Best posts made by bored

@Arkandel said in TS - Danger zone:

Let's go back to discussing forbidden topics.

How much do your TS habits change based on the MU*'s themes? That is, do you find your characters are more promiscuous on say, a Kushiel game than a World of Darkness one? Do you TS considerably more often? Is it easier (or harder) to find partners - and are they actually better at TS on average?

I had to think about this a second, because I think it is a factor but maybe not in precisely the straightforward way suggested. I don't think any theme is going to discourage TS if two players connect and want to do it (often through whatever weird signaling dances if they don't know each other previously). What I think it does encourage is the ability to present characters as openly promiscuous, and I think that may create more organic TS, ie situations where people simply fall into that RP naturally after whatever interactions vs. engaging in their usual quasi-OOC hunt for other people who are into it.

This is also one of those places where we're still pretty sexist, because while I've pointed out that in general I find women on MUs every bit as aggressive/stalkery/etc, we as a group are still fond of slut-shaming a concept, wiki or desc we find too overtly sexual and I think that tends to target female characters more.

This is why (referencing that Fairy Brothel discussion) I think people go so nuts for those kind of games and concepts, because they want to be able to play sexy without being judged. I think back to just how many people were drawn to playing prostitutes on Firan (which actually had rules the players had to be female, not that those didn't get broken occasionally), and that I often heard from those players that they enjoyed them as 'low stress' alts who they could do that stuff on without fear of being swept up in scandal and ruined (which was IC, yet also carried a certain brand of OOC morality and vindictiveness at times). That was clearly a major factor for those players. Or there's the crazy Western game I played for maybe a week and yet had basically 75% of the female population wanting to work for my character as a saloon girl, even people who'd apped entirely other concepts.

This is in contrast to some game themes that encourage people to keep their sexuality to themselves, ie comic games. So I think it's a factor in that sense, in terms of how comfortably and openly people engage in the topic.

@Tinuviel said in TS - Danger zone:

@bored said in TS - Danger zone:

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.

Which ideal world is it that you live on, and where can I get a ticket?

People break rules all of the time. People are harrassed and abused all of the time. How is it so alien an idea that those two things criss-cross far more often than we hear about?

If 'niche' gives the wrong impression, that's my fault, but I don't mean to suggest that I think this is hugely rare or alien, so much that I was trying to highlight a particular intersection of player behaviors. Whether I think it's precisely more or less common than some other combinations would be hard to comment on without it being wildly unscientific guesswork. Nonetheless, this is clearly a particular subset of all claims of harassment (and this is an important distinction).

Yes. You can do whatever you want with your game. You can make it about anything, anywhere, any time, and with any rules. I still reserve the privilege (because rights don't exist here) to call you a fuckin' moron.

I mean, OK? And staff reserves the right to ban you. I am not sure what you're trying to get across here. Players play by choice, staffers allow players to play by choice and no one has any power of enforcement. This is 101 stuff.

@bored said in TS - Danger zone:

this seems like a category of player not worth the energy protecting

The idea that a person being abused isn't worth the energy protecting makes you look utterly reprehensible. Who cares that they broke the rules? If you're going to ignore them, or punish them for reporting it to you, you're tacitly silencing people that need help.

Lets be clear, first off, with all the really hostile 'you' shit you're throwing around, that I would never ban TS on a game. I would probably not even ban a lot of the borderline content. But that's because I don't want to play with children, I am not sensitive to themes that other people might have valid reason to be uncomfortable with, and so on. I nonetheless support the idea that someone might want to allow kids on their game and thus need to ban it. I support that some staffer might really really not want to spend any of their leisure time dealing with sexual content, ever.

Beyond that, see above: claims of harassment. We know that in the ridiculous land of MU drama, figuring out who the actual victim is in any scenario is difficult, and just as often it's two fuckwads with 0 communication skills in an escalation loop. If I have to make choices in terms of what time I am going to put into doing how much for what players (which is always a factor, no staffer has infinite free time), I am going to prioritize believable claims by trustworthy people who take some responsibility for their own well-being. The same way I'm not going to ban someone with zero evidence because the 'victim' couldn't be arsed to log (or, you know, doesn't have one because they're lying), someone who's teeheeing sneaking around the game rules, but then is harassed, but... not seriously enough to admit that they're cheating but they still are seriously concerned about this other player? If they happen to be the one who falls through the cracks (someone always will) vs. someone who is more honest? OK.

@Arkandel I think fully organic interactions are the ideal, but maybe not very practical, especially in an aging player population that is seemingly moving away from (also organic) grid RP toward more structured and plans plots and scenes. It's also worth pointing out that policy laying out PC/NPC distinctions and boundaries doesn't necessarily require they be publicly labeled. Some might prefer this, but player advocacy and staff trust are something you have to constantly balance back and forth. Staff sets rules, but you always have to trust them to abide by and enforce them. Plus, I think the mere presence of some guidelines does tend to help (if the staff is baseline ethical, anyway).

Also, often its going to be obvious, and this goes with the kind of games we run and how we run them. Thousand year old Vampire tyrants, unassailable rulers backed by massive armies or literal divine mandates, magical beings beyond the scope of PC access (dragons, demons, etc): these things often have to (or really should) be NPCs and you may prefer the transparency to rumors of that OP character being so-and-so's PC. Some of this is unavoidable due to the thematic structures of the games we play, but if you want more organic interactions you may need to step away from this type of storytelling: obviously this is an 'ask,' since getting to play the ubergod entities (even under NPC restrictions) is a perk to staffing and you want staffing to be fun, but when every NPC is like this, its hard NOT to end up with those divides.

@Auspice said in The Dark Side of online Role-Playing:

15-year-old RPing vampire sex with another 15-year old: OK
15-year-old RPing vampire sex with a 45-year-old: Not OK

Which, realistically reduces to '15 year-old RPing vampire sex: not OK' because you're never going to know. So many people here who've been MUing since the early WoD days were lying back then, myself included. I have no idea how many were obvious as minors or who could pass as adults. I had adult women hit on me OOC. Maybe some of them were secretly dudes and murders, too, I can't really know. I also had a situation where I, pretending to be an adult, was TSing with someone else, also pretending to be an adult, and in reality we were the same age and went to high school together. Accidentally harmless (and hilarious), but could have been bad for either of us, right?

I don't know how parents can really contend with any of this stuff safely. It would be great if you could encourage your children to participate only in age-appropriate explorations but do those even exist? Even age-appropriate online games are full of this (I've seen someone being groomed in an MMO guild). And society isn't actually comfortable enough with adolescent sexuality to intentionally create vetted forums to intentionally promote kids doing this. I think all you can really do is accept that your kids will lie (as all of us did) but do your best to be aware of what they're doing anyway.

Yeah, +warn (along with +timestop, +ftb, etc) all existed for a long time on WoD games and probably elsewhere. So if anything it's not that we've never tried something like what's being proposed here. There were versions of +ftb that were definitely meant to a hard stop & contact staff for whatever details, and not a licence to pose a bunch of excessive extra stuff as has been described. Games have tried different versions of it throughout, yet in the end seemingly gave up on the idea and moved away from it. If I had to guess why, it's because those commands were often pretty underutilized.

Which leads me to the thought that it's not merely a matter of having the commands or not. We've had them, they're not magic bullets. It's really about building an overall structure of all the involved parts: staff policy (and follow-through), overall player culture, individual willingness to act, and the appropriate OOC tools. This kind of thing is trivial to code (its what, basically just an emit and maybe a staff channel echo?), but it's hard to implement culturally and see adopted.

@wahoo I suppose I'd counter, why is it a problem, so long as staff is creating suitable boundaries to what is required for the process? Or alternately, what goals to do propose for these houses in lieu of advancement?

Arx is frequently (if, I feel, disingenuously) advertised as a PvE game. That means shedding a lot of the zero-sum instincts that players have, where they see any gain by another player as diminishing them (which is clearly the case for a lot of the objections here), and instead simply focusing on your own advancement. If you apply this to houses, what are lower tier orgs supposed to do in a purely PvE environment, if not grow and potentially eventually strike out on their own? The only alternative seems for them to essentially be pawns/supports for their lieges, throwing their resources into stuff that isn't their own story. Why should they do this? Why is it owed to their lieges?

I will argue with @Tempest for once that I don't think the liege relationship seems relevant. It might have been for Pravus, but the PvE mantra means there can never be true rebellion (it seems like this was a compromise to prevent it, in fact?). There's only 'the children growing up and striking out on their own.' Which is a natural outcome. It will continue until there's no more room for growth, at which point you'll be back facing some de-facto PvP realities.

@Pyrephox said in Arx's Elevation Situation:

Playing a game with an ostensibly feudal theme should come, I'd hope, with an understanding that nothing about it is ICly 'fair', and it really shouldn't be.

If you're playing a political game, that is. If you're playing a game where every house is entitled to eternal expansion and inflation and the idea is just how you gather the resources to do that, then no, it's not a particular concern. That's not a theme that particularly interests me, and never did.
...
But that's fine - I rarely even log into the game anymore, and it increasingly doesn't do things that I'm interested in, but which many many people manifestly are.

I don't disagree with any of your analysis. And you found the solution. If you don't like enforced PvE (that nonetheless will occasionally have PvP consequences/implications), don't play Arx.

The only issue is you have people who omg love Arx to death forever but also really really obviously want nothing more than to fuck up Pravus as hard as they can, because how dare they benefit by PvE?!? They need to pick one.

My current (only!) PC is non-white.

That said, he's from a culture I've lived and worked in so I have confidence to play him, if not wholly accurately, at least with a degree of verisimilitude that is acceptable to my own standards. I don't really know how I could play anything else decently. People sometimes say 'do research.' I think if current world events show anything, it's that the gap of experiences is something far larger than simple 'research' could cover.

There's also another problem. Based both on channel chatter and this very thread, I often find myself self-restricting what kind of RP I engage in. Not to avoid stereotyping (obviously I am conscious of these), but to avoid engaging almost any topic of cultural relevance at all, because I don't trust the very people suggesting this to be anything but unbearable in their effort to police RP. I picked my current character to engage with some uncomfortable history, but I really can't do it, because I know it will cause a shitstorm of people getting offended. So instead I do pretty generic RP. I'm not sure this has accomplished much, in the long term.

@HelloProject I don't know how well your definition works for the Mediterranean & Middle East, where the definition is often cultural (the Muslim ban you're referring to) as much as phenotypical.

A nice mass media example was the 'discussion' (to put it mildly) of Gal Gadot's casting for Wonder Woman, and the dialogue was extremely illustrative of the whole 'what actually counts as a white person.' She's Ashkenazi Israeli cast as a (crazy fantasy origin but basically) Greek woman. Some POC advocates got upset about it in the vein of 'She's a European being cast as a POC!', which implies Greek = not white and European Jew = white. Some went the other way, declaring it important POC casting, which hilariously (to me at least) seems the more white supremacist take since it's effectively asserting that neither Jews or Greeks are white.

Yet more generally, while Greeks might get a little of the 'greasy, hairy foreigner' racism that's targeted other borderline groups like Italians and Eastern Europeans (heck, Greeks are basically the mid-point between those) they generally aren't getting hassled by police.

So, I don't know. I think this shit is really complicated and context dependent, and any quick definition of 'who counts' is going to fail to be useful for anything other than twitter-based tribalism and points-scoring, as the Gadot debate sort of illustrates.

Yeah, I think it's mostly skin color as @Coin says. I can't say I translate 'Spanish' (from Spain) as POC as part of my American menetal construct of race, any more than I would a French person or Italian. But then again I grew up in the 80s and not on twitter, where there's an effort to make everyone POC, which, as I said before, seems very dubious because it both seems to continue to mark Anglo-Saxons as special and also erases the very different issues different groups have. The experiences of Blacks (or Native Americans) in the US are not comparable to every other vaguely darker than lily-white group. Other POCs sometimes get upset to hear that, but... oh well?

But color and other visible evidence of race is always the big factor. My neighborhood saw the Dominican population organize to (sometimes violently) defend businesses from looting: some folks quickly called this racist (against blacks). But among the Caribbean-Hispanic population (which is a mix of Spanish, African, and Native ie. Taino ancestry), Dominicans are one of the darkest skinned groups and often treated poorly by other related groups (and, edit for emphasis, by cops). They felt they were being left out of the protests, despite having the same kind of tension with police (even years before the protests, you'd hear 'Hands up!' shouted by people whenever a police car drove by the street here).

Even with the religious-oriented hate, it tends to follow those visible lines. Muslim-owned businesses are quite common in several places I've lived, but even at the height of 9/11 furor, who got targeted and who didn't was very much racial: brown Pakistanis moreso than basically white looking, well-assimilated Arabs. Jews too: I don't look it, and so I'm a generic white American if you don't see my last name on a document. But if you're more visibly Semitic, people are way more likely to comment on the heritage (even in the weird fetish-y 'friendly' way 'nice' Christians often do, which I've definitely seen happen to friends).

@Prototart I'm willing to bet that some of the time you're wrong, and that some of the bad lesbians are the lesbian equivalent of the guys who play 7 foot tall sex-vikings. IE, lesbians can be crap RPers too.

E Q U A L I T Y.

I am sure all of this is true.

Personally, I'm as worried about the fetish gays and lesbians as I am about the giant sex-vikings and 4'9" waifus: its all garbage tier, hyper sexual RP from horny people, but unless its disruptive, I really don't care if they enjoy it. If it's disruptive, I'd prefer they kindly moved to Shang.

But worrying about this stuff does not actually seem to be supportive of the community it's purporting to be supportive of, since you're basically promoting policing gay portrayals and witch hunting for impostors. Surely there's better things to be doing than worrying about two clearly very straight dudes RPing as big-titted schoolgirl besties?

@Auspice I'm not unaware of this, but I think the other option is worse, because it means you're literally applying a higher standard to people of the minority sexuality. There's no scenario I can imagine where that works out better. In fact, it's the status quo we used to have back in the old days, when people were pretty aggressive about 'catching' people and policing this stuff (remember when Firan had a rule against male players playing female prostitutes? that for sure wasn't out of respect for RL sex workers, it was a homophobic 'I don't want to accidentally TS a dude!')

Not everything has a perfect solution, and a lot of things in MUing, despite us trying to massage complex solutions, boil down to 'bad players can ruin anything.'

@mietze said in FFG L5R:

I think @bored had a game? Or iirc they would be a good person to talk to about it. I might be conflating them with someone else though.

I don't really read here much anymore, but yeah, I ran an L5R game although it didn't really last that long. It was under 4e rules and I had to write all that code myself (I do probably still have it but not in an easily-transmisible format), so it was much different than the current FFG stuff system-wise although mostly identical setting-wise (the rebooted setting is a bit different, particularly re: getting rid of some of the still-assumed gender norms etc and gender-flipping a couple of the old NPCs, like Hoturi). I've played FFG in table top and it's interesting, although I predict there would be some MU issues in terms of defining Rings/Approaches, as the game gives you a lot of leeway there but also requires the GM to say no on occasion, so those gray areas might lead to some arguments/rules lawyering.

More generally, there are setting challenges. Personally, STing on my game, I found getting people to adopt anything like actual social/court RP extremely difficult, there's just a lot of assumptions that are vastly different in terms of how social interaction works. Maybe the answer is just to say 'fuck it' and not try and replicate that stuff too much? I don't know.

It's still one of my all time favorite settings/lines (I was even into the CCG tournaments back in the day), so good luck to anyone who wants to try it. You'd have me as a player if nothing else.

@reason The ring vs. attribute change is definitely interesting considering it's almost entirely an anti min-max change. For any who don't know, in prior editions, each Ring was composed of two attributes (and had the lowest value between them), but because non-Shugenja rarely rolled Rings directly, and each Ring pair split really clearly on combat/other roleplay, you'd usually polarize them. Water? Strength (damage) vs. Perception. Air/Fire? Reflexes/Agility (defense and attack) vs. Awareness/Intelligence. Earth was the exception where even though it had that physical/mental split (Stamina/Willpower) you rarely rolled Stamina and Earth gave you health points, so people left that even (and tried to get Earth 3 fast to not die so much!). This also led to a weird thing where Bushi lagged behind Shugenja in rank, because you calculated insight from Rings (among other things).

Curiously, this is a change you could actually patch backwards into the older L5R rules with almost zero issue, since any roll that required one of the old stats you could just replace with its Ring. You'd have to slightly adjust the chargen but it would be an almost trivial conversion.

re: the MU, I could get into it in a lot of detail that expands on ideas about what make MU's succeed in general, as I don't think it was any particular major thing. I was the only staffer, and it was a small playerbase, many of whom didn't know L5R, so I was teaching people through chargen and in every scene. That meant people weren't so confident to drive RP on their own. There's issues with the rigidity of Rokugani culture vs. player norms: while we had tea and sake houses, but 'bar RP' is trickier when the samurai ideal is polite emotional control. And then there's big stuff. L5R's themes are about honor and loyalty, and samurai willing to die for those things without hesitation. But MUers are risk-adverse. I created some incentives, XP refunds/ bonus XP for rerolling after a 'good samurai death.' Even had one taker, where a Battle Maiden suicide charged an oni on the Wall. That's the kind of story L5R wants to tell, but not that many players will go for it, and the game can fall pretty flat if people don't buy into those big ideas. And without those, as your average social, simulator it's going to be too stuffy for most.

@Jennkryst While I almost always prefer pure pointbuy CGs for this reason (I've complained about it for FS3), I think the issue you bring up is minimal in FFG because the gap is very small. Moreover, some of the questions outright let you choose between skill dots and other benefits (like honor). The game intentionally does not deliver 100% equivalent characters.

The 2/2/2/2/2 spread is so unlikely that you'd mostly only end up with it through an intentional sub-optimal/anti-type build. The natural result, because there are ring overlaps between Clans and most of their schools, or the families and their more unusual schools, is that you end up with 3/3/2/1/1 or 3/2/2/2/1 almost every time. The first one is 'worth' 6 more xp, but depending on your intended final Rings, the 2nd one may get you to your goal faster (remember the Void + lowest limit on Ring raises). There's also the simple fact that Rings at 1 are weaknesses. Do you live to reap that XP?

As the skills go... meh. None of the clans or families grant Martial Arts. The biggest 'main' skill you can get to 3 is Theology, and every Shugenja family gets it, as does every school, so most characters will get 2. Only Phoenix get 3 automatically, which... if you're annoyed by Phoenix being the best shugenja, L5R isn't the game for you But everyone can take it to 3 with Question 13. Other than that, the skills you can readily get to 3 without Heritage table results are Survival as Unicorn and the low skills you can raise from Question 8. Aside from sneaky Scorpion, most of these are skills people would avoid for min-maxing.

Conversely, I think if you just gave people XP... you'd see much more min-maxed results, even if they were more 'XP equivalent.' Everyone would max their chosen MA, Fitness, Theology, Courtesy, and perhaps a few others based on their character/build. They wouldn't end up reflecting their clans and families, which is important in L5R. It's part of the setting: characters strongly reflect their heritage, and breaking with tradition is rare and a big deal.

@Reason I think from all of this it should be obvious the game is a passion hobby of mine. I'd absolutely play a game using either recent system.

I'm definitely not voting, just trying to give feedback and ideas. I stick by the opinion that Crab lands work well as a newbie area (to a point: the deeper Shadowlands are very much not). Fighting goblins is a mainstay rank 1 action activity, and the less precarious social environment is a good warmup. But obviously it isn't going to be for everyone. The capital has appeal for not being tied to any clan, but the high-stakes environment makes it harder to give PCs major agency to shake up the local world.

The difficulty of picking a static setting that appeals to everyone is another MU/tabletop split. I'd argue the tabletop game is not designed with a stable setting in mind (outside the box set campaigns), foremost because it assumes characters of mixed clans. This is why the most archetypical L5R party is the 'traveling magistrates': the PCs are deputies of the Emerald Champion and can be sent from one corner of the Empire to another, righting wrongs and dispensing justice, with the authority of the office giving them the freedom to travel freely and meddle in local affairs (things that otherwise are very much not the norm).

For more neutral options, I'll go back to suggesting book stuff because they're bursting with ideas. Zakyo Toshi, also in Strongholds, is effectively a neutral Ryoko Owari-lite in minor clan lands, at least before the Scorpion annex it. Naishou Province is a single-book campaign setting from 4e. It's not as detailed as the box sets, but it's well designed to work as a sandbox, neutral lands under Imperial authority (the book doesn't actually give it a canon location for the sake of letting a GM work it into any game, although the described history and geography makes the foothills of the mountains between the Dragon & Phoenix a good candidate, above the Lion plains and Toshi Ranbo).

Now quick, some masochist make a game so we can all sit here judging/criticizing your work!

@DnvnQuinn said:

Just because the government does it, does not mean private parties can do it...If we're going to follow this bad analogy.

Game owners absolutely can do it, and you will never know (well, until they page you 'bow chicka wow wow!', apparently). I assume you mean that they shouldn't do it, and I'm not disagreeing, but it's still head-in-the-sand level naivete to imagine your privacy is going to be protected on a MU. Thus the statement that you shouldn't be doing things you'd be upset if someone saw is objectively good advice.

People are shit, people will do shitty shit. You have zero expectation of privacy, regardless of what anyone tells you, because they're probably lying, or some staffer under them just doesn't give a shit.