Posts made by kitteh

@Arkandel

I agree it can be weird OKing some horrific things and not others, but we do also tend to have some fairly set social conventions about these things. Some of those are silly (graphic violence OK, me shirtless = won't someone think of the children?), but we can modulate a bit between the two and come up with something reasonable as a baseline. And then RP that goes beyond the baseline can be restricted (whether that means it needs a warning or just shouldn't happen is up to the staff).

Her game sounds like it has a pretty obvious set of inspirations, and Black Sails is among them. It has both a fair bit of graphic violence (including some of the nasty realistic consequences like amputation with shit medicine) and sex, and even sexual violence (see Max), albeit in the last obviously more is implied than shown. From that you can pretty easily find the common (sex, violence) that people should be OK with to even step foot on the game, but also probably the high end where a warning might apply (extreme gore, actual porn, rape, etc). Doesn't seem crazy.

Yeah they're great!

@surreality

Yeah, I like playing them because usually they have an above-average draw for people to actually come RP at the location, which is hurdle #1 in the hobby, and the locations tend to be a little more colorful than Ye Olde Starbucks. So even the random filler RP is a bit less generic. The standard RL comparison applies: I spend lots of time in bars/cafes, but at brothels? Not so much! (I'm such a prude, I know)

Plus you do tend to get up to all kinds of stuff, much like the ones in the show are core rumormongers, etc. Just because people are willing to walk up to you and RP is a big icebreaker and it gets you in on things.

And even people coming looking for TS usually have the sense to do what I'd hesistantly call... foreplay RP? IE, 'I hand you money, you give me secks' doesn't tend to get you much effort in return, but if people hang out at the place and establish good RP with the characters (like they would anywhere else) the chance of naughty typing where I give a shit highly improves. And I think people know this. So whether horniness is the motivator or not, they're still good draws.

So uh, pre-sign me up for a spot at one of those places, finned or not, probably

@surreality It doesn't need to autosubmit, but for example something like what BSGU or some of the comic games have that can at least spit back out the scene without need for further cleaning. I'm aware you can do some of this in a client, but there's inevitably stuff it misses.

To comment on the other part of the convo, I don't think I'd typically want to post personal, 1 on 1, private bedroom thrust by thrust TS and I agree it seems weird to me, not to put down anyone who wants to do it. But for things like:

@surreality said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

there are some areas of the grid that WILL be labeled NC17 by default

It makes more sense, and I highly approve of this. I've played my share of brothel workers etc, and at locations like this it makes sense that you'll have some degree of public sexuality. I'm thinking of any scene at the brothel in Black Sails, for instance. There's basically never a shot that doesn't have a boob in it, and people may be in laps, but people probably aren't straight-up fucking on the tables... most of the time.

@Arkandel /me swishes tail?

@Ghost So mean

As a current mermaid player, I am in favor of the mermaid (sexy?)funtimes.

So hooray.

With all the log-based XP, I'm hoping there's an automatic in game logger? One of the things that kills me in the current culture is that while log sharing is a constant thing and sometimes tied to XP, it's still often manual. But time to wrangle log foo becomes time I have to subtract from RP or shows up randomly later in the week so I don't submit things in timely fashion.

@Faraday I love the sound of your thing (and I sort of enjoyed Storium for a bit, and can see some similarity)! I'd really love to be able to use visual aids, and just the portability of playing in a browser would be nice. I am also garbage about logging and hate having to fiddle with wiki code even though I like character pages, so that being automatic would be wonderful.

@Cobaltasaurus Good luck with Mirari! She may own a dress I harassed some guy into buying her after he spilled wine on her old one.

I only made it in on the end of the Firan stuff, so I probably missed out on a lot of the most spectacular drama. But I really was drawn to the theme and I'd love to see someone do something similar.

People tend to gravitate toward medieval-themed lords and ladies-ish stuff, but pre-christian antiquity is in a lot of ways a much more vibrant period to draw on. There's a lot of room for cultural and religious diversity (and conflict), exploration, etc. It also deals with a lot of the common issues people cite with historical games, in that you have more modern-familiar public civic life.

I'm sure, especially with the positive attitudes being expressed here and in some other threads or by other game staff (ie on Arx, even if they don't get it right 100%), that someone could do it without egregious sexual stuff. And to be clear, I don't find sexual themes problematic on their own, even ones that include uncomfortable or negative historical material. I rather enjoy the opportunity to RP around those themes as long as it's clear the players aren't using the RP environment as an excuse to act out RL misogyny or reinforce those themes as correct.

Oh I forgot that one. It was a fun game.

@icanbeyourmuse The part that was problematic (and that another player didn't even believe was in my BG) was not her having a contract sold to her house later on (although the contract itself is an iffily-defined thing, too), but the fact she was an orphan raised by other relatives who then sold her to the courtesan school as a child for money to feed their other brats.

Obviously I'm not a setting expert but it's hard not to see a lack of free will in that part of it. And while Whispers might not be explicitly prostitutes, she was specifically picked 'because she was pretty', and she was raised to be a seductress. All the thematic hand-waving you want to do about 'there is none of this stuff', this... sounds like sexual exploitation of a child.

Anyway, I did say 'implied.' It felt like someone wanted to write that story but was skirting saying it outright and using coded language and wink-nods instead.

@Kanye-Qwest Does your roster offer any way to tell staff-made PCs from player ones? I think ending up with prior player cast-offs can kind of undercut what people might be going for playing on a roster game, ie getting a character that is designed to fit into the world, have hooks, be relevant, etc.

@Kanye-Qwest Mirari.

So hi, I played here a bit but ended up fading off due to a mix of RL and difficulty getting in on RP and with some of the uh, support system? commands.

@Ominous said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

A note about courtesans, as was discussed heavily recently, there is no institutionalized prostitution in Arx at all, so courtesans are not selling sex. They are event planners, host/esses, companions, etc. The description of the receiving room in the Whisper House can be a bit confusing since it says that people occasionally show up thinking it is a brothel. That doesn't happen as there are no brothels. The very idea of a brothel is an alien concept. The description is likely a hold over from very early alpha.

Personally I found the Whisper thing confusing. I appreciate that staff is willing to challenge the grimdark sexploitation that GoT etc has made so chic, but I felt like they kind of couldn't make up their mind on this.

My roster PC's bg was basically Memoirs of a Geisha. Reading her, she sounded not just like a hooker, but a (implied) sex slave. It really felt like it clashed with the 'there is no prostitution or sexism!!!' files.

I even had a player challenging (not rudely, but basically in a friendly newbie-helping, 'you're getting theme wrong' way) my RP as incorrect when she was trying to share some of her life. So that came off a little strange. I've been looking at coming back but I'd probably stay away from the faction.