There's characters of mine I've lost without feeling much if anything, there's characters I've lost and felt satisfied about, and there's characters I've felt ridiculously sad about. For me it often has to do with the circumstances surrounding their death as well as how much I liked that character. It can be really sad to not only witness a tragic story but like... be immersed in it more thoroughly than you can get immersed in any other media. If you're more of a method-acting roleplayer, then it's almost like a part of you that you've lost. There can be very strong feelings of grief involved here and I think it's important as a community to acknowledge that these feelings are real and valid. It's an emotional struggle that will lighten with time, understanding, and players being kind to each other.
Posts made by hobos
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RE: Mourning a character, how do you do it?
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RE: Places Code Pros and Cons
I've never seen any system like that. It always distinguishes between action and speech in what I've played, so you'd see something like:
At the bar, Bob looks at John with narrowed eyes. "Y... t me, pu..?" He yelled, "G...O..! Now, ... .... .... ch...."
Or whatever. And if people really wanted to yell, they wouldn't use tabletalk for it, usually.
Anyway, reading your layout of rationales, I think that's very well said.
It's very interesting to me that you would distinguish immersion and story. I've never thought of them as very separate concepts before, but now that I see that, it's enlightening. They're not the same thing. Most systems tend to prioritize one over the other to some degree, even while trying to have both, like being bilingual -- there's going to a first language in most cases.
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RE: Places Code Pros and Cons
Most muds I played would obscure things said at other places so you'd see something like...
Pulling out her hair-tie, the shoopy shoop at a table in the corner says something.
Or...
Pulling out her hair-tie, the shoopy shoop at a table in the corner says, "... stinky... de... Pie hole..."
And it'd usually be colored differently too. This way eliminated the need to emote twice separately, once for the room and once for the place.
I do like the balance of creativity that a scene takes when you have to emote twice, though.
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RE: Too Much
Pose order is a conundrum for me. I don't like that it slows things down, but at the same time - without it, I have an even harder time holding the threads of conversations. You'll be in the midst of typing up a reply to one thing someone said, then suddenly somebody else replies to them first and the convo goes off on a tangent and your pose no longer makes any sense. So I view it as a necessary evil. Honestly 3-per and free-for-all pose orders just give me a headache and suck the enjoyment right out of a scene.
Sorry to hear that, but yeah, I can see where you're coming from. I guess it really is a personal preference sort of thing. I tend to write short, interruptable emotes when I'm in a non-pose-order situation. It just feels more like normal conversation to me, but the thing that is lacking in a text interface is ... seeing that someone else is in the middle of talking. Maybe someday a mud client will be developed that shows when someone else is typing -- dialogue, not action.
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RE: Too Much
For me, it depends what kind of mechanics the game has to manage crowds. If there is a tabletalk mechanic, I will primarily use that. It also depends on the game's culture and if pose order is important. If pose order is important, what saved my sanity in large scenes was being able to use the '3P' pose order.
I've been in some large scenes on games that felt relatively comfortable (or uncomfortable for all the right reasons) and fun, due to the concordance of a culture where "pose order" was not something particularly taken into consideration, and tabletalk was nicely used by everyone involved.
Two problems I noticed in the 'pose order heavy' games are these:
- A long dialogue scene will take forever. Strategy meetings become painful and really just another way to socialize. People are stuck online for hours and hours if they want to just handle a small item of business. This leads to people colluding OOC rather than discussing IC events IC.
- The flow of the scene is constantly broken by a person responding to multiple people and multiple lines of conversation in one emote. Not only is this unrealistic in terms of conversational flow but it's also confusing, and can lead to the leeriness towards large scenes that we see here.
As a culture, how to not take pose order into consideration? Well, this doesn't mean you will never be stuck waiting for someone to emote. If the scene is describing something that cannot move forward without someone's input, then you should either wait for them politely as long as it takes, or modify the scene to move forward without them, without powergaming them. If people are just chatting, then just keep chatting. Leave room for interruptions. If you are asking someone a question, then wait for an answer. If you're saying something particularly dramatic that might warrant a response from them, then maybe give a long pause before continuing.
Pose order can be useful for async scenes or play-by-post roleplay so I think it has its place, but I just personally don't enjoy it in an immersive roleplay environment.
For me, in an ideal environment, it becomes too much when people are just firing out emotes so fast that they are colliding and thus don't make sense at all. And I have only seen this once, in a scene that contained roughly fifty people. And it only happened once during the scene before people noticed it was happening and all tried to slow down a bit, kind of like a bunch of friends talking rapidly over each other at a dinner table and then chilling out and slowing themselves down in order to hear everyone else.
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RE: Review of Recent Bans
I have to agree with that assessment, based on what I've seen here. There looks to have been a period where the admin were silencing posters just because they wanted people to be quiet while they deliberated. This wasn't respected, but that period is passed, and now people are saying they are afraid to talk, while the only limitations on what you can say are.... to at least try to be courteous while saying it. There's no need to be afraid to talk, @RightMeow.
I have examined my own feelings and I definitely feel like I can post more now that the main people who would bring up my past mistakes and mock me no matter what I said or how irrelevant it was are no longer posting here. Now I almost think I need to make a forum signature that says 'watch out I'm a terrible code-abusing person' because my posts don't always have sassy little replies that bring it up. Seriously I'm feeling a strange void and it makes me a little guilty.
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RE: Positivity Going Forward...
When I was a kid and used to play these games, the biggest divide in the hobby that I knew about were people playing in the "evil city" and people playing in the "good city". Then I played some PVE sorts of games, quit for several years, and came back as an adult. The first divide I learned about then was that there was a difference between a MUD and a MUSH, and people had strong opinions about this. I thought it was silly, and that this was a lingering niche hobby and we should all just be friends.
This divide is even sillier though, and I get that it's fun drama to go on and on about, but ... it's dumb, c'mon folks. All the "these people" and "that forum". Cool off and get over it. Nobody involved in this scuffle is actually an evil villain. None of this is as earth-shaking or terrible as anyone is making it out to be. First step to positivity: actually stop being negative.
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RE: The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc
This 'pseudo-dating' perspective is primarily why I really prefer not TS'ing. I'm really inclined to agree with Ghost's views here, based on my own experiences and reflections.
Recently I roleplayed an IC romance that was really great. It was like, started off work buddies, became enemies swiftly, started semi-tolerating each other but with a lot of peeves and digs, started growing some forbidden romance sorts of feelings (they were different races, but with a lot of repressed racist problems in a very racist society, one was a half-elf and one was a human) and finally all bubbled up into a situation where the other character was changing into her armor and my character followed and I engaged a FTB. They continued with this secret fling for a while, entertained thoughts of eloping, struggled with birth control, confessed to close friends, and eventually died for each other in a very tragic fashion. Later, after their deaths, I finally reached out to the player behind the character... and they confessed that they was sort of taken aback by that FTB, because they would typically write these things out. I explained how I felt about it and how in the past I'd had boundary issues and how I didn't like all the drama. They agreed, told me some really terrible and cringy stories about their own experiences (including someone who was very obviously typing one-handed and made every attempt to flaunt it), and we moved on easily as gaming friends.
So, you really don't need to TS to play out fun IC romantic writing. Cerebral, heartstring-pulling stories don't require graphic erotica, even if they are romantic stories. IC romance does not equal TS at all.
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RE: Magic in games
It depends on whether you want things to be balanced, too. Maybe thematically for your game it's alright if some people are overpowered. I've seen some games handle this in the sense that you have to build up points that show you're a decent player, in order to be permitted magic-wielding characters.
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RE: Something Completely Different
@selira Sounds like a reasonable line.
@NotSanni Bigotry totally is a social malady. Maybe you should read some academic work on the subject, like Critical Race Theory by Richard Delgado.
Anyway, I still think the Hog Pit should be deleted. I remember when someone first told me about it, that "people are upset with you there" and for weeks I struggled to resist the impulse to just go look at it. That whole year was not a mentally healthy time for me.
But, I can also completely cope with the decision of an adminstrator, so -- I can say, whatever, and go back to my business. Yep, a much healthier year for me.
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RE: Something Completely Different
@selira said in Something Completely Different:
To a degree, we all are, but identifying how you are being such and working to address and mitigate these impulses is key to growing as a person.
If someone is working to address and mitigate those impulses, I would not label them. Like you said, to a degree, we all are. So where do you draw the line? I'm not your typical white person, and people micro-aggression me all the time. I don't think they're racists.
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RE: Something Completely Different
There's a difference between calling someone a misogynist (or, I've actually seen people calling someone an abuser and stalker)... and pointing out that someone has some ingrained misogyny in their thought patterns and attitudes. It's like calling someone a racist, or pointing out that someone has some elements of racist behavior that they should watch out for. We all suffer from social maladies but hopefully we're aware of them and trying to counteract them. Someone who commits microaggressions against the Hispanic person in her office isn't a racist, but she does have some elements of racist behavior that she would be better off paying attention to. Someone who says that women shouldn't walk in dark alleys at night isn't a misogynist, but should probably pay attention to the fact that they're indulging in some really painful victim blaming. And they should probably be blockable to those victims in a safe community if they don't stop talking like that. But if the ground rules have been laid out that he needs to not engage in these discussions and he's helpful technically, that's a decision that doesn't need to be dogpiled. Especially when the admins have asked repeatedly to stop talking about it until they can sort it out themselves.
But this forum has been decried over the web (particularly reddit) for a long time as being a nesting ground for a toxic clique, with the Hog Pit as their crowning gem, and I guess people in the central friend group felt entitled to be able to do what they wanted regardless of moderating requests, and it exploded. All I can say is... wow, Ganymede really was impartial. So impartial that it seems barely human. Most people can be pressured to step off when a community acts like that, but not Ganymede. I guess from now on you all will see how much of this site was in fact held up by the clique itself, and how much of it was other people who just enjoyed the hobby. Honestly it does seem like the majority of vocal posters are gone, and most of them were mostly reasonable people except for the cliqueishness, and those who are left are still pretty shell-shocked. But if you can make a reputation as a less toxic forum, that'd be probably the only way to survive. Honestly I think you should delete the Hog Pit altogether and not even leave it as an archive, and just move out the threads that are warnings about predators.
That's my irrelevant and unasked-for take, at least.
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RE: Silent Heaven: Small-Town Psychological Horror RPG
Looks like you have put a lot of thought into this. Best wishes. I agree people can sort through themselves a bit in games, and community can be helpful for that, but it can also be damaging. Even shouldering as much concern for the mental health of your prospective players as you're doing here (by providing things like a consent checklist and sanitizing the playing field from certain types of nastiness) is a serious burden, and I applaud your good intentions. I'm not planning to play your game but I wish you the best.
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RE: Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.
That's generally very true when it comes to any kind of minority.
While I am sorry for the bigotry that Jewish people have endured regarding their perceived connection to Israel, and not trying to argue with cupcake's feelings, I am presenting an expansion of knowledge on a complicated topic.
Here's a Jewish media outlet, and an article written by a Jewish author. This will explain why it is a little more complicated than just listening sometimes.
https://mondoweiss.net/2018/12/hypocrisy-zionist-antisemitism/
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RE: Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.
Anyone who thinks Israel and Jews are a monolith needs to look into Neturei Karta, and anyone who thinks criticizing the IDF is antisemitic needs to look into 'Breaking the Silence'.
I know people aren't very well educated on the complexities of this issue but in college I knew a lot of Jews who were pro-BDS. I do know some Jewish people who haven't mentioned the situation, so I don't know what they think, but I definitely do not assume that they must be innately pro-Israel, and I definitely don't hold them to account as if they have to justify Israel somehow, or even associate Israel with them in such a way that I'd be holding the topic politely back while chatting with them. That would really be unfair and cruel.
It's safe to assume that anyone who is educated understands the differences between an individual who has an ethnic background -- and a political entity that shares that ethnic background. Religion becomes an even trickier situation because there's frequently ideological battles over what a religion really is, so an individual really can't be judged on that at all.
Uneducated people, yeah, I have seen and heard a lot of disgusting antisemitism that lumps Israel's reprehensible actions in with Judaism. Sorry for the bigotry you generally have to deal with.