Posts made by juke

@Thenomain said in Incentives for RP:

Okay! Now that everyone has settled on their opinions on what makes a good game, go out and make one!

...

Hey, it was worth a shot.

Workin' on it.

@Ghost said in Incentives for RP:

judgmental

Rather than quote both posts I just figured I'd address this bit.

Maybe it's just me, but honestly I have not found that the Hog Pit is an accurate depiction of what people are like on actual games. It's just...not. Maybe those opinions are held and meant in the moment, or hell, maybe even in perpetuity, but tbh the gripes and peeves thread is reliably a place where people are annoyed with one specific thing, post to generalize about it and commiserate, and participate in that ongoing conversation. Maybe someone prefers short or minimal poses to purple or longer ones (please for the love of god I'm only using this as an example can we not rehash this here thx), but I would bet you one bajillion dollars that if they met someone who wrote longer, flowery poses who in every way made them feel valued and gave them great story, it would become the exception to the rule.

People are performatively judgemental when they're in social groups because it becomes a part of the culture. Get them on their own, individually, and their compassion and tolerances are usually much longer than you would think. At least, this has been my experience.

I can definitely see how it would make new/inexperienced STs intimidated. It does take a very real kind of human courage to throw yourself out there creatively, even if it's just for a dumb mushgame. But I would say:

Everybody likes fun. Not everybody has the same idea of what 'fun' is, but somebody super into cronchy stats judging me for liking more narrative-based RP doesn't phase me because I like what I like, and that's all there is to that. Plots are sort of the same kinda deal. Maybe I wouldn't find a given plot fun, but if people are playing in it and having a good time and it's not screwing over the rest of the PB -- more power to them. Judging that is sort of fruitless and hollow. Own your fun! It's fun for you and yours, so...fuck it.

Unless your fun is unethical or hyper offensive, or something. Maybe don't own that.

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.

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?

@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. ^.^

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.

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.

@Tinuviel Fair enough! Amended to, 'it doesn't seem to be the general assumption.' Including 'anti-sensitivity bias' and whatever else was said, since we're nitpicking specifics.

But, anyway, fwiw, I agree with you on the lack of wisdom involved, whatever the reason for it.

@Ghost said in Gray Harbor Discussion:

I think the general assumption of people being shitty is somewhat telling of some of these mentalities, to be honest. People are very willing to suddenly believe that everyone is bigoted or ugly before asking for clarification.

I honestly didn't see anyone assume anything untoward about the policy-makers. There was just discussion of the policy itself. And it wasn't like a building wave of rhetoric in opposition to a counterpoint, it was people chiming in with feelings and opinions about the thing under discussion. I actually saw people more than once say they didn't feel it was malicious, just that the policy itself gave them weird feelings, which is more than fair.

These are very different things. MSB does enough actual dogpiling and conflation of opinions with people's identities as it is, it probably doesn't need people to assume that's happening when it's (for once) actually not.

I'm not saying I don't understand it. People want a diverse game. But I'm with @Kaiju, personally. This issue is the source of weird feelings because it turns something that is a fact of life for many people into a character gimmick/bulletpoint/angle/accessory/niche/whatever other words were used for it above, and it's effing weird for people to be territorial about something like that. Being an amputee isn't a plot point in a story that belongs to one person, it's a thing that happens to people.

The big-picture concern (I assume) is, 'but what do I do if half of my game's PCs are suddenly amputees' and that sort of cascades into the conversation about whether or not 'uncommon' concepts should be restricted in PC populations (example: Force Users on a Star Wars game). Some people say yes. Some people say no. (I am in the 'no' camp, because I like fun, but ymmv.) I am sure MSB could do 50 pages of circular arguing on the point, though. I think an individual character's relationship to their own circumstances, physical and emotional and otherwise, is what makes them come to life. The variables just give them framework.

Gray Harbor does seem to exist on the edge of a hell mouth full of monsters or something, anyway. A couple of people missing limbs would definitely not surprise me. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

@Thenomain I've had it recommended to me previously! It looks great.

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.)

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.

I've been thinking about this thread a lot lately. I find myself in a situation where I want to get involved in game things again after a stretch of being away, but I still need to be careful about stretching myself too thin. The difficulty for me is mostly this:

@Testament said in The Balance:

or get anything done with meaning or value(which, value and meaning are completely subjective to what one considers 'value' or meaning').

What draws me to RP in the first place are those meaty, granular character arcs with deep and nuanced complexity in them. It's something that can happen in isolation (I'm playing some backstory stuff on the side with some folks, and although it's just the two of us the story has been phenomenal), but usually doesn't. Most of the time, the really interesting twists and turns come from characters colliding and bouncing off of happenings out in the world -- public events that feed into 'private' character beats in unexpected ways.

Having that means engaging with things in meaningful ways, and meaning is hard to one-shot. On top of that, I then worry that extricating myself to disappear for some substantial stretch (say, weeks) will leave other people in the lurch, story-wise.

It's certainly fair (and definitely a good idea) to warn people that this is your situation, as @mietze points out, and I'm sure good people will understand...but I'm definitely sympathetic to the feeling that it might still be a struggle to find a satisfying balance, depending on what it is that motivates a person to RP in the first place...and, of course, it's always hard to get invested in a story and have to let it go because outside factors make it unworkable.

I guess where I'm landing on it lately (for myself) is, 'I'm going to try this and see how it goes.' Finding people who jive with those needs is definitely possible. Not something you can directly control, but also definitely not something that will happen without looking.

Hah. I remember Svoran.

@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.

@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

@arkandel said in Unlikeable, incompetent, and inactive: Can these characters work in an MU?:

Possibly not for this thread's scope but it's also why attributes like Charisma or Status don't work very well for MU*. A great player might be playing some baseborne peon yet that's gonna be a baseborne peon with a goddamn following before long, just because it's fun being around them... while Leaderman McStatus might struggle to find anyone to come to his party.

The last time I posted here it was a big ol' grouse about social stats in general, so I'm with you.

@wretched said in Unlikeable, incompetent, and inactive: Can these characters work in an MU?:

@arkandel On one hand I agree with what you are saying.

On the other hand i think it's also partially the payers responsibility to have their character 'stay in their lane' based on stats.
[...]
But of course at the same time, it's really really hard to be 'but i have all the stats I should be the leader!' if you cant Rp yer way out of a wet paper bag and every time your PC show up people groan and leave.

And thus my never-ending gripe with social stats. People like what they like, and in an ideal world respond how they think their characters ought to respond to what's happening, because that's natural (rather than what they know about someone's stats).

I said in those other replies that it's cool, obviously, if people like to play that way. Different strokes, and all. But...I hates it.

I guess it's peripherally related to this thread, though, because all of these concepts are pretty 'how are you playing them' instead of 'how are they intended to be perceived,' which is honestly not always a perfect-circle-venn-diagram thing.

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.

@lisse24 said in How to start?:

If I'm open to RP, but won't really be put off if no one joins me

I don't think any of the above methods are a problem if you're relaxed about whether or not you get a response! It's only when people try nothing else, expecting a response, and then grouse about never getting any RP/talk about how getting RP is impossible that it becomes a frustrating phenomenon. There's nothing inherently wrong with open invitations!