Posts made by Roz

I'm not hugely interested in games without a solid metaplot happening. The games I've staffed have always had a strong metaplot component. When I staffed on XMM when we were mutant secret agents/spies, the metaplot involved a global organization that served as a long-term enemy. Not all the staff plots were missions centered on this organization, but a fair number of them were. It provided an ongoing, recurring plot thread beyond other staff plots and PRPs that were fun and exciting but existed more as one-off storylines. The sense of continuity was really fun, particularly when we could do plots that called back to our previous conflicts with the enemy org.

I think that, for me, the best form of metaplot is one that everyone can participate in if they choose to do so and put in some legwork. (If your game is small enough, staff might have the time and energy to basically drop pieces into every player's lap, but that's not generally the case for most games, I think.) But my ideal is that there are doors to involvement that can be open across the whole variety of PCs that might exist. Or that there are varied aspects of the metaplot that different types of PCs can be involved in.

People shouldn't be forced into the metaplot or actively penalized for not participating. I think that generally if you're a player who hates metaplot and you're on a game that has a strong metaplot component, what are you doing there?? But otherwise, sometimes people have more interest in some arcs than others, sometimes people get busy, etc. People shouldn't be forced to have the same level of involvement at all times. But there's also that component where you may need to kind of nudge people away from certain things, possibly by way of metaplot, in order to maintain theme cohesion. See: the point in this convo about happy house vs grimdark survival.

@icanbeyourmuse said in World Building: What are the essentials?:

One thing I REALLY dislike is the just spamming a link or help file (or for things based on books or what have the book/page number/whatever). If someone is asking they were, probably already looking at the aforementioned thing and does not understand.

As someone who is a habitual question-answerer, it's really not my experience that this is the case the majority of the time. (And people who have already checked the available resources tend to be fairly clear about that in their initial question.)

@Arkandel said in Good TV:

GoT Season 7 Finale SPOIIIILERS.

... Still here?

Did anyone else get annoyed at the kangaroo court they had for Littlefinger in there?

Um, no, it was the most satisfying part of the whole episode.

Sansa and Bran were both witnesses to his crimes. When the noble family in charge witnessed your crime, it's not that strange for them to move swiftly to execution in a feudal society.

There's no innocent until proven guilty here!!

@Arkandel said in Good TV:

GoT - no spoilers, just a bit of trivia I read last night!

Apparently Bronn and Cersei's actors contractually can't share a scene, since their actors went through a bad breakup iRL years earlier and they wrote that into their contracts that they can't share the screen.

Seeing your hated ex every day you go to work for years must be awkward!

It seems like that contract would mean they don't see each other every day! Or, in fact, almost any day at all.

Sounds like a legal nightmare tbh

@surreality Jessica Jones S2 is filming right now. (Iron Fist S2 is also announced as happening.)

@Pyrephox said in Eliminating social stats:

@faraday And your character can /try/ to be a cool dude in the face of intimidation, but if he fails, it's just bad playing to refuse to play the failure honestly.

Personally, I think the 'agency' argument is always a little disingenuous. If you have a character in a system that has rules about social interactions, then by making that character, you've agreed to play by those rules. You have made a character knowing those rules existed, and have chosen to play a character knowing how conflicts are resolved.

Deciding that a subset of those rules shouldn't apply to you because you don't like how it plays out in this situation is every bit as mature as a guy who flips the chessboard when he starts to lose, no matter what kind of 'but my creativity!' artiste arguments it gets dressed up in.

I don't think there's really a need to characterize @faraday that way. She's stated that she just doesn't like playing with systems with a strong coded social component, not that she wants to play in them but ignore the social skills. Certainly she's built FS3 as a system that's not really designed to explore social combat, because it's not her thing.

@MrWigggles How do you make any new relationships?? Like. I mean, sometimes meeting a new character does end up boring, because you don't click or whatever, but how do you develop any new connections without it?

I've also had plenty of times where meeting a PC of a player I've never played with before has totally resulted in quick chemistry and rapport. It doesn't require knowing a player already.

@faraday said in Indicating Discomfort in a Scene (online):

We have a hard enough time already getting people to come forward with complaints. I envision even fewer if people know their complaint is going to be plastered all over a bbs.

This. I feel like making everything from the very first complaint public will actually end with fewer complaints submitted, not more. I'm a pretty strong believer in staff confidentiality until the point of a ban. (Permanent or temporary, I guess. I've never dealt with permanent.) If you have to take serious action like that against a player, I think you absolutely need to be up-front about it. For me, that means summarizing what the bad behavior was.

@Three-Eyed-Crow It seems to get updated, like -- once a year. There was a batch of new games 51 days ago, and then before that -- 345 days ago. Once the games are in the system, the info seems to get scraped automatically, but it's just getting new games added that seems to take forever.

@Arkandel said in Indicating Discomfort in a Scene (online):

@Rook said in Indicating Discomfort in a Scene (online):

In any sampling of MU*ers, I think that 1 out of 20 is a dirtbag for any of the following reasons:

• racist beliefs, subtle or overt
• sexist beliefs, subtle or overt
• hidden need to dominate/ruin others in the name of 'fun'
• someone simply looking for sex/rape/BDSM RP, no matter the theme of the game, or even discussion leading up to.

Devil's advocate though... we are playing charcters, too. So for example I would like (well, in general, I'm not saying I want to ) to be able to play a racist character without being racist myself.

So how is that done? How do you play out villainous values without being branded a villain? What's the mechanism of introducing discomfort in a way that serves the plot without it taking over that plot?

I very much want you to hate my character but I'm not keen on being hated.

I didn't have the impression that Rook was talking about IC behavior with his list.

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I will say a few things. They are not meant to be ONE WAY IS CORRECT AND YOU OTHERS ARE WRONG, but I think they're valuable considerations as to why people would consider developing tools such as this.

1. Having tools like this indicates overall to the playerbase that consideration of player comfort is a priority on the game. Yes, obviously there are a lot of ways to indicate this, including firm policy and whatnot, but I'd actually say that a game basically going, "We care enough about helping people to work together to make sure everyone's comfortable and enjoying their time to actually invest some time coding to facilitate that," could be very reassuring and set up a pretty strong foundation for a game's attitude towards the subject. Especially because there have been plenty of games over the years where this attitude is not the case.

2. RP Prefs or whatever seem to me to have value in that they help people avoid -- or at least minimize -- having to deal with the abrupt sensation of being confronted with something you really, really don't want to be. It's very different being able to have an easy tool to make someone go, "Oh, sure, I'll steer clear of X topic around this person," then have X topic come up and have the other person throw down the red flag as it were. (Or, if it's possible, sometimes there are topics that people would just like warning leading up to them and then they're fine. That's also a thing.) I think RP Prefs accomplishes something similar but also different than in-the-moment communication.

3. I myself have a bad habit of getting frustrated when other players don't find it as easy as I do to broach things OOCly. Yeah, I do think there's a sort of fundamental point when you have to be like, "You need to be able to discuss things OOCly sometimes, adult to adult." But I think it's discounting how giving people tools can help make it easier to start that conversation and open it up. Again, this is as much about setting up expectations for how a game intends to address OOC considerations overall as anything else.

I think that the real point is that, no matter what your setting, you should write your helpfiles for newcomers, not experts. If you're building a wiki for a WoD game, yeah, a lot of your players are probably going to have a lot of WoD experience, and yeah, you have source books which is where a lot of this stuff lives and you can't put it all on your wiki because copyright. But make it easy for newcomers to understand what the path is. "Here are the books, here are the pages in the main books that talk about Merits, here are the pages that talk about Attributes, here are the pages for X specific thing for this sphere, Y specific thing for that sphere." Yes, newbies will have to buy or borrow the source book, but make it as easy as possible for them to understand the connection between the parts of your chargen and the parts of the book. And the same thing for games based on a movie or TV show or whatever. Don't just kind of half-ass a whole "well we've all seen the show, you know what it is." You don't need to explain the entire plot of several seasons, but try to approach things from the angle of "How do we explain this setting to those who aren't coming in with preexisting knowledge."

BONUS! If you actually take time and care to think about how to write out helpfiles in this way that's designed to be efficient and informative, you'll also tend to make things easier and clearer even for your more experienced players.

@Sparks said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

I think Arx's Info channel is similarly pretty active and helpful (even if like 70% of it consists of @Roz beating everyone else to the answer).

Sometimes I have to go to the bathroom, okay. I'm putting the squeeze on that last 30%.

@surreality Yes, totally. I'm admittedly reacting to a pet peeve of mine which is the sort of "MU*s = WoD games" that tends to be pretty prevalent on MSB (as it was on WORA). But I wasn't arguing that there is always setting info to read and players should just read it. That part is 100% true.

@surreality said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

@Sunny I feel you on this. I love -- love love love -- some world-building, but the amount of info needed is not easy for something that doesn't have an RPG book handy that people can get and read through.

That said, most games involve at least one RPG book that someone has to get and read through. (Or a television series to watch, or a series of novels, etc.)

In my two decades of MU*ing, I've only played two that involved an RPG book. And one of them I only played on for like two scenes, so I don't really count it. There's a lot of games around that don't involve any RPG books. Which is not to say that the overall encouragement you were giving Sunny is wrong, just that there are a lot of lot of games around that aren't WoD or based on other written tabletop systems.

It's not really a line as much as a balancing act. How much do I want to avoid a player, theme, storyline, etc. OOC? How far from my first IC instinct would I have to skew? RP should be fun, first and foremost. (Well, sometimes it's reasonable to endure a little annoyance or boredom, but that's where the balancing comes in.)

My philosophy is this: people are complex, and they can have a lot of potential reactions to any given situation. It is entirely possible for someone to reasonably have different approaches or reactions to the same stimulus without it seeming out of character. There isn't One True Response to a given situation in RP, just like there isn't one in RL. So I think there's often room for flexibility in nudging IC reactions in a way that doesn't make them flatly OOC. And I think that's not just okay, but a good thing to be good at as a player. Because it helps maximize your own enjoyment, and it also helps players be a little flexible with each other to maximize everyone's enjoyment.

@Sunny That makes me so happy just because I'm like SO SICK of horrifying articles about women who live with emergent conditions for days or chronic conditions for years and have permanent and preventable damage because doctors wouldn't listen to them. That is: I'm sick that the articles still need to be written. It's good that they are being written so long as this remains a problem.

That got a little RL Anger there, but the point is GOOD ON YOUR GP. FOUR FOR YOU, GLEN COCO.

@Thenomain said in What locations do you want to RP in?:

@Roz said in What locations do you want to RP in?:

Speaking just as one user among many

Here's my take on "one user among many": You can have brilliant ideas that would help the many. Sometimes you have to defend those views, but just because you're not "the many" doesn't make those ideas any less valid.

Oh, I was just being polite. I totally think my ideas are brilliant.

@Thenomain said in What locations do you want to RP in?:

@Roz said in What locations do you want to RP in?:

Having now experienced the +hangouts code on F&L, the thing I wish it more easily told me when I hit +hangouts/all is: a one or two word descriptor of what kind of place it is

I didn't have enough room for that. Well, I could kill the 'Details' column for it, and just put a checkmark. Though I do have a very small amount of room left over for it. Hm. Until I kill that giant 'Details' column. Hm.

Hm hm hmmm. Hmmmmmmm.

Speaking just as one user among many, I'd personally rather have more basic info at a glance then an indicator of whether or not there's more detail. I ended up going through every single +hangout entry on F&L just trying to get the basic lay of the land re: the grid and figure out some public spaces I could reasonably throw my PC at. In my case, I'm not looking for rooms where people already are; I'm looking for rooms where I could be.