Indicating Discomfort in a Scene (online)
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@Gingerlily If I ever pull up the droplet I had stuff set up on it would be easier to see than explain, really.
I had everything set up so the MUX could pull data from the wiki.
All the stuff on the wiki could be filled out with forms.
One of the forms was to let people fill out a series of preferences, under a list of pre-defined topics. This had some of the basics like 'political' or 'combat' and some sensitive subjects people tend to have strong feelings about.
This info would show up on the player's page on a tab, or in a collapsible section, with all of the information they typed out about what they liked, or didn't like, about anything they saw fit to make notes about. Bear in mind, this also had some really general things like 'times available' and 'pose style' and such as basics, also 'things I like to GM' for people who like to run scenes, if they had special sorts of things they liked to run or not run for others on request. This information could also be pulled up on the game.
Each subject also had a wiki page that would list the preference entry of all the active players who had filled it out.
Essentially, people could look at an individual player to see where they may have common interests (or indications that they would not mesh at all), or look at a page for the subject, and see the interest or lack thereof in that subject for all of the currently active players on the game.
So if you had a category like 'crime', on the subject page, you could get a listing of what characters currently active on the game were interested in criminal RP, and what kinds -- as victims, as people who wanted to avoid it, as a specific sort of criminal, etc. If you were a GM interested in running a crime plot, you'd be able to get a general idea of who was interested in what -- and could potentially contact those players asking if they wanted to do something, or at least know that 'we have 20 people who like pickpocketing, but nobody likes assassinations, so if I'm going to run a crime plot, I'm going to get more interest and participation if it's about pickpocketing rather than assassination', etc. If absolutely no one wanted anything to do with that, you'd see that, too -- which means no time is wasted constructing a plot around it and then wondering why there weren't any nibbles.
There was nothing percentage-based like +kinks code, or ratings like Cobalt's +prefs code; it was just a box where people could write something describing their interest in -- or strong aversion to -- a particular subject, to whatever level of detail they liked. For instance, there was a category for 'addiction'; some people find this to be great story fodder and are into it, others may be fine with alcoholism but are sensitive to drug use, others are recovering addicts RL and want nothing at all to do with this subject in their pretendy fun time.
In allowing people to just write, it spares a lot of false positives or negatives, especially in areas like the subject above, where some things are absolutely fine, but other things under the same umbrella might be really difficult for the player to encounter. It requires the work of reading and writing, but those are requirements in this hobby already and I don't have tons of sympathy for people unwilling to do a reasonable measure of either.
(And, obviously, people could just skip anything that there wasn't any strong feeling about in any way.)
I liked it. It's different than what's out there now -- but I think it would have been a good communication tool. Not advocating anyone else do it, but as it is different from the other pref systems already in use, it may help ease the confusion some.
