Best posts made by Pyrephox

@wizz said in Online friends:

It's 2021, I doubt anyone (especially here) is going to say online friends aren't "real."

@arkandel said in Online friends:

Where do you draw the line, if you do?

This the more interesting question to me. I've definitely gone too far in online friendships, and I strongly suspect most of us could say they relate.

I tend to be more reserved now, but I still don't know exactly where the line should be. There does seem to be a point where you're giving and accepting so little that I would personally find it really difficult to call that relationship what I consider friendship -- instead of just like, an acquaintance I guess? Gaming buddy? -- and it seems like that arm's length is actually where I've found most MU people keep most other MU people.

What factors make y'all decide to move further? Is it solely just time and trust?

There's actually a phenomenon called the Online Disinhibition Effect - so if you ever feel like you've gotten too close too fast with someone, you're not alone and it's just a way our brains work. Talking to people online tends to be less immediately threatening than face to face, so you can share and bond /very/ fast, outpacing enduring trust and knowledge, and then emotionally recoil when you realize how vulnerable you are (or when you realize that the other person isn't as in sync with you as they first appeared).

But, aside from that - I make online friends the same way I make RL friends, honestly. First through shared hobbies, then through assessing if I feel like I 'get' them and they 'get' me, open up a little, see what happens. I'm a slow friendship builder, though, so I often feel that online relationships can leave me behind or I accidentally hurt people by recoiling a little from TMI sooner than I feel comfortable with dealing with that with a particular person.

So I'd definitely say I have an order of magnitude more /friendly acquaintances/ online than /friends/. Although that's true in RL, too. So.

This is a very good question, because I run into a lot of that same sort of frustration and the tip over between that frustration and the fun I do have is often what leads to me quietly exiting a MU*.

The experience I want varies to some degree by the game and its theme, but generally what I'm looking for is:

• A cinematic experience, with moments of high action, high drama, or high stakes.
• An experience where I feel my character has the potential to meaningfully contribute to the plot of the game - this doesn't mean to SUCCEED all the time, because constant success ends up not feeling earned or meaningful. But mysteries that fundamentally unsolvable (not just HARD to solve) frustrate me, /if/ they're core to the game experience. If they're not, then that's fine - I'm totally okay with "this problem of the game world is thematically fundamental and won't change" as long as there aren't a whole lot of plots about trying to change it and failing.
• An experience that is cooperative OOC and often fraught with conflict IC. I want to experience 'big' events and big conflicts in a game - I'm not particularly interested in games that have no room for characters to clash. But I also get frustrated when people immediately take IC conflict to an OOC place, and try to manipulate or punish people OOC for IC events.
• Finally, I want to enjoy the people I play with on an OOC level. We don't have to be best friends forevers, or anything, but I'm not really interested in an 'IC-only' environment where people don't chat OOC. RPGs are, for me, fundamentally a social endeavor and a game where people don't chat OOC or seem to enjoy each other's company at least a little is...empty, for me.

@herja said in GMs and Players:

@il-volpe Boy. I can't think why GMs aren't falling over themselves to make story for you.

Honestly, @il-volpe isn't wrong here.

It is wrong to expect that a GM or staff member's world revolves around a player. However, it is not wrong to expect the same consideration and respect that we would expect from any other person in a social setting. Players and staff are both carving out time from their lives to meet up with each other and do things, and that's important to respect from both sides.

If I sign up for an event or a scene, as a player, I am /absolutely/ choosing to miss out on other things I want to do in my life in favor of this. If a GM continuously just blows it off or decides not to run something on little to no notice, it's exactly the same as if you and someone else made an agreement to go out to dinner or an event together, and the other person keeps blowing you off at the last minute. It's not 'falling down on the job', it's not the end of the world, but it IS RUDE.

And if it happens occasionally, that's fine. But I've absolutely left games (and will again, probably) over GMs who schedule events and then blow them off with little to no warning on a habitual basis. The GM's life is important, and their time is valuable...

But so is mine. And it being a hobby that people are doing for fun doesn't really excuse disrespecting other people's time and effort, or making serial commitments that you then break with little warning.

It is possible that having these expectations makes me a trial to GM for. If so, I'm okay with that.

Obviously not a definitive list, but these are the things I try to remember when I GM:

1. The players don't see what you do. This is ESPECIALLY the case in mystery plots. No matter how clear you think you've made that hint, or how obvious you think you've made the connection between two events, most players won't see it. This isn't because they're not smart people, but rather because there is a major, qualitative difference between seeing the whole plot and only seeing pieces of it. Solution: Be flexible. Don't rely on the characters putting the clues together in a certain order or to a certain conclusion in order to move forward - rather, pay attention to how they're processing the clues, and where possible, incorporate their thought processes into your plot.

2. Every scene should matter. If you're requiring players to give up hours of their time to be in your plot, then don't give them "filler". There should never be a scene where nothing happens, or the players just witness some event...especially if that event happens after two hours of more filler. If there is an event the PCs need to witness, then that happens in the first couple of poses, and the rest of the scene is the PCs /reacting to/ and /affecting/ that event. Double never: Never have the PCs reduced to witnesses of some NPC being awesome/terrible without being able to do something.

3. The PCs are the stars, not the plot. Basically, this just means that the focus should always be on the PCs, what they are doing, and what effects those actions have. It should not be on how cool you think your unbeatable NPC badguy is going to be when he wipes the floor with the PCs and stands cackling over their bodies, or on this obscure bit of worldbuilding that just fascinates you, or on how shadowing, sinister, and powerful this NPC organization is. Before an event happens, always ask yourself, "How is this going to affect the PCs," and "How do I see the PCs affecting this event?" (And be prepared for the PCs to come up with something that isn't on your list at all.)

4. Challenges should be experiential, not informational. Don't hide the plot from your PCs - the fun begins when the PCs have enough information to try and Do Something, and you want to get to the fun as fast as you can. Instead, if you need barriers or challenges, build them into the actions required - instead of giving out tiny bits of information that PCs may not connect (see point 1), go ahead and let them quickly find out that there are arcane bombs hidden beneath the schools in the area that can't be detected or disarmed by conventional authorities, and they're all going to go off in twelve hours. And there are twenty schools. Now the PCs have a REAL challenge: figuring out how they're going to reach and disarm twenty magic bombs in buildings filled with children and suspicious adults. Also, don't build challenges that can be reduced to a single die-roll - your PCs should have to do things, whether it's gather a vial of virgin's tears, or hornswaggle R&D to give them a prototype device to seal a dimensional breach, before they can even TRY banishing the demon to another plane, or whatever.

5. Work with the PCs for resolution, and let PCs use their skills and abilities. Nobody likes to have their toys taken away. If a PC has invested XP and time into being an expert in a field, give them the opportunity to shine. If you've got someone with badass social skills, let them use them. Let them intimidate that thug out of wanting to fight - there are always other thugs. If they're a combat maven, then give 'em at least one chance to beat someone down. If they're a research guru, make sure that you have juicy, useful, and /timely/ information to share with them that no one else can get. If they're a telepath or a hacker, then don't be surprised when they want to read minds/hack things, and be sure to give them that chance - don't panic and shut them down because "it'll solve the plot". Remember - build your challenges into the actions, not the information. It's okay for PCs to know things. Does this mean you never put the brawler in a situation where he has to go to a fancy dress party and be polite? No, of course not - but players enjoy fish-out-of-water challenges more when they also know that they will have a chance to show their area of expertise.

6. Let failure add complications, not dead-ends. This plays off of "every scene matters" above. Few people have fun spending three hours fruitlessly searching for something and finding nothing. If the PCs are failing because they're on the wrong track, then put a complication in their path that puts them back on the right track in an entertaining fashion. Have the bad guys come looking for /them/. Have someone steal the last page of the ritual they need, and now the scene is a rooftop chase trying to get the damned thing back. Blow out an jet on the spacesuit, and now the team is trying to stop one member from spiraling helplessly off into the cold black of space rather than catching the bad guy.

Ultimately, remember it's a game, not a novel. You're here to have fun. Your players are also here to have fun. The plot exists so that the GM and players have fun. If something about the plot is preventing someone having fun, then change it. If something isn't working the way you hoped it would, change it. Most of the time, no one will even notice.

@demiurge Um...it's not "disturbing content" that I think is going to be the problem, but possibly people using the anonymous nature of it to actively harass others. Like, if someone starts posting to the collective unconscious a lot of sexually explicit fantasies about what they want to do to Character X, knowing that the player of Character X can't identify who's talking about the gross stuff, or encouraging more people to start talking about sexually explicit fantasies about that character. And for 'sexually explicit', you can also sub in violent fantasies, or whatever - having a free for all to be able to talk about how you fantasize about skinning Character Y alive, or whatever, knowing that the player of Character Y can't do anything about it...that's a bit offputting.

I would hope that would never actually happen, but I think you have to have a policy in place for when it does. Likewise, for being able to bar someone from a dreamscape if they are just...utterly gross towards the character who 'owns' the dreamscape to the point that it makes the game unfun for the player.

I tend to care about three things when it comes to posing:

1. Does something happen? A pose should move the scene forward in SOME way. EVERY pose should do this. If someone asks you a question, don't just answer it (or refuse to answer it), but then add something new, or take an action that progesses the scene.

2. Is there a flow? This is more about the back and forth of poses - this is partially a function of time, but also a function of paying attention to what's out there. Each pose should FIT IN to the scene in a logical sort of way, rather than changing it just to change it. Also, this is where slow posers tend to irritate me, because it's very hard to hold flow when you have to wait 15-30 minutes for the next pose. Sometimes it's worth it. Usually? Even when the pose itself is GREAT, the flow of the scene is broken.

3. Is there chemistry? This is not romantic chemistry, although that can be a subtype of it. It isn't even just chemistry between PCs - you can have a feeling of chemistry between PCs and the plot, as well. Chemistry, in this sense, is a feeling of shared inspiration that comes from the INTERACTION of the players involved in the scene - these characters or circumstances fit together and become something greater than the sum of the parts.

All of these things are tangential to size of pose or even objective quality of writing - some of the scenes I enjoyed most were with a player who typically gave one liners, and who could not really spell all that great. But that player paid attention to what was going on, made sure their contributions were relevant to what was happening AND moved the scene forward, as well as playing off of other people in a way that made the whole scene more enjoyable. Sometimes, "Jason flinches at the sound of fist hitting flesh. He jumps forward to try and grab Suze's arm. "Stop, you goddamned lunatic!" is so very, very much more engaging than something that scrolls the screen and takes forty minutes to type.

Regarding how long the scene, in RL, should last? These days, An hour or so for a low-key, character development scene. Three to four hours for a plot scene. That's pretty much all I have, and all I WANT to have - there's too much competition for my time, with both work and other leisure activities. Now, sometimes, that magical chemistry happens, and you look up and it's five hours later, and you don't regret that at all. But more scenes need to be okay with...ending when they're done, in my opinion. Without people getting bent out of shape about, "Oh, you just closed this scene so you could go play with X." Nah. I closed the scene because we ran out of things to talk about or do. Doesn't mean I don't like you or the character; it just means that scene ended.

@bear_necessities said in What do player-STs need?:

@Pyrephox I think "changing the world" is something I really get stuck on. Like what could I do as a game admin to make you feel like you are changing the world?

It doesn't have to be a huge thing. Like, I get thrilled when a PrP in a modern setting makes the IC news and I didn't have to write it, or if something that happened in the plot gets mentioned as a aggravator/mediator for something else in other plots: A challenger runs for mayor because just LOOK at the robbery on Main Street last month - clearly Mayor Big is not doing his job, and we need Change!

For me, and this is just speaking as a player and should not be taken as universal experience, the thing I want most from a persistent setting is for it to reflect the things I do. Not in the sense of 'and now I'm going to completely change this world' but when I poke at the setting, I want it to poke back in SOME way. As a player, that means I want consequences (good or bad) for what I do, in a way that makes sense for the setting and reflects my character's rolls/skills/abilities. As a GM, it means that I want my plots to take place in an integrated setting, and have meaning beyond the moment that they're run.

That doesn't mean I want them to run forever, or that I want to be able to burn down City Hall or kill off the King in a PrP. But the one thing that is guaranteed to keep me /engaged/ as a GM is when someone takes something from a plot I ran and ties it into the world.

From a player side: Impact!

When something my character does has an impact on the world, a meaningful one, even if it is a /small/ one, it encourages me to Do More Stuff. An NPC rises or falls in their organization, a building appears or changes, a group is formed, dispersed, or changed, or there's some mark on the occult side of the world. In the first Darkwater, I still remember Cobalt letting an article my character wrote change the way people perceived a neighborhood, and thus gave everyone harvesting a particular emotion a boost in that neighborhood for a while. Tiny thing, but I really appreciated it, and it made me want to engage more with the world. Likewise, on Arx, something my character did mostly because I didn't know what to do with my personal money ended up getting my character a populist title (that he hates, and I adore). It doesn't matter at all, it's just a random folk title, but it tells me as a player that my actions don't happen in a vacuum, and that doing things can have good outcomes.

I forget several of my characters, so I'll just stick up the ones that I remember, but I don't remember all of their NAMES:

Former:

Harriet at Brass and Steel
Thomas at Darkwater (Ver. 1)
Solomon at Darkwater (Ver. 2)
James at TexMux (Ver. 1)
Layabout Rich Murder-Shaman Guy at TexMux (Ver. 2)
Psychologist Shaman with Vampire Living in her Barn at The Reach (For...like three or four weeks.)
Paige at Requiem for Kingsmouth
Solace and Meihui at Tenebrae
Orazio at Arx
Xavier at Calaveras
Hadrian at Angel's Legacy

Current:
Perronne at Arx
Alexander at Gray Harbor

EDIT: Good lord, this hasn't been updated in forever. So, now it is.

@surreality Please remove this person from your life. Seconding what people have said up above - they're not your friend. Friends sometimes go through rough patches, or they say stupid shit, but if it's been relentless and constant like this? It's not a rough patch. It's not a slip of stupid shit. It's deliberate and it will never truly stop as long as they remain in your life.

Also, I don't think anyone who has done the work you've done can ever be considered "not creative". Juries liked your work. People like your work enough to /pay actual money for it/. That's a pretty compelling evidence that it speaks to people who aren't abusive assholes. And I really, truly hope that you come to recognize and respect your work again!

One thing to consider is that a lot of players, when considering what makes an 'effective' character, aren't comparing themselves to an outside metric that measures their PCs against the NPC hordes, but rather directly measure themselves against other PCs. So that 'great' rating doesn't mean much if every other PC is also 'great'. This creates a pressure to min-max the areas where the player wants their character to stand out - not against an NPC baseline, but between other PCs.

This also tends to create staff pressure to up the level of challenges facing those PCs, which also creates min-maxing pressure, because it soon becomes that 'great' just doesn't cut it in a typical staff-run challenge or against other PCs, so you have to have 'excellent' to even be considered effective, much less stand out.

I think one way to combat this might be to encourage width rather than height in character design. Have a number of alternate progression paths that help characters stand out and be somewhat unique among other PCs without creating too great of power disparities. Fighting styles theoretically are meant to do that, but WW/OP has never been good at making them balanced between styles or between style/no-style players.

I definitely don't watch an animated show if I don't like the art style, and I don't care how important The Message might be; if it's unpleasant to look at, I'm not interested. I can get my Important Messages from other media that don't make my eyes weep. That said - I thought She-Ra was fine, art-wise. It's not my favorite style, but it's at least not that awful weird squiggly ugly thing that some American shows have got going on, like all the artists are drunk or hate what they're drawing.

But, yeah, not liking a single example of an Important Show, for /whatever reason/ says absolutely nothing about a person's political or personal stances. I even know people who, gasp, spend their lives working in advocacy for disadvantaged groups who /don't like cartoons at all/. Or fiction in general.

Let people like things, or not, without it being a referendum on whether they are a Good Person.

@Tempest said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

Who in the world are you RPing with, that you walk into a “Hey help me waterboard this guy” scene without being aware that is what the tone of the scene is going to be?

I still clearly remember setting a scene in a Victorian-era game in a bookstore, where my character was trying to get a particular occult book from an elderly shopkeeper, who thought she shouldn't worry her pretty head about such nasty things. The other PC proceeded to try and turn it into a graphic torture scene of the shopkeeper to find the book.

You'd be surprised how fast a scene can go from okay to //what the fuck are you on//. And that's without the people who want to go from zero to KINKY SEXYTIMES in two poses. I still remember the time when a male PC I played started a scene with someone at his office; someone he'd been pleasant and mildly flirtatious with, and she started to just strip right there for no discernible reason. When his reaction was not 'let's get it on' but 'you know I work in a cubicle and also WHY?', she was completely bewildered.

I'm not even so sure it's PVP, itself, as a blanket thing, but rather how PVP is organized and run within the game.

For example, when I played WoD games, it felt like the prevailing OOC opinion was that PVP had to end in the destruction or utter submission of one of the parties involved. I think there were even arguments on WORA at the time from pretty prominent players that there was no OOC reason to leave an IC opponent in any position to ever be able to fight back against you - which usually meant killing them - no matter how minor the conflict...because if you did, the OOC assumption was that they were going to get their revenge and destroy your character, and you'd kinda deserve it for not taking them out when you had the chance.

Which did seem to play into an OOC atmosphere in a number (not all) WoD games I was on that, no matter how rare PK was in practice, you always had to assume that any conflict with another character was going to eventually end in your PC getting ended unless you 'got there' first, or managed to make the PC largely invulnerable. So there was a whole lot of IC and OOC posturing about how tough your PC was, how well connected they were, how sneaky/assassiny they were - any sort of 'protective coloration' people could find to put out there. And when conflict did happen, people tended to assume 'this asshole is trying to end my character' and respond accordingly, IC and OOC.

Now, those are only my observations. But possibly the least toxic game I was on was Requiem for Kingsmouth, and I think part of that is because the methods of PVP explicitly expanded beyond 'murder the fuck out of that guy' and had interesting and satisfying mechanics for fighting for territory, etc. (Mechanics that I believe were adapted from LARP rules? Which was a good decision, I think.) There were also some notable de-escalation points of PVP, and reasons to spare people (you could grab a boon from them instead, etc.).

I'm not saying RfK was perfect. People still threw shit fits about stupid things, and there was certainly bullshit on the micro and macro levels. But it's one of the games that really tried to engage with wanting to facilitate a specific TYPE of PVP, and making sure that the mechanics made that feel powerful enough to draw people into using it, without having an end game of 'kill your enemy'.

I've come around to thinking that if you're going to have a game with PVP, you need to be as explicit as possible about the mechanics of those conflicts, open about potential consequences to characters at each level, AND build in 'de-escalation' points along the track that ICly and OOCly incentivize being a gracious victor and not pursuing an opponent's utter destruction.

When you have a chance to pursue a tense, dramatic plot and even if there are bumps along the way, the MAIN THING happens and it's beautiful and painful in the right way. When people are willing to let their characters be vulnerable and hurt and hurt each other without it being an OOC thing, and it's just great fun.

I tend to think the ideal MU* structure player-side tends to be a large number of smallish Sandwich Clubs with some overlap. It's sort of what IC factions tend to be trying to create. People can't play with everyone on the game - even if you wanted to, there just aren't enough hours in the day to give equal distribution to everyone. But a group that doesn't play with ANYONE else does tend to become insular and isolated from the game at large. What I really like, is groups where, hey, maybe there's five people who play together a lot - but everyone of those five have at least a couple of people outside of that group who they also play with a lot. And THOSE people have about four other people who they play with a lot, but each of those people have a couple of people outside of that group the play with - so the whole game is connected by a few degrees of separation, even though most people play most of the time with four-to-six people.

I think Sandwich Clubs tend to get toxic when they start trying to police who people play with outside the group. Either by outright 'I won't play with you if you play with X' or the more subtle (not MUCH more subtle, but...) attempts to monopolize playgroup members, or egging them on to criticize people outside the group (so that they can later go back and tell those people oooooh look what X said about you and isolate the club member further).

@sunny said in The Desired Experience:

@arkandel

It's a problem better solved by game design, in removing situations in which one person specifically needs to be consulted.

Honestly, this is better design ALL AROUND. Remove bottlenecks wherever possible, especially ones where you have to go through one player or staff member. Some have to be kept, but anything where you can /spread that out/, do so.

Not just because of toxic people, but because of adult human beings. People have work. People have different time zones. People log on to play fun scenes with their friends, not do administrative work for companies/factions/organizations that don't even exist. Being an 'IC Leader' should not really mean having OOC responsibilities to organize and shepherd other people's play time, and it doesn't mean that a 'non-leader' PC should have to get every damn thing they want to do rubberstamped, either.

Bottlenecks kill involvement. Having to wait weeks or months to hear from the One Person who can move you forward or even say 'hey, you can try this' is anti-fun.

I will never stop loving when you can have a scene with big, complex or negative emotions and people doing/saying the kind of impulsive things that people say/do, and it doesn't hurt any OOC feelings or cause any OOC drama, and instead you can just enjoy the IC drama with the other players involved.

@Apos said in Sensitive cultural/political/religious aspects of game themes.:

tbh if someone logs into Hello Kitty, Island Adventure and says that the lack of rape and sexual assault themes just ruins their immersion, maybe the problem isn't the game.

Sure. And if the game is WWII, and the game says, "By the way, there's no antisemitism in this setting," and that breaks people's immersion, maybe the problem isn't the players.

Things, in my opinion, to remember about creating interesting, playable, and sustainable political setups in games:

1. There must be finite, meaningful, and necessary resources which cannot be evenly distributed to all interested parties for no cost to any one or group of those parties. Politics is, at its core, how societies answer the question of "How do you decide what to do when you can't get everything that you want?"

2. There must be some staging of the setting that incentivizes some level of cooperation, but at the same time incentivizes some level of competition between PCs. Players need incentives on both ends to occupy that happy space in the middle, where PCs are supported in having distinct goals and needs, some of which can only be obtained through working together, and some of which /require/ competing with other PCs or setting factions. You can also use penalties for this, but penalties are a harder sell for players OOC, and often create resentment and the desire to 'beat the system'.

3. The setting should be explained and concrete enough that players largely have similar conceptions of the worth of resources, the expectations of factional behavior, and the consequences of actions they can take. This does not mean players need to know everything about the setting, but if players can't generally judge what the cost and consequences of actions are LIKELY to be, and they don't agree on the culture of the setting, or the worth of whatever resources drive the conflicts, then you will have unproductive OOC disagreements, and IC confusion - both of which harm the ability to design, implement, and respond to political actions. Ideally, you want players to be able to interact with the setting with as little hand-holding needed; political play flows best when people can act, see the consequences, respond, etc. in a smooth flow. The more bottlenecks you have in waiting for responses to "Can I do this?" and "Do I know how X Faction might view Y action", the slower and less satisfying things are likely to be. You ESPECIALLY do not want your political actions and procedures less well-defined or understood than your physical conflict ones. Players will default to interacting with the least painful system, and the one that gives the most predictable gain, and if that's physical combat, then that's what people are going to use.

4. There should be no absolute wins or losses. Politics needs to keep churning to stay engaging and useful - you may be on top one day, and on bottom the next, and while you may have some strengths as a character or faction that remain, you should never be able to either rest on your laurels OR be written off as a threat. There should always be a way to fall from grace, and there should always be a way to rise from nothing. This doesn't mean that every shoemaker should have an equal chance to become King, assuming a medievalish setting, but it does mean that any PC should always have actions open to them to improve their lot, and they should always have risks that they can lose to fall farther, no matter what.