Best posts made by bored

I find it particularly odd (and again, in fitting with the recent hard turn scramble, scramble, defenses up! in this thread) that we're choosing to focus now on the danger of abuse of the nebulous OOC/IC divide around TS while simultaneously defending privileged individuals engaging in those relationships?

For those of you strennuously defending NPC TS while warning against the dangers of emotional abuse & manipulation around TS relationships... does it not occur that these problems are almost certainly 1000% worse when a person doing the creeping/manipulation/other violation of boundaries is Staff?

This is a huge part of why it's a bad idea.

I was on TFW and played with the staffers elsewhere. They're nice, enjoyable people to RP with outside of a staff context, but probably a bit self-centric in it. In this light, them sandboxing is actually probably the correct choice (although I think it also implies a certain admission of guilt regarding TFW's original incarnation). At least they're being honest with the fact that they don't really want to share except with a few close friends.

That said, I really want to focus on this:

@Ghost said in The 100: The Mush:

@Kanye-Qwest Don't be like that. I have said repeatedly that staff should definitely RP on their own games and enjoy the work they've put in. I'm just saying that staff shouldn't pigeonhole the entire game to being about their PCs and need to understand that by opening a place of RP to the public, there is an unspoken expectation that the roleplayers that they have opened a play space for are joining the game to matter.

By matter I mean: beyond assisting staff PCs in being the big heroes, and not being unwittingly delegated into being supporting cast characters.

People join these games to get camera time, have arcs, and feel like they're causing an impact on roleplay, not to be listed in IMDB as "Guy in Coffee House #3"

(Last bit about homebound people removed, as not terribly relevant)

I do think there's a trend in a lot of these games (quick setup FS3 L&L games especially, though not wholly limited to them) to end up in this trap, probably not wholly because the staffers are evil and abusive, but because there's kind of a blind spot to how easily you end up there. It usually goes something like:

1. Well, the King and whoever else will be NPCs (run by us) because we need them for plot
2. then we create a bunch of tiered houses, the topmost leaders of which will be NPCs (see #1) or maybe top-tier feature PCs
3. their kids (and maybe some of the lesser house leaders) will be PCs
4. most of 2 & 3 will nonetheless still be played by staff (because they need real PCs too not just NPCs), and friends (take your pick of between first-come first-serve when their friends know first and casual nepotism)
5. Thus, the majority of actual, Joe off-the-street players will get third or fourth tier characters at best

I've seen this pattern on every game in the genre I've interacted with in the last several years, and have heard about it on other places besides. It's a real issue, and I think staff really does need to consider it when they're designing a game: you need to make space for off-the-street players to be important and impactful. If you're not doing this, whether by intention or accident, you may as well at least admit to what you're doing and retreat to the pillowfort.

@Pyrephox said in Arx's Elevation Situation:

Great Houses, in some ways, get hit harder by this than many others, because they have a severely limited number of duchies to work with, and only receive taxes from the duchies and any direct vassals they might have lower on the chain (like De Lire).

So you mean, the people who got the most free, totally unearned advantages early in the game, have less growth opportunities late in the game? This is unfair, how?

I've seen it repeated several times that playing a Barony-level PC is the least attractive option in the entire game, as you get none of the swag commoner market abusing code options and your house is probably tiny and poor. Do you have literally no empathy for other players or any sense of fairness? It's really mind boggling how greedy the atttitudes being expressed recently are, in contrast to the perpetual claim of universal, benevolent positivity on Arx. Really, all the complaints just seem hugely entitled.

This is so amazingly off topic but also so painfully stupid I feel like I can't NOT answer.

@Admiral She's a former IDF fitness/combat trainer, and knowing nothing about you, I'm pretty confident to say she'd beat your ass.

In the realm of 'this is Hollywood and we have to cast someone conventionally attractive or our movie will not receive a budget,' casting someone who could do the work seems reasonable (to say nothing of the fact that the rest of the Amazons got precisely the casting you're asking for, with MMA fighters, boxers, and other martial artists among them). And bear in mind that it is work. As with other comic action stars like Hugh Jackman, actors don't walk around with action bodies in their normal lives. It takes months spending more time working out in a day than most people do in a week (generously, more than most of us probably do in a month) to get in shape for those roles.

Also my personal take is that calling a real person a 'skinny little twiglet' while you're supposedly promoting body positivity makes you sound like a jackass.

The only thing you can do to make people complain more is take it seriously.

And I mean in general, collectively, across all games, as a cultural shift.

The more that staff respond seriously (and ethically, since people they know may be involved), vs. the kind of defensive hand-flailing and denials that we often see here, the more people will come forward. That is 100% the only solution.

While I'm pretty pro fuckery...

@Wretched said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

Addendum: ALSO PLEASE STOP TSING PEOPLE WITH YOUR NPC'S AUGH

Yeah, I'm gonna come down on the 'if you use it to TS, it's a PC,' regardless of how pure you think you are about your separation of conflicts of interest etc.

If teh sex is needed to move plot along, that's fine. But teh sex (or, whatever, meaningful romance) can happen in summary without spending 4 hours typing elaborate bullshit with one hand. Once you're doing that, there's a player motivation involved that has nothing to do with any of the things that are supposed to be on the mind of a GM doing GM things. You're also by necessity devoting huge amounts of time to this person and that alone is a form of favoritism; people who are looking for NPC interaction to move their own plots along are not getting it in that time, and we know that time is precious in our aging hobby.

I can see why some of the people defending it are defending it, but. Yeah, c'mon. You can't pretend it doesn't open a huge can of worms.

I'm... starting to detect a pattern here, between the people defending this across multiple threads and conversations and the examples being used.

That aside, yeah. It's still bullshit. You can write about how sexuality is important to the lives of these characters all you want, or give examples of great stories revolving around romantic storylines.

TS is 100% irrelevant to that.

TS is not an IC construct. It is an OOC choice of activity that dips into RL sexuality. I've had characters that were ICly married, had active sex lives and ongoing stories, and where no TS occured because I did not have that sort of relationship with the player, or care to. I have also had multiple relationships across differing games with a small handful of players, many of which were ICly deeply romantic where TS was also an expected part of it because we had that OOC chemistry. I've also pursued TS more or less out of boredom with various randos, as a fun time-filler with almost no real story value. Oh, and I've hooked up with staffalts, and I can't think of a single time I didn't get some significant benefit from it?

When it's a staffer in a mix, there's no way the 100% OOC part of the activity isn't going to have some influence. We're currently having it implored that 'oh won't someone remember that some staffers are good!' and yes - certainly for some, this influence may not rise to the degree of game-destroying ethical compromise. Yet the subtle effects are pervasive, and it's a kind of willful blindness to pretend they don't exist.

I'd been planning on posting something here for a bit yet any time I started I'd get distracted. Ahem!

Even though I eventually stopped playing, this game is really something special. In a hobby that basically lives in its comfort zones, retreading familiar systems (albeit with some great new code) and well-tested ideas, it's perhaps the only place I've seen any sort of real innovation in terms of modes of play and what a MU can actually be. So it deserves attention not just in the sense of people checking it out, but also as an example for future game builders. MUing has its problems, but HorrorMU proves that banging your head against them applying the same old 'solutions' and throwing your hands up when the inevitable problems arise isn't the only option. We can think outside those boxes.

I think hard boundaries are definitely a good idea. We say no to evil characters in tabletop when it's not appropriate, and we set other boundaries to enforce the general RP themes we want (ie, its not uncommon for medieval games to nonetheless keep people from playing actual dirt farmer serfs because those characters would have few opportunities). So I don't see why there's any problem of 'Grimdark fantasy' plus 'but srsly no raping.'

There will still be gray areas if you want some historical verisimilitude, but setting the red lines helps. After that, it's probably easier to address the players who is nonetheless continuing to press things too far (IE: excluding the female doctor above from plots vs. 'A lady physician? My word!') as individual problem cases. There are always going to be people who want to press that RP whether or not its supported in your theme (I think I recall mention of hostile sexist players on, say, a BSG game, where the setting is totally fantastic AND does nothing to support it).

This turns back to the old adage that you can't design around bad players.

@Sparks

'Good people will be good, bad people will be bad, and we should only worry about the latter and not try and make rules for the former' is a dubious approach, largely because most people are not 100% one or the other. Outside of a few fringe cases, most staffers probably think they're ethical, good and right. So no ethical guidelines for anyone, right? In the reality of these gray areas, having guidelines can be valuable. Even for the 'good' people, whoever they are.

I know a few staffers are ruffled because you consider yourselves More Ethical than Average (tm) and yet also evidently fuck around on your NPCs a whole lot while handing out magic swords and babies, which some people consider shady as fuck by default. This is causing a truly bizarre amount of teeth-gnashing and bizarre testimonials wherein people talk about all the favors they're receiving and then ask for validation that they're good, really, and did nothing wrong. It seems pretty silly. No one is going to stop you, and if you're confident there are never any negative consequences, so be it.

Unrelated double post but how did I miss this:

@Salty said in TS - Danger zone:

@Tempest peak Jolie, yes. Current Jolie, no. Think Closer to 2000. Tomb Raider and Alexander.

Hey, I grew up on Hackers. I feel you.

@insomniac7809 said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

The Italian, Irish, and German diasporas to the USA are a really interesting topic, IMO.

The short version is, these days we're all white, but back when we really weren't.

Goes double for slavs, with a bonus of almost universally being depicted in... like hilariously openly racist ways in the media, even today, and people generally being totally OK with it.

I'm not sure the 'back then but not now' is even true, it's just less obvious (mostly). Of course, all light skinned people (even in groups that white people don't necessarily agree are white, see even Ashkenazi Jews) benefit from not physically looking black and being targeted for that reason, but when you get into things into wealth and education etc., it's hardly uniform, even today.

I don't post much any more, and I've observed all the recent chaos at some distance. I have opinions on all the nitty-gritty details, but they're hardly relevant because my final reaction boils down to something very similar to the OP here and the general direction of the thread.

I have a similar history here as a combative and probably mostly negative poster, but as time as go on and old feuds have died (either by détente, as happened with one 'ancient enemy', or by people simply moving on, or both) I've found myself leaning more and more toward this kind of view. There was a previous instance where we debated the existence/purpose of the Hog Pit. At that time, I defended its need to exist, largely under the justification of the restrictive Advertising section rules. But at the same time, I basically nagged another more constructive subforum into existence (I think it was the Game Dev one, I've lost track with how things have been renamed/reorganized). In my mind, it was about balancing things, giving people the ability to vent or be constructive, and assuming the forum would somehow 'average out' on the larger scale. But this was pretty naive. I think we've all seen that it's very hard to maintain civility when the rabid hostility is a next-door neighbor. It breeds a simmering hostility, long grudges, bandwagons and dogpiles, and does very little to preserve useful discussion.

So I think this is an encouraging direction. Rather than precariously balanced extremes, it fully embraces the middle road, and hopefully that will allow some nuanced discussion that won't immediately derail into ad hominem. Or... maybe not, and it will just kill the forum, because it really was toxicity and negativity that was the main draw. If so, well, we've learned something that is pretty telling. But there's nothing inherently wrong with having two forums, and it's an interesting experiment to see how things might develop on each.

My reaction was mostly 'I dont care if you have some twu luv bond with these dragons, invent a fucking saddle.'

@Arkandel said in How much plot do people want?:

The TV show model should still be applicable here. On TV their formula is one-third long meta-arcs, two thirds shorter duration stuff, so that regular viewers have something to look forward to but newcomers get the chance to be hooked into the day to day events.

I think this is really spot on and the most succinct explanation of how you want to structure plots, and also a good look at how most games fail (because most do, when it comes to plot, meta or otherwise - these things wouldn't be so infamous/unicorn status-y if people did them right more commonly). It almost always veers too hard one way or another. Either it's a sandbox and nothing matters long term, or everything is doom doom doom, to the point where it's trivial.

When there IS metaplot, the buildup/resolution is poorly balanced. Entry level storytelling is disregarded and basically left to the players, which leads to the inevitable case of a few indispensable people holding all the keys and the newbie role being to suck up to them to get clued in, and maybe if they're nice dragged along to watch them solve the plot' Lead-up tends to either be nonexistent or mostly irrelevant filler: if there are prelude steps, they either won't affect the outcome much and are just time-wasters until the inevitable 'everyone shows up and the dice god dinos make the bigbad go away', which is usually the only relevant scene to the outcome of the whole plot.

STs everywhere need to learn how to do something other than all-or-nothing. Short arcs that are widely accessible, even to new players, that feel like they have meaningful outcomes even if the scale is small. If you're doing a big metaplot, it's probably better if people are only even vaguely aware of it, and that when it finally rears its head, there has been plenty of diverse lead-ins heading toward a fairly timely resolution: you don't want to get bogged down in it. Nothing takes the impact out of metaplot than the big doom looming so long that looming doom becomes status quo.

While I'm not on the 'omg its drivel' level, I agree with several people that the quality has taken a nosedive in the post-Martin era. TV writing feels like TV writing, and it yields a certain predictability of story beats as well as annoying shortcuts (the teleportation issues of last season). This episode was still a step up, it almost couldn't not be with the money and resources they poured into it, and it showed off a ton of characters and wow moments, so that's not something to scoff at. Detail wise...

***Yeah just gonna put everything in here***

@sparks So 'X is a serial sexual harasser' belongs in the Hog Pit because it's a personal attack on a staffer?

@surreality said in Separating Art From Artist:

ETA: I don't support the 4chan trollstorm approach. Not even when it's 'my team' doing it.

I think this is kind of the key. If you allow/support this kind of discourse, well, then it's the discourse you're going to get regardless of who is speaking. Which leads perfectly to:

@insomniac7809 said in Separating Art From Artist:

I mean, when we get into actual doxxing or death threats, that shit is evil and the people doing it need to be in a fucking cell.

The first time I'd ever seen 'dox' used in the mainstream (as opposed to a decade+ earlier when it was purely hacker lingo) was on a feminist blog calling/asking for info on some right wing target of theirs (another younger blogger). Every time I see it brought up as a right-wing tool, my mind jumps to this. So the point still stands. You don't want this horrible behavior, regardless of the team.

@meg Sorry! I'll even go an edit. I just meant to put the point on it that it's a real thing that happened, and this argument that they're offering is basically serving this guy's interest.

This is, again, why we need some kind of middle ground where bad things can be said about people... where there is substance being offered, not just bile.

I am ridiculously hype on Picard. TNG was the Trek I grew up with (to the degree that Geordi being "the guy from Reading Rainbow" was actually a major selling point), and after much meandering through all the movies, prequels and reboots, this feels like it's actually landed. This isn't to say I've hated all the other stuff (the JJ movies are fun), but they've felt like something else. Understanding Picard is so essential to understanding post-Kirk Trek, since he really set the tone for it as a series about diplomacy, exploration, and science over space Western pew-pew Kirk punching Lizard guy goes here.

And I wouldn't want a new episodic rehash either. I think that's the challenge they've faced, since TV has moved away from that a lot and the audience has higher expectations in storytelling.

I had some concern in the trailers since they leaned a little hard on the 'powered girl kung-fu' sequences and I was worried it would be trope-y Whedon-esque shit, but having seen what that plot actually is, I'm on board. Stewart is among the best actors working, and it shows. The Daystrom scene nailed Trek-science feels. I also like how they've built out Earth and Federation life a bit, since there was little of it in the old shows.

And the final shot? OHSHIT!