The limits of IC/OOC responsibility
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@darinelle The family in question is the Firgaliks? Will take to PMs, actually, to not derail.
I just think that sort of piling on because so-and-so is a cripple or whatever is kind of fucking lame.
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@deadculture said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:
@darinelle The family in question is the Firgaliks? Will take to PMs, actually, to not derail.
I just think that sort of piling on because so-and-so is a cripple or whatever is kind of fucking lame.
So this is a really great example, right?
They were sheeted to hate her. All of them except Jalil. It was thematic to hate cripples, because people weren't sure if that meant you had a partial soul or not. She could have been soulless and evil. She was a trumped up commoner because her father was a famous commoner who became High General and eventually won a marriage prize and then - well. There were lots of reasons, and theme, that said the Firgaliks should hate Portia.
I knew that going in.
What I didn't realize was that she not only didn't have any friends, that the only RP I would have with anyone on my actual sheet would be horrible, for months. That gradually changed over time, but there was a lot of bullshit that happened between point A and point B.
It can be thematic, and still be fucking wretched to deal with. Consider the player.
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@magee101 said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:
Personally for me this is my guidelines for the various IC positions you mentioned.
Significant IC position in a group: You should be willing to meet with other memebers for RP at least once a week to pass along IC information, if need be have a 'court day' where your PC has an open door policy. You should also be willing to do ST a miniplot or something along those lines once a month, usually handed out as an assignment from your character.
Leadership PCs should not be expected to GM. Playing leadership and GMing are two completely different skillets. Focus on someone who has the former.
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@roz being able to GM and being able to storytell are two different skillsets of their own as well. GMs are already in the game as Staff, if you cant cobble together an intro, conflict, resolution, and be able to present that material you shouldn't be in leadership positions.
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@darinelle I feel like staff sets the norms here, the expectations, the culture. When the situation at the outset is 'The Top tier nobles are Gods and everyone else is a clod. They have tons of shit, authority, prestige, way more money than you, awesome castles and the best land, possibly fancy magical heirlooms, the backing of history and culture, etc, also probably more PCs', it becomes something more than risking conflict, it becomes a monolithic task to overthrow the presumed status quo of the game, thematically, structurally, and mechanically. There's also the pure pragmatic side. If the big dogs are so much bigger than your chance to win is well under a 50-50 shot, it doesn't make a lot of sense, especially when 'losing' on a MUSH is often very much an OOC thing as much as IC.
Now you're claiming (or at least implying) Arx is an exception and the setup is fine and the players are a problem. From as much as I know, I'm dubious of that, since the game ticks most of the boxes of extremely tiered feudalism, the top tier folks being richer, having better stuff, disproportionate PC population, and just a giant weight of theme behind them. If you feel like you've balanced things perfectly and are baffled people fail to pull the trigger, maybe you should look at how you set and communicate expectations.
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@darinelle said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:
EVEN THOUGH THESE WERE ALL IC REASONS, it was oocly fucking miserable.
To derail: This is why I loathe the statement "ICA=ICC". While we should all agree on the game we're playing, its theme and its mood and to uphold its setting, we are all players sitting behind a screen.
People have used ICA=ICC as an excuse to do horrible things to characters (and in some instances make them unplayable) for as long as we've been doing this.
Sorry about the tangent, but this is one of the hills I'm willing to die on. All decisions you make for the character and on behalf of what happens to other characters are OOC, and if you're good then they're informed by IC. All of them.
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@bored In Arx we offer equal (and often better) metaplot tie ins to commoner characters, and do not limit their interaction with the metaplot in any way. The larger world of Arx doesn't give a fig about a PC's title, in 99% of cases.
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@bored In Fading Suns getting the top tier sword (mist or flux) involves 13 CG points, which you can't easily get at the onset, so you have to take flaws. If you see this in a MUSH, would you think this is fair or not? As in, someone spends points to get superior gear.
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@thenomain But you also have the other side of things where a player does not follow the theme of the game in their IC actions and then whine and complain and bitch when something bad does happen because they broke the theme or at least was not smart enough to get away with it and thus you have to assert ICA=ICC
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@magee101 said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:
@thenomain But you also have the other side of things where a player does not follow the theme of the game in their IC actions and then whine and complain and bitch when something bad does happen because they broke the theme or at least was not smart enough to get away with it and thus you have to assert ICA=ICC
No, you don't. You have to assert Play The Game. That isn't ICA=ICC. That is the agreement that everyone makes when they log into the game: That they will try their best to honor the theme and setting of the game.
When someone is creating a vulcan for an Elf-Only Inn, then the staff is well within their rights to tell them to leave.
When someone wants to invent steampunk technology and the staff does not want that to be part of the setting, they are well within their rights to politely tell that player that this is not something they want on their game.
These are OOC decisions made by a player, enacted via their character. You cannot remove the player from the character. There is no character without the player, no NPC without the staff.
As someone wisely said recently, "is this fun for the player"? Sometimes the answer has to be "no", but that answer is never about doing what's IC. Sometimes it's about maintaining the game. Sometimes it's about shitty things happening to characters because that's what the game demands. But it's always a conscious decision to enact it.
Sometimes that decision is agreeing to play the game, but it's always enacted OOC.
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@bored said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:
Now you're claiming (or at least implying) Arx is an exception and the setup is fine and the players are a problem. From as much as I know, I'm dubious of that, since the game ticks most of the boxes of extremely tiered feudalism, the top tier folks being richer, having better stuff, disproportionate PC population, and just a giant weight of theme behind them. If you feel like you've balanced things perfectly and are baffled people fail to pull the trigger, maybe you should look at how you set and communicate expectations.
No. What I am claiming is - sometimes it is staff fault. Sometimes it is player fault. It is rarely any one thing, but it's a combination of things. To say "staff is lazy and disinclined to let people affect setting" is provably laughable when it comes to Arx specifically, but I also wouldn't say "things are perfectly balanced." We're imperfect people and we're trying, but we're also not straight-up opposed to civil war.
Sometimes players decide that the external threats are more important, which is in this case probably smart of them, but if they choose to have a civil war and then aren't equipped to handle what else is coming, we're also not opposed to a total system reboot or Arx: HellWorld either.
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Breaking by replies up a bit some (oh and more stuff)
@Arkandel When I say lazy and corrupt are the options, I don't necessarily mean that every staffer at every one of these games is terrible everywhere, but that ultimately the persistent failure to make a different choice probably comes from one of these. It's either (intellectually) lazy, which is the 'its done in the source material and on every other game and I'm not going to think about alternatives' explanation, or its 'corrupt' in a broad sense that I take a hard line on all unequal chargen being in some sense corrupt.
It's not in any way difficult to do these things differently, it's just uncomfortable because it deviates from the 'everyone does it this way' familiarity and it takes away the ability to let your friends play pretty princesses/badass prince mcmanlypantses. You can give some high nobles better titles but equal or worse stuff, it's not at all difficult mechanically and its quite true to history, which is full of powerful 'Count' level nobles overthrowing Dukes and Kings.
@Kanye-Qwest Maybe that's true but it's not what I'm talking about? That's plot access or 'speshulness' quotient. I was having a very specific argument about the construction of noble hierarchies and the impact that has on feudal conflict. Arx's hierarchies are equivalent to Firan's, Star Crusade's, 5th World's, etc, and one of your staffers admits people are shy of conflict, so I think it still fits the mold.
@deadculture You know me and know I'm a fan of equitable CG in general.
FS's book rules vs say the implementation on SC kind of get at one of the big problems, that there's basically no way to 'fairly' (and math-ly) balance out the sweeping advantages a top-tier landed noble gets on a game in that style with CG points. Which is why I tend to suggest you just need flatter, more realistic feudalism. A higher title costing a marginal amount of extra CG points works if most domains are still roughly equivalent and all you're getting is a touch of prestige/IC clout/etc. It doesn't work if the higher titles come with an order of magnitude of IC benefits across every facet of the game.
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Something that just came to mind: I've never played a game with an IC war that didn't suffer emotional exhaustion on the part of the players, often killing or starting to kill a game. Firan may be the exception, but given enough time I may be able to pull enough evidence to show that it's the exception that proves the rule.
If the players don't want to play out a civil war, I wouldn't discount that they are wise beyond their apparent years.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@darinelle said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:
To say "staff is lazy and disinclined to let people affect setting"
I didn't say anything about staff being disinclined to let people affect setting. I said that setting up things in the way they do creates mountains of setting expectations that players are uncertain they can challenge.
When something is the 'Great and mighty royal house of X, with vast lands, riches, a history dating back to the founding of our civilization by its greatest culture hero' it's not surprising that 'Count Bob of the SomethingLands' might feel the task of challenging that is just insurmountable. He might be right if the mechanical benefits skew enough in their favor. Regardless, its psychology, and has nothing to do with what you're actually willing to let BobPlayer do.
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@magee101 said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:
@roz being able to GM and being able to storytell are two different skillsets of their own as well. GMs are already in the game as Staff, if you cant cobble together an intro, conflict, resolution, and be able to present that material you shouldn't be in leadership positions.
GMs don't necessarily equal Staff? A GM is anyone who's GMing. I don't understand what the understood difference is here between a GM and an ST. My understanding is that these are just people who run plots.
A player shouldn't be expected to run plots to be in a leadership position. They should be belong to enable RP for people in their faction.
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@thenomain said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:
Something that just came to mind: I've never played a game with an IC war that didn't suffer emotional exhaustion on the part of the players, often killing or starting to kill a game. Firan may be the exception, but given enough time I may be able to pull enough evidence to show that it's the exception that proves the rule.
If the players don't want to play out a civil war, I wouldn't discount that they are wise beyond their apparent years.
There's truth here too.
I'm not opposed to a civil war. Depending on who's doing the uprising I might cheer them on! But there are a ton of other stories to tell as well. I'm not sure Firan's uprising didn't kill the game in the end, or at least turn it into something that was a paler, lesser version of itself. I didn't play before, but there was a certain "golden era" remarked upon fondly by many players that seemed to be before that time. So... <shrug>
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@bored I do think that games could be better about this. Higher ranks, across the board, tend to just have /more/ IC resources to throw at problems, without any downside. Now, in the IC world, people of high ranks should have a lot of their time, energy, and resources tied up in maintaining their position, dealing with whatever infrastructrure they're in charge of, and have a lot more eyes on them, watching for any sign of failure, weakness, or inability. And in a classist society, there are always major shibboleths of 'upper class' which must be maintained, and those of 'lower class' which must be avoided (in public - in private, of course, most people don't care) if you want to be taken seriously as a member of the upper class.
But, in the reality of play, none of that matters. You have just as much time as any other player to do anything that you want, and the playerbase by and large isn't going to enforce any IC consequences for acting 'ignoble', and there simply aren't enough hours in the day for staff on any game to enact consequences for 'good' or 'bad' cultural behavior as often as they need to be enacted. You have to rely on PCs to keep each other in theme, and that...rarely really happens. Instead, players largely choose their reaction to events based on their own, personal values, and their relationships with other players - people who we enjoy playing with usually get a lot more slack and defense, no matter the IC action, and people who we find tedious or annoying OOC get jumped on relentlessly for every mistake or poor decision.
And I'm just as guilty of it as anyone, really. I try to recognize it and take a step back when it happens, but it's very easy to get caught up in a hate fest on a character where everyone's high-fiving and validating each other and bonding over sick burns, especially if the player is someone you're already not fond of.
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@darinelle said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:
I'm not opposed to a civil war.
If I played there I would be. War plots usually get the kind of acceptance as weather plots do. It changes the game I logged in expecting to play, and I'm in no small way forced to accept it regardless of my desires as a player.
Even the one war plot I participated in that had a good 90% player support killed the game (and I quite enjoyed it myself). We lost good players who didn't want to be involved, too. War plots really accentuate that ICA=OOCC.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@thenomain War plots aren't bad and they don't represent the end of the game. Particularly in Lords and Ladies games, where things stagnate if there isn't a plot to feed into the positive and RP-stirring drama.
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@thenomain Sometimes 'Play the Game' means Bad Shit(tm) is going to happen to your character. It may be caused by other PC's, it may not. Play the Game and expect only good shit to happen to you is when you get people playing fanged and furry super heroes on a WoD/CoD game.
The /game/ is dark, the /setting/ is dark, the whole /world/ is dark. It is gritty. It is horrible. Everything good is paid for with the blood of innocents! (Ok maybe an extreme statement but the point stands).
On some games 'Play the Game' means 'Understand that bad shit can and will happen to your character.'
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