@Jennkryst has been asking for years, and it'd be really nice to see her get a chance to give it a shot if that is on the table. It may work out, it may not, but dang near everything else has at least been tried at some point to find out one way or the other.
I'm working on a novel of a response, but feel it relevant to interject here: a lot of the people who SWAT are kids who have no real comprehension of consequences. (And, horrifically, rarely do they face any.) They expect it to be non-lethal, and think that because they expect it will be non-lethal, the idea that it may end in physical injury or death isn't a consequence they even let into their heads.
This? Is fucking terrifying.
@yyrqun I'm not personally concerned about it. I'm chill with games that go in either direction, for different reasons. Sometimes I like being the <thing> that is an exception, sometimes I like <thing> being the norm, sometimes I like something else that is the norm when <thing> isn't even if <thing> is a concept I normally enjoy. I don't have a preference personally on this specific issue until things start veering toward Gor level extremes, at which point there's frankly nothing about the place I'd find appealing, and I simply wouldn't play on that game.
For folks who do have a strong preference, I can understand how it would be an issue for them -- in either direction. I'm just not one of them on that particular subject. I understand why some people may want the reality of the books, I understand why some people may want a certain amount of historical accuracy on historical games, and I understand why some people may want something more egalitarian than those things. I don't think any of these people are wrong to want what they want, or make assumptions about their reasoning for it. It's pretendy fun time; different people have fun pretending different things, and that's perfectly OK -- they just need to find the place appropriate for the kind of fun they want to have to have it.
I was about to type, "I wouldn't go into an Italian restaurant to order sushi," to illustrate this point, but then remembered that some of the best sushi I ever had was at a favorite restaurant that is, actually, an Italian bistro + sushi bar, so here's to analogies that would normally work until 'reality is stranger than fiction' gets in the way.
@seraphim73 See, I'm a 5ft heavy chick with rainbow green hair. Whoever is showing up may not be frightened of the kind of physical harm they may come to, but 'that weird woman is aiming a sword taller than she is at me, she is crazy, RUN FOR IT!' is definitely a thing I have no qualms merrily exploiting.
I mean, at a glance, the old couple in cheap velour track suits would scare no one. When they were screaming through the door, trying to kick it in, and looking for yard tools to bash in a window... they were pretty terrifying. 
ETA: Joke's on them. As if we do yard work. Ha!
@coin This.
I know some games have coded things that replace the name with something like 'a quiet male voice' or 'an androgynous melodic voice' or whatever else, too. These can and should not duplicate (however you want to figure that out), but keeping people's contributions separate from one another isn't trivial. You could even set something up that when you actually meet the person face to face in the dream world, you 'learn' their voice, and thus see their name instead of the descriptor.
The 'spoof others' thing is definitely interesting as a concept, but I am unsure if it's one I would be comfortable running with personally.
If you're going to allow that, I'd suggest that coming with a cost of points that, when applied, records who used it and the statement made with it for staff records.
Most people in this hobby are awesome. Some are not, and that smaller group would be very likely to use this for many ugly things, plenty of them OOC grudgewank, trying to provoke OOC jealousy, ruining OOC friendships, or trying to drive players they dislike from the game, etc.
@apos While I agree with you in theory, sci-fi really is its own animal in this regard, and is substantially different from creating a fantasy-based setting. @faraday is not wrong on the lottery comparison, and every world-building guide for creating a world for fiction (interactive or otherwise) under the sun (or from the moon?) will tell you this explicitly, too. The expectations and requirements are substantially different, as is the required knowledge base.
I have played on many excellent original theme (and/or system) games, sometimes for years, quite happily.
None of them were sci-fi games.
Not because I wouldn't have been interested, but because they weren't there. By the time I'd hear they existed, they'd typically be down to two people logging in ever, and on their way to their demise.
ETA: (Just when the news about SF gets bad, it gets so much worse.)
@lotherio Pretty much this. I'm not the only one telling stories in the world, even if I am the world's creator. I want to create the tools required to enable and encourage people to tell their own stories in it as well, that are meaningful to them, and this requires providing them with information and tools that enable them to do that.
This may mean having all of the information about everything available from day one, with 'what you know IC' clearly marked out and 'what you will want to look at if you want to start crafting plots based in X aspect of the setting' marked as necessary (that isn't required for the non-scene-running player to know, or for the characters to know; in many cases this is stuff the characters explicitly do not know!) for that purpose, and so on. This creates a cohesive framework onto which others can build.
"What the players need to know about the world because their characters would know it" is a bigger pile of text in sci-fi than it is for nearly anything else, particularly if they are interacting with technology in almost any way.
I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE. YOU MADE THESE STANDARDS TO SPECIFICALLY EXCLUDE ME. HOW COULD YOU, GOOD SIR.
I will be in my trailer, crying girl tears. 
@faraday Modern or historical-feel fantasy settings also build on mostly established knowledge in ways future settings don't.
Nobody's going to be asking 'what's a horse?' or 'what's a sword?' -- they may ask 'what's a bloorglebeast' if that's what everyone's riding in your world, but you can tell them, "It's kinda like a horse with scales and feathery bits instead of a mane!" and that's going to cover 99% of anything anyone is ever going to need to know about the noble bloorglebeast.
You have to tell people what a phaser is, and what it does, if all of your players playing security personnel are going to be armed with them.
You have to tell people what a pod is, and what it does, if that's what your little transit shuttles are called, and you need to establish how many people fit in one and how fast they go and whether they can survive re-entry to serve as landing pods or how long their life support lasts if you're stranded in one or or or or or or or...
...and I'm a very much self-defined not tech-heavy person, but even I could go on and on about the things people would need to know -- because their characters would know it and live it and breathe it every day -- before they even made those characters.
You can't just fudge that base level of required info, and 'what kind of story you want to tell' has absolutely nothing to do with it.
The higher the tech level of a game, the greater any individual character and player's agency is in it, barring the rarest exceptions. (The 100, for instance: all that high tech is useless if it's all broken and scattered as non-functioning debris across the landscape, at which point you're not really telling a sci-fi genre story any more, you're telling a survival genre story set in the future with technology existing solely as plot mcguffins or set dressing. It essentially has more in common with The Walking Dead than it does with Star Wars.)
@Luna said:
@Cobaltasaurus lol that's awesome.
The best boob moments on Mus were from back when descs mattered and some dude would be pretending to be a girl. Petite, 110 pounds, size 46DDD boobs. I'd always be like psst hey bro, numbers are the band size. You actually want that smaller. 46DDD isn't that big, boob wise and no tiny girl would wear that. I actually had one dude argue that it was European sizing. Then your band size isn't big enough. Cup size is still wrong. How hard is it to google about boobs?
OMG this. The rib cage horrors were seriously amazing.
Though the euro band sizes seem to be pretty consistent with the US ones, so either way they're epic faaaaaaail. The cup sizes vary, though. (I was all happy 'cause while I did go down a size, it was per the UK cup sizes, so I was like... AWWWWWWYISSS, back into the first half of the alphabet! and then I saw the conversion chart and muttered all the goddammits. 
)
@apos said in Sci Fi/Opera Originality:
so they can make their head canon click.
This is sorta the point. Some people are not going to be able to get interested in playing at all unless they are able to wrap their heads around how things work.
This point varies for different people.
Wanting things to make sense in a way they can understand is not a bad thing for someone to want.
ETA: Also, I have to disagree with the 'want to detail every little thing' being the problem. I'm one of those people that loves detailing every little thing -- and I know even my level of Tolkien disease (which is nigh terminal) is not enough for the average sci-fi genre fan if I was going to make an OT sci-fi game.
@Jaunt: I'm not talking specifically about your post, but about the many mentions of the same prior to it. That... poisons the well a bit. Maybe that will help make sense of some of it. I try to read good intentions into things and was raised with someone with a well-meaning evangelist mindset (even if it drove me bonkers at times), so I have a thicker skin on this point than a lot of folks may.
I also think your bias is potentially turning some sincere questions into 'trolling', but not knowing specifically which ones you're discussing, I'm not going to hazard a guess either way. There's definitely been some, but it tends to be pretty obvious -- though how obvious may depend on how familiar someone is with some of the personalities around these parts. Hopefully, that is clear and understandable; I'm pre-coffee as yet, gods help me.
I know I'm in the process of building a game (or three; I have no idea if they would fit the criteria for OR or not, but that doesn't really worry me either way and doesn't offend me in any way -- I'm doing it the way I think it should be done to create the specific environment I want to create, and if that happens, it's all win anyway), and had asked a few questions in the thread about a variety of things, because I was curious if your site would be a good resource for me. I tended to get the runaround more than I got answers that would have helped me make that determination, since the answers seemed to demonstrate a lack of understanding the question more than anything else. I've peeked at some of the articles, but haven't (yet) run into anything that's uniquely relevant to my situation. Granted, I don't expect that everything would be, or even most -- and that's true of any resource.
I do, however, find a lot of useful information and help here -- more than I have on previous iterations of the community forums. I'm a world-building addict, but the technical points of setting up a server, managing things on that end, and working on code, are very much my weakness. Some of the folks who have had the strongest negative reactions in this thread are the very same people who have offered me enormous help on the technical end for projects simply for the asking. To me, personally, that says a lot more about the actual quality of a person than just about anything else, and that is something that's immensely common on this particular incarnation of the forum. It is, really, a refreshing change from previous versions. While the same thing happened, it wasn't as frequent, and the broad encouragement and support here that arises around potential projects is a distinct sea change; 'that's going to suck, don't bother' was the old norm. I'm not afraid to ask 'stupid questions' about the things I need help with here, for instance, and that's not something I would have dared before.
Don't get me wrong; I can be a shrill-ass harpy if I get my panties wadded. (This is no mystery.) I make no claim to nobility here, myself. But, even so, it isn't just noble souls that create, or consume what is created. If it was so, mercy knows I wouldn't get my panties wadded so often in the first place!
@arkandel said in Social Systems:
I think the issue here is a combination of a high overhead in making social plots compared to making physical ones, which devalues the former even when it comes to using them on NPCs, and pure stigma; far more cases have been recorded where assholes tried to abuse Manipulate to get others to play out stuff they didn't want than Brawl.
That's really just part of it. Way back, I mention the thing about the kinds of things people are trying to accomplish with their roll or skill.
Punch someone is a one stage effect, with the desired outcome of 'that person takes damage from being punched'.
Most social actions aren't handled the same way, and most people rolling them aren't going for the equivalent of 'that person takes damage from being punched' -- they are looking for an outcome that is much more specific, and involves many additional moving parts.
"I roll to seduce your character so they'll willingly have sex with me."
^ This is not an equivalent end-goal as 'your character takes damage from a punch', but it's the kind of goal people tend to go with, ignoring all the moving parts in the middle to get from point A to point Down-N-Dirty-In-Your-Pants.
That's more equivalent to 'My punch landed, so I do damage, knock you unconscious, and it tore your shirt so everybody could see you're wearing that greasy old laundry day tank top underneath, and since you fell on the floor, you're face down, and now you have to roll a save vs. whatever gross stuff is all over the bar floor you're drooling into.'
If people took the same approach to the seduction attempt as they did to the combat -- namely, it's not a 'one shot and I get everything I want the way I want it' -- things would be different. For example, it's going to take a bunch of punches for most people to go down as described above. How about 'I'm going to make a roll to see if I can get your character's attention in a positive way' first? For instance: "Rolling to see if flashing a little leg gets your character's attention." <-- most people would not find this in the least bit objectionable, and it's closer to being on par with landing a single hit in a reasonable combat scenario.
And a lot of systems do approach things from this perspective now, which is good. But the culture has to catch up to that, and it needs to smack the people still trying to turn one landed punch into a TKO for the title belt with every possible flourish and bit of fanfare under their complete control. We would not tolerate that under any circumstances in combat, but for social rolls, plenty of people still operate under the assumption that that's how it's supposed to work.
@Jeshin said:
- We have been discussing OR and how it works as a community a lot and since Musoapbox (out of all other communities) has been the greatest contributor to message clarification and introspection. I figured if we had to have a messy muddy possibly brand damaging thread this would be the most productive place to do it.
We're weirdly... good for that.
While the tone can (and often is) pretty harsh around here, it's rarely ever for the simple sake of being harsh. Sometimes it is, but that really is pretty rare. On previous incarnations of the board it was a lot more common, but it's not typically the thrust of even the most heated arguments.
Arguments of varying degrees of civility usually happen because, in a nutshell, people give a crap and don't agree about something. I mean that's common sense, but it's pretty easy to lose sight of in the heat of things.
While it isn't necessarily fun, it's worth keeping the cause in mind. (The 'give a crap' part.) It isn't always easy to find people who do.
@arkandel Exactly this.
I will not play with Jeurg because I know he will engage in disingenuous bait and switch behavior that skews toward subject matter I don't enjoy and find intensely disturbing, and he likes to force people to go along with it even knowing they are not enjoying themselves at all on the OOC level because he has said so.
I will not play with Spider, because she's keen on emotional manipulation of other players on the player level, and is abusive.
I will not play with Ravaun/Hawker, because I find him to be disturbingly unstable and he has no respect whatsoever for OOC boundaries.
I could go on and on. Is this metagaming? Frankly, I don't give a damn either way.
If 'playing the game' or 'being a good player' means 'my experience of the game consists of being forced to interact with these people at length through a chain of experiences that are no fun for me at all as a player because the rules say I have to', that game is not going to be a game I am interested in playing.
Further, I don't think 'is a game' is an excuse for this to be considered an acceptable space to engage in gross behavior OOC through game mechanics as a means of force. I don't think 'is a game' is reason to tolerate these behaviors, or that an unwillingness to tolerate these behaviors is an indication of immaturity, childishness, poor sportsmanship, or 'being too invested/having IC-OOC boundary problems/etc.' or any of the other utter bunk people try to pass off as being the case.
I consider this being a person who doesn't have infinite time to spend on anything, and if I'm going to engage with something, it has to be worth my time to do it. If it is not fun because it's set up in such a way as to encourage wholly selfish players to power trip or generate wankbait through game mechanics at the expense of people who are trying to behave in a reasonable and respectful manner toward their fellow players with cooperation, collaboration, give and take, and otherwise giving a damn about the fun other people are having as well as their own, it is not going to be worth my time to be there at all, and ultimately there's not much that policy or mechanics are going to do change that plain and simple reality.
@Jaunt said:
You can always go the fun route of introducing an STD "plot" to deal with the starlets. It's LOL every time.
Nah, since it has too much of a 'wrongfun' vibe for an RPG that does heavily feature sex and seduction in its real thematic elements. The 'sit around TSing all day thing' has zero to do with the type in question, it's the thematic thing.
It would, for instance, be hilariously thematic for the locals to get drunk, head out to lover's lane, and screw like bunnies because there's nothing else to do. There absolutely will be things for people to do in the game because of the game themes, but if you think of your classic podunk town where there's nothing else to do but that? That would be this town. They don't draw movie starlets by the truckload. 
Most folks go for 'big enough city to allow for anything'. I fell in love with a real place because it was so chock full of classic horror movie tropes and unintentional references (like a real 'Crystal Lake' covered in camps) that it begged to become a game setting for that vibe, which isn't modern gritty urban horror covered in slick neon, it's campy 80s-90s horror film horror, which often enough involves just such places, and just such people going off to Lover's Lane because they're bored (only to find themselves the new seed of a local urban legend when something staggers out of the brush and chases them off again or eats them).
Anytown by Night has been done, and a number of players just port their character from one to the next whether they fit or not. That makes me sad, because one of the truly amazing things about this hobby is the chance to make new things and tell new stories. I just felt no need to pick a place for people to tell different permutations of that story again.
@ghost I still think, as a player, looking to have fun on a game, this is unrealistic.
The paradigm you're describing doesn't take 'am I enjoying any of this at all?' into account even once.
There are, yes, people who are simply miserable unless they're winning all the time and are never willing to 'give', etc. They're roughly as plentiful as the abusers are.
Can all of these assholes. Just boot the fuckers.
Don't punish the people who are willing to give or willing to lose or willing to play fair unduly by making them suffer through tiresome, tedious bullshit that wastes their time and is no fun for them in the name of 'that's what the game rules say should happen because Joe Insufferably Boring rolled that it be so'. If that's what someone wants, they should probably be playing an RPI.
Similarly, don't punish the people who are more than happy to work with the other player to find an outcome that both can live with when the other player 'loses' by banning all such things outright, or those who will take the time to tailor a reasonable scenario toward achieving the goal they have in mind that does not treat the other characters around them like props in their personal story to be steamrolled at will with zero regard for the enjoyment of the other players on the game.
Both of these attitudes are flawed beyond repair, and neither of them will work.
Finally, don't punish the people who don't feel like wasting their time hoping to stumble into something OOC that they'll find enjoyable when the hobby has consistently been moving in the direction of creating means and methods for players to learn more about the other characters around them OOC, in order to best find fellow players with shared interests, with whom they can maximize their enjoyment of the limited time they all have to play the kind of stories they want to be telling. Especially true as in precisely those same spaces, a player has absolute agency to write: "I am only interested in being approached for things IC and through IC means, and am only interested in communicating with your character IC," if that is how they want to play the game and is the way they will have the most fun doing so.
@Jaunt said:
ETA: And what you're doing, creating an environment that's not been done to death, is a great first step. I always like to think about 'surprise', too. When players aren't being surprised, then they're basically just walking through a story in their head for which they already know the ending. That's one aspect of a GM approach that can work wonders; you can kick players off of their straight, well-paved road, and then let them explore the woods. Who knows what they might find in there?
It's more or less the point. I... actually do kinda know what I'm doing. I just don't tend to run things unless I like the idea enough due to the volume of work involved.
(edit: Or I get so irritated with something I have to have a project, but those don't get far without the former.)
@thatguythere I think, oddly enough, this works for and against a place.
One of the benefits of Reno1, back when, in the period between its opening rush (which every game had, after which 1/3-1/2 of the initial appers who just apped every new place at the time fall off in the first or second idle freeze) and WtF2 hitting (when a new wave hit, which was followed by the RfK closing wave), was the size.
It wasn't tiny but it certainly wasn't big. People had to be on better behavior and keep themselves in check and compromise to get anywhere -- all around. And people did, and in a reasonably peaceable manner, too. The environment at the time greatly benefited from this, and it was one of the healthier game communities I've seen during that period.
It's one of the reasons I find that 'active player group of around 10 or so players on most of the time + 20 or so players popping in 2-3 times/week + 20 or so more casual players popping in maybe once a week' to be pretty much the ideal 'sweet spot'; it's enough people around to allow for opportunities, but not so many that things become permanent niches or cliques or circlejerks if people want to actually do stuff.
