The Waiting Game
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@faraday
You have a higher opinion of people the I do. I would bet dollars to donuts Bob would bitch just as much with what ever reason Jane came up with for her ICly moving on. Note not saying Bob is guaranteed to bitch but I doubt the IC reason Jane picks to leave matters in the equation.
Edit Also how do you enforce that. You as staff can say Jane can't leave Bob because he is absent, are you going to monitor her scenes on why she left Bob to make sure of that? If not it is the most pointless ruling ever, because unless it is enforced it carries no meaning. see Andrew Jackson and the Supreme Court. -
@ThatGuyThere said:
You have a higher opinion of people the I do. I would bet dollars to donuts Bob would bitch just as much with what ever reason Jane came up with for her ICly moving on.
Oh, he can gripe about it all he wants. What matters more to me is the "player agency" thing. Jane simply can't make significant decisions about Bob's actions without Bob's permission. Saying he's been working late and neglecting his spouse so much she's ready to leave him is significant.
Now if he's been gone long enough, it falls under the game's idle policy, so that's a slightly different scenario. On my games, my idle policy is structured to favor the folks left behind.
Edit Also how do you enforce that. You as staff can say Jane can't leave Bob because he is absent, are you going to monitor her scenes on why she left Bob to make sure of that?
In this particular (silly) example, I would make it clear to Jane's player that Bob was, in fact, not absent. So she can choose to RP telling people that he was, which makes her a liar (and heck, might make some interesting RP) or she could come up with some other justification for why she left Bob and adjust her RP accordingly.
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Clearly we need to invent the new Time Stop for character continuity.
Both characters are locked in a room, until such time as staff can sort it out.
That way no one's agency is taken away, and there is not RP to retcon.
I have a waggish sense of humor.
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@Misadventure So if one player is at fault both of them get punished? How solomonic.
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@Sunny said:
@faraday said:
And btw, in either case Jane could've avoided the conflict by coming up with an internal justification for Jane wanting to move on, rather than making it have anything to do with a presumed IC reason for Bob's OOC absence.
And this is what I'm advocating for at the end of the day. It's possible, and I do think people should take that little bit of effort to do it -- it causes less problems for everyone involved.
Here's the thing: say Jane has decided to take up basketweaving and leave Bob to pursue her career as a basketweaver extraordinaire.
If the absent Bob is of such concern, Bob's player can just as easily say, "Bob would have actively pursued Jane to prevent her from leaving!" for that reason, too. Realistically, he would have been present IC, and if 'what Bob would do IC if he could be bothered to be around' was critical, it is entirely reasonable for him to believe he could have taken action to prevent this from happening. Whatever the reason, Bob has lost his spouse, and if he's mad about the 'neglect' reason, odds are very good he'd be just as annoyed about the basketweaving reason.
There are horrible ways people can overdo it on this front, but forcibly tying the hands of active players for the sake of players who (usually, barring the far more rare actual emergency) have for whatever reason gotten bored and flittered off is simply not that reasonable.
There is an onus on a player who is being made uncomfortable (and considering departure due to their unease) to communicate this. It is just as possible for the soon to be absent player to communicate this to staff if they're too uncomfortable talking to the other player, rather than pulling a vanishing act, and it's weird to me that I'm not even seeing this come up as so much as a suggestion. Not only is it the responsible course of action, it's entirely possible that the intending-to-remain player they are having an issue with has caused the same kind of trouble in the past, and staff should absolutely be made aware so if intervention is necessary, it can occur before anyone feels they need to leave, or feels like they have to sit there twiddling their thumbs for weeks on end.
Instead, everyone around them is supposed to sit on their thumbs, their RP stifled, sacrificing for the sake of someone who has either gone off chasing pixies on another game or in another hobby, or could not be bothered to express their concerns to their play partners or to staff.
I just don't see that behavior as the kind of thing to encourage, or to severely disadvantage others to coddle.
A lot of people treat a MUX the way they treat a video game. They expect all the little sprites to be at the same save point where they were left a week ago, or a month ago, or a year ago. That just isn't how it works.
Oh fucking well.
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@Lithium said:
Person A comes back, puts up a post about how they've been missing since whenever, they're killing the character off, or their character is just disappearing indefinitely.
People who do this suck. I had a case where a player of a character that my character played with fairly often up and disappeared for a couple months. I played it off by avoiding conversation about the character. When specifically asked, I played it off as they were still around, just busy, etc. The player comes back with a story about how they disappeared and all this horrible stuff had happened to them. So now I'm in a situation where my character looks like a complete dick because he wasn't worried about the other character being missing.
Long story short... if you take off unexpectedly and without any sort of attempt at communication for months, please do not come back and say all this angsty, horrible, dangerous drama-llama happened while you were away. It's not fair to the player that stuck around.
Of course, all this can be avoided by taking 30 seconds to drop a quick @mail saying that you won't be around a while and please assume blah. Or, if you are in a situation where RL is prone to happen and you have absolutely zero internet access, come up with a back-up plan. I've done this with people before. "If I ever disappear, you can assume blah."
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@surreality said:
There are horrible ways people can overdo it on this front, but forcibly tying the hands of active players for the sake of players who (usually, barring the far more rare actual emergency) have for whatever reason gotten bored and flittered off is simply not that reasonable.
People leave all the time though for 1-2 week periods though. Illness, work, vacation... Coming back to find that everyone's been playing like they've been ICly on the Moon, or had their head stuck in the sand the whole time strikes me as equally unreasonable.
Beyond that - yeah, they're probably never coming back. My favored idle policy isn't tied to a particular login date - 30 days, 60 days, whatever - because that's usually too long. What it does though is allow concerned players to come to staff to override player agency when someone's absence is impacting their RP.
I get that lots of times players don't trust staff, don't want to bother staff, whatever. But as staff? I'd much rather get a +request from Jane at the 3 week point saying "I want to assume Bob went to help his sick aunt in Cleveland" and allow everyone to RP "What about Bob" with the confidence of a staff-backed ruling. That strikes me as far better than waiting till Bob returns 8 weeks later and watching the drama of conflicting assumptions ensue.
But that's just me. Everyone does it differently.
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@faraday I agree that a week or two isn't a really huge deal. With the reality of everyone's schedules, that may only really ever have an impact on the smallest number of scenes for the affected parties. That isn't terribly unreasonable.
It's the extended leaves that really do bother me -- and the 'what do you mean things aren't saved, frozen in time, for me to step back into at my leisure?' mentality, which really is sometimes quite the issue.
For instance, on a game I will refrain from naming, there was someone who ran an active IC business. This player would regularly vanish for a month or more at a time, and was in and out of the deep freeze as this went on. All of their employees would have to figure out what to do with themselves, adjust for this serial vanisher, and finally when they had been gone for a rather egregious length of time, the business was handed off to someone else by staff. (This also included things like maintenance of the faction commands, channels, etc. -- which needed tending in this player's repeated absences.)
When they finally returned, there was enormous drama about all of this, and when apparently staff came down on the side of, "Sorry, this is far from the first time you've completely flaked and left everyone in limbo, so we're not taking things out of the hands of the people who have been running everything for the past several months to give back to you," not only did the player throw a whole summer stock festival season's worth of drama, they sought means of making all of those other players utterly miserable in and out of character in retaliation.
Personally, this is the kind of situation in which I have zero empathy for the missing person. Were I staff, and observed this transpire, the next 'month off' for that player would not exactly be voluntary.
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I've had a lot of experience with my RP being shat upon by someone else and needing a timestop... and not getting it.
For example. Let's say we have two characters. Bill, and Tom.Tom and Bill get into an argument and Bill decides to PK Tom. Staff is called in and, somehow, things go sideways. There are some really hinky things going on during the scene and the staffer stretches the hell out of (or even breaks) some of the rules.
Tom asks for a timestop so other staff can sort out the mess. Power A, by the book, doesn't work like the staffer said and there is no houserule on record about it. Power B either. Also Bill's friends Hank and Gary showed up right as the PK was happening despite being in a TS scene with Sue when things started, across town.
Staff refuses to timestop it because it would 'inconvenience' multiple players, but says staff will review the scene later and fix things as needed. Tom dies in the scene, as expected. A week passes. Two weeks. Staff rules that 'Yes, rules were broken but too much RP has passed so Tom is still dead'. Bill gets a finger shaken at him and told not to do it again. The end.
...so yes. When in doubt? Timestop everyone. TImestop -everyone-. Because this situation has happened to me multiple times, and it's bullshit.
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A week or two? No big deal, in the grand scheme. Upgrade that to a month, two, even more? And you're shitting on the RP of everyone who's associated with your character.
I'm in a sticky situation like this myself, at the moment. The player who portrays my character's spouse essentially dropped off the face of the planet back in December. They've logged in just enough to keep their character from being frozen, but haven't played. They've communicated with me only once or twice, OOC. During one of those conversations, we determined that he'd been out of town up until that point, but was now back. Thing is, he specifically stated he was sleeping elsewhere, and gave an affirmative response when I asked if he was simply avoiding my character and the other members of our group.
So I put a deadline on it, on my end of things. That if he wasn't back around and active by my character's birthday in early February, she'd start moving on with her life - including filing for divorce. Her birthday came and went. A @mail was sent letting him know that he'd find his belongings in boxes outside the place where he'd been staying...which was ignored, for quite a while. It got to the point where I did reach out to staff, stating that my character had filed for divorce, and mentioning that legally, a defendant has 20 days to answer before the plaintiff can submit a request for default judgement to the clerk's office - and asking for the go-ahead to say that the divorce went through by such-and-such a timeframe, if he hadn't returned to argue the matter or get active again by then.
Still waiting on a response from them on that, but honestly, I really don't feel that this is an unreasonable move on my part. Nearly three months? Seriously? There has to be a limit on how long another player's agency over their character remains sacred. My character deserves the chance to move on with her life.
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@Scorn said:
Still waiting on a response from them on that, but honestly, I really don't feel that this is an unreasonable move on my part. Nearly three months? Seriously? There has to be a limit on how long another player's agency over their character remains sacred. My character deserves the chance to move on with her life.
For me, that limit is when the player starts connecting and refusing to OOCly acknowledge how their behavior is affecting others.
Which puts me a position inapposite to @Sunny's, but that's okay.
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In case people wonder what sort of a tyrant I am, I invoked the extreme of a Timestop model exactly because it should help people realize exactly how many people are affected by this "agency" of someone ignoring one player and all other players connected to that second player, and all events engendered.
It's serious enough to perhaps have a policy in place telling players to report immediately when someone is unable to respond to info requests beyond X days. For instance, report after 5 days, staff will look into it, after another stretch they may be forced to intervene. Adjust day count to be both useful but understanding that we don't always log in or read @mail every day.
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I'm really not against things being resolved. I think that when the time comes, staff needs to be the one that takes away player agency, not another player. If you can, make a choice that does not take away their agency. If you cant, get with staff. That's it. I do not believe that a player should have the right to make ooc decisions for somebody else's PC.
I'm sure as hell not advocating remaining screwed.
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Does the idea of give staff a +headsup early, but still have some time seem reasonable? It's meant more to make players who might be stranded aware that they can and should be alert for this than rush a player who is having RL issues and what have you.
And/or would it be smart to advice players to leave a "if I vanish for a long time please do X" type thing if they are going to closely link to a PC or NPC/PC group?
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It seems like an extra, unnecessary step that adds more paperwork that only accomplishes taking away some of staff's ability to react in context and situationally.
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How does it take away anything?
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@Sunny said:
I do not believe that a player should have the right to make ooc decisions for somebody else's PC.
I understand what you're saying. And, for the most part, I agree. But this statement -- this one -- really grabs my tits and twists them.
Situation: I make a ghoul for a PC, on the PC Player's request. And then, after a couple of weeks of good play, PC Player suddenly decides to tell my PC not to leave the house, and goes off to RP with other folks. Attempts to resolve the situation fail; OOCly, there's a stone-wall to my pages, my @mails, my impassioned on-channel pleas.
Suppose all of this is true, above.
The PC Player that asked me to make the ghoul? Has made an OOC decision that has screwed my PC. That decision is: (1) to avoid me; (2) to ignore me; and (3) to pretend I don't exist. And yet, I have to be the one that takes steps with staff to correct the injustice.
Horseshit.
But, I get it. In real life, it's really not appropriate to key your ex-lover's car when he decides to cheat -- fuck you, Carrie Underwood. You don't get the choice to fuck someone else over just because they did it to you. You should knuckle up, and do what is necessary.
But if I were staff and asked to make a decision on how to handle the situation, it would be to disintegrate that player's PC utterly, and then ban them. Because fuck you for making me step into this domestic-relations shit. If you can't be bothered to talk to people that you've fucked over, I'm not particularly interested in being "fair" to you. Eat in pari delicto and unclean hands and shit.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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The thing about timestops and pvp to the pk extent is that there will never be an even fight. Either you will skew things in your favor, or someone else will. People will page others, and others will suddenly 'show up' when they have no reason to. The only thing you can do in that situation is to try and strike first, as soon as things get heated, call staff so that the scene is locked down or whatever.
If Staff are being pricks by letting others come into what is obvious a pvp situation like that, cut and run, get the hell out of there since it's obviously a battle you can no longer win.
(Not saying you do this but) It always amazes me how many people set into a conflict and refuse to run. It's like, they can't handle the possibility of losing unless it's final death or whatever.
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