@warma-sheen said in Wish Fulfillment RP:
@arkandel said in Wish Fulfillment RP:
The issue comes when it's not about playing something better than we are, but playing something better than others are. That's when shit starts to hit the fan, since you now have multiple people all wanting to be the best - the most powerful, coolest, sexiest.
Well that depends on what you want out of MU*ing. The real issue here is if people aren't mature enough to handle wanting something and failing to achieve it or if they ruin someone else's experience in order to achieve it.
At the end of the day it comes back to what we're doing here, a topic that isn't well defined. Is it cooperative storytelling? Is it collective writing? Or are we playing a game: the G of RPG? Games have winners and losers. Most games have more losers than winners. The ideal (in my opinion) is to be a good winner as well as a good loser. Its one of those character traits that seems to be easily overlooked and undervalued as we increasingly see win-at-all-costs and burn-it-all-down-if-we-lose popular models displayed in the world around us.
There's nothing at all wrong with the idea of wish fulfillment itself. Its your own little dose of happiness and pleasure with unlimited refills and no prescription necessary! And most MU*s allows you an opportunity to create that for yourselves. Very few games police private scenes between you and another player. Most let you tell the stories your want amongst yourselves (with varying degrees of limits). That's not good enough for some people though.
The problem with wish fulfillment on a MU* is that many people want everyone else to accept their wish as reality. It isn't enough for someone to live out a fantasy. They can do that on their own writing whatever they want without limits. They don't want that. What does it for them is that other people accept their reality and acknowledge it, willingly or otherwise. So they come to a MU* where people gather. Its a power and control issue, forcing your will onto others. And that's a people problem. So not just players. But staff.
That's where things take a hard turn into problems, especially when people start using unfair advantages, which doesn't just include classic cheating, but also more subtle maneuvers like gaslighting and emotional manipulation, to impose their wishes on other people because their wish can't be fulfilled if someone else doesn't accept it fully.
If people kept their wish fulfillment to themselves, things would be fine. But when problems arise, its usually that someone has extended their wish fulfillment out to someone else trying to force acceptance.
Thought this was really insightful. I definitely notice people reacting with OOC unhappiness rather than IC play sometimes when their concept is challenged by another's IC play. I do find it a problem but it's also human nature and seems to happen whether or not wish fulfillment is involved. Here's an example: a player is trying to roleplay a benevolent mafia boss named Ruff Dooley.
This player, if asked about his character, might say something like, "Dooley can be tough, but it comes from a place of love. He deeply cares about his neighborhood and takes care of it, and the people there know that, and honestly respect him. He rules with love, not fear."
And another player ends up rolling in a character that saw her parents murdered by mafia henchmen. She displays fear and resentment towards Dooley...
Now Dooley's player is upset. And it doesn't matter whether he has wish fulfillment towards being a benevolent mafia boss.
I think this is a normal human thing. When I was in my late teens, I noticed it in myself, and thought I was being immature... So I taught myself to revel in misunderstandings of my character and roleplay through those as happy narrative conflicts, and take them as proof that I was playing a layered and multifaceted character. But then when I got a lot older and came back to these games, I realized that veterans of this hobby show the same sorts of OOC peevishness when their concept is challenged through IC events.
And it probably just gets way more personal when wish fulfillment fantasies are involved, because in those cases, people are more liable to insert more of themselves into a roleplay character and take everything more personally in general.
