Not sure whether to put it here, or in RL sads.

My dog is getting older. His breed is expected to live 12-14 years, and in April he'll be 11. He's starting to show signs of it, too.

Once upon a time, I'd open the door and he'd run out with me, all full of energy. He still goes with me, but he's slower, and you can tell that his joints are starting to bother him. He's not as mobile as he used to be. Jumping is almost ou tof the question at this point, but he climbs ok. Except when he doesn't.

Recently, he's started showing symptoms of dry eye. His right eye looks terrible. I made a vet appointment, but I know that they're going to put him on drops for the rest of his life.

I have mixed emotions. He's been a part of my life for so long that I can't imagine life without him. But at the same time, I know that he'll be gone sooner than I'd like.

Yet I know that he was loved. He knows that he was loved. He has lived the fullest, happiest life I could give him. Which, honestly? Sometimes I could have been better. If it came down to taking care of me or taking care of him, he won out, every time, and yet there were still times that I just felt so guilty because I couldn't afford something he needed.

Anyway, he's still relatively healthy and happy, and I am gonna make the most of that. But it just sucks so much, seeing him get older and start to struggle and look at me with that face that says he expects me to fix it, or help, the same as when he was a puppy -- and knowing that old age is about the one thing that I can't fix for him.

I started staffing kind of on accident. I mentioned that I liked doing build stuff to a member of the (then current) staff. She, in turn, grabbed me and dragged me into a page convo with @Coin that basically said "Can I keep him?" So, I started as a build staffer, and fixed the little building mistakes here and there. After that, I branched out into Werewolf because that sphere was too much for anyone person to handle I even managed to code the barebones outline of a game system that someone else improved greatly upon. And the rest is history.

Power was never a part of the bargain. Except, I guess, me bitching at @Coin and @Thenomain that trying to build as a non-wizard in MUX is fucking tedious, and begging for power there.

Forgot to tag @reimesu in here because it's her find but I was le tired.

skims. makes a face

Yeah, I don't agree with some of that in the context of a MU. Especially the parts where it essentially seems to imply that I have some manner of duty to ensure the mental health and well-being of someone else.

No, I don't. And I know for a fact that I am not the only person in this hobby that has expressed that opinion before. "I am not here to be your therapist" was a rallying cry not even a year ago, and now we're presented with material that says we're essentially responsible for making sure that others can handle stories?

Nope. I am not opening that door. I mentioned in another thread that if players don't like the content of something, they have the option of removing themselves from it. The game should give clear enough guidelines on what's about to come down the pipe, and players can decide for themselves whether that's something that they're cool with.

I am absolutely not going to chase down players and make sure that they're ok after the fact when they have given their agreement to continue in the story by continuing in the story and not saying anything to the contrary, because that opens a ton of doors that lead to uncomfortable places and dependencies and strange, weird relationships that we've been decrying for a decade or more.

You are responsible for you. Period. I'm responsible for making sure you know what's there. How you handle that is not on me.

@devrex said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

I've played 'em, but I sat long and hard and thought about everything else a villain could do besides kill an opponent, stay mostly in those areas, and really just try to make my mindset that when I make a villain it's just like STing: the character is there for the enjoyment of others.

It's never the villains that you have to worry about.

It's usually the heroes coming in and getting a whiff of anything opposed to their thing with an antagonist tag and swooping in like some kind of demented paladin determined to crush it into a fine red paste.

The villains usually play a longer game. The protagonist factions give no fucks. They just go in and decimate and then pat themselves on the back for staying the 'good guys' after their inevitable baseless murders.

@carma said in Weird or unrealistic gaming... stuff:

Brigid: "I think that's everyone safe and accounted for. Thank heavens nobody was killed in that meteor storm."
Abelard: "I haven't seen your husband. Is he alright?"
Brigid: "Oh, I completely forgot about him. I'm sure he's fine."

We haven't seen your wife in four months, sir, and you've yet to file a missing person's report.

• She's not missing. She's in like -- France. or something. Maybe.

So you have no idea?

• How is this my problem?

Sir, we're gonna need to continue this conversation down at the station...

Not entirely sure where to put this. Not a peeve, but not ... anyway, so this happened to me today.

Me: peruses inbox at work (for a government agency)
INBOX: Top email subject line: INVITATION TO SHANG
Me: chokes on coffee, looks horrified, like WHAT THE ENTIRE FUCK. Tentatively click on e-mail.
EMAIL: INVITATION TO SHANGHAI BALLET
Me: OhthankyouJesus.

@faraday said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

I think that instead of expecting people to compromise on a game that we're doing for our own enjoyment, we just need more recognition that people play these games differently and that's okay.

@faraday said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

I think it's best if folks do try to meet in the middle a little.

I think that both of these points are valid. But I would also like to add a third:

Staff needs to get better at saying 'this is what our vision of the game is, and the kinds of things that we are expecting. If this is not what you want, then this isn't the game for you.

Lots of the fights that come up on games is because there is no clear vision for what the feel of the game should be. Take WoD for example. You have a werewolf. But what feel for werewolf? Some people are gonna try to play Garth from Supernatural, campy and awkward and human and relatable, and another is gonna try to play The Howling. Those two playstyles are not compatible, and are going to create dissonance in your game. So you need to clarify which one you want to see.

Same goes with how horrific said horror game should be. Some people are gonna play Supernatural. Some people are gonna play Nightmare on Elm Street. And when those two playstyles meet, you get the bitching about agency and triggers and such, because nobody ever laid those lines down and said something like "this is a game where you can expect to be victimized regularly by supernatural forces, so this may not be your kind of game."

We really need to get better at figuring that kind of stuff out, because that's where a lot of the divides tend to come from. Games trying to cater to as many people as possible while not giving a clear indication of what players can expect to find (or not) and what staff are expecting to see. Thus, you get your various tribes that each talk shit about the other and never RP, because they both think they're absolutely in the right.

This one is relatively easy:

RP is hard to find sometimes. Everywhere. People can have a lot of biases.

But in my experience very few of them revolve around gender identity and orientation.

You are more likely to miss out on opportunities for bad spelling or poor grammar or times not matching or people being wary of strangers pr people losing interest in a particular game than for a non-cishet character.

So if it gets to that point, and you find yourself lacking? It's almost assuredly not because the char is trans. That is very, very low on the list of common issues.

So one of the very first tabletops I ever ran was just for me and a handful of friends, and my at-the-time boyfriend. Well, kid sister to one of the friends was like 12, and wanted to get involved in some of what we were doing. Kid sister was pretty cool, so I agreed to let her play.

This kid, man. She soaked up pretty much the entire rulebook inside of a day, was asking me advanced questions about gameplay by the end of the week. Hadn't even played yet, but I was starting to get a feel for where her mind was going.

Well, I knew that the others at the table were either going to take it easy on her for being new, or try to do the whole newbie initiation hazing thing that they do, and I was starting to get a feel for how her mind worked. So I set her up as one of the villains of the story, infiltrating the group and actively working to undermine them from the inside.

And man, this kid sold it. Every time they would encounter a setback that she had cleverly engineered, she would be the first up in arms, calling for them to mount up and ride off, no time to wait or rest or prepare, we have to go get that son of a gun!. And the rest of the people at the table are just like "Yeah, we can do it, rar!"

And I'm trying so hard not to just lose it because this kid's acting is worthy of Hollywood, right? And she's coming up with just the most devious stuff -- we had agreed that if she had a question she could write it on an index card and I would write the answer back, since she was new and playing shy (this was well before texting was anything like easy or affordable, SMASH THAT BUTTON 4 TIMES FOR S, 25 CENTS A MESSAGE), so nobody else was catching on.

So by the end of it she's managed to sabotage half their efforts and prevented them from resting in their haste to race to the bad guy, and when they show up, she just casually adopts this big, chipper smile like 'Alright, they're all yours now, I'll be in my room!' Grabs a blow-pop from the big bowl, and just straight up walks out of the room with a little skip in her step before the big boss battle.

They still managed to win, but man, it was a tough fight, and they never underestimated this kid again. She was a regular in our group for like four years, and is easily one of the best players I'd ever met. I'm thrilled that I was able to introduce her to the hobby, and I hope that she's carried that torch forward.

@TNP

Hey dude?

We.

Can.

Read.

Who are you trying to fool?

@Ghost

May I also suggest:

“EVERYONE’S MENTAL HEALTH IS THEIR OWN PROBLEM BUT IF YOU ACCIDENTALLY STUMBLE INTO MY OBSCURE TRAUMA IT IS YOUR SOLEMN DUTY TO TRIP ALL OVER YOURSELF TO APPEASE ME YOU INSENSITIVE TOXIC JERK.”

@Ghost said in Ruiz:

Also, to add:

Of course, I joke up above with gifts of champagne bottles because the truth, tongue in cheek, is that despite the insistence of many that everyone here (including myself) is toxic, there sure are a lot of forays away from that safe space where we arent to interface with us and subject themselves to this so-called unbearable toxicity.

It's kind of the unspoken truth of the situation altogether

Which is precisely why I’m not exactly bending over backwards to do what @hobos is talking about. Would I like this board to be more positive? Sure. It’s a good goal I think.

But I’m also not an idiot, and people like TNP and Tez aren’t coming here to engage in good faith. They’re just coming here to fling shit because they can, and I have no intention of being so bound up in bureaucratic red tape that I just shrug and go ‘but what can you do? Rules.’

The rules exist to guide our actions and (hopefully) make a better board. But they chose to go a different direction, and I’m not going to sit here and pretend that there’s any chance of somehow winning them back. There isn’t. I know it. They know it. Everyone reading this knows it, and if the the expectation is that the admins are going to just sit back quietly and not call them out on that behavior? Then you’re going to be disappointed.

For the people who actually do want to engage in good faith and build something positive, we’re here. But if the BMD crew just wants to behave like howling shitgibbons and scream about how we’re supposed to be better than them, I have no patience for it. They have a board, they can act like idiots there.

@Cobalt said in Ruiz:

I’m really tired of this particular community using the fact that I engaged in sexual RP in the past to shame me or question my judgments.

To be clear, it's not slut shaming. I don't give a shit who you get down with, or don't. I actively encourage people to bang it out with whoever they want.

My question wasn't about sex. It's about boundaries and using positions of authority to gatekeep RP and leverage your own desires, sometimes crossing into territory that the community has a whole has considered unethical for some time.

So fly your freak flag high. Nobody is slut-shaming. But dipping your toes into a situation as an admin that your PC has a stake in? Not a good thing to do, and something that we should all be questioning more. The fact that, in my experience, you do it more with romantic situations is really entirely tangential to the point, not the focus.

As for playing on one of your games, I haven't done that since Darkwater, and don't plan to. Ever. Not only for the reasons Reimesu mentioned, but also because I respect you as a player and a coder, but think you're a garbage decision maker. I'm sure you have even less respect for me than that anymore, so it'd be foolish to pretend that we were ever going be copacetic in any scenario.

You do you. I'll do me. We'll both continue living the same as before.

@Bessarion

Logs that were very selectively provided, which were later proven to be only a partial picture wherein he actively continued to engage her for sexual RP while she was concerned that he was harem building?

That's based on logs too.

Not that the existence of this evidence has exonerated @Macha in the eyes of her accusers, naturally. She's surely done something else equally abhorrent so she's still just as guilty.

I hypothesize that there might be more to then story and I'm 'writing fan fiction' and 'making up crimes out of thin air', but they can ignore actual exonerating evidence while continuing to decry her as the devil.

Kind of like that same group did to you, what. Last week?

@hobos

That's not how conjecture works. If I had proof of something happening right now then I would simply post that and it would no longer be conjecture.

Then it would be an accusation.

But I did not make an accusation. I said, based on my past experiences, that it would not surprise me if there were an alternate explanation for the situation that went something more along the lines of the hypothetical scenario.

Which is why it's conjecture. It might not have gone down like that. But based on who is involved, my own personal knowledge, and the actions of everyone all around? I won't rule it out.

Players can come to their own conclusions. They're going to anyway regardless of what gets said or what evidence is presented, as we can see from the community response to this situation even after exonerating evidence is presented. But being made aware that there are possibly other motives involved is hardly News at 11 for MU-land. That's our standard playbook.

@Cobalt

I said that it was conjecture. But that conjecture is based on past experience, wherein you did this to me, personally, twice. (Or three times. I suppose it depends on whether you count 'twice at the same time across different games' as one incident or two.)

I didn't say that's what you did here. Maybe you've changed. It was a long time ago. I said that it would not surprise me if the actual events were more like what I described in the, again, statement of conjecture.

That said, you have done it. Repeatedly. Pretty shamelessly, I might add. It's a pattern that I've personally witnessed, and in fact been on the receiving end of. So I'm perfectly allowed to wonder, and even hypothesize, that maybe you had a personal stake in this incredibly hasty and rash action that, from all evidence so far, was based on exactly the kind of weaponized accusation that I repeatedly warn against.

Perhaps, in the future, consider digging a little deeper before doing something hasty. This one seems to have come back to bite you a bit.

There are several threads scattered around this here forum somewhere. I’ll see if I can track one down.

@simplications

Didn’t you just disavow us with a dramatic exit not even a page ago? Is this one of those “I wish I knew how to quit you” situations? Get in or get out but don’t stand there yelling through the screen door.