Feelings of not being wanted...
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I felt like the Off Screen System used at where ever (RfK?) gave every vampire a way to be worth interacting with, either as a potential ally or enemy.
Anyone else get that impression?
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@Arkandel said:
But it is. I mean it's still considerate to ask before joining but if you're in an actual public place - I'm not talking the back room of a bookstore but a busy restaurant or something - then being annoyed if someone walks in is unreasonable.
Being annoyed if they walk in is unreasonable, but so is being annoyed if you walk in, ask to join and they tell you 'no'.
If you're having a nice private conversation at a bar table in a public room and someone else walks into the bar, I don't feel that you're obligated to include them. It's nice if you can, but sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes your character is crying in their beer or talking about Something Serious or Something Secret and it just doesn't make sense for them to start chatting up some random person who walked in. I don't feel it appropriate to tell the original people: "go find someplace other than the bar to RP your bar scene".
Now if that happened, I would politely and apologetically explain to the newcomer why I can't work them in, and do my best to make it up to them next time.
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@Sovereign said:
People are social creatures, and social exclusion is a common weapon.
This holds true if you do not enact policies or systems that turn social exclusion into a direct detriment and/or social inclusion as a direct benefit. The difference between real life and a MU* is that you can do this on a MU*. As @Misadventure points out, this can be done.
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I have not yet encountered a game that did that well. I suppose you could give each player something special and unique that others needed, thus forcing interaction, but beyond that..
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My bad: I edited my post.
Requiem for Kingsmouth's policies made it directly beneficial to be friendly. Of course, being friendly doesn't pay, but, there you are. It came to a point where just about any vampire PC that spent some time socially could own and hold territory, and could thereby become a political pawn/mover if they wished. @lordbelh nearly took over the entire game by carefully choosing his allies (like me).
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@Misadventure said:
I felt like the Off Screen System used at where ever (RfK?) gave every vampire a way to be worth interacting with, either as a potential ally or enemy.
Anyone else get that impression?
Absolutely. Heck, it even gave ghouls and regular humans things to do. In part, I think, not necessarily because This System Is The Best, but because it gave actual explicit rules for what effects people could have, and what they could and could not do to achieve that effect. It also gave other avenues for antagonism than simply combat or direct confrontation, which helped to build what the game was going for - that political feel.
Which is, again, about communicating the expectations of the game to players. A lot of times, I've found, MU*s have a lot of unwritten rules about what you can and can't do. If you're in-touch with the game culture, you feel welcome. If you're not, then you can risk continually running up against those unwritten mores, and then, yeah, you feel feel less welcome.
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There's always benefit to being friendly, in any game: if someone takes your side and supports you, that helps. Exclusion is never the optimal strategy.
But that doesn't prevent exclusion.
As for RfK, I'll take your word for it. I didn't like my brief taste back when it was around, so I don't know what it wound up doing.
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@Sovereign said:
Exclusion is never the optimal strategy.
Unless you want to hoard power and are able to do so. In which case, "exclusion" also includes "including people in your RP so that you can crush their skulls in."
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Power + more allies trumps power + fewer allies. It is always, without exception, better to bring someone in than keep them out. But people don't behave optimally; incentives are nice, but no guarantee. And sometimes you can't bring someone in.
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@faraday said:
@Arkandel said:
But it is. I mean it's still considerate to ask before joining but if you're in an actual public place - I'm not talking the back room of a bookstore but a busy restaurant or something - then being annoyed if someone walks in is unreasonable.
Being annoyed is unreasonable, but so is being annoyed if you ask to join and they tell you 'no'.
If you're having a nice private conversation at a bar table in a public room and someone else walks into the bar, I don't feel that you're obligated to include them. It's nice if you can, but sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes your character is crying in their beer or talking about Something Serious or Something Secret and it just doesn't make sense for them to start chatting up some random person who walked in. I don't feel it appropriate to tell the original people: "go find someplace other than the bar to RP your bar scene".
Now if that happened, I would politely and apologetically explain to the newcomer why I can't work them in, and do my best to make it up to them next time.
Yeah. As much as I like being inclusive (and I do - I try to make it a policy to play with lots of different people, because I enjoy the variety in interactions), sometimes a scene - not necessarily intentionally - has turned to something where it's very awkward to shoehorn another person in. And you can't necessarily predict what that scene is at the beginning.
I can remember once scene, in a public room, I was in where it started as a standard sort of 'run into you' scene between my character and another. It grew tense and confrontational, although not obviously antagonistic in a way that would draw public attention. A new character entered, posed walking up to the two and just saying hi. My character's next pose only acknowledged that in a terse nod, because most of his attention was focused on this very tense interaction. The player then had their character walk off in a huff because they weren't instantly included.
There was just no way to DO that in that moment that matched both the scene and the personalities involved. And 'take it to RP rooms' doesn't really help when the scene wasn't planned to be tense or private, but just...turned that way.
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@Sovereign said:
But people don't behave optimally; incentives are nice, but no guarantee.
This is also true.
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@faraday said:
@Arkandel said:
But it is. I mean it's still considerate to ask before joining but if you're in an actual public place - I'm not talking the back room of a bookstore but a busy restaurant or something - then being annoyed if someone walks in is unreasonable.
Being annoyed if they walk in is unreasonable, but so is being annoyed if you walk in, ask to join and they tell you 'no'.
But that's what I'm saying, it depends on the context.
For starters and before I say anything else, I'm not staying for a scene where I'm not wanted. That'd be ... well, it wouldn't happen.
Otherwise if the scene is about people talking on their own then yes, trying to butt in - especially if they're not particularly welcoming, let alone actively adverse to the idea - is a douche move. But if it's about something else that specifically draws attention and invites intervention fuck that. If my character pulls a gun in a downtown restaurant at lunch time I don't get to tell people they can't be there because they might call the cops or try to stop him and that 'ruins it for me'. It's not cool.
If the setting is some seedy watering hole in a bad part of town at 1 am then there's an argument to be made.
It's all context dependent.
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@Arkandel said:
@faraday said:
@Arkandel said:
But it is. I mean it's still considerate to ask before joining but if you're in an actual public place - I'm not talking the back room of a bookstore but a busy restaurant or something - then being annoyed if someone walks in is unreasonable.
Being annoyed if they walk in is unreasonable, but so is being annoyed if you walk in, ask to join and they tell you 'no'.
But that's what I'm saying, it depends on the context.
For starters and before I say anything else, I'm not staying for a scene where I'm not wanted. That'd be ... well, it wouldn't happen.
Otherwise if the scene is about people talking on their own then yes, trying to butt in - especially if they're not particularly welcoming, let alone actively adverse to the idea - is a douche move. But if it's about something else that specifically draws attention and invites intervention fuck that. If my character pulls a gun in a downtown restaurant at lunch time I don't get to tell people they can't be there because they might call the cops or try to stop him and that 'ruins it for me'. It's not cool.
If the setting is some seedy watering hole in a bad part of town at 1 am then there's argument to be made.
It's all context dependent.
That said, there's also the phenomenon of people jumping into a scene because Something's Going On, and immediately bogging it down. If, for example, a character is pinning another character to an alleyway by their neck in an argument, there is no real reason for there suddenly be 5 extra characters who appear out of nowhere or were "there are along" and now they want to break out all their combat dice, and call in all the PC cops, and so on and so forth. The PCs originally involved should absolutely be able to say, "we'd prefer not to be ICly interrupted until this is resolved."
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@Pyrephox I think that stretches what a lot of players would consider public. That's trying to RP a scene in a remote or inaccessible setting to make it unlikely or impossible for other characters to randomly happen upon it. That would make it more logical to be done in a temproom on sandboxes or a locked/inaccessible room in non-sandboxes.
@Misadventure Having never played on RfK, could you explain the Off Screen System? That sounds interesting.
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No, I agree, that's a more annoying phenomenon. I don't always mind (and often want) new people to come in and give the scene a jolt but not always, and it's impolite to assume - especially when the setting is kinda public but not a lot. I mean I get it, people are bored in a room waiting for something - anything - to happen and then something is so they just want to be part of it, but when a bunch do so the original scene is buried under walls of text from all these newcomers. That's not fair.
Asking first is never a bad idea, and please be prepared to take 'no' for an answer. It's not personal if there are already 4 people there and your inclusion would swell the numbers further.
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There are also certain circumstances that would make it less likely -- for instance, your characters have left the bar proper and wandered to the alley out back that isn't represented as a physical space on grid -- or you're picking up a scene that began and ended days before in IC time, etc. (I would argue in the latter case, finish up the scene in a temproom, but people don't always do so.)
There are non-asshole reasons inclusion by default is sometimes unrealistic.
Oh fucking well.
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The OSS system was a slight modification of the Damnation System for Vampire. It translated skills etc into being able to hold and improve territory, and gain mechanical benefits for doing so. Given that more or less all territory is defined by the setting, you have a limited number of areas to hold, and so everyone can try to take, hold or improve a territory.
Thus everyone, even a noobie who no one knows has something to offer (alliance or direct service), or at worst has something to take away (territory) or prevent (contributing to your enemies, or taking away from your holdings).
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@Apos said:
@Pyrephox I think that stretches what a lot of players would consider public. That's trying to RP a scene in a remote or inaccessible setting to make it unlikely or impossible for other characters to randomly happen upon it. That would make it more logical to be done in a temproom on sandboxes or a locked/inaccessible room in non-sandboxes.
Eh, I'm not a big fan of interrupting a scene that's flowing well to go to an entirely different on-grid room for an interaction that may not take up more than a few minutes of "screen time" or that might have happened unexpectedly. It just doesn't seem rude to me to be able to say, "Can you give us a moment to finish up this bit before entering?" Or even, "We'd rather not add another to this scene," even if it's in a public room.
Now, if that's happening all the time, that's one thing. But most of the time, if someone says, "Hey, not now," I don't assume it's about me, or excluding me, but rather that the scene just doesn't fit having my character there at that moment, even if it's technically a place where they COULD go.
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@surreality It is very interesting to me to see the differences in cultures in one MU type to another. I never heard of barging or pose orders ever before playing on the Reach. They simply wouldn't have made any sense at all on other games I played on. The non-asshole reasons you mentioned are very clear and emphatic on sandboxes where people are telling their stories (where barging could really destroy it), but way more limited and specific in ones that have a more top down narrative.
some fucking idiot who people only like because he's good at taking credit for the work of everyone under him, just like every other fucking L&L headwiz.
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@Ghost said:
@Arkandel I tend to get a lot of OOC pages about moving the scene away from the current venue the moment a police character arrives. Webb, was it? There was a character who was a cop/hunter with a large dog. I'd be in scenes with changelings, werewolves, and shifters, and Webb would walk into the coffee house or whatever with his dog to BUY COFFEE AND DONUTS and the players would freak the fuck out in pages like he was the fun police. Me? I roleplayed with the guy, because even though my character knew he was an IC cop, was doing nothing illegal and it's okay to be sociable with cops.
Sidenote: Webb was a great player and was always really good about working around the supernatural angle and communicating OOC to find the ideal solution for everybody, from my experience.
