Best posts made by saosmash

I don't see any issue with checking in oocly with the player of the person who is potentially at risk of being creeped on to see if they are ok because the poses are throwing up red flags for them the way they are for you, or with intervening icly if it's IC for your character to do so, or with some combination of the above. IC is IC, but that doesn't mean it's impossible for we as players and writers to perceive what is happening and have ideas about what it could mean.

That said, I've charged in and +requested about IC/OOC creeping before on another party's behalf because we are socialized to not want to be a bother about things and many victims of grossness find reporting hard. With logs, it's still effective! Without logs it's just gossip.

I'm honestly mystified about what abuse cases we are concerned about from people using a command to indicate the need for a ftb. In my experience of ftb, the events still happen offscreen. So if I reach a point in a scene where I'm uncomfortable and I slam a button saying I need a stop, maybe you don't get to ask me why I need a stop but perhaps we still need to communicate what is being established off cam?

I agree w/Meg about staff involvement. Reporting seems necessary only if there's an issue that can't be resolved between players.

@Rinel Aureth has never been that sexually repressed in his life.

I wish I had the juice for another game right now.

NINJEWS!

What exactly requires "gushing empathy" here?

I feel like some metaplot from staff is critical if only because without the framing story most PrPs are going to be wandering in the dark. But flexibility from staff and availability for PrPs to happen is also necessary because it's critical that player initiative not be stifled for a game to chug along at a healthy intensity.

We've been using a season structure for our metaplot on one of my games and I'm really enjoying it. It translates so well to this medium and leaves a lot of room for flexibility while still providing direction. I mean, mileage may vary -- I'm staffing the game so I don't know what the PrP opinion is -- but I think it's been a really successful experiment in terms of structure. A lot better than stuff I've tried to do in the past with broad sweeping arcs.

I think players have some obligation to make their own fun but I also think that staff has an obligation to run story that will shape the game in the direction staff hopes players will go. I also find that an engaged staff leads to an engaged playerbase and vice versa (of course there are some exceptions to this rule as with any generalization).

But I find as a staffer that when I (or my fellow staffers) am not actively creating story players will do stuff but mostly it will consist of making out with each other. Which don't get me wrong I'm fine with! But do staffers really get in the way of player initiative?

I personally hate pose order tracking systems because they encourage exactly the pose order police attitude KQ is concerned about here.

There's nothing that grinds a scene to a halt faster than slavish dedication to pose order. Especially when people wander AFK without saying anything or just aren't tracking the scene. I don't skip order to steal the spotlight/railroad people/be the answer to everything. I skip order to stop scenes from bogging down in stultifying slowness while people dither around trying to decide what to do/what's okay to pose/whose turn is it/whatever.

Nothing throws me out of a scene more than extended periods of silence while no one is posing. I find it very frustrating and immersion-breaky.

I know that "trust staff" is hard for a lot of people with gaming PTSD, but at every turn I have watched these staffers deal well with masses of players who all have some level of gaming PTSD (including me). I don't really know Custodius aside from reading reputational screeds on MSB et al, but I feel pretty good backing up KQ here.

@Faceless but you'd rs/validate for a handjob, right??

When you're running a scene and you can tell your players are having fun with it just by their poses and their energy. IT'S A GOOD FEEL.

The tenses thing is more about like ... reacting to the way people are around you, for me. It's not that past tense versus present tense is such a huge deal, but if a player makes no effort to react to the fact that every single other player on the game is playing in present tense and it happens for multiple scenes in a row at some point I'm starting to wonder if they're reading and responding to other people's poses.

@apos I mean, sometimes I'll randomly take damage in the middle of a scene from a storyrequest and I usually just wait until the scene is over to RP a new one about the fact that I'm vomiting blood. There's usually room to be at least a LITTLE flexible.

@mietze Thank you and indeed thanks to the whole mod team for responding so quickly and seriously.

My noodles were so hot at lunch that I still have that spicy burn feeling around my mouth after driving back to the office. Yet no garlic or ginger flavors were sacrificed in my food in pursuit of lighting my mouth on fire. A+.

@mietze Proactive players who actually run with things immediately get branded as part of the staffers' pets' clique, though, so I mean, it's just kind of the nature of the hobby at this point.

I loved running a game in the Mass Effect universe and while I'm done with the characters and story from Alpha & Omega -- it was a beautiful ride but the best stories have endings -- I am definitely interested in what you are doing here and in the possibility of maybe actually playing on a game with you for more than five minutes.