Posts made by Groth

I made scones for brunch today. Scones are amazing. That is all.

I think the extent of which lack of reaction to a plot affects characters is something that you need to establish clearly and up front with any given game. If you've been running a laid back mostly social RP kind of game for the past 2 years and then suddenly unleash a zerg-like swarm that murders any character that doesn't evacuate, people being grouchy about is a fair reaction!

However if you've been running a game like HorrorMux, then that very same thing is completely expected and what the game is all about.

Before now I didn't even know Lucifer was based on a comic. I thought it was just yet another procedural with a random twist.

@Arkandel said in Fandom and entitlement:

Perhaps the answer is "well, some writers are better" or maybe their material is just easier to write for. I can't tell. But for most creative teams around popular productions I can't imagine being online because there are fans out there who will trash them completely, and very personally, pretty much no matter what choices they make for their characters or plot. Because what do you tell the guy who literally tattooed the show's lines on his body, named his firstborn after a character and basically lives for your show when you have to do something he doesn't approve of?

There were two advantages that Breaking Bad had that many shows do not have.

1. It was properly planned from the very start with a clear overarching story-arc that was never milked for more seasons. You can compare this to House of Cards where it's obvious that Seasons 3-6 were in no way planned ahead of time.
2. Breaking Bad never had a complicated plot or unsolved mysteries for fans to get angry about. It was always just a rollercoaster ride of one mans crazy journey of self-destruction and the writers just had to deliver on that.

I don't think theres anything wrong with the idea that the reward for staffing is the joy of staffing. If I vollonteer to Staff for a game its because I really like the game and I want to help it do well and not because I want to earn something.

However I also don't think much good comes from forcing people to do things they dont enjoy without compensation. I think its unreasonable to expect Fred to recieve the same attention as Susan unless youre going to start paying in a harder currency then joy. Thats not to say Fred should be ignored, but if he bores the GM to tears, only misery will come from some kind of enforced equal time shenanigans.

@Ganymede said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:

Both positions can be correct, so I wouldn't respond either, except to say perhaps that the observation is true, and if one's experience has been so bad that one cannot trust any staffer than maybe this hobby is more trouble than it's worth.

I think that to a large extent the bad staffer problem is overblown. It's not too difficulty to avoid bad staffers once you spot them, maybe it means you have to avoid their characters or in the worst case you have to switch to playing a different game and while there has been some legendarily bad staffers out there, it's not like we have an actual plague of them roaming the world of MU*.

When you look closer at what frustrates players it comes a lot from their desires.

• They want a game that's active enough that they can easily get a scene whenever they feel like one.
• They want to be involved/feel important to the plot/other players in some fashion.
• They want the game to be 'fair'

The problem is that the first desire becomes easier the more players there are, since offers more opportunities for RP. However at the same time the second desire becomes harder the more players there are since only so many people in a group can be 'important' and Staff attention is a limited resource that doesn't scale up with players well. So they end up in a situation where they see these other players getting to be 'important' while they're not important and this is terrible and unfair and clearly the staff are all the devil incarnate etc. It's something that's bad for the hobby but I have no idea how to fix it short of Google making a version of deepmind that storytells for people so they can feel important.

@Auspice said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

It's being responsible with your position of power. It's volunteer work, but it's still work. You took on a mantle of responsibility and if you can't handle those responsibilities, then maybe it's time to step down. Anyone can run plot as a player. Almost every single game out there welcomes and practically begs for players to run plot. If you want to run plot with the freedoms to run it however you want and for whomsoever you want... then relieve yourself of the burdens and demands of being a Staffer to do so.

Well, part of the reasons most games practically beg players to run plot is that most of the Staffers usually don't want to deal with all the headaches involved with actually running scenes for players and focus on the back-end work and keeping those anomaly jobs numbers down since that can be done at your own pace and you rarely even have to talk to a player.

@Ganymede said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:

I'm not sure how any of this has to do with what I believe Sparks is talking about, which may be why she casually walked around what Too Old for This was saying. But I would approve and support of a measure that holds staff to a higher standard of conduct than players by virtue of their positions.

I wouldn't say a higher standard. The standard of conduct for Staff is inherently very different because they in many cases interact with the game in an entirely different way from the one that players do.You don't need rules against players giving magical stuff to their friends or forbid them from spying on their enemies because they can't do that in the first place however since Staff does have that power, I think it's important to establish up front what is considered appropriate for them to do.

In some games Staffers invisibly spying on scenes is considered appropriate because it makes it a lot easier for them to pop in NPCs or otherwise tie current events into the plot. In other games that's considered a terrible invasion of privacy.

In some games anyone with any kind of power is either staff or a friend of staff, in other games staff are expected to not be involved with IC politics.

The specific set of rules that are right for a specific game will depend a lot on the theme, setting and the kind of playerbase the game is expected to have. However regardless if you want to be able to consider yourself an 'ethical staffer' then you need to have the ability to pick a set of rules and stick to them and not make 'exceptions'.

I think if you want to take the thread in that direction you may need to make a hog pit topic.

@Wretched said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

@Kanye-Qwest I don't think that at all, nor was it what i said. But there is a difference between 'This staffer likes to run scenes for the Cavanaugh Family Group because they click well.' and 'This Staffer like to TS with Henry Hung Hunkenstien, for the plot.'

Well, if the staffer wants to TS with Henry Hung Hunkenstien because that's something they mutually enjoy, that's fine. However I would argue that the staffer, HHH and the game as a whole is better off if they do that TS with a character that isn't plot important. Which touches on the related subject of Staff PCs in positions of power because if someone seems to be rewarded by the 'pc' Prince that just happens to be played by staff it has all the same optics as if it was an NPC.

@bear_necessities said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

@Kanye-Qwest said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

@Wretched do you honestly think staffers are not going to prefer rp with players that are fun for them to rp with, regardless of TS?

It's your responsibility as a staff to engage with all players regardless of how fun they are. Players someone would consider "boring" deserve interaction, too.

Eh. Until you start paying the staff an actual wage, their main responsibility is to have fun, usually they derive some part of their enjoyment from running the game well.

@Sparks said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

If someone TSes and that doesn't happen, it's not a problem. The fact that some people do get that way when they TS shouldn't mean that you ban TS, any more than the fact that some people do get that way when they encounter an RP style they really like means you should ban all good RPers.

The topic however isn't TS in general, it's a very specific form of TS in which one party is a presumably important NPC played by a member of staff and the other is a normal PC. It's not useful generalize that to all TS ever in any context.

So, no, TS isn't the problem. The actual problem is when you have someone with an OOC opinion about someone else that is so strong it is literally disruptive to gameplay in some manner, whether that manner is beneficial to the target of this feeling or not.

This is basically a tautology. Problematic behavior is problematic. Sure it is is, noone questions that. However we can do better then that, we don't have to be literally on fire to detect a fire. We can be smart enough to realize that we shouldn't hold a bonfire in the middle of a dry field that hasn't had rain for months and we can in fact figure out that some patterns of behavior are likely to lead to problematic outcomes without actually having to go through the entire process of getting there for the 500th time.

@saosmash said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

But if a staffer wants to create sexually themed story, there's nothing at all wrong with that, and assuming that all scenarios in which sex happens with a staff NPC are in that category is bullshit. Pretending that this is what is always happening does a disservice to like... everyone.

To me there is a meaningful distinction between sexually themed and TS which is about as wide as the difference between HBO and Porn. For instance if the King is getting a blowjob at the same time he's holding an audience with a PC, that is sexually themed but it's not TS because the scene is about the audience and not the blowjob. I don't think anyone has a problem with scenes that have explicit sexual content in appropriate context.

That said the worst staff scene experience I've ever had was when my character was sneaking into some building and the staff basically powerposed my PC giving the guard a sexual favor to get past and I was just too shocked at the fact he did that to object. To some extent that experience colors my view on sex in scenes with NPCs because if the NPC initiates it can put the players in a really awkward position.

@surreality said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

In fairness, part of me feels this was a bigger issue before we all got old and lazy and believed in things like 'enough sleep' and 'work in the morning', and getting laid was a much bigger priority in those horny college age days, but that could be my need for a nap talking.

It's kind of tangental to this topic, but the biggest TS hounds I've ever known have been people in their 40s, they just behave like horny college kids! The people with wierd ooc attachment issues however are all over the place demographics wise in my experience, I don't think its something you grow out of.

@scar said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

@Kanye-Qwest said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

You can find something hot/sexy that is still 100% ic, and that is not creepy. If I am doing IC rp and someone tells me, OOC, that it inspired a RL orgasm? That is invasive and uncomfortable and weird, and it is ON THEM.

I have so many yikes right now.

i've had someone oocly ask to prolong a ts scene so that they 'could finish'

Can I unread this somehow?

@Sparks
I agree. Rules and policies always need to be attuned to the kind of game you want to be running, there is no such thing as universal perfect rules that work in every context.

From a hobby perspective the rules exist to make things a smoother experience for everyone. When it's clear up front what is expected noone needs to feel ambushed and you avoid a lot of needless arguing or dissapointment. If someone doesnt like the rules and policies you picked for your game, ideally they should be able to either find another game that suits them better or make their own.

What ever you choose to call it, you are willfully ignorant if you havn't noticed how OOCly emotionally invested most MU* players get with their TS partners and while generalisations are unfair, it is easy to see why players would think staffers that TS players are emotionally invested in those players.

@saosmash said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

I disagree that TS is always irrelevant to story. Rping out sex can have an impact on the intimacy of characters that is very difficult to replicate through simple ftb. Any kind of story can be off camera, but there is always more room to maneuver and express where you actually rp versus where you offscreen. Whether you are off camming the boning or the torture or whatever else.

In general I agree and it's the kind of argument I use to justify spending time on TS scenes for my own characters. However when it comes to NPCs I have a hard time thinking of a situation where playing the scene out is a good use of my time as Staff, esp as NPC relations should get documented so future Staff can take over.

@saosmash said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

One character or player monopolizing all the attention of a particular npc is an issue that exists regardless of whether there is hanky panky involved, and is especially annoying when the player attempts to use it to throw their weight around ooc about how well connected they are. But while the sexytimes angle is and can be part of this I GUESS, I think making the issue sex instead of spotlighting is a mistake and muddies the waters.

The tricky part is that while one on one RP between an NPC and a PC is 'inefficient' use of Staff time, it's also super exhausting to do public scenes all the time and public envirements tend to prevent you from exploring a lot of the more deep interactions.

What I usually see happen a lot is that some player approaches an NPC to Explore some sort of plot hook and the Staff playing that NPC gets excited about where things are going, so they make themselves available. That can then look to outsiders like that player is getting special favors when it's really just two people enjoying RP.

Somewhat tangental:
In theory the optimal form of goverment is a benign dictator, having the flexibility to always to the right thing for the people without any of the red tape and bureacracy of a democracy. In practise it never happens because people are human and thats why the most succesful countries are generally those with accountability.

MU* is similar in that if you have the perfect staff, they dont need rules to tie them down since theyll always do the right thing to make the game better for everyone. In reality though most staff are just normal people trying to have some fun with their hobby with others and there's no reason to expect them to be saints.

Good rules and policies makes the hobby better for everyone since it makes the expectations clear and you put less pressure on the staff to always make the right judgement call. Sure at times they might feel cumbersome and unneccesary if you have a lot of trust however I think it's on the whole better to lean on good policy rather then trust.