Posts made by Ghost

@Ganymede said:

@HorrorHound said:

...The Hedge transforms PoohBear into Naughty Bear and starts hanging entrails around like Yule decorations.

That's cute and horrific, but misses the point.

If you're going to play a game based on paranoia of being whisked away to another land to be treated like a Tzimisce meat-puppet, there should never be a Pooh Bear Happy Dwelling in the first place. It's one thing to clamor about "wrong-fun" over-policing, and another to stop people from taking a shit on every part of the thematic material.

Aha! But what about the element of Grimm's Fairy Tales?

I think, when it comes to Changeling, it's perfectly fine to, say, come across the embodiment of what was the basis of a fairytale, hell, perhaps the very vision of influence that influenced a fairytale writer, only to find it goes "Grimm's Style" or has been used as a means/lure to procure children and tasty mortals in a horrific way.

The sweet little old lady in the woods who offers you sweets and then tries to lock you away to devour you piece by piece is a very in-theme thing for Changeling.

@Roz Agreed 100%. The best roleplayers view any given scene as a team effort towards the game/plot/story.

@faraday There really is this unspoken contract, though, isn't there?

I come here for fun, but need other players to roleplay with. Therefore, to BE entertained, I have to be ENTERTAINING in hopes that I will accrue another scene. If I run out of roleplay partners, then I run out of roleplay.

I've always felt this underlying, invisible social contract when mushing that cannot be ignored. I think maybe this above concept is half of the reason I began this topic. At what point is entertaining others required to become entertained yourself, because if we don't work hard and/or try to keep a game populated, we have to hit this RESET button on our fun and start someplace else.

It's just unwieldy for me, this concept. It's where 90% of my burnout comes from, this feeling that I've worked hard to entertain others, but because of X reason (interest in other mushes, multimushing, cliques, selfishness, boredom) I end up being that guy that's going what the fuck happened to this game??? when it inevitably dies out.

This all kind of brings up an interesting point, though. I've seen multiple posts about how some mushers can be hideously self-centered in terms of roleplay, and how some mushers don't seem to care at all for others beyond what they're getting out of the deal. Hell, I've played on some games (Fifth World) that felt like playspaces where the owners really wanted to RP their game, but needed other players to participate because they couldn't do it alone, but had very little interest in players other than themselves impacting the very fabric of the game.

But it's true, right? We log into these games because we are seeking to be entertained. For some people that means sharing the rp experience like an improv acting troupe; that what we are trying to recreate on some level is a bunch of drama-interested playwrights writing stories together. For others it's I want to be entertained and if I'm not having fun, even if having fun means everything goes my way, then I walk.

But on some level, we log onto these games because we seek to be entertained.

To be honest? I kind of feel like, without the sex element, xWoD would never have flourished. The various settings are such a magnet for sexy roleplay that True Blood, Eclipse, or Anita Blake likely wouldn't exist had it not been for online vampire roleplay throughout the years.

I say this because my tabletop group doesn't want to gather every other week to roleplay depressing shit. One of my players is a cop who has seen some really depressing shit. So they like their pretend funtimes to be swashbuckly with the feeling of Han Solo and/or Firefly. I tried to pass WoD/BSG past them, but they weren't interested. They like Call of CthulhuTech because it's short term horror, and I'm sure they don't feel comfy getting into the sex element of xWoD around a bunch of bros and my buxom, tattooed significant other.

People don't like to roleplay depressing shit all of the time. It's hard on the soul and it isn't an escape from our already depressing, aging, someday-to-be-wormfood lives.

So, without the sex element, would xWoD have become so big, or become so big online? I don't think so, and I think the Winnie the Pooh giggletimes Changeling players roleplay cute stuff as a means to let off pressure due to a lack of want to truly embrace the themes of horror, destroyed lives, and quicksand darkness xWoD provides.

@Cirno I'm laughing. You can't hear it but I'm laughing. LOL be er means the person is actually laughing out loud, but I got a good laugh out of this.

Thanks for the good addition to the morning, Cirno.

@Cirno Holy shit, Cirno, it's a good thing I didn't open that WHILE IN LINE AT MY COFFEE HOUSE WITH A BUNCH OF CUTE GIRLS BEHIND ME!

F.M.L.

@Soresu You really shouldn't do that. It's unhealthy. Please, don't lean so much on what I think. Let me worry about that.

@HorrorHound Changeling is World of Darkness, not Muppets of Darkness

EDIT: I'm still kinda twitching from VASpiders beau's character: Reggie. The adorable WW2 era prop-plane fighter pilot who was an OTTER WEARING A LEATHER PILOT'S CAP. He had a magical bug biplane in the Hedge that carried everyone around like a magical school bus with wings. There was nothing of Darkness about that character. He only RPed in scenes with Spider anyway, or scenes where they were going to go his way, and it was a lot of "cheerio good chap. Let's give the Axis a good rogering, oy!" stuff.

@Soresu It's a deterrent, mostly, due to the sometimes self-centered nature of such efforts. It's okay, though, my feelings on ragequit games don't require your acceptance.

@BobGoblin Ooh, good question. Is this a RageQuit game? I mentioned this as a game killer for me in another thread.

@HorrorHound GREAT EXAMPLE.

Take Commander Adama ( Edward James Olmos) and Admiral Cain (Michelle Forbes). Both were the military figureheads of two different Battlestars, the Galactica and Pegasus, respectively. To Adama, Galactica was a family, a family that sometimes needed a father, a disciplinarian, and a friend, but ultimately their responsibility was to place their lives before the fleet and protect the last of humanity at all costs...even if that meant running and hiding. Cain's Pegasus was a warship in a time of war, and the Cylons were the enemy, and she turned a blind eye to the rape and beating of a Cylon captive as a means to fuel the fire to take the fight to the enemy. The needs of the fleet were to provide soldiers, and the mission was to fight or die. Cain wasn't above executing soldiers for refusing to follow her orders, because in wartime, cowardice/treason could be legally punished with death, and she was in charge. She wasn't evil, and she was matronly, but she was an iron fist.

BOTH existed in a genre that was gritty and fatalistic. The theme's whimsical moments were vastly outweighed by themes of survival, mourning, heartbreak, and sacrifice.

My favorite BSG character I ever encountered on any of the given mushes was a disabled engineer in a wheelchair. Like Vriess from Alien: Resurrection, she was rendered without the use of her legs and was bitter as hell about it, but she could still function. What else was she going to do? A disabled naval officer not working would just be sitting alone in some room, praying the ship didn't blow up.

It's just a setting where happy characters, unaffected by the war and are pacifists simply don't make sense. In war, even a wrench turning technician could be called to fire an assault rifle, and characters don't get to choose what they do and don't do. THAT is the spice of the genre. No one wants to fight or die, for the most part, but swearing an oath and suffering the whims of commanders who may or may not be making the right call with your life makes for a kind of obligated terror roleplay.

It was really hard roleplaying with characters who just simply didn't get why that slight film of depression and fear covered everything.

Thanks for the tip, I'll keep this place on my radar, as well as AoA if some of the policies loosen up.

@Three-Eyed-Crow Some people you just can't reach. I think, like a lot of people, I try to figure out if someone is being disruptive/explosive/attentionwhoring or if it's just the player trying to write some kind of quirk into roleplay. Ive found in some cases, the person is playing strange for a good reason and I end up applauding them for it. In other cases, maybe most, it's a roleplayer trying to steal the show and isn't polite enough to ask how anyone feels about it.

I've had some horror stories come my way. I've been paged with verbal lashings for not roleplaying the response they wanted. Sometimes it's gone to staff. It's hard. Some people are just either kinda fucked up, or maybe the person is just being a troll who assumes it's a free, anonymous internet service and he/she doesn't give a damn if they cause a huge stink and get kicked off of the game.

Trying to be constructive here, but when another player has done things that come across as disruptive to the scene (or attention whoring), have any of you asked them politely to tone it down a notch? Any first-name experiences with trying to work through that kind of behavior?

I personally can't think of any examples where I've tried to mitigate the situation diplomatically to keep the scene somewhat sacred. Now that I think about it, I've often just gone ugh and treated it like a problem without trying to fix the problem, which could be part of the problem in some cases.

I mean, what if said EXPLOSIVE ENTRANCE character is run by a player who has had some good feedback for that sort of thing and is just trying fuckall hard to get noticed?

I think @Three-Eyed-Crow hit something important, too. It always helps to incorporate the other players into your interests. A player can tell when someone doesn't give a shit about them in favor of meeting their RP needs. Players who tend to ignore other people's poses or follow the flow of a scene tend to make others feel like they're really just roleplaying around someone, rather than with them. It's very important to gauge how active or passive you intend to be in a scene, and to always remember to share the stage.

Another point? It's sometimes very hard to incorporate new players into RP when their character designs don't fit the feel of emotional gravitas of a scene/game. A bubbly, pacifist cartoon fan who fails to notice there's even a war going on, on a genocidal Battlestar game, might leave players feeling like they're being distracted from the energy they're trying to capture in a scene.

So before you chargen a character who has no interest in dramatic scenes, combat, roleplaying around sad characters, or wanting to follow military protocol might not be the right fit for the game, and that's not anyone else on the game's fault that it doesn't mix. You have got to ask yourself, during cgen, how the character will fit. It's for your own good.

I'm fairly happy with how this thread is progressing, because I really do believe that this topic is the root of all butthurt forum posts, gamesplosions, and inter-player shadow warfare that plagues nearly every game.

I run tabletop games and have never run the plotside of a mush, but I can tell you from a GM perspective.

I don't so much foreshadow as I do create elements in the present that work like carrots on a horse. I'll plan, say, an assault on a facility to free hostages, and inside will be evidence that someone was onsite directing traffic before the assault, which will both launch follow-up adventures and keep players invested in their involvement in the campaign. I like foreshadowing, but I definitely prefer the abovementioned kind of foreshadowing over visions and future viewing, because then I feel trapped by the future, Mua'Dib style.