Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning

[Roz]

@Arkandel said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Roz said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Honestly, I tend to be welcoming enough in public scenes 75% of the time that I don't feel bad if 15% of the time I need to hide in places when other folks enter. And if there's more than one new person about, they can clearly just RP with each other, so I don't feel bad about that, either.

How do you handle the spam though since not everyone is using a place? It's usually my problem... well, that and people reacting to everything anyone is saying, so I have 6 people trying to talk to my PC at once which gets pretty weird if I try to visualize it.

I, uh. Maybe skim the spam in case anything important happens but mostly just respond to the stuff happening in my place. I'd probably pose discouragingly enough from other people trying to talk to me outside the place. (Like, flash a quick smile, but clearly distracted with private conversation, etc.) Eventually people will generally stop trying to engage with me and just engage with the other folks there.

[Thenomain]

@Misadventure

For the attention, usually.

[Misadventure]

From who? They didn't bother to interact with anyone there. It was a drive by RPing.

[3543thrh67]

@Misadventure people IC and OOC often talk about it. Thus they get their atttention even if they do not stay.

[mietze]

There are a handful of folks seemingly on any game that get a lot of enjoyment at disrupting others for their own amusement. I don't think it's about attention from other people in the usual sense, just satisfaction about getting to do it, or the sense that they have an audience (that they really don't want interaction from). I have seen it on Shadowrun/WoD/original theme/Battlestar/Fading Suns/you name it.

[ThatGuyThere]

@Misadventure said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

My interruptions have always been more ... severe.

People come in, and have a gun fight. Never try to engage the players there. Just interrupt.

People come in, loudly have a scene where they paint the entire setting up as they like, then leave.

Why these people even bothered to come to a place where others were is beyond me.

So much this. the main reason I will try to steer any RP away from public places on any game, dealt with this too many times not worth the effort of dealing with again.

[Arkandel]

@mietze said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

There are a handful of folks seemingly on any game that get a lot of enjoyment at disrupting others for their own amusement. I don't think it's about attention from other people in the usual sense, just satisfaction about getting to do it, or the sense that they have an audience (that they really don't want interaction from). I have seen it on Shadowrun/WoD/original theme/Battlestar/Fading Suns/you name it.

Yeah, that's totally a thing. My favorite was this guy who came into a scene at a bar I was at and the first thing he posed, before even waiting to see what we were up to, was describe how he was all bloodied up because a mob had jumped him outside and he needed help.

Like... dude. Ask first at least.

[Thenomain]

@ThatGuyThere said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I will try to steer any RP away from public places on any game

This is too bad, because being able to find RP with new people and diverse interests gets people more invested in the game as a whole and increases the excitement of the player base, not to mention then their willingness to draw others, especially newbies, into the game's multi-tiered and various levels that make a game like this feel alive. It is a beautiful thing, but needs as many people as possible to buy into it.

That also makes the drive-by disruptions easier to ignore, as everyone can just shrug and get on with what they were doing. Or, and here's the even more fun part: These disruptions can be absorbed into the game as a whole and add to it. Not everyone is going to be willing to share their time this way, but not everyone in these drive-bys are this way.

[Apos]

@Misadventure said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

My interruptions have always been more ... severe.

People come in, and have a gun fight. Never try to engage the players there. Just interrupt.

The vast majority of people making really elaborate sets just want to be very evocative storytellers, and I'm really okay with that. But then there's guys who just want to dominate a scene, and it's because of them that I'm instinctively wary of anyone taking tremendous liberties in describing the environment in a set, and trying to force everyone to conform to it, which just doesn't work so great in non-sandboxes. Like I personally prefer people to avoid describing any of the context of the world around them except things that are completely unobjectionable and would fit the context of anyone just wandering in, if they are in a public space. It makes the organic rp a million times easier, and I think rp that's highly referential off of the environment changing is better off done in private when context is easily understood throughout the scene.

[Pyrephox]

@Apos said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Misadventure said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

My interruptions have always been more ... severe.

People come in, and have a gun fight. Never try to engage the players there. Just interrupt.

The vast majority of people making really elaborate sets just want to be very evocative storytellers, and I'm really okay with that. But then there's guys who just want to dominate a scene, and it's because of them that I'm instinctively wary of anyone taking tremendous liberties in describing the environment in a set, and trying to force everyone to conform to it, which just doesn't work so great in non-sandboxes. Like I personally prefer people to avoid describing any of the context of the world around them except things that are completely unobjectionable and would fit the context of anyone just wandering in, if they are in a public space. It makes the organic rp a million times easier, and I think rp that's highly referential off of the environment changing is better off done in private when context is easily understood throughout the scene.

Man, that makes for some really bland scenes, though. It's one of the reason I often get burnt out and unhappy with public scenes - they tend to take place in this gray, featureless expanse where the weather is always meh, you're perpetually stuck in a grey sort of twilight so that no one has to remember if it's day or night, and you're surrounded by faceless nonentities of NPCs. Might as well just have a set of blank rooms, at that point.

[kitteh]

So hi, I played here a bit but ended up fading off due to a mix of RL and difficulty getting in on RP and with some of the uh, support system? commands.

@Ominous said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

A note about courtesans, as was discussed heavily recently, there is no institutionalized prostitution in Arx at all, so courtesans are not selling sex. They are event planners, host/esses, companions, etc. The description of the receiving room in the Whisper House can be a bit confusing since it says that people occasionally show up thinking it is a brothel. That doesn't happen as there are no brothels. The very idea of a brothel is an alien concept. The description is likely a hold over from very early alpha.

Personally I found the Whisper thing confusing. I appreciate that staff is willing to challenge the grimdark sexploitation that GoT etc has made so chic, but I felt like they kind of couldn't make up their mind on this.

My roster PC's bg was basically Memoirs of a Geisha. Reading her, she sounded not just like a hooker, but a (implied) sex slave. It really felt like it clashed with the 'there is no prostitution or sexism!!!' files.

I even had a player challenging (not rudely, but basically in a friendly newbie-helping, 'you're getting theme wrong' way) my RP as incorrect when she was trying to share some of her life. So that came off a little strange. I've been looking at coming back but I'd probably stay away from the faction.

[Arkandel]

@Pyrephox, @Apos, I don't know which games you jerks have you been playing but where I'm at if you're willing to set then people will adore you for it, not object to your choices of ambience.

I've encountered a hell of a lot of silence following 'hey, anyone else wants to set?' than 'HELL NO you did not just pose it was raining!'.

[Kanye Qwest]

@kitteh Which character? Some of them were written before I came on board in a serious way and put my foot down about the subject.

[kitteh]

@Kanye-Qwest Mirari.

[Kanye Qwest]

@kitteh Ahh gotcha. I think that one was generated by a player some time ago, and Apos tends to approve those while at work without uh, looking super duper closely at the sheets, at times.

He's a very busy person!

[kitteh]

@Kanye-Qwest Does your roster offer any way to tell staff-made PCs from player ones? I think ending up with prior player cast-offs can kind of undercut what people might be going for playing on a roster game, ie getting a character that is designed to fit into the world, have hooks, be relevant, etc.

[3543thrh67]

@kitteh I've seen Mirari's background. It doesn't seem imply sex slave to me. Unless it was different than the current one? It does say she went to courtesan school and she had a contract sold to a family. I've only seen the recent Mirari stuff so I don't know anything about previous stuff.

[Meg]

@icanbeyourmuse

There also may be BG stuff you can't see on her. But if it's the public one, yeah, it doesn't really imply sex slave to me, either.

[kitteh]

@icanbeyourmuse The part that was problematic (and that another player didn't even believe was in my BG) was not her having a contract sold to her house later on (although the contract itself is an iffily-defined thing, too), but the fact she was an orphan raised by other relatives who then sold her to the courtesan school as a child for money to feed their other brats.

Obviously I'm not a setting expert but it's hard not to see a lack of free will in that part of it. And while Whispers might not be explicitly prostitutes, she was specifically picked 'because she was pretty', and she was raised to be a seductress. All the thematic hand-waving you want to do about 'there is none of this stuff', this... sounds like sexual exploitation of a child.

Anyway, I did say 'implied.' It felt like someone wanted to write that story but was skirting saying it outright and using coded language and wink-nods instead.

[ThatGuyThere]

@Thenomain
I agree completely, the random public scenes used to be one of my favorite things about mushing.