Best posts made by Arkandel

@Thenomain Are we raging? I need to be told how to feel about this.

@Ghost said:

Characters need to fucking die. One thing that always gets to me is the suspension of disbelief that comes from the fact that a LARGE number of mushers are willing to play actiony characters...so long as they get to decide whether or not they die, and if the risk of chardeath is up for grabs, they tend to just not get involved.

While that's true, I don't think it's unusual. What about literature or pop culture prepares us for regular character deaths? Because most people (and I don't mean that in a demeaning way) roll PCs as protagonists in their own stories. And protagonists dying is rare; so much so that shows which kills theirs become known for it - look at Game of Thrones, for some it's its main characteristic. And let's not go into movies - John McLane survives things which would have reasonably murdered anyone several times over - or books.

That's the paradigm we're all accustomed to.

Because that's what fucking gaming is.

Is it? Again, I'm not so sure. I mean sure, my character on WoW has died hundreds of times but he always gets better afterwards! It's fairly rare for gaming deaths to be permanent - Diablo's hardcore mode comes to mind but that's hardly a common feature.

@Miss-Demeanor said:

Not you two, obviously, or even necessarily anyone on MSB... just in general)

<bites his tongue until blood is drawn>

@Apos said:

I love this a lot, but I think the biggest problems will be in auditing to keep consistency and making sure all staff is on the same page, though I'm sure you know this.

Absolutely. You'll notice the entire game is geared toward not only having a small staff bur protecting them as well. Both parts are really important.

If staff is large forget about having them all on the same page; politics will rear their head, communication becomes yet another tough task to be handled rather than a given and of course you have to make (more) compromises in recruitment.

If staff is small but you don't protect them via automation, approving spends, judging backgrounds in CGen, having to decide on character ranks and parenting players then they will burn out. The pie has to be smaller (and more delicious) if you have fewer people onboard.

• ( 3, 6, 8 ) Characters decide their own groups' composition. Status-weighted votes determine ranks, positions and membership. To facilitate early game launches NPCs are set in place who can be voted out or competed with as normal by PCs. Conversely that means there are no protections for IC actions; highly ranked characters are bigger targets who may be eliminated in the same way as NPCs. Staff only audits this process to ensure OOC behavior remains civil and, to the extent it is possible for them to establish, that no OOC means or information were employed.

Good, and my preferred method, but you must make sure the means of removal of the barely active are very accessible to players. I'd say players that get a title/position/whatever and then idle out and stifle all RP around them are more common than the players that are big contributors to activity in a game. If you don't have good means of players doing this themselves, you could be dragged into endless GM'd pvp arbitration that leaves everyone unhappy.

That's a good point. Do you have a mechanism in mind for pruning the trees in organizations like that? It would need to have at least some safeguards versus clique takeovers ("me and my five buddies who created yesterday have decided y'all are in the way, so bye-bye") but allow for inactive people to not form glass ceilings.

Extremely good, but to be frank I think most MU admins are way too soft a touch and not even close to ruthless enough to really do this. You see posts about giving people MONTHS of second chances for a wildly disruptive player. You absolutely will not have time to run things if you administrate like that. If someone is disruptive, you need to show them the door immediately. No second choices, no long debates. Nothing. They have to just be gone and that's that and deal with the angry threads here calling you hitler. I believe you can't get away with any less and reasonably run the game.

Again, having a small staff helps there because you can assume you have the others' backing. Remember, this is a yes-first game for IC things; you trust your players to play. That doesn't limit your authority as an administrator to remove problematic players - indeed in some ways it increases it because you don't have to squander your players' good will by giving them unnecessary "you can't do that"'s over and over again; after all the weird shit you allow in the name of creativity when you do step in it means something.

... Or that's the theory, anyway.

Very sandbox-y, I think you might be underestimating the amount of disruptive concepts you have to deal with. Also the whole 'check to make sure if they are thematic' might have a really wide interpretation among staff which will lead to a lot of debates, and can be around something like, 'Is a troll playing a graphically sexualized character that some players find offensive worth removing or not'. Either answer will probably have some players leaving, and is a stark reminder you really can't please everyone. I'd decide early on which you want to keep rather than have a constant unhappy attrition there.

What I was thinking of in terms of 'being thematic' is stuff you could find on the wiki in a FAQ. Nothing subjective. In other words your example would have absolutely been fine - it's not staff's job (in the context of a yes-first game) to step in there, but they would if someone rolled a Jedi in a WoD MU*. Or tried to be a former <X> who is now <Y> (an Awakened Mage who is now Kindred). In other words all I'd be expecting them to catch is the really out-there shit, not variations of character concepts based on taste.

Your players will have the tools to isolate and ignore anyone who disrupt their sessions, it's the responsibility which comes with the power you bestow them. Trust them. And hope it's returned.

Very good but again I'd be ready for a lot of casually thematic breaks. This is not so bad if you want to have a sandbox, which is fine, but there will be a whole lot of descriptions which are inherently contradictory to other things and describe impossibilities. Imo I'd write a desc guide that specifically informs players of good practices, so you don't have multiple people trying to describe their location as the best X, the only X, whatever.

Even if that happens (which I don't expect to too much) it's an acceptable compromise. I mean sure, yes, someone might write up a bad as being 'the only one in town' but what does that really, truly hurt? If it's not it's not, players can still figure out where other watering holes are. The flipside of it - not needing staff to have to set it up, check up on it, players to read long guides and have to figure out even more arcane commands - is well worth the tradeoff, IMHO.

To be honest the building part to me are more of an example for something we can chop off which has been a staple of MU*ing forever rather than anything important. It's not. But if we're to examine our practices we should look at things like this and wonder if they're really worth it. The least 'work' a game includes the more benefits we yield from it - and in this specific case, we can still leave it to players who like setting this stuff up to do so. I'm not proposing we remove the commands themselves, just to not require them all to be set. Just... let go. It'll be okay. You know what I mean?

Also sometimes people simply mistake friendship for acquaintance or just what hanging out with someone grants them.

I have had gaming or basketball buddies about whose lives I never knew much about. We'd get together sometimes even multiple hours in the week and be friendly but not friends. There's no fairweather factor present because it is (or ought, IMHO, to be) understood that it's just not at that level.

There's always the friend who's a little bit crazy. They'll do whatever fucked up thing (that you may have advised them not to) and then expect support. Depending on the depth of that relationship such support might or not be given.

Ghost said:

Constructive Devil's Advocacy:

So does this mean that if I really want to play a serial rapist with an immunity to jail time who uses his powers to justify uncomfortable sexual situations, that I can drag all of my Shang friends with me?

Yes.

In the context of this thread it's not staff's job to say what's ethical and what's not. Is rape wrong and illegal? Yes! So is murder. If you don't intend to ban assassins from a game why draw the line at one but not the other?

Players have all the tools to deal with and isolate, bring IC consequences or anything else to these people. The game isn't consent-based by definition. Law enforcement PCs can imprison them, badasses can beat them up or kill them. The tools are there.

Can we play a cadre of Furry BDSM experts who don't partake in plot due to what we, OOCly, really want out of the game is to have a new theme space where we can work our kink into roleplay on a new server?

As long as people don't play things which are impossible in the setting and they just go to a room and... do... things to each other, more power to them. Staff would need to come in if someone's doing something entirely unthematic (as in, can't happen) such as playing Jedi in a nWoD universe and moving things telekinetically with the Force. But at that point we're really nit-picking possibilities.

Look, assholes will happen. Staff has a widely defined range of authority to deal with them not merely even but especially in a game like this to step in and make them go away. "Yes-first" applies to IC actions within the broadly defined theme, it's after all part of the very first 'goal' mentioned.

@ThatGuyThere said:

To me the issue is games not being clear on what they are. To use table top as an imperfect example, in most of my games I states right away in the beginning that death can and will happen, a friend of mine in the same group when he runs is clear that only in the most unusual of circumstances will a PC die.

The problem is I've never been to a WoD game which didn't claim 'death can and will happen'. How people responded to the actual possibility of death though was amusing - on TR I used to rate the risk for my PrPs in advance. I got a page by ... someone, I forget his name now (of course) who was actually one of the big guns in Mage asking me what one star meant. When I explained it meant some danger was present if things went a specific way and there was combat he immediately signed out of the +event.

Some people don't want to lose their characters. It doesn't matter what you say, what the game's rules are or even if they will be just sad but not cause issues if it happens or if they'd pitch a fit. They don't want it to happen.

There is one problem here which is systemic though; rewarding only physical danger with tangible rewards (such as XP). In the long run that means if I join every combat plot with my brawlin' Gangrel and kick ass I'll outpace your delicate socialite Daeva, especially since if you come to those scenes your chances of dying are probably significantly than mine.

Some games, like TR, compound the imbalance by letting STs get a scaling portion of the rewards and thus ensure there will be more combat scenes ran as well.

Our new puppy is super friendly, excitable and nice. She, however, doesn't love me - not specifically. She's happy enough to see me but no more that any stranger. She is, however, much happier around girls... which might be because she spent most of her young life in a shelter where the mostly female staff spoiled her.

Anyway yesterday I found myself bemoaning the fact to her. Dammit, I'm super nice to you, I give you treats, I walk you, I give you belly rubs and I feed you! Why won't you just love me?

And then it hit me. I'm an incel!

@Ghost said:

By all means, don't police rape scenes and allow characters to forcibly rape other characters on a no-consent, yes-first game and see what happens.

If you're liberally not governing what kind of things can be done on the game, then (just as an example) you are potentially allowing a player who has real life rape trauma to come into contact with a player who has unrequested physically dominating rape fantasies, and that...will be a fucking mess.

The entire point of treating players like adults and giving them the tools to play their own game is that they also have the responsibilities of adulthood. You can't have it both ways except for this one exception: if a player steps out of bounds OOC and stalks another, or doesn't take no for an answer, or won't accept the IC consequences of his actions, or tries to deny the right to fade-to-black ... etc... then it's absolutely staff's business to step in because those are things IC actions alone can't address.

Purely IC actions in this context are to be handled handled on the grid by characters in whatever way they deem fit. Capture and castrate him if you want, beat him up or kill him. Implicate him for the in-game crime of rape, call the cops and send the character to jail. Or if he's an IC creep but hasn't actually acted on it ostracise him, exclude him, vote him down until he's kicked from organizations, implicate him. Deal with it, what's stopping you?

I am not saying you are wrong - or right. Only that staff 'policing' scenes is no part of a game like this and if it's what a player expects from their staff then there are certainly more than enough MU* out there ran in a way which (claim to) offer it.

You think your TS is bad? Take a look at...

https://nothingintherulebook.com/2019/11/27/bad-sex-in-fiction-read-extracts-from-the-2019-shortlist/

@Groth I quite agree.

I used to quite like Arrow. I used to watch The Flash every week.

Then they jumped the shark, leapt off a cliff and got hit by several buses. I just tried to watch the latest seasons' first episodes and I couldn't even sit there for more than five minutes before cringing. Whyyyy. It's honestly shit.

@Alzie said:

@Arkandel So, you want a yes first game then tell someone amassing an army icly is trolling. So someone calls you on that and the response is that players should have the right to decide what they feel is appropriate. Would you care to take a single stance? Either they can or can't do what they feel is acceptable icly. Either they are or aren't self policing. Sounds like it's a bad idea and you're having trouble making it sound like a good idea.

Rape aside, there is no situation in which staff can run a yes game. Your first post even says you won't be a yes game, you'll be a yes as long as I think it's okay game. When confronted with that fact you go back to player advocacy and self empowerment. When called on something that would be unfavorable you're back to being a staffer ready to say no.

Would you care to bring up a specific, viable example of what you're asking? I'm not sure where you're saying. "Someone amassing an army ICly is trolling" - what does that mean? They have PC (or NPC?) followers and they are trolling OOC? Because those are irrelevant issues, if someone's disrupting the game OOC then it's staff's job to step in. If you explain further I'll try to address how I'd handle the matter within these confines.

This is not a "yes game" proposal. It's not even the case in the thread's title. It's a yes first game, meaning that when staff is approached with an idea for anything - a character concept, a plot, a new faction, anything - it should be their primary inclination to say yes, and work with the player to try and iron out all the parts which need tweaking or don't work. It in no way takes from them the ability to say no if something is unworkable.

There were concerns raised in the forum we're engaged in groupthink and perhaps that's the case. I am not claiming this is somehow the solution to all issues (in fact I'd be shocked if it was anywhere near ready to be used in an actual game), which is why I brought it up for debate by the community.

Having said that I do think there is something profoundly defeatist in assuming the players are incapable of handling their own shit if given the tools and ability to do so. I know @Ghost means well for example while playing the devil's advocate but one of the examples used there was that a single character would be physically, socially and legally superior to every other character in the game and rape them all. That puts me in an awkward position because it implies other players need someone to rescue them - that they are victims-in-waiting. There is near XP parity within the game by design, so is there really no one who can handle this villain on any or even all of these fronts?

Let's poke all the holes we can into this guys but please let's also keep an open mind?

@Wretched Like Derp, I'd say losing one every six months is about right. The thing too is that I then throw the other eye's lense out, too, so it's easier to know when I need to switch to a fresh pair down the road.

The only time I can remember being annoyed at potential character death was on HM, years ago. I was completely new to the sphere, like... two weeks in, and barely knew anyone so Fry (I forget his PC's name now) offered to run a PrP for a few people. Happily enough I joined in.

Well, there were 3 of us, all either non-combat or having barely had any XP spent on anything, and he threw a small army of axe-wielding people at us (no idea why to this day, they were just hanging out in tunnels waiting for someone to chop into bits?). In WoD 1.0, too, where numbers really mattered a lot, so my PC fell into torpor and the rest barely managed to kill the last opponent to survive themselves.

Like... come on man, scale the threats to your participants at least a little bit. It's not fun to die right out of CGen before your character has had a chance to roleplay or even knows what he's dying for.

@mietze I've been obese - for my entire childhood and much of my adult life. I know how it feels.

I did not mean to dismiss anyone. I apologize. Counting macros worked very well for me, and it has for others. But I should not offer unsolicited advice, so I shut up when prompted to do so.

@Lithium said:

Nothing lasts forever and these are games not life and death. They're really not. If something is happening you simply cannot handle, then quit is an option.

Of course leaving is the ultimate option but it's hardly a solution from a game-runner's perspective. If you were a Storyteller, you had some people at your table having fun and one of them was an asshat causing another player to leave just to not be the target of that obnoxiousness, you just lost a good person and still have a crappy one in your hands. That's a lose/lose proposition right there.

@Lithium said:

I don't agree with @Arkandel in this whole thing to begin with. I think if we all could play together nicely, we would have done it by now. People become to invested, unwilling to back down, unwilling to compromise, and /that/ is why there needs to be rules.

But we have. Just because the asshattery is so easy to notice - there are upset people, angry threads, etc - it doesn't mean it happens often. I frequently play for months before an iota of drama hits, it's not like games are packed with bad people. They are not, it's the occasional player who's either just bad at being around others or is caught under the wrong circumstances which cause the stupid to come out of them which makes things awkward.

I refuse to believe most players can't get along with each other. That we're all here barely able to function in a game and we're just waiting for a chance to ruin each other's fun. What makes things bad and compounds the issue is that when something iffy flares up staff historically try to stay away from it (it's a human response, trying to protect their own funtimes from being splattered with drama) instead of stomping on it early, to both make it stop when it's somewhat easy and to set an example before the behavior spreads and becomes a cultural issue. But this isn't by any means limited to the kind of game being discussed here - staff would have the same mandate and authority to intervene.

Do I disagree some people being abused may be worried about reporting it - for whatever reason - and we should figure out a better way to encourage them to seek assistance than a +policy entry or a wiki page? Of course not, I would love it if we could come up with a better system for it.

@Lotherio I think it's the best kind of mix between Star Wars and Firefly. Or it could become just that, which would be amazing.

Two things.

@Tempest said:

I'm not reading all of this. Is 'yes-first' a thing people actually want in a MU?

No one is forcing you to. And some people do. It's not for everyone, but what is?

Sounds like an awful fucking idea. Especially since most MUers are complete and utter, entitled, self-centered trash.

That's an awesome view, quite constructive. May I also remind you the one thing I asked in this thread was that we focus on the methods to achieve a goal, not the goals themselves? I said 'please' and everything.

If you think a "yes-first" game isn't for you then that's fine, I can't possibly fault you. But if you don't have something to offer this conversation than 'we're all a bunch of assholes barely able to function around each other so this is doomed' why are you even here?