Posts made by Ganymede

@Derp said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

...until when? You have a massive list of stuff that people aren't allowed to engage in and everyone must completely memorize?

It's not about "allowed to engage in"; it's about giving staff some heads-up about what might really hurt someone. And if staff has some idea of what might really hurt, they could also tell the player before approval that the game is probably not for them.

@Ghost said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

You may be right. It's not like rpprefs kept instances from taking place, and I'm sure there are some instances of stating "not looking for TS" made it hard for some players to find RP.

Probably. But putting it up front means you can bar someone from engaging in that kind of RP with you. And if that means you don't get the RP, then maybe the game isn't for you.

As Derp has said multiple times since time in memoriam, not every game is for everyone. That's a truism. And I concur that there is an expectation that if a player makes a character that staff can and will bend over backwards to have them included. That is just not the case anywhere.

And this is what I think backgrounds are for. I couldn't give two shits about why you are a world-class fencer and bourbon distiller, but I really would like to know if your concept and RP preferences are ill-suited for the blood-orgy Vampire game I'm running.

I wanted to add something.

Maybe we ought to add in our character applications a little section where people can inform staff as to RP that they do not want to experience or be a part of. I'm thinking about the Arx thread and the post which triggered trauma in a player. I don't intend to victim-blame at all, and the section should not have to explain why that RP makes the player uncomfortable, but that little section might at least give staff a heads-up as to what might be inappropriate in a game-wide setting.

@Ghost said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

I worry more about how people are treating each other at the dinner table than I do whether or not they think my casserole is amazing.

Yes, but getting people to treat each other better at the table takes more than adding an extra fork or spoon to each setting. People may tolerate the lack of napkins if your casserole is damn good, but good guests are hard to come by.

That tortured analogy aside, I surmise that many players aren't going to fully understand the +xcard function or motivations initially, so there will be belittling and there will be teasing because: (1) this happens in social settings, regardless; (2) this happens often where people are relatively anonymous; and (3) this happens more often where people have social issues.

I wish I knew of a panacea to make people feel more comfortable on games, but at this moment I don't. I support tools to report bad players, but I'm not so sure I support tools which are calculated to terminate forms of role-play due to a player's personal experiences. It's impossible to predict with any efficacy what will set anyone off, and even more so on games which are clearly by design meant to cater to "darker" topics.

WoD games used to have things like +rpprefs which would alert others to what RP you want your PC to engage in. Maybe that's all we can do insofar as "personal agency" in setting your personal boundaries for others not to cross. If there were a clear policy along the lines of "set your prefs and respect others' prefs" I would certainly get behind it. And since we have done it before, we aren't re-inventing the wheel.

@Ghost said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

"A player in this scene has pressed the X-Card. Please either FTB, end the scene, or continue without the following element(s): <string>"

Won't this provoke more anxiety?

Think about it. What if you're in a scene with more than a handful of people? The other players may be confused about why <string> is so distasteful, but they don't know who pulled the card out so they cannot converse with the card-puller. So they have to publicly lodge a request for staff to get to the bottom of things. And that seems reasonable.

But what if staff isn't around? What if it is impossible to continue without that element? I can see why other players would be kind of pissed: in their opinion, play has stopped for no good reason and they cannot escape without obviating the RP as a whole or waiting until a staff member finally shows up.

But what about the card-puller? Although no one should feel responsible for what makes them uncomfortable, I can see how this would make an anxious person feel terrible about themselves because they are the ones stopping play.

I'm uncertain if this actually solves the problem; rather I can see it exacerbating it. All it takes is for one nimrod to make some dry comment about "snowflakes" or something stupid like that, and faith in the system erodes.

@Auspice said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

Relying on commands to tell someone if you want to proceed with rp or not basically signals that you don't trust them enough to have a conversation in which case.....why rp with them to begin with?

I understand, but --

@Pandora said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

With a fairly regular frequency, it comes up that people either don't know their boundaries until they've been crossed, have trouble standing up for themselves, are stressed out by the idea of initiating push-back against uncomfortable IC interactions, and so on.

(Emphasis added.)

I know that topics drift but I feel as if we've wandered away from "what we can do for people who have trouble with or are stressed by telling people off" to a conversation about "people ought to be communicating about their boundaries rather than relying on commands to communicate the same." And I say this because I'd like to discuss more of the former than the latter because: (1) I have no problem with telling people off; but (2) I know that others aren't like me and I want to help them if I can.

@Auspice said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

tbh, for casual RP between two players? I wouldn't want any sort of special commands.

We're adults. I'd like to treat my players as adults who can communicate between one another what they're comfortable with.

To pull the conversation back to where we started, though, I thought we were mulling over commands that may assist people in communicating the breach or existence of a personal boundary.

I will admit to being lackadaisical in following this discussion.

@Auspice said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

Make an opt-in. Make people running scenes, plots, writing shit for the game, etc., label their stuff clearly.

What's the default level of play?

If you have an opt-in, there has to be some expectation of baseline play. What is that baseline? What if baseline RP naturally progresses into a kind of RP that requires an opt-in, but the players involved forget about using the right command and barrel on in?

@Lotherio

If you want to make players use a command to enter adult situations, you have to define it. And then we get into the whole Justice Stewart thing again.

@Arkandel

Let’s set aside the flagpole question.

As I implied, the staff, story, setting, and system are all important to me. I believe the tendency to get mired in mechanics is due to a reasonable reaction to announcing what system will be used. That said, when announcing new games here, posters tend to lead with the system used, so that’s the first thing to hook onto. And some people have strong feelings on particular systems, so they get caught up with that issue rather than examining the other important issues.

I’ll stop there for now.

@Arkandel said in What game system would you prefer for a big-tent nWoD project?:

Conditions, aspirations etc do very little to affect that.

If you say so. But let me go back to your original opinions.

@Arkandel said in What game system would you prefer for a big-tent nWoD project?:

The exact mechanics, XP availability, city selection and aspirations code aren't very significant in terms of making a flagpole game.

What's a flagpole game?

IMHO staff selection, plot availability and setting (meaning making different interesting concepts available, so think 'post apocalyptic' or 'dark ages' rather than 'Chicago') are all far, far more impactful.

I think this is a truism. If you have good staff, good plot, and a good setting, people will tolerate the clunkiness of a system; conversely, if you have a good system that people like people will tolerate deficiencies in staff, plot, and setting. If you take the four different parts I think you could fairly debate that strength in one or more will off-set deficiencies in the others. So I don't think the opinion is really going to spark a meaningful or spirited debate.

These days modern codebases matter.

But this was always the case. We used to have spirited MOO v. PennMUSH v. TinyMUX debates.

@Derp said in What game system would you prefer for a big-tent nWoD project?:

Arx has custom built everything. There are no books you have to go out and read. Everything is on the website, and it is literally learn-as-you-go. WoD is not those things, and people cannot be bothered to even so much as read their books, much less the website -- because it's not learn as you go. They expect to be taught the relevant parts.

This always bugged the hell out of me.

I mean, you can learn as you go too, right? You can fake it until you make it. (It worked for my RL relationships, at least.) That's how I learned Mage 2E, which I'm still not proficient at: I made a PC that was magic-lite and learned more and more as I went ... which is kind of how the game is calculated to play out too.

I say the same things about Conditions, Aspirations, Anchors, and Touchstones. They are not difficult concepts. And, frankly, I don't know how you can actually play the game as designed without them. Which is why taking them out of a game is a hard-no for me: you're pretty much crippling the shit out of a large number of powers (especially Conditions).

I also want to add: WoD 2E is best-suited for the learn-as-you-go approach because of the linear advancement model.

Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse.

Definitely the best of the Spiderman movies.

Probably one of the best superhero movies ever made.

Maybe one of the best movies, period.

@Arkandel said in RL things I love:

Up's first five minutes are er, up there with any romantic movie ever made.

Definitely. And it is done with just the opening dialogue. The montage is silent-theater genius.

Speaking of which, WALL-E is up there with any romantic movie ever made. Change my mind.

@eye8urcake

So, Up, right?

EDIT: Moved posts on request from this Game Development thread to the Hog Pit thread about the same game.

@JinShei

Frozen Ghost -- Dream Come True.

(Sappy note: this is one of my all-time favorite songs. The lyrics are plain, simple, and heartfelt. Plus, I like 12-strings.)

@Kestrel said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

Whether intended or not, the phrasing of this policy, as expressed here in particular, can come across as pretty victim-blamey. I can only speak for myself that it wouldn't in any way encourage me to come forward with any complaints I had, because it implies that doing so isn't the adult thing to do, and makes me somehow lesser. It also puts the person complaining on equal footing in staff's eyes with the person they're complaining about, as a baseline.

I cannot argue against how the policy makes you feel, but I would suggest that you are reading too far into it.

I think it irrefutable that expecting players to work issues out among themselves is reasonable. I also think it irrefutable that if this cannot be done, for whatever reason, contacting an authority is the next step to resolving the situation. Frankly, this is exactly what I tell my own kids to do: don't fucking bug me unless you can't work it out between you two, you little shits. (And, as they are twins, they are on equal footing with each other and this is another problem all on its own.)

So I believe Faraday's policy to be appropriate and reasonable for most if not all issues. Going to staff immediately about harassment or discomfort is perfectly reasonable and fits within the policy. Ultimately, whether by +warn or some other command that alerts staff to inappropriate behavior, what we are discussing is a way for players to: (1) notify staff of a problem; and (2) have staff resolve the issue.

It has been said by greater minds than I that you cannot invent code or implement policies to change social issues. Harassment and the anxiety associated with reporting the same are social issues. The issues I see in this discussion is whether there is value to implementing more tools, and, if so, how should those tools work. Faraday's policy is of itself another tool: a printed policy.

@Arkandel said in What game system would you prefer for a big-tent nWoD project?:

XP is not the problem. It's a paper tiger. It's idleness that kills game after game. This cannot be fixed via systemic changes, it requires active recruitment of STs and promoting those plots aggressively.

I concur in part and dissent in part. A game should focus on how it will keep the players occupied, first and foremost, but your advancement system is important to its longevity and continued success.

@Pandora said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

Of course it bears keeping in mind that oftentimes it'll be someone in no position to be making threats that's hitting the abort mission button.

Granted.

If I recall, the command also triggered a message on a channel for staff indicating when the command was used. And I think the command also stated that such a notice was sent to staff. There was also a command that would initiate a timestop and notify staff. If you wanted to continue, you had to go into the timestop and wait for staff. The combination of the two was an effective deterrent, I think, for people that wanted to prey on anyone ICly.

I mean, it's been a long time since that game. We're in a culture that shies away from PK as a method of resolving IC conflict, which is fine. And I may have been sheltered from a lot of the predatory behavior because I have the online presence of being smashed in the dick with a hammer.

I'm just tossing out another suggestion based on observations.

@Kestrel said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

If you're exclusively active in the kinds of WoD games that get circulated and advertised on MSB, maybe you can't fathom why it can kind of seem like a big deal to reach out to someone, or to staff, and let them know there's a problem.

I think this is an unfair generalization. I know plenty of the people that have chimed in here have played on WoD games, have a lot of friends to play with, and yet still suffer from the same anxiety you do. Let's just presume that this is a problem across all genres, regardless; I know I am, even if I don't suffer from the problem because I am actually a complicated algorithm invented by a feline practitioner of law.

@Ghost said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

Because who wants to explain to strangers personal past traumatic experiences or personal fears?

This is kind of why I like +warn.

I mean, yes, the point of the command is to tell people "please stop or I will kill you". Some people may be anxious to say this to another player. But if I recall correctly, the point of Pandora's discussion is to conceive of a command that will discourage another player from ICly engaging in conduct which would make another player uncomfortable. What better way to discourage this than by saying "keep this up and you'll be a grease spot"?

Creeps and predators online are generally cowards (there are a few exceptions).