Best posts made by Sunny

I think I misspoke, really. Logically, I understand -- and did, as to the question I put forth. Emotionally, it doesn't matter how much people explain it, it baffles me. I'm not saying it's the wrong thing to do, or the wrong way to behave, or anything along those lines. What I am saying is that I do care about the people on the other side of the screen. @Ganymede (I pick on you because the comparison between our approaches is so dramatically different) has always been very private, and that has not kept me from being emotionally invested there. Because I am who I am, and I do not -- can not -- see caring about people I spend time with, virtually or not, as a bad thing. Me caring about other human beings just isn't a bad thing.

I choose to be pretty damn open about a lot of things, and it has certainly caused me a considerable amount of pain over the years. Buuuuut I have that problem in the meat world, too.

ETA: I should also add because otherwise I'm sure it's going to come up: I know damn well most folks don't care about me as much as I do them. That is something I have had to deal with in my life since I was probably 4 or 5 years old. It's not new, and it's not unique to online.

@cyberdemon

You would think, but it's actually exactly the opposite. People might have the time, but they don't have the energy or resilience to engage in a meaningful way.

@tinuviel said in A healthy game culture:

I mildly object to the idea that a game can "bring out the worst" in people. People are the problem, not the game. The game is just an excuse people use to be toxic. It's the "what was she wearing" of our little community - along side the actual "what was she wearing."

ETA: I'd also like a moratorium on the word 'toxic'. We have plenty of other adjectives we could use.

I've seen it enough times and have enough personal experience / data to say that it's incredibly weird to say that the specific games (and their attendant cultures, which is impacted by the subject matter, though not defined) do not in fact have a significant impact on how people behave in the associated environments. While one can hardly blame the games wholesale, competitive games drag competitive streaks out of people, paranoid games draw out anxiousness, and so on.

eta: missed a not. Games DO impact the behaviors of the players, particularly in the course of playing the games in question.

Fairness should not be the mark you're shooting for. 'Fun' should be the mark shot for. The people who insist on it being 'fair' are naive AND responsible for all sorts of total bullshit on games. Not everybody is capable of playing a (insert any difficult concept here) and why the fuck should we be forced to let them try?

@Thenomain

It looks to me like you're deliberately antagonizing her and then trying to blame her for reacting to it, personally.

I love the idea of the scenes code.

I think it should be implemented alongside a real grid, not instead of.

I am one of those players that needs an actual 'physical' grid for a variety of reasons that I have tried to explain until I am blue in the face, and I will not go into them again (as I'm uninterested in further thinly veiled insults directed towards my person in the form of 'anybody who likes this is stupid' that inevitably result).

But yes, people like me do exist, and while I am sure I would (and have) try games that use a new way of doing it, I inevitably wander away because I cannot find RP with the tools provided to me. It's not how my brain works. The virtual-physicalness of it matters to me.

@Misadventure

Because it's actually all the same guy and he identifies himself as having come from 4chan. It's not multiple invading trolls, it's a single 4chan dude.

Updated for a character switch on Arx. I love Jennyva and the people around her (someone really should pick her up, you'd be getting a GREAT character and group of folks around you), but the looming threat of incoming CoI made me bail rather than holding onto her in a sort of 'I'm probably going to have to give her up' limbo. It was a BLAST.

Rodica is proving to be good so far, though, I am tickled pink. Everybody has been SO freaking friendly and helpful, and the character is super fun. I haven't had a PC like this in a REALLY long time, so I'm looking forward to playing her. omg I appreciate Nat's social-ness in a new way now though, let me say.

srsly tho, go Shepherd. They're good peeps.

My thing is, like...it only seems to be addressed as a personal insult when it's actually somebody responding to being personally insulted. Like, it's totally okay for @Tempest to imply I'm a lazy ass, but when I say 'no, actually, you are the lazy ass' suddenly people are wagging fingers. Not that this exchange has happened, specifically, I'm just using Tempest to illustrate my point. This feels gross. Just like when a mod was doing X behavior in one thread while taking people to task for the same behavior in another thread. Like, either mod or don't. This 'both thing, somewhere in between' is terrible, and personally, no, I did NOT ask for THIS.

@arkandel said in Managing Player Expectations:

My only explanation (other than accounting for jerks) is poor self awareness. I.e. players who want mainly TS but tell themselves they're after metaplot, depth and all the other trappings of a non-TS game so they log on those to look for the former anyway.

Why is it so hard to believe that someone might want BOTH types of RP?

Fucking inability to sleep. I have been waking up 1-2 hours early every morning (or more) for weeks now, regardless of what time i go to bed. This morning it was sleeping in to wake at 5. I am so tired.

I feel like it's unfair to ask how we can make the hobby more appealing to new people / how we can bring new people in, and note that we're not talking about X, Y, or Z -- when X, Y, and Z are the biggest issues surrounding bringing new folks in. I don't see how a constructive discussion that could actually accomplish anything is possible without breaking into things that are specifically noted as outside of the scope of conversation. Like, the issues are systemic, technical, and cultural. Addressing anything else is like putting a new coat of paint on a rustbucket. Great, the paint is pretty, but...

@wizz

If it helps I am one of those people that is uh, not a FATE fan? And I'm interested enough (especially by your enthusiasm for the project tbh) that I'm very likely to come check it out when it gets to that point.

ETA: I will learn it if I have to. I do not want to, but I will.

Started to post about this as a side note in another posts, but realized it belonged here.

I do not get along with one of my sisters at all. Like at all, she is not a nice person. But today, we were holidaying at my mom's, and all of the sudden my sister is moving to get in between our sister-in-law and her own kid. 'NO, she does not have to hug you if she doesn't want to. It is her choice to touch or not.' Total growly mama. I have not liked my sister that much in years.

@admiral said in Horror MUX:

@kanye-qwest You can tell who the clique is by who upvotes every single post in this thread praising the game.

Yeah, glad I left. You guys can fuck right off.

Even a cursory glance through this page alone betrays that this statement is factually incorrect, just FYI.

I've done it, had lots of fun and success with it over the years. Don't any more, with my bff having passed away.

Best advice I can give you is: don't let people use it as a forum for venting about other games/roleplay/the hobby stuff in general. Put a requirement down that all 'public spaces' need to be neutral to positive, venting for private. Otherwise people will get into the habit and it's hard to reclaim the space once it happens.

ETA: What I ended up doing was to put some variation of 'this is not a space for venting' highlighted at the end of the desc of the main room folks hang out in when not playing stuff, then just a cheery reminder when it veers that way.

@derp I don't find the 'doing other things' part rude at all. What I find rude is someone not looking at me when we're speaking.

Code creates / influences culture. The way a platform is presented and setup dictates how people interact with it.

It is my opinion that rather than focusing on what people prefer / think / state, a game creator needs to consider what their end goal is, and then create the tools to support that. If they do not consider their end goals and base it instead on other inputs, your code/tools will enforce a culture/game that is not what you're aiming for.

For example, to encourage grid-based roleplay, you would not put in tools that allow people to skip the grid to get to RP (meetme, teleport). Instead, you offer tools to help people find their way (directions), and you bribe them with rewards for being out on that grid -- be it XP, bits of lore, whatever. You also don't put in tools to let them take themselves off of the grid. If you put those tools in, people will use them, they take themselves off of the grid, and now you aren't encouraging grid-based roleplay any more.

Using Ares as presented removes a lot of these thinking-steps and assumes you're going to go a particular way, encouraging a particular culture. It can be used to encourage other cultures, but you have to approach it critically and think about every piece of it that you implement, and what that piece is going to ultimately do to the culture and how people interact with your game.

ETA: The culture of a game only "just happens" if it's not done intentionally. These things CAN be planned for. It's not magic.

ETA2: For a counter example of what I'm talking about (sort of), consider PVP. If your policies all say 'this game does not encourage PVP', but you developed a code-system that gave XP for killing other PCs based on how much XP they had spent, it does not MATTER what your policies say, people will actively engage in the PVP your systems have encouraged.

ETA3: Ares comes packaged with a particular culture. It can be used in other ways, but out of the box it absolutely encourages the specific culture that it was designed to encourage. This is a BENEFIT, a huge one, until the people using it don't understand that X or Y choices that the platform itself made for them has A, B, and C consequences on their game.

People who stick with you when you're going through bad, bad times. Those people are the best.