Posts made by bored

I couldn't get the demo to do much, but as I do a weekly VTT this is interesting. We've been using maptools for years (never liked roll20, the way it handles npcs clashes with my GMing a bit), but while it is very function-rich it's not very user friendly and can be hard to set up for new players (haha java). So very curious to see where this one goes.

@Ghost If you think making your cheeky 'you did a bad thing' post instead of just hitting the report button like an adult is you contributing to the positive environment, I don't know what to tell you.

@Ghost Oh gosh! It'd sure be terrible if he noticed the post I tagged him in! He definitely needs your help! Good thing you've come to the rescue!

Realistically, if he wants me to edit out that line, fine, but the sentiment stands. His post is a pure Whataboutism-style derail, which I think is fairly nonconstructive (not in the rules breaking sense, but in the pointless, derailing argument sense) in a thread otherwise celebrating new ideas.

[EDITED SUPER POLITE VERSION]

@Arkandel said in Things I've Learned Running Horror Mu:

But I think what you may be missing is that what's fun for you isn't a universal goal across the board. For instance many players like the idea of a persistant character they can sink time into for long periods of time, or MU* where that can support power imbalances, or where the theme is set to something specific they can learn and sink their teeth in rather than have it periodically revolve.

This is an extremely condescending and unnecessary stance to voice.

No one is missing this. Its the way that things have always been done and to the degree that the hobby continues to exist, it will be (for the large majority) the way things always will be done. Arguing on behalf of the absolute status quo seems one of the least necessary arguments one could possibly waste time making. 'I don't know if you realize, but some people enjoy (or at least tolerate) things the way they are!'

No one in this thread is suggesting that the 'old ways' be banned, just observing that doing the same thing leads to predictable results and that doing something new... can actually work. Also, you're making a serious logical error in assuming that 'because lots of people are continuing to enjoy x' it means they wouldn't enjoy something different. In large part, people have no option or opportunity to ever try something new or different. If they do not have the resources / time to create a game, even if they aren't satisfied, they have no option but to play what's there to play or not play at all. In some genres, they have barely any choice of games at all.

Seriously, all kudos to @botulism and again, anyone who is interested in progressing things in this hobby should seriously look to this example. Note, that doesn't mean 'Make a HorrorMU clone.' Indeed if 'go make a GOMO' is anyone's take away from this, they've seriously missed the point. You absolutely need one persistent character? Ok! Go change some other norms. There's plenty of room for experimentation, here. And engaging in it won't hurt the precious way its always been one iota.

@Ghost Oh boy another 'serious writers' vs. 'people who like systems' post.

I don't think the divide you suggest is legitimate or really explains the Star Wars situation. Coded gear/economy systems are absolutely not any kind of requirement, but I think some acknowledgment of their presence and importance is hard to avoid. We can agree that the Millennium Falcon is a character at this point, right? Not just a ship? That a looming Star Destroyer is a powerful symbolic shortcut? That Boba Fett is popular because he had a cool visual design aimed at marketing and toys and it fucking worked? That a lightsaber is an elegant weapon for a more civilized age?

Playing a smuggler, your ship is going to matter. It might not matter that it rolls exactly +8 for 4d8 damage, but it being a scrapyard junker jury rigged to chaotic perfection vs. a well-maintained high end craft matters a lot to the story you're telling. Somehow, you need to acknowledge that the two things are different and it matters, or you're losing something both in the story and in any sense of mechanical verisimilitude. The same goes for a bounty hunter's kit being part of their identity, or representing a lightsaber as something other than 'just a sword.'

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.

@Alamias @Lotherio Oh, the trucker hat is real for sure.

That they added to his n52 costume even before they'd settled into the tech genius part. First RHATO cover:

***=As I realize these are huge***

@Lotherio The problem seems rooted in the fact that they want the playerbase draw of a 'multi-verse, crossover, any comic and version' game... but they only really respect the Marvel side story-wise. That's fine for broad theme, setting (ie NYC vs. Gotham and Metropolis), story direction, etc. It's a problem if you're inviting people to play DC characters but tell people they need to be explicitly weaker than any Marvel analogue (with special exceptions for a possibly staff-buddy Batman, iirc from earlier in the thread). On any game like this, no one should be getting superlatives (smartest, richest, strongest, etc), really - you should just have a tier of 'top tech characters' that hey maybe will RP together. Weird idea.

I think the Hulk Hogan/Superman thing is a whole different problem, basically of trying to use a narrative system approach with players that are looking for simulation-style information. Whether it would or wouldn't work for a game, I can't really say, but it's a somewhat nontratditional approach, at least in MUing, so I can understand players having difficulty with it. 'Why is his +4 better than my +4' is a valid question (even if it has a valid answer).

@surreality Being generous, I'd say its at least some kind of homage to the 90s and all the Liefeld era of guns & pouches, but its sadly possible it's 100% a serious, straight take. This is also a book that got wide coverage for Starfire's presentation verging on pornography, albeit several artists earlier.

@Alamias said in Empire State Heroes Mush:

@ZombieGenesis said in Empire State Heroes Mush:

justify things like Roy Harper being smarter than Tony Stark and Reed Richards.

Red Arrow? Arsenal? That Roy Harper?

Smarter than Richards or Stark?

Have I really been out of comics that long that this is even a question that has to be addressed in the first place?

To be fair/comic nerdy, this is probably based on his version from Red Hood and the Outlaws (which, yeah, people mostly hate, but it was a thing). In this version, Roy was a kid tech whiz that Ollie brought on to help him with gadgets, and he designed most of the trick arrows and things.

By later points in the series, he's not only building robots to defend their secret base and lecturing the crew on Starfire's warship (which has... you know, FTL/teleporting across space level technology) how to improve their own engine performance. He shows up to one fight looking like this:

Comics are weird.

So, taking both @Thenomain's general 'hey design it better' and this particular problem:

@surreality said in X-Cards:

It's hit or miss if I mention it on a wiki or otherwise.

For the people looking to build a better mousetrap, maybe this is where you should be looking?

IE, maybe someone needs to work on a new version of publicly available +event, +finger, etc code that supports preference tagging so that these things could be included at a level where they can't be casually ignored. IE code it to the degree that if you +event/join a thing that has one of your !prefs in its <subject> field, it flat out gives you a fail message about the scene including content you've marked as undesirable.

We could also make some improvements toward privacy (also re: @surreality's concern) over just 'here is some visible text on my character that says, 'Hey, I really dont like X.' For instance, it wouldn't be hard to make these lists private, and have code warnings merely show that a limit was matched, not which limit it was. Obviously there's always going to be some room for fuckery here, but I imagine the obfuscation could be useful.

The X-Card thing feels too thin to even be called a system; as it's really just 'saying no.' But giving people better tools to communicate about content seems do-able.

This really just circles back to age-old discussions about consent-only games, and I don't think there's anything new in this particular approach to it.

A unilateral veto is pretty much unworkable in what's supposed to be a large, cooperative environment.

This is getting increasingly ridiculous. No one is 'drafting a set of standards.' No one is going to go over and knock on Arx's door to make people stop TSing with their magic elves or PC-turned-NPC superheroes that are already lulzy as fuck in the ethics department.

But as a broad statement, I still have no problem casting NPC TS as generally unethical. Use @Ganymede's phrasing if you prefer, because lawyer, but there's so much baggage wrapped up in sexual interaction that I simply cannot accept people shrugging it off as no big deal. It will always be kind of a big deal, give or take, it will always carry implications of favoritism or coercion. It's not being treated special because we're prudes, it's being treated that way because human nature shows it to be that way.

I mean...

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

Yes, if you are GM'ing for a specific organization—if you're running games at a convention for WotC or Paizo—you do have a set of rules you're expected to adhere to, and which you agree to when you sign up to do that for them. But if you are running a game in your house, you are not running it on behalf of anyone else. You do not have to sign anything before you sit down to run a game, not even if you post an open invite on the board at the gaming shop and allow people you don't even know to come.

If you're running a game in your house, you're still beholden to a 'set of standards' you yourself didn't create. They're called 'society' and the laws of wherever you live.

This is, again, where it becomes almost riotously bizarre the way this defense is being constructed. Sexual harassment of this kind is a real problem in gaming. Women getting hit on/propositioned/offered benefits for sexual favors in real life when entering gaming spaces is a problem long reported on. You wouldn't hesitate to call a DM doing that a deplorable of the highest magnitude, I imagine, even if they'd skirted breaking any actual laws. That is applying a set of standards to someone's home game, too. Saying its onerous to have even thoughts or discussions about it here is ridiculous.

@Roz We're talking about core ethical policy and divides on how people even conceive of NPCs.

You discussed it happening on a game, publicly. That means it's at the very least, no big deal there, and it means those staffers do not see that ethical conflict. It means all of them are free to do it. Exactly many extremities go in how many holes for what kind of quid pro quo is pretty irrelevant at that point.

@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.

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.

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

I disagree that TS is always irrelevant to story. Rping out sex can have an impact on the intimacy of characters that is very difficult to replicate through simple ftb. Any kind of story can be off camera, but there is always more room to maneuver and express where you actually rp versus where you offscreen. Whether you are off camming the boning or the torture or whatever else.

This is the only thing I really consider a valid counter-argument here, but I still think there's a fundamental difference between what most people are talking about when they say 'TS' and what you're describing.

TS itself can be a vague term. I played briefly on a game where my character owned a saloon/brothel, and he had several scenes hiring new employees (tangentially: lol, everyone wanted to be a hooker). I had no prior relationship with these players and so I always told them we could play with any level of explicitness they cared for, or could straight ftb. Some went straight for the TS. But I also had one scene that fell into the vague middle ground of this, where we RPed enought to indicate some of the traumatic elements that went with the job/setting but without posing, erm, juices and whatnot?

I'm not going to indict someone as ethically bankrupt because they have one scene in which their NPC and some PC bone, and they do 2-3 poses that summarize the activities, emotional involvement, etc.

I am going to sideeye any relationship between a staffer, their GM-PC puppet, and a player that involves ongoing, lengthy, descriptive TS to the point where it reaches textual mutual masturbation.

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.

If Dark Phoenix does as badly as its tracking, Turner might be in some real trouble - the franchise's flop has already seemingly done in Lawrence. It seems likely that Disney/Marvel will want to do as much as it possibly can to get distance from a bunch of terribly-received films, at any rate.

In other news, Ian Glenn will continue to be in every movie you totally forgot he was in.

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

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

I object to staffers using NPCs - special characters with access to shit regular players can't get (whether that's abilities, connections, information, whatever) - as their personal PCs, and justifying it by saying "it's just an NPC."

That sounds like unethical conduct to me, which makes it fall outside of whether sex and romance should be in the toolkit of an ethical staffer running a plot for someone.

I'm not sure even this is true, because pursuit of romantic plots is a well established goal of RP for many players. A staff bit that has access to all kinds of unique nonsense barred to the general PC population will be pursued as a romantic object in part because of those qualities, whether for raw speshul factor or the chance of a magical baby or whatever. See Firan/Arx, or even on WoD with a staffer playing some otherwise banned bloodline, tribe, etc. I remember baby drama over White Howlers, back in the day.