@Darren said in Depression Meals:
@Tinuviel said in Depression Meals:
@Darren With that mustard? What are you thinking?
I was thinking "Damn this is gonna taste great!" and I was right.
Definitive proof that one cannot think clearly in the grip of depression.
I know for me, personally, I am not that big a fan of letting the players fully control the direction of the scene, like some other people are. I have a plan, and a story I want to tell, and in order to do that, we need to get to B and C and D, starting from A. So I can engineer the events of the story to get us there.
This doesn' t mean that players don't have an impact. Things can happen faster or slower, enemies can be aided or hindered, etc. But I know some people who will fully change the story on the fly because a major NPC got one-shotted by a lucky dice roll, or the PCs decided to meet at Waffle House on the other side of town instead of back at Home Base.
People can talk about not liking things being 'on rails' or whatever, but sometimes you just gotta use that fiat.
@Auspice said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
Who wants to be my valentine?
(really I just want a free dinner)
So what you're saying is, if I give you money for food, that's where my effort on this day can peacefully end and I can relax and just do nothing further?
@SG said in How do you like things GMed?:
As a player, I'd like a heads up about scenes like these so I can opt out.
Which is perfectly fair. It's certainly not everyone's favorite thing.
But at the same time, I have other factors to consider as well. If everyone in the scene is like this, and just wants things to go off in whatever direction they try and move it, that takes an incredible amount of overhead that I just don't have the kind of time for these days. That requires being able to re-jigger NPCs on the fly, or have a small stable of them already prepared. It requires knowing the plot hooks and quirks of all the characters in the scene. It requires that you have the kind of time to do the open-ended type of thing that it will almost assuredly become.
And these days, I have a full-time job and school obligations, etc. That kind of stuff was fine when I was younger and had not much else to do, but now that I am older? I can create a thing, and we can have fun with it, but you might find that if you push too hard against the boundaries of the story, you run out of 'give' at a certain point.
I think that, as a hobby, this has been hitting all of us a bit harder, which is why we have fewer people willing to do the full-time staffing thing and fewer overall stories being run, evident from how much we talk about exactly that sort of thing regardless of what game comes up.
So the 'everyone does whatever they want and screw the plans' type of RP, while perfectly valid, isn't as viable as it once was if for no other reason than "all of us have other things to do now." So I don't really feel as bad about it as I might have, once upon a time in my younger years.
@RightMeow said in The Work Thread:
So in the my work life is weird department, this has happened:
I decided a week or two ago to quit my job. I'm an adult with bills, so I wanted to get a job first. I haven't heard back from any of them. So I'm like, huh, maybe I suck, but whatever. Not to worry, keep apping.
I go to work. My asshat boss is strangely nice to me. He's like I realize it's not you, it's your team and I want to work with you to fix it. (I have heard this dance request before). My uber shade asshat boss (Boss of the asshat boss), tells me that it's not me, but the team needs to be reined in. --- Then one of my team quits because they had a falling out with a co-worker - BUT - it's not me and they will stay on to get me through the week of hell coming up next week. The other person that got accidentally screwed over, says they aren't a little bit angry at me.
I have told NO ONE that I'm thinking of quitting. It's been my little internal mantra.
Then today. One of the bosses in another department (on line with the asshat boss) comes to me and says they need to talk. They asked if I want to come to their department as a manager because they think I'm the SOLUTION to their problems over there. Uber Shade Asshat Boss told them that he completely agrees. - New boss says they haven't told their team as they are reviewing options, but they also want to get me a pay raise if I go to it. This was the department I wanted a year ago.
I have said nothing and it's almost like people are oddly falling over themselves.
This is weird. I'm still okay quitting, but I'm also okay with trying this. However, it's very very weird.
It must be something in the air.
I applied for a different position in my agency. Everything seemed lined up and ready to go. Then I was told that I literally could not have it because of conflicts. So I applied to a different agency. Got a way better position. That same day, not an hour later, they came and asked me if I still wanted the other position and they would find a way to work around the conflicts.
It was surreal. It's like they could smell the fact that I was on my way out the door.
@Seraphim73 said in How do you like things GMed?:
I call this the "Gated" method, rather than on-rails, and it's what I use (and prefer to play within) as well. There are certain points that will happen, but how they happen, what order they happen in, and how that impacts future gates changes.
Yes, this. Exactly.
I was just talking to someone else about how much I hate the terminology "on rails," because I think that it's a dismissive way to marginalize a bigger concept, which usually is:
The part of the plot you are interacting with is only a small subset of the overall thing. When I run stories, several groups of players are usually simultaneously working on a thing from different angles, things are going on completely off-screen with NPC groups (some of which are working to undermine the players' efforts too), and the whole thing has momentum because the story as a whole has quite a bit of narrative mass to it. The actions of one playgroup do have the ability to affect it, yes, but there are other forces at work on the thing too, and players might need to take that into consideration as well.
@Ganymede said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
What is it about white folks wanting to give away blankets swimming with disease?
How are you gonna go and judge their cultural heritage like that? Geez.
@Aria said in Covid-19 Gallows Humor:
Uh, it's bat country, thank you very much.
I'll see myself out.
@Arkandel said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:
It's like thumbing your nose because people are watching soap operas instead of Breaking Bad. I mean sure, there's no denying BB is a masterpiece - but so what? The value of your entertainment - what you watch (or play) - doesn't determine your own worth in any real way.
No, it doesn't. But this is not an apt metaphor. The people enoying Breaking Bad and the people enjoying Soap Operas are watching fundamentally different things that are handled in a completely different style, and we don't expect those two things to mix, ever, because they're contained neatly within their little containers (shows).
Same with games. You don't mix Soap Operas and Breaking Bad in the same space, because it doesn't work. There are spaces for both of those things, but trying to include them both is a recipe for trouble, and we should be able to say 'we respect that you like this, but we don't want it here'.
The relevant standard isn't that everyone is entertained. It's that the people wanting to be entertained in the same way can do so. Others who want a different style of entertainment can find it elsewhere.
This is the entire premise of genres, and why everyone thinks slash/fanfic can be cute but nobody takes it very seriously.
Sometimes, one person doesn't fit. They don't even have to be an asshole. It's just that their expectations are different. That's fine. But they still don't fit. And that's an issue.
So while I don't think that it's shaming, I do think that telling someone that what they want isn't what the game wants (and thus isn't gonna happen there) is perfectly reasonable.
GenCon is cancelled. 
I mean, not a peeve, or a gripe. More of a … sad?
I so look forward to it every year. ;(
@Thenomain said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:
Tangentially: It never ceased to amaze me that people who staffed acted like they needed benefits. You can change the course of the entire game, numnutz, what kind of benefit would you call that? And you get to RP any NPC at any time as befits the game. And you have an organized support network, which is far more than non-staff players can say.
Eh. Sometimes. Even staff are often constrained in the actions that they can take as staff, because of community expectations, and realistically their own PCs get sidelined more often than not. Playing an NPC is fine, but that's not the same sort of thing, really. Staff know that. Players know that. Sometimes, there has to be a re-balancing, because the constraints (either implicit by community expectations or explicit in game policy) can quickly cause the benefits to get outweighed by the drawbacks.
One of the biggest things that I've found is that the most prolific staff scener0unners often have a devil of a time finding someone to run a required scene for their PCs, either because the other staff are conflicted out for some reason or the players have come to rely on staff storytelling so much that they don't offer to run things in return, which can lock out a lot of growth options.
So I don't mind staff getting certain benefits, so long as whatever those benefits are still abide by the general rules of the game, and don't give them too massive of a leg-up that players can't get.
Sometimes, being on the other side of the curtain just flat-out sucks so much that it's demoralizing. Those benefits help to keep staffers at least moderately engaged.
But no solution is perfect.
@Ifrit said in RL things I love:
@SinCerely said in RL things I love:
10/10 would recommend.
Do we all need to call @Herja or are we allowed to speak to other people?
I mean, I think you had everyone at 'sweetest, soothingest dominatrix'.
@bear_necessities said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:
Anyway, basic difference IMO is that an NPC is meant to be a story device. NPCs are there to move plot. They are the "quest givers" basically. They shouldn't be regularly played and they should be played ultimately to support PCs.
Yes, that's one of their purposes.
The other purpose (although it's been largely neglected in the games I've been on for some time) is to be used as tools for staff to help keep things on track. NPCs usually hold positions of relative importance or have a desirable skillset, so they can be used to steer things back on track when players are starting to veer too far off course. Yes, they can support PCs, but they're also a wall that the PCs have to face off against if they want to transgress outside of the established boundaries (for example, a King who has the power to issue investigations, levy sanctions, etc).
THis isn't a popular view of NPCs, by any means, especially among players, but that's one of their realities -- they exist as a foil to the PCs so that they can't just go hog wild and do something goofy.
They are there to provide direction and consistency as much as they are to provide support. Sometimes they're a shield, sometimes they're a sounding board. Sometimes they're a hammer. At the end of the day, what they are, without a doubt, are tools that staff use to tell the story they want.
Dear Douchebag Attorney,
You have a fucking J.D. I know you know what 'no records responsive to your request' means. You can get mad about it if you really want, and sure, you can send the subpoena, but just because you list a document you think we have on a piece of paper doesn't mean that we actually have it, and your list shows that you have not the first clue how this even works.
Did you do any research before you started flailing?
I am not your paralegal. Just because you don't know what a thing is called or who actually produces/maintains it does not mean that I am required to go hunt it down for you.
Also, FOIA is federal. We use different rules.
Fuck.
@Auspice said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:
It also, on platforms like Ares, gives a very convenient place to attach logs.
I hear that on Ares you can have your PC in multiple scenes at once without the need to proxy things over, which is a point in its favor, and I think would resolve a LOT of issues around PC/NPC access.
@Auspice said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):
but what if everyone does secretly hate me?
This would require everyone to be way better at keeping secrets than you have experienced.
@Tinuviel said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:
@Derp said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:
We expect you to behave like an reasonable adult would in any other position of responsibility, and if you can't do that, then you don't belong there.
And what a reasonable adult would do is find someone else to do it for them, so that it still gets done. That's what a team is for.
In what universe do you get to pawn your work off on someone else because you've got personal beef with that bitch Brenda in accounting?
You leave your personal bullshit at the door, and focus on the work that needs done. That is what reasonable adults do all the time.
So, one thing that I tell people over and over - and @Testament has heard this from me literally yesterday - is that it's really hard to be someone who is both pretty smart and mentally ill. When you're smart, you take pride in that great big brain of yours! You come to trust it and its ability to synthesize information, solve problems, think creatively, etc.
But here's the thing: Your brain is also full of lies.
It tells you stupid shit like, "Ohh, Aria! Silly girl. None of your 'friends' actually like you. They just put up with you and never say anything about what a wretched burden dealing with you is because they're just too polite. Don't believe anything nice they say to you! That's just social expectation. You're really just a pile of hot garbage."
So you get frustrated. You get frustrated with yourself because you have this otherwise pretty cool brain that just malfunctions in this one particular way and why, why why, can't you just make the stupid thing work like it's supposed to??
My honest to god recommendation is to start dissociating from your negative self-talk. Stop treating it like it's a part of you and start treating your anxiety/depression/OCD/PTSD/whatever like it's the shittiest roommate imaginable. You don't like them, in fact you hate this asshole, but they're on the lease that is your head and you can't just kick them out. It is a whole lot easier to talk back to your negative self-talk when you've made it into a little caricature in your imagination that is the sort of wretched person that starts off sentences with things like "I don't mean to sound racist, but....", who literally never pays you back for anything ever, and who dents your car but insists its fine 'because you have insurance, anyway, right?!', etc.
Treat your negative self-talk like it's the sort of person whose opinion you'd never give a shit about, anyway, but would instead mutter about behind their back/under your breath and it's a whole lot easier to ignore.
"Nobody actually wants to---"
"Did I fucking ask you? No. No, I didn't, so shut up."Trust me (and my therapist) on this.
I cannot upvote this hard enough, and also: thank you. I've been having one of those weeks where my stupid lying brain is lying and I know it but it still manages to make some headway. It's good to know that there are others out there feeling the same thing. It really helps.
@Sunny said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:
For the people who are still playing on games, do you feel there's a lot of people either ready to write one another off, or just in general hating each other to the extent that they can't co-exist? Is this actually peoples' experiences on the games?
God, yes. So much yes. So much shit-talking and vague hatred happens, on every major game I have played on in the last three years, regardless of genre.
