Posts made by Ghost

Congrats to the TRUE Philadelphia Eagles...

YAAAAAAAY THE NOT-PATRIOTS WIN!!!!

<<Looks at @Aria >>

YAAAAAY SOMETHING AWESOME HAPPENED TO A PHILLY TEAM!!!!

@auspice Yeah, it's unfortunate. I see what you're saying.

I guess my mindset is the best you can do is try to create a culture of fostering collaboration.

At the end of the day, you can lead a horse to water, dump it on its head, push their face into it, beg the horse, pray to the horse gods, whisper it it, and learn to speak in centaur language...

...but if they don't wanna drink, no amount of prodding will make them do so.

Edit/Afterthought: BUT...with these collaborative tools and ideas in place then it would be more apparent whether or not you're dealing with a player who isn't proactive or just needs help finding collaboration.

@seraphim73 I see it it, too, and by a decline in proactive players, I mostly see it come in the form of players who don't ask for, seek out, or present options for RP. The last few years I've seen a lot of players wallflowering in OOC rooms waiting for other players to start RP, or events forming, but not a lot of hunting down RP and collaborating with others.

Ideas: I think the more people dig into their characters for content, the better it'll be. I think these wikis having less sections about who your character is and more about where you would like your character to go would help. Things that could help (and I've seen some of these help) might be:

• A wiki section on character pages for plots theyre involved in and help they're looking for
• A list of plot elements that theyre hoping to find for their character (TBH, I don't see WHY saying openly that a player is hoping for a romantic interest for their character, or characters to help with a plot involving the disappearance of their sister would hurt)
• Any other wiki sections dedicated to what the player would like to do

I guess my mindset is that just details about the character or images is okay, but that sort of content tells a lot about the character and is less overt about ways to get into RP with them.

So maybe a trend of these kinds of RP collaboration seeking content on character wikis could help with that.

I truly believe that some of the lack of proactivity is due to shyness, not wanting to beg for RP, and a general difficulty with knowing how to arrange collaboration. If my theory is correct, this could help.

@surreality We can absolutely agree to disagree, and this is definitely the right place for suggesting what you think would work better. Thanks for your feedback!

@surreality When I state that I believe players should weather abuse from other players, and that avoiding abuse is metagaming, then I welcome you to do so. When I state that playing with your friends is metagaming, then I welcome you to do so.

I meant in no way to imply such a thing, so I will clarify for you what I meant so that we can be clear and consider this misunderstanding closed.

No one said that you were bad, or a cheater, or should suffer abuse from other players.

What I meant in the greater context of that conversation was, in that example, that players doing OOC research on other players to determine a character-level decision is, in its own way, a form of metagaming. It's using OOC information as an IC process, and however justified it may or may not be, it is playing the player and not keeping it IC.

If you disagree, this is fine. But I did not call you a cheater, nor do I suggest or feel that you should suffer abusive players to avoid metagaming.

There are other processes to handle abusive roleplayers, and I am a very big supporter of them. No one should have to suffer abusive behavior for the sake of finding RP, and in a perfect world, no one should have to care who is RPing who, because people are behaving appropriately.

@surreality Please highlight the part where you feel that I implied or outright stated that you should suffer abuse from abusive players or were not allowed to play with friends.

Please do so understanding that, at the time, my context was referring to the way players often tend to hunt for OOC information to determine how to behave icly, which is by definition metagaming...

...and yet still I do not see where anything in there saying that @surreality is a cheaty mccheatypants who should deal with abuse and is not allowed to play with friends.

Is this really necessary?

That is not what I was saying, nor intending to say, and I hope this response brightens your day with the knowledge that I meant no such thing and that there is no reason for hurt feelings.

@surreality said in Social Systems:

@faraday I have to second this, because I am more than a little disgusted by the idea that 'I know I like playing with this player and we have fun when we write together so I'm going to play with them when I get the chance to' is an indication that I'm a bad evil cheating metagamer abusing all the good-hearted players everywhere with my cheaty cheaty ways.

ETA: I'm doubly digusted that 'that player was gross and abusive to me in the past OOCly, and I don't want to play with them again' apparently also makes me a horrible cheaty cheater McCheatsALot.

No one said or implied any of these things.
Absolutely nothing that I wrote said or suggested that playing with your friends is metagaming or that people should be subject to abuse from abusive players. I regret that you interpreted it this way.

@faraday I love, love collaboration and please understand that I don't have enough time or space to list out every contingency and corner case, but I think you and I really are similar.

For example, I would love to read a log where someone is planning on poisoning or lying to my character, then reach out to those players and say "I loved that log, how can we collaborate to make this awesome?" That, I think, is really in the best spirit to write out memorable stories on these games.

While I have opinions on the term "metagaming" (using the above example re: poisoning), I could even see planning your own dramatic angles regarding attempted poiaoning to be fun and not meta. I was simply more referring to blurring the lines between a character acting on information their player knows, rather than finding creative ways to add to the story from the character's perspective.

@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...

@ganymede @Arkandel I knoooooooow and I love you both dearly for those two really specific points. I agree. Remove those people from the political arena and avoid them.

But it's just a damned shame that I can't RP with every single approved character and expect the same level of metagaming ethic when it comes to that kind of stuff.

PLAYING THE PLAYER is like:

VLAD SAYS SOMETHING

• Who plays Vlad?
• Ask around
• No one knows him? Page him with "hey where else do you play?"
• wikistalk
• check if he is using a PB you hate

If your search turns up to be negative:

• Your character doesnt believe him
• Never RP in a room with them again

If you know him and like his player?

• Page "LOL OMG ARE YOU??? HIIIII"
• Plan RP together

If you don't know who they are

• Proceed with caution, ask OOC if they're lying

Like...I know we all know people who do this lol.

And so my while involvement in this thread has mostly been because I wholly prefer "stop paging me and dice me, bro" as an alternative.

@ganymede said in Social Systems:

Imagine how fun it would be if vampires were to play their requiem rather than their players' erotic fantasies birthed from teenage fiction.

To the rest of your post, though?

I think some of us are really good at writing it through and handling it as a cooperative story. Nothing is better to me on these games than when I'm in a group of writers all about writing deception, chaos, lies, and plot twists going in knowing that they are happening and congratulating each other on our writing.

However, there's a concept I've mentioned before that I came up with in my LARP years:

PLAYING THE PLAYER

This is when people make their RP decisions poker-style based on what they know about the OOC person or their likes/dislikes. It's a form of metagaming that is hard to catch and even harder to convince players to stop doing.

In terms of social role play without dice, its the "My character isn't going to believe Tom's new character, because Tom likes making characters who lie, and I don't want my character to be lied to"

I won't get on my soapbox about how this I think has become the norm more than not and why so many Mushers care about which player is playing which bit...but on-topic, Playing the Player is one of my big reasons for being into social rolls.

If we are, in fact, gaming, then it should be what happens IC that determines the flow, and social dice provides a little protection from this kind of metagaming.

@faraday Exactly! We're in sync on this I think.

Social rolls have to make sense, but also have to work within the characters, scene, or setting.

If the bad guy thinks girls are gross, there is no amount of seduction that would make him decide to take the girl back to his room. If your character is a secret service agent, no amount of persuasion would make them take a box from a stranger and put it under the seat of a Senator's convertible.

Since we all like depth and writing so much in this hobby, I don't think that social rolls are a problem, but I think they need to be in proper context.

Sidenote: I've had a LOT of my TT players and some Mushers go the route of oocly explaining their argument and hoping that the justification will handwave the social roll altogether.

"My character is going to tell them that they're a cop and to give them their car"

Roll for it.

"Oh please if a cop told you to give them your car, you would."

Do you have identification? A badge?

"No but..."

Then roll with negative modifiers for lack of looking like a cop, or find some other method like pulling your gun and using intimidation.

I think the above is a good example as to why social rolls are written into systems and shouldn't be handled ad-hoc between the GM without resolution. In some cases social rolls are as vital and treacherous as combat rolls and things like leaping to catch an outstretched hand.

@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.

@faraday In TT/MU I think that can be handled with a policy that states that you can't persuade someone to do something that they knowingly have no interest in doing.

Knowingly

In your example, if you neither want nor need a 2018 BMW, no amount of critical successes would make you decide to throw yourself into debt to buy something you don't need.

BUT... said salesman could leave such a good impression that when your character decides they want a BMW...Charlie was so awesome and comfortable that HE is gonna get that sale.

Using an old example again:

You will never be able to persuade Leia to agree to a Death Star test against Alderaan. Never. BUT you can persuade her to give you information under threat of blowing up Alderaan.

Using social rolls has to include some kind of reasonable context for the social attempt. As fun as it might be, a roll to try to talk the Pope into knowingly leaving the Vatican to make live broadcast midget porn doesn't make sense.

...but you might be able to get him to privately put a porn DVD into a laptop that contains a Trojan virus. But if the Pope has zero interest in porn...a copy of a movie might do the trick.

It's all in the context.

Update: I've added Ortallus to ignore. He's just trying to instigate snippy BS.