Posts made by Roz

Welp. Custodius/Max/Branan just got banned!

The fact of the matter is that at least airing issues in public allows for the opportunity of debate. Airing issues privately in whisper campaigns allows for nothing to get contradicted. Having dealt with both public airing of grievances and whisper campaigns, I'd much rather the former. I also don't think that repeatedly conflating WORA and MSB is at all useful here, because there's a pretty stark difference in how they have/do operate. I think that bringing up the words "witch hunt" whenever multiple people agree on a player being toxic or problematic is actually a pretty harmful silencing tactic for information that could be actively beneficial to the hobby at large.

@Ghost Out of curiosity, is there a way people can basically express their experience of a toxic player's cycles and history in a manner that doesn't trip your line of "this is going to turn into a witch-hunt"? I'm asking that non-sarcastically. I think people have described the utility of records like this, which is basically: forearmed is forewarned. If someone has a really long history of acting shitty (and already going through second chances, third chances, fourth, etc.), isn't there value in giving others who haven't come across them yet a heads up? A level of education so that they can at least take a bit of care in their interactions?

@Thenomain Someone who just got shown the door on the game for being generally gross and stalkery who is now repeatedly connecting as a guest to page the staff with abusive language in the same vein as what he just posted. Because that'll show 'em.

@ZombieKerouac If only you weren't a creepy gross stalkery type.

@Thenomain said in Identifying Major Issues:

I asked my Millenial co-worker how many people he knew would know how to make a secondary email for junk and things and things and junk, to separate their important stuff from other stuff, and he said about one third.

We here are generally very technical people. I expected him to say, "why would anyone have only one email address", but he didn't. I'm not using this as proof that two thirds of "kids these days" are not technically savvy, but as evidence that "not that hard" is a matter of great perspective.

Having multiple email addresses doesn't have to equal technically savvy. I'd rate myself as very technically savvy, but I don't have a separate email for junk. Did your coworker really say that only one third of millennials would know how to make another email address, or probably have a secondary email address for junk? I do know plenty of non-tech savvy millennials, but I still think most of them would know how to sign up for an email address.

That said, I also freely use my personal email address for game signup things. I used it for Arx chargen, sure. I didn't think about not using it.

The bottom line is that @surreality is building a game with certain functions and a level of wiki integration that requires an email. That is the game she is building, so in this case, the structure of the game does need an email. If folks have strong objections to using an email, personal or burner, they can play other games and it's not a big deal. I honestly don't understand why this becomes such a huge issue whenever it comes up, like the very idea of a MU* asking for an email is so offensive to some people.

@buttercup said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I hope other players who currently feel the same way will at least make it known and it's enough of an issue to do something about it but I recognize that my current solitary case is not likely warranting of action.

Your single solitary case may not be, but as you say here that you hope other players who feel the same way make it known to staff, so should you. I'm sure there are a lot of people who are doing the "This one instance I've experienced probably isn't actionable enough" but enough of those and I'm still choosing to believe that if there's a giant enough pile of behavioral pattern they'll eventually have to do something.

@SG said in Random links:

Wonder Woman is pretty much DC's last chance. Especially with the major fumble of having Jason Momoa playing fucking Aquaman instead of Lobo.

Wow, you're actually like the first person ever I've heard unhappy with Jason Momoa's casting. My experience has been that it was a really popular move.

@faraday said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

@Thenomain said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

I agree with you entirely, of course, but I thought the complexity of implementing something this simple needed singling out. How many people here have lost trust in staff, players, or even an entire game because the line you expected turned out to be argued or even outright told was wrong?

A lot of people stop engaging rather than causing trouble for themselves.

I think for me this comes down to the same old adage: You can't use code to fix social problems.

You can, however, use code to make specific kinds of communications easier. I remember years ago on the old X-Men Movieverse MOO, we basically made up an @askstaff command that sent in an automated mail to staff with all the mail switches already handled and whatnot. We made it simpler to engage in a certain kind of communication with us, and a good number of people in the playerbase really liked it and people used it. It lowered the bar of difficulty on contact just a bit.

Sometimes people have had really bad experiences with staff on other games and it leaves them really hesitant to reach out on new games. This is super frustrating on the staff end, when you try to have that open-door policy, be reasonable and approachable and friendly, etc. But sometimes people have trouble anyways. I'd see putting in an easier code structure for lodging complaints (not necessarily anonymous) as just lowering the difficulty bar for the process of making contact with staff at all.

This thread is so strange. I see multiple people talking straight past each other and basically reading the worst possible versions of what people are saying. I feel like everyone here is already basically agreeing that communication of potentially triggering themes -- for the major expected triggers, come on, we all know we can't do content warnings about every potential trigger ever, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to hit the major common ones -- is a good thing. And that having methods of communicating that on both sides (player and GM) is even better.

And yet I've seen people on this thread basically misreading stuff to be like, "You're saying that I'm a terrible person because I don't want to put up an outline of my entire plot!!!" I don't know. I feel like people are not so far apart on this as it seems to have come about in this thread. Yes, we all know no one can warn for everything. We all know that things come up via GM improv. Obviously there is no foolproof system. The idea of having a basic content warning for major specific themes that you know are going to be in your plot seems pretty simple and easy. The idea of being able to list major triggers you have and want to avoid in RP player-side also seems pretty simple and easy.

It sounds like there are some GMs on this thread who have basically developed systems of their own that they have used successfully, which is great. I mean, people being thoughtful and deliberate about making effort to keep folks comfortable with the RP they're engaging in is really the main point. I don't think people are so far apart on this as it seems.

@faraday has a Starter PennMUSH DB that will install PennMUSH and her code suite all at once. Installation instructions are here, although that page doesn't link to the most recent version of her starter database. (Hence linking directly to the latest version first!) You can see what the code suite comes with on the Core and Addons pages. It definitely gives you the basics of weather, job systems, bboards, stuff like that.

@Ghost You can't police other people's language about what is and isn't too mean or rude to exist outside the Hog Pit and then tell them not to call out your own language. But you've already basically said that there's no way for your own language to be a part of any disagreement here, just my interpretation. So. No, I don't foresee that much constructive debate between us in the future on this.

@Ghost You're the one standing in the way of this being a civil conversation right now. I mean -- I'm not actively offended by you calling me a prick? I'm honestly confused at the heat of your reaction to what's seemed fairly tame language of debate. While you yell at other people to stand down because we're not in the Hog Pit, you're actually being the most volatile.

@Ghost I think that my language in challenging your statement was incredibly civil. I find the language of your response very much not so. My first response indicated that I was slanting my brow back at you. My second was about how your language choices come across. The strongest word I used was "misguided." You've now called me a prick. I think that you're actually the one who needs to turn it down a notch here.

EDIT: Intent is not the only thing that matters. The way we present our points matters, too.

@Ghost When you mention a list of things in the same breath as all getting a similar reaction from you, you're grouping them together with some indication that, yeah, there's some thread of commonality there. I still find the idea of listing those things all in the same sentence as stuff you're "keeping an eye on" to be pretty misguided, whether of not you think you equated them. So. Maybe the way you expressed yourself is also part of the problem?

@Ganymede said in State of Things:

@Ghost said in State of Things:

So, my rhetorical moral quandary is this: How can people strive for equality in a society where setting yourself apart from others as being more valuable is the main element of securing stability?

To be clear, my objection was to any suggestion that Black Lives Matter movement and the Everyone Gets a Trophy! group are similar. You did it here:

@Ghost said in State of Things:

So with the everyone gets a trophy or black lives matter or omg white privilege people, I tend to look at it all with a slanted brow.

Yeah. As long as you're going to be equating participation trophies with deconstructing deep-seated racial bias, @Ghost, I'm going to be slanting my brow right back at you. Those are very different things with very different validities.

@Rook said in RL Anger:

Without knowing if he was actually expressing disapproval or not (and I have been in those situations where I didn't know), I usually give them a chance to prove themselves dicks or not. I usually speak up and ask calmly but firmly, 'Is there a problem, sir?'

This is one of those things that I try to backwards-think. Such as, if this were a man and woman (the opposite situation) holding hands and he was smirking at them, what would your supposition of the reason of his smirk be then?

Except those two examples have nothing really to do with each other and are totally different situations? Opposite-sex couples don't regularly get disgust thrown at them for existing in public.

@Seraphim73 said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

@surreality said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

I do not believe in considering downtime between formally organized PrPs, plots, or even pickup GM'd scenes to be 'lesser'. ... This includes scenes like dressing wounds after a battle, discussing how some things worked and others didn't in IC terms, going off drinking to celebrate a particular victory, reuniting with a long-lost family member that finally arrived in the area, and so on -- all of these scenes can have a major impact on the characters involved.

Oh god yes. I agree 100%. I wish very much that more people would keep RPing after the "end" of a GM'd scene rather than just being like, "Welp, we killed the bad guy, and even though we're at the bottom of a collapsing mine, knee-deep in acid, with wounded to carry out and prisoners to rescue, we're gonna log out for the night and not worry about it." (I exaggerate, of course, but you know what I mean.)

While I love aftermath scenes SO MUCH, let's be real on this: a lot of the reason for signing off at the end of a big GMed scene is exhaustion. I want to do aftermath, totally, but I usually want to do it -- the next day. Because a lot of GMed action or adventure type scenes have already been a couple hours, and they tend to be more intensive than RPing other types of scenes for that long.

@faraday said in Course Corrections:

@Auspice said in Course Corrections:

The issue wasn't the concept of Legos. It was her need to use the brand name (in IC dialogue) and have everyone else warp theme to do so as well (for them and other such items), for her.

OK, yeah, that sounds obnoxious now that I have more info.

But still, back to the more generic point... LEGO is a particularly glaring use (like iPod would be), but it still seems a weird thing for folks to get upset over. I mean, where do you draw the line? Like @ThatGuyThere said -- what about 'tennis shoes' or 'aspirin' or 'kleenex' or 'okay', or 'getting to third base' or calling someone a 'casanova' or saying you're going to 'go postal'?
There are a bazillion common everyday items/expressions that have their roots in specific RL historical events or brand names. Trying to be the Theme Police for all of that just sounds exhausting.

Well, I can imagine a single off-hand comment ("Hah, we wouldn't actually have real LEGOs cause of theme") become a much bigger deal after facing the kind of reaction described. ("I was told I don't have to watch the show so you can't tell me when I'm wrong about theme!!") It definitely sounds like one of those cases where it may have only become a big deal because of the reaction.

@Thenomain said in Course Corrections:

but the idea of interlocking blocks as educational building tools shouldn't be the problem; calling them Lego should be.

I assumed that's what the problem was.