Posts made by L. B. Heuschkel

Speaking as someone with a diagnosis or two of my own I tend to fall back on the adage that mental illness can be an explanation, but it is not an excuse.

On the game I staff on we've outright banned antagonist characters -- but that doesn't mean everyone needs to sit and hold hands around the campfire. Our theme technically makes it possible to bring in very antagonistic groups such as the Spanish Inquisition or WWII Nazis (the literal examples used) and we don't want those.

Why? Because we are telling the story of a group of people in a situation, and how they manage to survive in that situation. If they end up murdering each other in back alleys instead of taking on the game's antagonists, it's going to be a short and miserable story.

That, however, does not mean that people aren't allowed to antagonise each other. Want to play someone with miserable social skills or for that matter, a manipulative asshole? Fine by us as long as you realise that any consequences of your IC behaviour are also for you to deal with. People aren't always nice. People aren't always capable of getting along. People are sometimes dicks.

The key issue -- to my eyes as a game designer -- is what kind of antagonism the game 'officially' sanctions. If you have factions like the example above, of Camarilla and Sabbat, then members of those are going to be in opposition to one another. If you don't have factions or everyone is a part of the same faction, then some people are still going to be in opposition to each other simply because they don't share views or just plain don't get along. This is fine.

The trick is to avoid indirectly sanctioning OOC dickish behaviour. You don't want the kind of 4chan edgelord who comes onto a game with the single purpose of antagonising everyone else in the name of freedom of speech and lol get a sense of humour.

This is why we run PVE, not PVP. Too old, too tired, too jaded to deal with more of those. Which, again, does not mean that we prohibit people from being dicks IC -- we just don't give them a shield to hide behind when their dickery has consequences from other players.

@silverfox said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

Plz tell me using crutches gets easier.

The times I've used them it's only taken me a day or so to adjust to them.

@silverfox (said shift has just been approved XD )

@seraphim73 There is absolutely nothing wrong with a social 'coffee shop' style scene where a number of people just happen to occupy the same space. It's a good opportunity to spread information around and catch up on what changed after the last big drama. Keep one another up to speed on IC gossip, warn each other about the big bad in the woods, and crack jokes.

I still want to go in there with that specific purpose, though. But that's also all it does take -- to go in, knowing that you're doing a kind of catch-us-up scene. Where it fails for me is just going in, with no purpose or agenda. Because that places the onus on the other person to make sure there is something to talk about or do -- and the other player is not always capable of that. I don't want to waste their time or mine, so I always try to have a backup plan.

I always have a purpose for a social scene -- whether it's coffee shop or bumping into people at the grocer, or just crossing paths on the marina. The purpose does not have to be complex or deep; a lot of the time it is simply 'meet this new person' or 'drop some plot info I got yesterday on others so they have it too'.

It gives me direction, though. I like to start with an opener of some kind that involves the game's location and theme: Is it the local Blueberry Festival (why, yes, last night in fact it was!), is it a cold and rainy morning where my character is dripping on the carpet while he waits in line, is there something local and unique to this setting to engage with?

And then I try to steer the conversation towards whatever it is I am trying to do -- unless it's already going somewhere else, in which case I just hop along for the ride.

I feel very uncomfortable if I have nothing and no particular reason to be there. But it's okay for that reason to get drowned out because somebody else had something more exciting. The main issue for me is to remember that the point of these scenes is to live every day life, but also to network and make information spread to those who weren't there when the thing happened.

Coffee shop RP can be boring as heck.

It can also be a way to get information out there to the people who missed out, filling them in and getting them up to speed on game gossip.

I suppose it depends somewhat on the motivation for the scene.

@arkandel said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

More time to play mobile games on the porcelain throne!

<<
I've gotten pretty good at Gardenscapes.

@arkandel Gluten intolerance, allergic to wheat, sugar, and dairy. Hear you loud and clear. Will help you murder that imaginary pizza I can't have, either.

Somehow, 'enjoying life' does does not extend to sitting in the bathroom all day the day after eating that pizza in real life.

@cupcake Bit early to start discussing my new game given we're still hashing out the very basics but maybe some day.

Updated. Throw me your game recs.

@aria Good catch. On the partner. As for the OB/GYN, some people should never be let out of medical school, not to mention, the cave they were born in.

@aria But, if your partner can still get off, you're fine -- right?

Two months ago I was experimentally put on a low dose of medicine for hypothyroidism, to see if it would affect extreme fatigue.

It did. My hormone values didn't change much, but I felt better. Then my GP retired.

New GP took me back off it, with the usual song and dance that fatigue is in the mind, and also, you're overweight. I feel like crawling into a corner and just lying there. I spent almost two years practically only leaving the sofa to crawl to bed and back again. I was finally able to walk a bit, maybe do a few things. Able to shower and have a conversation in the same day.

Back to square one. Lose weight while unable to do anything even remotely resembling exercise. Because my country thinks fibromyalgia and CFE aren't real.

@sixregrets Beat me to it. We've got a small handful of European time zone players at least.

@solstice said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

"Have you tried using logic to overcome your panic?"
"Have you tried focusing on your breathing?"

How Denmark officially treats fibromyalgia, ME/CFS, POTS, migraine disorders, whiplash, and a dozen other supposedly psychiatric disorders. I'm sorry you had to deal with someone who bought into the 'functional disorders' scam.

@nessa I feel the thing for me to take away from your post there is that you know what you want, and communicate clearly about it, and that you don't hinge your RP on specific other people.

Those are big deals. The last in particular is important -- to me -- to keep in mind when I run stories and plots. My story must not hinge on Joe and Bob being available. It needs to be possible for Sally and Sue to pick up, even if they weren't there for the earlier bits. If Joe and Bob don't turn up, hand Sally and Sue their own bits of plot so they have a reason to go talk to Joe and Bob, but also that they may attack the story quandary from their own angle.

There's never too many clues to hand out. Each character will have its own interpretation of what's going on. Customise a bit to their skill set and background, and you get overlapping threads that people can pursue and argue about. Communicating plot threads down the line, away from yourself, including more people.

Most plots do end up with a small handful of people making the final decisive choices in the end -- if for no other reason then because they were the ones signing on for the final Event. But before you get there, there's a long stretch of road where a lot of RP can be had, and a lot of people can be connected. I can only speak for myself (obviously) but I enjoy getting to participate in discussions or preparations for someone else's final stand as much as I get to make the final stand; we all take turns being the hero or hogging the spotlight.

@cupcake said in Battling FOMO (any game):

I generally have to try and disengage when that kind of thing happens or else I know I'm going to get ugly.

It's good to know when to walk away. But it's even better to not have to -- which is what I'm hoping for with this thread. To try to identify some of the issues, and some of the solutions. Not everything will work for everyone, and sometimes, the battle is lost.

But not always. I'm not going to pretend that after 35 years in the hobby in some form or other, I'm not still having a quiet moment of They invited ME!!! ZOMG!!!one! when someone sends me a note or a request for a scene. After all this time, I'm still genuinely surprised when someone actively seeks me out. And frankly, I think that goes for a lot of us. That we are not unwanted, but we let our brain weasels convince us that we are.

And that we let a few assholes convince us, too, because it takes just a few people with a bad attitude to render a game unplayable for a lot of us. We've certainly seen that happen over and over again.

I think one of the hardest lessons for me has been that everything is transient. People you play with today will be gone tomorrow. And keeping things alive for myself means a constant move towards getting to know and include the new people. There's no such thing as leaning back and just hanging with your friends because when you do -- you wake up one morning and realise it's gotten awful quiet in here and it's because everyone else left.

Not because they hate or dislike you. Just because something new and shiny happened over there, or life got in the way. In a way, inclusion is a constant quest to find new playmates and accepting that the present set will move on. It's not always easy, and I think a lot of us wax nostalgic about old days somewhere or other for exactly this reason.

@vixanic said in Battling FOMO (any game):

I feel this so very much. Between not having much time during the week, and being in an inconvenient time-zone, it feels like all I can do is casual RP, rarely if ever events, and just doing things via jobs is distinctly unfulfilling.

Not keen on jobs myself. They're necessary for some things but RP it ain't. At best, it's something to RP about.

Casual RP is my staple though. Probably because I am also in an inconvenient timezone (CET). I don't think you should think less of yourself for this. Events and hunting the plot is all good and well, but a game does not feel like a living community without everything else that goes on.

It's the inter-personal relationships I enjoy the most as a player -- and yes, I realise what that sounds like, but I'm not talking about TS. I like getting to know other characters, to form bonds and connect. To feel that I am part of a living, breathing community, where sometimes, saving the world will have to take second seat to what Our John said about Our Susy because priorities.

Insert obligatory spiel about asynchronous scenes solving a lot of the timezone issues too, if one has the kind of mind they work for (I know people who just can't, however much they want).

@pyrephox said in Battling FOMO (any game):

@l-b-heuschkel said in Battling FOMO (any game):

I find that open scenes and open plot events are a very big deal when it comes to battling this. Make it hinge less on me to reach out -- I am putting myself somewhere and signaling I'm available, and if people secretly hate my company they can just not turn up.

Alas, then no one turns up to your open scenes, either, and there's nothing quite as crushing as sitting for an hour or two with an open scene, uh, open and no one showing a lick of interest.

Events aren't so bad, because if no one signs up, then you just don't run it. But man, those open scene deserts hurt.

Yeah, they do. A trick I've found to work there is to have a couple of other people whom you know share the same brain weasel breed. Start those scenes together. If there's a scene sitting with just one person in it, people tend to skip it -- I have no idea why, but I see it often. If there's two -- a third won't hurt, and a fourth, and so on. I'm not sure how this works; you'd think one person sitting there all the attention ready would be enticing, but it actually frightens a lot of people off. Whereas stomping into a conversation that's already going on apparently is a lot less intimidating.