Posts made by Ghost

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.

On @Roz @Tez and @saosmash games, they also have this neat code for looking for RP that will grab a players name that is on, a subject, a location(IIRC) and basically helps people find RP fodder. I dug that. It won't help everybody, but for the people twiddling their thumbs, it's a potential solution, which is better than nothing.

Realistically, there are players that are either hard to gel with (one line poses, TS hounds, not playing in-genre, poor grammar), or characters that are hard to work with (disruptive to scene, uninvited, sends of trolling chills). I'll be the first to admit, there have been sometimes where I've been banging my head against a keyboard because I'm RPing with someone who is a pain in my ass. It kills the vibe. It kills my escape, right?

And I think that, knowing that this is a reality, people are very sensitive to the worry that they might be on this unspoken list of people who others don't want to RP with. I recently had the pleasure of getting IM after IM from someone I used to RP with about how she wasn't gonna RP with this person or that simply based on what was on their wiki page. People can be cunts, but there really, REALLY is an element of maintaining your MushRep(tm). I can absolutely empathize with people who worry or feel like they've been blacklisted, because people simply do not confront people as to why they are avoiding a player. It can be like Amish shunning. I've seen it happen, so when things get quiet...how do you know you aren't on that list?

I empathize, which is why I try to be really up front about how I feel or what I'm expecting from people, even if it's CONSTRUCTIVE criticism.

My only suggestion, based off of my experiences, is to not be afraid to speak up, even if you're feeling vulnerable, and if you are asked by said shunned-feeling roleplayer, to provide helpful support and not be afraid to introduce player to other players.

Shit, I would totally page someone with something like "Hey, this is X, she's feeling like she's having trouble breaking into the rp, could you show X around a bit in these scenes and help get them involved?"

@Roz thanks for the well worded reply. Appreciate it.

@faraday I dig the WoD book approach. Maybe post a list of suggested reading or viewing material with a blurb about the game trying to capture the gritty feel of Battlestar Galactica: Razor and how the game seeks to be a military, gritty drama rather than the swashbuckling, "Top Gun" feel of the 80s Battlestar Galactica.

Genre references never hurt and might even help spread our favorite nerdsauce to the uninitiated.

I've come across a number of players, both on forum and in game, who don't feel wanted or feel ignored. I've had some incidents in games that have made me feel the same way, but sometimes, looking back, I feel like maybe the reason I felt wanted wasn't because of what was happening on the game, but instead more my perception of what was happening. Maybe I misjudged? Maybe my emotions got in the way? Every now and then I can't help but feel like some of these cries of being ignored are more the player's internal hangups and that some of the accusations of cliques or rp is hard to get into can be misjudgments or self fulfilling prophecies.

Anyway, here's the topic:

How far do you think other players and staff should go to make a player feel wanted? What do you do when a player, no matter how hard other players or staff try, still claims cliques and exclusivity when you simply don't agree with their perception?

I'll show mine first:

I was on Mass Effect: Alpha/Omega. This was a @Roz game, who I tend to speak highly of. Roz and the crew involved are very tight, and they've been roleplaying together a long time. They have plenty of characters who interact with each other, but they are always very good about including others and making sure as many people as possible get involved if they want to. HOWEVER, before having to leave the game due to RLsplosion and stress, I started to feel like I wasn't part of the core demographic, which looking back on it, it wasn't true, but my RL stress had me tangled up in these nothing matters anyway type emotions. Now, I'm not the type to scream on WORA or whatnot, but had I been that person, I could have screamed and yelled about cliques or not being wanted. Looking back, I think I might have been a little intimidated by how good that group is. They pick up on each other's queues and roleplay like a pack of hunting raptors. It was impressive, but to stressed or timid or players with low self esteem they might generate some of those awkward feelings of intimidating, exclusivity, or better than thou.

In the end, I'm glad I got the time there that I did, and I feel like I learned something about the way my heartmeats work.

Share/thoughts?

EDIT: And no, I'm sure @Roz can attest, I never actually did reach out to staff to share my feelings at the time. I felt it would feel like whining, so I didn't, which is my own personal hangup. So I didn't seek a solution. So What do you think your responsibility is as a player to overcome these feelings of not being wanted?

Sigh.