Best posts made by bored

@thenomain On the other hand, there's a difference between expressing a viewpoint 'people have [held] about Wora for over a decade,' and somewhat passive-aggressively hammering on it while simultaneously claiming she's not actually trying to take away any of the toys. You can't bemoan toxicity existing and imply it's holding some vague population of presumably more enlightened folks (hah) from coming here, while also claiming that you're totally fine with the Hog Pit being a thing. It doesn't add up.

For me, I'm still personally not sure how we went from the original discussion about changes in the ad thread to where we are now. It feels like we weren't really consulted, like they assumed a lot more than they knew about the common opinion. And it feels like her nebulous complaints (and those of a like kind, I'm not claiming it's purely on one person) were a factor.

The current methodology, per as much as I can gather from @Ganymede's treatment of my suggestions, is 'If no person here find reason to object... then forever hold their peace.' IE, if your post gets 3 or 4 upvotes and no massive pusback, they just assume universal consent. So while there's no need to demonize, there is seemingly a procedural requirement for us to 'gang up' against her opinion, to prevent it from being assumed we share it.

Actually overall I liked it. Also some text goes here?

***=Do I have to put fake text here too? Avert thine eyes.***

@thenomain Sure, and I agree that we can and should strive for that civility where we can.

A concern does remain for me that there's a difference between 'we should do our best to treat each other as human beings existing behind the screen' as a general goal and the potential chilling effect of 'carefully censor your posts to avoid any negative tone or content to avoid them getting sent to the pit.'

This isn't a claim that we're at that point presently, but I do feel that it's the direction where some people want to move things. It's also why I kind of focus on an alternative to Mildly Constructive, because that word seems to limit discussion, particularly in a more moderated environment. It's very easy for 'hey, be constructive' to become a rhetorical bludgeon rather than an actual appeal to civility, where people use it to attack the tone of an argument rather than attacking its content (which, when it exists, is every bit as much of a dodge as an ad hominem).

Especially when people are responding to gross abuse (ie, once more, the UH example, where there's as close to a consensus on 'these people suck' as will ever exist on this forum), an element of emotional involvement is likely and natural. Those emotions seep through and things can get heated. I think leaving some space for this is probably healthier in the long run, giving people the opportunity to express their outrage, albeit with reasonable limits.

@Kestrel said in Separating Art From Artist:

Literally no one is treating at-will employment as a good thing.

I mean, @Auspice called it a 'sort of benefit.' You seem to be arguing that you don't support it, but only because you're in the UK. In the US, the only way people are getting fired for tweets (which you 100% support) is via at-will employment laws or (equally shady and anti-labor) 'morality clauses' in contracts. You can't separate the two things. If you want people to be able fired for (edit: relatively trivial - yes people can be fired for crimes and such) things that have literally nothing to do with their job, you're in favor of anti-labor employment laws. Consequences, as you like to say!

Which circles back to where I started. It's not that I want people to be immune to consequence. It's that I want consequences to adhere to reasonably just standards, and not mob whim. I want free speech protected while I would also like the law to catch up to the internet age of harassment, bullying, and doxing, and do more to punish those things. You presumably want most of the same (because you don't want women getting death and rape threats for speaking), but it seems to me you're just not willing to concede that it might limit you in even the slightest way in the process.

You want to fight the troll war, because it's cathartic to bully the badguys. Unfortunately, in the US, the winner of the troll wars proved to be Trump.

Non-coded combat of any significant complexity is a really high bar for me, similar to @Aria / @faraday. Not because I dislike it (I play D&D weekly etc), but MU* is just garbage for it I just really can't bother with the 8 hour timestops / PrPs.

Which, for better or ill, hits most of WoD.

@Kestrel You're choosing to cherry pick to avoid being uncomfortable or wrong.

You might live in the UK, but there's been plenty of discussion about America-specific topics/situations (ie the KKK, Charlottesville guy, etc). I have never talked about Rowling, and my discussion was with Ganymede about the US (again, Charlottesville). And you came and @'ed me about it. You don't get to do that and then say you're not talking about the topic I was actually talking about.

It's also pretty clear from context and other comments that you've made, that while you may be in the UK, you would support people in the US being fired for their tweets (so long as they're people you don't like, anyway). Are you disavowing that?

Really, everything about how you argue is disingenuous and evasive. The stuff about being fired for activism is another example ('I dont want to work for a company that would fire me, lolz!' - shitting on every person who doesn't have your freedom of job choice), but at this point it's hardly worth the effort.

@arkandel said in Spotlight.:

Without getting into pseudo-sociology here, why is spotlight wanted - and in some cases, needed?

You can't, because the player psychology is essential. I am going to do my Bartle-types bit now I guess. It really hits each of them:

Killers - Assuming an environment that frowns upon outright PK (which is most MUs since Dark Metal), their ultimate win is being the one to kill the Big Bad. Obviously, being that guy is about as big of a star role as is possible.

Achievers - Almost the same as above. Big Bad still counts, as does basically every plot milestone you can think of. Now, some have made points about public recognition (which is different, it's IC spotlight vs OOC spotlight), which may not be necessary, but GM focus is required. You can't achieve much of anything unless the GMs take your actions and say 'these matter.'

Socializers - I think this one really interesting. They want the spotlight because it forces people to RP with them. This type is commonly associated with support players, who we think of as cooperative, yet really they're no less catty (and in some cases more) when it comes to squabbling over this kind of stuff, because it's often very limited. By getting a piece of info, key mcguffin, whatever, and becoming a gatekeeper to other people being involved, you can enforce a social circle around you. By contrast, being out of the spotlight means being ignored. It's basically the worst case result.

Explorers - Exploring in MU basically means uncovering the setting, because physical exploration is rarely possible (and where it is, it's going to be a Very Special kind of TP). Finding out the secrets, the details of the metaplot, being the person in the know. As with the Achiever stuff, this is really only something the GMs can bestow upon you by putting you in the most focused roles and stories.

Per above, spotlight itself is often either kind of a byproduct or a means. Some players might really have a diva attitude and actually thrive on the spotlight itself, but even then, aside from with Socializers, this is mostly about acknowledging the achievement of their own goals. 'You may have heard of me, I killed the thing/solved the puzzle/etc.'

@faraday said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:

@auspice said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:

The "ftfy" imo fell into attack on idea rather than person.
Which goes back to my: learn to tell the difference.

This is why I don't like the whole "attack the idea not the person" strategy.

Because the root of the concept is still attack. People don't respond well to attacks, and particularly when the idea is some deeply held belief, or the attack is "that's f-ing insane" then it's really really hard for even an even-keeled human being to respond to it rationally.

I prefer the The Universal Rules of Civilized Discourse mantra of Be Agreeable, Even When You Disagree.

We don't need to attack ideas (or people) with over-the-top baiting remarks or vulgar insults. We can be better, if we choose to be.

I'm going to echo this. The 'idea not the person' moderation policy is bullshit and doesn't work.

Because you can absolutely construct an attack to target an idea while still vilifying a person. This is what @surreality is complaining about here: that she stated her political views, and then another poster attacked those views by depicting them as equivalent to (what @surreality clearly believes) to be a much more negative set of beliefs. So it does both things: it attacks her by attacking her ideas in a very severe way and by means of comparison. If I tell a person (who I know to be a liberal in the US) that their idea 'sounds like something Trump would say' that is a personal fucking attack regardless of how much it might be grounded in the ideas at hand.

This was also what happened with me in the OC thread, obviously: sure, it's attacking my ideas to compare preferring certain RP partners to homophobia, racism, and sexism... but it's also a ludicrously extreme comparison that serves double-duty as personal defamation.

So your moderation rules don't fucking work, and it's pretty obvious that they don't work, as every garbage pile of a thread demonstrates. You can make the standard 'actually be nice and civil' and fucking enforce that, or you can deal with civility being nonexistant.

Just chiming in since I actually got mentioned in this whole fiasco:

The idea that I've ever been 'plotting' against either @surreality or @Auspice on HM is pretty funny. My activity level there is minimal, and my investment is mostly for @Jealousy's sake, and I'll pop on to do scenes when she nudges me. It's no knock on the game, but my excitement/investment level in it just isn't high enough to warrant cloaks and daggers. My interactions with @surreality, as far as I can recall, boil down to 1 perfectly normal IC scene and one conversation in the OOC room about Penn Dutch furniture. Go figure. She may not be my favorite person in the world, but MSB interactions are always more toxic than even online face to face ones and I don't wish her any deep ill or spend my days acting against her. I happily welcome anyone to supply evidence of my 'plotting,' because it would be news to me!

Obviously, I do discuss other players (candidly) with @Jealousy off the game, but shockingly, she's her own person and has her own opinions (and some other people on here who know her will attest to how fucking stubbornly she holds her own mind on things). In fact, while I've always told her I think @Auspice (on HM) has been passive aggressive, cliquish, and a bit of a twink, she has largely defended her to me because the two of them became friends while playing on the game. For instance she always though the headstaffer on HM favored @surreality unfairly, which is supported by the discord conversation @Auspice herself linked a while back.

Anyway, it's no secret I've long held that she's a bad mod and a laughable choice. Her very first moderation on this board caused a huge ruckus (and reeked of abuse of power) and I've never doubted that she's that kind of person. While I'm not going to join any 'boycott' like @Cobaltasaurus, I think the reaction to this thread should be very telling to @Arkandel.

@Tinuviel To be clear also realize you're not Ark and I'm not really arguing for or against anything you said. It was just a nearby post using that language. Apologies if it sounded like I was trying to put some spin on your words. His own big post also referred to 'misconduct,' and then he declared none of it happened. So either he thinks none of the stuff that definitely did happen counts as misconduct (which seems to limit it to only abuse of powers in the strict sense you were using), or he doesn't believe it happened (in which case, lol).

Anyway, I think the whole thing is most remarkable as a reflection of how we discuss staffing on-game. This is the precise kind of staff cowardice and inaction that there is some 10+ upvoted peeve post about every other day, it seems. Yet the reaction here, despite all that supposed wisdom, is to do what any MU staffer would do: hide behind some nonexistent policy file and claim their hands are tied.

Many of the dull male and female stereotypes frequently decried here (the 7' fuck-vikings and their sub 5' giggleprincess counterparts) are portrayed by players of those genders. They are still dull as shit, and completely unrealistic depictions of those identities. Conversely, a more interesting player portraying something other than their own gender (or ethnicity, or anything else), even if they do it less well than they would 'matching' character, will still probably be infinitely more interesting to interact with. One of my long-term RP partners is like this; she plays men fairly often, and maybe they're not informed by a deep understanding of those identities... but they're still far more entertaining than TryHard McStudmuffin version 12.

So I don't think playing what you are matters much, compared to the all-consuming vacuum of RP-suck that encompasses much of the hobby.

These arguments are always framed as if there are sides. The people who just want to reasonably engage in thematic RP vs. the selfish cowards who just want their own fun and fuck anything that inconveniences them in the slightest. Or is it the players who just want to have fun vs. assholes who abuse in-game power to get their own selfish jollies, regardless of anyone else's comfort? Is it the useless, whining do-nothings who can't make good RP vs. the sainted leaders who get burnt out making fun for others? Or is it the sinister RP-hoarding cliques vs. the average players who just want a little more, guv'nah. Which is it?

Well, there aren't actually any sides because it's all the same pool of assholes.

More generously, its all the same pool of people rotating through different game experiences, with different degrees of investment, connectedness, OOC or IC power. It's all people who are fun on a good day but prickly on a bad one, inspiring when they're energetic but a drain when they're not. Who are positive when they're happy, but downers when they feel like things have turned against them. Etc etc etc. I could write up long lists of faults and shitty behavior for my favorite people in the hobby, for the players I've enjoyed the most over the years. They'd find no difficulty doing the same for me.

Every one of these arguments is reversible. There's no righteous side, and realistically, we all are in it for our own fun, or we'd do some other activity in lieu of logging in. The fun we (hopefully) create for others is always going to be a byproduct of our own enjoyment, and one sours with the other. I don't know if this points to any useful solution, but I think it's an important point of perspective. A player who isn't having fun will soon not be a player. What common good you expect out of a player, you have to make worth the effort.

@Arkandel said in Spars and fights:

Let me ask a different question for the thread.

Is 'knowing how to fight iRL' - having some kind of background in martial arts, or even just watching MMA stuff on TV - an advantage to roleplaying such scenes?

I fenced in high school, and I've found this a bit of both yes & no on related games. I think it can definitely help your own posing. Having an idea about some of the elements aside from 'hit other guy' (footwork is important!) provides, well, ideas. That can't really hurt. I definitely enjoyed RPing some of those scenes and was confident of my pose quality, though most of the places I did had rules or code backing things up so it was mostly color/flavor on top. The knowledge can actually be very handy there for 'huh, the dice say this, how could that occur?' and actually working out some plausible narrative counterpart.

For the other person, it's kind of a wash. Regardless of your knowledge, you can't assume they're going to share it, or acknowledge yours. They might pose 'mistakes,' but not agree that they are, or the dice might go the other way, etc. So again, it's far more handy for elaborating on the results you get than trying to really 'apply' the knowledge.

I also think knowing stage fighting / choreography is probably even better than knowing anything more athletic or realistic, since cinematic fights are often unrealistic and people probably want to emulate that. This touches on the class of styles above, but I think even the 'grittiest' game is still going to be closer to (serious) movie fighting than anything remotely realistic.

@Tinuviel said in ITT: Names You Always See:

ITT mostly fairly common Anglophone names...

I raise you a Siobhan.

@Arkandel @Jeshin

You are both making similar points (cousins to the 'hey, we RP murder all the time, why is <insert sexual crime> a big deal?' question that gets asked occasionally), so I'll answer them together.

You're right. There are and will be many forms of bias and favoritism, and advantages that can be found by players by appealing to staffers (or other players in power, as may apply to PrP runners).

There's two things to say about this. One, as has come up in some of these prior arguments, sex is different. We know this, its just a fact of being human. We know it creates drama and crazy. Pretending equivalence is a bit head-in-sand.

Two, and more importantly: is a form of bias being blatantly obvious a reason to give it a pass? That seems ridiculously backwards. If we know that TS frequently results from or engenders bias, is it not a good policy to say that staff NPCs will not engage in it, and that romantic interactions (for instance) might be limited to Seduction mechanics? It wouldn't snuff out the favoritism if Player A and Staffer B are secret online SOs, but in a more average case, might it not give some players, especially those inherently uncomfortable with TS, the feeling that they might be safer in pursuing romance or sexual quid pro quo with an NPC without the expectation that they'll need to TS. Heck, it would even make social dice meaningful.

I think it's perfectly fine to ban TS on your game (with the caveat that it might be a silly choice for certain thematic material). There are plenty of reasons, not the least of which is the underage player angle (insert hilarious reminder that Firan was an all ages game!), which people have treated like a throwaway concern but is pretty relevant. There's nothing about the medium that defaults adult, even if our sub-community is. And there is a real concern that staffers themselves may not be comfortable mediating such content.

You can declare this RP invalid on your game. You can't prevent people from sneakily doing it via whatever means, but worrying over this is a little silly: people can also sandbox being cyborg dragon ninjas on your serious history game. You'll never be able to police alternate channel RP, but you can demand that it never appear on the grid, be forced on other players as a topic they have to interact with, etc. And you can ban people who violate those rules.

I think/hope this is different than the discussion of 'stigmatizing' TS and the concerns for identifying and dealing with harassment. It's a matter of what your game is and what it is not. I would hope staffers would still address any complaint of harassment seriously. The danger here is only for the niche category of player who is harassed while breaking the rules, yet finds it preferable to tolerate the harassment rather than admit to and face any consequences for their own behavior. Given the level of crazy in our hobby vs. minimal chances of RL harm, this seems like a category of player not worth the energy protecting because they would not be trustworthy (we've established they're comfortable lying to staff) even if your policy was different.

The stigmas I have a problem with are games that allow some degree of sexuality but then refuse to fully treat it like an actual part of the game. A clear ban on behavior is much better than 'ts happens, we dont want to know about it.'

I'm just going to register another 'I would not intervene OOCly in a purely IC situation.' To me that's pretty bonkers and definitely taking this whole thing a bit down a slope to crazy.

HOWEVER (and this is a big however), someone pointed out upthread that OOC-creep and IC-creep poses look different and that is a HUGE big thing to acknowledge.

'Purely IC' is a definition that expands a bit beyond 'this was in a pose/emit' vs this was <OOC> text/page.' OOC can and very often does bleed into poses, and there's nothing wrong with applying our experience and human judgment to these things (and in fact it's a bit willfully oblivious not to). We do it easily for the 'obviously butthurt snarky metapose' shit, and I tend to find that OOC-creepery in posed/emitted form is just as obvious and cringe. We engage with one of these pretty aggressively, so leaving out the other is clearly a bit of a willful blind-spot.

Now, some percentage of creepery may slip through from much more skillful writers/manipulators but I think most of this is going to be under the public radar vs. something 3rd parties are casual witnesses to. Most of the serial, problematic, frequent creeps are kind of shit and easy to pick out, and it's fine to narrow in on that behavior sooner rather than later.

I don't particularly care about PBs (I'm a little oldschool and even used to kind of 'specialize' in character descs to the point where friends used to ask me to write theirs) and while I understand the value of the quick visual shortcut I think it's really easy to get lost into everyone using the same ~30 faces, with some slow rotation based on who is currently big in theaters (I have a friend who used Ana de Armas before she was big and now bitches about her being taken in the first five minutes on every game!). It basically becomes self-defeating, especially as people so often lean into the PBs to the degree that they're playing the actor or their most famous role.

@Auspice said in PB 'realism':

@Arkandel said in PB 'realism':

For example if you're playing a thuggish fighter type but your model is a slender more delicate looking person, or it's a figure skater as depicted by Chris Hemsworth, etc... is that okay? Not okay? Do you notice when people do that?

I 100% notice.
I'm not gonna call people out on it, but if someone is a strength 5 MMA fighter (without being, say, supernaturally enhanced) but they're using some really thin, reedy sort of PB... It throws me off a lot.

This one is my peeve as well.

It bugs me if there's an obvious stats mismatch. When I had my Size 18 Pendragon character, I picked a 6'5" actor. I onced changed a roster's prior PB from a prettyboy choice to someone with muscles because he was strength 5. I realize it may be harder for female characters since these body types are not well represented in media, but I appreciate the effort in at least picking someone who's a little athletic vs. exceptionally tiny, fragile-looking, etc for your hardcore warrior character.

@surreality said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

It's the same for Russian characters -- except in that case, I haven't even seen the one that isn't somehow involved in organized crime.

It's worse than MUSHing, really. Think about when you saw one of these anywhere in media. This is what I was getting at with the really blatant slavic (and really any non-Western European ethnicity) racism thing earlier; you only ever see Russian mobsters (or even worse, Albanian mobsters, who are real bad dudes unlike the friendly wise guy Italian mobsters), spies, and maybe the occasional warlord or arms dealer. Naturally you never see these roles played by the actual ethnicities, either (holy shit this Black Widow movie is going to be an accent trainwreck).

...that brings me to another point. I really don't have a ton of empathy for people who 'don't see it'. I need to work on myself on that, but it aggressively frustrates me. Again: clueless high school students in the 80s could see examples of sexist, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and other bigoted gross all over the place without any trouble. Less enlightened time, even!

But these things are not fucking subtle.

I genuinely do not understand how people 'don't see them'.

I think it's less a matter of not seeing, as it is to seeing what is presently culturally normalized, encouraged, and subconsciously desired. Media representations are a lot less accidental than we tend to treat them.

Certainly the horrific stuff you see in Sixteen Candles isn't the product of someone just being confused and thinking Asians are really like that maybe? It's propaganda meant to satisfy audience anxieties and prejudices (in this case, reflective of American fear first of Japan's economic rise and then the subsequent 'Tiger Economies' in the 70s, 80s and 90s) by mocking those cultures. And this is a broader trend. While we identify 'outsiders' by appearance, how we treat them is much more socially contextual. Asians are 'good' except when we think they're up to something (WWII, or the period above). Muslims are weird not-Christians, but we don't care that much except when they're obviously all terrorists (80s after Iran Hostage crisis, 2000s, etc). After 9/11, we get 24, a vastly popular show where we cheer a dude torturing people (who went from 90s holdover Balkan-types as the first season was produced pre-9/11, to typical nuke-wielding Muslims, to Mexican cartel types, back to Muslims... eventually getting to Chinese agents as we culturally decided who our next enemy was; see a pattern here?).

Uh. This has gotten long and convoluted, but yeah. The worse it is, the less likely it is to be accidental.

@HelloProject I don't know, to me, sexuality actually feels like an area where there's been huge improvements in the hobby. As in... holy shit it is waaaay more queer than it was when I started. You're not as massively an ancient a player as some of us so maybe it's less apparent. But I can't think of any game I've played on recently that didn't have a variety of non-straight couples, individuals, etc, enough for them to not seem special or unusual. Which I would think is the goal? I know this isn't a call-out thread, but I'm curious where these egregious examples are. Maybe I don't see them because I'm straight? IDK. 'All the lesbians are guys' seems a whole lot like 'there are no girls on the internet,' which is itself a really pervasive sexist attitude.

My reaction to 'these lesbians are all trope-laden sexpests' is mostly that we're all playing trope-laden sexpests, all the time, 24/7. Behavior that we consider normal for ye olde straights is being treated as suspect, which seems kind of the opposite of what you'd want, right? Also, it feels like it's a wholly different thing than talking about ethnic minority inclusion because sexuality is something where people actually explore and evolve. There are people on this board who have come out and/or transitioned during their tenure in the hobby. Surely 'just stick to RPing what you are' isn't something you'd have wanted to have told them, right?