Best posts made by mietze

When spoiled kids are tossing tons of electronics/clothing/ect because they get tired of packing it, you don't even need a niche. Especially when the surrounding areas are pretty low income. Yay everyone wins.

However, there is cause for basic knowledge to be known. You should know that probably your grunt soldier would not disobey orders and leave active battle line and endanger their unit to--go rescue a kitten they saw across the way (actually happened). Or maybe you would! But you can't cry about consequences then.

As a trainee or rookie cop, when your supervisor gives you a direct order in the field, probably you should respond to it instead of doing the exact opposite because your player couldn't be assed to read anything anyone else was posing (actually happened) and thus exposed the team to a greater degree of risk. Or at least, not if you're not willing to face the consequences (in that case, there was a redo once it was pointed out).

But for all details being correct all the time or others attacking people, I have a low view of folks that ream folks out. If I can bite my tongue at the degree of inaccuracy I've seen at what CPS and social workers do, or the people who make these PCs with tortured pasts of neglect and sex trafficking with absolutely NO evidence of adaptive behaviors in their RP at all ever, just bouncy happy sex freak, then dammit, RL cops can deal with people getting call signs on, and with occasional annoying TJ Hooker types.

By the time engineers get out of engineer school they all have the same handwriting.

I have met plenty of great writers who were absolutely craptacular RPers.

I think they are very different skills. Though I do think that great RPers always have excellent writing, the reverse is not true.

Probably the mormons would too but to be honest I think the kids they send around are just cute as a button and I don't want to scar some sheltered boy for life. All the JW folks I have encountered have been grumpy old ladies and weird dudes, with the exception of one young woman who was pretty personable.

@ide If it helps there was also a discussion about how a poser that's way mismatched for others (in a scene of 1-2 paragraph posers, they are hammering others with 3-4 of fluff and thinking it makes them a better RPer/writer/what have you) can be tiresome and rude?

I think people do tend to tune out BBoards though. i think it's an excellent thing for a wiki. Putting it on a board for some reason feels pompous to me be I can't put my finger on why. Or why I would feel that way on a board but not the wiki, where I'd enjoy reading it. Hmm.

I'm wiping away a tear of pride that this time at least 1 or 2 ethnic and homophobic slurs were left out. There is hope for the future after all!

I really love playing ghouls. This has meant that I've had to deal with dropped regnants a few times. This is not usually a problem you can go to staff with per se since it's not important (though I'm glad to see that finally a lot of vamp places do have house rules to allow ghouls some degree of OOC agency to remove/switch up regnants in the case of someone going AWOL) in a mush sense. What I usually do is wait whatever the idle-freeze time period is if the person has suddenly stopped logging in, and when they roll over contact staff to tell them my proposed solution, get their buy in along with whatever adjustments they propose. If I have contact info for the AWOL player I'll try to contact them weekly until that point--not in a bitchy or whiny way. Once the idle timestamp has been applied, I always send them the pitch I made to staff. If I don't have off mush contact info I send it in a @mail shortly before they roll over so that when/if their RL is such they can return, they'll be able to see what the pitch was. And then I move on, and if they return, I'm friendly--maybe we work it out to continue, most of the time not, but hopefully no one has been disparaged except for actions that THEY wrote and took prior to their departure.

Poor BobGoblin's situation though is...I mean, at least with someone who drops off the game, you don't have the kind of meanness that is ignoring someone or putting them off without the courage to say "I'm not interested." That's a shitty thing to do to someone. Even if you don't have a close tie in. If you don't plan to RP with someone, just tell them and then offer to work things out OOCly. I don't alt-stalk, so it's possible that I might have been in this situation too but was just unaware. I think think I'd be a lot more pissed if I knew someone was being a cowardly dick and wasting my time and theirs.

So in that case, I still would not involve other PCs in things--that's awkwardness on a lot of levels, as I said previously. But I would definitely after a month (or whatever the games idle policy is, whatever's longer) send a @mail and then +Request if the mail was not responded to stating that I'd tried for X amount of time to get scenes with no response, while the other player was active otherwise, and that I wasn't sure why--at that point /I/ was uncomfortable needing action on their part to advance my story, that I did not hold any grudges or anything, but I'd like the proposed resolution of XYZ (something face saving for both PCs) so that we could move on and not have any further obligation to each other unless we both agreed to it organically sometime in the future.

Ugh. We are not going to turn in to the old WORA here let's go post autopsy photos and be incredible vile and hateful on people's real life media because the link to their site was shared are we?

@Arkandel

I'd definitely be game to accept whatever staff ruled was the IC goings on too. I have found though that a lot of staff are kind of overburdened anyway, they have enough on their plate, and if I want things to not be kicked down the road of "god, I'll deal with this later, I really need to process this other priority stuff" by asking staff to pull the idea/answer out of their butts, it's better for me to spend less time stewing and fretting and more time thinking of some face-saving-to-all-sides proposal I can pitch.

People respond a lot faster to a pitch rather than a "you tell me what happens" much of the time, and if they do need to say no, they tend to be much more willing to come up with a compromise than something from scratch. Staff, someone who isn't equipped courage or social skills wise to be able to say no, you name it. As long as you are not punitive and overly self serving in your pitch. It's hard to do when you're pissed, I'll grant, but it's worth it if you can.

@peasoupling

Apparently threatening to become a real activist for really reals this time instead of poorly channeling Richard Spencer (with less wit and charm) is what we should aspire to.

I don't remember a lot of fantasy babies on SC, either. I mean there were people who had children (mostly offscreen) but they were heirs or somesuch. I guess I must have seen a very different slice of things though. I definitely think there was a lot of fucking going on, but I don't recall it being a huge emphasis in game play. I only had one ICly slutty PC though, who got surprisingly little action in that area. Custodius didn't care for my RP I don't think, so maybe that's why?

I totally agree though that putting in penalities for things that you know are inevitable (like TS) are not worth the time and distract from concentrating on the other hard lines you want to take a stand on. Like if there IS societal pressure against being seen as the kingdom's bicycle, then maybe instead of whining on bb1 or shaking your finger, just dock people status points or give them rumor crises they have to spend time/effort on to restore. (not like plots, just mechanical stuff, I think the other problem is if you give it too much attention). And have lots of positives and goodies for the behaviors/IC actions you DO wan to see.

Plus Christians are doing an awesome job of destroying Jesus and his teaching now. Maybe he's just jealous!

Most (not all) of the "involuntary" PC death I've seen (barring PvP) has been very boring and anticlimatic.

Why?

Because most of the time, it happens at the end of a 4-6 hour slog into the wee hours where by that time both the ST and the players in the scene are half assing it with 1-2 sentence posing every 20 minutes because that's all their fried brains can handle.

I think if you're going to get all excited about involuntary death for DANGER! and EXCITEMENT! and SUPERIORITY!! Then honestly? It's up to that staffer (usually it's a staffer) to provide a exciting and superior experience for all involved. Kick out the dragging their asses players. Keep it moving. Repsond! Be proactively respectful of everyone's time so that when/if someone dies it's not at the absolute most lame-ass period of the night where even the ST isn't delivering their best.

I'm good with making players bring it! But IME, it is not actually the players that tend to make these things so that people want to chew their own legs off to escape--but a lack of respect for time, follow through, and a willingess to boot deadweight.

If I ever have an ice cream truck I want it to play that!!! Or the bumblebee song

Sometimes I'll ask on pub if it's a place where that's a good way to get a scene. Though I think in recent memory the only place that has been relatively easy to do that with has been BITN, especially if you're a new PC--most of the time people get crickets, not because people don't want to play with them personally I don't think, but just because who is on doesn't mean RPable and they may not see it while they're idling or they're unsure when the ask happened.

So what I do when I'm looking or pickup RP is to reach out to others who are looking for scenes, even if it's been awhile since they asked. On pub/smaller channels, whatever. If I have an established PCs i'll ping friends too, probably first. Or I put myself in a public location and broadcast I'm doing so with an open invite to anyone who wants to stop by, as long as I'm in there, is welcome to join me at any time. I've actually found /that/ gets more shy nibbles/show ups than asking on chan. I'm not sure why. Has anyone else found this to be the case?

Also, if I've got research or plot tidbits to share, I disclose that too. I think it helps that usually I have social or flexible PCs.

I don't count prearranged stuff as finding RP necessarily because that's already found me.

I even had appointment setting software that would send emails/texts 1 week and 3 days before and then morning-of reminders, but would have no shows on occasion. Some people I know require cc on file for first time/unknown appointments so at least they get some compensation, but luckily I always got most of my biz through word of mouth so that helped.

PrPs or the equivalent have been if they're small enough to allow for dynamic RP and there's been something to bond over. But that's pretty rare.

I think the factors for it NOT being conducive to generating RP ties to new people as a result are the following (but not limited to this):

• PrPs on many of the games I have played in the last few years are the only form of potentially non-pure-social scenes people get, so they tend to be overcrowded with people glomming on without really thinking what's logical/appropriate to their PC. In addition, non-staff storytellers often times are very well aware of these fact (that this is a rare opportunity for players to do something that's not a version of baRP especially if they don't have a circle of friends already, and don't feel empowered or feel bad about adhering to their posted scene limits or screening for ICness, because they don't want to upset players who are starving for anything, anything at all.

• Because of the above, I think, people who do list public/unrestricted events burn out quickly, or end up having to change over to more spectator-ish scenes. It burns them out, so then you have largely people who don't mind 8-10 people scenes (which IMO are much less likely to bond/get to know other PC and players with a higher frustration/ooc checkout quotient) being the only public runners while most others have gone back to "those I know and maybe a +1 or two". Totally understandable, but it doesn't allow for a lot of mixing up.

• Sometimes it's difficult to get blurbs about those PCs in advance, even if asked for, so the runner can't try to incorporate bits to draw PCs out and towards each other. Yes, that's partially player responsibility too, but I think the runner has a unique tactical and vantage point that can help facilitate that--but while I've found that lots of times people are willing to front load their stats for you, they're less likely to share ways to draw them in on a story level. I'm not sure why that is--maybe they don't know themselves because they've had limited opportunities to flesh out a PC? They worry another player will use it against them if they share that info? They worry that they will be made the 'star' when they don't want to, or that it will feel bad to them if they bother typing up all that stuff and it's not used at all or given consideration? Or they don't know what to put because they've never been asked before?

• A lot of time by the time the scene is over, there's not a lot of time to make plans to meet up or to exchange info, or get to know each other beyond the action, and the players can be so tired that they are just trying to get through OOCly so they can go to bed or whatever. Follow through can be difficult. SOmeone who will go out of their way to attend a PrP for a chance at that action or to be included but they may be hooking up with people who don't share their usual timezone, so that makes forging more RP difficult even if it's very much desired.

I love my 40s. No really--they are even better than my 30s, and that was frankly THE best decade of my life so far in every way imaginable!

The one thing I do not love is that I guess something must happen to your inner ears; I used to love roller coasters. Still loved them and scrambler rides and all that stuff in my early 30s when I had the opportunity to go.

Last summer I went on a very tame baby scrambler type ride with all 4 kids and thought I was going to hurl if I tried to open my eyes. I figured that was just part of grumpy old mom stuff.

But today I was teaching my toddler how to pump legs on a swing by swinging in my own seat beside him--and it made me dizzy for like half an hour! Fuck, now I can't SWING without wanting to hurl?!?

At least I still enjoy going down slides...

I don't really think asking in channels works well for most people. I used to feel bad but then I noticed almost everyone else getting the same result. Asking people privately if I've seen them say hi I'm new or looking for to before and they're in the ooc room or quiet room rarely gets turned down, at least for me. I play a pretty nonsexual PC on the place where I'm most often seeking pickup rp (BITN) so that might help people not be afraid they're going to be hounded for something unwelcome, and thus I don't seem to offend people for asking via unsolicited page. At least that's my theory. I always have a pitch too, with a caveat of "but I'd be happy to try something else if you'd rather!"