Posts made by mietze

Ugh. I too live in the burbs on paper, but despite being about a 20 minute drive from downtown Seattle and about 5 minutes sidestreet from the downtown of one of the famous suburban towns, we are actually in unincorporated territory. Which means we have country (with a heavy emphasis on cuntry) standards of noise and other nuisances (livestock, unleashed dogs, fireworks at 3 AM whenever the neighbors get toasted enough, firearm discharges which is more of a temptation than it should be). We have had ATVs, those circus clown mini bike things, homebuilt motorized contraptions (granted, sometimes those are pretty hilarious, though the mom in me always has a gut clench seeing the kids take the huge hill, it's a miracle no one has had to go home scraped up off the side of the road and put into a paper cup). Someone did finally shoot the 3 peacocks. We've had an exotic cat on the loose too before from the animal sanctuary that is one house down from us.

Yep, I have played the gamut of PC types. Other PC reactions that are negative don't typically bother me, since most of the time it's in good fun.

However, if I start to feel like I am unwelcome when there's really no intellectual reason other than "gut feeling" for that to be the case, I know it's because I am just fried. Maybe because of things that have happened on game (frustrating staff, not having a direction to go/needing to shift gears, bored of limited opportunities or conversely tired from running a ton of stuff of coordinating and maybe doing too much with little personal RP) or RL stressors. But in any case for me I'm realizing it's a cue that I need to take a breather, so that I don't damage relationships with other players by being too needy (though I am super lucky and have quite a few people who I can tap for play in a safe ooc environment even if the rp itself is tense/down and dirty). And that it will pass if I give myself some time away from stewing/worrying about it--since it's an internal thing that others are not responsible for.

I think when I really honestly feel unwanted/unwelcome, it's a sure sign that I am very burnt out and spent. This is a fairly new revelation for me. Sometimes it's true that people may not want me around, and not everyone likes me in the best of circumstances anyway--but the reality is that's usually not the case (most people don't give a shit or have positive feelings about my play)--it's just that I am feeling frazzled/overwhelmed/worried because my ability to give and be dynamic is less than usual because I am exhausted from RL or game happenings (current or previous).

I do think there are certain types of people who use statements like that--especially inappropriately publicly--as a weapon, but I think they're a minority. I'm fortunate in that I do have a few friends who are very good at pulling my head out of my ass (in a way that I can hear/accept because I trust them), and a few that are happy to just love on me and provide safe shelter until I've got my energy back, with some overlap between the two.

Winter illness. It is hammering the household. With a few days respite around New Years (and even then I was KOed by the previous cold triggering asthma again like whoa) we have caught every damn bug astound from just after thanksgiving until now everyone but me in the family down with violent stomach flu.

All I can smell is Lysol and hand sanitizer. Which I suppose is better than a mixture of cologne, BO, and cigarettes all things considered...

That being said (sorry for spelling/grammatical errors, I'm on my phone with a sick toddler laying on me, yay stomach flu), one doesn't have to be paternalistic about it either.

Simple, no-nonsense, and enforced. If you have the ooc down, then honestly I think a game runs better, regardless of possibility freedoms. Without it, you have the same old same old.

This may sound "defeatist" but I think rather it is pragmatic.

No, you cannot expect that adults will act "grown up." You cannot expect that in any other collection of people (ask and teacher, school organization member, retail/service worker, any kind of situation where people have to work collaboratively with another human being). Why in the hell does anyone expect the MUSHing community, with the semi-anonymous veil of the Internet, to be more mature and even keeled than people who have to work with and deal with each other in the flesh, where if you are going to say your bitchy thing it has to come from your mouth and you will see the impact in another's face and body immediately?

This is why I'm a huge advocate for clear, enforced rules of ooc and IC behavior. Having that framework helps immensely. Being loosey goosey just do whatever until we decide it's too much I think hinders the ability of any organization or community to be able to create an environment of freedom and creativity, oddly enough.

I wish more games were willing to enforce theme. I think most of the time people are afraid of being the Fun Police, ect...but here are my observations of people incapable or unwilling to play to theme:

• They are too lazy to read news/bbposts/the wealth of online resources for established RPG systems (such as WoD).

• They are behavior blind and do not pay attention to what other people are doing.

• Often, not always, this is a learned helplessness game, and while it's all well and good to deal with that now and then, it does wear and tear on staff and players over time.

• The tipping point to theme destruction comes quickly. The more you let those "nice" people simper about being new and not knowing anything tee hee on channel and in scenes, the more you train people (including those who should know better) to do the same. Most good folks if they fuck up will go oh damn, sorry about that, I will do better next time, what are my consequences?

• I agree with Surr that you should NEVER EVER give super special princess attention to the people that constantly fuck up. They live for it, they draw it out, and somehow they magically pipe down when it dries up. Someone fucks up again with major attitude and aggression towards the wrong vampire who can take them down? Torp them for a month. No drama, no fuss, but they can chill in time out, life moves on, when the sentence is up no drama/no lecture untorp, go away now and have fun, next time you get ashed. Ect. I am really tired of people getting lots of one on one attention and drama scenes for stupid behavior. They tend to not be very fun anyway, since the people who cause them, well--for the above reasons. Cannot give and take, only think about their own stuff, really just want an audience, not a scene.

I played on WoD places before I bought a single book. I have little patience for people who clutch their pearls and fan themselves about how oh I'm a noob so of course I didn't know gangbanging a bunch of hunters in Ely was /wrong/! I assumed a little too much about how powerful the old Changeling "leaders" were until I observed for awhile and played with people and got a sense of it. Also I read boards. When I played in small town settings I'd bother to look up the general area. I played on Battlestar games and I never watched the series because it's fucking boring except for the eye candy. And guess what, I did not need anyone to tell me that it was stupid for a marine to be sobbing constantly about people being shot in a war and gender roles in that universe were pretty moot (because OMFG I read the theme section of the wiki). Nobody knows everything about any theme, and there's no reason to become a dickswinging asshole about it. However, if you cannot even be bothered to take an extra day or two to READ the material available to you on a game you wish to play on, and you make it other people's problem, then honestly, the game doesn't need people like that.

I don't think that there needs to be super detailed rules about it. I wish staff would take back their power in that regard. Unless you're an idiot, you KNOW when someone's just made a logical but erroneous assumption vs. a TEEHEE blush Oh my Goodness Gracious You caught me!!! Where's my spanking?!? People. And if the person is aggressive "Nobody told me I had to obey my commanding officer/Not blab the secrets of our Secret Society to people who want to kill us/Not get to indiscriminately kill people in the street with no consequences, how dare you, UNFAIR UNFAIR UNFAIR I'm new!!!" can we all just agree it's okay to kick their ass out the door?

I also wonder if volunteer non staff support (player STs) would dry up on a p2p place. It might be an interesting experiment. I could see it going either way, depending on structure.

It's not where the $$$ goes that changes it, but the fact that there is money changing hands period.

It's true; maybe some of the pitfalls of all-volunteer places could be approached in a different manner if you had paid staff (even if it was very low). But if everything was going to a specific third party organization, then you'd have all the usual issues of 'free' places with the additional complications of members feeling like they were 'owed' a different experience than they'd received elsewhere. Realistically, I'm not sure that they would get one. And I don't know, there is something about $$ being involved that makes people go a little nuttier than usual. I have taken many middle of the night sobbing phone calls about carnival prizes, "free" events, threats of lawsuits because someone did not win anything in the raffle they bought $15 in tickets for (that person later did try to file suit against me personally as chair of the board and the nonprofit itself). This was a mentally ill member of the community who was a known problem in the district. Maybe this is the RL equivalent of fretting over past experiences, but man. If I was taking money from anyone for any reason, even just to hold it to pass it on to a third party org, I would really want to make sure there was some legal separation of funds from my personal and the MUSH. There are some really sick and crazy people out there, and it is super stressful to have someone filing suit against you even though you KNOW it will get tossed out and you also have insurance and lawyer coverage. The harassing emails, the phone calls, and the bogus lawsuit kept me up at night for months, even though I /knew/ nothing would happen because I'd ensured all of our legal ducks were in a row, I knew the gambling laws, I had all the proper documentation, ect.

Just...I don't know. I don't think it's good to mix $$ and a hobby like this unless you know for sure what you're doing, and you're prepared to deal with the consequences. Nor should anyone P2P like this and not assume there's a strong possibility that their money may not go where they would like it to, and they may not be paying for a better experience.

Between holidays, illness (family), visitors, illness (mine), and other RL stuff my sleep schedule and sense of time is totally fucked up (and probably will be for a bit since I have that nasty upper respiratory plague that seems to be going around everywhere, and is triggering my airways like whoa. I am at my most awake and productive between 2-4 AM. My god I might break out the woo woo stuff and try melatonin or something like that because I am desperate to feel like I'm on a human schedule again.