Best posts made by Roz

@derp I don't think the "living room" mentality means that you're expected to be friends with every player? It's just an approach that's more focused on hobby community than it is some sort of professional service.

@Cupcake I've actually been having kind of a similar experience. There were times when I was younger when I'd get a lot more upset if I got invested in a ship -- or the idea of a ship -- and it didn't work out. (I mean, there were times when I was just too invested in RP in general, like years ago when I was unemployed for extended periods of time and dropped too much emotional energy into the hobby instead.) Another part of the issue was just communication. Now I'm playing an unrequited love knowing that the most likely outcome is that it remains unrequited forever, but the friendship is still really great and interesting. I talked to the player earlyish when things were developing to check what pages we were both on, we're both happy and cool with everything and feel comfortable, and it's really nice. COMMUNICATION.

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

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

"Well, this is what it is, but good luck finding the game you want!"

This is exactly why a problem player will stick around. To many, it's better to suffer through the things you disagree with and actually get to play, than to sit on the sidelines. The idea that you must agree 100% with a game to play there is dangerous, that you can't be critical is poisonous. You can demand respect, but you get the respect that you give. All game culture is shaped by how staff acts, no matter what they say they want, no matter what's written down in a news file or on a wiki.

Throwing someone's dissatisfaction in their face is not good behavior.

Okay, you're taking my super glib remark pretty literally. This is a distillation of a number of serious problem players I have dealt with who make series of super unthematic demands while being toxic to the game and then try to get their way by yelling "Well if you don't give it to me I'll leave!" It's very empowering in moments like that to be able to say, "Okay, you can leave if you want."

Or guests who clearly want a game that's totally different than what you've set up and you've been working with them for literal months off and on trying to get them on the same page and finally telling them that we're probably just not the game for them.

Like, maybe give a little benefit of the doubt here and don't jump to the conclusion that what I'm talking about is showing every player who criticizes my games the door?

@bored I think you're mistaking "doesn't want any sort of criticism/only wants positive feedback" with "just looking for feedback on specific areas of development for the time being." I mean, if the thread happened again, I'd just advise @surreality to respond to any questions outside of the areas of development she wanted to address with a simple "I'm not hashing out that area yet" and ignoring anything further.

So no, I don't actually think it's accurate to say that @surreality (and @faraday) are actually asking for areas where negative feedback is entirely restricted. You're just misrepresenting what the real objections were.

@Ghost said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

I said the same thing everyone else did: choose the right people/good team.

That's not what anyone else was saying or talking about, though. The reason it was a frustrating post was because it was an unnecessary reminder to make sure you only hire women that deserve it, when the topic at hand is how to build a workplace that's supportive of women when it's thus far been male-dominated. These aren't the same issue, and is difficult for women to repeatedly hear people bring up the former in discussions of the latter because it is, in fact, a derailing of a topic that is incredibly important to them and affects them on a daily basis. It is a reminder that there will always be a contingent of people wondering if we're even qualified for our jobs.

I don't think it's a violation of privacy to say "this person engaged in X behavior that we don't tolerate here." I also don't think that there's any game in which a public announcement/explanation of a ban is the wrong fit. I strongly, strongly think there are a whole host of reasons to be reasonably transparent about bans and I've yet to hear a reason otherwise that I find compelling. I think that making banning posts while not revealing the player identity is going to be actively detrimental to your atmosphere as everyone starts whisper campaigns.

There's no reasonable expectation of privacy as far as "staff won't reveal that I broke rules if they have to remove me from the game." Like, that's just not a thing.

d e l i v e r y.

my wallet hates it.

@lithium said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

@deadculture said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

@kitteh said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

@deadculture I don't remember the details of the character trying it. Some noble. But it was right in the main, public area of the Temple. She was sitting in the pews praying, he sat next to her, and a pose or two later had a hand under her dress trying to... well, I'll leave it there, before I went scrambling.

sigh

I'm pretty sure the noble privilege shit started during the Taleo era. Of course, trust Gold Dragon nobles to take it to fucking eleven.

As a person who PLAYED a gold dragon noble, I don't like being painted with broad strokes of a brush like that. Not every Gold Dragon noble was a skeezy fucker. In fact, it was kind of weird when I took the character how fast people /wanted/ me to take noble privilege with them and I was like... no. Am kinda glad my character ended up dying in war, never went back.

Heck it was Firan, maybe my denying people their rape RP was what got me killed.

lol is this really #notallgolddragonnobles

@faraday said in Social Systems:

@seraphim73 said in Social Systems:

I think, however, that it all comes down to one singular point: Trust.

Yes, but that's kind of core to why we have stats at all. If everyone trusted each other to play reasonably or (for GMs) to judge situations reasonably, we wouldn't need social stats or physical stats.

I actually disagree with this point, and I think it's an important disagreement. That is: I don't think that the only reason for sheeted stats is because people can't play reasonably with each other. I think there's a fundamental difference in the feel between full consent and limited to no consent. A lot of players like the numbers, they like having the element of chance and the unknown. I think it's a mistake to think of stats as "this thing we need to have to make people play fair with each other" instead of "this thing we can design and utilize to help enhance RP for a certain style of play."

@demiurge I think you're doing a lot of conflation with "something that offends someone's sensibilities" and "something designed to harass other players and make them uncomfortable." I'd suggest you think of it less in terms of censorship and more in terms of "how is this theme and medium I've chosen going to allow people freedom to be creeps and how can I can minimize that." Everyone on the thread gets what you're trying to go for, I think. It's just that you seem to be a bit unaware of what you're opening the game up to. (Smack me if I'm wrong, but I'd wager you maybe don't have the experience of being a woman on the internet? Obviously harassment is not limited to women, but there's a reason why a lot of folks talking now on the thread about this point are women.)

@carex said in Let's talk about TS.:

@roz said in Let's talk about TS.:

This whole scenario will just end up in game-wide civil wars and terrible toxicity the first time there's any sort of disagreement among the playerbase.

I'm sure they said something similar about having democracies instead of kings. Giving up control is always a horrible, unthinkable idea to people who have power.

It's almost like a MU* is a small hobby game and not an actual system of government!

So I was having a ball the other day looking back at my old domain and websites I had in high school on the Wayback Machine, and I found that I actually had a page where I'd recorded a bunch of RP characters that I never would have been able to remember nowadays. So I thought I'd combine them with my more recent characters that I do remember, because why not? This is -- vaguely chronological. When I started on MU*s, I was like eight or nine, so some stuff is kind of hard to remember.

From about 1995-2005
Redwall MUCK: Amani, Kaelin, Tafietin, Viana, Maphis, Swarttin, Steelcuff, Vikrin
SnarlRPG (Beast Wars): Sleekpaw
The Lion King MUCK: Kodoa
PokeMUCK: Viana (Staff), Mewtwo
After Colony 195 (Gundam Wing): Lady Une
X-Men MUCK/X-Men Movieverse MOO: Kelsey MacDougal, Renee Lambert

2009 Onwards
X-Men Movieverse: X-Factor (Formerly X-Men MUCK): Rosalind (Staff), Kelsey, Harrison, Jake, Brent, Adam, Richard
Second Pass (Pern): Sebastian
Steel & Stone (Game of Thrones): Banshee (Staff), Hardwicke, Rosanna
Mass Effect: Alpha & Omega: Roz (Staff), Alexei, Tau
Robots in Disguise (Transformers): Xandar (Staff), Knock Out, Grimlock, Flareup
Transformers: Lost & Found: Roz (Staff), Knock Out, Grimlock, Cyclonus
X-Factor (Marvel mutants post-X-Men): Roz (Staff), Alexandra, Richard
Arx: Valkieri, Calarian 1.0, Insaya 2.0, Bastien
Fear & Loathing: Rafael
Valorous Domain: Baldessare
Spirit Lake: Garrett, Mateo
The Network: Tamsin

Current
Arx: Aleksei, Berenice

So there we go!

One very important thing to keep in mind when you're developing boundaries is this: your feelings are worth the same as other people's.

I find that people who have trouble enforcing their own boundaries tend to regularly underrate the importance of their own feelings in order to protect others'. But why should you have to suffer discomfort to protect someone else from the discomfort of having to mildly adjust? GUESS WHAT! Your discomfort is a valid feeling that you are feeling, and it's okay to politely seek for a way to make it go away.

Think of what you would want someone else to do if you were doing something to unknowingly make them uncomfortable. Wouldn't you feel bad if you knew they'd been keeping it quiet so they didn't upset you? Since my impression of you is that you're a generally decent person who cares about those around her, I'd be willing to guess that you'd much rather endure whatever discomfort and upset you might feel at being asked to change something a little.

@Arkandel said in Intersectional MU* Community:

@Tempest You earned that upvote.

This is not a GREAT look for you in the Ad section with the current rules.

It's hard for me to even pinpoint. I'm from a nerd FAMILY, and it was just always a part of my life. My dad read The Hobbit and The Chronicles of Narnia to me when I was little, and the vast majority of my book intake growing up was fantasy. We listened to the BBC radio play of Lord of the Rings on family car trips and fancast imaginary movie adaptations years before the movies actually happened. Star Trek and Star Wars were also constants for as long as I can remember. I come by it honestly from both of my parents, but my dad is particularly scholarly about his consumption, particularly with stuff like Tolkien and Lewis. (He's a priest and a theologian, and he appreciated their work a lot on multiple levels through that lens.) We were always COINCIDENTALLY OUT SICK from school on days when a new Star Wars or Lord of the Rings movie would come out, that sort of thing.

So I guess I don't have a nerd origin story. I WAS JUST BORN TO IT. I came to MU*s by way of Redwall: I loved the books when I was little and found Redwall MUCK at some point in late elementary/early middle school. And that was that.

For me, it depends entirely upon the game; I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all answer here, or at least there isn't for me. I don't think I've ever played a game with zero OOC secrecy, because even the many games I've played where all the logs get posted, there's still a level of secrecy that was held by staff running metaplot things. I do think that people get much more sensitive to secrecy between players than secrecy about, like, the answers to mysterious plot stuff that staff is running. (Or in PRPs, too, tbh.)

Atmosphere and setting just makes a big difference. Whether or not there's a competitive or collaborative atmosphere makes a difference. Whether or not there are even ways to get ahead at all makes a big difference. I've played on games where there just isn't stuff designed in the setting to get secret advantages or whatnot, no real route for selling your soul for power or whatever. OOC secrecy didn't matter there.

In settings where this is much more of a real possibility, I do think OOC secrecy can protect against metagaming to a certain extent. Like -- if everyone can see that PC A sold their soul for evil, how long do you think it would take before other PCs start being randomly wary of them for no particular reason? Not long, IMO.

The long and short of it is that some people want a fair amount of OOC negotiation and some people want none. Some of the former group will try to be excessive and use it as a method to avoid any conflict or loss, and some of the latter group will try to run roughshod. Bad behavior exists in both styles.

I think that specific game cultures tend to have one or the other be a bit more popular. I just suggest people look for games that feel comfortable to them.

Lemme tell you, if someone is in love with a concept that just won't work on a game I run, it'd be way preferable for the player to just peace out (if it's really all they want to play). Life would be so much simpler if more people were just like, "Oh, probably not the game for me, have fun with it." I would rather people leave when they're told "no" if it's that important to them.

@devrex said in The hog pit thread titled Admin Derp:

@kanye-qwest said in The hog pit thread titled Admin Derp:

@ganymede said in The hog pit thread titled Admin Derp:

when the situation has been dealt with to my satisfaction,

How long does it take to tell Derp he should step down?

@devrex said in The hog pit thread titled Admin Derp:

I wonder if people would be so comfortable reading an unemotional statement of legal procedure as an attack if it had come from a woman.

Absolutely disgusting, my guy. Get out of here.

Why? He was essentially told to sit down and shut up. It’s a valid question. Or maybe I should be asking if an unemotional legal analysis would be taken as an attack if made by anyone but Derp.

He was not told to sit down and shut up. He was asked not to respond in such a condescending manner by asking someone "How is this surprising?" when someone was being upset at a major political moment. Most of his initial post could have stood without anyone being bothered, I think, if not for the explicitly unempathetic opening implying that someone was stupid for being upset.