Best posts made by surreality

@GangOfDolls said in Policies:

This is the only game where I've seen this policy but there may be other places. The reason that I was told when I wondered about it is the game owner is personally affected by this issue to some extent (I don't know/didn't ask for specifics) and often finds that people who play mental illness tend to play it as unhinged crazy or socially maladjusted, that it borders on offensive stereotype or is just entirely unpleasant to have to RP with.

But it makes sense that other games would ban these concepts, as well.

A lot of people run with the fishmalk, too.

I have a pref for this one for people to clarify if they have issues interacting with this sort of char so people can self-select. It just feels more fair than banning it. People can warning label themselves as playing a 'crazy' alt, and people who have sensitivity to certain types of portrayals can say so in a non-confrontational way. It just 'felt right' as a way to give people the tools required to find/avoid what they're looking for/looking to avoid.

@Arkandel Fuck yes. I have a list.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Policies:

@Arkandel No. There are people playing Arx that I didn't get along with at all in other games. Heck, there are people I DESPISED at other times/in other games playing Arx.

The exception would be if someone had been excessively creepy in other games, like stalking or harassing players or being generally gross and scary.

That's pretty much the criteria I use to select them, too. It has nothing to do with liking the person or not, and everything to do with the kind of damage they do -- creeping, harassment, cheating, etc. as repeated patterns over multiple games, enough to observe that they see nothing wrong with these behaviors that would prevent them from engaging in them on any site I ever eventually run.

@Arkandel said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I guess when I asked "should people be banned on games for past behavior elsewhere?" I was really merely showing off my prophetic powers.

Seriously.

Though 'being a pompous asshat' is not enough to warrant a ban, IMHO, let alone a pre-ban. That tale is just passed along as a reference to something that is a bit brow-arch-worthy that's more recent than @WTFE's accounts of douchebaggery.

@Arkandel said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Juerg was quite nice to me, for instance.

You do not have a vagina. This is relevant.

@Arkandel said in Shadows Over Reno:

@mietze See, Reno's situation reminds me a bit of Vampire@HM - it was kinda like that. Very little staff intervention but a good cast of characters spread out across at least a couple of Covenants... and once people realized that yes, there was nothing governing their steps or hand-feeding them roleplay but there was also nothing in the way of doing with the sphere as they bloody well liked, they took over. The results were great.

That was the intent with 1.0, too, and it was working well enough until RfK closed, at which point the very word 'sandbox' became a pointed insult, and a large percentage of the folks who had been around a while puttering along and enjoying what you're describing above got driven out by a shit-ton of negativity and insistence that everything change to fit the new crowd and what they had been accustomed to elsewhere.

When attempts to do something like that happened, the IC power split was spread around to both camps, but it felt artificial, awkward, and was generally full of head-scratch-inspiring bullshit -- the usual cronyism, gossip games, back-stabbery, and so on. (I mean the OOC kind, not the IC kind.)

Being very much a fan of the kind of environment @Arkandel is describing, provided it has enough reasonable oversight to prevent the kind of stifling roadblocks that @Miss-Demeanor is describing, well, I hope it will happen this time without a repeat of the last go 'round.

@tragedyjones had a season plot for vamp at one point; all but the smallest handful of people completely ignored it. Weresphere actually had a metaplot; see above, wash, rinse, repeat. Entirely unintentionally, they linked up in a way that was pretty neat, too, and that caused some cool tensions and conflicts, as a lingering thing from the few scenes run regarding each. TJ ran a few, Hazard ran a few, I ran one for TJ's and a handful for mine. Some were +events, a number of them were pickup scenes, because since the place was relatively small, folks were happy to either run stuff for each other when asked, or with fairly minimal scheduling.

I'd like to see that happen somewhere, frankly, because that's a good vibe. It'll be a while before I'm off my ass enough to get anything done myself, so hopefully Reno will get there.

@Kestrel said in Borrowing ideas — at what point does it become theft?:

Side note, I'm surprised to learn that that dream/nightmare RP of the style I described in the OP is apparently something people considered generic. I haven't encountered it in other games, but I suspect that I inhabit a different subset of the hobby to most of the posters on MSB. (e.g., I have never played a WoD-based anything.)

WoD (and I think a lot of modern horror settings) have dream-related powers to do this. I know the one I've been picking at for ages does; the game I ran on a stripped down version of the setting and mechanics way back was actually set in that reality's 'dream world', just in a particularly stabilized pocket thereof, where crazy things could happen.

One of the pairs of world-canon characters from that setting -- now I'm getting all wistful -- were millenia-old servants of some of the world's gods, of a sort. They were in direct opposition, and one of them finally managed to confine the other to the extent that, with hundreds of years of isolation, the confined one learned enough dream magic to leap into the head of his jailer with the intent of messing with her until she was too broken to keep up with the terms of his confinement, offed herself somehow, or just gave up. Didn't work. Too quickly, though she had no idea who 'that person in the dreams' was (having forgotten his actual face forever ago), they actually started to understand each other too damned well, decided they didn't want to do this dance any more, and yet, couldn't abandon their roles, either; they were unalterably locked into those until one of the gods was dead or the gods themselves were rendered irrelevant. (At which point, they actively worked together toward the latter end, aggressively, because 'Can we be done already?')

It's definitely out there, and definitely being done lots of places. If they had special code to enable it, that might be unique to them -- we just had, well, the grid. We would have needed special rooms for the real world, for instance, rather than a dreamspace. I've seen temprooms used a lot for dreams, however, over the past few years -- so it does happen.

@Sunny There will be <semi-sekrit theme>, there will.

@Lisse24 I like this idea as an addition more than a replacement, since 'generic cattle call' is still something worthwhile (even if it isn't necessarily useful all the time).

The reason I like this one: it gives someone a chance to pitch the idea for wanting the scene or a scene suggestion. This cuts out the 'Wanna RP?' 'Sure.' 'What do you want to do?' '...uh, you asked me, I thought you had an idea... ' song and dance that can be pretty painful.

In my dream world, we could also have something like +wantRP/faction <faction>=I want to get together with members of the faction to discuss my nefarious plan to monopolize the world's supply of Cheezits or +wantRP/sphere <sphere>=I'm new to the sphere and trying to make connections, if anyone is interested in RP with a pan flute player with a raccoon fetish, please get in touch for a scene!

@Warma-Sheen said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:

Not: 'in a MU* environment, it doesn't offer the practical applications that a tabletop as written blah blah blah Bob Loblaw blah...'

That's what I'm talkin bout.

If you do not think that being in the physical presence of other players vs. being an anonymous entity outside punching/dice-throwing/ability to see horrified looks on people's faces range makes a profound difference on behavior, you're pretty dangerously ignorant of human psychology.

@Warma-Sheen said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:

@surreality said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:

@Warma-Sheen said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:

@surreality Doubtful. I think you're just willing to cater to worse behavior than I would be.

What I -- as player or staff -- tolerate or not has precious little bearing on what some people will attempt to get away with on any given game, period.

That's exactly what it has to do with. What you allow players on your game to get away with is what people will try to get away with. That's the culture your game develops.

If someone tries something you think is wrong for your game, just say no. It doesn't matter if they are trying it because they think they're anonymous. Say no. Its that simple. Say no. Grow a spine and say no. Don't be traumatized and paralyzed with fear of what someone might do. Just say no.

If you can't do that you should run a game or be on staff and have no business being around house rules in the first place.

Frankly, I think you just keep compounding your fallacies here, and you keep making a number of assumptions that are pretty profoundly unintelligent.

Let's break this shit down, shall we?

#1: You assume a player on a game has the authority to dictate how others behave on that game. This is fundamentally and wholly false. The sum total of control a player has over how someone treats them is by not being around the person, reporting to staff about their issue, and employing page/@mail blocks, possibly just leave -- the end. A player does not make the rules on any given game they set foot on. The sum total of a player's power essentially amounts to: "I don't want to interact with you any more than I absolutely must."

#2: It's just as breathtakingly stupid to think any given staffer has this level of authority on most games. Your average staffer absolutely does not.

#3: You are essentially assuming that whoever is making any given HR is headstaff; this is rarely the case.

#4: You assume flawless reporting of issues from the playerbase. This is part of that 'living in a dream world' problem, because that simply isn't a thing. Most people do not report. Many people who do report end up reporting things that aren't actionable ('my boyfriend is TSing that hussy over there, do something!').

#4a: If you're not assuming flawless reporting from the playerbase, you're assuming that staff are aware of every single action taken on the game at all times. This is hilariously unrealistic and bears precisely zero relationship to reality.

#5: You assume that people will follow the rules they're presented with. Wouldn't that be nice? Most do! That's awesome. Plenty don't.

#6: You assume that players will actually even bother to read or be aware of those rules, which, from long experience staffing, I can pretty much promise you, many people simply don't. Many don't even own the books or know the material in the books, let alone any given house rules.

#7: You think that examples of action being taken are an effective deterrent. For some? Sure! But we still have people going to prison regularly in the real world, so punishment is clearly not a universally effective deterrent.

#8: You actually -- oh you sweet summer child -- think that telling some people 'no' will stop them from doing it anyway. That is adorable.

Again: if you don't think there's a notable difference in the way the game is played when people think they're anonymous and are detached from the consequences of their behavior by physical distance/ability to directly observe their fellow humans, and that these conditions can require changes in the way the game itself is played I'd say you're the one who has no business running a game or being on a staff, because that's shit you have to be prepared to handle. Sometimes, it is by telling people 'no', absolutely. Sometimes, it's by changing the requirements for a mechanic.

And this is even before we get into the problems of scale on a MUX, even though they certainly feed in to the ability to know what's going on at any given time.

It's cute that you don't think I have a spine. I would have banned Rex from Reno three days post-chargen because of his more detestable attitudes. Could I? Nope, not even as headstaff at the time, as all headstaff had to agree on such things. Is that stupid? YUP! So, yay for jumping to (hilariously incorrect) conclusions about how I handle things, I suppose; that's extra douchey and narrow-minded of you.

@Warma-Sheen ...are you actually insane?

Pretty much.

There are, realistically, some cool elements of that system -- and I wouldn't be against hybridizing something, as the idea of 'doors as social health levels' is one that I think has some real merit. The no resist, no defense factor, however, is simply not viable.

Either tends to require oversight, but the cultural issue of 'STs are only needed for combat' is pretty pervasive and it's the #1 thing that needs to change. It resolves the worst abuses on either end of the spectrum -- namely: "I'm untouchable!" and "Now you TS me! Oh, FTB? I have one success so now I'm going to take over your character and rewrite them however I damned well please in ways that you as a player are screwed by utterly going forward... sure you don't just wanna TS me instead?"

@AmishRakeFight said:

Over time a lot of very long metaplots have gotten into a corner where the staff running it get worn out by the demands and expectations and diva moments and freakouts of players participating. Sometimes players completely miss incredibly salient details and spend four hours of your life in running a scene where they stay fixated on the wrong thing and will not be gently or jarringly pushed towards the missed detail. A couple times is annoying but couple that with weeks or months of players refusing to roll with things and pushing back on a lot of fine details? A lot of staff understandably throw up their hands and say 'fuck it'.

I like the episodic approach best as well -- since it can be handled by teams swapping out or even a 'guest season ST' to guide it, to help prevent burnout; you just need a head person or people who people check in with on the whole -- but you hit on something really important here that others have touched on as well:

Plot, meta or otherwise, should provide people with things to do, not something that someone must do.

The former creates a range of evolving options and increasing amounts of story; the latter tends to result in dead ends of any number of kinds.

@mietze said:

@surreality said:

Taking the 'distrust by default' approach, which RfK initially did in this case, exacerbates the problem considerably. Why? Because you've already established that you needed rules to prevent staff from playing because they can't be trusted to not cheat or be unfair if they're doing both. When you establish and foster that mentality among the playerbase, you encourage the worst elements of paranoia and staff vs. player dynamics from the top down.

I want to address this directly. I think taking that viewpoint above is a very combative one as well. Why is it that, vs. "We wish to establish an environment for players where they do not have to worry about PvP conflict with staff alts, as part of the culture of our game."

Because PvP conflict with staff alts is not, and should never be, handled any differently, ever, under any circumstances, as PvP conflict with any other person on the game. Period.

Which means having to place rules there is bullshit coddling of either cheaters -- by preventing them from cheating (in easy ways and forcing them to be more subtle about it because if someone's going to play unfair they're going to find another way to do it anyway) in which case gods help you if you gave them authority in the first place -- or of paranoia. And both of these things need to stop for any semblance of health to return to this hobby. Both are egregiously entitled mindsets, and both need to go.

@mietze The 'immunizing' stuff is in response to @ThatGuyThere -- the last bit of the post above mine. I don't think it's possible to immunize, and with methods that do more harm than good IMO, it's just doing more damage while pretending it's possible to create a perfect world.

Partly why it baffles me we're not on the same page is that -- well, we have worked together. I've seen how diligent you are about CoI, and consider you a seriously amazing role model.

You didn't need rules demanding that... that's just what you did because you knew it was the right thing to do, you know? I would trust you to staff on a game I was running in a hot second! (And if I ever get the place I'm slowly prodding together I am seriously going to puppy dog eyes at you, woman, because I think it may be right up your alley and I KNOW you are trustworthy.)

I'm very much in favor, personally, of 'some pivotal roles will remain in NPC hands full stop' for the sake of continuity/etc. on the game, as a player resource. But here's the thing... while those characters are not personal PCs, they're often staff-run if they're of the high end type. (I am also super fond of 'local color NPCs that any player can pose in accordance with whatever notes are provided for the NPC, like 'the waitress that always is stuck with night shift at the diner and remembers everybody's order the moment they walk through the door', etc., but they're a different animal entirely.) Since often enough these NPCs are more powerful than the average PC, I would actually worry more about the potential for abuse there than on a staff PC that, say, owns a club they consider their domain that is their build, is the head of a coterie/pack, or is some important person's second or advisor/etc.

I get the attachment argument in the broad sense -- as in, 'MY character is more important to me than the NPC that might be more powerful' -- but either can be exploited... badly. And one can be taken out, while the other, usually, cannot.

I'm not talking about a free for all with no rules for staff regarding CoI. I just think rules involving OOC behavior need to not bleed over into artificial IC restrictions that further an atmosphere of distrust.

I read it more as "If you know you won't have the tools available to accomplish what your responsibilities entail, don't take that job."

Frankly, with or without groups of some kind, people can, to put it bluntly, fuck shit up.

I've seen this in action on WoD games as a problem child more than on games that were not, really. As a result, though, I'm speaking in broader terms based on experience with both.

Take a basic XP spend. In WoD terms, this is a spend on a skill or attribute. In a system where all characters function under the same ruleset/powerset, it could arguably be anything. 'Sphere staff' setups in WoD could handle anyone's basic XP spend, as while some spheres have special discounts or rewards for certain skills based on type, it's not hard to write a staff cheat sheet on this, and/or note to players, "Hey, if you have any special conditions related to this spend, put it in your job." (I favor 'and' because even clueful staffers sometimes overlook or forget.) There's no reason any staffer at all can't handle a spend like this. WoD is the only place I've seen people forcibly divide this up and it's an example of where the sphere model breaks down. This is the kind of job I think any staffer should be willing and able to do under the heading of 'basic jobmonkey'.

(I need to stop agreeing with you, @Derp, really this is getting weird!) But like @Derp says, some people are more knowledgeable in certain areas than others. Not everyone is qualified to make any given judgement call on the game, and this becomes more and more the case the more groups there are on the game that require tending. In a game like RfK, with one super sphere and m/+, it's not hard to learn everything. Now try applying that logic to TR and imagine the chaos that would have ensued. You would not have found many qualified candidates for staff at all under those circumstances. Also, I've seen 'the jack of all trades is master of none' proven true more times than I can possibly count, so frankly, in WoD, this becomes an absurd expectation without someone who can handle certain special cases because they're the person that knows them best, and has ideas most in line with headstaff's intended direction for the game.

Again, I have seen the 'too many cooks' problem in action. If I was running a TR-style game, I would stick to the sphere model with a middle-level authority to filter the heavy duty judgement calls for any given group, though 'basic jobs' would be open to any admin to pick up and do.

Personally, I wouldn't allow the 'no one but this sphere is allowed to play with our toys by staff fiat' other games have permitted under the authority of a TL/sphere head/whatever, which is one of the primary problems people have with the sphere system. But again, this is a headstaff call as to whether or not that is allowed as part of that role's authority or not.

Apropos of nothing other than it immediately coming to mind the moment anyone mentions cod.

@Groth said:

The biggest problem I tend to discover in the transition from being a player in a game and staff in a game is that as your awareness of behind the scenes things increase, like player requests, metaplot etc etc you often lose awareness of what's going on at the player level since you don't get to interact with people in scenes the way that you used to. Spying on players is one way to gain that sort of awareness but it's something that is easily abused and can lead to the loss of player trust.

I agree with your assessment of the problem; I've observed the same. You at once know more and less from the staff side -- what you know is simply different and it is not quantitatively or universally better or more useful. It's a different perspective, and one that comes with advantages and disadvantages that, frankly, are often overlooked entirely or hand-waved away, though they are indeed real. (This is part of the reason the 'but staff knows metaplot!' argument is generally a bag of horsepuckey; in reality it's a trade-off.)

I do not think spying is an appropriate means to address this, however.