Best posts made by GangOfDolls

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

'Cancel culture' is nothing more than the right's latest replacement for 'political correctness'

Cancel culture originates from Black twitter spaces. It was taken from this space (some would rightfully argue stolen) and has been misapplied in a lot of profound ways that are far from it's original use and intention. This comment really seems to communicate the idea that you seem not actually very aware of what it is or where it comes from.

@thenomain Can we move this to the Hog Pit? I'm interested and engaged in reading this but I'd like to respect the conditions of the Advertiser section.

@Macha Thanks I appreciate it. This adult stuff sucks sometimes.

@derp

At least on the games I've been on, there was an awareness but election not to do it. The reasonings boiled down to the overall power creep in multi-sphere games and not borrowing trouble with the player base. Also a bit of: eh, what does this really hurt thrown in.

Which... it was hard to argue with in those enormous games.

It was also the case that mage spheres were often defacto cut off from the rest of the game. There were exceptions - The Reach had blended template families with dominant template type so there were vampire-intended families with some mages hanging around, for example. But on a higher level, there was a cold war agreement across most spheres that mages did mage things and everyone else should stay out of it and that followed on down the line with the vampires, changelings, and werewolves.

Even if the mechanical power structures were as @Ganymede pointed out apples to rocket launchers when you laid them side by side from template to template, the optics of restricting one template when giving another full freight to kinda just do whatever the fuck they wanted would have quickly devolved things into a crisis state.

On a game where its just mages and only mages, these rules can be enforced but it has to be enforced from the jump. The other thing that creeps beside power in mage games is the relaxation of what staff will allow as the game goes on, people stop being polite, and they get more and more worn out and worn down by the day to day of game running. Add to this in either single or multi-sphere scenario, plot focus as to start tight and stay tight which is also one of those 'this sounds great but when does this ever actually happen when humans start doing human?'

@Derp

I love Cheezits but it's entirely the case that I might love them too much.

@Bad-at-Lurking said in Sexuality: IC and OOC:

I will straight up admit to being pretty skeptical of women playing gay men because (and this is the part where I'm likely to get roasted), most of the examples I have personally seen have been, ah, problematic. I think that's the most diplomatic way to put it.

I have had this experience. A number of times higher than 1. My worst encounter with it was on Haunted Memories but most of the time since, it's been more often than not its been represented by straight or bi women primarily attracted to men who have a kink for gay male porn. Or that's how it reads to me - problematic fetishization of gay sex because it turns their player's crank.

That said, I'm quite certain that I've met some women playing gay men and had no idea because their efforts didn't come across the least bit squicky. Confirmation bias in action.

Derp, too many tabs open. Nothing to see here.

I will add to this that tentpole games can be but are often difficult to be casual in, if the definition of casual is that fade in and out of engagement and RP as interest/life/schedules allow.

It's totally possible to have casual in a large population setting but it often means being okay with being distant of plot and having people to RP with who are chill about your dropping in and out, as time goes on.

I struggled a lot with Arx at the time because at least then it was pretty difficult to keep up with stuff with my then work travel schedule and found that I couldn't be casual, much to my disappointment.

It's so good. The best day.

Not dumb at all. I think what might be a task to manage is the theme: low-tech 50s.

I like this theme but it's one of those things that if you want purity on the theme, it'll require some monitoring of players when they let non-50s things seep into the game.

This is something to think about in terms of how theme is theme and how much you want people to stick to it.

@Ganymede Figure it out, bud.

@Fantom Because it sounds like your buddy DJs bat matzvahs but wants to get into running MU*s when you lead with that?

I donate platelets about once a month, which I actually enjoy doing especially in 2020. It at least feels like a positive contribution in some direction instead of helpless screaming into the void. And it has benefits like forcing me to eat enough iron-rich foods to stay on top of my donation game.

I made my last donation appointment a while back, forgetting that Saturday was Yom Kippur. It was too much trouble to cancel the appointment, so I went anyway. I just wasn't hydrated enough, which I'm now finding out three days later makes a huge difference in how quickly you bounce back from donating.

Lesson learned but Lort, I am tired.

I've been thinking a bit about this topic after a conversation about the natural lifespan of a game. By that I mean, a game starts, it trucks on for a while, and then it comes to an end. There's no real intended time frame in which this all happens because for most games their lifespan is kind unique. Some games make it less than a year before staff officially put out the call that the wrap up is coming and some games, though rare, last a decade or even longer. Most games, though, live somewhere in the middle of those two places.

But in those cases, these are games that have a start, middle, and end. The quality of these phases are variable, though generally games with healthy/functional staff and player bases tend not to come to an abrupt end but it's been known to happen every so often.

But this discussion isn't primarily about those games. It's more about the games that seem to be doing well or well enough and something happens. It can be a big thing that the game didn't necessarily see coming or had blinders on about and then it happens and they have no contingency in place to deal with it. Or it's a lot of small things. Staff makes a series of wrong turns in administrative decisions or game morale decisions that causes the game to start taking on water.

And often in these cases, the game is too in the weeds or too busy defensively circling wagons to see what's really happening. And usually about the time someone with a fairly objective point of view says 'hey, what's all this water doing in here? Guys?' ... that's about five minutes before the game cracks in half and sinks to the bottom of the ocean, no Celine Dion warbling included.

So, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be a game runner and I think that also includes doing merciless health checks on your game. You have to scoop out your personal feelings and protective instincts and idea of good taste out as much as you can and set them aside and do a cold audit of what's going on, what's good and working, and what's bad and needs help and hopefully long before the game hits that premature point of watery death, no return.

I have this idea that most games die before their time because of things they don't see as a problem or don't critically connect before its too late. It would be maybe productive to discuss these shouldn't-have-been-a-surprise-but-wellllll.... events as it may be helpful to current, former, and aspiring game runners to keep these things in mind and look out for unconsidered pitfall so games don't have to come to a shuddering halt before their time.

A Note: The purpose of this thread isn't to trash current or former games, though some will offer up likely unvarnished critiques of things that happened that didn't go well. Imma try not to frame up anything I say as an attack but you do you boo boo.

@tyche

I am well aware of the federal structure with regard to seeking development permissions. This is maneuvering to have access to resources (relatively few to land mass and location) and resource transport (Keystone, etc.) without having to be challenged by Indian people for it.

However, I'd like to point there are few recognized tribes relative to the whole of us that have anything worth developing. PacNW tribes have negotiated resource treaties which as worked out well for them and there are some tribes in Maine and the mid-Atlantic who also have resources that they can manage and financially draw from. The key here though is these tribes didn't endure the disruptive reach of forced relocation.

The rest of us? We have nothing. My tribe spans the Canada/US border. The Alberta side has resource access due to the energy boom in Alberta. The US side doesn't have dick and for most relocated tribes, that's also the situation. The coal plant you reference is on tribal land that on the whole spans 4 states. Most of the Navajo nation has nothing, the distribution of wealth from that plant has definitely not been evenly distributed. Most Nation members live at or below the poverty line.

Most BLM land is land that no one wants for a reason- no matter how resource rich it may be, it's so far away from population centers. The resource draws have to be enough to make it worthwhile to invest in an infrastructure system to extract and most tribes lack that start-up.

In the mean time, there are other benefits that we lose by having our sovereignty revoked. Given the poverty, rates of addiction, and lacking access to education, these are lifelines to Indian people in an already bad situation. There is likely no transition plan to deal with these disruptions, so while I understand that this is a resources game - people's lives depend on recognition.

I noted that NPC kids are a thing, which often becomes an issue when people use their NPC children to be assholes in various ways.

This includes:

NPC children being supernaturally capable and able to put the zap on PCs without consent or any good story reason to do this - i.e. just cause chaos because.
NPC children being used to insult/grief PCs. And by this I don't mean a kid having a tantrum or being a little obnoxious, I mean more like the player using them as a form of passive aggressive metaposed hostility towards another PC they don't like.
NPC children just being fucking annoying- posing them in ways that pull focus and entirely derail a scene.
NPC children as conflict shields. Taking your children to a scene where your PC might get bootpartied by storyline or other PCs as a way of trying to avoid IC consequences or outcomes.

All these things should go without saying but there are enough players who have done this on other games with their NPC offspring that I feel that these things need be said provided that these are things that you think are a no-go.

ETA: NPC children committing violence or illegal activity because your PC would never but That Little Homicidal Scamp just can't help himself when he gets around knives....

Every. Fucking. Thing. About. Today.

...Today.

(Except the steak I had for dinner which I ate with my hands like a goddamn savage)

@Arkandel

I find this sort of thing sticky but sometimes necessary.

I'll be honest that in the scenario that if I were to run my game (this is staggeringly levels of unlikely) there are people exclusively by reputation that I would politely turn away. This list is maybe 2 people long and entirely likely obvious as to who they may be. While they may be as people not entirely garbage, their penchant for burning down games is entirely more than I would want to take on.

It gets a little more murky when people ban and pre-ban each other based on petty differences of opinion and pedestrian dick moves, because you don't necessarily want to open the door to normalizing bringing a chemical weapon to a slap fight.

But then I guess, in that case it becomes a 'vote with your feet' proposition for the other people playing. Pre-banning players for petty cause is a red flag about how the game administration will likely go and go forward, good luck and god speed to you if you want to keep playing there.

The return of Twin Peaks.

@Arkandel said in Roleplaying writing styles:

What's your favorite 'roleplaying writing style'? Do you have any biases either way? Do you consider yourself an elitist?

I like some hint at the PC's personality and world view in poses, which is often the most effective in meta. But meta is a tricky balance to strike and not everyone does it well. I have no idea if I do it well but I do go for the meta narrative.

I don't know if I consider myself elitist but I don't have a lot of patience for two types of posing:

The first:

Enormous fucking paragraphs that go on and on and on without line breaks. I don't know what it was about Dark Spires specifically that seemed to really be into this kind of pose style but there were multiple people there that would just go bananas with huge fucking paragraphs.

Like for real, I don't care if you're just told me the secret truth of all the universe - I am for real not going to waste my time having to read that because there's so much in there, I can't respond to. any. of. it.

On the contrary I've learned to associate brevity with subpar roleplay.

This is my second. There are people who are great at writing with effective brevity but often, this is not the case. And it tends to follow for me too that I also associate this with the other side of the bad RP coin. If the pose is super flat and too short, it tends to signal to me that the other person isn't paying attention/doesn't give a shit.

So, how do you like to pose? What's your preferred style in your partners?

I just want a little personality and hype in the words but that's so subjective sometimes. I struggle with RPing up against what feels like flat poses, where the writing feels kind of limp, lifeless, and ho hum.