The Waiting Game
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@Sunny said:
Sometimes something does have to give, and that something is not for handling on a player level.
I cannot agree with you here. I'm more on @Lithium's side of the bench, under the circumstances.
To wit: if I make your PC's IC husband, and you slough off my attempts to RP with you, I am absolutely free to presume that your PC is ICly sloughing off mine in some way, shape, or form. You can protest, of course, but that would require confronting me OOCly -- maybe ICly. But if you're OOCly avoiding me for some reason or another, I doubt you'll do that, and I doubt that whatever harm may come to your PC is substantial, since you won't do anything about it.
Not that you would actually do this to me, of course. I think the salient fact in the situation here is that Sam is online RPing with others. So, it's not like he can't be online because of some RL complication. Here, Sam's player is just being a serious dickbag.
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Or the person in question is being a psycho stalker that made the character against Sam's wishes. We really don't have the full story, here (I remind that the player is having OTHER PLAYERS @mail Sam about this, which is a huge red flag to me). The rest of it, well, I don't agree. I think that players have no business taking away the agency of other players.
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@Sunny said:
I think that players have no business taking away the agency of other players.
What of the agency of Ingrid's player to play Ingrid as she was designed? Isn't that being taken away by Sam's deliberate evasion?
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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@Ganymede said:
@Sunny said:
I think that players have no business taking away the agency of other players.
What of the agency of Ingrid's player to play Ingrid as she was designed? Isn't that being taken away by Sam's deliberate evasion?
Nope! Sam isn't making any decisions for Ingrid.
This is where I point out that the PC I play most heavily's IC husband pretty much doesn't play any more, and hasn't in months and months. I know that it's entirely possible to continue things along without messing up anything for the other player, because I do it. Have been doing it. If it got untenable, I'd ask Staff to step in, not just declare that the husband has decided to start avoiding her / has vanished / etc, because that's not my job.
Edited: If Sam is avoiding her OOC, that's an OOC issue, and staff needs to get involved. If he's actually avoiding her ICly, then he should say so, and that can be handled ICly. If it's an IC avoid that he won't say exists OOC, then staff needs to get involved because that too is an OOC problem.
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@Sunny said:
Nope! Sam isn't making any decisions for Ingrid.
In your examples, however, Sam's decisions affect Ingrid.
Corollary: Ingrid is Sam's ghoul, and made the ghoul with Sam's knowledge and consent. Presuming that to be true, does your analysis change?
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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@Ganymede said:
In your examples, however, Sam's decisions affect Ingrid.
There's a difference between making a OOC decision that affects Ingrid and making an IC decision for Ingrid.
Example of the former: I don't feel like RPing with you, so we need to work this out off-camera.
Example of the latter: You don't feel like RPing with me, so I'm just gonna assume your character is out of town/sick/working late/avoiding me without asking you.
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This is true.
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There's also nothing /wrong/ with a person rp'ing that they /feel/ they have been avoided. It's entirely possible to RP being /wrong/ about stuff. In fact, we should do this more often in general. So many times do I see people RP things their characters should not know, because they simply do not wish to have their character hurt or inconvenienced.
This is wrong to me.
If my character is going around behaving that they're being avoided because there is no RP, and saying that they /believe/ they are being avoided, that is in no way shape or form making decisions /for/ anyone else. It is one characters opinion on the reality of never seeing the other.
That isn't removing anyone's player agency at all.
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@Lithium Except if it's your sister/spouse/employer/boyfriend/BFF you "feel" is avoiding you, and they then assert that they ICly see you every day. Then you look a little strange.
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Except they cannot assert that without my consent because then they'd be removing /my/ agency over my character.
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@Lithium Exactly! You get into a conflict of agency that then staff must resolve. Which could be avoided by either having a pre-arranged agreement (as @surreality suggested awhile back) or involving staff as soon as you need to start making potentially-controversial assumptions about the behavior of someone else's character.
Edit to add: This isn't black and white. Assuming I see you every day and nothing exciting happens is probably not so controversial. Assuming you've suddenly started avoiding your spouse/BFF/etc. probably is.
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If there is a character who by logic sees yours on a regular basis -- a SO, a coworker, something like that -- then your character feeling avoided necessitates some change in the usual habits of that other character seeing them. Which means that RPing feeling avoided is still implying that something about the regular relationship has changed ICly.
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The issue with RPing as if someone else is avoiding/abandoning you without having that permission is that it widens the circle of potential complications and kind of forces other PCs to get their own RP complicated OOCly, perhaps without their knowledge that it's an OOC problem.
It's why I would probably oocly let people know that the person hasn't been available and then RP noncommittal stuff in regards to that and steer RP away from discussions about it, but if it was seeming to impact me a great deal to do that, I'd probably get in touch with staff for guidance as to what I can and cannot work out for myself if the other player cannot or will not communicate with me.
Perhaps my point of view is influenced because I've been in a situation where someone's IC partner/tie in dropped off the face of the earth for a bit, and she really really played up the Poor Me aspect. She didn't really tell anyone that she wasn't in contact with him OOC, so we assumed that he was in agreement with some of the zanier things that she would say as to why he wasn't around. None of us asked, but this was like all she wanted to RP about, all of it revolving about how horrible she was taking this abandonment. Our reactions/actions went along as ICly appropriate. When he returned, unexpectedly, she was happy to act as if none of that had happened, and would get really angry about any references to previous RP surrounding her "IC" feelings of abandonment, ect. It was just an awkward situation all around.
I'm reluctant to spread the potential awkward/retcon beyond what it really needs to be, to be honest. So I think noncommittal if you have no contact, and then adherance to the game policy if there is one/checking in with staff if it's important, or being willing to fudge a little that YOUR pc decides to dump his/her sorry ass if you want to move on is preferable to getting a bunch of other people involved ICly.
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Noncommittal answers are definitely the best way. I've seen the same thing happen with someone who was still logging in to the game and could easily have been contacted, but had been very short on RP time lately so playing with people who were available when they were and getting important scenes done took precedence over "relationship maintenance".
It boils down to a philosophical disagreement between people who assume that nothing happens off-screen between characters unless they explicitly agree to it, and people who assume that coworkers and significant others usually see each other all the time regardless of whether their players are RPing much.
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@mietze As far as I'm concerned the only issue is having to make assumptions, not to advance your roleplay or move forward but just because it's inevitable.
Say I'm playing Bob, Jane's boyfriend and Jane's player goes on a hiatus. I can try to avoid referring to Jane in RP and explain this to others but at a certain point someone will ask "hey, is Bob single?" and at that point I'll have to provide an answer. Well, is he? This isn't a Schrodinger's cat situation! And either answer is settling the matter on someone else's behalf.
My take on it is that if you're not active OOC and IC - if Jane is responsive to to @mail or pages she can settle the matter and all's good - then you should be fine with staff making such calls on your behalf when they are contacted to resolve the matter. Yeah, Jane is out of town, her mom is sick.
An open ended answer can even be a hook for future RP, provided of course Jane eventually comes back. We were on a break! And if she's not at least poor Bob can finally move on.
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I really love playing ghouls. This has meant that I've had to deal with dropped regnants a few times. This is not usually a problem you can go to staff with per se since it's not important (though I'm glad to see that finally a lot of vamp places do have house rules to allow ghouls some degree of OOC agency to remove/switch up regnants in the case of someone going AWOL) in a mush sense. What I usually do is wait whatever the idle-freeze time period is if the person has suddenly stopped logging in, and when they roll over contact staff to tell them my proposed solution, get their buy in along with whatever adjustments they propose. If I have contact info for the AWOL player I'll try to contact them weekly until that point--not in a bitchy or whiny way. Once the idle timestamp has been applied, I always send them the pitch I made to staff. If I don't have off mush contact info I send it in a @mail shortly before they roll over so that when/if their RL is such they can return, they'll be able to see what the pitch was. And then I move on, and if they return, I'm friendly--maybe we work it out to continue, most of the time not, but hopefully no one has been disparaged except for actions that THEY wrote and took prior to their departure.
Poor BobGoblin's situation though is...I mean, at least with someone who drops off the game, you don't have the kind of meanness that is ignoring someone or putting them off without the courage to say "I'm not interested." That's a shitty thing to do to someone. Even if you don't have a close tie in. If you don't plan to RP with someone, just tell them and then offer to work things out OOCly. I don't alt-stalk, so it's possible that I might have been in this situation too but was just unaware. I think think I'd be a lot more pissed if I knew someone was being a cowardly dick and wasting my time and theirs.
So in that case, I still would not involve other PCs in things--that's awkwardness on a lot of levels, as I said previously. But I would definitely after a month (or whatever the games idle policy is, whatever's longer) send a @mail and then +Request if the mail was not responded to stating that I'd tried for X amount of time to get scenes with no response, while the other player was active otherwise, and that I wasn't sure why--at that point /I/ was uncomfortable needing action on their part to advance my story, that I did not hold any grudges or anything, but I'd like the proposed resolution of XYZ (something face saving for both PCs) so that we could move on and not have any further obligation to each other unless we both agreed to it organically sometime in the future.
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I'd definitely be game to accept whatever staff ruled was the IC goings on too. I have found though that a lot of staff are kind of overburdened anyway, they have enough on their plate, and if I want things to not be kicked down the road of "god, I'll deal with this later, I really need to process this other priority stuff" by asking staff to pull the idea/answer out of their butts, it's better for me to spend less time stewing and fretting and more time thinking of some face-saving-to-all-sides proposal I can pitch.
People respond a lot faster to a pitch rather than a "you tell me what happens" much of the time, and if they do need to say no, they tend to be much more willing to come up with a compromise than something from scratch. Staff, someone who isn't equipped courage or social skills wise to be able to say no, you name it. As long as you are not punitive and overly self serving in your pitch. It's hard to do when you're pissed, I'll grant, but it's worth it if you can.
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There is no 'perfect' way to do this.
It will always depend on the situation.
Say person A has dropped off the face of the earth. Person B out of 'player agency' issues decides to give nothing but vague or noncommittal answers because they do not know what is going on with person A.
Person A comes back, puts up a post about how they've been missing since whenever, they're killing the character off, or their character is just disappearing indefinitely.
They have every right to do that, it is their character, but suddenly person B seems to be a wacko who wasn't responding to this person being gone all the time or missing or dead or whatever.
This is different than if person A has been around all the time, but for whatever reason isn't responding to player B's requests for RP, though is clearly out RP'ing with others.
People's opinions will vary on what to do, and in the end it's a personal judgement call you have to decide on a course of action that suits continued enjoyment of your character.
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Nope. Go to staff.
