@Solstice said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:
I can very clearly see why you'd think that, when this schism was largely along the lines of whether you were suitable to hold power.
Now you do so nearly unilaterally, with two admins racing one another to upvote your every take.
Best possible outcome for you. Thus, healthy.
This has nothing to do with the topic.
@Derp Yanno I think there's great wisdom in what you just wrote.
I agree that there was an existing, festering wound in place for a long time, and this place was really a constant state of "fuck you" and "well fuck you, too". In a way it could be said that there are multiple ideologies in play with the people in the hobby themselves, up to and including people who avoided the Hog Pit altogether.
Clearly, it's obvious which camp I'm in, but I think you're right that a schism/donnybrook/fallout to the point where "if you want this then feel free to create your own space" could actually be the best thing that ever happened to the community because it made it clear that it doesn't always have to be the way it's always been. There IS a problem. Recognize it. Decide what you want to do to make it better OR at least recognize the issue enough to no longer enable it.
Anyway, in the least trolly way I agree that the schism needed to happen, some people needed to be told no, and something absolutely needed to be done about behavior guidelines and the Hog Pit.
@Ganymede said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:
I don't mean to be flippant or nonchalant, but you are looking for answers which have plagued every community or group since forever.
And that may be the long and short of it, really. It could be as simple as that.
@Ganymede said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:
@Ghost said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:
So I ask: Really, what would it fucking take to clear the air and make the environment more 'repaired'?
If you're referring to the community that once inhabited here and its predecessors, then I would only say "time."
I'm not sure what air needs to be cleared, to be honest. Positions and opinions have been stated and re-stated. I presume that posters, past and present, can make their own decisions. So I presume as well that what can be repaired promptly has been repaired.
These presumptions may not be correct, but I've always believed you cannot force two people who dislike or distrust one another for reasons great or small to decide to mend and move forward, unless they want to.
I'm referring to...well...all of it.
I honestly don't know what the answer is, either. A while back I asked myself if the hobby was making me happy, and obviously the answer was "No". The question in my head though is "What can be done to move the needle in the other direction?" and it just seems to me that in classic risk modeling you either ACCEPT the risk or try to MITIGATE the risk. Shit or get off the pot, right?
Having said that, I think one of the concepts in "World War Z" (The Redeker Plan) kind of applies. You're not going to be able to create a solution to save everyone. IF there's a solution, I feel it may require accepting that certain people aren't interested in a positive environment and it may require to put them at risk of being excluded to either make them go away, create their own games, or guide their behavior to adjust.
@Kestrel Look at it this way.
If what you WANT is to get a stab in at someone who has annoyed you, then obviously your response would be flagged as bullying/inappropriate and could lead to getting put on ice. If that's what you want? Then I advise you 100% NOT to do that, but also that that response really wouldn't be on topic to what I was trying to achieve in the OP. It's not helpful and just contributes to the problem as a whole.
However.
If what you WANT is to actually discuss what you think the community as a whole needs to do to become more welcoming, more positive, and less back-biting, then why not do it? There's ways of doing that without needing to attack or belittle others. This includes clearing up issues that could be causing you to have negative emotions, not feel welcome or safe, etc.
You are capable of having a voice for a reason. You have an opportunity here to use it to try to build something better. You can choose to laugh at it and accept whatever the result will be, or you can choose to contribute to people putting their heads together to try to move the community in a direction you hope it will.
One's decision to laugh at this, ignore this, or contribute to this could say a lot to themself as to what level of happiness they'll get out of the hobby now and in the future, really.
@Kestrel Or....you could compose an opinion without thrown shade and deliver it respectfully and not have to worry about any of that?
Edit: Really, there's a number of global issues that even people you -like- are probably contributing to. So what do you think would make for a positive/welcoming community where behaviors like this are a thing of the past?
I've thought about this for a while now. I'd been active on the games for close to 20 years and I've been away for a few years now, and it seems like a lot of the prevalent issues still exist. Ultimately, what I see is a pretty much fractured community with a number of social habits/constructs that 1) make the community somewhat uninviting to newcomers 2) shoots itself (the community) in the foot with societal norms that create a baseline of negativity and 3) has decades of bad blood/grudges that will be hard to untangle.
One of the reasons I ultimately decided to stop playing the games was because I asked myself "What would it take to make the environment less negative?" and my only answer was to try to play as incognito as possible and not involve myself in the OOC stuff...which didn't go well (either I was avoided for not giving personal information and thus not proving myself NOT to be one of the numerous boogeymen -or- OOC drama about other players was thrust upon me in pages regardless of asking for it).
So I ask: Really, what would it fucking take to clear the air and make the environment more 'repaired'?
Here's what I came up with in my head:
This won't be popular, but it's a respectful opinion. YES there are bad/problematic/abusive/stalker roleplayers who have rapey/disturbing/"in some cases illegal" behavior that need to be watched for. HOWEVER, there are also players who (while not as extreme) display very abusive behaviors that need to be culled. A swath of players have gotten on for years by abusing/excluding players for failing to do what they want, toxicly display faux-elitist behaviors to act like being a part of their "clique" is in your best interests, get off on using public forums to belittle other players, their roleplay ability, and their personas, and use staff inclusion and "OOC power in game" to exclude other players who they don't like.
How is this stuff not as bad? I think it's easy to spend years arguing about how bad the super-bad people are (like Cullen or Spider), but while some of those mentioned behaviors are arguable, the end result is that it's negative and breeds an environment of "who's camp you're in" and old school high school "clique" and "mean girls" behavior that doesn't do anyone any good. Whether or not you're popular enough to "sway the mob" should never excuse you from your own bullying, and should never sway the sense of what the true justice is.
If I were running a game, I'd allow any logged bullying behavior from any source (discord, msb, pages) as evidence to warn people about their negative behavior, up to and including the end result of removing them from the game. HOW you behave towards other players, even if it's "shady" or uses some kind of "diagonal attack vector" should matter.
I don't know the right answer for this one. The reality is that even staff who are the most impartial will have players they like and dislike. However, (and please read this) SINCE TOTAL NUMBER OF PLAYERS AND STAFF POPULARITY SEEM TO CONTROL WHETHER OR NOT PEOPLE ACTUALLY LOG INTO THE GAME, this factor usually controls how staff handle issues.
It's in staff's interest to keep as many players on the game as possible, because this affects whether or not people even try to make a bit at the game. So with this in mind there's a lot of quasi-collective bargaining when it comes to issues. "If I decide this way, will a ton of players leave my game and take my player-base with me?" It's a thing. Some times the end results aren't about fairness. Players tend to ignore certain behaviors they see to "not rock the boat" so a lot of bad behavior goes untouched out of fear of "losing roleplay partners" or "not being welcome anymore".
So a LOT of bad stuff just goes untouched, festers, and gets worse over time because the motivations behind DOING SOMETHING or NOT DOING SOMETHING tend to fall always in line with whether or not it'll affect the game, roleplay, or "popularity currency".
Which is why people like OPP often get culled: It's because they're so universally disliked that it's an easy choice to auto-ban them, but other bullies who have their own clique often go untouched because culling one of them could mean losing 10 other players (even if, in my opinion, they all enable each other and games are better off without all 10 of them, anyway).
@ZombieGenesis I'm jealous as hell. We played the AAAAAAAASSSSS off of SFRPG back in the day. I'll be doubly jealous if you're using the card system to do the combats because that made it so much better.
For those not in the know, you could print out these little move cards like "light punch, medium punch, heavy punch" and on the cards would be the modifiers (+2 speed, +2 damage) etc.
Well, when you were "fighting" someone else you'd pick your move on a card and play it face down, then do initiative.
The way it worked was simple.
BLOCK had a speed of like +6 so you'd almost always be able to block FASTER than someone could do a Dragon Uppercut. So "mr badass" would think they're about to clean your clock so they'd play their "dragon uppercut" card face down, but if you ANTICIPATED that they were going to do this...you might put your "jump back" card face down. Voila. You jumped out of the way.
It kind of recreated the concept of 2 players going PVP trying to anticipate the other player's next move. Fun stuff. BUT OH GOD DON'T EXPECT TO FIGHT CHUN LI WITH A STARTER CHARACTER. She's got like 40,000 dots on that WoD-style character sheet.
Yeah, for all my "these are the weird IC/OOC blend things in the hobby", I'm not above admitting I've done some wish fulfillment, too. I don't think there's anything wrong with it per se.
HOW AND EVER. Here comes my caveat.
I think there are different grades of wish fulfillment, and the deeper the emotional tie to the wish fulfillment is, the more responsibility I think the "player with the wish fulfillment" has to keep themselves in check.
Example:
Obviously, once you get into #3 territory all I recommend is the player of said wish thinks long and hard about their level of emotional attachment and how it could be a stressful experience for the other player (unwitting grantee of said wish fulfillment) if a level of control and reasonable guidelines aren't kept in check.
Having been an unwitting fulfillee to something very emotionally unchecked by another player, I can say it often doesn't end well and I felt like 50% shit about it. 50% because I can't hold myself responsible for things I didn't know were going on in someone's RL, but the other 50% of me was the empathetic human that felt for the person...even while they were losing their shit on me.
@faraday said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:
I agree. I played on a few pure-consent games early on in my MUSH days and I hated it. It was like playing cops and robbers with small children "I shot you!" "No you didn't!"
OMG I've used this exact analogy too. It's spot on.
Laser Tag > "Guns in the yard" because at least that little laser tag vest would make the ruling.
I think I'm looking for some advice on this one.
My friend (a non-MUer so this doesn't involve anyone any of you know) is starting to get very difficult at "table time" when it comes to their depression/passive aggressiveness. I love the guy, but they're very "edgy" in terms of how they approach their emotions. They're the type that say things like "if this ever happens you better say goodbye because I'll be going to jail", so you never really know if approaching them about the behavior will result in a blowup or not.
Regardless, here's the issues.
The real hard part is...I love the guy. One of my best friends. When things are good they're great, but every 2nd or 3rd game night it's just this massive black cloud that's REALLY difficult to navigate. I want to approach them as a brother and recommend counseling and seeing a doctor about it, but I'm afraid they'll go super edgelord about it or storm off out of the friendship out of "chase me" rage. I want to try to promote the game night as something he can do to ESCAPE these feelings and just hang out and have a good time, but I'm not yet truly okay with them quitting the gaming group. I'd like to see them happy.
But...I'm starting to feel like if they don't rein it in a bit and stop making every 2nd or 3rd night about their passive aggressiveness that maybe he SHOULD be replaced with someone who isn't so difficult to navigate.
Thoughts? Any advice?
edit:
The super rough statements like "Well I got the haircut but I no longer care about my personal appearance" (note: this is not paraphrasing. That's exactly how they word it) really tugs at my heartstrings for the person, but at the same time it's somewhat....
Like...how the fuck do you respond to that, and are you doing something wrong by not responding to that? Addressing that sort of thing is way out of my league and to be honest sometimes I really don't have enough spoons to make other people's shit MY shit, yanno?
@tirit said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:
Do you have to mandate it?
I think there's ways to mandate it without being Alpha about it, but the alternative is to leave it to constant bartering. Not that players are children, but I think leaving it up to constant bartering is kind of like letting a child decide when they're grounded: a few will be noble about it but you'll eventually end up with kids who refuse to ever face responsibility for anything.
Staff could help this along by
A good example as to how I've put this into play (and it has worked) is that I will 100% allow a TPK (total party kill) in my RPG sessions, which will create an element of excitement as players know that failure is an option, and then have all of the players wake up in a dungeon and the scenario turns into a jailbreak arc.
So they failed. They all "died". Now they're in a Riddick-style or Guardians of the Galaxy style scifi prison break story. Maybe they become friends with the mutant rat boy that scurries around the jail tunnels and after they escape rat boy becomes a beloved NPC?
Who knows. But if failure is never an option or is fought against you never have the joy of seeing the look on their faces when you introduce something unexpected that was an alternate storyline based on a fail result.
@ghost said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:
Social dice ARE acceptable to allow for deception, lies, and IC manipulations, and failure to roleplay the results and/or metagame around social failures would be punishable by suspension (up to being removed from the game)
Note:
I -get- that (some) players don't think it's fun to act on incorrect information, their characters being manipulated, or to be moved down a path of making bad decisions because their character was lied to. Some players also think making those bad IC decisions because they failed a manipulation roll is fun!
But the alternative of "oocly lying or withholding information" (which I've been forced to partake in) never ends well, which is...
I mean...FFS fiction is FILLED with amazing characters who are impossible to write in MUs without outright constantly OOCly lying to other players who refuse to consent to failure. Characters like Gaius Baltar from BSG or Crowley from Supernatural or Margaery Tyrell from Game of Thrones, all of whom weren't technically abusive or rapey in ways that most games would accept, but because of the issue in this topic are near-impossible to play unless you receive notarized consent in triplicate that the other player is okay with being lied to...but then they're most likely to act 100% of the time as if they don't trust your character.
See...I'm not so convinced that "consent" is across the board a 100% good thing. YES, consent is 100% important when it comes to activity that could lead to abusive or sexually abusive roleplay. 100% full stop.
But somehow it's (consent) been blended into meaning things like:
I feel like at some point in time the concept of consent and "failure" were blurred into something...disruptive. I've personally been threatened OOCly or harassed for making character decisions that impacted other players without their consent. Shit, I got banned from Serenity for it. A number of players sort of latch to other players and then "consent" becomes a vehicle to control other players, their IC decisions, etc.
So when it comes to incentivizing IC failure I feel like the most immediate thing you can do to actually incentivize IC failure is to codify it into the game rules that A CHARACTER FAILING AT SOMETHING IS NOT A CONSENT ISSUE.
If I had my way, MUs would work like this:
Ultimately, what I'm saying, is that I feel the only way you can incentivize IC failure is to mandate it.
From my Vampire LARP days there's this concept I like to call "Stock Exchange Dice Bartering", which became a bad habit in my tabletop games. Basically, players would AVOID putting XP/Dice/etc into specific skills, and when it came time for a pass/fail result they'd all holler at the GM at the same time with ideas. The GM would then pick the best idea they heard, run with it, dice weren't rolled, and the results were roleplayed. This led to a REALLY bad tabletop RPG habit with some of my players where they'd do things like this:
Diceless/freeform systems mean that you are constantly going to have players playing around with "ghost dice" and using these OOC-leveraged explanations as to why they should and should not fail (up to and including a simple "well I didn't consent to failure and that's not fun for me, so no one gets to win" Because that's really the issue with incentivizing IC failure and players that refuse to play with scenes or other players in situations where a win for the other player means a loss for another player.
So, again, I can't stress enough that where the line is drawn on how much of a "GAME" it is determines where the whistle is blow, the goals are scored, and where the rules apply. If it's a game, it needs rules, it needs referees, and it needs to determine pass/fail results. The byproduct of this is "success", "failure", "cheating", and "poor sportsmanship", and when you look at it from that perspective...most of us have been used to these concepts since childhood and have a whole lifetime of understanding those concepts. BUT if you leave it to "negotiation" then all you will ever do is negotiate, and while you're busy negotiating with people who don't play fair you will be critically impacting players who DO play fair.
This is one of those moments where I wish I could have started the thread so that my reply will be at the top and easily found (and ensured that it is read). This may be a little long-winded, but please bear with me, here.... (because I know I've dropped this before on MSB and I will -always - feel that this is relevant).
Almost 2 decades into the hobby, reflectively, I think I've come to realize two MAJOR quandaries with the MU hobby in general that are responsible for probably most of the highs and lows of the hobby. The first (which is irrelevant to the topic, but I'll dip) is "Is it cybersex between players or is it in-character romance?" The second, however, I think is a KEY concept that is responsible for so much frustration, bullshit, and confusion in these games that it may very well be a tangle of computer cables that may never be fixed:
"Is it a GAME or a Cooperative Writing Hobby?"
Here's why this applies to the question of "How do we incentivize IC failure" and potentially why the hobby may never, ever, ever be able to communally incentivizing IC failure a reality, and here are important things I think that everyone needs to understand.
The online tabletop RPG community has the same issues: Pervy/rapey players, powergamers always wanting things their way, people min-maxing their stats to try to win everything they'll roll, and a TON of other bad habits when it comes to sharing the table, trying to control win/fail results, and being cooperative with others. HOWEVER, many of these games are attractive to RPG players (like me!) because often they use existing RPG settings and systems as a front-end (World of Darkness, Star Wars, Superheroes, etc), so a lot of people who might search on Roll20 for a tabletop RPG might find themselves finding MU as a hobby.
Why this is important to understand
For better or for worse, the RPG-minded player hits a wall with other MU players when it's realized that a large number of people DO NOT WANT DICE TO RESOLVE SUCCESS. Dice are the great equalizer; a number that determines pass or fail whether you like it or not, and it only works if everyone agrees to let the mighty gods of RNG decide their fate
(In this example) "It's not a GAME right? It's a STORY." Therefore the concept of pass/fail isn't based on whether or not you've put in the time, stats, experience, or have the +3 broadsword. It's about whether or not people are having fun and enjoying the story, right?
Why this is important to understand
Alas (with that last bullet point), surprise surprise, the majority of MU players I know always say stick to people you know as much as possible. Sure, this can be to avoid really strange, dangerous, bizarre, and downright scary players, but I think it's mostly to avoid the issues I found commonly with players I didn't know: Misunderstandings turning into flame wars on MSB, accusations, people getting upset, etc....
WHAT I THINK ALL MU GAMES ABSOLUTELY NEED TO DO TO UNDERSTAND PASS/FAIL AND PLAY WELL TOGETHER
I guess in short: I don't think the "my story" types and the "RPG gamer" types mix together very well, at least in a long-term gaming environment. There's always some "my story" person who doesn't give a shit about dice and experience points getting trounced by some absolute dice-whore who doesn't care about "their story". ("I don't care if you think this moment is a character-defining moment where you stood up to a bully. I have 34 combat dice and turned you into grape jelly in one roll!") Likewise, there's always people (like me) who thought that their character sheet and experience meant something getting shutdown by GM-caveats and players acting like they have dots on their character sheet that they clearly didn't spend, which was always frustrating ("Hey, I actually have 10 dice in being manipulative. Your sheet has a dice pool of 4 because you spent all your points in other things. Why do I have to CONVINCE you OOCly that it's okay to manipulate your character?")
I think the MU community as a whole tries to accommodate far too many playstyles to ensure the maximum number of people will log in to play, and then these games hope and pray that people will find a way to get along and play cooperatively. I think that this is a long-term mistake and it would have been better setting rules and guidelines about HOW the game is played and ensuring that people who aren't playing in the spirit of the game (regardless of how many friends they have, who they know on staff, or what kind of accusation they threaten to make on gaming forums) are politely removed to keep things safe and fun for copacetic players.
(And yes, I suppose it COULD be BOTH a GAME and a WRITING HOBBY, but not everyone has the same definition of WHAT THAT MEANS, and with that comes ultimately the constant problem of incentivizing IC failure and dealing with people who become problematic around the topic. So ultimately my logical brain goes to "if this is an "IF/THEN/ELSE" scenario all you can do is start creative definitions, your expectations, and focus on the PLAYERS YOU WANT rather than EVERYONE.)
@macha said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:
I think the problem some players run into, is that they're more than willing to be 'part of the team' like you do in TT, but then they end up in scenes with players who.. aren't. It makes it hard to do anything impactful when someone else is always going in, guns blazing.
Can confirm. I know I've had that feeling before, personally.
Like a TT player I'd try to stay in my lane and not try to Hog the scene, but then someone(s) would just bowl over that goodwill, try to do everything, and try to Hog all the attention/xp. Left me feeling like my fairness and trying to be conscientious of others was being taken advantage of. I know it made me passive aggressive more than once.
Just running my brain-meats here. Churning.
I think the issue with MU is that everything is so stretched out.
So with that in mind I think that IC failure would be much easier for the MU community if the pace was a bit faster. Think of it this way.
I honestly feel (reflectively) that aversion to "IC failure" was a little bit of people just not wanting the negativity of "not being successful", sure, but I also think that the absolute time sink of the hobby and wanting to feel something in terms of return on investment was a huge part of it. A lot of players failed and it was "WELP, ya failed, so sorry, have a good night" and including some sort of element in failure that led to other RP opportunities always seemed to resonate well with the players I knew.
As one of the players who can lose a character and feel nothing, I figure in the least judgmental way possible I should sound off on why that is, and wherein may be coping mechanisms to handle losing a character.
I've always kept my eye on what the character represented, which, in my estimation due to the vaguely ooc elemented sense of things in MUs, was a sort of narrated sock puppet to play make believe with other marionettes. In all my years of MU it was fairly constant to make new characters as games opened/closed in short notice, so I realized any emotional impact I had due to character loss wasn't because the character itself impacted me, but because it represented some kind of anchor into the social aspect, connections to other players/characters, and therein lied emotional needs I wasn't addressing.
This may not be you personally, but Andrew Robinson played Garak for years, delved into makeup to the point of wearing Garak's skin, thinking as Garak, and the degree of fan love and energy generated from simply being Garak. I guess for me I never felt I ever did something so important or so deep with a character that letting go of them was all that difficult, but losing access to the human connection to another player was often more difficult.
So when I let go of a PC (which 95% of the time was due to me leaving a game or the game closing) my thought process was: Will people forget me? Will I find RP? Will I be able to find RP and social time with another character or will they focus on other people instead and it'll be hard to...not feel lonely?
So I feel (for me) it was important to focus on a bigger question: "Am I mourning the character or is this vaguely personal feeling related to me, my insecurities, and my need for a social outlet?"
With that thought in mind, I realize on an introspection level that I never really mourned a character, but instead mourned time spent with other people; be they a temporary warm body willing to make me feel like my presence had value or be they an actual friend that I liked spending time with.
I may or may not have said this a while back (as in years) so I'll just say it again.
I can't help but feel like the issue is the format of the technology.
Hear me out, here. So for DECADES the format has mostly stayed the same aside from some pretty cool upgrades (Ares, Evennia), but ultimately the format is: UNIX-based text emitter where everyone sets a pose order, writes a bunch of poses in turn, and then calls it a night. Part of me feels like another 20 years could go by and the same issues would be prevalent, so my mind starts going to "out of the box" options.
Given the technology these days of APIs, better GUI interfaces, etc, maybe it's a good time to come up with a "new way of doing things". Just off of the top of my head?
I think the "Online Tabletop" industry is where all of the movement is at. For example: "WoD Nexus" is coming (via "Demiplane" at this website. With that includes the following:
So, I'm not saying "everyone move over to TTRPG or Demiplane", but perhaps within those technologies is the answer to taking THIS hobby and moving it into the 21st century.
Three person sex scenes are in theory totally wonderful. As one of those pan folks, I am like yay, a threesome with a boy and a girl at same time sounds great. /Sounds/ great lol, it rarely works out. Hard to line up times. Easy for it go to wrong and often in danger of the third wheel effect.
I dunno why but when I read this I lol'd in my head about the idea of a 3 person TS scene where my character is there with headphones and a microphone narrating the 2 person sex incident for their podcast.
Missed opportunities I spose.