Posts made by Derp

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

This may be an unpopular opinion, but here goes: Nobody - and I mean nobody - is entitled to my free time. It is for me to spend as I choose. If RPing with Fred is excruciating, then I'm not gonna RP with Fred, as player or as staff

Does Fred have any barriers to access to this NPC?

Are you the only one that plays this NPC?

Not all PCs get access to all NPCs for various reasons, but 'I don't like the player' is not one of them. Not for a staffer. You don't get to just arbitrarily decide that a player isn't worth your time, and therefore doesn't get access to said NPC, even if you are providing 'other ways to succeed', because that sometimes doesn't work.

Frankly, if you can't work past a personal bias like that to give a player necessary screen-time with the NPC in question, then I think there's a problem.

If a staffer on my game said that, I'd probably fire them. Not gonna lie. RP with who you want to in your free time on your PC. If you're on a staff bit, you're held to a higher standard. Or at least, I would hope.

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

"you're too emotional" is a common derailing tactic in debate used against women who express any sort of investment in what they're arguing about.

Which would be more valid if he implied it was because she was a woman, and not just a person getting emotional.

Telling someone you believe they are getting to emotional is perfectly fine. I think that people are reading some kind of sexism into the statement that Thenomain didn't put in there.

People, regardless of sex, can in fact be getting too emotional.

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

HONESTLY the puritans have so much to answer for.

To be fair, the Puritans had pretty active sex lives and were fairly open about it.

Speaking of ceilings, though, since @Wizz brought it up (although in a different context):

One of my main uses of NPCs is to keep some degree of control over the governance and theme of a game. This isn't a popular stance for many, who think that PCs should be able to hold all the keys to the kingdom.

But honestly, I've seen so many games go off the rails or just idle into oblivion once you stick PCs in the top spots that I'm not a fan of that approach.

The big-league spots will always be held by NPCs, because frankly I know how they'll react to certain things, and I know that they won't overlook various types of breaches of law/decorum because they want to avoid interpersonal conflicts. In this way, they are a ceiling, and a tool that I can use to maintain some semblance of sanity in the game I want to run.

There are many, many uses for staff NPCs, but ultimately, they are just tools for staff to use to tell the story they want to tell. Nothing more.

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

@Derp And how, exactly, is it creepy to expect people to give you their full attention when you're roleplaying with them?

If you want to play four different games at a time, whatever, but I expect you to pay attention. Otherwise, you're just wasting my time and anyone else's in the scene.

You are the determiner of whether the quality of someone's RP is good enough for you to continue or not. You can always make that choice, on your own.

But you don't get to make demands of other people's time. If the RP is up to your standards, that's all that matters. If it's not, find other people. The second you try and impose restrictions on others because you feel that you're entitled to such is the second that you cross a line.

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

Hardly. If I'm putting all of my effort into one scene, and you're not, you're the one that can go fuck themselves.

And exactly what right do you or anyone else have to dictate how I spent my online time? You don't, as many people on this board have recognized before. You demanding that someone else pay attention to you and only you is exactly the kind of behavior that we call out here, so I'm calling it out.

That's creepy as fuck. So I stand by my statement. If you expect this from people, then go fuck yourself.

@Auspice

No, no.

Ok. Let me try this again, since this doesn't seem to be doing the thing.

You are a staffer running an NPC. You have, for sake of argument, two people with regular access to this NPC. One person RPs with this NPC almost every night (because, I dunno, they're the PCs mentor or something).

You still need to make sure that you are giving screen time to the other person. The way that you do that is:

1. Either run multiple scenes,

-or-

2. Make sure that they are getting access to said NPC in another fashion.

If you aren't doing one of those things, and just cut the PC off from the NPC for no valid reason, then you are failing in your duties as the staffer running said NPC.

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

And some people don't appreciate people they're with being in multiple scenes.

I suppose that there's really no polite way to say this, so -- too bad?

'You're with me, you have to just be with me and only me' is what you would expect from narcissistic creeper stalkers, not everyday RP partners.

Unless there is a game rule against it (which I think would be incredibly stupid and nigh unenforceable given the number of games out there), then people who 'don't appreciate people doing multiple scenes' can go fuck themselves.

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

Though you do miss an important factor of the multiple scene factor: some people can't handle multiple scenes at once.

My point was more that it was an option, not that it was mandatory. To put it another way, 'there is no excuse for a character with access to an NPC not getting time with said NPC when required because there are multiple tools that allow you to do so, and failing to do so is worse than favoritism, it's dereliction of duty'..

@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.

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

Assume two people who have equal access/connection/whatever to an NPC (ie, two people in the 'small group' that interacted with your drug dealer). If you were spending 4 hours a night TSing one of them, there's zero chance that would take away from the others in that small group?

I have no idea why anyone would spend four hours a night on TS, personally, but my larger point was that it doesn't really matter what the activity is. It's favoritism if you're actively denying someone with no barriers to the NPC access to them.

But is this ever really the case? We've been making proxy bits for years now. You can have two scenes going at once. More, even. Assuming that someone is getting four hours of sweet, sweet lovin'-text a night, how does that prevent you from also doing other things with them in another window? (Hey, the Han Solo bit is tied up in this other scene, mind if I grab this stormtrooper and just proxy?)

If a staffer is denying someone access to an NPC and there are otherwise no barriers to accessing that NPC, that's a bigger issue than favoritism, to me. That's dereliction of duty. But I don't think it's favoritism just because someone either doesn't get access to an NPC they might not have access to anyways or because one of them gets a lot of time (though I think s3xytime is a little weird...).

It really just isn't that cut and dry, and I think that just writing it off as favoritism is hasty because that might not be the case, and it could be an even bigger issue.

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

You're also by necessity devoting huge amounts of time to this person and that alone is a form of favoritism; people who are looking for NPC interaction to move their own plots along are not getting it in that time, and we know that time is precious in our aging hobby.

I am gonna disagree here. For two reasons.

1. Not every NPC is so integral to every player that people should be clamoring to see them. I had an NPC for ages, a low level drug dealer, that was important to a very small group. I played him for them. This has nothing to do with favoritism. It had everything to do with creating a specific, useful tool for the story.

2. Not every PC has an absolute right to interact with every other NPC. You might want to talk to the Councilor, but they might not want to talk to you. They have Provosts and shit for that sort of affair. Just because one PC gets access and another does not does not imply favoritism, no matter what the activity engaged in. It implies that NPCs are as selective with their time and access as any other person, and can be manipulated like any other in pursuit of their own agendas.

@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.

@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.

@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.

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

The idea that a "sphere" is an "independent game" is one that can probably get out of WoD players' vocabularies.

This works if all of your staff are onboard, and they all know that they're accountable to each other. The moment that a staffer tries to treat any sphere as its own little fiefdom without accountability to any of the other staffers, that's when it becomes a minigame.

Yes, you can have one staffer have almost dictatorial control over things. Honestly, that makes it very efficient. But also ensure that there is someone who is willing to step up and go 'woah, what are you doing? Explain yourself. How does this help? Why did you ignore how this effects everyone else?'

So partially agree: You need a mix. But you also need creative control sometimes. Checks and balances.

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

wrongfun

I hate this word. It feels like such a cheap copout on a way to get around something obvious: "wrongfun" is a real thing.

Wrong place. Wrong time. Wrong setting. Wrong theme. Wrong feel. Wrong universe. Wrong audience. Wrong style.

Yes, there are plenty of times when the kind of fun you're looking for is wrong for whatever of those above categories, and others, it is conflicting with. But bring that up and people shout down at other people about "how dare you wrongfun me!"

Well, conversely, how dare you expect everyone else to conform to what you want when what you want doesn't conform to the standards?

Yes, there is such a thing as wrongfun, and I think that we'd be a hell of a lot better off if we used it more, especially when it's not 'minor infraction that can be chalked up to quirkiness' and more 'no, you are seriously going way into the weeds with this'.

I've had a couple of players recently that I really wanted to punch in their virtual teeth because they don't seem to get how disruptive their styles are to what everyone else, including the staff, is expecting, but because we're so very anti-wrongfun everyone is afraid to approach them and say 'dude, take a breath and read the room'.

So I get that it's sometimes not staff's game either, per se, in deciding what the culture is, but sometimes? You just gotta have those hard talks, too.

@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.

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

I loved Faraday's 'RP wish list' on BSG

For those of us who didn't play there, tell us more.

The other part of that is:

Concrete is better than general.

Don't just offer random social RP without a purpose. Offer social RP in a specific venue for a specific purpose. 'Anyone wanna meet at the coffee shop' is much weaker than 'Who would be down for karaoke night?'

Always have an actual plan when it comes to RP, and don't make others pick the venue/purpose. Offer concrete examples. Be flexible to negotiation. You'll find that this isn't nearly as hard as it seems.

So, I've noticed things about 'getting RP'.

'Does anyone want to RP' sounds like 'someone please entertain me'.

There are better ways of doing things.

For instance, I rarely have a hard time finding RP, because my RP requests usually look more like 'I am gonna go do this thing, and am willing to ST for it. Anyone down?'

At that point, you are offering to entertain them, which makes it sound much less like a chore. And others will do the same, because that's how this tends to work.

@Rinel said in Game of Thrones:

lodestar

Yeah, you're a lawyer. Lawyers are the only people I see ever use thos word.