Best posts made by Roz

@ominous Yeah I'm not hugely sympathetic to the idea of "I wanted to have this but I didn't want other people to have it unless I decided they could."

@three-eyed-crow I mean, I think the point is that if you pick a new PB, it needs to match the character's description. I don't think you can play the game of "authorial intent" with rosters too much, but you can play the game of "does this character resemble what's written on their sheet." (And by "resemble" I mean overall, not just physical appearance.) Rosters should be able to grow and change, absolutely! I think anyone who's played a roster game has probably had the experience of "oh a new person just picked up that cool roster! to...ignore everything on their sheet, cool" at least once.

@bananerz said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (:

I'd rather think folks are mature and adult to handle a tool, and if not, get them out of the game. If a player thinks they can't handle such a tool, then don't use it. But shaming everyone because of fringe cases seems off-base. If though folks are being jerks even after the warning, get rid of them.

You're talking as if we haven't already basically gone through this whole point. I'd like to think folks are mature and adult too, but they already proved that they weren't. It's not "shaming everyone" to say "this used to exist on the game but it was abused so they took it away."

And you're not listening to @Sunny in terms of the fact that it doesn't actually require all these people to be active assholes; it just requires a number of people to be thoughtless for it to become a serious weight of unfun on others who are receiving high volumes.

@faraday said in Rosters: To PB or Not To PB?:

ETA: But that's just my personal philosophy. If you're going to allow a change of PB, I don't get why you wouldn't also allow a change of desc details like height/skin tone/etc. They go hand-in-hand in my mind.

Well if you change a PB, it should be someone visually similar, because it should be matching the same physical description of the character.

@thenomain said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (Answered):

@roz

I said:

I cannot really imagine that 40 people individually decided that Dawn needed reamed.

If you can tell me this is exactly what happened, then so be it. With a sample size this large with the same opinion, it's hard to believe that there wasn't collusion, subconscious or otherwise. I'm not calling for a conspiracy, and certainly not across the entire set, but 40 people? Yeah, not buying it was a statistical fluke.

I mean, you're right in that I imagine there were also scenes of people expressing dislike, and I know there was plenty of OOC bitching. But does it require a bunch of collusion for 40 players to thoughtlessly sort of shoot off a 'condemn Dawn=She really sucks'? It was really easy to do without thinking about it, and I'd say that the lack of thinking or consideration required is what encouraged the volume in certain situations.

edit: Let me put it this way: If one-fifth of the game's active population all individually decided that Dawn needed condemned, then maybe it wasn't a dog-piling. Maybe it was a real, if visceral, opinion of the game's population.

Staff decided that it wasn't, that one-fifth of the game's population was hatin'. That's...a huge chunk of the game's population, on any size game, to decide are abusive. Without comment to them about their actions.

Can you take a hater and make them play nice? I don't know. I wasn't given that choice. One-fifth of the game's population was. Call it good or call it bad, I'll call it a thing that adds into the overall staff culture. It is what it is.

You're missing the actual point that's already been explicated in this thread. It's not that people didn't think it was a real opinion of the PCs being played. It wasn't that people were using condemns abusively on an individual level, hence why multiple posters have already talked about why it wasn't really a situation where staff could start taking people aside. It was that the system encouraged a thoughtless brand of negativity that offered no IC risk and yet could end up piling a huge lack of fun onto certain PCs. It wasn't that 1/5th of the game was necessarily being abusive by way of condemns. It was that the system encouraged a method of play that easily could become actively unfun for anyone in a leadership position who ended up having to make any sort of difficult position.

If you have forty people lining up to complain to one leadership PC, for those forty people it's one part of their play, for that leadership PC it's the entirety of their time. It's the same logic. And the condemn piles would also be hugely uneven based on certain factors -- COUGH GENDER COUGH -- that only added to the overall un-fun-ness of it.

Ugh, has this really already devolved into "There's no reason why anyone would want to do things other than the way I prefer"? Like. Really? No room for "different types of games have different needs" and "different types of players play in different ways"?

@faraday said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (Answered):

I'm not sure why anonymous messengers would fall into that same category though. There's a very real difference between a gossip-y/gripe-y condemn system and and a direct message system. Would a significant number of characters really be sending hate mail to the leader ICly via anonymous messenger? Because if not, then using the message system in that manner would be OOC abuse. It seems like that could be easily smacked down by staff (assuming the sends were tagged - for staff eyes only - with the sender's name).

The benefit to headache quotient there is so wildly off, though. What great value would there be in having to spend the time policing it? Keep in mind the size of the playerbase. It's just so wildly not worth it for the trouble it would cause.

@mietze Yeah, I didn't really take issue with your posts before, because I can see all your points and find them reasonable. I think both sides can absolutely contribute to different atmospheres and enhance different types of games, and it's absolutely reasonable to talk about how that plays out in practice. (I was only objecting to the idea slipping out from some others of "there's no reason to ever want open sheets" vs "there's no reason to ever want private sheets" like there aren't pros for people to like about both of them.)

Rosalind was my staff alt on X-Men Movieverse MOO. There was a Shakespeare naming theme and someone had already been Beatrice, the best of all Shakespeare heroines. So I became Roz!

@tempest As one of the testers -- I think for the second go-round, so there was another two or three test groups after me -- you definitely can't make it very far in one of these if you only have combat monsters with no skills in other areas. And there are obstacles for social characters that I saw multiple times. Dumb sentient door. I couldn't sing its stupid song well enough!! There's definitely obstacles angled towards Physical, Mental, and Social characters. (And crafters, even!) Often there are options for more than one "type" of character on a given obstacle.

@surreality You're right, the initial response was more "What the hell?" and shock than it was "Hey could you not use that word, I don't like it." And then a lot of people, including Ghost as he would say later, including myself, got too angry about each side doubling down so that it spiraled. The overall reason it always spirals does still tend to come down to fighting over whether or not someone should be able to use the word if they want. Ghost and I had it out, both on that thread and over PMs, but you're the one who continually likes to allude to the group of bullies who harped on your friend but love to cheer on people abusing you. (Because, say, I was out of the house with a friend one time someone called you something honestly nasty, or then because, you know, you were already posting about how the latest usage would have everyone ignoring it just because it's you by the time I ever saw it, and it wasn't even getting thrown around as an insult, even if I don't like the word, and you were already laughing about it and not caring. Unlike Saosmash, who was shocked to be called the word as a clear and direct insult.) I'm honestly really exhausted at the repeated sort of gleeful vagueblogging about how awful and inconsistent I am. I know we're not each other's favorite people, but I don't think I tend to sideswipe in your direction with allusions outside of us speaking directing with each other on the forum. If I do, call me out, but it's exhausting feeling like you're counting down for me to perform properly. Ghost was acting like an asshole on that thread, I was acting like an asshole on that thread, other people probably also. Definitely plenty of folks admitted as such. I reread how it started, but I didn't reread the whole terrible spiral. Can you maybe just stop holding onto this so tightly? That's how it least how it feels to me.

But, for the record, I think @Kanye-Qwest was referring to the most recent incident, wherein @Seraphim73 did ask pretty politely for folks to maybe find a different word. Way more politely than I did, certainly! I don't think we started at armageddon level on that thread a year ago, though; both sides had to build up to it. With -- snark manure. Or -- some other terrible metaphor. I'm out. I'm out of words. I ran out.

@kodiak But you can PROTECT THE SQUISHY SMARTIES

As for the larger topic of this thread, I think that saying words are entirely neutral outside of intent is wrong and not how language works, that the words we use absolutely has an effect on how we think about things and the world around us, that they're always involved in systematic oppression and that part of that is making them commonplace beyond intended oppression. But mostly I imagine my reputation is already yelling about stuff for me and no one is surprised and I'm just kind of tired.

@il-volpe If you use Ares, @Tat might also be willing to talk about her process of building a magic system on top of FS3.

@three-eyed-crow I will always vote for restoring downvotes (and disciplining individual posters who use it as an excuse to go through someone's entire post history or bring in a crew to brigade).

For the people who are fond of OOC rooms, I'm curious: what benefit or functionality do they provide for you that channels don't?

@friendlybee something something don't call people assholes outside the hog pit something something

Arx doesn't have a traditional temproom system, but it does have a plotroom system that would probably be adaptable and that you'd be able to find in the public Arxcode github. It's more designed to have temporary rooms tied directly to @cal events, not just for everyday RP, but it has a whole database setup, people can desc plotrooms and make them public so others can use them for events or keep them private, etc. I'd imagine it'd be a good jumping off point, at the very least.

@ganymede said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

@pyrephox said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

... if your policy is, "IC social contests are contests between players," then you're going to get a higher percentage of players who have poor separation of IC/OOC to start out with.

I disagree wholeheartedly. I have been in many spheres with IC social contests, and, for the most part, have found that, given the amount of potential conflict, there was little actual conflict that bled OOC. However, in a bizarre inverse relationship, games with less potential IC conflict socially bred much more conflict IC and OOC. I couldn't tell you why this was (with any authority, but I have some ideas), but that's my experience.

I feel like there's some dissonance in what you two are saying. The important phrase to me from @Pyrephox's post was that the social contests were between players rather than between characters. That is: if your policy supports the idea that player talent in regards to social maneuvering is what is going to win the day, it will encourage players who want to basically try to do their maneuvering OOC. Versus if you create policy that sets up how your game wants social systems to work and spend time working out how it happens on a character to character basis, and take steps to reduce ways in which people can basically use their OOC wits to make up for a lack of IC wits, I think you'll actually be building towards what you are describing, Gany: that when players understand the expectation and the normality of social maneuvering, it can actually reduce the OOC drama surrounding it. And when you take efforts to push things into the IC sphere, it reduces the conflation of character and player that @Pyrephox is talking about. I don't necessarily think that your experiences are disagreeing. I think the key is "set up policy to support IC contests as being between characters, not between players." I also think that having social conflict systems be a common and everyday thing helps to normalize it and have it feel a bit less like every instance is a huge deal to stress people out.

@Ominous What movie?