Best posts made by Derp

@auspice said in Random links:

https://imgur.com/gallery/2O1Ov

SHE TOLD ME THOSE PHOTOS WERE FOR HER OWN PERSONAL USE! DAMMIT!

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

To Derp's point, I resigned my PC when Echoes' vampire staff decided to not allow PCs as top-tier leadership in their respective covenants. I disagreed with the decision strongly, but I understand the bases for it. In my opinion, if you do not provide opportunities for leadership you are not going to draw in leaders. And I think you want leaders on games, especially World of Darkness games.

That was a contested decision. On Echoes, you pretty much had each little sphere as its own kingdom. I had Mage (Harvester) with some assistance in Werewolf, which was mostly Ecliptic. And then Moonshrimp had Vampire.

We did not always agree on what the best course for the game would be, but there were certain points where we pretty much just took a vote 2-1. Ruling out PC leadership was part of that.

Ultimately, it comes down to levels of control. Mage and Werewolf had some external control in that the Elders and Council, etc., were controlled by NPCs. We could help direct the boots on the ground experience from there. Vampire had no such thing going for it, and we were frequently confronted with the 'well it is PC-controlled so go talk to them' excuse. So we decided to remove that as an excuse.

When you let PCs run the show, you, as staff, lose that ability, for the most part. You have to rely on the PCs themselves to do that. To dish out consequences and steer the flavor of interactions. And if they idle, you have to give them a reasonable chance to get back to it. If they disagree with you, then you either have to push them forcibly back along the path you want to see on the game or find some kind of IC external force to do it.

Ultimately, it's almost always a mess, and creates more headaches than it's worth. Players can be leaders in the sphere without being at the top of the food chain. That is not a necessity for pretty much any game. You can have some pretty devoted shepherds who have no title or official authority whatsoever.

But those titles and official authority positions can bring your game to a grinding halt in a hurry in the WoD. In many ways, PC leaders are even more problematic than overt PC antagonists because they often do end up working in direct opposition to other players, or at best being so negligent that it has much the same effect.

People keep telling me that this is somehow a necessary thing, for PCs to be able to have something to strive for. But never, ever (1) on one of my games, will the Throne be something within their grasp. I am not relinquishing that level of control over my game world to people that I don't trust to actually act on it in a way that betters the game. YMMV.

(1) I can think of a rare handful of exceptions to this, but honestly I doubt the circumstances would ever arise to get there, so effectively never.

@auspice said in Good or New Movies Review:

(Though I'm mad at Netflix 'cause how y'all gonna cancel Marco Polo?!)

I'm still salty about Sense8.

@arkandel

I mean -- yes? The two I referenced earlier I have, in fact, met in RL, so I don't know if they would count for this. But I have not met @Devrex, for instance, and I consider him an excellent friend, just like the friends in RL.

AND, just like RL people, there are levels, or I guess -- rings? Like, certain circles wherein certain members get additional trust/attention/obligation over others. Some are acquaintances that you know from work and are friendly with but you aren't gonna offer to help them move furniture or whatever. Others are people that you would totally let crash on your couch if they needed it. Whatever.

Thread necro!

@Ganymede

@wizz said in Online friends:

This the more interesting question to me. I've definitely gone too far in online friendships, and I strongly suspect most of us could say they relate.

@Aria said in Random funny:

I had to see it. Now you have to see it.

So wait, wait. Hold the fuck on.

Those maps that said "Here there be dragons" were accurate?

I think that we have a definitive majority answer here, lol.

Nothing we do is confidential, because it's all public record, but in the interests of removing as much identifying information as possible, I'll reword that post:

I don't actually know what to classify this one as, but I"m gonna just put it here...

clears through

Dear Opposing Counsel,

I appreciate that you liked the argument that we made to the Court of Appeals. But do you really think it's wise to take that argument (and, granted, you didn't take it verbatim, but you took the whole thing, citation for citation) and then print it in a legal publication that pretty much every judge and attorney in the state reads, agreeing with it as your own opinion -- while we're still waiting on a decision from the court?

I mean, that's a bold move, really. I'm not sure what you were trying to do there, but I hope it pays off for you.

Cheers.

@il-volpe

Ok. Sure.

But the difference is, there's no Writer's Room on a MUSH plotting out every single thread for every single character. The tailor is the most interesting character because he was custom-designed to be that way. Bashir feels so shoehorned because he was shoehorned, and other than that only had the fact that he was hot and smart going for him. A mile wide, and an inch deep.

There is not even the remote equivalent of a thing like that on a MU. There is no central authority planning out every single thing that a character will do, say, and experience in combination with all these other characters.

So making a character like a tailor and expecting, as if by magic, someone to figure out a way to get him from the dressing room to the dungeon depths is not only a little unrealistic given the logistical difficulties on a MU, but even actually a little entitled. It assumes that someone else is going to do all the mental gymnastics necessary to flip the story around in such a way, including every other character in it, to not only make it possible for the tailor to participate in the dungeon-delving, but to also give them a time to shine -- somehow. No matter how ill-suited they are otherwise to dungeon-delving.

That isn't fair to the gamerunner. That isn't fair to the other players that have made characters that can flow into their specific parts with minimal resistance or disruption. It is your responsibility, as a player, to at least attempt to create a character that isn't going to make an inordinate amount of work for anyone else. Or to find someone willing to do that work for you. Nobody should simply expect it of anyone else just because you're there.

A MU isn't nearly the same as a season or nine of a television show. They have very different distributions of resources, and very different creative control methods. You cannot expect them to be remotely similar, or be able to employ the same mind-boggling logistics that it takes entire teams of people months to storyboard for in a relatively static environment.

@surreality said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

cheesecake cupcakes

@mietze said in The Desired Experience:

Honestly, I like finding a RP group of people who are nice to me oocly in game and who like my rp and stories and who have interesting characters that I like learning more about.

This.

I want to find a group that I click with. I want to tell stories with that group when I have the time. I want other people in that group to tell stories when they have the time. Sometimes, I want to be in those stories.

I want to find a game where I am not forced to engage with things I don't want to engage with. Where staff is cool with my boundaries and my level of commitment, or usually lack thereof.

I want to just -- find my little friend island and enjoy my time in the sun or whatever, reach out and explore when I want to, and then go back and retreat to my little safe space, and let other people do their own thing. Preferably out of reach of me unless we agree otherwise.

@GreenFlashlight said in Good or New Movies Review:

I feel like a lot of the backlash to the new trilogy is based on the audience resenting that they now have enough critical thinking skills to recognize the things they weren't savvy enough to notice as kids.

Amen.

@tmr said in The Desired Experience:

What also happens (ask me how I know) is that a player asks "what kinds of characters are needed?" because they have no fixed preference. Then the staff says, "well there's an important shopkeeper role in town we've been wanting to fill" so the player does so.
And then gets no RP.
And then complains about not getting RP.
And then quits the game for lack of RP.

This is absolutely not on staff.

Staff can point you to a role that is available. They can tell you what might fit in with demographics, and where you might be able to carve out a niche.

That's it.

What you do with that character to attract RP from that point forward is on you. You can be playing the most important character in the known universe, and if people don't want to RP with you? Then they won't RP with you. If you don't give them a reason to want to RP with you, in particular, in that role, then there is absolutely nothing that staff can do to change that.

As a staffer, I would not RP with that character either. Precisely because I pointed someone to that bit. Staff characters already get the celebrity treatment: the target of constant speculation and gossip, no matter how innocuous of a thing they're doing, and endless rumors about favoritism and TS. And even barring that, if we dare to take a day for ourselves to just, you know. Play, and have fun with our characters, then we're slacking at our jobs because god forbid other players aren't getting instant gratification.

So, no. This is not on staff, even if they point you toward that role. They cannot make RP for you, they cannot predict whether you will play the role in a compelling way, and they cannot force people to play together who don't want to play together.

That's where your skills as a player come in. Staff can only help there so much.

@GreenFlashlight said in Good or New Movies Review:

So, uh, Elsa sure does enter a lot of tight tunnels while singing about having confusing new feelings that nevertheless seem right and make her tingle, huh?

Have an upvote for causing a very near literal spittake.

@mietze

I mean -- it's really not that complicated.

Rule 0 or Whatever: Nobody owes anything to anyone other than what they willingly agree to. Period.

It doesn't matter what complications or mitigating factors there are, what they have been diagnosed with, how badly their divorce is going, how much their job sucks, what happened to their playgroup, what the game thinks of them as a whole. Unless you have made a clear commitment to someone to do a thing, you don't owe them anything, regardless of what their circumstances are.

You just don't.

It only gets complicated when people try to think up reasons why the Rule 0 above doesn't actually apply.

It always applies.

@GreenFlashlight said in Good or New Movies Review:

Is this meant to justify or excuse it, or what?

The point, I think, is that it's easy to find this sort of thing when you're focusing on it, even when it might not be there intentionally. It's just another sort of confirmation bias, wherein we can assign meaning to things that don't actually have them in order to justify our beliefs.

Look, my boyfriend and I saw Frozen 2 together too, and neither of us actually read anything into that either. I don't think that the vast majority of people would.

MSB is not representative of a vast majority of people, and the ones who notice it here are probably hyper-sensitive to such things in the first place.

Maybe it's intentional. Maybe it's not. But most people aren't going into Frozen 2 looking for queer iconography.

Personally, I don't consider it 'baiting', even if it is intentional. I consider it a step in the right direction, moving away from old stereotypes into at least some kind of new territory. All things in time.

@misadventure said in GMs and Players:

Are the alternate forms of RP acceptable, for what kinds of scenes: alternate window rp, paged rp, on game mail RP, forum RP, email RP, etc?

brake screech sound

Noooooo. Nonononono.

God, we've already seen what happens when staff refuses to act on some kind of easily-faked Discord screenshot that someone claims is someone else being abusive.

Nobody should encourage off-game RP. There is no good way to police that in the event of a dispute even though apparently people think that GMs are supposed to police shit that happens off the game.

This just sounds like all kinds of a bad idea.

@GreenFlashlight said in Separating Art From Artist:

So if Kestrel reports a Klansman for being at a Klan rally, the effects of that on the Klansman's family belong more to Kestrel than to the Klansman who chose to be at the rally, who chose to be a Klansman, who chose to tie his family's fortune to his Klan participation? Because I feel like it's on the Klansman, and on the Klansman's SO who realistically had to know what they were getting into.

Substitute 'clansman' for literally any other political / religious / belief-based organization and you quickly start to see the problem here. The Klan is taboo because we as a society have chosen for it to be. But it wasn't always. And other things can take its spot in the future. Like being a democratic socialist. Or a muslim.

Our current 'enlightenment' in whatever form it takes is no more realistically informed than any other eras. They had their own arguments for believing what they did was for the best in society, some of them sincerely held. Don't think that can't change in a heartbeat, given the right match to the right powderkeg at the right time.

waves hand at Border Wall and Muslim Ban

@bear_necessities said in GMs and Players:

How do you expect someone to "prove" that someone else is stalking them?

My point was that I don't. I don't need you to prove it. Because your out-of-game interpersonal relationships aren't my problem.

I have a set of rules. One of those rules is that someone can ask for no contact for any reason. Period. Once you invoke that, if he contacts you, then we can boot his ass. Easy.

If he doesn't contact you, then it's a moot point.

If you think that there is some other kind of shady shit going on -- he's paging your friends or whatever, or I don't even know -- then that leaves a trail too and likely violates our general "don't be a dick" policy.

@bear_necessities said in GMs and Players:

why would you believe they have some nefarious purpose in declaring so-and-so a stalker? And I think that's kind of the crux of what you're saying - you have to have proof becase otherwise you could just be telling lies and honestly that's how you get people like Ruiz, or that Down with OPP guy everyone talks about, and by the time you figure it out it's way too late and it's already tainted your game.

Because doing the opposite of this and just taking everyone at face value is how you get people like Spider, and some of the people at games like The Network right now, just making random accusations and expecting that staff will act on it because they said so, to the detriment of those not in the person's in-group.

That sword cuts two ways, and I prefer to err on the side of the one backed by stronger evidence than someone's deep conviction.