Best posts made by Sunny

To try and bring the question back around: how do we deal with mismatched expectations between reasonable players and reasonable staff?

You have laid out your policies and your game, and you are set up to play the game in a certain fashion. You want to tell epic sweeping stories and you're really just not interested in providing any support for extensive gear differences. To some of your players (who are otherwise reasonable!), it seems to be common sense that if you're telling an epic sweeping story, you have GOT to have epic gear to go with it, right? Like, how do you kill a dragon without a dragonslayer sword?!

What are some tricks and tips people use to try and bring these things together? Do we post posts? Have individual conversations to try and bring everyone to the same page? How can we deal with this sort of misalignment effectively, and how do we minimize the appearance of this problem in the first place?

@SquirrelTalk

Yeah, that would be great. We see it so often because those people tend to have the free time to devote.

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The amount of time, energy, and bullshit involved with running a game is astronomical. The number of hours you have to put in all week every week is ridiculous. If you have time for a full time job at the same time, you've given up getting a full night's sleep most nights (weekends are great). You spend precious "free time" hours mediating interpersonal drama between strangers on the internet. WHO DOES THIS FOR FUN?

yeah. Game runners are awesome, but you gotta have something. Or be superhuman, I do still know two superhumans that run games.

@GreenFlashlight

'It' is that there is no great injustice, I just happen to have a peeve, too. I spoke my opinion. Me speaking my opinion does not make for an injustice.

@thatonedude

Yeah...that's what "and mistake that lack of enjoyment as it being a problem with those games" means!

@phase-face

• Continuity/retcons
• Consent / FTB policies
• Discipline policies
• Character approval requirements
• Censorship of public spaces (IC/OOC)
• Chain of Command / Appeals of decisions, any attendant processes
• What do you expect your players to be playing?
• Rights / Expectations / Responsibilities, both for staff and players
• System
• Purpose/philosophy of game
• Game's pre-game-on history
• PRPs
• Advancement / player goals for character
• Realtime vs asynch vs both RP support
• Channels

..not exhaustive, this is from an old brainstorming list. Trying to find my 'Things to do when opening a mush' checklist but I have a...lot...of folders on dropbox.

@Auspice said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

@Tinuviel said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

@silverfox said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

HE MADE SOMETHING FOR FOOD I DON'T LIKE.

So long as you swallowed.

It's okay if she gets it all over her face so long as he provides the towel.

TOO FAR!! You are talking about my virtual uncle here omg and that is so weird. No. Bad. cries

@bobotron

Yeah, and on games where rosters are handled like that (thank god the one I play on isn't) I would just never ever take a roster PC. If I couldn't make my own, I would not play. That would be a huge barrier for entry to me.

ETA: That attitude (you have no ownership of a roster PC) is why I avoided roster games completely for the first 20 years I played in this hobby, and why I still won't play on most of them now. If staff thinks that's a way to build investment in their game, it's a good hint to me that their style and my own are not going to be compatible.

@saosmash

Yeah, if it exists and people aren't using it, then further guidance on how a game expects people to use it is needed (examples, provide language to use, restrict people to picking off a list and if they need something not there they have to ask for it). Gotta model the behavior before people will adopt it.

eta: like...'so you want to run a plot on this game, signup for a 15 minute training session to discuss how we expect these tools to be used'. I do NOT understand why more games don't do training sessions, it was always HUGELY helpful for keeping things running IME. I trained every one of my staffers; we had discussions about my expectations and how I wanted them to do things. I missed some terrible, glaring issues of course -- but taking 20 minutes to preload someone with what I needed them to be doing...was a lot easier than cleaning up the messes, let me tell you.

eta2: take this with a grain of salt. I also did essay tests for elder vampire applications to test their understanding of the material before I gave them a feature. this was bad. this was so bad. I had different tests for different power levels.

Yeah, I just realized I do it to. I want very complicated things when I'm not feeling well (aka depressed).

@magee101

Not all games do things the same way.

@pyrephox said in Battling FOMO (any game):

And then...time passes. And no one asks for RP. And the little voice goes, "Oh. OH. So I was bothering people, and no one actually enjoys playing with me. That sucks. Now I feel bad that I was being a pain in the ass for people."

Literally the meltdown I had that I was referencing, yes! That's exactly what I did!

But I was in such an awful place IRL that I was unable to get to the other side, internalized the "I was being a pain in the ass", and ran with it (to the point of THAT getting under peoples' skin). Instead of "people are creatures of habit, and they're in the habit of me being the asker", which was the actual truth in the situation.

I don't know that there's much of a solution to this beyond being vocal about it happening and being a thing to watch for in the hobby so that when the stupid tiny voice starts talking, it's easier to shut up.

I was on an ensure diet for a few weeks once. Wasn't allowed solid food. It was the most miserable thing EVER.

My 'it's not Buffy' statement was related to the general premise of the game. I get that people want to see something unique/different/not done before, but I want to play a Buffy game. That means playing people (of whatever sort) that are fighting the good fight against the darkness in a relatively modern-day setting. There are LOTS of REALLY COOL and fun things that can be done with the Buffy system, and the setup, and all of that, there's no question. But what's being discussed here is an actual Buffy game. If you don't want to play Buffy, I do not understand why you need to hijack the Buffy game to try and make something else.

ETA: Also, this is the game development section, and I would appreciate it if the insults could be kept to a minimum, thanks.

@lotherio

Okay, one -- springboard away, my good sir. Two, I agree entirely, and I apologize if it seemed like my suggestion to passive aggressively whine on the boards was even remotely genuine. I'm pretty mortified by the thought. That one was a firm tongue in cheek comment, because it WAS the preferred method of addressing this issue on many an oWoD game. It was stupid. It didn't work. It always made people just log in less.

I think it's important to understand that the blame for this sort of thing often lies at the feet of policies that weren't followed through to their logical consequences before they were implemented. You get the environment you build, and every bit of it can be catered to.

If you're building a game and you want a lot of public RP of a particular sort to happen, you build into your system ways to encourage it. It can all be done intentionally, and it's not even much of a mystery. XP policy and approval policy and what your +where looks like and how many ways people can indicate (without asking, with asking, BOTH) they're looking for RP right now. Do you give people a bonus reward when they flag themselves LRP, go somewhere public, and someone else comes to play with them? I mean, you can do that -- but make sure you follow that thought through to the ways that people might abuse it, and what kinds of RP it ends up encouraging.

@mietze

Oh, I honestly don't think that it's a reasonable expectation that somebody do it, and keep doing it, when they're the only one doing it. But it does have to start somewhere, and somebody has to do it. The ball has to get rolling, and none of the solutions to problematic idling are passive, unfortunately.

@Ganymede

I understand. I'm still incredibly bothered by the context of the situation. Really, really bothered.

If I had more energy, if I had any creative power right now, I'd offer some of it to you. It's a good concept, it's a great idea, and I really really really hope you can find a team to work with. Best of luck, and I hope I can someday play on this game.

ALSO another thing staff can do:

Turn idle timeout back on

(I think it's a terrible solution and there are reasons you turned it off to begin with BUT)

@Ganymede said in Dead Celebrities 2020:

@Sunny

I appreciate the perspective.

I appreciate how you've handled my feedback. Thank you.

We use Spiceworks as our ticketing system where I work, it seems pretty functional. I think we are relatively tiny compared to most of all y'all though.

@bluebird

You're okay. Welcome back. It takes some getting re-used to.