Best posts made by juke

I'm not saying that this is the hurdle you're facing, just to be clear, but...I consistently see people doing things that are either ineffective or straight-up counterproductive to getting RP.

Vaguely saying in a lounge, and sometimes even saying on faction channels,

Player is trying to decide if they want to RP tonight!

or,

Player feels like RP!

--I almost never respond to this, for a whole boatload of reasons. I'm not an elitist, and I don't just like to RP in a corner with my friends, though that's often how things go, because my friends actually specifically ask me if I want to RP, and usually they have an idea as to what we might do. So many of the people I see complaining about cliques and being left out of plots never actually page a scene-runner and say, 'Hey, your plot looks awesome! Is there a hook that would allow me to get involved, or somebody I should talk to about doing that?' Most of the people I see in lounges who announce they are debating RP tonight never actually go so far as to ask anyone specifically for a scene, or put in the thirty seconds of time to check someone else's character info and suggest a scene that might appeal to them, or check the +events board and ask people running plots if their character could follow up on something that happened, or propose something they could get going on the grid, no matter how simple -- or any number of other proactive choices.

Which almost inevitably seems to lead to this kind of player disconnecting after making some kinda passive aggressive remark like, 'Player guesses they'll just give up for the night, then.' And while I totally understand that it can be frustrating not to get traction on a game, this behavior is not endearing. That person becomes someone I sorta plan to avoid.

Which kinda leads into the other thing I think people don't keep in mind: many people still doing this are grown adults, many with children and full-time jobs. Some of us enjoy ST/GMing, particularly large-scale, long arc plots. There have been times mid-plot when my free time for RP is booked up for literally two weeks with people who need scenes with me, in addition to whatever funsies I'm doing for myself. It gets difficult to do spontaneous RP for scheduling reasons, and certainly there's only so much creative energy anybody can put into this stuff without going insane and burning out. Sometimes, it's very much a kindness to very specifically ask someone for a scene, suggest something you think might be fun, and then plan a day to do that. I sort of miss games where the culture leaned into 'random grid RP,' too, so I get where you're coming from there...but, that's just the way things have trended, so all you can really do is try to be more direct.

People do not page, though. I sure can attest to that. I've run enormous plots on numerous games, and more often than not I wind up hearing about salty players who say they can't get involved, who have never once actually paged me to ask me how they can do that. I'm a very not-scary person to interact with.

Honestly, I think most people are flattered if they're approached for RP by a polite person who has an idea as to what the scene might be.

Many people doing this are

a) older now, and in accordance with that change in time of life tend to have more commitments and less time

b) and less patience for bullshit behavior on the part of others.

They have to pick and choose how they spend their time, and naturally want to have as much fun as possible in the limited time that they have. Family obligations, careers -- sometimes scheduling way out is the only way to make that time. Many of us have been doing this since the nineties, and have favorite friends to play with, too.

I've met brand new people in the last few years that I'd never met before who have become routine favorites on my list of people to play with, and all it took on my part was going to events and inviting people to do things that I thought might sound fun for them. Paying attention to what people like doesn't mean you have to become lifelong friends or pitch your character as something they are not, but yeah, if you want someone to block out time for you, it makes sense to have an idea of what you'll both find fun. That's courteous, and more likely to get you the long-term options for RP you want, anyway.

The hidden difficult truth here is that sometimes I hear people talk about how they cannot for the life of them 'break through the cliques' or get RP, and I'm not sure how to tell them that it's because they're incredibly irritating human beings, either through selfishness or some other unfortunate quality. Nobody's got time to life-coach strangers. (I'm not saying this is you. I don't have any idea who you are. I'm just saying, it happens a lot.)

tl;dr: Things changed because a lot of us grew up, and some of us did not.

I don't buy the 'no conscious logic' thing. Of course there is. A person sits down at a keyboard and types out threats, lays out statements meant to upset people, that is absolutely a conscious choice. Maybe the underlying impulses that drive a person to become like that are debatable (and probably not worth debating as far as what it means to this community) but it's frustrating when people write off choices as being anything other than acts of intention, regardless of whatever compels them.

When you can tell after the first round that you and the person you're in a scene with are both on point that day, and the whole scene is going to be SO GOOD.

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

Okay, so. I think I've finally managed to actually figure out why this topic is bothering me.

Bless this post.

There are middle grounds between the two, too.

I fall in the 'I don't want to share my NPCs and don't feel that I'm obligated to lend them out for people not in my timezone who can't engage with my plot, but I'll work with them in @mail or a gdoc/Areslog scene, or via legwork, or in some other way that acknowledges their interest without murdering something important to my enjoyment of storytelling' camp. I also fall in the 'I find TSing players on an NPC pretty weird and wouldn't want it happening on a game I ran' camp. For me, the apparent benefits do not outweigh the apparent drawbacks. And in spite of that, I'm admittedly in the 'yeah, staffers are going to have favorite players to run plot for and that's not an ethical issue' camp because, I run stuff, and of course I have favorites. They make my life easier instead of harder. They aren't entitled. They contribute. They share plot points with fellow players. They do cool shit with story.

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

It is that fred and sue should have the same opportunity for staff npc time. For example, if you are running a scene to get the mcguffin that sue and fred are both capable of getting, you shouldn't immediately go "nah" to fred because hes boring or leap on the opprotunity to give it to sue because she isn't.

I get it. I get you have people you enjoy GMing for. But those people shouldn't get all of your attention. Maybe fred just needs a different plot to come alive in. Or maybe fred is just super boring forever but he still plays your game and deserves the chance to be apart of it.

The trouble with this is, players don't all pursue plot to the same extent, and there are only so many effing hours in the day. If Fred and Sue are both in my scene and they both engage and they're both making choices, taking actions, contributing, then they're both going to get traction from me because as a storyteller that shit is my favorite thing. But if Fred is sending me legwork, showing up to scenes. RPing about the plot with other players, giving them opportunities at the spotlight, etc., and Sue doesn't really contribute but thinks she ought to be included in every plot development regardless of the fact that there might be 10 other players like Fred that want my time and attention...

This happens all the time. All the time. I once had a player send me an @mail on a game to tell me she felt 'sidelined' in a plot I was running as a player, non-staff ST, because she had a magic-oriented character -- but that @mail was the first time she had even spoken to me. I know it sounds far-fetched, but it's constant entitlement.

I have limited time and energy. I spend it doing what I enjoy as an ST, which is usually in large part about making players excited about the story I'm telling -- but also because it's exciting to tell that story. You seek a balance between the two. You have to.

My solution to the problem of 'who gets my time and attention' as a staffer is usually to run periodic public event scenes that literally anyone can go to, provided they're around, and in between these, motivated players who continue to engage with the plot get my priority.

Lots of good stuff in this thread. A couple of things by way of response for me personally:

@egg said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@juke Not everyone has the luxury of a decades-long RP superfriends group.

That's true, but what I said still works. Like...I recently went off on an adventure of curiosity to a game without telling a single one of my usual crew, just because I wanted to try something different, on my own. It was @faraday's BSG: Unification game. I didn't know a single soul there (or at least, I didn't know that I did, even if it turns out that @Seraphim73 and his wife were there, hah). I still didn't have trouble getting into RP, though. It was toward the end of the game's life cycle, but I had a marvelous time and met a lot of lovely people, and produced a whole lot of logs in a very short amount of time. I find I rarely ever struggle to get RP unless there are extenuating factors on a grid contributing to people's availability, etc. (or my own inconsistent availability creates problems).

It's definitely not because my shit doesn't stink, or that I'm any more fun to RP with, or something. It's just that I've figured out a way to engage people that usually makes them interested in/willing to give me some of their time and energy, which are not small requests, these days, to make of people. And I try very hard to make sure that they come away from it feeling like that was worth it. Related to which:

@egg said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@krmbm Iif you are a more of a pantser than a plotter, as I am, you might not have an idea until specific characters are thrown together in a specific setting.

I think I'm a middle-ground person. I'm a pantser-plotter. I will have a very simple kernel of an idea that I think people involved will be into, and then we jump IC and see where it goes. My favorite players to play off of are people who do really interesting things with that, surprising me and taking it in unexpected directions, and we can riff story with one another all day long. It's a joy to see where a simple thing will go, with them. But, you still have to have a place to start.

And I'd talk about that, but I think a lot of people in the thread have already given a lot of solid suggestions about how to do that, anyway! Sometimes it's enough just to tell somebody you think they look fun to RP with and ask them what kinda scene they might enjoy so that you can come up with a reason to throw your characters in a room together.

Bar RP is like any RP. It can be the most spectacular scene imaginable, it's just down to execution.

Incoming blathering .02 with a dash of personal RL perspective...

@Ganymede explains perfectly why most of the people I hear talking about not getting RP will not benefit from additional tools. They cannot bring themselves to use the ones already there, so they're not going to use a +wantrp command, either, because what if the other person says 'no' anyway?

Which is a thing I didn't see mentioned, but wanted to throw in here: the flip side of the coin is, some people have RP they want very much, story beats for character development and etc., but won't trust in the hands of just anyone. It's never going to wind up on a public wantrp command. People are still going to feel left out. OR, as people said earlier in the thread, they literally cannot plan their RP fun around random stranger RP, because they are time-poor or exhausted because work/family/whatever.

I loved Faraday's 'RP wish list' on BSG so much that I am totally stealing it for a thing I'm working on, but I don't remember seeing much of it get run by players, if any at all. It doesn't hurt to have it around. It might only help. But it won't fix the problem.

I really think people have to learn to engage. Besides, these are useful interpersonal skills to have in any arena of life, and this setting is pretty consequence-free as a place to try it on (I'm talking like real, serious, lasting consequences, not MU* drama). There ARE good, kind people out there doing this. I have met many. They'll respond well to honest efforts that have everyone's enjoyment in mind -- whether it's social anxiety causing the speedbumps, or a lack of experience with storytelling, or just plain shyness, or whatever. Even figuring out how to approach people and create a good connection from which to work together is pretty useful daily life stuff...you know?

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

So, a staffer playing an NPC versus a staffer playing a PC.

Is there really a difference?

Can an NPC without extensive documentation exist?

When does an NPC become a Staff PC?

Fight.

I understand why you're asking, and I think most of us have seen instances where these things were unethically used, but if I'm honest this line of thinking still makes me a little bit nervous, for all of the reasons @Wretched mentioned. When people create a game, pouring their time and energy into a setting that excites them, nine times out of ten they're creating the place they want to play in because it doesn't yet exist. If you're like me, you're already hyper-aware that there are limits being put on what you can do with your PCs in order to stave off player perception of taking liberties. (This is true of anywhere that you're intensively storytelling, too -- the juiciest plot bits are probably getting dispensed to other people.)

You're already sort of in the crappy position of finally having the game you want to play on, but at the high cost of spending a significant chunk of your time doing things that aren't RP (and are often frustrating), and when you do RP, you're more limited than you would be as a regular ol' player.

I use NPCs as a player storyteller and as staff. They work the same way in both cases. I make them up on the spot all the time. They're Supporting Cast. Sometimes they become important to a plot, emotionally or otherwise, but their fates are governed by the actions of actual players. That's a subservience of purpose I would never want to feel my own PCs are beholden to.

Sounds to me like he's trying to make mountains out of molehills in an effort to be sooOOoOOo threaaateninggggg, oh nooooOoOOo. SECUUUURITY FAULLLLLLTS, I USED FARA'S REAAAAAAL NAAAAAME, I'M SUPER SERIAAAAAAL (even though she freely puts it on Ares-related content)...

They're just a creep and they thrive on engagement and attention. Using her name, talking vaguely about having encountered you before, vaguely threatening to redux this whole mess...this person just wants to feel they can control other people and these are all painfully juvenile, transparent manipulations.

The absolute worst thing anybody could do to him would be to insta-ban him as soon as there's an ID and not interact with him after the fact, because if you don't care, he's got nothing. All he can do is inconvenience you.

The ability to sneak around IP bans and stuff makes it hard to whack these moles for good, for sure. It would be lovely if we could come up with a system to not. But he's probably reading this thread and jerking it to all of the @ mentions he's getting, and I am mostly wondering why this person is even allowed here. (Unless I missed something and the @ mentions of his MSB handle are just leading to a dead account in which case, excellent, very good, carry on!)

@mietze said in I owe a lot of people some apologies.:

With boundaries people who have tendencies towards behaving badly can actually be enjoyable to RP with. [...] The problem is that few people want to set up or enforce those boundaries because it's a lot of unpleasant work with an uncertain payoff.

I wanna make it clear I'm just responding to this post and not as a broad commentary on the whole thread, but:

I know this happens, but I think it's the craziest shit ever. There are a lot of people out there who are fun to play with who aren't also crazy assholes who would abuse people if they were given the inch to do so.

get rid of them

@egg said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

but having to work to play is exactly why I made this post...

Maybe as Fara said, this is the major difference. For me, figuring out what I wanna do with somebody -- not the whole scene, mind you, just the idea, the scenario -- isn't work, it's actually part of the fun. I get to come up with a situation, any situation, within the limits of my imagination (and the theme), and find out what happens if characters get thrown into it. If it's something we're both excited to explore, that excitement totally carries over into the RP.

For me, 'what if...our characters, two people with conflicting agendas who don't know each other at all, randomly met on a riverboat that had a poker tournament on it and tried to work those angles?' -- isn't work, that's like 'holy shit yes, let's go do that right now.' (Spoilers: the riverboat broke in half and sank, on fire. True story.)

We didn't plan what would happen, and I didn't know what their character's agenda was. They didn't know what mine was. We just knew they were the type to be Up To Something, and glorious mayhem unfolded.

On a game with supernatural elements, I was like, 'let's do a fucking ghost ship,' so we did. It wound up having time loops where nobody could die, while our characters tried to figure out how to put the ghost ship to rest. We didn't know that would happen, either. It totally happened IC. But, 'ghost ship' was my 'fuck yeah!' starting point. It doesn't have to be work! It can be fun. ^.^

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

In what universe do you get to pawn your work off on someone else because you've got personal beef with that bitch Brenda in accounting?

You leave your personal bullshit at the door, and focus on the work that needs done. That is what reasonable adults do all the time.

The day somebody pays me a living wage to ST on a MU* is the day I don't collaborate with the rest of staff to make sure the shitty jobs get spread around enough that we don't all go absolutely barking mad.

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

• they are not allowed to switch hands and be played by a different staff member

I'm still going to loudly object to this. I don't share my NPCs because any NPC I create is a character every bit as considered as any I would ever play, I have specific plans for them and I made them that way for a reason, and I don't want a thousand different voices mucking up what I'm doing. I don't trust anyone else with them. It's not that other staffers aren't as good at RP as I am, or something snobbily elitist like that. It's that they are not me and don't/cannot live in my head, so they don't know my characters like I do, and my NPCs are still characters, not sock puppets or Pez dispensers made for spitting out plot points. Their interactions with PCs are meant to be meaningful.

It's completely fine if a game runs NPCs that way, sharing them around. In some cases it may even be necessary. But it's wrong to assert that doing it any other way is improper or unethical. I won't drag a bunch of players I've NPC'd for in here to testify, but I know they would back me up. They got interactions with 'real people' -- or people who felt as real as I could make them -- which gave their character's story depth, dimension, and significance tailored for them in a way their interactions with other players often will not because other players have their own agendas, while my NPCs can be entirely reactive to player choice because their fates remain in the hands of those players.

Bringing the world to life is one of the greatest joys for me, and I know there are storytellers who feel the same. Sharing an NPC just dilutes the clarity of that vision for me, and makes the whole thing workmanlike. I can stamp out plot that way, yeah. I'd just rather not. If I know every inch of that NPC's story because I was there at the time, it's much easier for me to dig down and get into the emotional nitty-gritty.

YMMV, obviously. But for me it's genuinely not a small detail, it's a big thing that matters a lot.

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

I do not think anyone who had two brain cells to rub together would have considered that interaction to be plot advancement, or a meaningful touchstone to the story of the game. Funny? Sure. Livening up a boring as fuck meeting? Yes. Did I get more RP invites after that from people I didn't know before? Yup.

But. Still not advancement for that PrP or even my PC's story.

Pretty much this. The reason I think people like the description of NPCs as part of the environment is not because a, say, bolt of lightning is a 'character,' but because their best use is similar: it puts meat on the bones of the setting/moment/scene/story/whatever. Sometimes NPCs are plot mcguffins. Sometimes they're plot-givers. Sometimes they're part of what raises the stakes in a situation the PCs have to consider, as victims or hostages or an element that raises questions in a morally grey area. Sometimes they're a source of public opinion or pressure, as in the ubiquitous 'They.' But sometimes they're just flavor, a thing that breathes life into the world, and that is also good. Some of my favorite moments in MU* involve well-crafted NPCs. Almost all of my characters have significant NPCs in their lives, because people know other people. /shrug

I think whether or not they're being used incorrectly has less to do with how important or meaningful they are, or how much you care about them -- it has to do with whether or not they start to take control of a story without the person running them doing that specifically because they're thinking of how that will contribute to the story for real players.

@Ghost I identify with all of this.

Players who know how to follow organic RP down the rabbit hole complete me. It's astounding the kind of story that can emerge.

My favorite RP buddy and I like to say 'no safe words' because we can't get enough of the intensity that comes from really committing to a character, never forcing anything, but always following the story wherever it goes. I do realize that this isn't everybody's cup of tea and it requires trust, but man, when things click..!

I've played unlikable characters. The trick is that they're likably unlikable (John Constantine). Acknowledging in meta that you understand they're being absolute dickheads when they're doing that goes some way toward smoothing ruffled feathers. It doesn't always work, because some people are going to be upset about any conflict or disparaging of their character even if it's entirely IC. Some people are not able to deal with those things, ever, no matter who it comes from or why or how deserved or not it might be. Some people are people I don't care to play with.

I've played characters that were antagonists at their core, too. The trick is understanding that antagonists who aren't sympathetic must be temporary, and that sympathetic, longer-lived antagonists still need a character arc with growth and change, ideally one that responds to how whitehats influence them, so that people can see they've had an impact -- and that you're just straight-up going to have to lose sometimes. (Some people will want you to lose all the time. Some people want that regardless of whether your character is an antagonist or not. Some people are dumb and also selfish players.)

I have played inept characters! I don't understand the question here so much. Most people love playing beside an inept character, because it makes them look better by comparison.

I have played inactive characters. ...uhh, not so much by design as just, you know. Because I saw something shiny and got distracted. I am curious as to the purpose of this though.

Ultimately I agree with @Arkandel and a couple of other people in this thread -- a character's success almost always boils down to execution and audience, and I think the common thread isn't so much what the character is like, as it is the OOC perception/feeling that the person who's playing them is interested in other people's characters and stories, and will invest the time and effort in raising other people's characters up, as much as they do their own.

For the thing I'm working on, I've been looking at ways to reward people who ST for other people...with plot that's run for them. Because, speaking as someone who loves to ST...sometimes, you'd really just like to get embroiled in a plot mystery that you don't hold all of the cards to, for once.

How to do this in a sane way, without burning out staff responsible for doing that (in the event you wind up with a glorious abundance of players STing for other players), is an important question. It's possible that a player may not even like the plot that gets run for them, because in MU*ing the one universal truth is that you can't please everyone...but I think communicating with the player about the kinds of things they want/enjoy solves a lot of that.

I've always liked games where fun little mcguffins were part of storytelling and plot, too. Objects or information that did stuff.

@faraday said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:

Jane is still harboring a grudge against Mary from some game eight years ago / Tom thinks Jane is an idiot and won't RP with them outside of staff-run plot scenes (and then will avoid direct interaction) / Mary thinks Bob is a low-down dirty powergamer who's always trying to make his character shine / Bob turns his nose up at Jane because she only likes relationship RP and doesn't participate in big plots / Harvey is pissed at Tom because Tom's PC said something mean about Harvey's PC / Sam won't RP with Jane because she poses too slow/fast/long/short/pick-a-peeve / ...

I could go on and on and on. These things may not be as directly harmful as some of the harassment/flaming/etc. we hear about, but it's not good either.

Imagine being a GM in a TTRPG where half of your friends can't stand the other half, and everyone is constantly complaining about or avoiding each other. It's just draining.

But these behaviors are legitimately irritating and we all log on to have fun. Sometimes a lasting response to a person isn't a grudge, which implies spite, so much as it is having learned that some people are going to pee in your cheerios, and you just aren't going to give them the opportunity anymore. There's a fine line between holding something against someone, and deciding they cross boundaries you find unacceptable, idk.

It's a smallish community, and it's probably inevitable. TTRPG groups fall apart for reasons of interpersonal drama all the time, lol. Some of it is apparently spectacular (link included for funsies: https://twitter.com/clownstench/status/1124132789656346624?s=19).

I'm definitely not saying it doesn't create problems, but sometimes those problems are preferable to the ones that would evolve if people didn't hold bad actors at arms' length.

@faraday said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:

I don't disagree with that point, but I think you're looking at it from the player perspective. Which is fine, but I'm looking at it from the staff perspective. Making things that will generate RP when many of your players just don't want to play with each other often feels at best like threading a needle, and at worst like an exercise in futility. This is demoralizing as a staff member.

I really am looking at it from both sides, but my stance as a player and a staffer tends to be the same, wherein I do what I can do and consider reasonable, and if people make the choice not to participate based on things like who else will be involved, I figure that's on them, not me. I have done the thing I said I would do. I made the opportunity, I created some activity. People can join in, or not. I definitely want to make it interesting to as many people as possible, but it's that whole 'leading a horse to water' thing, you know? At a certain point, people make their choices, and it all works out, or it doesn't.

It totally wears on staff to be groused at by players for any reason at all, definitely. The moreso when you consider them friends in any way, as is ideal, at least for me. There are some things I've just decided I'm not going to take on-board anymore. It can be more complicated than that and get into grey areas when people bring their perceptions into it, and those perceptions don't align with mine ('you're always running things that are more relevant to them than to me!') but, if I'm doing the very best I can and I know that, there's not much else to be done.

I don't disagree with anything you said, exactly. I'm 100% behind people trying to find something positive in an interaction with other people, or figuring out how to engage with people they don't get along with in a way that works for everybody -- feeling out where those limits and boundaries are and how to respect them. But, when they can't, and I figure it's inevitable that's going to be true, there seem to be less fireworks and drama if they have room to breathe and aren't forced to deal with one another, which can be draining for me in a very different way.

I backed it. I liked that it was largely narrative driven and the art totally sold it for me. I don't usually go in for giant mech games because they're usually so focused on fapping mech stats, but this seems like it has a more narrative focus, and I dig that. (And I can deal with some crunch as long as I'm engaged with the world.)

@mietze said in I owe a lot of people some apologies.:

I would much rather play on a place that very stringently enforced positive behavior standards than on a place that had no such boundaries but banned a shitload or people who were problematic elsewhere.

I mean, yeah, of course, a game where people enforce standards of behavior well is a good thing.

But this is a weird post. Anywhere that enforces stringent standards of behavior is likely to ban people who have been assholes elsewhere because they have certain standards of behavior and those people are known to fail at upholding them. Pretending prior behavior isn't relevant is weird.

And if nobody knows about the prior behavior, and the person behaves, then...the point is moot, anyway.

Anywho I didn't mean to derail, just. I think people are weirdly determined to allow people privileges under x, y, or z justification when really the question should probably always be, 'what is even gained by doing that?' If the answer is just 'stuff you could get from other people, with less involved baggage' then...I just don't see the point.

ETA: To use a hamfisted analogy, as far as building and running a mush goes, to me it's like: you're trying to build a machine. The parts are sort of delicate and it's important they all work well together, because when one part breaks it tends to not just break itself but also some of the other parts in occasionally unrecoverable ways. So you're building this thing, and there's this part that's known, proven, to have broken in the past in other machines. You know this, but you choose to add it because this one isn't broken yet, and you've built the rest of the machine solidly enough that there's a chance it won't break. But, if it does, it could definitely break other parts of this machine that you've been so carefully constructing, and if that happens, there's a good chance other parts will break and fall out, too.

Just...why, you know? And yet, it happens allllll the time.