The 100: The Mush

[lordbelh]

@Lithium said in The 100: The Mush:

You are probably right. I wish I had ran into situations where that didn't seem to be the case. When I was there it was one big asshole after another: Do what I say or starve. You can't use this unless you fight me for it. If you go against me I'll kill you in your sleep.

There was so much angst and asshole that it is all we ever remember seeing, even if we did see other stuff, because it got drowned out.

Really? Considering nobody was in charge of anything, that sounds really odd. I was there pretty much at the start. I cant think of a single character who went around and threatened to kill anyone in their sleep. You and me seem to have been playing totally different games, especially as the game was full of factions from the start, and its really hard to have gotten on everybody's bad side. At which point you wonder if they were all antagonistic towards your character, or if you were the antagonist without realizing it?

[Lithium]

@lordbelh Samson wasn't an antagonist. Samson was a defender. He stood up for people smaller than him who were being bullied. Samson didn't start with an antagonistic attitude towards anyone, but he did end up in situations where he was facing off with antagonistic people. All. The. Time.

Considering I only played there for a week and a half or so before I got burned out without my SO also playing there to counter balance the shit, I hardly think I was part of the problem.

[Arkandel]

@Lithium said in The 100: The Mush:

Considering I only played there for a week and a half or so before I got burned out

What on earth happened in 10 days? I haven't been paying much attention to this thread but that's ... not very long.

[Lithium]

@Arkandel A lot of antagonistic RP.

[Arkandel]

@Lithium I just took a very quick glance through the last couple of pages... I have to agree with someone (I think it was @lordbelh) who pointed out the actual The 100 series was full of some really serious assholes.

I mean I get it, running into jerks constantly can be grating, but it sounds like this was just not the kind of MU* you'd enjoy - by design.

[Lithium]

@Arkandel Depends on the math: Named Asshole Delinquents: Murphy (Big king asshole behind Bellamy, who wasn't really a Delinquent, he was a stowaway), a handful of guys who followed Bellamy/Murphy, and then there were the others. Finn, Carter, Wells, Octavia, the two stoners/tech heads...

So... yeah, most of the 100 weren't assholes to the nth degree. Even the most violent of murderers didn't come down and be assholes until someone on the Ark blackmailed them or threatened their family.

So... by design... following the theme of the game to have so /many/ wasn't what I was expecting, per the theme.

[Miss Demeanor]

@lordbelh I'm not saying nobody can be an asshole or a bitch, but its a pervasive enough attitude that its driving multiple players away. You can be gruff or blase without being an asshole. And really, is your enjoyment of the game going to lessen THAT much if people in general tone down the IC aggression and antagonism a notch? If so, you may be an asshole yourself. I'm not asking for hug town, I pretty specifically said as much in my last post. There's a HUGE middle ground between 'hug town' and 'surrounded by assholes'. That's what I'm looking for. Because right now, there's enough people that are coming across the 'surrounded by assholes' that its worth addressing.

@GirlCalledBlu I... don't get what there is to not understand. You are having fun and think everything is peachy. Other people are having a very different experience. Are you incapable of seeing outside your own perspective? Can you not grasp that someone else may not be having the same experience you are? I... kind of feel like you're being willfully ignorant here to an extreme degree so you can protect your own fun. This... isn't rocket science. More than a few people are stepping forward to say their experience on The 100 was that other characters were being overly or needlessly antagonistic and asshole behavior in the majority of their scenes. Not just one person, not just one situation or specific instance. Its an overall IC behavior that multiple people have run into more times than not.

When it was just me, I just quietly left the game. I figured it was just me. But its not just me. There's enough people having similar problems that its become a multi-page discussion on this thread. That makes it something that needs addressing. As staff, your job is to make that effort to address it, whether you have personally experienced it or not. In short, you may need to try harder to step outside your comfort zone and look carefully at the posts people put up saying they had a bad experience. Look at what they're saying. Look at what happened. These were people who left the game quietly. They didn't kick and scream, they didn't put up big angsty posts, they didn't passive-aggressively snark on anything... they just left the game after a consistent bad experience. Why wouldn't you want to look into this?

[lordbelh]

@Miss-Demeanor The character I've been playing on and off is Faolan, so I don't know. You tell me!

[Miss Demeanor]

@lordbelh I wasn't talking about characters in that instance, I was talking about players. If your fun, as a player, is SO dependent on being able to be a dick to anyone, anywhere, anytime... to the point that you can't accept toning down your character's IC attitude just a little so others can enjoy the game too? Then yes, you're an asshole. But that's something you have to answer for yourself.

[Goyim]

I don't even play this game, but I, for one, am a fan of antagonism.

Considering even rolling a PC in hopes that Faolan will push my face into the dirt and tenderize my succulent boipussy. :3

[lordbelh]

@Miss-Demeanor said in The 100: The Mush:

@lordbelh I wasn't talking about characters in that instance, I was talking about players. If your fun, as a player, is SO dependent on being able to be a dick to anyone, anywhere, anytime... to the point that you can't accept toning down your character's IC attitude just a little so others can enjoy the game too? Then yes, you're an asshole. But that's something you have to answer for yourself.

There is antagonism that is game ruining. But nothing I've seen on the 100 even approaches that level of antagonism. There's no stomping on people's throats in gangs of roving assholes, tormenting every newcomer on the game with spears pointed and demands for their stuff or die. There's no crowd of bitching harpies whom every one of them will snark at your every word and your every move.

If your whole fun is predicated on destroying other people's fun, then sure, you should probably reevaluate what you're doing. But its a fact of life that everybody will not like everything equally. I'd rather not water down my RP just to suit someone else's temperament. I'd rather they found a different someone to play with, or just a different game entirely. Which some have, obviously. But every game doesn't have to be everything for everybody, so that's fine to me. You think the game has too much antagonism, and that's okay. But I don't share that opinion, and I think that if you water the game down I'll probably be the one to leave. Hell, if anything I'd like more fights. With conflict people get to show their characters for whom they really are.

[TNP]

A bunch of teenage criminals, formerly locked up and kept under under watch, are suddenly transported to an environment lacking any authority where they have complete freedom.

That's Day 1.

Day 2+ is jocking for position, gaining influence, trying to establish oneself in the power structure (or distance oneself from it depending on the PCs inclination), etc.

And ten days after opening they should be playing nice? At that rate, by Day 45 the game would be over. There's been a lot of character growth going on, peoples' attitudes are changing, lines are reforming, etc.

Comparing the game to the show is meaningless. The show is scripted by what? 4-5 writers? The game has dozens of writers. They're not going to sit down for a week and pre-plan all their RP for the following week. It's all improvised.

And no one has said what staff is supposed to do beyond telling people to stop being so mean ICly.

[surreality]

@TNP Not quite.

I suggested they ensure they have support for the 'strike off and get the thing done on one's own' thing that happens frequently on the show (because it has to due to the kind of characters doing... exactly what you're describing, really).

...and brought up exactly the problem regarding something involving a small group of authors and a collaborative group like a MUX, actually.

[Seraphim73]

@Miss-Demeanor said in The 100: The Mush:

I'm not saying nobody can be an asshole or a bitch, but its a pervasive enough attitude that its driving multiple players away. ... More than a few people are stepping forward to say their experience on The 100 was that other characters were being overly or needlessly antagonistic and asshole behavior in the majority of their scenes. ... When it was just me, I just quietly left the game. I figured it was just me. But its not just me. There's enough people having similar problems that its become a multi-page discussion on this thread.

So, I'm seeing that running into antagonism caused three people to leave the game. That's not good. However, the latest the two of those players I can identify played was IC Day 5. It's now IC Day 18 (at 1 IC day to 2 RL days, so almost a month ago). I definitely think that things have cooled down some since then. I also don't think it's fair to call this thread entirely about antagonistic RP/attitudes on the game, since we've also had quite a few compliments, some complaints about spotlighting a Staff PC (which has been and is being addressed), and several shots from players of our previous game that have nothing to do with this game at all.

@surreality We've definitely seen people who are on vastly different sides of the key IC divide in the game come together to get things done, and those have been great scenes. Some of those have led to huge Camp-wide swells of support, some of them have led to the characters taking matters into their own hands and being castigated (to one degree or another) by other people in Camp. The way things are done definitely matters for public, IC perception, which is cool.

@Lithium If you're talking about the character I think you are, the character who was OOCly and ICly talking about killing other characters in their sleep was given two warnings about OOC antagonism, and after the second one, left the game (the third strike would have been a siteban). As for the person who was giving you a hard time OOCly about being ICly against bullying, we would have loved to have heard about this problem from you so we could address it. As it happens, the other player in this situation did bring it to our attention, asking if he had gone too far. We told him he probably had, and he has certainly addressed the issue in his actions since then. Sorry you had to go through that.

Sidenote, I think that Faolan is pretty much as far from an OOC or IC jerk to people as can be imagined... except when he's in combat (then step back).

[GirlCalledBlu]

I'm not going to put up a post that asks people to stop being IC assholes. I believe it is not my place as a Staffer to make people change their characters unless they are directly going against theme.

BUT...

I have zero tolerance for OOC assholes, manipulators, aggressors, threateners, harassers and any other OOC bullies you can think of.

So, while I'm certainly not going to put up a post asking people to stop being IC assholes, I'll certainly put up a post asking people to let us know when someone is an OOC asshole.

Unless we've already got an OOC problem player on that we have already talked to and warned about their behavior, we do not snoop, set people suspect, or spy on OOC conversations (or IC ones for that matter). If there is OOC conflict happening and we aren't seeing it or it isn't being brought to our attention, we have no idea it is going on. We want/need people to bring these issues to our attention if they are happening, because I can't imagine a Staff who would just be cool with people being OOC jerks to one another.

Here's my deal: I don't feel comfortable as a Staffer to demand that a player change their character's personality for any reason. That's not my job, nor my place. I can't imagine how I would feel if a Staffer paged me and went: So, you're character is really too cheerful, and people really are finding your cheer grating when they RP with you. Could you be less cheerful? (Yes, I used a different emotion on purpose).

I personally would feel awful, and question whether I wanted to stay on the game because Staff felt it was their job to demand I change/tone down my character's motivations/personality (particularly after they approved my character knowing she was particularly cheerful).

The only time I feel that Staff is in the right having that conversation is concerning Features, where personality and character traits should be captured properly. Otherwise, the best Staff can do is offer situations/hooks that might motivate my character to be less cheerful (like, I don't know... watching her best friend die).

But, as I said before that, I have major issues with OOC aggression and antagonism because that's what drives off players/kills a game faster than IC jerks and assholes.

[Miss Demeanor]

@Seraphim73 Yeah, I'M wrong, yet there's still going to be a post going up. Thanks, dick. Enjoy your game of assholes, I prefer honesty in my staffers.

[Seraphim73]

@Miss-Demeanor I... don't get where I say you're wrong. I said that the problems that you encountered very early in the game have, so far as I can tell, lessened. As for the post that Blu mentioned, just because we think that the problem has lessened doesn't necessarily mean it has. We readily recognize that. So we want to know if our current players are having a problem that we aren't seeing.

[Deleted]

Staff is right and you are wrong. That seems to be what Seraphim73 is trying to relate. Whatever problems you had either weren't problems, or aren't problems anymore.

Couple that with Seraphim73's character being the star of the game and you've got a recipe for literally every single game run by a married couple ever.

[Ghost]

@Admiral said in The 100: The Mush:

Staff is right and you are wrong. That seems to be what Seraphim73 is trying to relate. Whatever problems you had either weren't problems, or aren't problems anymore.

Couple that with Seraphim73's character being the star of the game and you've got a recipe for literally every single game run by a married couple ever.

Right. The main complaints I'm hearing from my friends who have left the game, or former players of this couple's previous endeavor, is that the game is awfully railroady, cliquish, and that the main IC clique is so embroiled with their own enjoyment of the game (as led by staff PC), that complaints get an "I don't know what you're talking about" response, or that the issues people are having with the game are non-issues and are explained by staff as not being issues, which is what we are witnessing in this thread.

[GangOfDolls]

It's not that there are PCs teenagers with an abject lack of social skills and a refusal to get along with other people IC, there is a niche in this specific theme that caters to that. There is, however, something to be said regarding the art of playing an asshole that makes it enticing to come back and find out all the interesting reasons why they are a magnificent asshole.

The source material has plenty of magnificent assholes but we see their humanity because the show writers craft those little views into their humanity on purpose. This is in order to make us invest and make us care what happens to this PC because they are going through something that we wouldn't otherwise know about if the writers didn't show as a series of flashbacks and narrative exposition.

The closest thing on the game to that is Memoirs section and maybe some people read those, but just as easily most people don't read them and especially won't read them if the Memoir is about a PC that has run them off.

The art of magnificent assholery is poorly understood and the players who are taking it too far, who think they're building an air of mystery that's meant to intice us to come back and peel away more of the onion? They are often creating a bar so high that not even the people that can sing the high note in the Star Spangled Banner can get over it. And the reality is -- no one with a little self-respect for the way they want to spend their limited free time to play in a game after a certain point is going to enjoy bashing their head into the same wall over and over and over again just to flatter your mean as fuck with no apparent upside PC.

If you're rude and shitty once IC and there's no interpersonal basis for it, I certainly write it off to IC forces beyond my control and insight. If you're rude and shitty a second time IC, I start to wonder what's up this. If you're rude and shitty a third time IC, I am likely going to assume that you are just an asshole, you don't want my PC to build rapport with yours and whatever reasons that may exist for why you are a shitlordly dillhole in this game are now in the 'I don't give a fuck' bin OOC.

There is such a thing as being too precious with your exacting interpretation of a terribly behaved person in character and it is sadly often the case, that the players doing this are so fixated on how precious they are being that they fail to see that they are now actually alienating players.

And this can actually have a negative impact on the cooperative elements of the game, especially if those same PCs stand in the way to another PC's ability to interact with plot or affect story elements.