Best posts made by surreality

Ghostwheel MOO, 1996. The best friend of the guy I still live with played there, and decided I needed a hobby to escape my workaholic tendencies.

<looks around at what kind of things she's doing now> Fffffuuuu...

It's definitely necessary for players to have a mature attitude about this; I just don't personally see (sorry to single out your comment here, @Lithium) comments like "Protagonists who are unwilling to risk character death, aren't fucking protagonists. They're couch warmers." as being demonstrative of that.

Most fictional protagonists I find compelling are not throwing themselves into a meat grinder at every possible opportunity. They have things they're willing to die for, and things they are not. They're picking battles. They are having actual cowardly moments and learning from them. Sometimes they realizing running for it and living to fight another day when they're properly prepared is the wiser course of action, or 'get the message out to our allies that the bad guys have more than we knew about' is more important than dying on that hill.

We don't call the people willing to die for every possible cause protagonists, we call them crazy.

This is an example of what I mean: 'Hide in the bushes, wait for the bad guys to pass, sneak into the building, get the info for our scouting mission' isn't something I see much of any more, no matter how realistic or sensible it is. Nope, it's 'kill all the bad guys and storm the building, then get the information'. Both are viable story mentalities. The latter is a first person shooter mentality.

It's a concern that the hobby is veering sharply toward the latter, and losing viable stories in the process. I don't MUX to play a FPS game; bringing the FPS approach to MUX and 'one true way'-ing it turns MUX into something other than a story medium.

This is very different from players being willing to let go of their characters -- which is necessary -- but the two are frequently conflated or confused and it's something I think is pretty reductive and ultimately damaging to the hobby. It isn't about 'I have to consent before you can kill me!' -- it's about the fact that countless compelling heroic characters do not treat themselves (or those around them on their side) as canon fodder out for the kill alone.

@Pandora There are assumptions there that swing one way or the other. There's an unfairness to 'assume the character is always there whether the player is there or not', but there's also an unfairness to 'assume the character isn't there simply because the player cannot be'.

Solution: wait until the player is connected, but isn't around the target IC. That's fair to all parties involved in every possible way, and assumes nothing in one direction or the other.

@faraday You know, that is actually a good idea. It could be handy to set up the exit parent to actually just note <OOC> [name] has arrived [optional: from direction]. for odrops, and <OOC> [name] has left [optional: via exit]. for osucc.

That could clear that confusion up pretty nicely, and auto-loggers designed to strip OOC comments from logs could automatically remove it as needed, provided it uses whatever the standard OOC text prefix is.

@Cupcake We are all the person with the self-awareness of a turnip sometimes. Every last one of us.

Sometimes, I wish more folks would remember that, really. Would prevent the decent-intentioned sorts from beating themselves up too hard when it happens, remind the folks who really suffer from it the most that hey, mayyyyyyyyyybe they should at least consider what's going on there, and... well, the shameless jerks intent on being shameless jerks, they're still going to keep shinin' on like that crazy diamond more or less no matter what.

Is it by default? No.

Can it be? Yes.

People get confused as fuck-all about what is and isn't art. Even self-professed artists.

1. It doesn't have to be good for it to be art. There is, obviously, bad art.

2. Some of what is and isn't good or bad art is subjective. Some isn't. There is objectively good and objectively bad art.

3. Whether you like it or not doesn't define whether something is good or bad art.

4. What you like and what you don't like defines your personal taste, which is a trait attached to you, not the art.

5. The art can be good even if you dislike it. The art can be bad even if you love it.

6. There is unquestionably artistry involved in the creation of a game, a scene, or a pose.

7. Some people are objectively better artists than others in this regard.

8. This will still, going back to the matter of taste, not really mean a hell of a lot in the long run. Good art will be ignored, bad art will be adored, mediocre art will be abhored, and any and all combinations of the above, all at the very same time. Sometimes by the very same person in the same head.

There's a specific artistic principle one of my profs hammered into our heads (or more accurately, tried to hammer into heads but it didn't stick unless people intuitively understood it already) regarding 'level of finish' that I think the hobby could learn a fair bit from. Unfortunately, he was a great teacher, and he couldn't explain it in a way people could understand, and I am a crappy teacher, so I don't think that's a tangent I'm qualified to go off on.

@ThatGuyThere See, I think people should be willing to be proactive in creating their own fun.

Staff are not only there to be the servants of others at all times.

They should be allowed their own fun, too. If they're making that fun for themselves, and it isn't giving them any advantages, and is not associated with any grand, sweeping game plot, they are doing precisely what I wish more players would also do: create their own fun, and not rely on others to spoonfeed them fun. Bonus points if they (read: people staff or non-staff who are creating their own fun) invite others to join in, provided everything's properly labeled from the start.

If, for whatever reasons, players are not permitted to run their own scenes in the same fashion, obviously, that's going to be different. But if everyone is allowed to run things like this, staff should be allowed to do the same without people flipping their shit, provided they're doing so within the same restrictions and parameters that players are.

@Insomnia said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.:

It's separating the two that is the issue. And really that shouldn't be up to the woman who is being bothered to sort it out.

I was mentioning in a PM convo something along these lines. If it wasn't for the fact that I know for certain that the player who did it has serious social... we'll just politely call them 'challenges', I would have read them the riot act rather than just be creeped out and resolve to never, ever engage the player again save for in a staff/professional capacity.

A character I was playing had been in two scenes with this dude, both of which involved philosophical discussions with precisely ZERO flirtation of any kind. My character was deliberately gawky, awkward, and non-sexy. She was a frumpy, socially awkward, librarian with a temper. (So hawt, right?) No flirtation or playfulness at all OOC with the player in conversation, either. Anyway, fast forward a few weeks, and my character is on +where as being in a bedroom with someone. Whether they were using the bed or not is sorta irrelevant, because we all know that's what everyone assumes the moment they see 'bedroom', and that particular stupidity is a stupidity to rail against at some other time; the only relevant thing here is: the assumption is definitely there.

This dude pages me and my RP partner, and asks him if he'd like any help in there with my character.

...

Yeah.

He clearly thought this was completely acceptable behavior, rather than being supremely gross on more levels than I can count without resorting to rabid frothing.

If I didn't know this dude has the social skills of a rotting turnip, that frothing would have emerged to drown that guy in enough foam to make it look like somebody took a fire extinguisher to his dumb ass.

@lordbelh said in Social Conflict via Stats:

While I believe that social skills and mechanics do need to be important, in fact they should have more metaphysical weight than physical stats/skills, they're not equivalents of each other. They do very different things.

They can't be handled the same, because they aren't the same. The consequences aren't the same, either.

Being beat up is a temporary setback. Even if its not temporary, even if you have a limb chopped off, you're still playing the same character (minus a limb). You decide how you handle the loss. Death is permanent, of course, but at least you played your character to the end. Physical combat is the result of two players' agency coming to a head, and arbitrates the physical result.

In my experience people would much rather be beat up, than have dice tell them that a year of scenes and friendship with character X is now at its end, and you have to play out a betrayal that will branch out and disrupt every story and every scene you were looking forward to. Social combat results in one player seizing the agency of another player, and rewriting it. Often with very little thought to the internal conflict and wider consequences of that rewriting.

Acknowledging that, and thus ensuring that your systems have a decent amount of give and take is imperative. You don't need to cooperate to create a plausible scene and story through physical combat. In social combat, its an absolute necessity.

^ This. And it ties in with much of what @Arkandel is saying in the example of the religious person and the atheist, too.

We have much more cleanly quantifiable physical offenses and defenses than social.

The agency issue is key here.

No one would expect to, using one of the physical examples here, chop off a person's arm by playfully blowing a handful of feathers and glitter in their face.

We fundamentally understand that this is a completely broken cause and effect chain that is laughable on its face (unless this is the physical acts to perform a magic arm-lopping spell that weaponizes glitter of some kind, which then becomes a magic system roll, not a physical combat roll on the lopper's part, anyway). If someone attempted this as a direct physical-to-physical means of lopping off an arm, we would rightly say: Hell no, regardless of what numbers appear on the dice, and we would be right to do so. That may take the form of saying, "No, you need to describe this as a plausible physical attack, because that method is not appropriate to the intended results," or it may take the form of a staffer or ST stepping in to say: "That is so ridiculous that none of it happens at all," or any number of other things, but I am reasonably certain that as players, staff, tabletop STs, etc., that would not be permitted to stand as the actual cause and effect chain of a character physically losing an arm in the course of play.

Is it entirely possible that the lopper's physical combat dice roll says, "Yup, I lopped your arm!" A responsible loppee is going to take that without complaint, but a responsible lopper is not going to insist on the mundane blowing of glitter in someone's face to accomplish it, no matter what the dice say.

We're pretty routinely subject, however, to the equivalent of this in social scenes. Someone cooks up an idea they want to use as their method of achieving a specific end, and no matter how implausible or ridiculous, if the dice say it works, it has to have worked. In a social conflict, using the priest and atheist as an example, you can, per the rules in many a system, say that one or the other does a tap dance, and if the dice say 'that totally converted the other guy to your way of thinking', that's what the dice say. And people will fight tooth and fucking nail to strongarm this implausible nonsense as entirely reasonable and fair "because the rules say so!"

Well, the rules also say that if the dice say your arm is lopped off, if somebody says they did it by blowing glitter in your face, you gotta stick with that, too.

Yet, in one instance, the absurdity is almost universally recognized as being absurd to the point of damaging, while the latter? Not so much.

Do people abuse this? Of course. But that's not what I'm getting at here -- people can and do abuse everything. But if we're looking at defining 'who is playing fair' here, which is ultimately the call a staffer may have to make, the physical example of glitter-delimbing is an obvious call: no, it is not reasonable or fair for the lopper to force acceptance of that method on the loppee.

@Lotherio said in Policies:

Myself, I always have something about TS. Only because I don't care, but I don't want to have to field questions form players (hey, can we fornicate with furniture? - me: don't ask, don't tell, I don't care). Some people may not be interested in a place with such policies because some leap to the idea that TS is encouraged or something.

"What you do in private locations, provided it does not break any other game policy or rule, is your business and your business alone. It is not the business of other players or staff. Players not directly involved in such scenes should not approach staff with concerns about who may or may not be engaging in roleplay of mature themes that do not violate game policy; if they are not breaking a rule, it isn't staff's business, and it isn't yours, either."

@hedgehog I am entirely out of even to can't with.

@Ghost I agree that it isn't a great choice for folks who want full control over their character's fate, but I don't think the other extreme -- random capricious PC kills to show that shit just got real guys! -- is viable, either, for an enjoyable play experience.

While there are some players who will whine and bitch up a blue streak about getting a hangnail or oh my god my character could never be intimidated!, they're fairly rare.

The sort of deaths people are averse to, for the most part, are the capricious ones. "He sat on my favorite barstool!" was, for a long-ass time, considered a perfectly reasonable cause to turn somebody's PC into a greasy red smear by someone having a crappy day RL and wanting to flex their muscles IC to feel important somewhere, and I'm pretty sure most folks these days agree that's complete bullshit.

The husband goes on about what his tabletop games have dubbed 'the PC aura'. And I think it's relevant here. NPCs are -- generally -- fine for that kind of show of force. You are not ending another player's story on an OOC hangry mood whim, then, and yeah, that's relevant. This goes to something bigger, though, and that's that the hobby has -- for the most part -- grown up and opened its eyes to the fact that it's shitty to smash up someone else's shit they invested time and effort into just because you can or just because you wanna smash some shit to get an RL bad day out of your system.

While there's a fair age spread in the hobby, I'd still think the majority of us who have been at this a while are between about 28-45 or so. It used to be mostly high school, college, and maybe a handful of just-recently-graduated college folks -- yes, we all got old.

I'm not throwing the 'growing up' term around for the sake of mere metaphorical language here. Not only do most folks have less time to invest (which means people want more quality out of that time, however they define 'quality'), we also collectively have a much better understanding of what investment of time and effort means as rent/mortgage-paying adults with jobs and responsibilities, so, yes, you're going to see a lot more resistance to the party kid/rebel 'just burn it all down ha ha ha fuck it smash all the things' mentality that's a lot more common in high school and college. When you know how much work shit really is to build up yourself -- in reality -- you get a lot less inclined to smash other people's shit up for sport. It's an empathy that translates to other aspects of life, games being no different (usually in subtle ways but sometimes much more consciously).

@Miss-Demeanor said in Where's your RP at?:

Why are people so afraid to have characters die? Why is death such a terrible thing in a game? Yeah, its the end of a story. Not the only story, just one of many. You can make a new story. Stories don't have to stop just because one person dies. The narrative continues under a new voice.

I don't think it's actually the dying that's an issue for most. It's dying pointlessly or without time and attention to the narrative, which can be pretty rare in most events (there are definitely exceptions). If you get ground to a pulp with a bad roll in a huge combat where your character's story ends in a half-line footnote of red mist after you've been playing them for a year is a pretty shitty ending to have, pretty much, but sometimes it's the best you're going to get out of a combat event death even with a really great ST, depending on what else is going on in scene.

Being random-smote to just prove shit just got real, that so-and-so really is a badass/means business, is really a fate best reserved for NPCs.

In all seriousness, since we are now arguing about the ways in which people choose to argue, shouldn't this be the meta-meta-discussion?

<rubs her temples and reaches for the tylenol>

@WTFE You just had someone tell you they were planning to add precisely this to the default room code to be used freely and are still bitching and whining.

Dude, I love you, but you are your own worst enemy right now, and are bitching for the sake of 'still not good enough' bitching. In the process, you're alienating the shit out of the creators who are generally interested in ideas like this in the first place by shitting all over their faces while they are telling you that they were or are interested in providing exactly what you were asking for.

You can even go over to the code forum and see how far back I asked about this re: temprooms; same code was going on to the stock room parent to allow for public-added addendums as needed, on the fly.

If you'd rather flail around frothing, s'all good, but it's counterproductive and I have zero qualms calling that shit out when I know somebody's generally better than that.

@WTFE said in Identifying Major Issues:

I'm sorry if you think finding "staff über alles" and "all PrPs and nothing but PrPs" being both equally problematical is an issue.

The problem is, no one has suggested, let alone said, either of these things are ideal.

You have an issue. People responded to say, "Yeah, we should do that," and instead of realizing, "Oh, hey, maybe these people are listening, cool, that will be an improvement if people get on that, do it!" you chose to find different reasons to just keep on bitching and being negative and shitting all over people. Example, @Rook, who agreed with your idea, you seemed to see fit to attack just because you don't like the kind of game s/he (sorry, don't know which!) picked (WoD), despite their support for using that idea and thinking it needs to be more available.

Then you just bash @Derp for 'probably being an American' -- while you're the only one thinking of absolutes, by insisting everyone else is thinking of them, when they're not. That's in your head, not on the screen. You're at the point of making a fool of yourself. Seriously? Take the condescending attitude and scrambled-for justifications to just keep being a dick to people for no damn reason to a different thread; this one is meant to be productive and constructive and while 'OP doesn't get a say', I sure as fuck am going to speak my mind on this point because I'm tired of people's grudgewank-filled sandy vag whining, and inability to see how inappropriate their bullshit behavior is, fucking up otherwise useful dialogue.

@Tinuviel There's a difference, I think, between bitching about somebody or venting and harassment or cheating, and it's a pretty important one.

Maybe it's just that I don't tend to take second-hand views on people to heart very often (which has absolutely gotten me burned for it; I mean I let Spider live in my house, ffs), and tend to judge for myself, I dunno, on the gossip front.

The instances I'm thinking of involve things like fellow staff on a game doing things like trying to influence me to deny apps from people they don't like, or give those people grief over things I'd never give anybody else grief over. It's the difference between bitching and people expecting me (or someone else) to take action based on their bitching in a way that's negative, and unjustified, to the target, in most cases. Which is a pretty easy line for me to draw, at least.

Scream up a blue streak about how much you hate JoeBobMonkeyPants, get it out of your system, but don't talk about how you wanna cheat him out of something, or create extra hurdles for him as a staffer that no other players deal with, tell me about how you enjoy harassing him (seriously people have done this, what in the actual fuck, people?!), or try to get me to join in some crackpot scheme to drive him off the game/etc.

Just a few things to add, really.

1. No matter how many things you plan for, expect to find ten more you didn't foresee as you work on getting those things done. This will continue for the duration of the game, no matter how well you've planned. This is OK. If you want to knock it down to nine more of these things the next time, keep notes on the things you forgot/overlooked/did not foresee this time. (This will continue for the duration of, well... life.)

2. Be prepared to deal with more irrational behavior than you expect. We all expect some, but there is always more than that.

2a. You will be tempted to think that reasonableness, understanding, and transparency will resolve this. Sometimes, it will. Sometimes, it will help a little. Other times, it won't, and anything you do or say will be twisted into something horrible. This will be frustrating and you'll feel helpless to 'fix' it. This is because you actually can't fix it; like politics, the same basic, harmless statement or event can become a firestorm through convoluted interpretations alone. You can try. You just need to accept that no matter how hard you try, it isn't necessarily going to work. The best you can do at this point is to recognize that this is not really about what you're doing, and try not to take it personally for that reason. The tl;dr of this is: you can only discuss what you've actually said or done; there's only so much you can do regarding what somebody thinks you have said or done.

3. Do not expect that everyone will know the ins and outs of the culture of the game, or games like this at all. Newbies happen. If there's a social contract, lay it out. Nothing is so daunting to newcomers as being treated like they're horrible because they didn't realize they couldn't enter a room that was unlocked without permission if they're used to playing on games where you'd use a lock if you wanted or expected privacy, etc. Let people know what your expectations actually are, even if you think they're common sense. (What is or isn't common sense varies wildly.)

This is all in addition to what everyone else has already said.

@ganymede said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

@krmbm said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

Sorry if you don't care to be lumped in with us plebs, but - like it or not - we are your catty, cliquish people. There may be a few good apples in the barrel, but numbers don't lie.

Man, karmabum, you've gotten cynical over the years.

I think if you actually look at the Hog Pit recently, there's only a select few that are sniping at each other harshly, but even they pale in comparison to the eloquence of our dear brother, HelloRaptor.

Mostly, it's about inappropriate GIFs that we snicker at childishly, and petty insults that we think are funny. All of that catty acrimony pales in comparison to some of the shit I see at the gay club where I'm at now.

I agree about the Hog Pit -- but only to a certain extent.

Yours is a very easy perspective to have when you're not the subject of regular dogpiles nearly any time you disagree with someone in any given circle of friends, are not being chased all over the forum (including outside of the Hog Pit) being bullied, or having completely irrational attacks slung at you, which are things more than a few people around here have experienced and are experiencing here.

It is a very easy perspective to have when people generally treat you with a modicum of respect, whether you disagree with them or not, play with them or not, etc.

It is a much more difficult perspective to share when people think it's totally awesome fun times to take out their shitty day or shitty life or personal baggage that you have absolutely nothing to do with on you from out of nowhere, because you're somehow on the designated 'no harm no foul' target list to randomly abuse without any social consequences for this shitty behavior.

As your experience isn't the only experience people are having, it would probably be a good idea to walk a mile in someone else's shoes on this front for a bit before rendering that judgment as you have here.

And out for reals for a bit. Sticking around here is getting hard because it's making me want to try to do stuff and I'm not there yet, thus shouldn't. My temper being a giant pile of WTFery of late... well, yeah, kinda proves it. Not asking for sympathy, empathy, or forgiveness, just noting that I realize it's an issue and I'm not keen on inflicting that on y'all further.

No offense is intended to anyone here, but most of the folks I know only through here or the hobby I've had to take off skype and similar as well. Nobody's blocked or anything, but if I'm a mystery ? all of a sudden, that's why. It's not anything you did. It isn't that I dislike you in any way, or think that you've done anything screwy in even the smallest way, or anything like that. Please do not take it personally, it is sincerely not intended that way.

Hobby fu is just really unhealthy for me right now and if that's all we talk about, well, I kinda can't for the time being, no matter how well-meaning folks are. (And I know y'all are, and do appreciate that more than you might imagine.)

There's a couple folks I've known forever as friend-friends for a decade+, or that I mostly talk about knitting or random life philosophy or whatever with that are still around, but, uh, please grok that I'm not looking to talk game-fu at all. I do love you for wanting to invite and welcome, which is sincerely good of you and speaks so well of you and proves unquestionably why I think y'all are the best of the best, but as much as I you for thinking of me and wanting to include me, I'd be a drag to be around and I refuse to shit on y'all's fun, because I do sincerely want y'all to have fun. It is, after all, the real point.

Good luck to y'all starting games or restarting games or just dreaming some day of running a game or creating a world. Good luck to people brave enough to try new ideas; you are needed, your ideas are needed, and they have value. I am sorry I couldn't help more. I wanted to. I realize that counts for less than a handful of magic beans, but I wish I could have finished something more useful to contribute along the way.

No weepy tears or hand-wringing, just be well, y'all. I'mma try to do the same.