Best posts made by Roz

I FINISHED "YOU" YESTERDAY AND I AM VERY ANGRY ABOUT THE ENDING.

That is all.

@the-sands My experience of being a newbie going through WoD chargen is that people who have been playing games with the system for years consider almost everything to be "common sense knowledge." "The system doesn't play in practice on our game like the book describes" is 100% not "common sense knowledge." "Common sense knowledge" doesn't include "knowledge that veteran WoD players have accumulated over years."

@surreality It's certainly true that it's better to know up-front than have it be one of those sorts of situations where there's weird, insidious judging on the game for playing certain kinds of characters.

@Arkandel said in RL Anger:

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/will-smiths-rumored-new-role-causing-controversy-skin-color-113504252.html

This is just plain stupid. Will Smith isn't black enough for a role? Wtf.

I mean, colorism is a thing, there is plenty of academic study on it at this point, you can read plenty of papers and articles. It's not a made up issue.

For me personally, I don't really get RPing within the constraints of certain immovable events. I find it stifling and like I can't make a meaningful impact. I prefer games that start at the end of a given canon or, if they're in the middle of a canon, for them to simply become an AU driven by the players. For games I've staffed, that's generally how we've always done it.

Guys, did you hear that Serenity MUSH had a video ad?

@VulgarKitten said:

Related: How do I politely ask a person to stop chewing gum with their mouth open?

"Hey, would you mind not chewing gum with your mouth open?"

I've actually staffed on games that very explicitly tried to set up expectations as far as metaplot involvement vs character type. X-Men Movieverse: X-Factor, Mass Effect: Alpha & Omega, and X-Factor NYC all had a main faction that the game focused on. (Mutant secret agent group, a specific mercenary company, and a mutant investigative group, respectively.) For XMM, we specifically had a different character type for people to app support characters that were outside of the main secret agent group, they had different activity requirements, etc. I think for A&O and XF:NYC we mostly were just really explicit that "Hey, these core groups are going to be the ones involved in the metaplot, you are totally welcome to make a PC outside of that, but just be aware!" These were also small games, we had small staffs, and we had a specific focus we wanted to tell stories in.

So yeah, I think that just being clear is hugely important. If you have a broad setting and no real indication that "really it's just this one area of the setting that interacts with the metaplot," then the metaplot should be accessible across character types.

@Cupcake said in Considering Arx? Consider Deepwood!:

I generally approach all characters from a bisexual baseline and from that the individual player can decide. A character who currently has an opposite sex spouse (like Mia) may also like the same gender, and characters who were formerly married, ie widowed, divorced, etc, may also have desires toward the same gender, and vice versa. It's really no big deal.

And really, a noble who's widowed or divorced from an opposite-sex partner could still be gay. Just -- you know, marriage politics.

@VulgarKitten said:

@Roz How about to a person who will get super defensive at any hint of criticism?

Hey, you asked for a polite way to say it. You didn't ask for a way to say it that without making super defensive people defensive. There's nothing to be done about that.

@apos said in Spotlight.:

@three-eyed-crow said in Spotlight.:

This is what's frustrating to me about this stuff, because these complaints are incredibly burn-out inducing when they're about the little things. Oh, there were complaints that a person took part in a game at my party? Whelp, I don't terribly want to run parties anymore, because clearly doing ANYTHING gets you flack. Yeah, this stuff is silly, but so much of it's ABOUT the silly stuff that it takes away from legitimate complaints about game balance and favoritism.

100% the main cause of cliquishness in the hobby is people wanting to limit their exposure to microaggressions and griping like that. This hobby imo is powered entirely by enthusiasm of participants. It is incredibly easy for just a few persistently negative people to pretty much gut a game faster than a Custodius could ever dream of doing so.

I can get accused of spotlight hogging for doing little more than breathing. It's pretty remarkable.

Yay Ann! (Aleksei here.)

Youngest sibling here, am obviously a monster. It is known.

I was married to @saosmash on Second Pass for -- gosh, I dunno, a year or two? The entire romance was basically two years. It was great! It ended cause we left the game, which was sad. But they made it all the way to fatherhood and stuff.

We also apped in married on a different game, which was fun because we'd been friends for many years at that point and so trusted each other a lot. Sadly I was a jerk who only lasted a year or so before wandering off. Actually it was apparently longer than I realized.

@scar Um excuse me I was on XMM before it even officially opened. (I just left for several years in the middle.)

@Arkandel Lmao. How many reports did you end up with?

His name was MALIGNANT or something like that before I guess he switched to Moon-Man. I was just like, lol, not even trying

@arkandel said in Real life versus online behaviors:

My policy in general is to try and not think of what someone might be like in real life at all. I mean... unless I'm going to be meeting them (and I won't) it just doesn't matter. What I perceive online is, for all intents and purposes, that person.

Yeah, I mean, what else are you gonna do? It doesn't matter what a person is like IRL if they're being a jerk in your online community.

@seraphim73 said in Real life versus online behaviors:

I agree with @Roz in particular that not treating online interactions as "real" is a warning sign, but I also think that in some cases it's the result of just not thinking things through rather than a conscious choice to treat other people as lesser because you can't see them. That being said, in most cases, I think it's just treating people as lesser because you can't see them.

Yeah, I mean, there is a wide scale here. Someone can be doing stuff just because they're thoughtless about it, and that's still jerk behavior, even if it's not intentionally being a jerk. But people like that who aren't really trying to be jerks should be able to shape up or ship out of an online community if told that behavior isn't welcome. I can call someone a jerk who is doing jerky things even if they're not intending on being malicious. But I will think of people with malicious intent as serious mega-jerks. This is a scientific scale.

@apos said in Buttercup's Playlist:

@buttercup said in Buttercup's Playlist:

I am a bit relieved to be done with him in some sense. There is a large gap in immaturity where players associate characters with their players. I had seen a lot of it and understand this is a natural tendency for any medium like this. I took Tovell (the pious and dutiful knight) off the roster to sort of just compare experiences. I kept my use of him pretty much unknown and the difference in how I was treated as a player was amazing. Some of the same people that were crap OOCly to me with one alt were friendly, welcoming, and utterly different on the unstated alt. I enjoyed the OOC experience of playing a good-guy far far more.

In fairness to that, there's a marked difference between outright hostility ooc and just people being guarded, though. If someone is an antagonist, a lot of people just aren't comfortable being extremely communicative ooc because they feel they could be considered disingenuous if they then need to work contrary to you, or want to avoid ooc pressure over IC decisions. Anyone can be really friendly and chill when they know there is absolutely nothing at stake for doing so, and I tend to pay closer attention to the people that are that way when they know their own characters are at risk.

I honestly try to be OOCly friendlier when I play meaner characters.

What kind of food do you like and what kinds of things do you like to do?

When it hasn't been games I've run, it's most often been a combination of ad + word of mouth. Or ad + "hey roz we're gonna try this game if you wanna try with us."