Best posts made by Ghost

@arkandel Olivia Munn was the masturbation story. Henstridge is alleging a forceful act against her.

What I feel about this is...what is the proper response? I'm not talking about how to determine guilt vs innocence, but more...the sheer amount of clout the entertainment industry has in many of our recreational lives is fairly high. When you think of the scope, think of it this way:

When a player in the NFL does something someone doesn't like, a jersey gets burned, right?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Miramax_films

There's the Miramax filmography that encompasses hundreds of films from Kevin Smith, Tarantino, Gangs of New York, Bridget Jones, etc.

We're talking the X-Men films, Rush Hour(Ratner), classics like The Graduate and The Usual Suspects.

When you're talking about an industry these people used to prey on others, up to and including Feldman's allegations of Hollywood pedophilia, this could very well encompass and inject a feeling of negativity into whole decades of generation-defining films.

We're nerds.

What happens if Roddenberry or Lucas come up in these allegations? Whedon. Whoever.

My point is, is that these things and industries people love, or have dreamed about, could very well be tied to a hidden society of obfuscated rape.

I know a lot of my posts come back to "is it an RPG game with writing OR a writing group that uses light RPG elements", but I feel that it applies to this topic.

I've played in a lot (and I mean a lot) of TTRPGs (D&D, etc) where the players knew the GM didn't have the balls to use the hitpoints system in a way that would kill their character. In traditional D&D (and all RPGs) there's a system where if you take too much damage, the character is dead. Write up a new character. However, you can always tell when a GM is actually using the "death and dying rules" based on how the characters play.

Using death&dying rules
"I spend my time observing the room, looking for traps, and making sure it's safe before proceeding."

NOT using death/dying rules
"I strip naked and do a Simone Biles floor exercise running series of flips with my wire cutters out, searching for traps as I flip, hoping to snip wires and disarm traps as I tumble."

I often refer to the latter as: "When the character knows they're in a D&D game"

Mind you, I don't argue for absolute and final PC death as the ONLY answer to things, but players behave differently when they know at some level that they have to understand risks on an OOC level and properly play their characters as understanding risk, as well. An absence of RISK outside of the PC's control changes the landscape greatly, and if you leave that risk in the player's hands they will almost always only choose the risks that either promote their PC or are as minimal as possible.

So I agree with you a lot @Ganymede . Were I to run a game I would require that in staff run scenes consent be waived with specific caveats in mind (caveats being things the game shouldn't have anyway, like rape, etc.).

A while back in my TTRPGs I'm a GM of I instituted a few rules that have helped things GREATLY:

1. PC death is never off the table, and the more brazenly risky the action the more likely PC death is an outcome. Play your characters as if they know they're capable of dying.
2. I will always try (within reason) to not have PC death be the only option for failure (ex: instead of everyone dying, they all wake up in a cell and need to escape)
3. The only successes you can achieve without dice rolls is trivial stuff (making coffee, unlocking your own door with a key, ordering off of a menu).

This stuff has helped my TTRPGs but may not necessarily apply to MU in all cases

@faraday We can! And we can still be buddies about it!

I agree though, a preexisting proclivity is reasonable. My examples weren't iron clad, but this is why Google, surveys, etc exist. It's to find those preexisting proclivities, because ad firms pay HUGE sums of money to find those proclivities to avoid trying to sell ice to polar bears.

So I think it's fair to push back with preexisting stances. I think it's good RP to RECON what those preexisting proclivities are so that the social rolls make sense when they happen.

One of my cardinal rules as a GM is that TV, books, and movies can help GMs figure out how scenes can make more sense, so here is another example.

Any caper/investigation show from Miami Vice to Leverage has an investigative phase where their target is researched before the lead female puts on some ridiculous dress and goes into the cocktail party to flirt with and plant a bug on the crimelord. Dexter did it before his killings.

These examples are RP gold and work well with players.

Warrel Dane, singer of NEVERMORE and SANCTUARY (and regular go-to for sountrack entries for yours truly) dies on December 13.

http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/nevermore-and-sanctuary-singer-warrel-dane-dies-of-heart-attack-in-brazil.html#Dt7MgmV0drsPMdkx.01

Nevermore - The Heart Collector

I may have posted something about this years ago, but this is something that is always on my mind when it comes to online games and RPGs. Basically, it goes like this:

1. If no humans ever died in the real world, we'd run into issues of overpopulation, lack of food, CO2 imbalance, etc.
2. In RPGs, if there is not a threat of a PC dying against the will of their player, then outcomes are staged and "fear of failure" ceases to become a thing.
3. In RPGs, if PCs never die, then new players will -always- remain X% of XP behind elder players, who will always remain X% ahead of other players, thus there will be:

• No true reason why positions are ever rotated with new players taking place
• "Capability" is a matter of how old the character is and never the player's ability to RP
• Without the "great equalizer" of PC death, player disenfranchisement grows as players will never be able to compete with older characters.
• Players literally need to stop gaming, quit, get banned, etc to have a character die or taken out of the power rotation

So that's the short version. Here's my minute at the podium about it.

All "my PC dying isn't fun for me" aside (which I know is a common argument to PVP or dice deciding PC death), I personally find games where my character can do ANYTHING with very little fear of death (or other repercussions that would effectively have the character sheet retired) to be rather BORING. I feel sometimes like knowing (as a player) that nothing TRULY bad would never happen unless I approved it takes away any of the suspense of playing a character. Example: If I were playing baseball in real life and could literally control whether or not I missed the ball on a swing of the bat, would swinging the bat remain fun? It's kind of like that for me. Likewise, also knowing that OTHER PLAYERS know that whether or their PC suffers repercussions/death is a matter of their approval often makes me feel like CHOOSING TO ACCEPT REPERCUSSIONS as a matter of "fair play" is a foolish act because you're going to be playing with players who likely wouldn't accept the same kind of fair play.

Here's an example.

A loooong time ago on Fallcoast there was a "Law" faction of PCs designed to investigate and round up criminals. The PROBLEM was that it was a "consent" game, so unless a character consented to being investigated/hunted/killed for their behavior, the LAW sphere really couldn't DO anything about laws being broken by PCs unless staff intervened. So a group of players went off the rails and made this monstrous Frankenstein-like revived undead creature and posted a roleplay of them going "into the ghetto", some NPC upset the Frankenstein, and then what followed was a lengthy display of "Frankenstein creature tearing 'gang members' apart in the middle of the street". Of course, since it was their own ST'd scene apparently ZERO people recorded it with cell phones, called the police, or was there ever any danger to the PCs. It was, effectively, "LOL I don't consent to getting into trouble for this so Frank is gonna just wantonly massacre "Crips" in the middle of the street, and not only will no one call the cops, but this won't really make the news". To make matters worse, despite there being logically left-over evidence of *multiple people being torn apart in the middle of a street in America", the Law/Hunter sphere couldn't do anything truly about it unless the group of people "consented" to being hunted/chased for it.

The PCs involved ultimately went away not because of repercussions from their RP, but because they were caught cheating the XP system.

Now, this isn't a critique of Fallcoast at all, but an example of where lack of fear of PC death, consent systems being entirely hands-off, and "lack of fear of PCs dying due to dice" gets out of control. You get this over-the-top stuff where you can jump out of an airplane without a parachute and still not die unless you consent to it. In my opinion, this kind of stuff leads to roleplay that becomes increasingly over-the-top.

So, here are the ultimate questions I have:

What DO you do about games and RP systems where "dinosaur characters" are able to simply continue to amass XP with over-the-top RP and zero fear of death/repercussions (as if playing a video game in "god" mode where you can go on a 5-star GTA rampage and simply never die)? I know the MU community will likely never thrive in games where dice determine character death and PVP becomes a thing^. How do you make it so that PCs actually have RISK as a factor without requiring it to be an OOC matter? How do you encourage the retiring of PCs that have so much XP they're spending it on "specialty: basket-weaving" because they're maxed out and hanging around with zero risk of failure/end without consenting to it?

^ Note: The last time I saw a "PVP fight to the death" was somewhere in-between 2000-2006 on "SerenityMush" where it was two god-stat level PCs posing stabbing each other repeatedly, breaking bones, gouging eyes, until ultimately one player CUT INTO THE OTHER PC'S CHEST AND DESTROYED THEIR CYBERNETICALLY ENHANCED HEART...and because neither PC consented to PC death...and then was promptly revived on the spot as the cybernetic heart was repaired and returned to RP without issues the next day. Groan.

@insomniac7809 Not to split hairs, but IC "infidelity", if kept entirely IC, is something dealt with after the fact, not something in a story that characters get to opt out of before it happens. Is it better if it's discussed beforehand oocly? Yes. But if everything is entirely IC then things can happen on the spot and the resulting IC roleplay is the fallout.

I see what you're saying, just...<headwobble>.

Yeah, all of what was said before is what has led me to this "All TTRPGs are RPGs, but not all MUs are TTRPGs" belief.

Really, if MUSHers wanted to play ACTUAL World of Darkness or Dungeons and Dragons, they'd be doing just that. Where it always got difficult with me is that I'd join a World of Darkness MUSH expecting to play the WoD TTRPG with lots of prose and writing, but it's really not that. WoD was never truly intended to handle that level of scope (# of players, spheres, staff, etc) but instead was designed to be a small number of players per GM (or be designed like a LARP with specific rules in mind for larger crowds of people).

TTRPG can be like MU in some places, but at the end of the day the general MUSH simply cannot be a TTRPG.

The general MUSHer wants to write out these stories in open-ended states, hit targets on character romances so they can TS their favorite people or whatever. In 20+ years I've -never- found a MUSH that actually uses the full TTRPG rules -or- includes the kind of story focus that a dedicated gaming group would. It's more about writing these stories with or without the system in mind. Heck, in some cases players join the games with a specific setting and really don't know or care about the setting itself. They just want to write specific stories within the general theme of the setting.

In the end I decided that what I wanted was TTRPG, so that's where I fell on the side of things. I feel like there's something healthy and logical about understanding the difference between "MUSH that uses a dice system" and "TTRPG", where the general culture, approach to dice, use of system, focus of RP are simply different.

surreality said in How to put an end to whisper game attacks?:

I was asked, at the time this all happened a year ago, by the fiancee of this person about the matter, as they were already aware of something going on, and were unsure if it was true or false. (I still don't know myself and was clear about this at the time.) That's who got the information and why; it did not go further by my hands.
I do not deny this for an instant.
Anyone who thinks of me as a monster is welcome to do so; it was no different than the screenshots shared with others in this conversation regarding things said about them, my own culpability wholly included.
I told you I did not go throwing this information around in whispers, and I don't

So.

"I shared personal information then but it was justified and I'm sharing screenshots now, but I don't do this ever."

Can we stop this before it becomes a circus of spreading further information about people's private fucking business?

@Misadventure said in Another Played By Creator:

I personally dislike using real people for played bys. Too much baggage.

https://artflow.ai/

Agree with you 100% on this, especially if there's TS involved.

Looking back on it, I feel really guilty about the idea of using an actual living human being's face as a reference to sexual content without their consent.

@magee101 said in Firan Secrets:

@Arkandel said in Firan Secrets:

@surreality said in Firan Secrets:

@magee101 You... do understand that not everyone engages in RP of sexual subject matter to fill their RL need for sexual stimulation/inspiration/contact/release, right?

I considered making a thread with questions like this, stuff we don't usually... ask. "What do you TS for?" would be high on the list.

But I'd be tempting fate there.

I thought you did make a thread with this question, or something similar.

I've been involved in some side chatter lately about the DANGER ZONE questions that MUers don't want to be asked. Oh man, there are a few of those.

Update: I ordered "Hellraiser: Judgment" and will have it by the end of the day. Review coming soon!

I'm hearing rumblings that the creeper may have been banned, but also the people who reported the behavior were banned.

Guess those adventures ain't so infinite?

@arkandel Fuck yes, such a good example.

I can't remember which game it was, but my character accepted information that I, as a player, knew to be a lie. There was even a log on the wiki about how they were going to lie to my character. I read it before the scene and still my character believed it.

A player paged me and asked(sic:) "LOL OMG are you wanting your character to be ruined on purpose?"

Social rolls won't get rid of metagaming, but the fact of the matter is that you and I, Arkandel, should be able to play with each other without me trying to guess what YOU are up to. It should be about perception at the character level. Logs and scenes your character is not aware of should not, but often do, affect character decisions.

So, back to social RP? Ethic like ours should be standard because it's fair to other players. Were that ethic the majority, we probably wouldn't have to wonder about social rolls at all. It would just be a question of what plot twists we wanted to throw at each other.

But I can't help but feel in a culture where little bits of metagaming here and there are considered commonplace that I'd love to be able to effectively lie ICly to any given player and not have it be treated like an OOC betrayal or cheating.

But even with dice, they'd know deception was rolled so...

I got to play a playtest for V5 and I'm 100% on board. I ended up picking up the Elder package. We're definitely going to be playing this game around my coffee table. It's pretty much done everything I'd hoped Masquerade would do:

1. Replace blood points with a hunger system: It's no longer about twinking blood economy, but the relative hunger your vampire gains due to using their blood.
2. Insert a story element that neutralizes a world filled with ancient 4000 xp elder PCs: You can't seem to find a VtM game (online or not) that isn't overburdened with supreme elder cheese characters with every discipline, every stat maxed, and way too much IC comfort. The new setting will make it difficult to be a vampire again.
3. A return to the clans/structure we started with: While I prefer nWoD's system, I always will love the original VtM clans more. It'll be a lot of fun getting back to the world of Camarilla/Anarch with Brujah, Gangrel, Tremere, etc
4. A New Inquisition: This second inquisition element is exciting. It's inserting into the setting that Vampires aren't the apex predators anymore, and maybe in a tongue-in-cheek way suggests that an era of one too many breaches of the masquerade have resulted in a severe need to worry about a 21st century society armed with cell phones, phone cameras, and near instant access to posting on Instagram.

I think the new ownership of the IP has really looked at the downsides of the oWoD game(s) and min-maxy player habits, and has made some really good decisions about how to play in the spirit of the setting.

@Derp Yeah. Just giving the whole thing a 10,000 foot view, I feel like "Why did this result in a banning and an SA accusation coming to staff?" and "Why is the owner of the game saying this incident is involved in the decision to close the game?" are strange, unanswered holes in what is clearly a caustic situation. Having not just started MUing last week, I've seen situations like this before, and in a good number of those situations there is some kind of triangle factor where one person is more invested in it than they claim, or are invested in the situation for reasons they're not making known.

Obviously, with the site closed up there's no log evidence to pore through and (shockingly) the accusation was taken to the one place where people don't need much empirical evidence to "seek rational justice and discourse" (airquotes), there's no way to really figure it out...

...which is why I think the answer to the question if Cobalt had a PC involved with this Isaac bit is pretty important.

Alas, if someone is being accused of sexual assault roleplay, popular or not, they deserve to at least be able to explain their side of things before they're marched off as horrible person #32 this week. In this case the logs don't contain SA and I think it's fair game that they shared their receipts. We are clearly not dealing with some shady person that's surprising people with rape rp.

@Auspice Hahahahahaoh man

No spoilers here.

Infinity War went further than I thought Marvel/Disney would dare go. I was pleasantly surprised by this. The writers are clearly playing hardball and the events of the movie are a lot bolder and have more impactful consequences than I thought they'd be willing to put on screen.

As a Marvel dork who read the Infinity Gauntlet when it came out, I'm an ubernerd for the original Infinity Gauntlet story, and was originally concerned about the deviations the MCU was taking. The original story included characters from the X-Men, Fantastic Four, etc, so due to IP rights they couldn't recreate the comic, so it was a definite risk in terms of fanbase entitlement.

I loved it. A+. Best part for me? I have no idea where the road leads after Infinity War, so I'm now excited to see what comes next.

@kk That's the hardest part; setting boundaries.

On one hand, you don't want to say something that will judge/dodge you out of roleplay, so you (rhetorical you) do your best to come across as easy to work with and accommodating. On the other hand, not setting boundaries up front is something 10x easier to do with someone you already have rapport with. Sometimes players will outright decide not to RP with you if you say you're not looking for TS or relationship RP. There's definitely a subtle art to asserting your boundaries -and- coming across as worth roleplaying with.