Posts made by Arkandel

@ganymede Without knowing the specifics of the game I can't comment on that, but it is a difficult balance to strike. Unfortunately, much like real politics, made-up power attracts the wrong kinds of people who are in for the benefits while the folks you want helping out are often reluctant to step up.

It might be the same with antagonism. That perfect storm of personality, communication skills, ability to reach out across the IC/OOC barrier to help the other player trust you even if they mistrust your character is rare.

To also revisit the original question in this thread ("how to handle antagonists") I think an important piece of the answer is fostering faith in the system.

That is not easy. The MU* culture is very cautious, bordering on paranoid, and trusting one's fellow players is not at all a given.

Hell, trusting staff isn't. There is so much baggage! Is staff placing hurdles in my PC's way to make the journey more interesting, or is it that they don't like me? Is it that they want their buddies to get it instead than me? Is it?

That's where I'd begin. Because it is different when the antagonist happens to have earned a good reputation. When ES ran her occasional black hats people lined up to have their characters' souls crushed. It can happen.

@ganymede said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

And yet I can count the number of times I have seen players with the crown fulfill the responsibilities that come with it on my fingers.

Yup. This falls under the same clause as people who want to be staff but not do anything.

It's the perceived prestige they want, and the access to 'inside circles', not the work associated with the positions.

@sunny said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

The longer I participate in this hobby, the more I come to the conclusion that this platform is bad for competitive play. It does cooperative very well, but actual players competing with other players, due to the distance between people and how human brains work, actual competition is ultimately poison.

I agree. It is sad, because having a good antagonist can really add to an environment, but the cons outweigh the pros.

However my caveat here is that competition kind of... comes with the hobby, too, whether there are black hats involved or not. Many players want to be special and stand out (which I won't analyze) but MU* social systems are often designed a bit like dancing chair games; your playerbase of 30 may only have 10 'ranks' - there is only one Prince, 5 Primogen, etc - so there you have it... competition.

My anecdotal example in this regard was from years ago when someone rolled a new chef into a sphere and the existing chef complained OOC about it. There can only be one!

Sometimes even where no antagonism intended we go ahead and invent it anyway.

@rightmeow said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

The PC itself needs to have connections, friends, etc. They need to be more well-rounded than just to sow discontent. They also have to have a reason for their thoughts.

Beware of trying to codify what makes for a 'good' antagonist.

Think of the worst, most abusive examples of predatorial assholes in gaming. They all had connections, friends, and they could offer long treatises on exactly what their reasons were.

They were, also, predatorial assholes.

@reversed said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

If someone's playing their character in a way that's antagonistic to the point of disrupting how a faction operates IC

The gray area here is in defining just what 'disruptive' means and just what is unwelcome.

It's the very essence of IC antagonism to be disruptive. By definition you are in the way of what someone wants. However not being able to get what they want is not necessarily a bad thing at all since in many ways that's exactly what makes it valuable in the first place. If your Elder is blocking me with her vote from achieving a rank I want that adds value to the rank which would otherwise be a nearly empty string set in my +sheet.

The other aspect here is players are quite notorious for not being able to tell the difference between not being immediately able to get what their characters want and being harassed or singled out in an unconstructive manner.

In regards to MUSH where collaboration is very important, and more so in smaller games since they are prone to rolling big antagonistic fish in a small pond, part of the responsibility is for the players who play those to ensure they aren't going to make other characters unplayable.

In other words: If my antagonist expresses himself by stabbing people in the face that's bad; I can't collaborate with dead PCs. If he exercises his Princely antagonistic authority by locking PCs in dungeons thus preventing them from meeting others that's also bad.

The key is to create RP opportunities through IC antagonism. A good bad-guy is priceless since they can encourage others to band together to stop him, offers RP hooks to everyone who wants to have something to discuss, they can attempt to pull minions into their evil plots, etc.

***=NSFW content***

@greenflashlight I don't think they would show it if he wasn't going to be in it. Why disappoint fans after essentially encouraging them to speculate about it?

@ghost The problem with that is you'd probably end up running a ghost town (pun only partially unintended) since it'd take so much scrutiny to even start playing there.

If of course your goal is to have a small, controlled environment then that's fine.

@kanye-qwest said in Good Anime:

I had to bail out because it was just WAY too derivative, and I predicted le big twist immediately based off of the material it was ripping off. Looked up spoilers, and I was right! Meh.

If it helps (and probably doesn't since we're talking about the show and not the source material) the twist itself was a very early one in the course of the overall plot.

In the comic books the entire season 1 is a small part of the story - just the introduction, really - and serves to set things up rather than be finale of a 'season' like the show does.

But speaking of subverting, the show itself did do away with a lot of themes the original comics feel... very dated about. A lot of borderline homophobic humor is missing, a female romantic interest is much stronger and more interesting in the show than she is in the comic book, another's reaction to seeing Mark with her was much healthier in the show, etc. Clearly they were trying to do some things better, and I think they succeeded.

@misadventure said in The Dog Thread:

@cobalt she loves you so much! She will defeat whatever she can find in the living room to show you!

... After a nap.

@aria said in MU Things I Love:

One of my players messaged me privately today to thank me for being a good org leader and setting them up with a bunch of stuff and now I am all mushy and full of feels.

Hello, I am new player! You are good org leader, set me up with bunch of stuff.

@derp said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

@arkandel

Well, if the title in the infographic is to be believed, it means that the number presented is the number of male suicides for every female suicide, so in France for every 10 women that kill themselves, 32 men kill themselves, whereas in Spain that same ration would be 37 for every 10, and in the UK it's 38 for every 10, etc.

I understand that part.

What I don't know how to interpret is in terms of the political climates (in 2012), what it meant for the gender roles in those nations, what the root causes were or for that matter why the enormous disparities existed between countries basically neighboring each other. And certainly that gap between East and Western Europe... damn.

I don't know how to interpret it or what it means but...

McCarty et all

@greenflashlight

@carma said in Player Omsbudsman?:

I feel like the best Ombudsman is the collective players of the game, who show their approval of staff actions by whether or not they opt to continue playing.

Yes and no.

The word of certain individuals simply carries more weight. A respected member of the community vouching for a game, telling me it's being ran by reasonable people, matters.

But more importantly the collective playerbase focuses on negative feedback. Look at MSB; you see much more frequently entire threads created about bad experiences playing on games or interacting with staff or specific people than you do about PrPs being ran and generally having fun.

Having someone actually air those good vibes and let us know a MU* is worth giving a try can definitely matter, whether that's done in an 'official' capacity or just in passing.

@mietze said in Player Omsbudsman?:

But again, I think if your whole current staff is so incapable of this that you need to bring in another person exclusively for that, I think that it is unlikely to succeed because one person is not going to be enough.

Also why not just use the more competent person handling the communication anyway be staff and cut out the middleman?

@lotherio Another thing, even though it's a bit flawed to compare how corporations and games can be ran, you can't really solve bad management through policies and rules.

It's a catch-22 since rules are enforced by human beings, and if they are not bad at their job - and the list of reasons that might be true is long - so will their enforcement.

In this case great staff will be their own best advocates but they can quite likely still benefit from someone who spreads the good word as their main job. On the other hand bad staff will ignore (or fire) any hype-folks hired to promote them.

In this context an omsbudsman is basically HR for a MUSH. It'd be saddled with the same drawbacks any HR department has had, ever; it works for the MUSH, not the players, and at its discretion.