The easiest way to stop whisper campaigns is to stop sharing details about your personal life with those who have no significantly earned your trust. A person can be a damn fine roleplayer, but not be someone you want knowing your life's secrets, you know? What we do creates this amazing feeling of intimacy. Sharing creativity with someone often does. Yet, I think in many ways, it is an illusion. People are people when they are out of character. People who gossip. People who lie. People who don't respect boundaries. Most of us wouldn't tell someone our secrets on the first meeting or even at the fourth. Yet, there is this safety and comfort with doing it online.

I don't say this in effort to 'victim blame' anyone. I say this as someone who has been heart broken and hurt by people I thought I could trust just because we had a super fun time roleplaying together. Just because someone plays your friend in a MUSH doesn't mean they are your actual friend. I think that roleplayers, as a community, have a really difficult time telling the difference in general.

I got a job!!

I fail to see what is so difficult about giving your players a warning before running a scene with common triggers involved. I do every time and it hasn’t been immersion breaking or a hassle at all. It just seems to me to be common courtesy since my goal is for people to have fun not relive past trauma.

People who have been checking in on me over the past couple months as I work through a pretty debilitating bout of depression. It's just the occasional 'Hey, how are you?' and talking about random stuff that usually has nothing to do with my mental stuff. Those check-ins have been enough to convince me that despite whatever I'm feeling now, people care about me and things are probably going to be okay.

@saosmash Goddamn this. It feels really shitty to be informed by a 'friend' that someone has been talking shit about you. Most of them try to couch it in the whole 'I just want to work things out between you.'

No. You want to stir the pot. If someone has an issue with me or the way I do things, I expect them to come to me about it if this is truly important to them and it wasn't just a moment of venting out of frustration. If it is serious enough to need a resolution, they need to come to me themselves. If it's not, then I don't need to hear about every time I irritate someone and they needed a moment to bitch.

Players that not only tolerate when my GMed scenes get weird (because they always kinda do) but seem just as in to it as I am and roll with everything I throw at them. Players like this are the reason why I love GMing. You guys are awesome. If I could have kept you in the scene for a week, I would have.

I’m just really happy that a couple of my RP friends that have been gone due to work and pandemic related insanity are coming back.

Ianthe at Arx. She was a charming disaster that started out as this free spirit until she finds out a pretty crushing secret that completely broke her. RPing that out was difficult but it was one hell of a story with her making mistake after mistake because that revelation wounded her deeply enough that she couldn't figure out who she was supposed to be anymore. I would have loved to see more closure for her, but I think a tragic ending fits for how that story arc went. Not every story should have a happy ending.

On Arx, a lot of people get introduced to magic in a brutal way. I think that works for a setting in which magic is generally pretty terrifying. Yet, the other day one of my NPCs got to introduce a PC to magic in a very gentle, wonder-filled way and it was such a sweet, nice scene. I’m still thinking about it days later.

Be generous in poses. Give your partner(s) something to react to, be it a piece of compelling dialogue or some sort of non-verbal cue that they can then pick up and run with. I don't mean something that results in them merely reacting to your PC, but something that gives them something to build on in their pose. There should never be a point where the other person, if they are semi-creative and a decent writer, doesn't know how to continue the conversation. Leave openings. Let other people feel important in the scene. Don't center everything on just your character.

I think the biggest thing that helps me is to give PCs space to get to know each other. If you make every moment non-stop action, you lose a lot of opportunity to allow PCs to bond and get to know each other. So, if I am doing, say, a dungeon quest, maybe we have a brief interlude where they camp for the night. Maybe they are just walking around the forest and talking, looking along the trail for signs of their quarry. If players are given space, they will typically 'fill in the gaps' with conversation and that is step one to developing PC relationships.

@macha Probably Indiana, lol. We don’t have any inspections here and it shows.

@il-volpe Boy. I can't think why GMs aren't falling over themselves to make story for you.

@roz

Goodwill is what you pay OVER the valuation of a business. If a business is worth 2 million, but you pay 3 million, then the excess is considered goodwill and amortized since it refers to the intangible property that you are purchasing, such as branding and intellectual property, etc. If the business is valued at over 2 million, but you are only paying 1 million for it, then the excess valuation is going to be taxed as a gift per the IRS. I would be very careful and make sure all your documentation is in order.

@ganymede My daughter is on the spectrum and operates in a similar way. She can be a really kind kid in that she does a lot to help out with her little brother and she loves animals but she is also the sort that will burst out laughing if someone else is crying or having a meltdown. She says things that are incredibly hurtful and is confused when I explain to her why that was super messed up. She doesn't respect authority in the form of a person at all, but she does respect "the rules". if you tell her a rule, she follows it without deviation even when deviation from the rules makes more sense socially. She is exceedingly, brutally honest, even when it would be better for her if she lied.

@caryatid I always had fun with you and wish you the absolute best.

@saosmash said in The Work Thread:

Organization and calendaring were ALREADY a problem for me

I have a months worth of audits to do in 2 weeks (thanks seasonal depression!) and just trying to get all the paperwork organized and the actual audits scheduled makes me wanna crawl back in bed and hide some more.

This is why when I have been asked on Arx what we 'need', I just tell the player to pick something that sounds fun. I don't like that question because it feels like it comes with an expectation that RP is just going to drop in that player's lap if they choose this specific role. Also, most of the time, I don't know the player in question at all and I don't feel comfortable playing a guessing game to see what they might find fun because, almost inevitably, if they don't find what they are looking for with my suggestion, they are going to blame me for not giving them the right hook rather than admit that they need to choose for themselves and stop making their fun my responsibility. I offer opportunities for fun, not guarantees.

Getting paid to do what I do now does nothing to solve the fundamental issues that some players are entitled Karens that might be willing to pay for entertainment but don’t really respect the effort that goes into it. Attaching a paycheck to it just turns it into a shitty retail job and no thank you. At least now, if a player is being a creep or a jerk, I can just ban them or not engage with them and it doesn’t affect whether I can pay my light bill.