@Andraian said in Empire State Heroes Mush:
Instead, the mush has now lost an excellent player and disrupted RP for numerous other players.
And all because his actions MIGHT disrupt RP for some hypothetical person who would want to app Aunt frigging May but would be turned off by having been portrayed doing Aunt May things.
I really do not get it.
I do not understand why it matters if Peter NPCs May, even if someone apps May. How would that player's choice to ignore previous canon be any different from a player ignoring the previous canon from a previously played character?
@Prototart said in Comic/Superhero Games:
I still like my marvel/wildstorm shit that will never be used
The New Gods are better than the Asgardians, so I feel your pain.
I hear people say Empire State Heroes is good.
@insomniac7809 said in Sexuality: IC and OOC:
Like, every woman I've known who's read ASoI&F has commented that no, George, no woman spends that much of her day thinking about her own titties. The accidental stereotypes come, in my experience, from writers thinking too much about how an <X> character's <X>-ness would color absolutely every interaction, more than from not considering it at all.
My mom was a nerd. Some of my earliest memories are of watching the Star Wars trilogy with her. I will always associate those movies with love and warmth, and as a kid I watched them so many times my dad made a rule that I couldn't watch them while he was home.
Another part was the school library. In sixth grade, I found out they stocked Dragon Magazine, but kept it hidden under the librarian's desk for no reason I ever figured out. That they hid it made me all the more voracious for it, so I read it intensely.
In high school, I noticed some boys reading Wizard Magazine. The nearly full-page picture of Adam Hughes-drawn Vampirella they were looking at exposed me to feelings I wasn't ready to deal with, so I asked one of the boys I kind of knew if I could borrow the magazine to read it. He said yes, and I discovered I really like Superman. Things progressed from there.
There are other steps scattered throughout the middle; discovering Margaret Weis in junior high, for example, or my mom buying me my first ever hardcover books in the form of Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy. I think she also gave me my first Stephen King book to read when I was ten, the Eyes of the Dragon. But, in general, I became a nerd because I kept noticing nerdy stuff and decided to fixate on it.
@Atomic said in A fully OC supers MU:
Yeah, I loved playing on them, so I'm thinking of standing one up.
I'm strongly considering an Academy style game where the PCs are students. I have a lot of world and lore already built. I love to run scenes, build stories, and do long plots.
I'm partial to the Mutants and Masterminds system for MU resolution, though I am reading a few other supers rulesets right now, because total dork.
How does that bounce off of people?
Brutal honesty? I'm interested in the idea of an OC only game, but when you tie that to a game system that requires a financial investment from me, I find myself wondering why I shouldn't just take my OC ideas to a game I don't have to pony up for a book for. I think a strong enough sales pitch could convince me to cough up the sixty dollar investment, but as it stands, "I'm thinking of doing this, probably in a school for supers" isn't selling me.
@ganymede said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:
Hey, now. Some of us who disagree with you are hearing you.
That's fine, and I'm not trying to be passive-aggressive. I'm being as straightforward as I know how when I say that I am not talking about this thread's topic, so my commentary has been a derail. I dislike derailing, so I'm out of this one. That's all.
Sounds like we aren't talking about the same things, then. Sorry to waste your time on a derail.
@surreality said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:
@greenflashlight I think there's something getting lost in translation here. It may just be a word choice issue -- it isn't so much something staff wants to do.
Maybe. Let me stop and define my terms, since I admittedly have pretty weird definitions.
I read something once that always stuck with me: "The ends don't justify the means. The ends determine the means." That sentiment really changed my worldview, and to give an example relevant to this discussion, I consider 'want' a pretty useless word that I no longer treat with much respect in my personal usage. Whether you--and I'm just using 'you' as a stand-in for the hypothetical staff--want to do a thing is intensely irrelevant to me in the face of whether or not you did it, because I don't know a way to measure what you want to do except by watching your actions. If you start an investigation against my will, then I'm forced to assume an investigation is the thing you want rather than to respect my wishes, since in this example they're mutually exclusive and you didn't choose another path toward your goal of chasing your prey. The accused is the end you're pursuing, and I'm the path you're stepping on to get there.
I guess the next definition is my goal in dealing with victims. I perceive harassment mostly as a violation of personal sovereignty; as a theft of personal boundaries. My goal is to heal that breach by allowing boundaries to be reestablished under the victim's control. If I have to choose between letting a predator go and violating the trust of an already damaged victim, I'll let the predator go every time, because the idea of hurting the victim more in order to buy safety for the next person is abhorrent to me. I don't believe in buying a third party's safety with a victim's pain. In my personal hierarchy of sins, that kind of betrayal is in the top three. It offends me on the deepest level.
I think that the way to get a victim's cooperation is to earn their trust by giving them back the power their attacker took. If you become their friend, then they will be willing to align their goals with yours if they can; to use a personal example, I never would have told the staff of United Heroes one word about my harassment if it hadn't been for my friend Prototart needing me to (not that it ended up doing any good, but I had to try).
But I don't know. Maybe this is all just me, and none of it makes any sense to you. Maybe I'm the only person who thinks the victim should be prioritized over the criminal; I've never really believed in solving moral quandaries by numbers, so maybe I'm the odd duck out. If so, just let me know, and I'll concede I have nothing to contribute to the conversation you want to have.
@surreality said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:
Further, I'm well aware of the emotional sensitivities during and after a traumatic experience, online and off, and don't need a primer on that front.
Sorry. That you're familiar and that I condescended to you. Both.
@kanye-qwest said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:
But it isn't okay, is it? Because if a player is doing this stuff to one person...they are probably doing it to others, too. Like, yes you should strive for comfort and understanding but at the same time the staff's job is to do the best they can for the players. That means protecting them from known shitlord elements.
Then we need to be clear that the actual goal is not to eliminate roadblocks that prevent players from coming forward, and is instead to make things easier for staff to do what they want to do. And I'm actually more okay with that viewpoint than I probably sound; it does have merit. I just think when the conversation shifts from "how can a game make reporting more likely" to "staff needs to take X action no matter what," we need to acknowledge that we're no long talking about nor prioritizing the same things.
@surreality said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:
This is a checks and balances issue; though I agree that 'the fewer involved the better' for confidentiality, some staff corps are just not designed to allow that and you run a real risk of things going much worse if only one staff member ends up handling it solo.
I was probably unclear. The advocate isn't empowered to do anything a normal staffer of their rank isn't. The advocate is there to listen carefully and consciously to the victim. When I said there may have to be a negotiation process in order to enact the victim's wishes because of ethical complaints, this is what I was talking about.
You can't, essentially, ask to leave the predator out in the wild to harm others if what they've done would warrant removal from the game.
It's your (hypothetical) game, so you run it however you have to, but I'll just warn you right now to be extremely careful in how you express this sentiment, because it is very easy for a frightened, panicked person to see this and hear, "We're going to put you through this process whether you want it or not because what you need for you isn't important compared to what we need from you."
Oh. Another thing staff should do when dealing with a victim to be be careful in all phrasing of discussions. "Do you have logs?" is an accusatory question whether it's intended that way or not, because of the social context it takes place in, where victims are often considered as guilty as their harassers are. "Do you want to show me any logs you have?" is better, because it acknowledges her role as the driving force in whatever happens next.
Stuff like that.
@surreality said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:
What do you think games can do to help? (Not resolve, but help.)
I'd start by changing the disclaimer from "tell us immediately if you're being harassed" (or whatever similar sentiment) to "we're here to help you, so we hope you'll feel safe coming to us right away if you're being harassed." It's a minor change, but the first sentiment is very... well, it's very confrontational; not necessarily toward the victim--though there certainly is an angle there in the implications, that since it's phrased as a command, you have done something wrong and/or punishable if you fail to comply--but certainly toward the crime itself. That's a bad thing because it stresses the importance of the crime over the importance of the victim's needs, which as an aside is a cultural problem we need to deal with: go Google "Al Franken harassment" and count how many headlines come up that name the actual woman rather than calling her 'woman who accuses Al Franken' if you want an example of what I'm talking about.
But anyway. By changing the statement to "we're here to help you, there's at least an implicit promise of comfort, and that staff will listen to the victim without discarding her as having played her part in the procedural drama of hunting down the wicked harasser. It's a good start.
I think the logical follow-up to that is to look for staff that has experience with victims. We're off-balance, so we need someone who knows how to approach us and how to not knock us further off-balance than we already are. This may mean letting an accusation go because the complainer isn't willing to pursue a course of action for whatever reason, and that needs to be something that's okay. The victim needs to know that though one person on the game has violated her dignity for the sake of his own needs, the staff won't do the same thing to her.
I think the logical follow-up to that is to have a policy in place protecting the confidentiality of any communications. The complaints are only for the eyes and ears of the advocate-staffer, not for anyone else, especially not staffers who feel gung-ho about "protecting other players" by taking a victim's complaints and beginning an investigation anyway. Don't be that guy. That guy might help some potential, future victim, but he does so at the expense of hurting the victim who's already here, and that's fucked up. The victim you have is the one who deserves your concern.
Anyway. I'm going to see a movie in fifteen minutes, so that's all I got for top of my head ideas. Feel free to criticize them if you think I'm overlooking something.
What do you think individuals people do discuss these things with should do to help?
The first response to the story always has to be, "What do you (the victim) want to happen here to be safer and happier?" Obey her wishes as best you can. What she wants may not be what's best for her, but it's not your place to make that decision. You may have to negotiate a compromise--obviously, not every wish will be ethical to implement--but the goal should always be to give her what she needs to restore her sense of agency.
What do you think individuals in this situation should do when confronted with these feelings?
Whatever they can. I've discussed how idiosyncratic my own coping mechanisms are, so I'm not going to suggest there's any one correct way for a victim to respond. The context of who's involved, the risks, the consequences, and the needs of the moment are all too complex. If you've been harassed, then you do the best you can with what you have, and please don't beat yourself up if hindsight reveals you didn't choose the optimal course. You're muddling through a hard, scary time: no one blames you for not thinking straight.
Except assholes. They blame you, but they can go to hell. People who've been through it are with you and support you.
@tragedyjones said in White Wolf Street Fighter:
Cool! I only briefly flipped through that book, once. Never saw that part.
Yeah, it's pretty good. It's like a deck-building card game crossed with an RPG. Any White Wolf game can be cheesed, but the simplicity of the mechanics prevent a lot of that, and the card game aspect brings in elements that add entirely new player skills to gaming.
@tragedyjones The Exalted sourcebook Shards of the Exalted Dream contains a game that's basically a fighting game. It's difficult to explain the mechanics; it's basically Rock-Paper-Scissors, except there are five or six different categories of technique, each of which trumps one different other kind of technique and which goes to roll-off against any non-trump situation. It's very fast, and much simplified over any White Wolf game to date.
I own it but never played it. The combat system was used as the basis for the Exalted spinoff Burn Legend, which I feel does it better.