Best posts made by Gilette

When I couldn't divorce my emotions from my screen, I was a literal teenager. The peaks of my RP were higher and the valleys were much lower, and it is, all in all, not an experience I would ever care to repeat. This is not a dig at you, @The-Tree-of-Woe, but I wonder why most people can't?

Surely the ability to take a step back from everything and get your bearings, to encourage healthy emotional separation and healthy emotional investment, is something MU players should encourage? Frankly, I wish someone had said as much to me back when I was that teenager, before I said and did things that absolutely ruined friendships -- even when, looking back on it, I can still acknowledge that my emotional response was understandable and not unexpected.

It's a rough thing to say but, again, let's be honest here: not everyone's emotional reaction is proper. The person who is upset because a character they liked to spend time with is dead, and they need a moment, okay, fine. Understandable.

The player who has an extreme emotional reaction and complains to staff about the character being killed and disrupts the scene to try and force an OOC retcon... Well, something something "no right to demand", "goalposts", etc.

I'm sorry to the good people I left behind, along with the plots and planned developments, because the whispers of petty, childish players got too loud to ignore. I'm also sorry to the players whom I didn't believe when those things were brought to my attention. I gave those malignant players the benefit of the doubt, like I did Elsa, when I shouldn't have.

@Lotherio

Yeah, I have to admit, I'm very impressed with the crazy sorts of characters running about and my perusal of the wiki has got me pretty psyched for the setting (already had a few players to reach out and discuss potential hooks and such). Looking forward to getting stuck in!

@Chet said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:

The Jedi have always brought an interesting philosophical dilemma for me: is balance to the Force a null state, Jedi and Sith, or is balance to the Force someone that lives in both worlds, someone that can use darkness to redeem an evil man. I think Lucas never answers the question as a test that shouldn't be definitively answered; you're supposed to pick Sith at some times in your life, and your answer determines your friends.

Have you ever considered a Star Wars MUSH with a Jedi/Sith heavy world? You'd have to research the novels on the canon's antiquity, and discount the movie backgrounds, which would displease your more issue concerned, externally aware audience, but please the mystics among us that see art as an internal question.

I'm sure you could dig up the proper quotation from Obi-Wan Kenobi when he introduces the lightsaber to Luke to properly inspire it.

To stay on topic, to apply the spirituality of stages and internal questions to a comic book roleplaying game, you'd have to avoid the cheap route, the obviously magical characters, and go with more of an arcane setting, something like a World War 2 comic book setting with a Hellboy backdrop. That doesn't mean you need Hellboy as the draw. Something like a Marvel 1963 thing, with the mystical elements of each Allied, Axis, and Neutral power drawing on the various setting elements.

Gotta lol @ this. Let this be a reminder to everyone that if you're going to talk at length about things you really need to understand them. Your dilemma is a false one.

Lucas has actually flat out stated what balance to the Force is. It's all light-side, no Sith. Dark side is a cancer, it's always bad, and you don't say balance is having 'a little bit' of cancer. Until TFA was released, there was no 'light side' in any of the films. There was just 'The Force' and 'the dark side of the Force'.

The EU conception of things like Gray Jedi is just that, an EU thing. Usage of the dark side in the movies is about as simplistic as you can get: if you use this power, it turns you into a hateful old man and kills everything you know and love. Using the power of lightning summoned from your infinite hatred "at some times in your life" does not make anyone a brooding anti-hero. It's evil. SW mythology and morality is very simple.

This is a very nice place. I've had a few scenes with some friendly, enthusiastic players since getting (promptly) approved and I'm digging the FS3 system which seems simple enough for quick-moving scenes while allowing players enough conceptual space to differ themselves from each other. Glad this showed up at just the right time!

I don't think the MU community feels more passive. At least, not for no real reason.

I think the MU community is suffering from an increasingly low number of players. I would wager there are only a few hundred unique IPs left across all the major MUs.

I think your three ideas are great, @Rook. And not just because I said something similar a few months back!

The reason introductions suck is because a lot of people approach them as like interrogations.

"What's your name? How long have you been [around here/on this ship/doing this thing]? Where are you from?"

It's never natural.

@sunny

No problem! It's a good article and the best way I've seen of explaining the issue that all online communities -- perhaps all communities -- inevitably face.

@Thenomain

Absolutely. If anything, it's great because it preserves a vague sense of normalcy. If people are just jumping from epic event to amazing event to astounding circumstance, well, things begin to feel less special. In the end, I agree with @Misadventure - it doesn't matter who is there because nothing matters.

Character death is nice when it's on the table and people can see good times for it.

However, I just watched a RP group disintegrate literally over night when someone suddenly decided to kill a PC. The reason given was much the same: I wanted to create tension. But it wasn't passed by anyone and, so, there were suddenly 3 or 4 very unhappy players who had ideas go up in smoke, lost an IC friend, or OOCly felt it was basically a slap to the face because the player in question was unhappy.

It's gotta be discussed.

@mietze said in Where's your RP at?:

In addition most systems do have a get out of jail free way to get around PC death, even if it costs something in return.

I think people who fixate on death as the only measure of True Morality on a consent game are kind of weird. Even on games that are anything goes, usually people don't think like that.

It's the easiest barometer. When death isn't happening, and isn't really on the cards, a lot of players start leaning on the fact that they won't be killed. So, to use a WoD example, you get neonates staring an Antediluvian in the face and just failing to sell it in any way.

Well, Supers RP has a crazy amount of scale. Someone might want to play someone like Spiderman and someone might want to play someone closer to Superman. Someone might want to play someone who invents things and someone might want to have god-like power at their fingertips. Someone might want to RP about the hardships of saving the day but never being recognised for it, someone else might just want to smash GENERAL GRACKTOR SCOURGE OF THE EYELESS DIMENSION in the face.

It's hard to find a system that allows for all that, while also making things feel different.

You'd want a very simple, flexible system, I think. One that's easy to learn and easy to adapt to any sort of superpowered character. The conflict resolution side of things will depend on whether you want to encourage people to PvP against each other (villains and heroes) or enforce PCs on the side of good (or, at least, not being blatantly supervillainous).

1. Players have a responsibility to be aware of what might trigger them and make them upset. There are numerous things I simply won't scene. A scene-runner has some (incredibly limited) responsibility to let people know what the rating of a scene might be, particularly if it is going to be a scene revolving around anything that might be a trigger. In general, though, I question anyone who feels the need to play out any content above, say, a MA or R18 rating. All games should have a general idea of tone and rating in the rules and it is the responsibility of players to stick to that.

2. Probably nothing. Let's be honest here, if a scene makes someone upset for reasons that no one might have been able to guess, it is not the responsibility of the scene-runner to placate an upset player, nor is it the responsibility of staff. It depends on the exact circumstances: did the upset player go into the scene knowingly (or disregarding the outline), or did the scene-runner spring it on the group without any warning? In the latter case, I'd say an apology would be warranted.

3. You can't. Controversial themes probably shouldn't be run because very few people will handle them with care. Staff/public scenes should probably always verge towards safe, particularly pick-up public RP, but plots can honestly go anywhere -- providing that people are warned.

At some point, and for lack of a better term, players need to acknowledge the social contract between themselves and their RP platform.

@Arkandel

Hmm. Whenever I think I'm going to touch on something that might be a bit too graphic for most, I tend to really tone down the details. In general, I also try to keep things to a M15+ rating at best. For example, in Australia, a film like Terminator 2 is M15 - and T2 features a lot of stuff, but typically fleeting and not very graphic.

I'd question the need for most games to go beyond that. However, for a setting like CoD, I can definitely see where a R-18 rating could be mandated because the whole point of that setting is the dark side of humanity. But even then I'd question -- if only silently and to myself -- the people who'd want to scene graphic depictions of torture, sexual violence, and so on.

To go back to my Terminator example, it's the difference between the T-1000 killing the dog implicitly with a yelp and a bloody collar and a graphic scene where you see it strangle the dog, for example.

@Paris

I had someone do that sort of thing to me -- very heavily push an IC relationship, with some stuff that wasn't my kink but I was happy to oblige -- and then turn around and get me banned. Then, when asked about it, I got a 'you know what you did' from the player in question.

@Ghost

I think exploring that topic -- how to mitigate some of those mundane attachment problems -- would be a really good resource. I know it's something that I had to work on several years back, and is still something that can tap me on the shoulder now and again, even thought I know it's not nearly as much of an issue.

And I've had many, many "I'm not a therapist" discussions, too.

Also, is this Yet Another Arx Discussion?

Not much to add at this time beyond wholesale agreement with @HelloProject's 1 and 3 points.

It feels like there's been a shift from staff as people who keep the game running smoothly to just people who keep the game running. People who are basically responsible for keeping the hardware online and preventing code from crashing things. It feels very rare to see staff drive the game in a direction or proactively discuss issues and/or discipline problem players.

At least with this one, I think one of the best things HellMOO had was a public bboard called Crime and Punishment. HellMOO was pretty liberal at handing out temp bans. If someone was just being a bit too much of a dick and not listening to staff? They get a day or two off. If they abused game systems? A week or two. Did they keep doing it? Longer. Did they actively try to bring the game down or make the game inhospitable to people? Don't come back.

A big part of this was a few points.

• Bans were not seen as permanent.
• Player culture understood bans as a disciplinary measure, not a 'stay the fuck out' measure.
• *cnp board kept things transparent: player name, what they did, logged evidence of it, duration of the ban and which staff member handled it.
• Staff had a vision and a drive and were quite involved in keeping things running smoothly, listening to concerns, implementing fixes and being as fair as possible. This led to respect, which generally prevented people from forming whineship groups if someone got punished. For example, if someone found an exploit and reported it, they might generally get to keep what they earned from it -- with a stern warning. But if it was found that you were exploiting and didn't report it, or shared it around? Well, then, you'd be looking at probably a day or two away.

Surprise surprise, most people played by the rules.

Running a game is more than keeping the server on.