Posts made by Ghost

History has shown that the more times a female player cries harassment, the more she is distanced from, even if the harassment was valid. I know plenty of female players who keep quiet about the people who are harassing them, as they have no want to seem like they're causing drama. If they can't game while dealing with it, they move on, or somehow find a way to tolerate it.

I think @Lithium is right. If we were really all going to get along and played fair, we would have found a way to do it by now.

@Groth Agreed. ALL I am trying to illustrate here is that some red tape is required, some guidelines or code of conduct needs to be set, and some kind of expected communication-between-players-type behavior needs to be highlighted. Once you highlight that, the liberalness of the game takes a hit, but I don't think that's a bad thing.

No button pushed. Just playing devil's advocate and trying to point out reasons why I think a liberal, yes-first type game could run into some major staffing/player base issues.

So if we are all adults and IC rape should be handled by IC means, then I could...say...

Create a character and, over time, focus on law and police contacts/allies and a broad collection of IC patsies that were willing to take the fall for me. While harvesting xp and spending it for the top weapons, physical and combat stats, and an IC army of bodyguards, my character could then, feasibly, rape every single character on grid and use my army, money, contacts, and Allies to either derail the investigations, avoid jail time, send one of my posse to jail in my stead, and through dice, roleplay, and theme, perform these roleplay acts against anyone willing to scene and/or unwilling to log off despite how fucked up the scene is.

...ugh, I felt weird typing that. I would never play that character, but I feel it is an accurate example as to why some things simply can't be held to "ehhh keep it IC" standards.

Staff has a responsibility to protect their player base from predatory players, and the only way to do that is to establish expected guidelines of roleplay, conduct, and some realistic trigger rules.

@Arkandel said:

@Apos said:

It's very surprising how many players feel pressured to RP out scenes they are deeply bothered by and they really, really need to feel that staff has their back. I wouldn't take it for granted at all that players would think first to fade even in scenes.

That's a fair point. How would you make it more crystal clear that if anything happened they'd be backed? I.e. other than stating the usual stuff (which exists in almost any sane game I've been on) about fade-to-black and whatnot... what else can be done?

I think it's important to remember the high number of MUers who have no RL social outlets and cling to games for social acceptance. This is why so many players will roleplay a scene that makes them uncomfortable, yet just go through with it, because sometimes there is a RL need of a sorts attached to the hobby.

I don't think there is any other good answer other than establishing guidelines as to what is acceptable behavior on any game. Due to the risks of minors playing the game as well, people should absolutely avoid scenes involving rape and other forms of sexual assault.

I don't think that is a lot to ask of a player base.

I mean -- shit -- if you can't ask your player base to not roleplay fucked up things like sexual assault, molestation, or other forms of rape, then this basically becomes a fucked up hobby, right?

I, for one, would never roleplay on a game, even if staff backed me up where there were no rules governing whether or not my character could be gangraped ICly. I don't log in for that shit and it's fucked up. Period.

I just want to clarify. I wasn't saying that staff should just KILL a PC to make a point or some quota. I was using kill in the sense that when the dice, or health levels, or situation (was warned OOCly to not eat irradiated uranium and did so ICly anyway) warrants it, that staff/GM allow/rule that that character dies. Doing so maintains an important level of causality in the theme of the game and allows for characters to recycle as needed.

One of my major gripes about MUs is, in some cases, the sheer number of GOD-level characters who have effectively made it to max level with all of the equipment, perks, and power on the game, and they've achieved this mostly through GMing that didn't allow them to die when they repeatedly should have OR by not increasing the risks due to the rewards involved. Sure, all level one players want their own space armada by level two, but let's not allow a single roll to determine that, yes?

Anyway, I digress. My point is this:

All too often, the power balance becomes upset on a game and a small handful of stacked-sheet characters usurp control with seemingly no way to challenge, avoid, or disagree with them due to the constant threat of PK, right? But a game who doesn't enforce death and/or using the combat/death rules per the system the game is designed off often neglectfully allows power players to skyrocket to positions of immovable power.

Avoiding the potential hate-breath of a player upset because you allowed one of his characters to die is simply not healthy for a game, and really is unfair to the characters who are basing their actions on the rules and not their power-gaming ambitions.

@Roz You put it so more eloquently than I did. I salute thee.

@Arkandel said:

@Roz said:

Not actually arguing against your non-ban, but I think there are pretty NUMEROUS REASONS why people draw the line at one and not the other.

Even factoring in the first six words of the line you quoted? If so, please elaborate.

I just mean that if your point is that you're not banning any IC actions of that nature, it's because you're not banning anything, not because there's no difference between the two and no reason to consider them differently. That's all I mean. I'm being obnoxiously derailing.

Please, nit-pick all you can! I'd like to have holes poked into my pitch, that's the whole point of it.

I don't want to give the impression though that we'd not be banning any IC things. That's what that 'thematic' part of the very first goal is about; some things can't exist and shouldn't. Not having to police everything else spares staff a lot of the burden in CGen and, hopefully, makes it more significant when they do feel forced to step in so it sends a message. If my concept finally forced them to wag a finger at it... whelp, I must have really fucked up, you know?

On a personal note I simply don't like rating horrible acts. Rape is a heinous thing to do to another human being, it's a crime, it's wrong. But so is murder. So is torture. I don't believe it's in the purview of running a game to determine 'which is worse' - they are all nasty. That doesn't mean other people couldn't decide for whatever reason one is worse than others and ban it from their setting, though.

By all means, don't police rape scenes and allow characters to forcibly rape other characters on a no-consent, yes-first game and see what happens.

If you're liberally not governing what kind of things can be done on the game, then (just as an example) you are potentially allowing a player who has real life rape trauma to come into contact with a player who has unrequested physically dominating rape fantasies, and that...will be a fucking mess.

@Three-Eyed-Crow Gars based all of his character's viewpoints on that of a paternal society-based 1967 Mississippi black man. Ugh I haaaated that guy.

I just don't think you can have a game where X population is trying to play the thematic spirit of the game, but Y group of people bullrush in, create a non-thematic faction, turn their faction into some kind of sex/harem RP, and all of the sudden your Civil War Combat era mush ends up with a "Space Pirates Who Love Statutory Rape" faction.

Ive said it before and I'll say it again, I don't think a liberal, yes-first game would work. I predict it would be a clusterfuck without some enforcement, which will gradually change "yes first" to "ask first" to "here's our list of what isn't allowed" to "we are no longer a liberal, yes-first game and are going back to more common guidelines."

Constructive Devil's Advocacy:

So does this mean that if I really want to play a serial rapist with an immunity to jail time who uses his powers to justify uncomfortable sexual situations, that I can drag all of my Shang friends with me? Can we play a cadre of Furry BDSM experts who don't partake in plot due to what we, OOCly, really want out of the game is to have a new theme space where we can work our kink into roleplay on a new server?

The problem I see with promoting a liberal-Yes First arena of roleplay, is that NO will become, at some point, necessary to keep the game balanced and/or in genre. Some items on your list, like automated xp spends and build requests, sound like good ideas, but what if people start to buy things with XP with no justification (I was a 7-11 clerk with no combat skills yesterday, but I saved up xp and became a secret agent with diplomatic immunity after my last Thursday shift) or building egregious sex clubs on grid that would fit NO existing ordinance code ever (Undocumented Korean Immigrant K-Pop rape club SLASH torture hotel that is protected by the mayor of the city!)

If there's one thing I've learned from years of mushing is this: You have reasonable players, and then you have WHAT THE FUCK.

EXAMPLE: On Battlestar Genesis, I believe, we had a char named Gars. Gars' PB was Linc from Tropic Thunder (Robert Downey Jr playing Kirk Lazarus who was playing Lincoln, an "Amos and Andrew" talking Mississippi black man from 1967 who was in the Vietnam war). The problem was, he wanted to play the character, but saw nothing thematically wrong with being a marine who, mid-firefight, would say things like "Come get some, n+gga! Huah! Mississippi Black Snake in your MOUTH, Bitch!" in a setting that took tens of thousands of years before Earth history, in outer space, where there was no Vietnam war, nor Mississippi.

I try to be realistic about this. You see, if a game doesn't have a dice system to arbitrate risks/plot twists, then you're going to have a game with a wide population of "main characters in their own story" who will only choose the outcomes that fit what they want for their character's story. Only...not everyone can be the Space Admiral, or the TOP pilot, or the special snowflake telekinetic rarity, or the fabled only person in the universe with the unique skill. I've been in plenty of scenes where it was just a bunch of "main character" players leap-frogging over each other to be THE hero with the winning solution.

Dice solves who hits, who doesn't, and saves the game from having a bunch of free-form roleplayers from all being the super magical wonder person or ubertragic lone survivor trope.

The problem with games/systems that don't allow players to die, is the theme of the game needs to determine the tone of the story. Let's use the Battlestar Galactica Mushes as an example. In BSG you had horrific headwounds turning characters into brain damaged translators. You had gunshot wounds to the knee leaving a character with an amputated leg. You had military-grade trauma. SO, if a character can survive a CRITICAL MASSIVE HEADWOUND by a round shot from a Cylon Raider, through the cockpit of their Viper, and into their head, then the round clearly isn't a paintball round or pellet. That would kill anything. That hit would kill a rhinoceros.

When you are playing a game with stakes, it is important to identify that there are players that play fair with damage. Their massive leg injury becomes a limp that will negate their ability to pilot Vipers. Their head trauma results in a mangled, scarred appearance on their once attractive character. When other players do not play fair with their damage, or risk of damage, in lieu of telling their story (because their want for a story > the story as a whole), then the game breaks. Why? Because the players who are willing to suffer negative consequences due to bad dice rolls or fairly judging how to roleplay damage incurred as part of the story that involves the whole of the game are not only caring about their story, but the story for the whole of the game. They are willing to suffer a negative character angle because it makes sense to the story and the damage incurred was part of a scene involving other players.

Any player who ignores damage or deadly wounds received because that gets in the way of telling the story they want to tell, is pretty much saying "I am picking and choosing the things I think were important out of a scene involving 10+ other players, and since I don't want to roleplay my character being hurt, I'm just going to ignore that part about being hurt."

I couldn't disagree more that character death isn't important. Not everyone can be superhuman or come out of so much trauma and damage unscathed. Sometimes, to build drama, an unexpected character death is necessary, and if the player isn't so busy worrying about themselves over the good of the story as a whole, they'd understand that shrugging off damage or death because its inconvenient to their wishes as a writer breaks the fourth wall for everyone else trying to immerse into a story.

@Cirno Shit, you didn't get the memo? SpaceTebows are supposed to say they're feeding SpacePeasants, but instead only spend 10% of their millions of SpaceDollars on SpacePeasants, and instead disseminate the remaining SpaceMoney to the SpaceTrust of their SpaceMinistry...

...which are the SpaceTebows

@Arkandel Respectfully, I disagree. What we are doing on these mushes is more akin to tabletop gaming than MMORPG. If a game has 50 individual logged in IPs and 100+ characters, are we talking 100+ protagonists who are the main character in the story and are thusly protected from death until it is delivered on favorable terms? Nah. We are playing tabletop RPGs, and every tabletop RPG has rules for death and dying, but most games try to avoid using that bit out of fear that the player will ragequit and take 20 players with them.

It's why sometimes players choose actions like "rush the minigun that is spitting 40,000 rounds per minute" instead of "find cover and call for backup", because after a certain amount of time you know which GMs will kill your char, and which will give them a miraculous survival. Lots of people wanna be the hero, and that lack of logic quadruples when there is no OOC fear of repercussion, such as character death.

@Cirno Uggggggggggggh I ache for you.

Characters need to fucking die. One thing that always gets to me is the suspension of disbelief that comes from the fact that a LARGE number of mushers are willing to play actiony characters...so long as they get to decide whether or not they die, and if the risk of chardeath is up for grabs, they tend to just not get involved.

I've spent years on mushes where so-and-so has no fear doing cartwheels wearing only a thong and a bucket of chicken on their head through the combined fire of the entire Canadian JTF-2 staff, and then land in a pit of poisonous snakes filled with Yakuza-affiliated-Ninja, holding their breath through poisonous gas, and then are forced to watch Boys Don't Cry seventy-thousand times with a boxcutter well within reach should they want to commit suicide....and only take 2 bashing.

Part of why I don't tend to staff is because I would be that guy that goes "They throw a grenade at you" and require a character to suffer for the grenade explosion, even if it totally gets in the way of their current TS arc with SexyBoobiePornstarKnightNumber34.

Because that's what fucking gaming is.

EDIT: You only get the prestige of surviving all of that shit above if the risk of dying doing it exists, but if you can do this all of the time with zero fear, then you're playing a superhero game and not any other genre. Or? You get prestige for doing it and fucking dying. I swear, I always have to double check what someone means by dead when they tell me that a character died in a combat scene, because so few characters EVER die, I always assume it was a planned death and never because they went into a combat scene and suffered the consequences.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said:

A lot of the examples of MU* campaigns mentioned here touch on something I think is important. I think it's a LOT easier to do a satisfying, game-wide story on a game that's focused on PvE, rather than PvP. This is one of the reasons I prefer those types of games, though far from the only reason.

Agreed.

That is precisely why I think @faraday BSG games worked so well. In a hobby where so many thin-skinned people are worrying OOCly about who gets this or that snowflake privilege, a game that pretty much said: "You're all fucked and now live in a shitty bunkhouse with people who fart in their sleep. Now get out there any fight on the same team before we all get GENOCIDED" worked so well.

EDIT: Also, as a side note, since all of the characters (unless you turned out to be a Cylon, which I never was, goddamnit) weren't defined by some kind of supernatural phenotype, people had to shape personalities, quirks, and hobbies to flesh out their characters. I genuinely believe this led to more meaningful roleplay.

If that game were still open, I'd totally make a SpaceDouche(tm) who makes internet videos about how bad SpaceMuslims are and then (with the aid of 20-some other SpaceDouchebags) takes over a meaningless building in the middle of nowhere because he thinks he's a SpacePatriot (Spatriot? Y/N?).

@Cirno I'm still keeping my eye on Fifth World. Long after the game closed down it was brought to my attention that the people who were running the game were writing a novel in that setting and had the characters, houses, etc written up in the novel. There was no disclaimer or sign-over of usage of contents in the game as material for their book. They have since removed everyone's access to the wiki. The wiki is still there, but you can't edit, add, or alter any of the content because all of the users were removed.

I have my logs and character's embellishments, wiki, etc saved. It would have been FUCKING NICE to know that there was a chance anything I did was going to be taken as their novel fodder. It really, really would have been nice.

@Cirno that kind of drove me crazy on Fifth World. Becoming a knight takes YEARS of training and dedication, right? I can absolutely understand being a knight that likes to get laid, because all that requires is hormones, but a ditzy knight that acts like being a knight is secondary to some sexy bikini photo-shoot roleplay doesn't make a lot of sense to me. There was a bunch of that on 5W, too.

"I've spent my whole life training to be a knight....but somewhere in there I also became a world-class actor/movie star/dancer/baristas/pastry chef!"

I will say this: I think it might not be very possible to have a wide-sweeping, successful campaign on WoD games with a large number of spheres. Those games really are cattle calls, and using Haunted Memories' Changeling Sphere as example, you can have successful campaigns within the spheres, but the game as a whole may simply be too large and too uncoordinated (even as a genre) to run a successful campaign.

Using BSG as an example, a SINGLE sphere with the player characters either supporting each other or ONE "badguy" sphere (a la Rebels vs Imperials) creates your biggest chance for a successful story. When you craft the game, you should have a loose outline of the campaign. Run the game, tell the story, then dismount. Tell the story and then close the books. Reset the game with a new story/new chars if people wanna play more, but it really does require staff/storytellers to craft a beginning, middle, and end. The hard part is creating a campaign where you have an idea where it's going, but allows for players to feel as if they're affecting outcomes.

Here's a good example:

A long while ago, I played on that future Lords and Ladies game, The Fifth World. The staff definitely seemed to have an idea of where the game was going, but they hamstrung players plot-wise. You either did the thing that made their direction of the plot happen or you didn't. It ended up rather frustrating, especially seeing as how their staff-alt characters were the only ones really furthering metaplot along. At one point, the PCs captured one of the mysterious, cybernetic bad guys. Players fucking threw themselves at this npc, trying like all hell to reveal parts of the plot, get useful Intel, try to generate drama and rp through this NPC, but the scenes ultimately went nowhere because the staff had other plans for the npc.

So be careful of that. There's no point if the players are just waiting for you to tell the story. They want to help tell the story. Always.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said:

@Ghost said:

I played plenty of the Battlestar games, like Cerberus, which had endings that were pretty much months/years before the intended close time due to loss of player interest or staff disappearance. Those games dropped one of those "let's all write our closing endgame points, but the game is closing on X date" things.

BS Pacifica managed a proper closer (I actually came back for the finale after taking a hiatus, and it was a great experience), but @faraday puts us all to shame, in a zillion ways.

I got ROBBED. I decided to check out Pacifica just as it was closing. I thought to check the place out, logged in, was told campaign was done and cgen was closed.

Missed that boat by a month or so.