Best posts made by surreality

@greenflashlight said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:

I consider 'want' a pretty useless word that I no longer treat with much respect in my personal usage.

Here's the thing: want is a useful word. It has a real purpose.

You speak a lot about what you don't want. I mean, the obvious thing here is semantic and basic logic; without want there's no don't want. The less obvious, but I think perhaps more important thing, is that boundaries can be expressed very effectively with the word want.

Example:

I don't want an investigation of this.
vs.
I want this problem to stop in a way that does not expose me to further discomfort, risk, or personal violation. I want to feel secure, comfortable, and respected here, and I want to heal.

Again, I'm not inclined to speak for anybody else here, but I'm pretty sure the folks who are or have been staff here would agree that we can't do much with the former. We can do a hell of a lot with the latter.

If you start an investigation against my will, then I'm forced to assume an investigation is the thing you want rather than to respect my wishes, since in this example they're mutually exclusive and you didn't choose another path toward your goal of chasing your prey.

No, you aren't actually forced to see it that way. You're actively making the choice to see it that way, and that is actually something you have to personally own.

The presentation of staff as predator in this instance is somewhat disturbing, though.

The accused is the end you're pursuing, and I'm the path you're stepping on to get there.

Except, to staff (by which I consistently mean 'staff who give a fuck and have an actual soul', not the lunatics with wizbits out there), this is not the case at all. Not by a mile.

The end they are pursuing is a game that is not a free-range hunting ground for predators.

The path they are pursuing is putting boot to predator ass when those predators are identified and slamming the door behind them, not grinding that boot to your neck to force evidence out of you to identify quarry on which they can then predate.

I say this as respectfully as I can: if this really is how you perceive the matter, yes, the coping mechanism of just stepping away from the entire game is probably the best course of action for you personally.

I perceive harassment mostly as a violation of personal sovereignty; as a theft of personal boundaries. My goal is to heal that breach by allowing boundaries to be reestablished under the victim's control.

Here's the thing: staff can help you with that. They can't do it for you, and there's a difference between helping and doing it for you that's important. Now, it's going to depend on the staff, and on what policies they have about such things, but many games allow for this.

Many games have things that allow someone to block pages or @mail from other players to stop private OOC communication from that person, and that's something a player can do entirely on their own to stop unwanted communication from someone.

And that is possible whether or not someone has tried 'Hey, not cool, knock that off.' From what I remember of your case, you did take the 'hey, knock that off' step, which is laudable, because it is setting a boundary. Not everyone does that, and while I don't consider it a required step nor do I think it should be a required step, it's a good one to take. (That you did this suggests you're not just leaving this all up to staff to do for you, pretty much, and that's awesome on a number of levels.)

Now, there's a reason the 'knock it off' or 'leave me alone' step is awesome -- and I think it's a way that might be especially helpful to you from what you're describing here.

While there's argument sometimes about how it gets implemented or managed, many games have what's known as a 'no contact' clause. It's basically a formal statement that (generic) you and somebody else will not knowingly communicate IC or OOC on a game.

This is something you can ask for from staff, and here's the thing about it: when it comes right down to it, you don't often need any elaborate reason or evidence. "I don't want to interact with Bob, he makes me uncomfortable," doesn't require any more than that. And most games, you don't even need that. "I don't want to interact with Bob, he's a jerk," or "I want a no-contact with Bob, he was awful to me on another game entirely and made me completely miserable" works equally well, same with plain ol' "I don't want to interact with Bob <no reason provided>." There's no investigation there whatsoever, staff's just going to slam the wall down for you and help you enforce it as needed.

You can choose to explain, "I was talking to Bob and asked him to stop doing X; he wouldn't stop, so I'm asking for no contact with Bob" if you want to. If you want to be super awesome, you can send a log of sending a page to Bob to that end and whatever, if anything, his response was.

There's no prying and no invasion there. There's no stepping on your neck.

Is it possible that Bob gets banned over that? Sure. For all you know, you're the third person that day asking for the same thing, possibly for the same reason. He's banned for his cumulative impact on the game, though, not because of your request.

If I have to choose between letting a predator go and violating the trust of an already damaged victim, I'll let the predator go every time, because the idea of hurting the victim more in order to buy safety for the next person is abhorrent to me. I don't believe in buying a third party's safety with a victim's pain. In my personal hierarchy of sins, that kind of betrayal is in the top three. It offends me on the deepest level.

@ixokai addressed this well, so I'm not going to repeat what he said.

One of the core principles of being a member of staff is that all players on the game are important. All of them matter, no matter who they are, what they do, what they've done, what's been done to them.

Ultimately, the target is not even more important than even the accused -- as they both have some rights, even if one is given the benefit of the doubt. (That's what an investigation is actually about, if one exists. More about that in a sec.)

What you are asking here is to make the target, based solely on their word, more important than literally every single participant on the game combined. They are now the most important person on the game, full stop; their needs and wants are placed above every single other individual present. Not just any given staff member, but all the staff. Not just any other player, all the players. Everyone.

You are asking someone to demonstrate a stunning measure of favoritism to someone based solely on their word that something -- that they do not wish to speak about, be questioned about, or provide evidence of any kind to support -- occurred, and put their wishes and well-being above those of everyone else.

No.

No, that's a mile past the ethical line.

I think that the way to get a victim's cooperation is to earn their trust by giving them back the power their attacker took.

This is not possible. I don't mean 'it's not staff's responsibility to do this ever', even though this is also true, I mean this is not actually possible.

Nobody can give that back to you.

You have to take it back yourself, claim it, own it.

That's the only way it works.

Staff can help you defend that line if someone tries to cross it again, but they can't give you that.

If you become their friend, then they will be willing to align their goals with yours if they can; to use a personal example, I never would have told the staff of United Heroes one word about my harassment if it hadn't been for my friend Prototart needing me to (not that it ended up doing any good, but I had to try).

Staff isn't there to be your friend, though. That's what your friends are for. I mean, you may have a friend who is also staff, but it's not staff's job to be besties with everyone -- that is a gross violation of their boundaries, and you're not entitled to be someone's bestie just for doing the equivalent of showing up at their front door.

Maybe I'm the only person who thinks the victim should be prioritized over the criminal

What you're missing is that the target is being prioritized over the predator. One remains welcome in the community, while the other is excised from it. The target is simply not being prioritized over the entire community as a whole in every way, which is staff's core responsibility.

There are reasonable arguments to have about 'by the numbers' approaches that go the other way, too, and people have seen damage done because of this. For instance, if the predator is an active scene runner, 'the numbers' suggest not getting rid of the predator at all, but kicking the target to the curb if they are not as 'by the numbers' generative of activity as the predator.

Again, maybe I'm speaking too broadly, but I can't imagine any of the people speaking up in this thread giving the first fuck about how much activity a predator is generating for the game if they're identified as a predator and thus are a danger to the game's community that should be removed.

So there are some objectionable 'by the numbers' arguments people have had over time, most of which boil down to the above, but 'ignore the well-being of everyone to focus on one person's needs above all others and allow an abusive party to freely abuse others' is just not one of them.

@tempest I don't think you're one of the people playing that particular popularity/bullying game.

You're an equal opportunity shit-flinger, and, yeah, you're chill and fun to hang out with on a game.

That might be why you're not seeing what's kinda painfully obvious in regard to some other folks, though, 'cause that shit is so not subtle.

@saosmash Honestly? Some of the names in that thread were braying for Auspice's head in this one not so long ago. I've personally observed how long they wank on a grudge and go nit-picking and twisting anything and everything into a federal case for shit to attack when they single somebody out with the intent of causing harm or humiliation or driving someone out. It's childish bully behavior, it's bullshit, and there's no excuse for it, or turning a blind eye to it and pretending it isn't happening, amongst people who claim to be adults.

It's worth note that not everyone agrees there's any offense here in the first place. If there was universal agreement on that front, this would be an entirely different conversation.

I don't think there's a problem with games that choose to exclude them.

I don't think there's a problem with games that choose to include them.

I think there is a problem when members of the community insist that all games must be one of these things or the other, and the other alternative is unacceptable.

I think there is a problem when members of the community insist that players engaging in themes without these elements are 'thin-skinned fantasists' or 'whiny children who want to live in bubble-wrap world'.

I think there is a problem when members of the community insist that players engaging in themes with these elements are 'glorifying bigotry' or 'must be into that RL, too'.

This is because both of the above attitudes are complete and utter nonsense, and we should all be smarter and more mature than (either of the) that(s).

@faraday I don't tend to see a character on a MUX as a protagonist or antagonist, but instead as parts of an ensemble cast -- as in, not one with stars and supporting roles, but one in which everyone is part of a whole, with the same (OOC) default importance to the story. How much they end up in the spotlight tends to be a factor of how much initiative they take to end up there. (This doesn't mean there's nothing special about them any more, it's that it's a group of special individuals each special in their own unique way.)

I try to steer clear of the hero|villain/protagonist|antagonist dichotomy in general, since the hero to one is the villain to the next, and so on, and not only in the sense of the villain who doesn't realize his plan to better mankind is monstrous or the reluctant anti-hero sort of way. More in that most characters, like most people, tend to be most interesting when they have strengths and flaws of ideals, personality, identity, morality, etc.

In a sense, I don't see allowing these types as a form of 'allowing antagonist PCs' -- I don't think that's what you're suggesting, either, really -- but as 'everybody on grid's got a grey soul, and some are brighter or darker a grey than others at different times and in different circumstances'.

@ganymede said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

You may dodge the dichotomy, but that doesn't mean that others do.

I don't dodge it. It's not 'this is an inconvenient thing I'm going to ignore because it doesn't suit my paradigm'. I think it's absurd in its entirety, so I reject it in full.

...just like I'd reject a character that was so two-dimensional that an -ism (or collection of -isms) was their sole defining trait without hesitation. I'd do the same with 'is a marine' or 'is an artist' or 'wants to avenge their spouse's murder' or any number of other things that lacked any depth or nuance beyond that one trait or motivation -- and app staff should really not hesitate to do this.

Essentially, I don't think this is some unique issue that requires that dichotomy to exist, I think this is the same 'two-dimensional/one trick pony problem' we are all well familiar with manifesting in the form of a 'trick' that has the potential to be substantially more problematic and upsetting than some of the other tricks that make the rounds.

I don't believe in protagonists or antagonists as viable concepts on a MU*, period, regardless of any -ism either may or may not possess. They don't work outside of short-term NPCs, because a game is necessarily an ensemble cast.

A game isn't 'Iron Man 2', it's 'The Avengers'.
It isn't 'Misery', it's 'American Horror Story'.

It may contain any number of subplots in which individuals take on a protagonist or antagonist role, the protagonist in one may be the antagonist in the next, or each character in that subplot may consider themselves the protagonist, even if they are acting in direct opposition to one another. This third scenario is the most common on a game.

If someone's character is racist or sexist as a side-note or a background bit, then there's no reason why it can't be overlooked or ignored, or made to be just as aspect, not a center-piece. And if a character aspect is not a center-piece, then it can be ignored in interpretation.

(What you're describing relates directly to my preferred approach to this subject, but considering how many people screamed about that to high heaven the last time I brought it up like it was the actual end of the world, I'm not about to do it again.)

And this is the predominant fashion in which it exists: as an aspect or flaw, not centerpiece. Even if you are looking at most actual antagonist characters that have an -ism as a primary motivation for the character, it isn't the -ism that's the overtly antagonistic behavior, it's what that -ism motivates the character to do.

Still, people fall back on time-enduring tropes because there's a reason they survive: they are simple, over-valued, and as American as apple pie.

None of these things are remotely something that is a uniquely or originally American phenomena, c'mon now, that's more than a little ridiculous to even suggest. They're world-wide human bullshit that did not suddenly emerge out of nowhere when the Declaration of Independence was signed. They existed long before it and they exist all over the world throughout all of human history. Does that make them cool or OK? Obviously not, but come on. If it was that simple, people could just set a game in Victorian London or Ancient Rome and voila, utopia at last!

@insomniac7809 said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

Well, ideally it's an IC view not shared by players. But we've all seen people who play creepers, who use the IC screen to try to legitimize creeping on women across the screen. Right?

Rarely do these players play something 'creepy'. They play something they think is going to appeal to their target audience, and then they start working the creepy bullshit in, like turning up the heat on a frog in a pot until it's boiling.

The ones who actually go there -- the Rex/Ashur/Sovereigns -- are pretty much universally unwelcome in the community on games run by anyone with even half a lick of sense. Similarly, anyone espousing hateful or predatory views OOC tends to get bounced these days with impressive speed.

This is the first answer to resolution on this issue, no matter what 'allow', 'disallow', 'allow with consent amongst consenting players', 'some other option' approach any game environment takes on the IC content on the game: these things must have no place whatsoever in the OOC environment of the game, and that line must be held consistently, firmly, promptly, and without wishy washy hesitation about not wanting to deal with conflict by the game's administration.

There are some people who don't want to see hateful, hurtful, ugly words targeting people like them used during their pretendy funtimes.

Which is reasonable.

The only thing I'd say here is that it's somewhat reductive to suggest that the only manifestation this is likely to have would be the use of slurs being slung around. There's a lot more that can happen that's pretty horrible, too, obviously. Mostly, this is a case of 'limiting language is not going to solve the issue' and it's not going to stop people from encountering issues.

You can also run into a completely non-sexist character that spouts off, "Son of a bitch!" or "Motherfucker!" when they hit their thumb with a hammer who'd get slapped by a policy with this kind of focus -- I'm a woman RL and I absolutely do this RL (my poor thumbs, metalwork is seriously not for me, y'all) -- while the sexist character that tells their female employee, "I don't think a woman is suitable for that promotion. Too emotional. Sorry, dear. Could you make sure to get me a fresh coffee on your way out?" would slide by. Not ideal.

There are some people who want to use those words and use the character as a shield.

Which is true, but should not be assumed as the default. Really. This is actually inappropriate. This is fundamentally no different than assuming any other trait or action a character demonstrates is indicative of the player identity, motivation, and integrity.

This same logic has been applied in the past to claim absurdities, 'They were playing a woman, they're not a woman, they are therefore a deceptive monster trying to make me be homosexual RL!'

Sounds opposite or different? It isn't. It's just a different permutation of the problem of making assumptions about a player based on the character, and one way it can go profoundly wrong in hurtful ways, when no one is actually doing anything remotely wrong or improper at all. The 'character gender' attitude described above exists in tiny pockets today, but it was the norm not so long ago. We have grown as a community enough to recognize that it was foolish and damaging.

There are some people who just think the barrier for proving they aren't in the second group needs to be higher than logging in from the other side of the planet and apping a character.

I have never seen a reasonable 'purity test' proposed. (I am literally cringing typing 'purity test' because I find this premise so awful, but there's no question this is what this amounts to.)

I have seen consistent insistences that the only actual 'purity test' possible that is valid is: don't play anything like this in the first place. And that's bullshit.

The reasonable purity test is that the player adheres to the letter and spirit of the 'law'/policy on the game in regard to bigoted behavior, whatever that may be. (Again, IMO, the only reasonable policy is: no, bigotry is not OK OOC on any level, period, the end.)

I do see a pretty big gap between hating shav'arvani or the goddamn metahumans vs. insisting that using the n-word as a comma is just historically accurate, guys.

And here's the problem again: those are not the only possibilities. The longer we keep characterizing people with a different perspective as one of these extremes, actual solutions are not possible because understanding and even comprehension of another's view is impossible. Reductionist thinking like this ultimately only serves to reduce the chances of any positive or productive outcome, because most of the people in the community exist within that very gap which has effectively been rendered null.

@faraday I think, realistically speaking, the storylines you're describing are the most likely by far, and anything else would be an outlier at best.

You do end up with a lot of exceptions, though, that are interesting characters in their own right. The Walking Dead has a lot of examples of these, and many of them flip back and forth along the protagonist/antagonist divide depending on the circumstances and experiences the character has. Black Sails is another example.

The freeform nature of a M* lends itself a lot to the above, too.

I embrace the 'ensemble cast' notion a lot in part because I believe it's an important ideal to reinforce -- that it's a group, we're supposed to be cooperating and playing off each other, collaborating with each other, etc. (The Avengers example is a great one of an ensemble cast in which everyone involved is a hero in their own right.) I tend to shy away from 'protagonist' or 'hero' terms as they tend to imply increased importance being placed on one head, which cannot be the case on a M* in the way it could be in a movie or otherwise standalone story.

@ganymede To claim murder is unthematic on WoD games would be a huge stretch.

"Killing that guy so I don't have to deal with him again instead of letting him linger to potentially interfere with my future plans," has long been considered an acceptable reason to PK with no consent, no discussion, no staff permission, on every WoD game I am currently aware of. The closest thing to a restriction on it is FC's 'you must be this old to ride that ride' policy, so far as I know.

Does it happen often? No. That doesn't mean it is unwelcome, frowned upon, prevented, restricted, consent-based, etc.

When MSB began, which was not that long ago in the greater scheme of this hobby, the attitude described above was considered standard practice. As someone who stood very firmly and aggressively by full nonconsent-with-FtB for many years, even if your views have changed since, you really should know that, come on.

You can put people down about being 'Dan Brown crap writers' if they find the subject interesting, but that's not exactly adding value to the discussion right now, either, yeesh.

Plenty of art is not pretty, and it is not the purpose of art to be pretty or only show us what we want to see. A great deal of art is explicitly created to show the ugliness, pain, unfairness, cruelty, or despair in the world. Art has often been explicitly created to show us precisely the things we don't want to see, and don't want to have to think about or confront, and this is not simply the domain of 'modern shock crap/offensiveness by design' -- go google Goya or Picasso's Guernica or something -- and in no way does this invalidate it as art.

@rook Oh lord. As in... 'if a nude image appears of this person anywhere'?

...where is my copy of photoshop again... must stop the spread of all the PeevedBys PlayedBys...

@thenomain said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:

I will some day make my Changeling game where all the characters work at some kind of Mall Of America, and many of them live there overnight.

Dibs on 'The Katanas and Trenchcoats Store'. That franchise is huge in WoD.

@derp That honestly sounds like highly quirky fun.

I still harbor a secret desire to make an intentional parody-ish/campy bad TV version of reality game with modded WoD/CoD rules hybrized with stuff from It Came From the Late, Late, Late Show and insane-as-hell custom powers like 'call a stunt double' to take a hit, or 'call my agent' to request a reroll/etc. I don't think that's what @Ganymede had in mind when creating this thread at all -- pretty sure she meant serious ideas only -- but I still think that would have been highly entertaining.

Double post: the best way I can think of to describe the 'you are not leadership material' crowd?

They want to be James Bond and M at the same time.

There are reasons that does not work.

@darinelle This.

This is absolutely a thing that happens, and it is maddening.

"That is clearly not the author's intent!!!"

"I am the author. You're wrong."

"I'm not wrong!" <continues making the same argument, usually with 'you're just changing it then because... ' accusation, the low-hanging fruit of this logic>

This is the reason I buy vodka, in a nutshell.

That I have never broken down and just trolled anyone pulling the 'not the author's intent' card when I am the author with, "What do you think the intent was?" "Really? Interesting!" and instead go with, "How can I make this more clear so this misunderstanding does not recur? Is there something you think would help clarify here?" is one of the hardest tidbits of integrity to hang on to, some days.

@Thenomain There's the 'the system allows it, so you have to!' argument some people try to make.

I do not subscribe to this particular newsletter when it comes into conflict with running the game I aim to run. Yes, it is possible to blow up the entire grid in any modern day real world setting; no, I'm still never going to let (generic) you do it.

@apos I don't disagree with what you are saying as it regards writing fiction, or even creating a game world in any other genre. (Or even in a more fantasy-based sci-fi genre to some extent, like Dune, or the Martian Chronicles.)

I vehemently disagree with what you are saying as it pertains to a MUX on which players are going to be making characters that have expertise in some area or another that you have to define as existing in the first place, what it entails, and why it's the difference between life and death when you're living on a space ship.

Regarding the edit, that's the problem: that is not something that can be done as easily in sci-fi.

There is a non-trivial reason that 'world building guides' even for non-interactive fiction in which there is only one (or a small duo or trio) of authors at work cover more or less everything -- and then have a whole additional book specifically for sci-fi settings. The audience expectations are that intrinsically different.

ETA: Pacing to reveal things to a reader or viewer is way, way different than necessary exposition for players to be able to create the characters they want to play in sci-fi. As a passive consumer of fiction, you may not know the ship runs on a warp drive that uses byzantium217 hydrocores on day one, but the person playing the ship's engineer? Needs to know this.

@faraday WoD is at least a little better with the 'opportunities to use them' problem -- it's just not universal. They do better in that they create more abilities and such that rely on them that might not necessarily be the 'smack somebody over the head with it', re: effectiveness of some powers and whatnot.

I've seen a lot of the 'let's leave this to the dice, I could go either way' rolls, too, amongst people who generally know each other well enough to know the people they're playing with aren't going to go crazy places with the results. That can genuinely be a lot of fun and I wish people would do it more.

It hits a number of walls, though, and while I think it's entirely possible that (generic) we'll get there at some point, it would take time and a willingness to act on multiple levels. I hammer on the notion of 'moving parts' in mechanics and policies and staff enforcement and all the rest, but I think the long-standing social fu problem is one of the most glaring examples of this.

It goes all the way down to the 'if someone can do this with the dice, is it inherently universally permitted that they be allowed to do so' question.

A lot of folks come down on the side of 'yes': if the mechanics allow it to occur, so must staff/other players/etc., even if it means the game ends tomorrow because someone blew up the grid.

'No' gets a lot more murky in that it has more moving parts (system, policy, staff enforcement, player culture, setting), even if 'no' is pretty clearly the sane answer, and where any given person puts that 'no' line.

@ghost said in Social Systems:

Any caper/investigation show from Miami Vice to Leverage has an investigative phase where their target is researched before the lead female puts on some ridiculous dress and goes into the cocktail party to flirt with and plant a bug on the crimelord. Dexter did it before his killings.

These examples are RP gold and work well with players.

These are those early/intermediate steps the people trying to pull absurd bullshit tend to overlook. They're relevant and they are good form.

They also mean that everyone involved is much more likely to stay true to their character. That's the genesis of the stat described earlier: have people make a list of their things. Working against them, so much harder if not impossible. Working toward them? Easier.

Most good players are going to be down with something like this. The 'not in character for me' issue may not be wholly resolved, but it is mitigated by the aggressor taking steps to ensure that the ask is set up in such a way as to respect the other player's concept of their character and what that character would do.

Bear in mind, I do not consider 'I can never lose' and 'you will do what I want, how I want it, I don't care that it makes zero sense for your character' players to be 'good players', in that the selfishness level is right off the charts in both extremes.

@arkandel I can tell you right now, just looking at that makes my eyes cross and I cringe from the soul out at 'omg more code and fuss to keep track of' potentially for piles and piles of characters. That sounds like a lot of overhead to manage for one character, let alone the other dozen or more I would ideally be interacting with sometimes.

I realize this isn't a huge thing for many folks, but it is enough so for me that it would be a major 'do I feel like dealing with that' factor for me regarding 'do I play here or not'. Probably a bigger one than 'do I think the rules for what it accomplishes are tailored toward my preference for how to tackle this subject', even.

@roz Yeah, that one was me, I think. I'm mostly staying out of this one, though.

I think it was pointing a stick at someone's chest and saying 'bang' and expecting it to work or something similar, but yes.

Few people object to 'can be influenced'.

People object to 'can be influenced in a hopelessly unreasonable manner' in the social arena in precisely the same way as they would object to someone pointing a stick at someone's chest, saying "bang", and expecting it to blow a hole through them in the same way a shotgun would if this were to occur in combat.

This has nothing to do with dice pools whatsoever and everything to do with absurdity. The 'my medical dice won't bring someone back from the dead!' example is also excellent. The other I like to use is 'it does not matter what your dice say, you cannot throw a baseball and hit the moon'.

These limits exist in the physical and mental aspects of the game, too. People are just generally not stupid enough to try them.

Many people refuse to recognize the bounds of absurdity in the same way in social rolls, and too many people have tried to pull the 'I fixed your car and made my roll so now you have to fuck me' when, hey, maybe I hate that car and wanted it dead so I could buy a new one, and fixing it would make me frustrated and angry with them instead. Similarly, the cheap pick-up line approach simply is not going to work on a nun no matter how hot you are, but people demand that it must.

In short: fuck those people.

If you need to have the understanding that you can't shoot someone with a stick and the word 'bang' for that firearms pool to do you any good, it's the same with social foo.

That means that, yes, you would probably have a better understanding of how to approach that other person to get your attempt to work, in the same way that 'must have a gun and not a stick and the word "BANG!"' is part of the fundamental knowledge inherent to successful use of the firearms skill.

It also means that, like the firearms expert knows they need a gun, the subterfuge expert has a better understanding of how they must appeal to their target to be believed. Neither gets to just 'make up' how they want this to happen, however we see people do this with social rolls all the time, and then demand that not only does it work, it works the way they want it to no matter how impractical or unrealistic the approach they chose is, even if it is just as impractical and unrealistic a means of impacting their target as the stick and "bang".

As a result, the way many people have traditionally approached social rolls is fundamentally broken, because they haven't traditionally been held to the same practical standard as 'no, you can't just point a stick at someone, say 'bang', and blow a hole through their chest, you need a gun for that'.

I have little issue with my character being swayed through plausible means.

I have major issues with my character being swayed through complete absurdities, same as I'd have major issues with the "Bang!"-twig blowing a hole through my chest instead of an actual boomstick.

...and we loop back to that whole 'systems designed for tabletop are designed with the understanding that someone at the table will inflict common sense upon the rules as written when and however necessary, typically have a rule that insists this should occur whenever necessary, and people who don't like the interpretation or definition of common sense that table takes won't return to it' thing.

I think a lot of what @icanbeyourmuse describes (and has described in the past) is, honestly? It's very familiar personally, and it's not just narcissistic horsepuckey when I say that's the kind of approach that makes for a really great player:

• Find the things you will both have fun doing together
• Mutually don't mind if people do things not involving them that are specifically about the unshared areas of fun
• Mutually come along and play along without forcibly changing the focus sometimes on things for each other's benefit to create more opportunities for others
• (somewhat related to the above) Share the spotlight; mutually be willing to be 'the backup person', taking turns supporting each other (which is actually also fun for me at least)

I think of this as 'the three big Cs': Cooperation, Coordination, and Compromise. (With their magic powers) Combined, they <insert Voltron theme music> become the big Collaboration.

@sparks said in Make it fun for Me!:

Saying you should put other people's fun before your own is a little unfair to players in general.

I think this is true to a point, though the exceptions tend to be corner cases, or instances of players who can't have fun while following the basic playground rules like 'the playground is for everyone' and 'sharing the toys is required', etc.

I'm primarily thinking here of the problem child players who can never be intimidated/charmed/lied to/tricked/come in second place/etc., derive fun from one-upping others on the player level, or aren't having any fun unless they're the star and predominant focus at all times. In these cases, yes, players with these traits are potentially going to have to place the fun of others above their own on a fairly regular basis in order to have a healthy collaborative existence on the game.

I don't see this as a fault with the theory; it's a fault in people that needs to be addressed in order to sustain a positive game environment.

Unlike @SG's experience mentioned earlier in the thread, I haven't seen as many instances of staffers or staff buddies benefitting from this, though I don't doubt it happens plenty. My personal experience has been more the opposite: when staffing, or playing with someone on staff I'm friendly with, I expect my fun is going to probably come in at last priority more often than I would expect it to otherwise.