Best posts made by saosmash

It is way more likely that a person reporting is mistaken than that they are deliberately manipulating data in order to get someone in trouble.

In the event that I was provided with evidence that someone was deliberately manipulating data in this way, I would ban them so fast their head would spin. There are few things I am more hardline about than OOC lying, though.

I strongly believe that deliberately false accusations are the outlier, however.

In my general experience, most disputants will exaggerate at worst, largely due to the magnification or distortion of their own memories.

@surreality that is the kitten that we need in our lives.

Ditto Roz, thank you for saying nice things about our game. It's ended now but it had a good run, and I was glad we had you when we had you. Sorry it didn't work out for you for longer.

I think your point about self-fulfilling prophecy is a good one, too. I've had players on a new game I'm running now (because oh God there are now two what is wrong with me) who, instead of asking for RP, sit around complaining about how there's nothing going on and no one wants to RP with them: this RAPIDLY becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because when they finally do ask for RP, other players look at the history of complaints and go ehhhh maybe I don't have the energy to deal with that. Edit because I don't want people reading this and thinking I'm bitching about my current players I'M NOT the player I'm thinking of left the game already because we weren't the game for them (clearly).

I mean as a staffer I can encourage people to RP with each other in as many ways I can think of (including repeatedly abducting PCs and putting them into cages with each other and forcing them to fight like gladiators), but in the end @roz is right: people will RP with who they want to RP with.

I sympathize though, I really do. Especially on a new game I can find it very intimidating and difficult to get into RP because I'm used to playing on small games when everyone already knows who I am, so I go to a new place and have to do all this work of making RP happen for myself and I'm like, wait but ... wait. This is hard. Why is this hard? Why isn't it just falling into my lap? I almost fell off a game one of my best friends was running because it was so hard to get over myself to RP. I mean. I get super anxious sometimes and I can tell I'm being stupid but that doesn't make it less stupid when I do it.

This cuts both ways. It's a player's responsibility to put effort into finding their own story. It's a staffer's responsibility to develop a world that is encouraging to players to develop hooks with each other and with the theme. I think they're connected issues.

I admit if I usually ran into the word cunt in porn instead of having it screamed in my face by methheads in a jail my associations with it might be different, but I wasn't approaching it at the time as a glass jaw respondent.

@lithium It's just factually untrue that in all MU**s ever there is always PvP. Players can cooperate with each other to create story in a PvE setting where nobody hates each other. Even players who don't like each other that much can still cooperate, not unlike coworkers with a common goal.

I think that post alone puts @Faceless in the longwinded category.

Both the games I play on have RP channels for finding RP, so I typically will go on the RP channel and go hello I would like to RP if I don't have anything scheduled. Usually someone will bite, but if no one does I'll go play video games.

I'm not sure why everyone's so down on hanging out on OOC channels. What else am I gonna do at work? WORK? Please.

@wretched Aww I liked that. It made so much sense with respect to how Wesley left the series and Wil was clearly having so much fun. It was such a nice set of goodbyes.

I'M STILL CRYING OVER THE HUG. YOU KNOW THE ONE.

As a staffer, I generally delight in players running plots because it means a plot is happening on my game and I don't have to run it/can maybe even play my PC in it.

???

@derp also re: strange new worlds the expansion on Spock/T'Pring was fascinating (lol) and i loved getting more insight into Vulcan social norms being matriarchal (which falls in line with T'Pau!!!). It was just such great insight into a female character who in the original series was basically just like an irredeemable raging bitch, and the show is like 'oh did you know relationships have two people in them who both have perspectives'.

When this was first bruited about I was like, ??? more prequel shit, but honestly I take it all back. Makes me wanna go look for Sarek/Amanda fanfic that takes that into account, except that I'm old and I don't have time for fanfic anymore.

(Also omg baby Uhura legitimately solving things with communication!)

It's also nice to have TV that I can watch with my dad. Discovery has been A Bit Much for him, but the aggressive tie-ins to TOS work to keep him interested. My parents were huge Trek nerds. We watched GoT together but it was basically like, uh, suffering.

@Kanye-Qwest Perhaps with just a soupcon of passive aggressiveness?

@derp I loved to see her and Uhura introducing herself to each other too. All the lovely nostalgic fan service, but not in a way that it was disruptive to the story? Very nicely done.

In my experience generally what you need to do is:

a.) Have a fun concept that will attract attention
b.) Have committed staffers who are into the said concept
c.) make a committed effort to having an accessible game with an understandable website/wiki
d.) advertise actively both on games that allow ad sharing, communities like this one, and if your game is fandom-based, in the fandom where the fans live.

It also helps in my experience to have somebody on staff who is a marketing professional and knows stuff about marketing but I do understand that not everyone can have a @Roz.

I am not at all sorry to have CGed into Velesona fealty because I love my character and his family and everything about everything.

My only fear for this game really is that y'all are going to get run over and burnt out because there's so much awesome here and how do you sustain??

Kind of a vicious cycle though. If people didn't consume that no one would sell it, and if we didn't societally treat women as advertising it probably wouldn't occur to anyone to play topless Counterstrike on camera or whatever.

I mean the commodification of interaction with people online is clearly the issue behind a lot of the harassment problems we have as a community but I don't know what the solution is. Besides calling it out when we see it and treating it as not okay, I guess.

I love wikis so much. I love storing logs and having information accessible and organized and searchable. I'd much rather have a comprehensive wiki than have to root around in helpfiles.

MU things I love include @Roz's characters without a shirt. Not actually relevant to what she just said. I'm just helping.

There is a noticeable difference between recognizing that a player is complaining that your game isn't what they want and suggesting they not let the door hit their ass on the way out ... and reacting badly to any criticism. Whether it's drapes or bitching about your open floor plan doesn't really matter. Some things are worth taking critique about and some things are somebody who is not going to be happy with your game period so why court them?

I'm super disappointed.

Belatedly usually when I'm writing rosters I don't try to explicit anything about sexuality and leave that up to the player, but when I wrote Jasher I was just super enchanted with the idea of the gay Thrax paladin archetype just because the gender stuff in Thrax has the most room for ??? -- I'm glad you like him.

I think I'm pretty out of the superhero business atm.

But even when I ran them-- I wasn't super into villain PCs. I hate PVP. We tried running a game with opposing factions and eh. The effort involved in keeping things active without people being OOC dicks is just too much. In my experience even players who like each other can get tangled in PVP shit, and honestly, one of the worst things is like ... people paralyzed in confusion trying to figure out how bad they can be / how much they can react / what to do next. It's just not fun.

PVE is way preferable to me, but of course, it also requires a lot of staff energy and attention to foster.