Posts made by Apos

@mietze said:

And I 1000 percent agree that if someone is using the "I'd be all over you but poor me my other lady friend won't let me" excuse? Maaaybe the lady friend is a total bitch, but it's 99.9 percent the case that the poor guy caught "in the middle" is an even bigger asshole.

Yeah. "I'm really sorry you feel that way, but X is a friend whom I enjoy RPing with, and I'm going to RP with her even if you personally do not care for her." This is not that fucking hard to say. I have done this and it really is NOT hard. Shit, the funniest conversation I had in a MU was with an incredibly possessive and passive-aggressive player who had a reputation for stalkerish behavior, I had no idea, and when she sent me a page like, 'So whatcha doin?:):):):):)' after +where stalking me. I told her my self-destructive and flawed (by design) character was having a torrid affair because I thought it would make a good story. I thought she'd be amused by it. Hoo boy. Not so much.

@Thenomain I've had mixed experiences. The problem I encountered was actually more the opposite of what you'd expect. More serious roleplayers are more worried like, 'Oh god am I going to play the character as well as the last guy, or am I going be thought of as the shitty version of X? Am I going to be able to do as good a job?' It's more -that- problem than the incongruous person that wants to totally revamp a personality and play it dramatically different than the last guy. And everyone kind of tries to pitch in to make the new person acclimated to it and tries to reassure them that no, they do not suck at the beloved character.

But when you think about it, it actually makes sense- if everyone is talking about how they loved X character and they were so fun and beloved for X, Y, Z, more people are going to be nervous about living up to that than thinking, 'oh shit yeah brah, that guy is a stat monster woo' or at least their application for the role might not really show a great understanding of the character.

@Luna said:

I've often felt unwanted. The worst thing though is 'I love RPing with you, but so and so hates you and will get super dramatic about it so I can't' Ph cool. Bad behavior rewarded. Awesome.

Missed this earlier, but as an aside, please don't trust guys that say this. Like ever. I've known several men who find it very convenient to blame other RP partners for their lack of availability when they aren't feeling it or in the mood for something else, since they figure if they just say that they alienate an RP partner they enjoy at least some of the time. Frankly, if someone is shady enough to badmouth an RP partner they keep around as an excuse to not RP with you, I would not trust them to be honest.

I know this might not help those feelings of not being wanted like the thread topic, but I have been in the position of telling a bro why this was horseshit thing to do after having to sort out drama of women that hated one another pointlessly over this very crap. "GOSH I'D LOVE TO RP WITH YOU RATHER THAN CONTINUE TS'ING THE BRAINS OUT OF THIS WOMAN BUT SHE'S JUST SO DEMANDING SO I'LL CATCH YOU LATER." 100% bullshit.

@surreality I agree with all the points Surreality mentioned but also I'd point out that if I knew nothing of either party and saw a 'I will not play with X' list, it'd trip all kinds of red flags for me. Justified or not, I'd think in the back of my head, 'Man there must be drama around this person' and probably avoid the person that created the list. I think the same thing about people that have really combative notes in their +finger. You know, the ones that are like, 'DON'T COME TO ME IF YOU WANT X'. It's a vibe that makes me instinctively steer clear.

@Ganymede said:

I realize I sound very hypocritical since I generally play on WoD games which usually end up just being a monitored setting with no particular direction or theme.

I didn't read it as hypocritical. Are many WoD games started with really big notions about a particular theme being enforced that they gradually relax and then ignore? I haven't played them enough to know if they followed a life cycle like that, but hadn't seen it in my experience.

@faraday I'm pretty much in the favor of a roster if you're playing with a closed group, or at least roster idled out characters (which I know some players would be very not okay with, since it's their baby that only they could play right etc). I would be adverse to not using a roster in a truly closed population where the only answer is 'they were there all along', especially if the population is thematically too small to really vanish into. I think this is one of those settings where there can be a real problem of scale. Like obviously if it's a game where there's only a hundred people dropped on a desert island, eventually the numbers would run out for character generation slots. I personally would just avoid that particular subset of these games in favor of a less defined number unless someone really wanted to go full out roster for it.

@Thenomain said:

@Apos Fair enough, but I have never played on a game where ooc is bad. Nor am I likely to because ooc is critical for negotiating social contract. Hell of a lot better for someone to tell me they can't engage then trying for 10 minutes only to have characters walk out on my attempts.

I honestly don't think it is. I've done years of both and I do see some ooc communication as important, I really do prefer it being kept to a minimum. In one case I can think of a couple MU characters I played for a couple years and had frequent IC interactions and shared stories with other characters who I never once communicated ooc with their players and I think it wasn't in the least bit detrimental. The Reach was noticeably different where I had to usually talk to players beforehand, and I found it annoying and cumbersome and got in the way of RP and basically destroyed spontaneity. I think it made me significantly more reluctant to reach (hah) out to people for RP, which is relevant to the thread. If people prefer it, more power to them, but I don't see it as critical at all.

@surreality Yeah, for example, the game I played immediately on before the Reach had all private rooms as locked and inaccessible except strictly by IC means (so barging OOC was impossible) and there was a very clear consistency kept in all continuity. Things would never be broken up time wise, there would never be events or RP held that would be happening in the past, and there was never any kind of tempus fugit type jumps, and combat was fully automated so there typically wasn't any equivalent of time stops that would have thrown in time-skew. This is not praise/recommendation in any way for that style, just commentary of how jarring it is to go from that to something like WoD sandboxes.

@surreality It is very interesting to me to see the differences in cultures in one MU type to another. I never heard of barging or pose orders ever before playing on the Reach. They simply wouldn't have made any sense at all on other games I played on. The non-asshole reasons you mentioned are very clear and emphatic on sandboxes where people are telling their stories (where barging could really destroy it), but way more limited and specific in ones that have a more top down narrative.

@Pyrephox I think that stretches what a lot of players would consider public. That's trying to RP a scene in a remote or inaccessible setting to make it unlikely or impossible for other characters to randomly happen upon it. That would make it more logical to be done in a temproom on sandboxes or a locked/inaccessible room in non-sandboxes.

@Misadventure Having never played on RfK, could you explain the Off Screen System? That sounds interesting.

@Arkandel In some non-sandboxes any ooc communication can be seen as immersion breaking and players are fully expected to rely upon only IC means. There absolutely should not be any kind of asking if it's okay OOC to jump into a scene, especially not strangers. It would be seen as rude and destroying the mood of the RP. Asking IC, sure, absolutely but not ooc. There can be a huge difference between the way things are done in sandboxes vs non-sandboxes. In the same non-sandbox scenario, someone with a gun out would be -expected- to be arrested by any cop player that's on the grid, tried later, and possibly imprisoned and have the character taken away, whether any cop character was in the scene or not, because their actions would have consequences outside of the immediate scene no matter how trivial feeling for mood it seemed to the player.

@Thenomain said:

For instance, it's a very common criticism here on Soapbox against people who don't give people something to reply to in a pose. This is what I'm talking about. I've seen people in a public area say, "I'm sorry but we're in a kind of tight-knit scene right now," and that's responsible and kind of awesome for them to see you and think of you as a fellow player. I'd rather them find a way to include you in their shenanigans or change it up, but if it can't happen then so be it.

Whoa, I'm going to have to pick on Theno here since it relates back to my previous post about even very experienced players/staff not being familiar with some cultures on MUs. That would be terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE advice on some games. I've played on MUs where any public grid RP is used as a specific invitation for anyone to join in as long as they can someone justify their character being there. Making it exclusionary would contrast dramatically with the culture of the game and be an incredible insult to pretty much the entire player base and be seen as directly incompatible with the non-sandbox environment they are trying to foster. I would absolutely not permit it ever on mine. There could only ever be IC reasons to not have someone enter a scene, never, ever OOC.

So again, that's a 100% okay thing to do on a sandbox and many games, and very very not okay to do it on others.

@Arkandel Yeah, I found that one of the largest problems from a design perspective for me too for fantasy games. I decided to go with, 'Focus on a single area, make virtually all the RP happen there, and then abstract everything else for plot'. I'm still not very satisfied with it, but I think trying to do all the areas and then having players teleport between them in something supposed to be gritty and realistic is just too damaging since there's very real problems of fucked up continuity in people being two places at once.

First, @surreality is impressive in being able to bring a thread back to topic.

Now I really like her points about player expectations vs reality and entirely different gamer cultures clashing since I think it's extremely accurate for an awful lot of cases, though I think we can echo the same thing about most staff. I think only a tiny percentage of staff is familiar with all these different subcultures of MU games, and even a smaller percentage of that has probably played most or all of them and enjoys them all for their own merits.

So when like a sandbox player goes to a non-sandbox, it's not just the playerbase that might alienate them. I know I've seen staff treat players that would be prized as exactly those fun, activity-generating types most needed on a sandbox as -problems-. "Omg, this player is crazy and doing things they aren't supposed to be doing! We need to stop their badfun!" And since staff isn't familiar with the other forms, they usually aren't even able to explain why something doesn't fit on their game, they just treat them as a disruptive loon. A lot of players are willing to shrug off other players being dicks to them on that same non-sandbox ('Bob never leaves his bedroom!'), but an authority figure? Nooooo.

Plugging away at mine. I think there's a fairly big trade-off in how much time someone is willing to invest in initially in order to design systems that should (theoretically) save time in the long run by reducing staff work, so I can focus on narrative and creating RP for people down the road. I didn't want a sandbox which means trying to reduce abstraction and hand-waving in ways that players won't find annoying, and ideally have something that feels action-y and reduces staff reliance like an RPI but has the story and narrative of a MUX.

@Ghost I would have been extremely concerned by their liking you.

@Thenomain said:

Misadventure suggested Themeslaughter. I may suggest: Bland Hole, the thematic pull from which no creativity may escape.

I would always read that as Themes Laughter.

@Ghost said:

I perceive this to be a huge part of the problem.

I would say half of the people I've mushed with, or at least a third, ask me something like: "Hey, did you play <insert name> on <inset game>, because your poses seem familiar." And then when I explain I'm not that person, its: "Okay good, because I swore I'd never RP with that person ever again, he did this and this and this and this and he's horrible."

Holy shit, really? I have literally never had that happen to me in all my years online. At least not in a roleplaying context. I would have been shocked that happened at all, let alone something that comes up often.