The 100: The Mush

[Deleted]

In this sort of environment, antagonism is only acceptable if you're in the right clique. If you're not, no amount of OOC niceness will do you any good.

[Monogram]

@Three-Eyed-Crow Playing a Grounder is the bee's knees. I like my Grounder more than my Delinquent at this particular moment. I highly suggest this. Besides, could use more of them.

[Sunny]

@Kanye-Qwest said in The 100: The Mush:

@ixokai said in The 100: The Mush:

The thing with the 100 is... almost none of these people are strangers. Now they don't all know eachother great, but they aren't strangers. You're new to the game, but your character has been around for the last two weeks, everyone probably knows his or her name, some details. Depending on how long they were boxed, they might know more.

I tend to have my character assume a certain familiarity with new people, and just try to work them in as if we at least passingly know eachother. No one's a stranger here.

So are you being extra nice OOC to make sure the players involved are ok with your antagonism?

Yes. He is.

[ixokai]

@Kanye-Qwest said in The 100: The Mush:

@ixokai said in The 100: The Mush:

The thing with the 100 is... almost none of these people are strangers. Now they don't all know eachother great, but they aren't strangers. You're new to the game, but your character has been around for the last two weeks, everyone probably knows his or her name, some details. Depending on how long they were boxed, they might know more.

I tend to have my character assume a certain familiarity with new people, and just try to work them in as if we at least passingly know eachother. No one's a stranger here.

So are you being extra nice OOC to make sure the players involved are ok with your antagonism?

I don't quite see it as extra nice. I like to think I'm just nice in general. I might be wrong. Who can see themselves accurately? But, I generally try not to be an ass OOC, because who has that kind of energy to waste their life being a jerk when you're trying to have fun in a hobby? Man, I don't.

I'm also not sure I see my character as an antagonist. He doesn't like some people for various reasons, but he gets along just fine with some others. Some he likes personally but they can't just see eye to eye on things so argue at almost the slightest provocation. They're a diverse bunch in both groups and if I'm in a clique I wasn't aware of it. A clique sounds way more organized then anything I've seen on the game.

Yesterday was a bit different because it was a pretty brutal scene; the Delinquents killed one of their own for murder. A lot of people had highly charged reactions to this. The most antagonistic I thought my character got was that he was utterly unsympathetic to those who were emotionally upset by the outcome. He coolly dismissed ideas like a need to prepare the body for burial by brushing her hair, cleaning her face. Niceties that he found trivial and irrelevant since they were about to dig a hole and put her in the dirt. Was that antagonistic? I can see how someone could think so and not like my character as a result. Totally a fair reaction. But there's reasons for his behavior and its not a desire to be an antagonist OOCly (or ICly for that matter).

I don't know. This thread has veered into a weird place where it seems people are expecting people who do not nice things IC to justify their not niceness. Since when was that a thing?

[Monogram]

@ixokai I don't think that's exactly what I was talking about. I think my point is that I was getting mildly nervous about the increased amount of conflict, to the point of there being too much in order to handle. Not whether or not people were justifying if they were nice or not and all the assumptions to where that leads IC or OOC.

[Deleted]

I was sent some logs from the game a while back of players being treated like crap for not justifying their antagonism through OOC niceness enough.

I wish I had held onto them to post now.

[mietze]

I think there is "my PC is a dick/doesn't need everything tea and roses" and then there is "I must relentlessly turn every scene/event into me ME me me ME oh my angst oh look dark oh so outsider ME ME me me oh don't you want to help/understand/give ME something else that I can use elsewhere to make sure everything always revolves around me IC/OOC." I think sometimes people don't realize when they've crossed that line. Or that people who are willing to cede the spotlight often have people who enjoy hogging it just this one time--all of the time, so all their rp tends to be supporting others with little given in return. Dunno if that's what's happening here but it's common enough everywhere I've played now that even when I play a hardass/not easy to get on with person I try to at least on a regular basis make sure I'm giving those others a chance to spotlight and I am not turning every scene into mememelookatme. It's easy to cross that line.

Same thing with wangst "poor me/Ive lost so much/never good enough" stuff. It is fine if played well and not turned into ooc a reason to make every scene all about that.

[Miss Demeanor]

@ixokai I can say that the uncanny knack to run into all the antagonism ICly is a LARGE part of why I left the game. I have a stressful enough RL, I don't need my every interaction in a game to be some shit-slinging hatefest. There's 'conflict between PCs' and there's 'I knew it, I'm surrounded by assholes!'. When you can't step into a scene without SOMEONE going batshit insane over whatever, its no longer any fun to play a character. I was told staff would be 'monitoring' this behavior, but I left long before they started doing anything about it. And maybe my tolerance level is just running low, but given the bent of the current conversation, it looks more like my prediction was right and staff are far less likely to say anything while they're getting to have fun with what they want. Its that whole 'well I'm not having any problems, so I don't understand why you're upset' thing. What you're comfortable with and what someone else is comfortable with could be wildly different things. And hey, if you're running a game largely for your own preferences, that's your prerogative. But you should make that absolutely crystal clear from the get-go, not just shrug and wonder why people aren't having as much fun as you are.

[Kestrel]

@mietze

Huh.

The problem you're describing is one which, in almost every instance, I have encountered exclusively on the opposite end of the spectrum. Rarely do I ever meet antagonistic characters whose motivation is me-me-me. Far more often I find this to be a 'protagonist' trait.

There are some people who just cannot seem to handle the idea that other characters will think ill of their characters, even when it's abundantly clear that this is character-to-character and not player-to-player or even player-to-character. These are players who seem to play with the goal of wish-fulfillment rather than storytelling, and will go on the OOC offensive when anyone rains on their IC/OOC-bleed parade rather than just retaliating in a way that makes IC sense and moving the story forward.

I play an antagonist because it's a role that allows me to draw other characters out. It invites them to showcase the deepest layers of the personality they've designed and test their character with challenges and circumstance they would not normally face. To me, this is one of the biggest draws of a survival/new-civilisation-building setting and it's the kind of thing I enjoy. I have 0 desire to interact with anyone who doesn't enjoy it, though I won't be an OOC dick to them for it, either. It just means we have different tastes and would be better off playing with other people who suit our interests better. If it was about me-me-me though, I would play the most perfect and wonderful princess who gets along with everyone, so that I can live vicariously through how much everyone adores and exalts my character. And I wouldn't, as I do, back off the second I sense my partner isn't having fun.

@Admiral: I don't know anyone else who plays this game. I barely even know anyone who posts on MSB. I have no contact with anyone there, and I make it a point to try and have at least one small scene with every player in the game, especially if they're new. So it doesn't seem plausible that I could be part of any kind of clique, let alone the right one, and yet I manage to enjoy playing an antagonistic character just fine.

[mietze]

I don't doubt your motivations, Kestrel, and I bet you are a really fun antagonist to play with. What I would caution though--and maybe it's just that you've not yet run into it yet but you likely will--is that absolutely antagonist pcs can very much be the flip side of the "pretty princesses" on the selfishness coin, and often accuse those who don't appreciate the ooc domination as well as "not being able to handle their PC being perfect in my pc's eyes." Or people that start avoiding them and the constant center of attention need as "well they just don't like anything that's not hearts and unicorns play."

Its just something to keep in mind if you start to get a lot of feedback from /varied sources/ (that's important!) that it may be overly dominating things. And if someone expresses some dissatisfaction with that type of play in general to maybe keep that in mind (they are getting too much of that particular kind of play every time they enter a scene) as something that most people get irritated at no matter what it is, and not and indication that they don't like that kind of play at /all/ or can't handle it.

It sounds like you're doing the good things like bothering to check (either overtly or not) if your partners are enjoying themselves. It's the people that do not that make folks leery. Or when someone cannot express that they're finding constant unprovoked antagonism tiresome/stressful/unfun and they're told that it must be just because they don't like anything that doesn't make them perfect. That's not true for a lot of people (I know it is for some!); sometimes they mean what they say--that they're just not finding constant personal antagonism that fun when it totally dominates everything they try to participate in and is directed at them.

[surreality]

@mietze said in The 100: The Mush:

It sounds like you're doing the good things like bothering to check (either overtly or not) if your partners are enjoying themselves. It's the people that do not that make folks leery. Or when someone cannot express that they're finding constant unprovoked antagonism tiresome/stressful/unfun and they're told that it must be just because they don't like anything that doesn't make them perfect. That's not true for a lot of people (I know it is for some!); sometimes they mean what they say--that they're just not finding constant personal antagonism that fun when it totally dominates everything they try to participate in and is directed at them.

Bolded for emphasis.

Anything that is 'all you ever get' IC gets tiresome. All tea parties gets tiresome. All TS gets tiresome. All high-octane no-time-to-breathe, yes, gets tiresome. Even for the few who genuinely can't ever handle not being perfect, I'm betting endless people telling them, "You're so perfect!" gets tiresome.

A varied experience is important to continued interest.

A balanced positive/negative experience can also help, but isn't quite as necessary (IMHO); heck, studies have shown the reason people gamble is because out of the twenty tries, that one win keeps people coming back despite the nineteen losses (and those are odds way better than people actually tend to get in gambling). So you don't even need to have a balance in the win/loss columns, because the wins count for a lot.

If you don't ever have them, though, you're back to the point above: there's no variance. There's only losses. That is going to make someone lose interest much, much faster.

And this goes for a 'win' however that person chooses to define it. It may be coming out on top in an IC argument. It may be saving the day and being the hero in a combat. It may be getting one over on the hero and luring them into a trap. It could be someone, yes, telling them once they're the prettiest princess ever -- even when the other nineteen times they're totally ignored.

That variance is essential. If people don't find it, boredom sets in fast.

If everyone is fighting to take on the starring role of 'king/queen asshole', yeah, you're going to have an issue, because that's a take-take-take environment, not a shared space environment. IC, everyone may absolutely be out for themselves and themselves alone, but that's not really an appropriate attitude for players to take. As players, we need to remember that we are sharing space with other players, and that means sharing the resources of that space -- be it in the form of attention, the hero/villain roles, the IC resources of locations or GM time, slots in limited events, etc.

Edit: This really, really goes back to a 'playground rules' thing again. It's been a while for all of us but we learned 'em all a ways back, y'know?

[Ghost]

Somehow this thread is reminding me of a psych study I read about, where a group of non-criminal civilians was split up into the roles of prisoner and prison guard. The study had to be stopped early because the prison guard roleplayers started to get physical with the prisoners.

I imagine on a game where the common trope for all characters being "criminal", whether it be falsely accused or not, would also naturally gravitate towards the edgy, brooding, quasi-80s punk bully loner without a cause tropes. For some reason I'm not entirely surprised to see this complaint about the game, because written into the assumed genre, even for the players who have never seen the tv show, would have to assume a degree of antisocial behavior, if even it is brooding due to being falsely accused. Then, add in the teenage trope, which on any given MU always seems to gravitate towards social bullying, underage sex, and drama-mongering.

People play a facsimile of what they identify these tropes with. Being that the grand majority of us are mistreated nerds who all sought private, non-physical-contact means of social roleplay, I wouldn't doubt we've got a whole gaggle of formerly bullied outcast types and players who feel that urge to rekindle those younger, more teenage freedoms.

I'm not a player on this game, I think that's pretty clear, but I wouldnt doubt there to be a large number of prison guards in a prison guard clique (and an IC/ooc clique) on a game with a Delinquents faction.

Are we really surprised about this? Truly?

[TNP]

The Stanford Prison Experiment.

@Ghost

Actually, there are no 'prison guards' at all. That's kind of the point of the show to a degree. The 100 get sent down on their own because they're expendable criminals (I haven't seen the show, I just play there). Everyone is also 18+ so no underage sex there either.

And while I do find things a bit exhausting at times it seems a natural outcome of the genre and what's happening on the game, which is paralleling the show (though not duplicating it). There certainly is IC antagonism but it's not between cliques so much as factions. In this case pro vs anti Ark. Which isn't to say it's that black and white; there are a lot of gradients to each side. But the thing is, it is IC antagonism. I've seen few OOC issues between players. Surprisingly few in fact.

It just might not be the genre for everyone.

[faraday]

@surreality said in The 100: The Mush:

Edit: This really, really goes back to a 'playground rules' thing again. It's been a while for all of us but we learned 'em all a ways back, y'know?

I dunno. To go with your playground analogy - yeah, playing nothing but basketball 24/7/365 can get tiresome. But that doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with somebody who only likes playing basketball. They shouldn't feel obliged to go over and join the baseball game, so long as their love of basketball isn't so overpowering that it's preventing everyone else from ever playing baseball.

An antagonistic character isn't going to be in every scene anyway (especially if people start avoiding them ICly/OOCly), so their behavior would have to be pretty egregious to outright prevent people from doing their own things.

So yeah... there are sensible reasons to provide a balance, but that's not gonna fit every character.

[surreality]

@faraday Pretty much, yes. No one should be forced to play baseball if they only like basketball.

They shouldn't, however, turn every game on the playground into a basketball game, or anyone not keen on playing basketball is apt to leave the playground, and rightly so.

[Kestrel]

@surreality said in The 100: The Mush:

@faraday Pretty much, yes. No one should be forced to play baseball if they only like basketball.

They shouldn't, however, turn every game on the playground into a basketball game, or anyone not keen on playing basketball is apt to leave the playground, and rightly so.

But this goes both ways.

If I tell you that I'm an antagonistic player — or if you just look at my character wiki/+finger and you see a big red flashing neon sign that says, 'antagonistic character' in the form of roleplay hooks like 'edgy' and 'broody', please don't, as an avid basketball player / warm-fuzzy TSer, come over to my baseball pitch to accuse me of being a horrible person for not wanting to come play basketball. Which by the way, happens all the time.

Basketball players and I have no beef. I might invite them over for a game or throw a baseball at them one time, and if they don't hit back, I'll shrug and go find someone else to play with. But I have encountered really entitled goody-type players who seem to get really offended by the fact that I don't want to change my character to cater to their fantasy. I come with a warning label, OK? Don't be the guy who orders a pizza from Dominos and then complains that the crust had gluten in it.

tl;dr: Everyone needs to learn to just be more accepting and find their niche because no style is better than the other, it's all just preferences. Live and let live.

Also, know what the theme of the game you're getting into is.

[Miss Demeanor]

@faraday There's some truth to your statement. But you're also, I feel, ignoring a very important part of what's being said. Its not that there's AN antagonistic character, or even A FEW antagonistic characters. Its that some people are finding (or have found, for those of us no longer/not playing) that EVERY interaction is antagonistic, often unreasonably so. So no, it won't fit EVERY character. But if you have a show that has a good dozen Bellamy's and 3 or 4 Murphy's, and those are who you consistently run into because they happen to be the active people... you're not likely going to watch that show for long since it tends to be a neverending stream of backstabbing, arguing, yelling, terribleness. If you'll notice, the show itself doesn't do that for a reason. They keep a certain, SMALL number of 'main' antagonists around. And when a new one shows up, an old one either goes away or gets killed.

See: Murphy being kidnapped and effectively disappearing during the entire Grounders intro. He shows back up to start causing trouble again right before the last big confrontation with the Grounders (at least in the early portion of the show, I frankly got bored with the neverending idiocy of the characters and stopped watching).

[surreality]

@Kestrel I don't see how I have in any way implied anything only goes one way.

The 'don't come over here if you're a warm and fuzzy TSer' retort is, in fact, exactly what has been mentioned as horribly problematic. This assumption is, bluntly, something that smells like it came out of the back end of a horse and sits in a fly-luring pile.

What you're doing right here is assuming that anyone who doesn't feel like dealing with constant aggression 24/7 with zero reprieve is only after warm fuzzy TS and perfection, is a nasty-as-fuck thing to sling at someone, and that is what creates the hostile environment full of negativity that @mietze is describing as hopelessly counterproductive to both their experience and yours because you are the one who has decided: "This is how all the things are going to be and you're all just going to have to live with it."

That is not sharing space. That is 'my way or the highway'. You can warning label the shit out of it all you like, and yes, people should respect that, but right here, you're actively demonstrating a complete and total lack of not only respect for what others may want to do or be doing in the shared space, but zero inclination whatsoever to find out what that actually is because you have a hostile pre-conceived notion of what that must be if they aren't on the same page as you at what might be at a single moment in time.

[GangOfDolls]

@ixokai said in The 100: The Mush:

@GangOfDolls said in The 100: The Mush:

Oh, yeah, I do see your point. And it may just be a matter of play style. I've played some major dicks in my time (as have we all) but as I get older and crankier, I do find that sometimes its not always in the interest of a game or a character to lead with uncompromisingly aggressive behavior IC when the PC on the receiving end hasn't done much other than be there at the wrong place, wrong time. Like sensibly, even people who very traumatized and behaviorally stunted, do not as a whole walk up and emotionally roundhouse kick a total stranger for just sort of standing there.

Provoking that kind of reaction is another thing, totally.

There's a charisma and chemical alchemy in a way to playing a PC who goes out of their way to be mean to strangers usually because their approach is very nuanced and you see the humanity underneath this PC that makes them charming and ultimately relatable. And I think for some players, how they think their PC comes across and how they really come across, are very different and they don't see it.

TL;DR: Dealing with a jerk necessitates an upside to dealing with a jerk. No upside? People will avoid your jerk.

Hmm. One thing I notice you mentioned twice is -- stranger.

The thing with the 100 is... almost none of these people are strangers. Now they don't all know eachother great, but they aren't strangers. You're new to the game, but your character has been around for the last two weeks, everyone probably knows his or her name, some details. Depending on how long they were boxed, they might know more.

I tend to have my character assume a certain familiarity with new people, and just try to work them in as if we at least passingly know eachother. No one's a stranger here.

I think we are working with two different ideas of what stranger means generally and more specifically to the game.

So here's what I'm coming from?

A real life example first: I work for a multi-national corporation. On the days I'm in the office, I see a lot of faces of people who work on my floor that I have no actual contact with other than maybe in the hallways and the elevators. I have no idea who these people are, what their names are, what they do, or what their basic personality traits are. They are visually familiar but that's doesn't make them actually familiar.

So in effect, they are strangers. I don't know this person from a hole in the floor. I just know that they happen to occupy the same space as me but other than the fact that we get our paycheck from the same place, I don't even begin to justify that as having some kind of relationship with them that elevates them beyond a stranger other than seen in the same place as me at the time.

A game example: Some people are not open with theirBGs on their wikis. They want people to find out IC about their PCs, including major BG points. No issue with that. But as a different tack, I have elected to put it all out there on the wiki and let people decide if they know my PC at all: friends, frenemies, lovers, haters, polite remove. Like, whatever. Because of the starting premise of the game, it does make sense that we should be at least a little bit aware of the other PCs who were all sitting in the same SpaceJail with us for some length of time before we fell to earth.

The experience of my reality with that? In all my interactions on the game, not one PC so far on the Delinquent side has made even passing mention of anything they could reasonably in the most cursory way know my PC based on BG information that is all free to be known. I want to be clear that I certainly don't expect that (but in terms of RP flair its certainly pretty cool when it happens) but I bring this up only as a response to your 'well we all know each other in some way' thought.

In my experience, most people on games don't utilize open notes about BGs that way about PCs when they don't have a particularly established or direct tie to another PC (either through page discussions beforehand or until after the PCs do get to know each other to some extent). It's neither good nor bad-- it's just not a thing that mostly happens. In my short years of playing on WoD games where the premise where we all came from the same creepy town or village, there were plenty of people who appropriately didn't go out of their way to be overly familiar with my PC (or me them) just because we had the same mailing zip code. Like, almost never in my years of online gaming has anyone said or metaposed to my PCs that I didn't already know in some way:

Oh, yes, Bob--- my neighbor from three doors down. He owns a silver minivan and doesn't take his holiday lights down until July.

It would be great if more people did this in some fashion but... they don't? Because most people just don't operate this way.

[ThatGuyThere]

@Kestrel said in The 100: The Mush:
please don't, as an avid basketball player / warm-fuzzy TSer, come over to my baseball pitch to accuse me of

Sorry but as my name says I have to be That Guy at times, in baseball a pitch is something your throw, you play on a field, a diamond, or a ballpark.