Posts made by il-volpe

The repeated mention of "PCs are cats" makes me want to do it.

I find the irony of this discussion coming up in response to my fearing that bigots will find my gay autistic self unfit to own a pet to be very bitter.

Eugenics is alive. I actually know someone who was force sterilized, and she's young enough that she could still be reproductive today if they hadn't done that.

@tinuviel That explains the volunteers.

But the fact that the volunteers and the 'successful adopters' come from the same demographic almost certainly means that the vetting process is biased.

Now that I'm looking, there seem to be quite a few reports of racist discrimination against potential pet-adopters.

@derp said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

You want it because people suck, but you can't have it because people suck.

Exactly so.

Yeah. There's due diligence when adopting out a pet, or dare I say it, selling an animal, and then there's the rescue business where you're all 'shit better hide the dildos, the judge is comin' to see if I was lyin' about having the chops to own a cockatiel,' and wonder why all the volunteers and all the 'adoption success stories' on the website are white ladies of around the same age and haircut.

@jibberthehut Craigslist is a pit of madness -- there's this bird listed who looks perfect but the only contact is craigslist hidden email thing, and no answer. So I put a Re: parrot hey check your junk? post up and get somebody else telling me not to contact, it's a scam, and a couple minutes later their own little free-form adoption application.

You know what sucks? PET RESCUES.

I want another parrot.

What I don't want is to have a white upper-middle-class neurotypical straight woman interrogate me and inspect my home to see if I'm a good enough person to have a pet.

@tinuviel Could be, but I don't hear people going, "Abelard ran a plot for his friends and I wasn't included!" It's easier to respond to that by going, "I'll run my own darn plot, for me and my own friends."

I do hear "We need staff-run plots!" and "Staff ran another event for Abelard, Brigid and Camille, and wouldn't include me, that's the third time this month!"

Sorry -- not talking about a way that has worked that I know of. I have never actually encountered a game that kept any kind of formal metric-of-inclusion. I think a lot of them ought to.

A very simple one would probably go a long way.

Proposal:

Each character has an inclusion-rating, which is +votes divided by participation points.

Participation points are given by GMs when GMs GM. If you were present for the scene, you get one PP. If you got to do something in the scene, you get three PP. If you saved the day, you get six.

Abelard has earned 120 +votes, and been in two scenes where he was just kinda there, and one where he stabbed Mothra in the eye. He has 8 PP. So his rating is 15.

Brigid has earned 142 +votes, but only been in one GMed scene, where she stole and drove the getaway car. She's got 3 PP, her rating is 47.33.

Camille has earned 130 +votes, and has been in 15 GMed scenes, has 55 PP. Rating is 2.36.

This rating ought to be visible on the GM's version of WHO. Probably it should just be visible to all, so that GMs who 'forget' to assign PP to their favourite players will get caught.

Under a lot of circumstances, it probably wouldn't be necessary to have any rules about participation ratings. GMs would likely see that it's desirable to try to get everybody's rating to be about the same, and away they'd go. As it is now, you get this self-perpetuating situation where GMs see GM-interaction as "activity" and "active player" as "good player" who deserves the rewards of GM-interaction. And further, have very little to remind them that other "less active" players continue to exist. It seems easy for people to slip into the thoughtless assumption that the players who are not getting GMed are not active enough to "deserve" it, but are active enough that they can readily keep themselves entertained while the GM and other players visit the Land of the Houyhnhnms.

MN's code is buggy yet, but I understand that when it's been tested and cleaned up it'll be available.

@l-b-heuschkel Oh, yeah. I'm pretty much wrapping up the one 'do your own thing' adventure where I invited others but had burned away my very last scrap of fuck before the event actually happened.

I have experienced and seen this on other games and had it seem a lot less egregious. The 'story points' thing I mentioned somewhere up-thread seems like it could solve a fair chunk of it.

@faraday said in A healthy game culture:

Jane stole my kill in the last battle scene. Bob made me look bad. Harry got promoted and I didn't. Mary's always getting the spotlight. Jake got a medal and I didn't.

@l-b-heuschkel said in A healthy game culture:

Nope. No one should ever have to play with someone they do not enjoy playing with, and they should never have to justify it, either. It sucks to be left out but there is always the other option: Make your own thing happen and play it with the people who like you.

I know it's not realistic on all games, but I do think that sometimes, people sit back too much and expect to get a ticket to the season's entertainment.

Totally guilty.

Well, the people who won't include me in the plot do like to RP with me when it's about karaoke or something. But they don't want to let me work the plot, and I am not feeling like a good sport about that.

And I do expect the season's entertainment. Or at least a bit of it. Or at least for the GM to understand that telling me to ignore the plot my character is invested in and do solo adventures about my own thing, while taking two weeks to respond to such a request, two weeks during which GM was running two and four scenes every night for the people involved in the plot I'm shut out of, is not cool.

A lot of human existence is all about expectation management, but I do suspect that a great deal of legitimate complaints about fuckery and shabby-ass treatment get dismissed as an over-demanding player.

@faraday I had this sort of policy that every so often I'd give the public channel the Brain Cooties talk, which pretty much went, a lotta MUers have the brain cooties, on our game we all pretend we're friends and we make concessions for our friends, but friends respect boundaries and I'm not here to choose for you where you put yours but as host will help enforce them, and everybody's brain cooties are ultimately their own. But as an interactive conversation. I like to think I got a lot of mileage from it, but who could tell?

@pyrephox said in A healthy game culture:

I think there's definitely an OOC aspect to a lot of PKs. Sometimes, it's because people are trying to correct an OOC problem through IC means (the 'this guy is ruining the game' issue where the game doesn't have a way to say 'this player is actively making the game unfun for a lot of players, can we uninvite them' but it DOES let you just kill any of their PCs

This. I know there are people who just run about wanting to kill off other player characters for the lols, but I almost never see it. It seems like the majority have been an IC solution to an OOC problem that staff wouldn't take care of. Either some kind of OOC bigotry, or a habit of disrupting scenes when not welcome.

@jennkryst I wouldn't care for that.

Now that I look at it again, humans in Cat as it's written (more or less) could be heavy go. If you don't catch the invisible monsters when they're just scurrying about they can latch on to your human and give them symptoms of mental illness, and lay eggs and infest others so you could end up with outbreaks of all the humans getting jealous and paranoid or unmotivated and depressed.

@pyrephox It seems like a lot of the PKs I remember and have chatted about had OOC motivations first. Someone saw a chance to PK somebody who pissed them off in pages and get away with it IC, and did it. We all decided to play Let's Hunt and Kill Darke and damn the consequences, he was ruining the game anyway. Ones between players who are friendly or neutral to one another much much more often included either a warning and an out or hiring a third party to do the dirty deed.

@too-old-for-this The trouble is that cats don't seem like the small-talk type.

I can see it being extra hilarious if you did it under a cozy small-town drama Northern Exposure/Picket Fences sort of thing where your human alts can do their dumb little human dramas and while you should not play your own cat it's okay to keep both characters connected so you can have your human react to the yowling fur-flying tangle as half the cats in town chase an invisible foe through the cafe.

@carma One of the John Wicks is the John Wick's Cat: A Little Game About Little Heroes guy, and that would make a fun MU.

PCs are cats defending their humans from the monsters that only cats can really see.

The Boogeyman is still under the bed.

Bloody Mary is still in the mirror.

All your childhood fears are alive and well, looking for you.

And your only guardian... is Mister Whiskers.

I wonder if the conversation here is muddied a bit because "community" and "set of people" aren't really equivalent. I can think of a group of RL people who could be a community of information professionals, a community of gay men, and the community of a table-top game. They're the same bunch of guys, but also three different communities.

@pyrephox said in A healthy game culture:

There's something to this, but I think it's largely a part of how the tabletop game has been translated to the MU* environment. The setting was really never designed to be used in a large group, persistent environment - a lot of the toxic elements, particularly rigid hierarchies and cruel superiors out to exploit everyone for what they can get, were designed to be the /antagonists/ to the presumed low-level, new/young supernaturals who are trying to maintain a spark of their humanity in a cruel world.

This is in some degree true of any tabletop game. They're designed for a small group of PCs who are all about the same power-level but in different areas and are on the same 'team.' MUSHes usually break all of those things and you've got to adjust for it.

I thought I had good results from trying to make my game more like a tabletop as an OOC thing. This is my place, I'm hosting you, as a good host I want you to have fun, you cannot treat my other guests, or my stuff, or me poorly or you gotta leave. Act like friends and talk about your cats 'round the big pub-channel table please, have a beer, unmask a little.

I wonder if the traditional WoD MUSH structure isn't more akin to that of large LARPs. I don't have much experience with them but many seem to be businesses where if you pay your dues and don't overtly break rules then you play, and you may openly be a dick to some degree, same as you can at a health club.

What @Too-Old-For-This said. As far as I know, setting a rule about not chasing people across alts was more than adequate -- after all, the public alts rule was to make it so that it would be visible to all if you did this, and thus subject to the hairy eyeballs of the community and to being informed upon.

The thing about VPNs being affordable was basically kind of moot. If somebody came to me saying, "Is Abelard an illegal alt of Bridgid's? Can you check?" I'd very often find that yep, they slip up from time to time or are house-swapping across states. I'd also ask the reporter what happened that it was noticed, which was usually alt abuse, so away they go. I did from time to time find unreported illegal alts the same way, and page the player with a "so what's up with that?" and make them register the alts, except one who said "I am being stalked," so I ignored her illegal alts because I'm unfair that way and she wasn't causing any problems with them anyway.