Posts made by Arkandel

@HelloRaptor said:

I just woke up so

<looks at his watch and sobs>

(Yes, that's what I took from that post )

Frankly, I'd quite likely play a well designed game based around politics regardless of which sphere they're actually using.

But the emphasis would need to be on said design, and that means staff who can strike a good balance between giving people the freedom to play without picking favorites and not being afraid to get their hands dirty in case people try to skip the legitimate consequences of their actions.

That's a high order for staff.

The Oath of the Moon might reduce the casualty rate. Unless of course PCs decide to ignore it, but it's a pretty big part of being Uratha.

@Ganymede said:

@Arkandel said:
Good staff consider all available facts, but the decision ought to come down to: "who would I want to deal with on a regular basis?"

That's a spectacularly bad policy.

For starters some really iffy players are very nice to staff because of this very reason. That doesn't mean such exchanges encapsulate (or are even representative of) their overall general behavior.

For another even genuinely pleasant people can still screw up. If, for instance, player A comes to complain that player B used OOC information against them and it's demonstrated player B had no way of obtaining such information IC then the matter should be remedied in favor of player A; not only could the fact the other party sounds irritable (and thus is less fun to interact with at the moment) be attributed to them having to go to staff for a legitimate issue through no fault of their own but also what's the point of even listening to facts if we decided cases based on who we like the most?

@Coin Well, there are two ways to look at this part.

One is that ultimately that's how every game works; the game-runner says 'this is how it'll be' and players get to determine for themselves if they can live with it or not. For example (as you know!) I disagreed with you heavily and argued against Renown justifications big time when Eldritch was about to open. Once the decision was actually made into policy you haven't heard a peep about it; I dislike it no less but the alternative to it would be to keep bitching about it which isn't conductive to anyone's fun.

The other is that people don't need to agree with each other before they can work together. I considered my collaboration on TR when @EmmahSue was my go-to higher up for Geist-related stuff one of the better ones I've had, and she probably said 'no' to me at least half the time. 'No' isn't a horrible bad word.

@surreality said:

And if you do make a decision, that's precisely how it is perceived: as taking sides. Not making a call, not even 'reacting to the glaringly obvious breach of policy' when such is actually the case -- but taking sides. Which is not really a good thing, and generally it's assumed you're corrupt the moment you make a call, since one or the other of those sides is the one decided against.

Although you are correct and I agree, one of the things I am most peeved about in any kind of making calls are staff is that all sides to an OOC conflict in need of resolution are necessarily equal to blame for that. And the reason for it is that, although in principle it doesn't sound so bad, in practice our hobby is sometimes frequented by some toxic individuals unable to cope with even lax social norms if they don't conform to their wishes.

So ultimately there are situations where one party is grossly mistreated by the other but staff, doing their best to appear impartial, try to push things into a state where everyone is equally unhappy; again, a noble sentiment on paper, but one where folks who lucked into having to deal with some truly batshit crazy players are put in the same basket as them and are portrayed as being partially their own damn fault.

It's not only bad staff who're responsible for this. In fact some of the best people I've met in MU* have done this. Not wanting to take sides is a very, very powerful factor in decision making.

In my experience most staff aren't corrupt, they just don't want any part of this. Whatever this is. They'll just ask people to jump through any number of hoops sufficient to make them give up and go away before they're forced to take sides.

Hackers in MU* are a blessing and a curse. As a ST I love them because how do I expose the information of where the bad guys' secret warehouse is? The hacker, that's how.

They're a curse because once that information has been dispersed unless the player is actually proactive they're stuck posing being the person sitting at a corner staring at a laptop. One of the things I hate most in the world (*) is playing in a bar scene trying to interact with the person sitting at a corner staring at a laptop.

(*) Nah.

@Ganymede said:

I'll bet you were pretty terrible at it too. Everyone is.

Play a hacker in my presence more often! You will be mocked.

(...then I wonder why people don't wanna play with me ).

@Miss-Demeanor said:

Even tabletop GM's don't tend to address social situations much, if at all. Its not MU* specific. Look at a handful of premade modules, let me know how often socializing or even social rolls REALLY come into play vs going on a monster hunt (cause we're not afraid!).

I won't go over table-top GMing but on MU* it's a fairly common theme that social situations are allowed to be hijacked by physical types who happen to also have good conversational skills - or at least you wouldn't know they don't from the way they are posed even if their +sheet wouldn't support it.

Part of the fault for that lies with players. My werewolf is no negotiator - there have been multiple situations where he's screwed up considerably simply by opening his mouth. It's not that he's dumb but he's not good at reading or talking to people in stressful non-violent situations. And yet I've seen the opposite happen a fair bit, which undermines other characters' concepts for whom this sort of thing is their bread and butter, where they can excel and shine.

The other half is Storytellers not requesting dice rolls (or, at least not doing so if they spot a mismatch between PC ability and actual poses). When in doubt there should really be more rolling, especially since STs don't always know what the strengths and weaknesses of characters in their scenes are supposed to be.

The real tricky part for me is players whose own skill with posing is misaligned with their characters' abilities. I've ran into more than a few folks who, for example, ought to be excellent at inspiring others or being manipulative but their actual poses are neither that inspiring nor manipulative. In contrast it's harder to screw up posing throwing a punch.

I mean there are some benefits to having logs (other than to post roleplay on the wiki of course) and that's to convey a more or less objective context rather than an interpretation. Two people can look at the same channel chat and see different amounts of rudeness or impropriety after all.

But otherwise the practice of submitting them in butthurt situations has dubious benefits at best. For starters if they are expected then their absence becomes an unfeasible requirement for complaints when it shouldn't, and a way for staff to fence-sit when they perhaps shouldn't be.

Then again bad staff will usually find a way to be bad either way.

Yeah, I'm not saying it's hard (almost every MU* around has a wiki and some also have forums) but that it's never been done to my knowledge.

I wonder why no one has combined the two.

For instance I can't roleplay from work or when I'm on the move, but I could post once an hour or something for a 'scene'. And it'd give a way for people to play together on a MU, even sporadically, who due to timezones or other obstacles don't get to do so as much.

@HelloRaptor said:

If people don't want to log shit, more power to them, but every time this comes up people act like it requires some degree of technical skill to set up or as if doing so would be an act of paranoia, and neither is really the case unless you're really, really technically inept or already paranoid.

It's not that I don't want to log stuff (I do routinely for wiki posts, after all). What I absolutely don't want though is to have to because of OOC reasons and drama. Hell no, never again.

I haven't done non-real time roleplaying in ages but a problem I recall was some people either simply outpaced the rest by posting way more often or they were held back by having to observe a post order enough to be frustrated.

It's different, for sure. Handling stuff like combat should be an interesting experience, too.

@HelloRaptor said:

@Arkandel

One of my many rules of thumb is that if I ever need to 'keep logs of everything' what I really "need" to do is stop playing that game.

The fuck? What kind of arcane programs are you bitches using to MUSH with? It is trivially easy to set up automatic logging. It takes all of a minute, if by a minute I include the rest of setting up a new MUSH world in your client.

You actually thought my problem with that was technical? That I didn't know how to autolog everything? Tsk!

One of my many rules of thumb is that if I ever need to 'keep logs of everything' what I really "need" to do is stop playing that game.

There's the flipside of it, when staff - usually wanting to wash their hands clean off having to pick a side in whatever's happening - ask for 'evidence' before they'll take action.

Evidence, of course, is next to impossible to gather.

@Coin said:

I'm the only good one in a set of triplets. Trufax.

Wait, there's two more of you?

Ask him to store the list of those phrases on the cloud.