Posts made by Arkandel

@bored Yeah. Human relationships are complicated and no matter how much we might want to stay mature at all times, stick everything into neat boxes to separate IC from OOC, communicate to avoid drama, makes up rules to keep things from getting out of line... sometimes they do.

It happens and those who get caught up in it are just... human. Sometimes the lines are super clear and it's easy to not cross them - that's when people get judgmental about others - but they aren't always like that. It's easy to look at drama when it's unfolding and go tsk-tsk about it or throw some popcorn memes around but the thing is... it can happen to almost everyone.

@surreality Geez. Okay, sure.

I do agree that, even though I don't care what happens behind closed doors in terms of TS - if people agree to roleplay shapeshifting into chickens and have rough sex who am I to judge - I do agree it can become an actual issue if their kinks are frowned upon in that setting yet leak out to become someone else's problem.

As for partner selection though... that's a rough one, for any kind of relationship. The easy and safe choice is to go with people you already know but that's not always an option, and the first scenes about anything, let alone sex...stuff can be hilarious and treacherous at the same time.

@SG I think that for most people - and yes, there are exceptions - the real issue isn't really possessiveness over a partner. Sure, that happens but I'm not convinced it's the real cause.

I think in most cases it comes down to either ego crossing over the IC/OOC line ("you cheated on/dumped me!") or the impact to a roleplay someone really liked.

@surreality Alas, my tablet's android. I guess bluetooth would still work anyway but eww, Apple stuff in my house?

I don't recall if we have an existing thread for this but... does anyone have a tablet keyboard to recommend?

Sometimes I want to play from my recliner in the living room my gaming laptop is too heavy for it. My 10' tablet would do the trick well enough but typing is annoying as hell, so I'd rather use a physical keyboard for that... but Amazon is full of weird unknown chinese-branded products full of reviews that might or not have been written by actual people.

Does anyone have experience using such a setup? If so do you have any recommendations for a tablet keyboard?

Sometimes it's unavoidable that someone is going to get pissed off or disappointed.

When I was much younger and the online RP thing was new I fucked up. I had a character in a WoT MUD who was 'bonded' to a character he had married; that's a pretty tight IC relationship, both on an IC social and mystical level.

At some point my partner's player's RL husband needed someone to play with him and she volunteered. I handled it poorly back then - with the excuse that my only alt was greatly impacted and there was no way out that wouldn't fundamentally change the character.

Well, boo-hoo. I still had no right to protest, and I could have made it work in some other way. In this case the other player did have the excuse of real life obligations trumping IC ones but really... it wasn't needed.

At the end of the day characters are expendable, and if they are not because of the time investment then the problem is investing so much time in the characters in the first place, not the reason that investment didn't pay off. Spoiler alert: Past a certain point it never can.

@RDC said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

This whole thread is yet another reason why monogamy -astounds- and -confuses- me. I don't do it IC or IRL, and it kind of solves all these problems.

Understood, but what works for you doesn't necessarily work for everyone. Polyamory is just one such hot topic yet I'd bet there are lines you wouldn't cross but others would.

@Auspice said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

Assuming OOC consent between adult players is there anything in an IC relationship, including TS, that you consider unethical? No, I'm not going to give examples since I'm keeping this classy! But you can.

I think this is a ymmv and depends on a whole lot of things. I mean, it depends on setting, theme, the characters involved. You're talking about IC here after all. What one character considers unethical another may not, right?

Just to be clear, what I meant was things happening IC that are wrong OOC, but which both players involved consent to.

(I didn't know if I should have included that item in the thread - I realize it can derail it. But it seemed to fit, so let's see how it goes)

Hey folks,

I'll start this thread with a warning: if it looks like it'll become a dumpster fire we'll lock it and that's that. Please refrain from personal attacks, even though anecdotes to support your argument are permitted.

So, this is the continuation of a topic that started in a different thread regarding the ethics of IC romance, cheating and TS. I realize this isn't going to be a controversial thread at all but I know we're all going to be adults about it anyway. ( /s )

Which parts of being in IC relationships, be they romantic and/or sexual or even otherwise, bind the players as well as the characters? For example...

• If your PC is going to cheat IC on another character do you feel obligated to let your partner's player know?

• Do you think you are responsible for a character whose roleplay is related to yours if your paths are to separate? In other words do you feel guilty someone else's PC might become quote/unquote unplayable because of your IC choices?

• Very closely related to the above, what if the choice that takes a PC mostly off the table is OOC? For instance if you stop being active on my PC's spouse to play an alt with Theno's PC. Do I have the moral high ground to get pissed off?

• When it comes to TS what's the correct way to suggest it? Do you let the RP become more explicit until the big words come out or you get told no? Do you page the other player first and explicitly ask if they want to do it? Something else?

• Assuming OOC consent between adult players is there anything in an IC relationship, including TS, that you consider unethical? No, I'm not going to give examples since I'm keeping this classy! But you can.

• Any other choices not found in this short list. I'm sure it's far from complete.

Well?

@Ganymede I'm in, as you probably know. But for the project to succeed we'd need a coder early on.

I can offer my services for the usual fare of plot, design and such as well as any sysadmin stuff a game might need.

These drama-free threads disgust me. You people are going to put honest admins out of work! I mean what am I even supposed to lock here?

@Ninjakitten Is there a GoFundMe or Patron for this? There is so much work and regular updates put into this project.

@Ganymede You know what's funny though? A lot of us have said this exact thing, and yet it's yet to be done. At some point the-collective-we need to put our money where our mouths are.

@Pyrephox I think a good gauge of whether politics really work well on a MUSH is when you can't really answer the question "who won that negotiation" until later, down the line.

Sure, distributing your resources (influence, money, troops, etc) might sound reasonable done a certain way today. You can run it by your advisors, look at it OOC as well, and it all looks great on paper. If you do so, then if either due to brilliance by one of your adversaries or even coincidence and luck - which are perfectly valid causes for the best laid plans to fall apart even in real life -- this all backfires terribly in the future then that's fine. It's more than fine... it's great.

@deadculture said in L&L Options?:

@Tempest Which is something most Lords and Ladies games sorely lack: compelling political vicissitudes to drive a story. It always ends up being a zero-sum game where two political interests are aligned in complete opposition, because even if there's a peaceful transition for someone's rise, someone likely gets dinged for it. Conversely, it is why player vs player action like civil wars and stuff never end well or are just killed in the cradle by staff: because the attrition will cost the game players or derail the theme.

One of the frustrating narratives encountered in political games is that the zero-sum game is a predetermined outcome - that in each encounter someone has to win, and that means another has to lose, the same way that it happens in a sword fight. After all if you're sparring with Joe either he wins or you don't, and it's clear who the winner is.

Politics doesn't work quite like that. For starters the very idea you walk away from a negotiation with Joe leaving him red-faced and fuming while you get what you want is a silly one; it's kind of a trope in books, but that's because the author set it up that way and the geopolitics are perfectly aligned to accommodate the total win for the protagonist. On a MU* player agency guarantees this is rarely seen; piss Joe off and he (or perhaps his player) will rather take a bigger loss than give you a win.

Worse, political games aren't that different than action-based ones (or any others, for that matter); it's all done for fun. If you piss off everyone you meet then they won't want to play with you, and how well is that going to work for your illustrous career as a political force? This isn't even a rhetorical question - I've seen disagreeable players of highly-ranked characters rely a hundred percent on their title to try and carry the day, thus missing the point of both how to be political and to play games.

The best politicians on MU* are people whose scenes you love being part of. Which, weirdly enough, is the same as in any other kind of MU*.

@Lisse24 said in L&L Options?:

The thing is, we don't run combat by fiat. The ST doesn't get to say, "Yes, throwing a punch here is better than a kick, so you win," and I'm of the opinion that political RP should be the same way.

There should 1) be systems that players can manipulate and then 2) How well they manipulate it should come down to their sheet and their rolls and 3) When a player is way off base, but is playing a character that is supposed to be savvy, then the ST might want to step in and let them know that they're not going to succeed at Task A until they've done some more ground work to prep for it.

On the other hand combat is fairly straight-forward. You can't really screw up throwing a punch too badly unless you try, so a roll can fairly easily align with the pose describing it.

You can totally and absolutely do some real dumbass things without realizing the political blunders. I've seen it in a variety of games - people throwing non-existing weight around, insulting higher ranking officials for basically no reason, threatening physical harm in minor disputes alienating parties that joined in good faith... the works.

In my personal opinion although you can base it all on a contested roll anyway it will cheapen and eat away at the source of what makes politics work - well depicted skill at getting people to do what you want them to. Yes - as you noted - this is subjective and yes it's dependent on the player's skill at posing a convincing, charismatic character but... that's just how it is. Oversimplifying the result by making it dependent on a single roll is not going to work, it'll do the exact opposite.

What should be mechanized is tracking the resources available to players because that's something political games in general have often been very unsuccessful at. PCs throw money around like it's inexhaustible, access to troops - or their quality - is up in the air, influence over NPCs and regions tends to be a kind of... fuzzy matters altogether, yet those are absolutely things MU* can be better at tracking down automatically for players.

If that happens then characters can actually be forced to make interesting choices which to me is the heart of what drives politics as well as good gameplay.

@Autumn I'm sad about the NBA in particular because it had such a stellar record of fostering independent views within its ranks. It backed players when they protested police brutality on black people, it stood by LeBron when he was told to "shut up and dribble", and even was fine with several championship teams outright refusing to visit Trump's White House which was a long-standing tradition to do.

But now they issue two different statements between the US and China, the latter stating how "deeply disappointed" they are with Morey's 'stand with Hong Kong' tweet while the former was... well, a word salad. They best they could manage is not firing the guy. Gee, thanks NBA!

I get it, I really do. China is a humongous market and they stand to lose a whoooole lot of money. But this is a good test to see where it really stands and so far it's showing some pretty ugly colors.

It's also a good test for the Chinese government to see how strong its leverage is within the US in terms of silencing critics. So far the answer is "pretty damn strong". No player has said a thing to back that up (yet many visit China often and have more than a passing knowledge of what's going on there), no official has made a peep and even most journalists have STFU. ESPN is owned by Disney, the chances of them saying anything is somewhere between slim and zero.

The NBA had a stellar reputation in the last few years of being the more socially conscious league, enabling its members the freedom to voice their opinions.

Then China happened and that freedom came at a cost.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/07/sports/basketball/nba-china-hong-kong.html

@WildBaboons That's because the universe doesn't conspire to provide the exact right circumstances and showcase how brilliant a politician is on games like it does in books.