Posts made by Sunny

Yes. Friends are friends, people are people, and I communicate with my "online friends" the same way I communicate with my meat-space friends the same way I communicate with my coworkers while I'm working remotely. I don't categorize my relationships based on how far they live from me these days. Like, is my SO's brother, who I play games with online, my meatspace friend? My online friend? He lives in another state and we've never met in person and just play games, but -- SO's brother. What about his friends? What do THEY count as? Yeah, no. They're all just "friends". Some of them are friends I game with, and some of them are friends I talk about mental health with, and some are friends I go to coffee with, and--they're just friends.

It's a Very Big word.

I think there's also something to be said about it being more about tone differences, than superfriends vs not-superfriends. WoD in particular is really susceptible to differences in tone being basically like...gamebreaking/immersion breaking.

If we're not all taking the game at the same level of seriousness (not like, obsession with RP seriousness, but like, my fancy hat is important and we are not here to laugh! seriousness). Witness: the fishmalk showing up to Elysium, and how often that was a straight up night killer.

If people are playing two different versions of the game in WoD, it can get really hard to reconcile really quickly, even when it's tone and severity of said tone. In a lot of other settings, it's super easy to disregard the little bits of cognitive dissidence that goes on, but in WoD (old and new!) it's basically baked in that you have to care about wtf your neighbor is doing.

@arkandel said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

However my caveat here is that competition kind of... comes with the hobby, too, whether there are black hats involved or not. Many players want to be special and stand out (which I won't analyze) but MU* social systems are often designed a bit like dancing chair games; your playerbase of 30 may only have 10 'ranks' - there is only one Prince, 5 Primogen, etc - so there you have it... competition.

Oh, absolutely. People are going to be competitive no matter what you do, which is one of the contributing factors as to why a competitive framework is so problematic. People are going to compete for time, attention, limited energy, and other resources -- now when your game sets up resources to be scarce, or more importantly something they can gain by removing resources from somebody else, now you have the environment itself saying "if you cooperate OOC, you are taking a risk".

This is actively unhealthy when you have a game of 30, 50, or 100 people, because you cannot ensure fairness of outcomes at that level, and when you remove fairness in a competitive situation, that's when toxic behavior explodes all over everything. This is why having everything coded like muds do mitigates it to a certain extent; when you have the code itself managing these things, the upset involved with Sally getting a mansion....well, it was the code, everyone has the same outcome with the code. It's also why there is such INTENSE screaming when it turns out that yet another one of these MUDs has cheater-bits in the code: it's the arbiter of fairness for their competition.

eta: I do want to note that I think all of this can be addressed, mitigated, taken into consideration, and worked with -- there are ways to like, handle all of the associated problems (there's a lot of them). I just don't think the juice is worth the squeeze, and I think the time is better spent on how we can improve engagement with cooperative play and lean into the hobby's strengths, rather than mitigating weaknesses.

Like, antagonists. If you set your game up to be cooperative, a lot of the sting of this comes out. You can set antagonist characters' players up to succeed, and create a culture of them working WITH the "protagonist" PCs to tell the best story, by rewarding them for leaving themselves vulnerable in X way. We ALL agree that antagonist characters add a world of good to EVERY game, provided they are in the hands of a good player.

The secret here is, though -- look back even at this thread, and the posts from good antagonist-characters's players, and you'll notice a common theme from them: they all played their antagonist PCs as if they were cooperating with the protagonist players. If you set it up to reward these people for doing the things that make that work, you hobble them for actually competing, right? But you make the experience more fun for everybody involved.

This is what I mean, and why I think it's super important to start divorcing "antagonist" from "competitive". If we start intentionally/mindfully setting antagonist characters' players up to succeed (OOC), the whole culture around it becomes more healthy. But that doesn't just HAPPEN save for a small handful of people, you have to actually build for it.

The longer I participate in this hobby, the more I come to the conclusion that this platform is bad for competitive play. It does cooperative very well, but actual players competing with other players, due to the distance between people and how human brains work, actual competition is ultimately poison.

This can be partially mitigated by completely removing the human judgment element (reducing it to objective code), but ultimately a whole lot of time and effort has to be put in to adjusting for the problems the platform introduces.

Note, I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying it's trying to climb a mountain barefoot. There are completely valid reasons to do it, but holy crap it's too much work for me.

eta: Also, I'd like to make the distinction between actual competitive play and cooperative play that involves antagonistic/antagonist characters, because they ARE different things.

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

I'm the kind of idiot who starts prepping and cooking a thing only to discover that I don't actually have parsnips, or whatever, and I really should go to the store and get some... Instead of checking I had all the ingredients I needed before hand.

My partner does this and it nearly drives me to distraction regularly. If he had CHECKED if we had tortillas before starting tacos, he would not have to be mad that we're out of them, and I wouldn't have to rush up to the store to get them before dinner is ready.

@greenflashlight

You are not alone in your idiocy, I think most people are this sort of idiot.

@tinuviel

Yeah, it's not for me and I think it's a terrible idea for a variety of reasons (the thought of the logistics of just policing gives me a headache), but I'd still like to see it tried, because I think we'd learn a lot from the attempt and I DO think there's a (small) audience for it, and I think it would require thinking about a lot of things in a different way than the usual approach.

Roster vs premade characters; there have been WoD games that did offer premades -- it worked a lot like the rosters do, except once you took it you took it and it was just yours, and you could generally make minimal changes to adapt it. I never played one of them, but several games definitely tried to use the system. It never seemed to cause any particular headache that I recollect, but I also don't recall it ever being something utilized as heavily as it could've been.

eta: The term that applies here though is definitely "premades" and not rosters, and that WAS a convention in WoD mushing for a while. Probably got carried over from Cam-LARP.

Back in the days of yore I don’t recollect it being written down places, and I vaguely remember thinking of it in a “I wonder if this is one of the games that let you, have to ask to find out” sort of way. (And I remember being supremely relieved when it was a yes, and somehow still surprised when it was allowed on Arx, because I vaguely recall it NOT being an option for aaaages).

@cobalt

Oof. I'm sorry. Thinking about you and yours.

@Ganymede @Derp

I wish I could help, could figure out something more helpful than just stupid words, but you both have far more value to your communities than what you produce in any particular day/week/month/year (and honestly, more than what you produce period, but that's a rant for another time).

Everything will still be here when you have the energy. If you forced engagement when you're not feeling it, we run the risk of burning you out forever. NOBODY who plays with you wants that. Patience is better. Time away from brain-y hobbies that require much thinkwork is not just helpful, but necessary to remain healthy.

@horrorhound

Okay.

Ours handles a great many infrastructure projects, including doing things like designing water / sewer systems that have to actually work.

@wildbaboons said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

@derp said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

Engineers only have to make it work in theory. Not in practice

This only applies to sales engineers

Yeah, our engineer at my work would be pretty amused to be categorized as only having to do his job in theory, I suspect.

@runescryer

I tried it on Ashes, and it was an abysmal failure and accomplished nothing. It didn't make anyone who wasn't already comfortable talking to staff comfortable doing so (they were still staff), and encouraged a lot of RIDICULOUSLY stupid complaining (so and so denied my XP request for X, which is literally in the files as something you can't spend XP on, for example), which when said ridiculousness was dismissed out of hand, was used as "proof" that it was pointless talking to this person because I was still the one making the decisions at the end of the day.

A game is FAR better off putting the time and effort into just being trustworthy people to begin with.

@testament

Grats!! So awesome!!

@silverfox

Joy. Thanks for sharing.

I genuinely think that either policy choice (PC led politics, NPC led politics) is fine, as long as appropriate controls are in place to ensure that the downsides of said policy choice are accounted for, and as long as the staff team remains consistent with the rule.

Stagnation/Turnover
These are the same issue, just one or the other side of the coin depending on which choice you make.

With a staff NPC in a leadership role, stagnation of the domain (whatever game set there is) becomes a serious potential issue. These characters also tend to be either too competent (leaving no room for a lot of things), or too incompetent without recourse for the characters (which becomes a suspension of disbelief problem).

With PCs in leadership roles, the turnover is generally intense. The pressure on the players of these characters is also intense, without active steps being taken to combat it.

Character Accessibility
When your leadership characters are played by staff, it limits the access people have to them (or the quality of the access is shit), because staff have eleventy billion other things they have to be doing. Ensuring access is HARD. Ensuring FAIR access is impossible.

When players play leadership roles, they typically only have that one character there (or maybe an alt or two). LOTS more access / involvement can happen. Including things like the seven hundred year old vampire prince of the city going to Starbucks and pretending to sip coffee while talking about Becky's poodle, because their priority is RP.

Plots
With staff controlling the leadership roles, these characters can be a source of plots / information for plots. They do not, generally, get to participate. When players control the leadership roles, you have the seven hundred year old vampire prince of the city helping track down a guy who robbed the convenience store and stole Becky's poodle.

Getting things done
When staff controls leadership roles, handling things that involve leadership roles can be a +request. When it's a player, player personalities and conflicts get involved. As well, you either get mini staff (that you didn't really choose), where they have responsibilities and requirements on them, or you don't, which gums up the entire works. PC leadership means that when IC laws/etc get broken, you're going to have players dealing with this.

Agency
Players in leadership roles give the orgs they are part of far, far more agency in determining the direction of their spheres of influence. Staff in leadership roles remove a significant amount of agency from the player characters that are part of their sphere of influence. Mind, this isn't wholly a terrible thing, as it allows for significant control of possible thematic drift, and so on.

Engaging Characters
PCs are like 99% of the time just going to be more interesting than NPCs are to regularly engage with. They're "more real" people because they get played a ton more, and have personal connections with characters that NPCs don't really have time to have. While NPCs get crowd-bombed when they step somewhere accessible, PCs are just part of the tapestry of PCs, so they can have rich levels of involvement.

All of these varying points have different solutions that are more or less work. This is not even remotely an exhaustive list, I'm just trying to illustrate the breadth of differences. Both are 100% workable, valid, reasonable ways to go, you just have to pick one and then address the logical consequences of that choice for the game in question, your staff team, and your players.

@silverfox

It gets easier. WAY easier. Once you get the muscle memory built you'll be OK.

@wizz

It's my understanding they sort of...changed the theme, for this most recent season? The connecting measure between all the episodes for this one is Rick's stupid ass shit finally coming back to him as consequences. Every episode is basically dealing with the repercussions of him being a selfish asshole. Which...is a fairly dramatic difference from previous seasons.

@pyrephox

That's what these last few books are for!

Resolving the plots.

Really, this time.

(maybe not.)

(keep going. I'll read 'em.)