Where's your RP at?

[Gilette]

It's almost as if there's a big ol' tension between the people who have their own story first in their mind and the people who are more willing to get screwed by a random roll of the dice.

I also think people who are comparing MUs to writing a story or watching a TV show are missing the point. Even appealing to tabletop is a bit odd. A MU is none of those things, not really - it is far closer to improv theatre. In a MU, you're not always the protagonist or the biggest star. Sometimes, your character is the guy who shows up in the background or delivers a key to the person who will Do Things.

I really like surrendering part of my character's agency to the dice or to the whims of other players. This is, however, incresingly hard to find.

What isn't increasingly hard to find are people who, say, taunt a character for half a dozen poses, or even attack them, and then attempt to no-consent out of consequences.

Unfortunately, a lot of players are realising that they can hide behind the banner of Consent-Based Ar Pee when things they don't like happen and there simply aren't enough players who will call them on that selfish, dishonest behavior.

My personal approach to my consent is as follows: Ultimately, my consent trumps anything and everything, which means it is not something I revoke casually. If someone says they want to stab my character out of the blue, I'll allow it, with the understanding that the worst my character will get is a few days in hospital. If my character dies, it will be at a suitably dramatic moment, or because I've grown tired of playing them. PC/PC conflict will always be settled by a mechanical system where possible, simply because it is the fairest way of doing it, and I will not complain about either result - even if I go into it knowing I have a disadvantage.

Multi User Shared Hallucinations aren't, y'know, singular hallucinations. The whole thing falls apart when people forget that the text reality is made up of more than themselves.

[Alamias]

@Miss-Demeanor said in Where's your RP at?:

Didn't Kaleb end up punching some other dude over it?

Indeed he did...

[faraday]

@Miss-Demeanor said in Where's your RP at?:

Without any risk of death... what is there to really fear in the ruins of your destroyed society? 'My stuff might get stolen... but its okay because I'll somehow get new stuff so I won't die of starvation' Where's the risk? Where is the ACTUAL risk?

You're equating OOC risk with IC risk. Just because you, the player, know that your character won't die doesn't mean your character knows he/she won't die. Think about an author writing a novel or a writer on a TV show. They know exactly what's going to happen and yet they can still manage to have characters react appropriately to the situation and exhibit the necessary angst and pathos.

Now maybe you haven't ever experienced that working well on a MU*. That's fine. But I have, so I reject the assertion that it's impossible. Just this past month I killed off a beloved NPC and spurred a lot of RP about it because people did care.

It's okay if people play differently. I've played on games with PC death. I had a character on TGG get blown to bits because I AFKed to get a snack while in the base and there was an artillery strike. I lost a Star Wars character to one bad Athletics roll and got sucked out of an airlock. I once participated in a PK plot to take someone out. I respect these styles of play, even though it's not my personal playstyle. But it doesn't feel like people are extending the same courtesy to the opposite point of view.

[Catsmeow]

Sweetness,

This is getting to be like the pro-life/pro-choice debate up in here. I feel like everyone is making assumptions about the other side and not listening. They are trying to veil their snark or think it won't be seen, then jump at someone else for doing it on the other 'side'.

We are adults, we should be able to see the other person's opinion and be respectful of it. There is a reason there are games out there and not game out there. They don't all appeal to everyone. I'm not big on super space games because my brain is sometimes too literal to understand all the science that is RPed, etc. It doesn't mean I HATE space games and space gamers. It doesn't mean I'm anti-genre. It means it doesn't appeal to me and here's why. It's not a you shouldn't do this because I don't like it. We are starting to get to the mud-slinging of the discussion, let's tone back. Sarcasm to one is a deep insult to another.

Now, I am not anti-death and need to have complete control over my character. I would write a book that way. I like how another person influences the story that is going and the choices made. I like to use dice like a which-way story and pick if I go left or right sometimes. I like to go into things with death if I know it's coming. I may have even understood the game death concept. To me it came across as the dreaded telenuke and boom you are dead. Rocks Fall.

I have accepted 'stupid' death when it happened too. I played Metro back in the day and was playing a straight vanilla mortal. It took me FOREVER to get that character approved. A question here, no time there, staff too busy, etc. My second day on the grid there is a huge blizzard and staff was like if you aren't @desc'ed right things may happen. I made sure my char was in layers. They were stuck in a building with people I didn't know. It was all fine. Then those people decided it would be cool to show how much power they had and stripped the char and put her outside. My char died the first scene after weeks of waiting to get in. That was stupid. Incredibly stupid. I dealt.

I think people are more saying they want to make a story. While the story continues for others if the char dies, it doesn't for them. We have bitched and complained about how one feels about being the background to another person's story. I think is comes off as that. Now, there are people that love that and will do it. So I really think the take away is this:

TL;DR

Let's talk like respectful adults, not politicians trying to secure votes.
If you want to make randomized death, be up front.
If you make it, normally people will come play.
Make CG easy.

[Miss Demeanor]

@faraday But they don't. Not always. Look at interviews with some of the most famous authors of today. They will freely tell you that often, the narrative runs away from them and what they had intended. That characters will do unexpected things. That stories will turn out differently. And a MU* is NOT a book OR a tv show, and trying to equate it to one is a fallacy. Also, even if you were going to equate it to tv... you aren't the writer OR the director. You're either the viewer or the actor, neither of whom will likely know the character is going to bite it until an episode or two before it happens, or the episode itself. The actors have zero say in when or how it happens. And we the viewers complain CONSTANTLY if we have an episode 'spoiled' for us by telling us what happens before we get to watch it.

@Alamias grins I miss Kaleb. He was fun to ruffle.

[Seraphim73]

@Roz I thought of that, and weekly would totally work, but I wanted a little more interaction than that. I think you could totally go with monthly, biweekly, weekly, every-other-daily, daily, or twice-daily, depending on how much button-pushing you wanted and how much you wanted each roll to matter.

[Misadventure]

@Sunny (and anyone else who might have an opinion, she gets named cuz I know she's handled this level of stuff) Serious inquiry re the example I made up.

The example was something like in order to avoid an over matched combat or retreat from a losing conflict, the player/group opts to "flee into danger" this being the wilderness in a post apocalyptic setting.

Once there they discover either they don't have the right survival skills, or that they cannot reliably pass skill tests (if asked for them).

How far would that situation have to go to kill a character if you were the ST in charge? No grudge against the group IC or OOC, no balancing the books from prior freebie survivals, no players deciding they want a grim death for their PC, just this one situation to consider. If anyone would die, I don't mean to limit the options.

My guidelines from a tabletop I ran was:

1. warning shot - prove that danger X can hurt the PCs.

2. Draw Blood - inflict that damage or loss, but not to finality

3. characters do not withdraw if given a chance

4. harsh results still arise from the usual ways (dice, consequence trading, whatever) not from having been given some warnings

5. players can still suggest a better story path, or return from the cliffhanger or death.

[Warma Sheen]

@faraday said in Where's your RP at?:

I MU* because I love to interact with other people. Stories evolve in surprising ways. I don't mind when bad things happen to my character - actually in most cases I welcome it because RPing complications is fun. I just don't want to lose my character against my will. I don't understand why that's so hard to understand when various people have laid out very concrete reasons why they don't like it.

Maybe 'understand' is the wrong word. I acknowledge the reasons given, your own included. But I can't reconcile the explanations given. For example, how you can say that you welcome when bad things happen to your character without consent, unless it is death? I can't get why that's an exception to the rule. Character death is just another bad thing that can happen to your character. If someone turned your character into a rock, would that be okay? Kept alive and healthy, but imprisoned? Cut off his arms and legs in a genre where you survived, but they couldn't be regrown, is that okay? Blinded and made mute? If death is the only exception, I don't know why it is not okay but everything else is. If it isn't the only exception, how much of a change to your character is acceptable and why is that the line that can't be crossed.

This isn't meant as a knock against you or anyone else. It is more a statement of my own inability to grasp these types of point of views. That's all.

[Misadventure]

Death or anything that renders the character unplayable is that step beyond a consequence you get to RP through and further evolve the story (unless its one of those games where you can come back and often do).

I could see multiple stacking some other sort of consequences together to make up for a "here is where you should have died by pure dice" but not everything is pure randomizers making decisions anyway.

[Ghost]

I've seen the term unplayable tied to a highly subjective state of my story, and this is something I think that people should keep an eye out for and be wary of.

I can completely understand when a character is unplayable because they're dead, rendered into the state of a comatose quadriplegic, incarcerated for life with no possibility of parole in a prison on the dark side of the moon, or literally turned into sentient strawberry jam.

I have heard (and seen first hand) some cases of the argument being made that a character has been rendered unplayable because an element the player demands be made available to them is not available. More or less, I've seen this leveraged as an argument for the people that do this to ultimately get their way. That, in some cases, the focus of my story is so subjective that things like not being allowed to have access to specific FBI files, a conflict resolved in a manner that benefits the character, or not being allowed to do something that no other character is allowed to do either is considered that which makes a character unplayable.

The reason I bring this up isn't to stoke any sort of argument, but is to bring into focus that there is a reasonable definition of unplayable and there is (in some cases) a definition of unplayable that is used as a leverage point to exhaust other people into giving others their way.

So, IMO, when dealing with the concept of a player being rendered unplayable, it should only apply to cases where the character itself is physically/mentally incapable of functioning. Wants do not equate to needs.

[Miss Demeanor]

Okay, since this is still continuing.... if people are so against character death... why are people playing on non-consent games, where you can, in fact, lose your character for nothing more than a bad dice roll? So far as I know, none of the active MU*s at this time are consent-based. So... what gives?

[Ghost]

Because it's easier to agree to the cookie and fight it afterwards than it is to argue the terms of the cookie before accepting it.

[Gilette]

Because what're you going to do, really, when a player withdraws consent and just says 'That didn't happen'? Ban them? Risk pissing off them and their friends? In this hobby?

All it takes is a few players to start railing against non-consent and/or mechanics-related resolution and the whole thing collapses. It's why people get so vehement about it because it is far easier for certain players to remove those things than it is to make players agree to start using them once they've fallen out of favor.

[mietze]

Probably because like many things consent/non-consent is not either/or but a spectrum.

If you don't think that any PC should be able to rape another PC as long as they have the dice to force them into unconsciousness in combat, and that the player of the raped PC should then have to play out the consequences of that happening, why are you playing on a non-consent game?

[mietze]

Gillette, I have played on games where revoking consent or hiding behind a consent policy did mean removal from play and/or staff intervention to not allow that player to wiggle out of it.

[mietze]

In addition most systems do have a get out of jail free way to get around PC death, even if it costs something in return.

I think people who fixate on death as the only measure of True Morality on a consent game are kind of weird. Even on games that are anything goes, usually people don't think like that.

[Gilette]

@mietze said in Where's your RP at?:

In addition most systems do have a get out of jail free way to get around PC death, even if it costs something in return.

I think people who fixate on death as the only measure of True Morality on a consent game are kind of weird. Even on games that are anything goes, usually people don't think like that.

It's the easiest barometer. When death isn't happening, and isn't really on the cards, a lot of players start leaning on the fact that they won't be killed. So, to use a WoD example, you get neonates staring an Antediluvian in the face and just failing to sell it in any way.

[mietze]

But this happens all the time in wod non-consent games anyway.

[Gilette]

Sure, and then you can fucking murder them with Potence 10.

[mietze]

But people do not. That's what I'm saying. Crappy ass rpers who overly rely on their stats or temper tantrums happen everywhere.