Posts made by Seraphim73

@Derp said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

This is just meant to browbeat and shame a person based on personal dislike for no other reason than to vent your spleen in an argument.

Actually, it was done to point out the hypocrisy, gaslighting, and rewriting of history on display. When someone calls for repair, suggesting that people act a certain way when they've acted in direct opposition to it, it's disingenuous at best and actively harmful to the efforts at worst.

@Derp said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

And frankly, you're intelligent enough to already know this. I know you are, I've seen it firsthand when we've talked.
Don't do this. You're better than that.

Is this a personal attack? It's certainly a personal appeal intended to shame me for an action that I've taken. Shame me for the action, through a personal description of me.

@Ghost said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

Let's stay on topic.

@Seraphim73 said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

So what do I think it would take to repair the community? In my opinion, fix the missing stairs. People you have to warn your friends about? Remove them from your circles instead of just warning the people around you. Tell staffers, share information, cut them out of the community. When they come back under a new name, find them (perhaps find out about them on a board like this) and remove them again. If you find yourself on a place that doesn't do that, or elevates their voices? Remove yourself from that circle. Vote with your feet....

Goodbye.

@Ghost Your hypothetical isn't applicable, because if I knew that Spider was on my game, they wouldn't be on my game anymore.

Now if, after I showed Spider off my game for being Spider, I had reason to believe that my friend had actually falsely accused them? I'd do my due diligence and check out. I'd talk to anyone else involved and then it seemed likely that my friend had falsely accused them, I would talk to my friend, give them a warning, and take any further accusations from them with a grain of salt.

As for a Hog Pit thread, I would likely respond something like, "From what I can see, this accusation is not accurate. However, this player has been banned from my game because they are Spider, and they have shown themselves to be repeatedly toxic to their community." Because yeah... I don't want false reports out there, but there are people in this community who are toxic and should be removed from it.

@Ghost said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

I think what they want is a place where they can shame people for being crypto-fascists

If there's a place where you can't shame actual crypto-fascists for being crypto-fascists, I don't want to be a member of that community. And your continued use of "some of these personalities" and "they" is complete bullshit, you were one of those most vitriolic members of the Hog Pit, you just couched things in terms you thought were nice (sometimes). @Kestrel previously called you out with receipts for some of the many times you've done this. You were/are part of the problem, and you were/are part of normalizing it, and now you're trying to shove that all on people who have been split (some by their own choice, some not) from this community and are in no position to correct your gaslighting.

@Derp said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

I think you underestimate how much support that can bring with it.

1. Thank you for calling those games wildly popular and the compliment.
2. Definitely not a coder, just someone who can play with numbers and hit locations to tell a story.
3. I certainly wouldn't call myself a core of either of the current two boards, nor of the MSB that came before the split.
4. Community members rallying to my defense came before any of this.

@Arkandel said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

@Seraphim73 is a goddamn (*) Whitecloak, is what he is.

Some of the most fun I've had on a MU*. And that's Child of the Light, thank you.

@Derp said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

I assume this is the general 'you'? Because I didn't actually ban a single person. I voted, with a group, on who should stay and who should come back and who should remain banned, and lest someone think we are a hivemind, the ban votes were not unanimous.

First "you" was definitely general, as in "the admin of this board at the time." The second "you" is... also general, I suppose. The folks who are being called bullies by folks on this board are gone, either because they've been banned or have chosen to leave.

As for needing popular friends to speak up, I'm certainly not anyone's idea of a popular figurehead among any group here, but right there in my example, folks defended me. We've seen people who dislike folks who have been accused still come out of the woodwork to defend them from false accusations. This community, before it was splintered, was pretty good about that. There will always be flying monkeys, but there will also always be those willing to defend the innocent.

And @Ghost, I'm with @reimesu -- just don't defend Spider. But yes, I would do my due diligence to see if the person was Spider... and also if they had done the thing my friend said they had done. And I would be one of the folks who spoke up to try to clear the person's name if the accusations weren't true, because people did that for me.

@Ghost Dude, Spider literally ruined someone's RL house and wouldn't accept responsibility. That's not overbearing or unfair. That's just crappy.

Beyond that one example, I have absolutely no wish to provide someone who has demonstrated themselves to be a crappy person with (usually yet) another chance. If they want to demonstrate that they can fix their behaviors through communications with me or through their actions on another game, I might give them another chance. But if I'm already staffing a game, I don't want to put in even more time and energy watching someone like a hawk who I know has demonstrated bad behaviors in the past. I want to spend my time and energy providing a fun game for the players who I know are there to have a good, safe time.

@Derp If an accusation isn't accurate, it can be challenged. History on this very board shows that it will be, often successfully. How many times have we seen someone accuse someone of crappy behavior only to have multiple people come in and provide evidence that the original poster was the crappy one?

Are accusations better with evidence? Absolutely. Are accusations better with non-corruptible evidence like Ares logs sent to staffers? Absolutely-er. Do some people not feel comfortable sharing evidence because they've been drawn into actions or RP that is banned from the server as a means to tie them to their abuser? Absolutely-est.

You've banned or driven off most of the people you claim were bullies. Shouldn't this board be able to handle being a clearing house of bad behavior now?

@simplications said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

I wouldn't want to see any of these as posts.

I absolutely do want to hear about the person creating multiple characters to avoid a do-not-contact request. I don't really care if the unwanted contact is for the purposes of sexual RP, but if someone wants to add that detail to the story, I don't mind. I absolutely think that they should go to the staff on the game too (first, actually), but I think the community should want to hear about it. That's the only way that we repair the missing stairs in our community -- shining a light on them so that we can see that they're missing.

And if it's a false report? Then if it's made to the community as a whole, it can be addressed. The person being accused of these actions can defend themselves, other people can speak up for or against and people can make up their own mind.

One of the first things said about me on WORA was that I was only made a staffer on a game because I was TSing another staffer. Is that the kind of bullshit accusation that used to be thrown around in order to slut-shame people? Yup. Was I TSing that player's character? Yup. Was that why I got the position? Nope. Folks could speak up and describe what I was doing as a staffer, and people could see that even if it was why I got the position, I was being active and good for the game. Done. Was it annoying to deal with? Yup. Do I still remember it a decade later? Yup.

But unless we as a community out the assholes among us, so that we can remove them from the community, I don't believe that we can ever repair the community.

@Tirit said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

While I understand and concur with most of your responses, doesn't this sounds a little bit witch hunty?

Without some due diligence on the part of staffers, yes it can become something used against "good" players. But like @Arkandel said, it's better than the alternative, of letting problem players lurk in the community, waiting to harm other players and drive them away.

@Ghost said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

my only answer was to try to play as incognito as possible

If you can only avoid the drama as long as you can hide who you are... the problem may not be the environment around you.

1. Understand that the Hog Pit was a mistake, that the people who thrived in it are bullies, and to identify/cull bullies from the hobby

How is "excluding players they don't like" as bad as "abusive/stalker roleplayers who have rapey/disturbing/"in some cases illegal" behavior?" Excluding bad actors and players you don't like are entirely legitimate ways to staff a game -- I might even say they're good ways to staff a game, because why should you have to deal with players who are going to cause a personal problem for you while you're staffing a game? Staff doesn't owe anyone a spot on their game. And you clearly realize it too, because two paragraphs after you say that excluding players is as bad as all of that, you say that if you ran a game, you've exclude players for bad OOC behavior on other forums. Now, I've done that myself, so I can't and won't complain about the decision, but the sheer hypocrisy of the statements is ridiculous.

It's in staff's interest to keep as many players on the game as possible, because this affects whether or not people even try to make a bit at the game.

No, it's not. Because if you have asshole players on a game, even if they're popular within a group, they're undoubtedly driving other players away. It's in a game's best interest to remove problem players, no matter how popular they are. If you end up with 10 friends RPing together because other groups left? As long as you're having fun, that's awesome, and guess what, you no longer have assholes you have to worry about dealing with.

So a LOT of bad stuff just goes untouched, festers, and gets worse over time because the motivations behind DOING SOMETHING or NOT DOING SOMETHING tend to fall always in line with whether or not it'll affect the game, roleplay, or "popularity currency".

And this is exactly why you remove problem players from your community instead of letting them fester. More and more game runners seem to be realizing this, and to be willing to take the short-term playerbase hit to make a better community.

@Ghost said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

Paranoia of who is who, who they've played, stranger danger

You realize that what you're terming as paranoia is a response to people who have actually been tricked into interacting with people who have been creepers/abusers to them in the past, right? Denigrating that totally reasonable response like this is victim-blaming. It's horrible. You can do better.

@ZombieGenesis said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

Stop with the "red flags" attacks on new games.

Seriously? Some games are utterly filled with red-flags, and it couldn't be clearer that they're going to be toxic dumpster fires (like the one Vampire game with all the anti-Semitic BS in its theme). Calling games with massive red flags out on their massive red flags shouldn't be a problem (and if the big red flag is a mistake, a good game runner will see it and fix it).

@Ganymede said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

In the past, most people have reported creeps and stalkers like Cullen / Azazello / Surtr / whomever through DMs to me.

In my opinion, while it's good to report creeps and stalkers to Staff in private messages, one of the biggest benefits of the previously-unified community of MSB was the ability to get the word out to lots of people at once: Hey, this person who the community has agreed is a problem is back on this game, watch out for them there, and it might be good to watch any people who are showing these general tendencies on other games too. That's how we caught DWOPP over at TSS and removed him. If it's a false identification, it can be discussed with others who might have useful information.

So what do I think it would take to repair the community? In my opinion, fix the missing stairs. People you have to warn your friends about? Remove them from your circles instead of just warning the people around you. Tell staffers, share information, cut them out of the community. When they come back under a new name, find them (perhaps find out about them on a board like this) and remove them again. If you find yourself on a place that doesn't do that, or elevates their voices? Remove yourself from that circle. Vote with your feet, and let people enjoy their 10-person game if that's what it ends up being -- at least if they're all missing stairs, they won't have the critical mass to bring in other people to hurt. Find a place that will remove the missing stairs, instead of warning people about them and leaving them there to bite unsuspecting ankles.

@lotherio As @Kalakh noted, and I agree with, a silent majority in a message board community isn't. It's the lurkers (nothing wrong with lurking, I lurk more than I post here, particularly now). Those who participate in the community are the community when the community is about participating. (Is that a tautology? I think that's a tautology, but I think it got the point across). I'm not saying that there can't be a community here that grows and even flourishes with a number of vocal participants having departed, I'm just saying that when the majority of the vocal participants leave a community, it's not the same community anymore.

I don't think that it's helpful to compare those who left to Germans in the '30s and '40s, nor to compare those who left to those pushing The Big Lie about the 2020 US Presidential election. I think that contributes to pushing people into their own echo chambers and reinforces distrust and disgust already built up by the use of strawman arguments.

Also, I believe that it's absolutely possible to want more active moderation without wanting someone who is not trusted by a significant and vocal portion of the community to moderate them. I also believe that it's absolutely possible to want more active moderation without wanting discussion to be shut down and directed to DMs -- particularly since one of the best parts about this board (to me) is the ability to express dissatisfaction and complaints about MU*s in the open.

@lotherio Sorry, I actually did read your post a little too quickly and thought that you were saying that some of the folks who left did so because they bought into the propaganda/perception of reality. I see now that you were speaking directly about Germans in the '30s and '40s. I apologize for the misreading. I still don't think it's a great idea to use Nazis as an example for a group (or several groups) of people who have a different opinion from you.

@lotherio said in Something Completely Different:

I mean not all Germans

You brought it up yourself, but I'm gonna say... maybe not the best logical leap to make. You might want to rethink it. You might also want to rethink the idea that many of the people who left did so because of either an evil, charismatic leader or propaganda.

@lotherio said in Something Completely Different:

Again, call me ignorant, but this continued pressure by a select group that has been a vocal majority has the perception of bullying

Isn't "continued pressure by a select group that has been a vocal majority" pretty much just people expressing their desires and a majority of the vocal population agreeing with them? Where do you draw the line between "the majority of the vocal people in the community speaking their minds" and "bullying?" Is the problem just how many people are saying something, because then it's dogpiling? Or is it how things are being said? Because I don't think there should be a problem with a majority of the vocal members of a community expressing their opinion -- that's how communities work. If members of the community are being assholes about expressing their opinion, I think that should be dealt with, but I don't think that members of the community expressing their opinions without being assholes should be a problem (do I think some of the people who were banned/left were assholes about it? Yup. Do I think that most of them were? Nope.).

I think that what's happened in the last couple of weeks was that precipitous action was taken by admin and a precipitous reaction was taken by some community members, and then both sides retreated and dug into their positions, each putting up some strawmen to take potshots at and restating the situation in ways that made them seem good and the other side seem bad. I think that it's quite clear that the trust of a large portion of the vocal community here was broken by the initial action and the actions and statement that followed. I think that a little self-evaluation is an important thing to do when you lose the trust of a large portion of your community.

Unlike some of the others, I do okay meshing with larger groups at once -- if I have the RL focus. But it can still be good to build up the personal connections between the characters in smaller groups if you have that opportunity.

If you're just jumping into a 5-7 person scene and want to get them working together? My best advice is to give them something they all have to react to, and something that they have to work together to overcome/avoid/whatever. @Quinn's advice on tailoring things to the individual PCs is great advice -- particularly if the thing they have to react to either is specifically triggering to some of the PCs (the PCs, not the players) or directly engages with some of their less-used skills as suggested.

I also agree that @mietze's mention of being OOCly up-front and honest about the situation: "This is a scene to get all our characters connected." This will give the players incentive to connect the characters, and when they react to that thing you're doing as the GM that they all have to react to, they don't just react by fleeing the scene.

@derp said in Is Min/Max a bad thing?:

This made me lol and I needed that today. Take your upvote, sir.

You're welcome.

@tinuviel said in Is Min/Max a bad thing?:

Not with the amount of bending over backwards to fuck me they seem to be doing.

That actually falls under the Blatant Fuckery Action Skill.

@solstice said in Is Min/Max a bad thing?:

Hey, every now and then you need dodge as a stat as a politician.

I would suggest that that's a background skill. I can't see Dianne Feinstein, Mitch McConnell, or Chuck Grassley dodging that.

@faraday said in Is Min/Max a bad thing?:
Unless you've got some grand scheme to sustain non-combat RP plots across your playerbase, just tell them up front that combat/adventure is going to be the main focus and make sure your chargen/approval process is structured accordingly. If someone REALLY wants to play a chef despite all that, make sure they understand that they'll be sandboxing their own fun.

It's all about expectations.

This is why I really appreciate the distinction between Action Skills and Background Skills in FS3. Not because physical skills should cost more to purchase out of Chargen, but because the distinction between the two types of skills can and should let you know what type of game you're playing. Sadly, it doesn't always, because Staff either want to run an adventure game or think that they have to have Athletics, Melee, and Ranged as Action Skills because they're active, and involve action. But they can!

Imagine, for example, a theoretical FS3 MUSH about Ministers of Parliament or Congresspeople -- Athletics, Melee, and Ranged would all be Background Skills, while the Attributes and Action Skills might be Composure, Hometown Support, Pontificating, Deception, Willful Obliviousness, Investigation, Connections, War Chest, Soundbites, etc. I don't know if that would be awesome, horrifying, or both, but the Attributes and Action Skills would certainly tell you what the game was about.

I'm going to agree with a great many people on this thread and say, "It depends." And I'm going to agree with a lot of people on this thread and say, "It depends on what the group is trying to do." I played in a tabletop short campaign where everyone was min-maxed, high-Karma Shadowrunners going into the Renraku Arcology shortly after Shutdown. It was bloody and it was awesome. I have also seen both MUSHes and tabletop games screwed up because one portion of the players thought they were playing an RP game, and the other portion thought they were playing a Roll More Dice game. The problem here usually comes when the GMs/Staff allow the latter group to steamroller the former through the weight of their dice pools.

This is why I love the skill/scan command on FS3 games and the Skill Distribution/Skill Census/whatever you want to call it page on an FS3 game's web portal (I'm being specific here because I believe that both commands are only available on FS3 games, and not any Ares game, but I could be wrong). It's a fantastic way to see what type of game is being run. Are the 'badass fighters' running around with 7 Composure, 8 Ranged, and 8 Melee? Are the 'badass diplomats' running around with 8 Composure and 8 Influence? Or do people have a 5 or a 6 in their area of specialty? The distribution of action skills (and the background skills taken by people) can tell you a LOT about a game -- and help you fit in with whichever side of the scale the game falls on.

I enjoy playing characters with large dice pools. Some of this is because I love posing people doing awesome things, and some of it is because I have to make up for my generally horrid dice luck. But as long as my character is within the same range as other PCs at what they're supposed to be good at, that's plenty good for me. Because posing utter incompetence can be entertaining too, as long as you know that's what you're in for.

So yeah, I don't think that min-maxing is inherently bad, but I do think that you need to have everyone on the game on the same page as to how powerful the PCs are supposed to be. It's when they aren't, and the assholes with the high dice pools (or even the normally-considerate folks with high dice pools who get excited to be able to THEIR THING) suck the fun out of the scene because they're the only ones who can do everything or they can do everything all on their own, that you have problems.

@arkandel said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

It's harder to shadow someone running a plot, or to coordinate them so they can run NPCs within the scope of what you're looking to accomplish, than to do it yourself.

I think this strongly depends on the system and the GM. I have a lot of fun following behind the poses of GMs and setting FS3 NPCs to do what the GM just said they did. It takes some of the burden off GMs who aren't comfortable with the combat system, and I enjoy playing with it. I think for someone who isn't familiar with the system/syntax, having someone do the "code stuff" can take a major burden off them, and for something as straight-forward as FS3, it's very easy to set appropriate actions for NPCs.

With a non-coded system? Yeah, it would be a lot harder.

Let's try this again, since it disappeared the first time:

I generally define PCs as characters played by a person for the purpose of telling the character's own story (hopefully) as part of the larger story on the game. I generally define Staff-run NPCs as characters played by a person for the purpose of adding to the larger story of the game rather than to tell their own character's story.

I strongly believe that Staff-played PCs should be able to get involved in whatever relationship they want, so long as those relationships do not come with OOC favoritism (as has been mentioned by others above, recusing yourself from a situation where your biases might change your ruling). Sure, Staffers have to be careful due to the inherent power imbalances between Staffer and Player, but they should still get to experience the game like any other player too.

I also strongly believe that Staff-played NPCs shouldn't be TSing unless how that TS plays out is going to have a noticeable impact on the game's story (I would assume that most TS wouldn't, but I don't want to assume that none would). I don't have a problem if a PC wants to seduce the town's NPC sheriff, but unless the -how- is important, I believe that it should be FTBed, so that Staff NPC time/focus can be spent on furthering the game's plot (note, I believe they can still do whatever the heck they want with their time on their PCs). I feel that even if the TS doesn't impact a Staffer's decision-making, a) it's a lot of time and effort that could be spent furthering the game's storyline, and b) there's going to be the perception of bias even if there's no bias.

Yeah, it took a long while to post, and then once it did post, it's now gone for me again.

@juniper I have absolutely had that reaction -- to someone who emphasized in every pose how gorgeous their character was. I have zero problems with people playing pretty characters -- male or female -- (I do it too), I have zero problems with a player mentioning every now and then how pretty their character is in a pose, but I do have that instinctive reaction that you mentioned when someone repeatedly hits me (and everyone else in the scene) over the head with how absolutely stunning their character is. That feels to me like their looking for attention and to be told how pretty they are and want to pull the spotlight onto themselves.

Are my feelings on that always right? Nope! Do I feel like this happens more often with female characters? Yup! Is that maybe because I just notice it more frequently with female characters? Yup! Do people still have the right to relish in how beautiful the character their playing is? Yup! Am I still going to have that instinctive reaction if (in my opinion) they overdo it with the mentions of their character's beauty? Probably.