Posts made by faraday

@seraphim73 said in Battling FOMO (any game):

I think is incredibly important is that Staff PCs be inclusive

For me, it's staff NPCs who should be inclusive, if you're trying to include people. My PC is there for my enjoyment, and I think that mingling staff responsibilities with your pretendy fun-times can lead to rapid burnout and unwelcome IC/OOC bleed. (People thinking that getting buddybuddy with staff PCs is the way to Plot or Stuff, etc.)

That's not to say you shouldn't be inclusive with your PCs, but I think it should be for fun not out of obligation.

Of course this is different if games are letting staff PCs = FCs, but I generally think that's ill-advised for other reasons.

This FOMO thing hasn't really been an issue on most of the games I've been on, I think due to their core nature. There are some common factors that have worked on a variety of game settings:

• Open plots - If just about everybody can come to just about everything, then people don't feel left out if they miss one battle/mission/whatever.
• PRP equality - If players can do the same sorts of cool for themselves as staff can, then you take away some of the "IC capital" that commonly makes staff run stuff special.
• Cooperative structures - If you take away jockeying for power and resources, there's less need for staff intervention to allow your character to progress.
• Keeping people together (geographically and factions) - The more ready connections you have between PCs, the easier it is to find RP in general.

@l-b-heuschkel said in Battling FOMO (any game):

If there's a pattern of 'friends only' every time, though, staff may have forgotten that they opened this game to the public, and some level of public accessibility is not unreasonable to expect.

It's unreasonable to expect if staff didn't set any such expectation. If you're just running a game to play with your friends, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Just be up front about it. Ultimately, nobody is paying for a service, or forced to be there. If it isn't fun, don't play.

Now, I think the most successful staff will set clear expectations ahead of time of what they plan to do for their players, and will try to keep the majority of players engaged and having fun.

@tinuviel said in RL Anger:

Without context, I'd probably chalk that up to a PCP overdose.

Often it is associated with drug use, commonly cocaine. It's a commonly-observed phenomenon in EMS circles. We're trained on it in our paramedic curriculum.

Some science: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3088378/

At its core, it is just an umbrella for describing things we know exist. Drugs can make people strong and crazy, and war has plenty of documented examples of people performing heroic feats thanks to adrenaline. We know that both drugs and flight-or-fight can lock out the logic centers of your brain and make you act out and be impervious to reasoning.

Unfortunately, excited delirium is commonly abused as an excuse to justify police brutality and deaths due to improper restraint, and that's some freaking inexcusably shameful BS.

@carma said in A healthy game culture:

I understand the nuances of the problem now.

Cool. Also as far as what is driving the "poor sportsmanship" - it's usually about "losing" in some form, real or imagined. In PVP games it's more overt, but PVE games aren't immune either.

Jane stole my kill in the last battle scene. Bob made me look bad. Harry got promoted and I didn't. Mary's always getting the spotlight. Jake got a medal and I didn't.

I'm using the first-person pronouns there deliberately because that's the real root of the issue IMHO. Bob didn't make them look bad, he made their character look bad, and there's a difference. But most players can't step back enough to internalize the distinction. Or to realize that Bob's player isn't necessarily out to get them. Or to realize that this kind of conflict, kept IC, can make for some of the best stories.

I don't think that makes them all a-holes, just fallible humans prone to being over-invested in their characters. (And frankly if you are going to ban people over this sort of thing, you're not gonna have any players left.)

@carma said in A healthy game culture:

Can you give an example of unpoliceable poor sportsmanship? I'm interested in learning.

What @Kanye-Qwest and @mietze said are good examples.

You say that patterns will emerge, but in practice they often don't.

• Jane avoids Bob because she just doesn't find his RP particularly interesting.
• Jane avoids Bob because she's being a poor sport and holding a grudge over something that happened four scenes ago.
• Jane avoids Bob because he's a sleazy stalker type who oversteps boundaries enough to make her uncomfortable, but not overtly enough to actually report him.

In one example, Jane is at fault, in another Bob is, and in the third it's just clashing RP styles and not actually a problem.

The trouble is - as a game-runner, these all look the same from the outside: Jane isn't RPing with Bob. Unless somebody complains, you'll never even be aware that there's an issue. And even if they do complain, it can be difficult, sometimes impossible, to get to the bottom of what really happened.

@tinuviel said in A healthy game culture:

"Brings out the worst in people" is an excuse. It is putting all the blame on the game, and not on the people. If that's not what you mean, don't say it like that.

No, it is not putting all the blame on the game. That's just not what that phrase means in common parlance. If you choose to continue to use that narrow interpretation despite numerous attempts to clarify the intent, that's on you.

@roz said in A healthy game culture:

No one is talking about using it as an excuse? It is not about shifting blame. It is about being aware of patterns certain structures can encourage in people so that you can be best prepared to respond and deal with them. Which includes, yes, getting rid of people who are being assholes. Or adjusting how a game is being run. The point is that recognizing certain patterns can allow people to more proactively prepare for more likely possibilities.

This. Saying that something "brings out the worst in people" is observational. It doesn't absolve people of the responsibility for their own actions.

@carma said in A healthy game culture:

That depends entirely on the community that gets fostered. If you remove people who express poor sportsmanship, then you'll have a game with close to 100% good sportsmanship.

When "sportsmanship" is exhibited outwardly in terms of penalties, rules, etc, then I agree.

But unfortunately most of the "poor sportsmanship" equivalent on MUs is more subtle than that, and is nearly impossible to police in the same way you can in other venues.

@tinuviel said in A healthy game culture:

ETA: Secondly, suggesting that it is the game bringing out the worst in people removes agency and responsibility from the people. That is never an acceptable answer.

Nobody is saying it's acceptable or good. Some of us are saying it's reality.

It is naive to deny the fact that people behave differently when they are in competition with their fellow players than when they are on the same team as as their fellow players, working towards a common goal. That is just human nature, plain and simple. You see it in sports, in playgrounds, in TTRPGs, in board games, in video games... I don't really see why it's such a controversial stance.

Would it be nice to live in a world where you can play with only mature players exhibiting 100% good sportsmanship? Of course. But c'mon, that's just not the world we live in. It's hardly a surprise that you see more jerk-ish behavior in Call of Duty than in Animal Crossing, because the nature of the game is competitive PVP.

@misadventure said in A healthy game culture:

I'd like to see people be clear about player vs player games, and character vs character games.

It's a nice notion, but the overwhelming majority of online RPG players cannot separate themselves from their characters enough to make a practical difference between PVP and CVC.

Among select groups of either good friends or really unique individuals? You could conceivably draw such a distinction. But for the general population of Internet People? It's best to go into it eyes wide open that a CVC game is going to be treated as a PVP game by almost all players.

I don't know that anyone likes it, it's just all they have to work with.

Various coders have looked at implementing CofD on Ares, but usually they want to make the full-fledged immersive type of WoD code that people are used to. That doesn't work well with Ares' flexible scene system, and would require so many custom code mods to core systems that it wouldn't be easy to share.

Nobody seems to just want to make a simple chargen + die roller for CofD. No MUSH chargen is easy, but it would be fairly straightforward - like the Fate/FFG/Cortex ones I put together. But even if they did, there are some other considerations around whether CofD/WoD really fits well in Ares' design philosophy.

@ganymede said in A healthy game culture:

Your point was how community is the primary factor.

No, my point was that certain systems and themes bring out the worst in people and can contribute to a toxic game culture. Which I think is the same point you're making?

The fact that my specific tight-knit group of friends made it work is not an argument that it will work in general, especially when you have an open game with no control over who comes to play.

I really don't think this is specific to WoD, though WoD might be the most obvious and extreme example. I bet if you took a Walking Dead MU and made it PVP with some folks being the crazy pscyho crew, you'd get a similar effect.

@ganymede said in A healthy game culture:

I’m sorry, but whereas the majority of gamers may not be dicks I can tell you from almost 25 years of experience that Vampire, as a game, seems to tease out the worst of them.

I don't see how that contradicts my point? Vampire brings out the worst in people. Battlestar games, on the whole, tend to be pretty laid back, friendly communities where most people aren't jerks. One could try to make subtle inferences about the differences between the two fanbases, but I think the correlation is more obvious: Battlestar games are PVE and cooperative, and Vampire is PVP and backstabby. Historical games are another area where they're not generally regarded as cesspools of toxicity. Why? Is it something about the types of players who are drawn to that kind of game? Maybe. But I think it has more to do with the lack of OOC competition.

@tinuviel said in A healthy game culture:

People are going to be dicks regardless of the system or the theme. Dicks are dicks.

Experience in gaming communities just doesn't bear out that theory though. There are a few card-carrying jerks around, to be sure, but they are the minority. Most people are influenced by the type of community around them. Put them in a game filled with backstabbing, manipulation, and competition, and that tends to drive a certain type of behavior. We see this over and freaking over again whenever games have certain elements (IC PVP, OOC competition for limited slots, etc.). Put that same person in a PVE/Co-Op environment, and they behave differently.

This isn't a MU-specific phenomenon. You can see it in everything from video games to board games to RPGs to 10-year-olds on the playground screaming "I got you!" "No you didn't!".

I'm not saying that PVE games are free from drama (I wish!) or that nobody should run PVP games. I'm just saying that there's a clear correlation between certain themes/game elements and a higher degree of toxic behavior among the players. If you want a less toxic environment, consider changing the environment.

I played in two PVP campaigns with my gaming group in college - one WoD, one Amber. In both cases we fought against each other - my chars were captured, thwarted, even killed - but it was fine because we were already friends.

PVP games among strangers on the internet is a recipe for toxic behavior, plain and simple. The players are in direct opposition to each other, without the buffer of friendship to mitigate the hard feelings. You can see this in everything from first person shooters to MUs. I don't think you can avoid it, you can only try to manage it when it inevitably arises.

I've played on tons of games through the years. Sure there were occasional toxic players, and how you deal with those are important. But the only ones that had a toxic culture were either run by psycho staff (no amount of policy or code can save you from that) or were strongly PVP focused.

Holderness Family ADHD parody "My Own Worst Enemy": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cw51gLry_I

So many of those things are me.

@l-b-heuschkel said in Redbird's Playlist:

Pretty sure there aren't any things you can only do on the web portal. There are things you can only do from a traditional client.

It's not a technical limitation, it's a cultural one. You can play synchronously in a grid-based scene from the web portal and asynchronously in a temproom scene from the MU client. What matters most is the culture of what the majority of players on that particular game prefer. I've been on plenty of dead pennmush games, but nobody's like: "Wow, nobody's doing anything. PennMUSH really sucks."

@tinuviel No, sorry.

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

Given the economy right now, telling a child that they are lucky for having a stable home and amenities is not far from the truth.

Presentation matters.

I tell my kids often how fortunate we are compared to some families, as a way of teaching gratitude. Not gratitude to me specifically, but just gratitude for our blessings.

I think that's very different from guilt tripping your kids into thinking they owe you something for raising them.

@saosmash said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

So I'm $500 out of pocket & still no closer to getting treatment.

That sucks And in general it sucks that treatment policies aren't more accommodating given that they know this is just a part of the very disorder they're treating.

But $500 for a no-show seems shady to me. Yes they're entitled to a cancellation fee but that seems ridiculous. IANAL but I wouldn't think they can bill the full amount for an assessment that never happened. Probably worth following up on your rights there.