving them to handicap themselves if they want a solution? Why do you need to pre-handicap a character? I just don't see the justification. Someone who doesn't want power won't grasp for it.

[Apos]

@bored said:

I don't get what you're saying here, or rather, I don't understand how you think the part you quote as not solving things doesn't actually solve things. Why isn't leaving them to handicap themselves if they want a solution? Why do you need to pre-handicap a character? I just don't see the justification. Someone who doesn't want power won't grasp for it.

Sorry, my fault for not being clear.

Say you're eliminating a tier system of I, II, III characters (which I think was a flawed system too), but your emphasis about useless characters was to more not generate them to begin with to avoid characters from either a stand point of personal (statistical) power or social power that are inherently weaker. So as potential approaches you make all characters have the same potential (which sounds the fairest), and/or you avoid generating characters that are kind of locked on rails to never achieve either high stats or social influence because that's how the character is designed.

From my experience there was a few small problems with both of those. In the former, if you have players who just wanted to roleplay a low key, slice of life character and avoid personal or social power, you have an awful lot of people giving them shit for doing so. While that sounds ridiculous, look at the firan threads and see how many posts are about players ruining or wasting a character. Yes, a lot of those were players that wanted to be powerful and fucked up, but I guarantee that the purely social types would get the same grief and worse often be nudged into taking the character in a direction they aren't comfortable with and can't play. So you generate all characters that have that potential, and some players are actually unhappy because other players give them shit for wasting it.

Avoiding generating inherently weaker characters also sounds great until you run into players who feel you are completely disregarding their playstyle by ignoring them and not making characters that appeal to them, forcing them into a niche of making their own characters. So you either do appeal to them (and specifically mark those characters as less important, by a firan style tier system), or you tacitly admit that no, you aren't going to make those characters and they are correct, you do value them less as players. Basically in the same way Firan implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) said IVs were worse a lot of players would take you not bothering to make them characters as much the same deal.

In my experience those players aren't necessarily more easy going or less prone to complain or less dramatic. They are just as demanding, but have entirely different metrics for characters.

[Saulot]

@Arkandel said:

@Three-Eyed-Crow said:

It's really all about consistency, if there's a game in a theme people like and no other choices. I will leave a game fun by total, fucking assholes, but a stunning amount of people won't, as long as the damn thing is up and running.

How do you explain Fallcoast/TR then? By all accounts it's a festering wound, but it's not the lack of alternatives which keeps it popular - no other theme offers more choice than the nWoD.

How many games are out that offer all the spheres?, or have not counting TR and HM? Note Prometheian and Mummy don't count.

[bored]

@Apos

Ah, ok.

First, while you're right that some jerks might still guilt trip people over 'wasting' their potential, I think that's a pretty small problem by comparison and a small sacrifice to make (and that those jerks will always be jerks). It's mostly an OOC social problem, at any rate. By contrast, it's pretty hard to be stuck with a character you see potential in, but that staff has arbitrarily decided has no future. That's a gameplay problem.

Beyond that, I'm also not advocating every char on a roster be created equally ambitious, just that there be no weird OOC dictate that X shall be able to advance and Y shall not. You never know how RP might go, and if some random blacksmith stumbles naturally into heroism, that should be OK, rather than triggering a response of 'well, you should have apped someone else if you wanted that kind of RP' Similarly I'm not advocating that everyone have the same strength score. That's silly.

A normal by-the-points CG can generate a wide range of characters based on how people spend their points, but maintains at least some vague standard. A roster system should follow that same idea of a standard, and merely pre-generate a wide variety of characters by a similar standard.

[Misadventure]

@TNP That is some terrible logic there. Argumentum ad ignorantiam.

A similar phrase would be many books are not reviewed, and so we can assume that they are good books, and that good writing has dominated the field of book writing for the past century.

[ThatGuyThere]

@Arkandel
Fallcoast does not have a lot of alternatives, no where else to play NWoD Mage, Changeling, Sin Eater , Immortal, or Changeing Breeds. I think that has a big deal to do with the popularity.
Also if is easy to get rp there, and it is not like quality of rp differs much from place to place so the reason I would choose Fallcoast over Reno or Eldritch would be simple lots more choices in things I like to play, never been a vamp fan on only play werewolf when the mood strikes me, and ease of getting to the point of the whole thing which is RP. And not just bar rp. I have been there since shortly after Spider was turfed and been in more plots and events then I really have been anywhere else but Oathcircle in a comparable amount of time.

[TNP]

@Misadventure Please. I've been on plenty of games that were perfectly adequate. I'm sure everyone has. The majority of games never had anything like the the horror stories that made it to WORA. The kind of thing that make them 'terrible'. Just like any other activity such as theatre or sports or even books clubs where many people get together, there will be the normal amount of friction that's unavoidable. This does not come close to 'terrible'. (It doesn't come close to wonderful either but that's not germane to the topic.)

Extrapolating to infinity based on a limited sample.

[mietze]

It is a little head scratching to me that it's to be celebrated and commended to state up front that you'll only pick people you know and like for the most important roles on your game, but you are a horrible awful excuse for a game runner if you pick staff for your game who are willing to cede those roles to people who aren't staff.

[Sunny]

@mietze

Huh?

One is bad policy, the other is a way of winnowing candidates down. One relates to the pool of staff you can choose from, the other to how their jobs are done. Is it really headscratching?

Also, I don't think anyone is being celebrated.

[mietze]

It all falls under the category of "pick what you feel is most conducive to the environment that you want," to me. So yes, it is rather headscratching to me to see the same people celebrating one and denouncing the other. They may not /like/ either one. But they're both methods/policies of narrowing down candidates. I would say both have potential to be very bad policies. Or they might accomplish the intent (which is usually not bad, unless the person is nuts). And both policies should be very overtly disclosed, IMO. If someone has no intentions of allowing a player new or unknown to them a chance at a major position, then probably that's something that they should also have the balls to say up front. Which is why I would probably choose to play at a place that said that up front, even if I was an unknown, vs on a wishy washy place, and would have more impatience for a place that operated like that, but for whatever reason wasn't honest about it.

The knee jerk nepotism haters seem to come from places where that policy was not clear (and I'm betting probably was denied or pussyfooted around), and thus had a pretty bad experience with it. Working towards earning something that you later discover would have never been possible for you anyway, because you didn't know the right people or hadn't been around for X amount of time) would be very infuriating, I'd think.

[Derp]

@mietze said:

If someone has no intentions of allowing a player new or unknown to them a chance at a major position, then probably that's something that they should also have the balls to say up front.

While I don't disagree that the policy should be pretty clear, it could fairly easily be argued that some of this is just common sense. As others have stated, no one should expect to be able to log into a game they've never played on, where they know no one, and expect to instantly be able to play the Prince, in much the same way that entry-level applicants generally know better than to apply for the position of CEO or Director of Marketing. Perhaps they would be the greatest candidates for that position in the whole entire universe based on their skills and competencies, but if nobody has ever seen them in action, it's a hell of a risk to take -- and one that not many people would be willing to take in the first place. Normally there is not a sign on the door that says 'experienced candidates for management positions only' -- most reasonable people kind of just know that's a thing, and that's how it's done. If someone had a meltdown over that being the case, do you think that a majority would consider that person reasonable or capable of handling the stresses that come with such a position?

[mietze]

Yeah, I do think that a game staff that purposefully always will choose personal friends over new-to-them talent that meets the same qualifications for the position probably should be explicit about that.

I don't find that to be common sense or good policy, but as I've said before, I can respect a lot of game setups as long as they're up front and honest. It's why I like Gany and get along even as staff or player with people who are up front and honest even if I don't always agree with their choices.

I think that putting expectations into place and having the ovaries to enforce them actually does far more to reduce risk and mitigate bad outcomes than relying on just giving out things to your friends. Just my observation, though.

[Derp]

@mietze said:

Yeah, I do think that a game staff that purposefully always will choose personal friends over new-to-them talent that meets the same qualifications for the position probably should be explicit about that.

But then we circle back around to "How do you know who meets the qualifications?" Through experience, of course. If it were as simple as ask-and-answer, then there would be no need to restrict the concepts in the first place. If you would trust anyone off the street to run them, they'd be open to everyone, which would negate needing qualifications in the first place.

And I, personally, would much rather prevent a problem from occurring in the first place than to have to go back and try to mitigate damage once it's already done. While being willing to crack down on violations of policy is certainly important, I would rather avoid situations where the policy is violated to begin with. No matter how much we'd all like to hit the rewind button and fix a thing that's gone off the rails, there is always some residual left over from that, even if it's just a negative experience for the players involved. Simply having a policy in place is not enough to circumvent that. The only cure is prevention, and the most effective way to prevent it is caution.

But I keep seeing a recurring theme here as well, which is this idea that somehow, allowing friends to do something over strangers to you is just the most bonkers idea ever, which I'm going to have to question the reasoning behind. Simply being familiar with someone doesn't automatically mean they're receiving some sort of unfair advantage. Whenever you talk about qualifications, you're talking about prior experience, and when discussing prior experience with any particular player it means that you're talking about familiarity. And familiarity comes the same way for everyone -- by sticking around, communicating, and showing people what you're made of. Nobody is prevented from reaching that, and everyone works toward it in the same way. So exactly how does trusting someone that you're familiar with over someone that you have absolutely no experience with whatsoever, and thus take on greater risk, mean that you're doing something unethical? If anything, you're trying to be at least responsible. Trusting strangers with the keys to your house? Not responsible. Trusting a stranger with your car? Also not responsible. And while you say that it's neither common sense nor good policy, I fail to see how being responsible is either of those things.