Posts made by il-volpe

I have decades old friendships with people I've never met in person, and people I have met in person but met on games.

Yeah, they are real friends and it's not particularly odd or different from other friendships.

@juniper said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

@il-volpe I don't really have any suggestions to resolve that problem other than the tentative suggestion that it's not really keeping secrets that is the important bit, but having respect for each other's moments of revelation.

Sort of. The most notable recent iteration of this for me was a situation where approximately the entire grid knew, but staff-run NPC faction leaders said they'd kill the character if she told, and would know by reading her mind or something.

It can also be pretty much wholly player selfishness/thoughtlessness. Lifting a finger to open the latch to let another person play is just an unfuckingthinkable stretch. (Forgiving mass murder is cake, though.)

Lemme fix that.

WoD in particular is really susceptible to differences in tone being basically like...gamebreaking/immersion breaking. inflexible and uncreative players who talk as if those traits are virtues.

Something gamebreaking and immersion breaking for me is when, in a game like WoD, where mooks are people, the PCs kill them like they're pixels and nobody minds, and the guy who murdered a dozen (kobold) children goes home and his neutral-good 11-humanity 5-empathy justice-activist girlfriend still wants to fuck him. This challenges my suspension-of-disbelief a lot more than a PC acting the clown, but unlike fishmalks and superfriends, it's not a WoD-player-virtue to hate it.

@juniper said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

Now imagine that instead of doing that, Jane continues to treat it like a secret and admits to keeping things from Bob.

Weeeeelllll... this often seems to result in a situation where Bob knows Abelard's secret and Jane's secret and Jane knows Bob's and, and. And you've got five characters in the room and every one of them is in the know about every other and even knows that every other is in the know, BUT they're all treating it like a secret so they have to RP about Starbuck's secret menu or sneak off in pairs to talk plot, and it's god fucking forbid that they RP as a group about something rewarding, and while all of them have IC reason to be involved and OOCly want to, desperately, only two out of the five will get to play, and very likely one will get left out of the loop entirely because passing on the interesting info once is fun, twice is kinda fun, but by the time you've done four separate scenes telling people the same thing you're bored of it and poor fucking Dylan, who just wants to be in a goddammed scene, is banging his head on the floor begging to play Superfriends and wishing his getting to play the damn game was more important than pretending that not-secrets are secrets.

@solstice It's the attitude I associate with the use of the word "superfriends," anyway.

It really is a swordmaidens sort of issue, in the sense that if all the PC women are swordmaidens it changes the theme in a way that people may not wish to play, and takes the pith out of playing a swordmaiden. A game where half the PCs are members of crime-fighting vampire-mage-werewolf-changeling polyamorous quads is probably not what's wanted. But as I resent banning of swordmaidens I dislike when GMs set diamond-hard glass-smooth sky-high walls against PCs of antagonistic factions/species getting chummy, and I get peevish when other players enforce it OOC socially. Especially in cases when it's OOC punishing to somebody who didn't app a swordmaiden, just ended up with a sword, eg, oops, I apped a Ferengi and I like her a lot, but it turns out everybody I'm really liking to RP with and share connect times with is playing a Klingon. It would be cool to be the only Ferengi on this Klingon ship, but staff-controlled Klingon High Command won't allow it and the Klingon players are embarrassed to say they want this unthemely arrangement...

@horrorhound I sympathize with that. But also view it as being pretty much the same as how I didn't want my Game of Thrones MUSH to be all sword-swinging women, yet also think that the GoT MUSH that bans them is bullshit, because they're a major element in the source and of course people are going to want to play them.

And I suspect we're all kinda tired of that game where you have to make an alt to get any RP, because, you know, somebody encouraged you to app that empty/wrong-time-zone-for-you faction. Especially when you get on great with the dwarves who are on around when you are and there would be no problem if people would stop bitching about how corny and wrong elf and dwarf players are if they RP not hating one another too much to interact.

@horrorhound said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

I, personally, loathe the Super Friend routine

I, too, loathe the Super Friend Routine, but I define that as, "When people whinge that other people's cross-faction RP exists without any fine red paste."

Probably cross-faction relationships are common tropes in the source materials.

Also, let people play with other people.

@tinuviel said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

@wizz Oh, yeah, I'm operating in the fantasy world where players care about story over victory. It's never going to happen and players are going to fuck up perfectly good games every time.

Naw. It happens all the time. Thing is, they care about their story, not their role as a bit part in yours. There's a significant difference between "wanting to win" and "wanting to roll."

What @derp says.

I'd say one of the actual issues isn't antagonist PC players not wanting to lose, they knew that was in the cards when they signed up. It's getting tired of losing by an ex-machina fluke of luck or something every time they've out-maneuvered the good guys, which is every time 'cause good guys are always "never mind maneuvers, go straight at 'em."

I do mean antagonist PCs, though, where the player signed up for that role in the story. Not the same as an evil character played as a normal PC with the expectations of wins and heroism.

I say, tell players, if you like to chargen and are bored af, make a roster character. If nobody does, don't worry about it. If someone does, you approve them onto the roster if approvable. If someone takes the character but doesn't RP them more than n-amount before dropping them, they go back on the roster. If they get played enough for it to matter, the character is gone same as 'original' characters and it's handled the same way. You also limit the number of times a character can change hands even if it's only one scene per player.

@tinuviel said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

@il-volpe Or like... just make your own character and not bother with the faff of a roster?

Because, as has been said, some people would rather not cg. For a variety of reasons.

I have some distaste for the character who keeps showing up with different players.

But I don't hold it against players if they'd rather play than generate a character and are (OMFG) willing and able to play a character they did not create.

And it just ain't so that making people invest time and effort in cg before they can play makes them invested in the game. Somebody might spend five hours making a PC, but will stop logging in before it's approved if you take more than a week or so. Or if they do keep showing up and checking, they might end up feeling 'stuck' in the OOC room with their enthusiasm all spent. If you want people to log in, you must reinforce logging in. Logging in and encountering friendly, responsive and amusing people is fun and makes you want to log in again. Logging in and finding your app approved is exciting in itself. Logging in and getting into a scene that's fun, even more so. If you can get all three of those events to happen to Penelope Player on her first login, you've given her a little jackpot reinforcer for logging in, and she's probably gonna be back /and/ have more staying power in terms of returning even after boring login sessions.

@tinuviel Okay. Seems like it needn't be. Just toss them after a player or two, and let people who want pre-made characters have them, if people want to make them.

Or, like, templates? Fill in a few details to make it yours? After a while the similar concepts will start to get wearing if a lot of people use it, but you could retire the template for a while.

@tinuviel I'm all for it except the bit where characters get passed from player to player. Warn people that such things are almost never taken.

Thing. Wot means roster character?

There's the "Feature character" model like on some BuffyMUs, where the scooby characters are traded around.

There's a roster of pre-made characters you can take, and they may or may not have been played before or be expected to be recycled if you leave them, and maybe they're open to everyone or maybe the character is Abelard's sister and only Abelard's player can approve you taking that one.

Then there's like, positions rosters, where, say, your game goes through a passel of sheriffs and town judges as some leave and some die, but each is a unique character. But seldom does somebody RP their way into the role, the PCs are made with it in mind.

@derp Huh. I've never seen it written down and players seemed surprised.

I can't remember when the last time I asked for that, but I've done so and haven't been denied, yeah.

ETA that maybe the surprising bit was that it was pretty clear that breezing sloppily through cg was okay.

@derp Huh. Aside from my own, I've never seen a MU with anything like, "You can tweak your sheet for the first few weeks if the character doesn't turn out quite as you expected or whatever," announced anywhere.

I did it mostly to reduce chargen anxiety, prevent people from feeling like they needed to give thesis-level thought to statting up, and thus get players out of cg and into RP as fast as possible. (I firmly believe this is a priority, and while it might seem counterintuitive for a quick and lower-effort chargen to be a positive factor in player retention, I am convinced that it is. It's "charging the clicker" in trainer-jargon.)

Faraday. Super helpful, pleasant and easy to understand. Made stuff possible for me. Built code that's what I've been wishing for since 1993 but masses better than I knew to wish for.

Faraday. You're the bee's knees. The cat's meow. YOU ARE DOCTOR WHO'S SHOES.

@derp You're right.

Funny, I've never seen a "If you have a problem you're shy to go to the staffer under whose purview it falls, see the ombudsman," system tried. It's more, you get told to and there's a gatekeeping aspect, like the ombudsman is also responsible for shielding other staff from dumb complaints.

Seen it tried, never seen it work.

The ombudsman has always been part of a hierarchical staff, and the one with the least authority.

This tends to send the message that 'real' staff don't have time for players. It appears to saddle the player with an advocate who has no actual power but is even more invested in ass-kissing than the player is, having a staff position and its perks to lose as well as a PC.

To me it seems to violate "more product, less process" principles -- are you sittin' around thinking up steps and 'proper channels' to deal with a problem and makin' flow-charts when you could just deal with the problem?

Well, it wasn't his non-existent speed trap I wasn't warning people about, and I'm pretty sure you can't get a ticket for flashing your lights. He did seem genuinely affronted at the idea that I was rollin' along undermining law enforcement.

The bemusement on his face called to mind some 20-something bitching about how the age of a car shouldn't make it slower so all these old vehicles plodding along at 60 on the highway are broken and need repair or to be trashed. In spite of Sammy Hagar's best efforts, he didn't know about the old 55 mph speed limits and was stunned that my '76 was not designed or built to go 76.