Posts made by reversed

Speaking only for myself, encouragement and interest.

So far we have 1. a username taken from a 1990s first person shooter, 2. a thread about getting new blood to sign up for MU*s, and 3. a post in the RL forum about how working in "the hood" led to guns being brandished at him.

C'mon, don't even play the game this time, just sweep him aside and move on.

@icanbeyourmuse said in New Sphere Playing WoD:

Just a small clarification.. I don't care whether I'm 'new' IC or not. I am 100% talking about hand holding OOC. I am not 'read the book cover to cover' type of girl when it comes to gaming. I focus on what is relevant to what I am trying to play and just eventually pick up everything else as I look it up to understand what the people are talking about.

I mean, I think my advice still broadly holds up; my experience is that the more people think your PC will be a net positive to their IC life than a negative, the more they'll be willing to indulge helping out. That's only my experience, but I think there's at least a little bit of universality to it. Though I can't comment specifically on what people are like on FC OOCly; that, I literally don't know.

Anyway I second what people said about 'app someone competent,' because you WILL find people generally more willing to reach out to someone who 'is useful' in whatever way ICly, even if OOCly they need a bit of a helping hand, than someone who wants to play 'It's my first night on the job and what's a Caine, anyway?'

I sort of did the latter with my most recent vampire PC as a change of pace for myself, but I had already meshed with a play group who knew I wasn't going to trample everything and claim ignorance as to what I was doing wrong, and who I could plan out an arc of development with so that Dumb Baby Sabbat eventually earned her spot as Dumb Templar Sabbat.

I also advise against making a ghoul (or kinfolk or etc.) to 'dip your toe in,' because while those roles do have less commitment, it's also a lot more likely you're going to be kept on the fringes of anything important, or at worst assumed to be a TSable blood-doll or something.

Basically just shoot for something solid and be up front with people that you're still figuring things out OOCly. Most folks will be much more willing to help out a Brujah enforcer who's already suffered a few dots of humanity loss in the name of getting the job done than they will be a week-one Malk who's still crying over having to drink blood, just because they can probably take that Brujah along on a quest, while the Malk would just come off as a liability, politically and otherwise.

As part of my current job, I took an online course in what boils down to communicating with people who are in "crisis mode." Not life or death crisis mode, it wasn't a course in counseling people who are having psychological crises or suicidal ideations or anything like that. But "crisis mode" in the sense of: they're fed up, they're at their limit, and even if they want to take in new information their emotional state might get in the way of actually processing or digesting it.

Since taking that course, I've on-the-sly passed some of the handouts and course notes to friends on MUSHes because while the course was in no way related to managing online roleplaying relationships, the basic principles of "dealing with people in crisis mode" have been surprisingly helpful to them in figuring out how to handle... well, not to put too fine a point on it, but MUSH drama.

One of the things in the course handouts I've shared with people is a thing on how to communicate with people to make sure that while you'll do the best you can, there are specific things that you can and can't do. It's less about red tape and more about "I'm not your magic bullet, I can't guarantee your problem will go away at a flick of my wrist, but I can support you as we work together to solve it."

Sometimes it's been successful for the friends who have needed it. Sometimes not so much (there was one person who reacted to that attempt to gently set a boundary by logging off in a huff of hurt feelings). But I think for anyone who struggles with this kind of stuff -- whether it's a staffer who feels like the players see them as a vending machine, or a player who feels obliged to take on the problems of another player even if they don't have the spoons for it -- that reading is, at the very least, an affirmation of "you don't need to kill yourself for this online roleplaying game stuff, and it's not your fault or obligation if people keep taking and taking and giving back nothing."

I don't really want to link the actual documents themselves because it gives away a bit too much about my RL work than I'm comfortable having out in the open on MSB, but I'm sure there are other resources regarding the same topic that are out there online. Maybe this weekend I'll have a look.

Optimization definitely felt mandatory when I was on CoH. Playing in the Sabbat, having 5 in Fort, Celerity, Potence, maxed Virtues and Willpower, etc. wasn't even seen as exceptional, it was seen as the starter package, to be as prepared as possible against getting PKed by overzealous members of other factions. Add to that the XP-bottomless-pit of playing anyone who does blood magic, and often it felt like a vampire wasn't "optimized" for the CoH environment, prepared against all the possible ways another PC could try to ratfuck you for Good Guy Points, at less than like 2000 XP.

Which, yes, I'm aware, is completely insane.

@Prototart said in [NSFW] Erotic RP Concepts:

there’s stuff i’m into that used to be so weird that only @reversed would do it to me but now it’s basically just, vanilla

Agriculture is normal now