@greenflashlight there are 2 at the preschool i work at. Also a Henrietta/Hattie, a Mabel, a Rosemary, and a Eunice. 
Also a friend of mine who was a mom friend when my big kids were little named her two girls Kimberly and Jennifer (they're 20 and 18 now) because she wanted their names to be unique in their age group and she was absolutely right!!
Yes. I will forever love Ares bc it made it so non coder me could even entertain the idea of being able to get a game together despite that. Even though I am so code impaired that I had to get some help with coding, that is only because if adaptation. If I didn't want to do that I would not have needed help beyond asking others where to find things now and then.
And its nice to not need to be wiki savvy too. I
I didn't know the language that it uses, and didn't pick it for that.
Also I tend to be grateful for people liking unusual or uncommon names. I wonder if it is because they like me get a little weirded out by seeing their own name on the WHO list. My given name and my nickname I've used since I was 12 are not weird or out there but I rarely meet anyone RL with them, but one time on TR both of them were pcs and that freaked me out. There was someone who took my given name on Arx and that was weird AF too, and even worse they were real "special" too. 
Yes I think most of us have "a friend" who is an amazing outlier. The mush silliness is that you can't spit without hitting one!
Yep, as much as I find unrealistic stuff on games amusing for the most part I frankly am fine with it and I'm fine with being annoyed at things that bug me.
After all, if I wanted to RP reality, I'd have to RP a fat middle aged person with no big accomplishments to her name and that doesn't sound like fun really (even though I'm fine with my RL too and would not want to actually have to do most of the things my PCs have either).
I prefer scenes of 4 or less. But honestly as someone who rarely parachutes into a game with a ton of friends, I know too well what its like to have to go to pub scene after pub scene trying to meet people and getting the brush off. So if I see someone new or struggling then I prefer to include them.
However, if they turn around and play hard to get in the sense of not reacting/posing ignoring everything then I let that go immediately. Don't have time. I've learned the hard way that I almost never regret turning right back around and walking out when someone solicits rp ooc and then poses being unapproachable or hostile or too good to pay attention to anyone around them, and often do regret when I stay and try to pull RP out of them. Nope, don't have time for that. And usually when I pose preparing to go the ones that want rp will change their tune and then a decent scene might be had.
I'm a super social person RL but never impose myself or try to lure out people who seem like they don't wish to be interacting. That's fuckinh rude and violating to push yourself on others! On mushes there was this odd pressure to try and chase people for RP if they joined a scene or wanted to interact with the set or gave an ooc indication that they wanted RP or were upset that nobody would play with them and verbalized it. But now unless someone is being an equal giver in the scene I try to not feel like I have to carry things/keep reaching out even when thd other person seems to find a lot of fun in slapping everything down.
I still feel that anxiety about someone feeling left out/excluded but I'm trying to be more like RL and accept/believe a person when they pose being disinterested in interaction regardless of what they might say or have done ooc.
Suddenly able to go from novice to doctorate level of a skill, just because you attended a few parties OR because it's been 4 weeks.
I have a very eclectic group of RL friends. I am a social person with a lot of different interests though. My long term friendships tend to be largely chemistry based. There are a couple of people I am still close to that I met at a group for expectant moms when I was pregnant with my first born. A couple of people from my older kids' elementary PTA days. A couple of friends from the 2 different church type orgs I've been a member of in the past 20 years. 1 person I'm close with whose kid went to preschool with my youngest. A handful of friends from my political life, almost evenly divided amongst activists and party people. A handful of friends from mushing. 1 friend from my volunteering with horse rescue org. 2 older ladies (in their 80s) that i got to know from the Y (but haven't met up with since the pandemic) And 2 from my days as a survivalist/homesteading hobbyist.
The vast majority of these folks probably would get on well at a BBQ i hosted despite being very diverse in backgrounds, beliefs, and appearances.
I have a lot of long distance friends but a local friend network also that I feel fortunate about.
Until the pandemic I think that it helps that I'm someone who likes to invite people to go do things or come over (and won't be offended if its only accepted once in awhile) and I don't think I'm a terribly needy RL friend either most of the time. If I enjoy a person's company then I'm happy to be around them on their schedule.
All 3 of my older kids are now at their respective college/universities as of this afternoon. I love seeing them ve excited. Got to hang with my eldest a little more since he wasn't feeling 100 percent after dental work recovery from the day before yesterday and thus asked for some help setting up his dorm room today. Was fine on the drive home maybe because my youngest kid was in the car. But now the house feels so much more empty. I miss them all already.
Lots of changes everywhere in the last few days.
If the problem to solve is getting shy players to take initiative and people feeling welcome to participate in mixed scenes then honestly I don't think that is ever solvable by system or mechanics.
That is a game culture thing.
You can nerf everyone into oblivion, remove whole systems from play and you will still have players who have anxiety about jumping in because it is not about sheets but initiating out joining play. You will also always have players who will refuse to participate in anything they're not "good" at and define being good as having a high probability of success. There isn't anything wrong with that as a playstyle but in that case nothing will really satisfy except for free-form play with no risk, so if they need that to feel comfortable and welcome then honestly they'll need to find a game that allows full choice rather than systems that allow for failure/risk.
And again, those games can be fun too esp when there's a culture of sharing the limelight and interest in developing other people's stories.
The issues tend to happen when there are mixed playstyles/expectations. People who enjoy risk of failure/less control over degree of success and needing to adjust play accordingly are going to see a system as a means to help them enjoy that kind of informing of play. If others see it more as a guideline to inform their play in general but not limiting it to whats on their sheet, thats going to clash.
And even then you have differing personality types (such as the all or nothing folks, if they are you maxed out or high statted for a thing they don't feel comfortable even trying, or someone moving from a high xp/power game to a low or moderate one now feeling inadequate).
But I think it is almost never the system but game culture. And you must cultivate the culture too, the system won't build it for you. Without guidance, you'll still have people not on the same page but hundreds of them.
Can you explain why it is imperative to have everyone have access to every scene? I'm not sure i understand. Or I don't relate to the idea that one should never have scenes that have a specific focus that includes every type of pc.
Ideally for some scenes it would be nice to have the opportunity for a balanced group be more successful, and ST can certainly nudge things that way...but a lot of the time the problems arise not with the code or system but with other players not wanting to give and take. Which can also be managed by the ST but its not very much fun to do so in the moment. I do find that largely people (aside from the person that wanted to do everything/control everything) are pretty grateful when the ST asserts some action control (hey bob, you can't do x, you, and z. Pick one action and pose appropriately. Hey bob, I asked earlier thar you limit yourself to reasonable actions so that others can participate. Pick one thing, the next time I have to stop the scene you will need to leave. Byeeeeeee bob!). In my experience as a ST there are players of social PCs that will attempt to dominate a scene just as much as combat pcs have the reputation for.
I think the more that you give and protect player opportunities to use the abilities of their pcs the more relaxed they get about when an individual scene might have less for them to do than they hoped, because they can trust that another time they might have more focus.
But a lot of that is setting game culture rather than relying on code or system to solve problems. I do think that if it's possible perhaps narrowing focus is also not a bad thing. I don't have an issue with extreme narrowing (all courtier or none), but setting and clear guidelines for what kinds of characters you will accept can help. Maybe all fighties must have experience supporting political delegations/missions, or courtiers are going somewhere with a reputation for needing some degree of self-defense, and do not approve fish out of water pcs for the specific setting and scope.
I think social mechanics work best with very active supportive storytelling opportunities (as in ways you use then against npcs). Unless its a pvp game very seldom do combat pcs roll combat against each other, its against npcs in storytelling.
And you could have social sparring for brownie points/onesupmanship just like you can combat sparring.
I did used to get peeved when players relied on their own ooc to be convincing rather than playing to the sheet they know they've built--but honestly now I figure they know that they're cheating and that's on them and will usually show up in other ways. Well and it helps that I tend to play games where people are assumed to have baseline competence in most things and tbe dice are there to allow the pc to do specific directed or exceptional actions rather than assuming that someone with 0 knife skill couldn't figure out how to cut their meat or cut a piece of rope (maybe they'd be messy) or wouldn't know what end to stab people with, or someone with no points in empathy was therefore a sociopath and should be rped as such.
If STs are not asking people to roll to convince the mob/schmooze the merchant/fast talk the used car salesman so nobody invests because they're never needed, then that's a problem with staffing and thinking of opportunities to allow folks to show off their investment! And can be pretty easily corrected.
But I don't think anyone can correct likeability ooc nor should they.
I think @bored had a game? Or iirc they would be a good person to talk to about it. I might be conflating them with someone else though.
CyberpunkRED is something I really like and have been working with others to modify (significantly in some spots, not so much in others) to use the world and some of the systems (obviously not at all perfectly) on ares.
I dont think that would work on a very large hands off game with broad scope. But for smaller scale and narrower focus at least from trying to set up storytelling tools it has been not as bad as I thought. But we haven't yet tested it with a group yet.
I too love shadowrun for many reasons (including meeting my hubby of 21 years on Shadowrun Seattle MUX), but I wanted to use ares tools and a simplified system and I could not even wrap my head around it. 
My partner is out of state at a business conference for the week, and gets back less than 24 hours before we drop our first college student going back to school at his school. I have the other two college kids working crazy hours to get as much $$$ as they can before they go back to school next thursday. It is blackout week for taking time off from work, so I'm not (thank goodness all the college students are home this week to get my youngest on and off the school bus). There are just a lot of last minute things that need to get done this week (flu shots, prescription refills, other appointments, ect) which means this week through Saturday I am going to be more stressed out and fried and kind of scatterbrained than usual.
It's fine, I'm fine, nothing is on fire RL or otherwise, but this is also a time kind of hitting me in the feels so I will be monitoring here less frequently until this Sunday, because I don't want my feels hitting me here too.
Please keep pinging Gany or me for issues or reporting posts so that they're easier to spot, it's such a big help for catching things when we are juggling a lot.
I think it is also possible to narrow the scope of an L&L setting so that it doesn't focus on nobility (though they could be part of the setting, and be done in ways that clearly are not m/f biological heir dynasties). Guilds struggling for power/influence (also involving some nepotism, either adopted, romantic, or biological), ect. It may mean the people who MUST have a royal/noble title vs the titles associated within the guild may not have interest, but it also eliminates people who will focus on that and have to be explained over and over again that the setting isn't the one they are familiar with in movies/storybook lore, and that might be worthwhile if you do not want to have to do a lot of pruning all the time.
I did run an online TTesque but using a mush server Fading Suns campaign that had no nobility at all but focused on competition and onesupmanship with a few guilds, on a frontier type of planet. It was super fun (I made the nobility into obstacles to be dodged or overcome), but again, I know that if I were to do a FS games without nobility I would have to do a LOT of handholding/pruning/dealing with people loudly complaining on ooc for awhile (or here).
@jennkryst Yes! We saw that one too, fantastic! Even if it's not a fantasy setting per se, it could be done with a walled city or whatnot in a fantasy setting. 
Sending your child to a school where you don't know or control what other families are doing or not doing always entails some risk. Especially a child of an age where they cannot be vaccinated. My youngest is too young for the vaccine, and has asthma that lands him in the ER usually several times when he contracts an upper respiratory infection (except for last year, which means honestly I'm considering having him mask up for flu season even when they're no longer required in my area). I know people who have gotten covid even though they're vaxed, who have children the same age as my youngest.
And so we did sit down and weigh our options when it came time for sending him to in person school. Ultimately we decided that it was better for him educationally and for mental health reasons for him to go to in person school, masked, with covid-19 protocols practiced by the kids. We absolutely believe there are people who will send their infected kids to school (it's already happened a few times in the district, because the parents didn't want to be discriminated against for their kid having covid). We believe it's very likely that there will be asymptomatic kids in his classroom (or he may be one at some point). The only way to control the situation is to have him be home with me quitting my job and forbidding our college age kids from being in the house with us. Maybe if we were caring for an elder relative on immunosuppresive therapy, we would do that, or if there was some other situation. I think there are some families that would choose to do that in our situation and think we are horrible people for not.
It's just a part of life. Whenever we go get medical care now, we're weighing the risk of exposure. Going to an outdoor gathering or not. Going into the store if I forget to order our stuff for curbside pickup.
We shouldn't be putting yet another burden on medical staff than they already have. Do I think it's fair my fat, middle aged ass in a triage situation probably would be put behind the 25 year old healthy fit mom with 3 little kids but who also is a rabid covid anti-vaxxer and anti-mask activist, if there was only 1 ventilator between us? No, but I accept that's the reality.
@arkandel vaccines have become the new satanic panic. A cultural phenomenon that has been part of settler culture and social behavior since colonial times.
If you rabbit hole for the various incidents of satanic panic over the last 50 years or so, there's a ton of similarity culturally, socially, ec.