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.
@Groth I tend to agree with you on the latter half of what you're saying, though a banlist only goes so far, because harasser MO tends to be to use workarounds and try to sneak under the radar.
The first part definitely doesn't apply here, though. These are well understood abusive behaviors, and they're not even a little bit subtle. That slim margin of doubt is what people like this rely on, which is why there's a strong negative reaction to that line of discussion -- it's why they're able to do what they do for so long, and why it often takes so long to ID and oust them. Alas.
@L-B-Heuschkel said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:
It's still worth it to let him have that satisfaction, though, if it means that the various games don't have to deal with the fall-out of each having to go through 2-3 harassment cases before the jig is up. Any harassment case avoided is a good one.
That was me, and I 100% agree with you. Now people can keep an eye out and a banhammer at the ready. It's just good not to engage beyond that if at all possible.
@GirlCalledBlu said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:
Every time he calls Faraday, "Lynn," it creeps me out.
Then it's working as he intended.
Making it personal, erasing conventionally polite buffer zones -- these things are the equivalent of getting into someone's personal space uninvited. It can feel threatening and still be plausibly deniable, and that gap is where these assgoblins try to live, and unfortunately where they thrive. They want to make people uncomfortable to create a power imbalance and they'll do it however they can. The number of attempts to control how you feel in the thing you pasted is absurd.
Good on you guys for protecting your players. I'd block any communications you get going forward, and keep the banhammer ready. Maybe he'll get bored eventually.
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!)
@Wretched said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):
Good pick!!
So many of those videos helped me to feel validated about things I struggle with, like @Kanye-Qwest described, with her diagnosis. Community definitely helps me to stave off the impulse to beat myself up for things that aren't really under my control, and it's hard to measure the difference that can make!
My ADHD isn't going to let me read all 20 pages of this (lol), but I wanted to mention How To ADHD in case nobody has yet. It's a youtube channel, and she also has a Patreon, along with a Discord that has a supportive community of people who have not only ADD/ADHD, but often all sorts of comorbid combinations of things (depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, and so on). There are a lot of resources there and a lot of support. I can't pay attention to that throughout the day either, but it's nice to have.
I'm all for people trying for testing. I just wanted to mention that there is sometimes a possible downside to taking the tests. Outside of observing your actual brain activity, the currently available tests are a pretty poor measurement of need for some people, and taking a test and being told you do not have ADHD can actually make it more difficult to get a reassessment and diagnosis. I would very probably not show up as ADHD with most tests available, but adding concerta to my meds has made a phenomenal difference in my life.
It's pretty easy to tell whether or not you need the medications, anyway. If you don't, you will know right away, because you'll probably feel like you're about to blast off into low orbit, instead of suddenly able to focus. Some doctors can be reluctant to try them without testing, but often, at low doses, they aren't. It can be worth asking, depending on how you feel about medications in general, your current needs/stability, etc.
A lot of things play into this aptitude (or lack of). How we spend our time, what we use our brains for, compounds weaknesses and strengths a great deal. I read a fascinating book not long ago called Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf about how transitioning from a society that reads 'deeply' -- with books -- into a society that consumes a larger quantity of digital information in other formats has very literally changed how we think, in the same way that the emergence of written language changed how our brains worked when that became a thing. That won't surprise anybody with any layperson understanding of neuroscience, but it's a thing we don't talk about or consider.
Which is not to say that I think aphantasia is down to 'did you read books as a kid, and/or are you of an age that consumes media very differently' or anything so reductive as that. It's always much more complicated than that. It just makes me wonder what patterns or commonalities you would find, if you were able to profile people who did or did not have aphantasia (which would require even knowing which factors to look at in the first place).
I have a hard time imagining what it would be like to have aphantasia -- somewhat ironically, I guess, since the thing that makes it hard is that I have a vivid and really sensory, detail-oriented imagination. Heh.
I've always written. It's where I excelled, and I enjoyed it. I mean...my early writing is trash, but that's true of 99.999999% of mere mortals who take on a new pursuit, because you have to start somewhere, right?
And I still write trash. All the time. It's a better class of trash than it used to be, but you never stop writing garbage. Photographers take hundreds of photos and might pluck one golden image out of the lot. Fine artists draw and paint a lot of studies and sketches they'd never show anyone, in and around their finished works.
I think some people find different aspects of the creative process easier than others, and it can come more naturally for some, but I get uncomfortable with phrases like 'can creativity be taught,' because a lot of what people call 'creativity' is actually just 'work.' Like...the head down, butt-in-chair, wringing-blood-from-a-stone, frustrating, self-doubting, out-of-love-with-everything slog that you can't even objectively evaluate for yourself because all you know is that you're not satisfied with it and it isn't singing for you.
Muses aren't real. If you only ever produce work on days when you're feeling inspired, you won't get very far.
That is the scenic route to get to what I want to say, which is that I think anybody can get into anything. The limiting factor is how much of the work they're willing to do. Somebody for whom writing comes naturally can be paralyzed by their own dissatisfaction with their work, and never finish anything; their neighbor might struggle to put one word after another, but invest enough butt-in-chair time to be published first. Prolific, even. They say 90% of writing is editing, anyway, but if you never get the first draft down, it doesn't matter.
And as @GreenFlashlight said above (and other people probably said elsewhere in the thread), getting the work down means being able to accept failure. Which is, in turn, partly because there are more Slog Work days than inspired ones.
As an RP-related side note, I don't think much anymore about how RP helps or hinders my writing. I try not to think about RP at all when I write outside of it. What matters infinitely more than that is what I'm reading. If I'm not reading, and I mean reading widely, outside of specific genres and voices, my writing gets cramped. My language stagnates. I don't have ideas, because I'm not putting fresh, diverse thoughts into my head and letting them roll around in there and bump into each other in unexpected ways.
Mom was not a nerd, and at first glance neither was my dad, but dad was a stealth nerd, actually. He was a track and field jock, but he also: worked for IBM in the 70s, read sci-fi and Conan, is the reason I saw weird stuff like Eraserhead or Tetsuo: Iron Man before I was even a teenager, owned IF games like Zork and HHGTTG, had an Atari 2600, subscribed to the Skeptical Enquirer, got really into specific sciences, etc.
So, that. Then reading his sci-fi and playing his video games turned into an interest in computers, which led to an AOL account, and RDI was a thing for a bit but I wound up hanging around a sci-fi chat room instead: Red Star Station. Never heard it mentioned since. Must have been a small group. I think I was in middle school. My generation was the right age for the NES, so I grew up gaming and never really stopped.
I think I discovered MU* because AOL used to offer Gemstone III, the only MUD I was ever on, and the leap between that and more RP-focused stuff was probably inevitable.
@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.
Whatever I imagine about how it'll be before I start RPing a new character, it almost always winds up being something else. Most RP feels cinematic to me, but I think music winds up shaping the tone/mood of my RP more often than films/shows/film genres.
I'm can also be pretty easily influenced by qualities of books I'm reading at the time, if the author has a particularly strong style/tone/rhythm/etc. I try not to be, but for MU* writing it inevitably slips through.
@faraday said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:
They don't (generally? hopefully?) continue to show up to session after session demanding that the GM somehow figure out how to entertain them despite the fact that they can't stand most of the other players at the table.
Yet that's basically what MU players ask for.
In the 'maybe someday you'll rp' (whatever the title was) thread, I said that I think part of the reason things have changed is that people are less time-rich or whatever else, and they pick and choose how to spend their time -- and that a lot of us have developed boundaries for behaviors we used to tolerate. I think this is part of it, and also part of why players who are willing to go out and stir up the RP they want do well, while people less driven to make up the scenarios, chat people, schedule stuff, etc., wind up having trouble getting the RP they want.
On the other far extreme, though, you get people who are so picky they don't get RP, either, and I'd like to think that eventually both groups are self-solving issues because they'll drift off from lack of interest or activity eventually.
...I am still waiting for the evidence of that hypothesis to arrive, but, y'know. lol.
@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.
@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.
TBH, I can't say I've seen this thing under discussion personally, though.
Like, I've seen staff favoritism become problematic. I've seen staff manipulate player behaviors and loyalties with the promise of more attention or rewards. Even more than that, I've seen staff PCs treat whole games like their personal playground, and all of the players around them as props.
Maybe it's just that I don't frequent the games in question, but I cannot for the life of me remember a staffer just straight-up refusing to run plot for boring people who make an effort and aren't also in some way total assholes.
@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.
@Auspice said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:
I believe NPCs should be Staff Property - playable by any member of Staff 'as needed' - for a plot scene, for a scene with PCs (a leader discussing disciplinary action, handing out a quest, etc etc), and so on. Their plot, their progress (such as sheets), and major actions should be tracked and shared (potentially discussed depending on scale) with the rest of Staff. Things like GDoc are great for this.
Once an NPC is being played by a Staffer on a regular basis in casual, day-to-day RP and is exclusively played by them (particularly if they are playing in personal, intimate friendships and relationships) they are no longer, IMO, an NPC and become a PC and should then be governed by the same rules as PCs.
I don't like this.
There are definitely cases in which this is useful: major comic book villains, etc. The kind of big-bads that are on-screen almost never. But I still prefer NPCs to be the specific responsibility of one person for many, many reasons. It's not just about consistency of tone, it's also about that person knowing everything the character has been involved in. You can say that it's staff's responsibility to share every interaction and keep everyone else up to date about all of the happenings, but even if you share the bulletpoints of it, things still get lost. Perspectives differ. A nuance that was important in a scene between a PC and an important NPC can utterly fail to register as important to someone else, or even be a thing they're just not capable of doing well in RP.
Plus, as a storyteller, when I make an NPC I make them with very specific thoughts in mind about what they're like, what they want, where their boundaries are. I make them in relation to my thoughts, feelings, and intuition concerning the characters they're likely to be interacting with. They have a specific flavor. If they exist to breathe life into the world, that core identity matters.
It doesn't matter how well someone else knows the other characters involved, or me -- they're never going to be consistent enough that they won't do something with my NPC that I look at and go 'eugh, not how I would have done that,' and then some of the magic is gone.
YMMV, of course. For some people this is definitely not an issue. It gives me hives, though.
@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.
@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.