Best posts made by Caryatid

I actually do fall into the pool of opinion that sexual stories are valid stories. Like @saosmash says, I do think that character development can occur during TS. I think that other RP can be spurred by what occurs in sexual situations. It's all part of the human (or alien or robot or mutant) experience.

Where my discomfort comes into it, specifically in regards to NPCs being played by staff, is where it feels there is a barrier to achieving greater RP because NPC access is limited to a chosen few. I have been in that situation before. When you're following the posted rules and guidelines to interact with the world/metaplot/staff/NPCs, presumably jumping the same hoops other players are jumping, and they are leaping into a dynamic tapestry of interactions that spur on their story and you... just are not living the same experience.

That isn't a player issue. The players who are benefiting from their experience, I'm happy that they get that.

But I want that too. Call it jealousy, ok. I feel to name it that is dismissive, and overlooks the underlying issues. With all of their tools staff is creating experiences for people. NPCs are a big part of that toolbox. And people notice when the pattern is radically different experiences for different portions of the playerbase.

I hate the extremes we fall into in discussions here. I hate that the distinction becomes "those who get NPC time and plot shenanigans are more fun to play with!" and "those who don't are boring and if they complain they're jealous".

Ugh. This thread. U g h.

Bring on the hard wipe and time jump. I am there for it. Tessere's elevation (or, really, their return to their former state) was baked into their story and having successfully spent a year working on it, proving just how amazing they are, and introducing luxury brocade... I'm ready. Bring on the dark future.

The first time I heard someone pose this question was in 1999. If they perfect gene therapy in my lifetime, I expect to hear it asked in 2099 too and maybe, just maybe, by then I'll have a schedule that allows me to RP whenever I feel like it.

@Skaldia The only reason I started on your game again was because of @Sunny speaking of it in glowing terms on these forums. She talked about how it had changed and improved. The only reason I lasted as long as I did on this last attempt was because I could see how hard she was working to make her positive representation of the game a reality.

She did a lot for your game. That you are treating her this way now because you're upset with how your choices are being portrayed paints you in a worse light than her.

@oldfrightful

I have in the past on multiple occasions had first meetings follow the "escaping a terrible date by pretending this unknown PC is a friend I haven't seen in years". It's a fun way to meet new folks and seeing how people react to it is a good indicator on how well the player grabs hooks that are throw at them.

Nora@RfK. She was a middle-aged perfumier whose fifteen minutes of fame had come and gone. Then she was dragged screaming into the ghoul life as an unwilling servant of a vampire, passed around to a few others before suffering a violent death and a postmortem Embrace. That's when the real fun happened. At slightly less than a year old, she managed to scheme well enough to land total leadership of her clan, wrangle up the appointment of 90% of the city's vampiric leadership (both clan and covenant leaders, and all of the harpies) and had pull enough even as a neonate that when the Prince and his lackies conspired to try to wipe her off of the map, half of the city rose to protect her and protest them moving on her. She got her man, quietly destroyed the careers of several big power players, and would have won the game if it hadn't been for corrupt staffers protecting their RL friends from their inevitable doom. All at an age in which most vampires are still considered a baby.

I like to picture her and Cai in some sleepy, idyllic backwater leading their own happy little blood cult and being horrible to everyone but each other.

Nox@XmenRevolution. Shadow-based mutant who, due to some experience with betrayal, kidnapping and being a lab experiment, had become a complete monster underneath the mild mannered exterior. She knew she was a monster and overcompensated for it by trying to be as June Cleaver as possible to everyone she knew. Eventually she snapped, murdered a cop responsible for an underground (non-consensual) mutant fight club, and lost everything she held dear (including her remaining sanity). She ended up working for the enemy, helping a government agency develop a mutant "cure" and acting as the spokesperson for their storefront company under an assumed name. Her story was a huge tragedy and I've never played anything as beautifully depressing before or since.

In my first scene on the game, you urged me to do something that was against the rules. You even said we weren't supposed to so you knew it was wrong but you said I should anyway.

A couple of weeks later, you did that thing to me and I pointed out it was against the rules. You again said you were aware of it and only apologized later in a manner that seemed aimed more at avoiding repercussions than being contrite.

You paged me often to complain about staff "nerfs" of a system you had been milking to stockpile advantages for yourself in an alpha setting, or to complain about other players, or to badger me for OOC information about IC scenes I was in that you weren't.

You had a melt down at a player who had been on the game for hours, who had not even made the sheet you were furious about. You ranted on the channel long enough to scroll the screen several times and yes, you did not ask him to share his stats. But when he said he was trying to figure out his sheet, you immediately invited him to share by saying you were curious. I have the log, do not blame Silas.

You are a competitive player. You were clearly using alpha to gain every advantage for yourself. Staff decided that OOC approach was not a fit for the atmosphere they want to promote on their game and I respect them for holding firm to that line.

My constructive suggestion:

The next time there is an official break from something game-wise for staff, let it be a break from code/system stuff. Players are gently told not to bring number complaints, whining +requests are triaged off to a 'TBD' queue, and bug requests are handled but the complainers not engaged with. Let it be a month-long story-only request so that those of us uninterested in code, numbers, min/maxing, etc. can have the forward momentum on our RP that we'd like to see when we engage with the game.

Breaking your character so you can rebuild then anew from shards and ashes. >.>

I guess my take on this is... if NPC interaction is free and equally spread, and any sort of interaction with them, be it mundane, sexually charged, or plot-related, is not limited to only a few players/characters, then so what. Where I run into a wall is when NPCs are falling into multiple frequent interactions with the same players/characters, when it is evident that their interactions with those players/characters is radically different (more invested/more interesting/more in-depth/more rewarding) with a tiny pool of players/characters, and when that interaction sets up other players/characters to be audience only without the possibility of breaking through to more involved interactions.

If I see an NPC in multiple scenes with the same people over the course of a period of time, handing out shinies of whatever variety to one or two people, and I am putting in the same level of effort but not getting the same level of return, then yeah... that's a shitty feeling, a shitty situation, and probably not a game I am going to stick around on. I have walked away from games for that. I will walk away from games if I'm in that situation again. It's something I'm wrestling with right now, in fact.

The shape of the interaction with the NPCs doesn't matter to me. What matters is the atmosphere created by those interactions, if it feels like a level playing ground. When it doesn't (and I acknowledge there will be times it doesn't feel level without there being actual staff misconduct), no amount of railing by the players is going to change staff's approach to it (because people on any side of an argument will find justifications to shore up their side of things). Your option then is to vote with your feet.

It isn't a matter of knowing it when I see it. For me, I know it when I feel it, and when I do feel it I'm generally not long for that game.

@Carex

Projection is a form of defense in which unwanted feelings are displaced onto another person, where they then appear as a threat from the external world. A common form of projection occurs when an individual, threatened by his own angry feelings, accuses another of harbouring hostile thoughts.

@Wretched Yeah ain't no way I'm sharing all of my kinks and preferences here. My best friends don't even know all of those because 1. Ew, and 2. Who wants to lose friends over being savagely aroused by fruit fucking (for example only. Fruit fucking does nothing for me).

(or does it?)

@vanderlylle and I are toying with an idea for a single-sphere 2e (with tweaks) VtR game with a heavy political focus. And while we’re committed to working on it as a personal project, just to see what we can come up with between ourselves, we also thought we’d check with the community to see what interest might be out there for something like this.

The broad strokes are:

• VtR 2e with some Mind’s Eye Theatre and other revisions
• Single sphere, with mortals/ghouls allowed but no mortal+.
• Focus on political play. Yes, vampires are violent monsters but we want to explore the long-term games they inflict on each other.
• Automated systems for feeding, downtime, territory concerns, etc.
• Focus on influence through the mortal world; we want to recreate the importance of mortals and ghouls to ancient creatures who have to hide from the daystar.
• Set in Paris, France, in modern times, and after an event that left the previous Praxis gutted. Paris needs to be reclaimed from occupying threats while also navigating the night to night dangers of dealing with your fellow Kindred.

Right now we have lots of ideas, we have some unpolished writing done, we have lists and lists of Things We Need to Do and Write and Prettify. We have a work in progress wiki. We have the possibility of a server but no present coding ability to get the systems and code that we need in place (though @vanderlylle has been working on learning some coding, so that’s a work in progress too!).

But we also know we’re facing a few challenges here separate of our lack of coding ability. Single sphere games tend not to be popular. Foreign-set single sphere games, less so. Political-focus single sphere games set in non-English countries might well be too small a niche for most..

So what say you, community? Is this something you’d want to be involved with?

I can't be the only one who clicked those links and thought "but those are all the rear view." My inner 12 year old is strong this morning too.

It's going to depend on the player and how well they receive the attempt. I've had it go both ways when I've put myself out there to offer advice and feedback. Sometimes you get thanked, sometimes you're brushed off as a dino with too much baggage to bring anything worthwhile to the constructive table. Do you feel like coping with the fallout if they take it badly? If your answer is no, let it go.

@saosmash

I promise to use my power, influence, and keen fashion sense only for good.