Best posts made by surreality

@Bennie said:

Are the people paired in twos with a partner with goals like "Fuck Lola again" and online every day in a private bedroom going to be the ones pulling ahead

I'm going to give this absurdity more respect than it deserves by saying: I've seen places go on record saying you can't repeat the same short term aspiration over and over again. So you'd have to, say, fuck Lola, then Sherry, and go through Donna and Becky and Jessie before maybe most staff would maybe let you get around to Lola again. Which might have to be something more like 'explain Sherry and Donna and Becky and Jessie' to Lola then somehow still manage to fuck Lola again, which, you know, I'd probably give somebody, given the givens.

turning in all those beats and the dramatic failures at Stamina + Socialize for being a bad lay going to be earning as much as the people who are running plots for others or being organization important?

I'm sure somebody, somewhere, has tried this. Haven't seen it, but I'm sure somebody's doing it. I'm absolutely positive somebody poses really horrible sex on purpose for XP. (And, in all seriousness, three cheers to them, because that'd be such a refreshing change from all the people who have to be awesome at the sexy things all the time.) I'm equally certain that at least a few of these people aren't so cagey about sending TS poses to staff, as required for dramafail reporting, have no shame whatsoever and would have no problem doing it. Part of me is sad for them that the collective news files being shared amongst most games these days more or less say: don't send explicit content to staff in jobs or even BGs.

The disenfranchisement isn't just "I won't catch up to dose guyz." The disenfranchisement is when someone's getting some because I don't think that's valid RP, and don't understand the reality of the situation enough to realize how impressively improbable my fear of this actually is.

To quote many before me: fixed that for you.

@tempest Maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with the fact that some of the same names who felt the need to create a whole thread to shriek about this were the ones braying for her head on a spike a handful of weeks ago.

It isn't a stretch to think they were likely none too pleased when they were told they weren't going to get the pound of flesh they wanted.

We've never seen that dynamic go down with an increasingly melodramatic display of micro-managing, histrionic hand-wringing, or aggressive policing of everything that person does or says on games (or forums), have we? Oh, wait, we absolutely have, all the damn time.

It's just gallingly transparent in this case. Whether or not there's an actual issue, the amount of drama it's generating is completely fucking ridiculous.

@Warma-Sheen said in The Apology Thread:

I didn't understand the community for a long time when I started MUSHing. I played online the way I played at tabletops and LARPs. We played hard, competitive, and to theme. And that was really fun. But it wasn't the way other people on MU*s were expecting to play. And that caused some conflict.

I think this is something that the community, collectively, could be a lot better about, too. It is full of a lot of unspoken 'how things are done' that serves as a major barrier to new folks joining in and creator of conflicts that need never happen.

There are probably a lot of new players we all owe apologies for expecting them to automatically acclimate to a hobby culture that has evolved a lot of quirks that have come to be expectations over its lifetime.

Holy crap. I stay out of the politics forum since this hobby is, for me, as much 'a space away from having endless arguments about real world politics' as I can manage. (Guess who is totally alone with their husband in our families in being 'the blue staters' in terms of perspective, even if all of us live in blue or purple states, yeesh.)

This sort of thing? Convinces me how right a choice this was. Holy crap on a cracker. So incredibly not OK. I probably would have gotten my own ass banned shrieking all hell at him if I'd seen that shit.

<raises a hand> As a person who has been publicly mocked for being weak/whiny/too childish/etc. on these forums over the years and on various games for requesting that people not strangle my characters (because they think for whatever reason it's hot in scene) after nearly being strangled to death in real life, I'm going to ask that we really not go any further on the personal trauma front, unless it's somehow directly related to something that happens on a game.

And yes, when I got ranted at and mocked for that, it actually was pretty fucking triggering for a few hours, and I chose to step back and calm down before doing anything else, so truly, fuck whoever it was (because I am not going to even bother to scroll up) saying these things should never have the power to do someone actual emotional harm that might make them less than perfectly functional for a little while.

In short: yeah, there are circumstances in which game shit can fuck with somebody. Anybody who considers that 'totally unreasonable' as an example of such can, frankly, blow me.

@kanye-qwest This is why, no matter how much you and I may not get along personally, I am 100% behind and in support of, and respect the work you have put into, the game world you created. It is absolutely and completely the kind of setting a lot of people clearly very much want, and appreciate for being the way it is. Personal bullshit aside, that is an objectively good thing.

I just don't think it's the only kind of game or setting that should be allowed to exist, or that people creating worlds, or characters, that are not constructed that way should by default be shamed, insulted, or assumed to be horrible people, because that is an objectively bad thing.

As a quick (maybe more optimistic in some ways?) update...

I have been informed by my doctor that I have a month or two in which I must remain ass in chair or ass in bed, and don't you dare lift anything over 5lbs goddammit.

So while I won't be on games, I'll probably peek in here more(ish) than I had planned to when I figured I'd be heading back into hammering metal and sloshing dye and/or paint and/or patinas around (and the perpetual cleaning and sorting of The Art Lair... ).

There are a couple of kinda in-depth things I have wanted to write for a longass time about some principles game design I think may or may not work, which tends to be stuff I ramble about, but I never get around to explaining because it's even more frickin' wordy. So I'm going to make myself sit down and do that, and if I get through any of them, I'll post 'em here so they can get the scrutiny they deserve. (Read: people point out where it's stupid so it can be adjusted as needed.)

Ideally, I'd like to make them a resource for folks, like a lot of the stuff I cobble together for wiki, and I'd really like to finish all that stuff off to be able to share with folks, too. Kinda seems dumb to have put so much time in and leave it unfinished, and if I have two months of chair time, there really is only so much Netflix, y'know?

If I can actually get it all working, ideally -- ideally -- I will set up a blank droplet on DigitalOcean (all the templates and such but no specific game setting data) with a wiki set with all the extensions and templates so on that someone would need if folks like the ideas and so on, and that droplet could be cloned and sent to people to set up their own thing from without having to copy pages or really install much of anything at all on the wiki itself, just start adding your data.

That's ultimately been the plan for a while, and I really do want to still do that if I can. Whether I'm playing on them or not, I do think Coin's principle of 'more games is better' is a very real thing, and it's a way I think I can help make it easier for people to make that happen.

If I am really lucky, I will have figured out some more of the basic code to pull things from the MUX over to the game -- I have a little and between Theno and Glitch's additions it's made it a lot easier -- it may be able to have a basic setup for that on a blank MUX core, but less than zero promises on that. (Because while it works, my pathetic attempt at coding is -- I will not be tactful here and call it 'less than elegant' -- a hot mess.)

tl;dr: Surrbrain went: finish your tools an' shit, bitch, you ain't going anywhere for at least a month, better make some goddamn coffee.

@saosmash Seconding silverfox here. There are some things totally worth getting banned over, in my book. Ripping a hole in a racist, sexist jerk who thinks they're being cute and funny while being actively cruel and intending harm is one of them.

(The one forum I've ever been banned from was an 'abortion debate' forum that asked me to join them since I helped mod on on livejournal for years. Turns out it was a trap site, like a lot of the trap 'crisis clinics' out there. Am I sorry I got banned for blowing a mile wide hole in the person who said 'who cares what some <lesbian slur> <sexist slur> thinks?' NOPE. Not even the littlest teensywee bit. More like 'point of pride' almost twenty years later.)

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

But ... surely you can't be saying that I should moderate my words because they can be painful to real people behind the screen?

In a purportedly constructive discussion where you're trying to be heard and have your concerns taken seriously? You're damned right I am saying that slinging around accusatory language in such a way that it characterizes anyone who disagrees with you as desirous of being vile as a person (not a character) is not the smartest way to get people to be eager to listen to your perspective or give much of a damn at all about how you feel. Respect either goes both ways, or it doesn't get anywhere.

I mean, do I need to playing a character on a MU to get immunity from that obvious bit of common decency?

A character on a game, again, is not real. You, the actual person, are slinging insults at other actual people. The difference is non-trivial. You and your targets are real people.

The most irritating aspect of this is that most of those targets are already very aware and empathetic toward this issue and do not believe in forcing this kind of play on others who want no part of it.

Here's the thing: Why is it hurtful to suggest that it's hurtful to use that kind of language and bring those situations into play? Why is calling a gay player's gay character a fag okay, but saying 'I have to wonder why you want the right to call somebody a fag' not okay?

Except that's not what you said. Nobody would have a problem with that being said, and that is exactly the sort of question that could generate reasonable debate. Claiming that people who are interested in this discussion and finding means to create games that may have these elements as consensual or opt-in aspects of the setting -- of which I am one -- would still be allowing people who are interested in exploring these themes with fully informed and consenting roleplay partners, and, as such, are getting accused of encouraging 'human beings to be vile and hurtful to one another'.

And that's just bullshit.

I'm having a problem with the disconnect in logic and empathy here. And this is, by the way, a textbook conversation about dealing with Others. One of the quickest responses is always, 'How can we make this about how uncomfortable it makes me when you talk about how uncomfortable I'm making you by doing/saying this thing?

Sorry, nice try, but no. Own your fucking words already: you wrote them, and you clearly know what words would not have been damning of others but still conveyed the same reasonable question for debate because you used them above. You don't get a pass on saying something nasty and hurtful any more than anybody else does.

For the record, I'm not accusing anyone of anything. I AM bringing up the obvious and fundamental questions that underlay the whole disagreement. And that is, yes, uncomfortable.

When you are claiming that people are asking for the right to be vile and hurtful as players, yes, you really actually are accusing them of something pretty horrible.

I am unironically sorry folks are having to think about this stuff. Apparently for the first time.

Maybe try not saying that to a bisexual fat woman if you want to have a reasonable discussion of any kind, as if there's no discrimination that person might have encountered in their life. Particularly one who started a thread on this very same subject months ago.

@misadventure said in Game Design is never easy:

I think what I am saying is I appreciate the visions, and the efforts of those who create these games, whether or not I am in the audience who finds the final product.

This is one of the reasons that I will always cheer on a new project.

It takes courage. It takes creativity. It takes real work. It takes time.

And there are no guarantees for any of it.

It's one of the reasons I will always support any ethical choice (and most choices are completely ethics neutral when it comes to these games -- things like where to set it, what time period, etc.) whether it's the choice I would have personally made or not. (I won't support things like, say, Elsa emailing abuse to people, because duh. That's the kind of thing I mean about unethical choices.)

There are a lot of things I disagree with. I still believe in encouraging people to try them, and explore the possibilities of them. They might work, and that would be awesome! If they don't, we've collectively learned something from that, too, and maybe they or someone else can fix it so it does work.

Every creative endeavor -- and I consider world building, grid building, roleplay, plot running, and even code to be creative endeavors -- is a constant learning process. Everything is constantly in a state of being refined. Sometimes this is from one game to the next, sometimes within a game. I think that's actually a pretty healthy thing, and it speaks well of those willing to do it. I start things over from scratch repeatedly for exactly this reason more often than I ever imagined I would at the outset, and that goes for not just games, but all the other artsy foo-foo I do. (I lost count of the number of times I've restarted the current knitting project to refine it, for instance; I know it's over twenty.)

@three-eyed-crow Agreed in full. I don't think it's terribly uncommon, either.

It looks uncommon when it's being defined as 'wants to demonstrate what a jerk their character is by slinging around slurs', but that's not the sum total of this kind of interaction with these themes and I really wish people would stop characterizing it as though this is the case.

I mean, I genuinely can't really understand how you'd be able to allow most religions in the world as part of a character background at all if 'any and all discrimination is verboten', since many aspects of the dogma of many religions do either set their followers above others, demonize others, promote an imbalance among genders, demonize sexual preferences or sexuality period, etc.

Even if you only allow 'casual believers' and no zealots, these are beliefs people are legitimately raised with and even casual believers struggle with it. So do we outlaw real world religion on games, even games set in the modern real world, because they contain indoctrination into these biases to a greater or lesser extent? Because you frankly just don't have anything that even remotely resembles the real modern world on any level at that point. And wouldn't outlawing religious with some form of bias be, in itself, discriminatory on an OOC level?

What about the forms of racism practiced in some parts of the world in which nothing is ever said that is hostile or rude, but native citizens of <country> simply know they are superior to all others. They simply are; this is how things are to their way of thinking. (Many view Americans this way, for instance.) The rest of the world is inferior, and should be treated as one would treat a dim-witted child, because they are simply not as evolved and couldn't possibly understand. How would one even begin to reliably distinguish between one of these characters being genuinely kind and accepting, and being 'compassionately condescending to the lesser being' in most cases? On the surface, things may be fine and dandy and civil and almost zealously polite and there's always a plausible reason <other> didn't get that position, or didn't get invited to the dinner party for <non-others>, etc., and so on, but this is a particularly insidious and demoralizing form of discrimination with as broad-reaching effects as the much more easily identified and dismissed radical slur bomb-thrower.

What about characters that are enlightened enough now but went through periods of their life -- which may come up in play in some form or another -- in which they were not?

One of my favorite characters was a concept that I'm sure would never get approved today under such restrictions, and I'd be a monstrous asshole for even considering her. She was the daughter of a former 'fire and brimstone' scam artist televangelist with an empire of 'pray away the gay' camps and 'teen re-education facilities' outside the country and similar horrors. She didn't really believe this was a good idea, but she still had no real comprehension of what they really were or what they were like until she was sent to one for not being on board with this grand plan to convert the world. "Lucky" her, she got spared the private jet crash that killed off her folks due to... being incarcerated in such a facility outside the US, and only got let out and found out this occurred at all because she was now the one who had to sign their paychecks. Did she? No. She did everything she could to dismantle that family legacy, and to track down the people it had harmed to do everything within her power to get them real, actual help and correct what little she possibly could of the harm that had been done, because she knew. She was just as zealous about stamping this stuff out as her family had been about promoting it -- and, ultimately, guess what? She was a very vocal non-fan of most evangelical Christians, as she saw them as complicit in doing this kind of harm. As such, she was, herself, a bigot.

Yeah, it hits all the right current social justice notes -- boy howdy, does it ever, dialed up to 12 -- but it's still something that anyone being even slightly objective would reasonably have to NOPE the shit out of, and how.

I don't think it's viable for a number of reasons. Others have been mentioned, these have not that I've seen.

1. If you're using published material or an existing IP game setting, players already know considerably more about the world and what is in it than their character is ever going to know. This is especially true of games like WoD and others with 'secret societies'. You're typically not even supposed to know vampires exist as a mortal character, let alone who is or is not one, but you do as a player, for example. We already trust players with this information before we even let them into chargen and we expect them to know these things well enough to play the game properly. This is non-trivial and should not be overlooked.

2. People have limited time for their happy fun time games, more so than when this hobby was younger -- so were most of the people in it. Being able to find like minds and characters with similar interests (even if those interests include having a conflict between the characters) via open information to get the things done that people will enjoy, and not waste their limited time bouncing off walls and being confused as a player is considerably more important than it was in the 90s. The average player's priorities have changed. This is also non-trivial, and not to be overlooked.

The big two: scale and anonymity vs. face-to-face interaction. These two battle for #1, because of the bastard child that exists as their love-child and is #0: who shows up to play.

The third is about on par: how does the game function without GM/ST/authority oversight, namely, how easy is it for people to manage the rules themselves?

These sound like small things, but they're not. Every one of them is enormous, and all of them have many moving parts.

People like to behave as though tabletop rules are somehow perfect for M* or sacrosanct while pretending not to notice how many house rules are required for their favorite game, and the number of 'well except for... 's and 'well everybody knows you can't use X online... 's they could rattle off for you that are the elephant in the room they're pretending isn't there.

WoD is in fact the perfect proof of this, and all of it's canon, formally published material: because the LARP rules and the tabletop rules are different. The developers realized this: not everything works just as well when played in different environments/ways/with different quantities of people/etc..

The first Night Owl games LARP in 1992, don't think we weren't walking around with printout character sheets with STs running all over the hotel like madmen trying to roll dice on neon plastic clipboards teetering on top of a stack of sourcebooks while something like 2/3 of the White Wolf staff squinted at how awkward and impractical this all was, because that is exactly what happened•.

And it's how a lot of people act re: M*, too. "Allow us to observe how this doesn't work, and squint at it with a combination of amusement and sheer boggle."

Later they tried cards. They tried a bunch of things. They adapted things over and over and over; there were new 'different from tabletop' things almost every time -- and it was for a reason. There are real reasons the LARP rules are different from the tabletop rules. (Most of those have to do with rule #2, the scale factor of #1, and definitely #0.) I couldn't tell you what all of them are (in part because I haven't played in well over a decade) but they observed what did and didn't work, and adapted, because adaptation was needed.

• With all the dice rolling off and away forever under hotel lobby couches and random con hookups having people wander off out of play and people awake for 72+ hour stretches STing fueled by a combination of Jolt cola and giddy geeky glee you might imagine. Now imagine like, three times as much of all of that as you just imagined, because that's at least how much there was.

Or maybe it's just as simple as being uncomfortable knowing there are guns in the house when you're not sure that in a moment of crisis, you wouldn't turn it on yourself, and you would be relieved if the gun was not so readily available to you because you have the self-awareness to recognize that you experience these moments of crisis in your life and want to stay away from things that could make it very easy to make impulsive and irreversible decisions in ways many other things do not allow for with such relative ease. (And you probably don't want those other things around much, either, for the same reason.)

Goddamn, people. That is in no fucking way political.

Maybe have the class and human decency to not take it there, please.

It depends. (Take a drink, y'all.)

The old quote, "Character is what you do in the dark," comes to mind here, and I think there's great truth in it.

If you can't behave with ethics and common decency when your real identity isn't attached to your behavior, you don't really have ethics or common decency. You just have a fear of being identified and/or thought of as someone who doesn't have ethics and common decency, and fear prevents your true colors from wholly shining through.

@Roz I was really impressed with Jessica Jones.

First, it was good to see a female hero story.

Second, the whole 'but since she's a girl she must be without flaw and a paragon of all the virtues ever' sort of routine that sometimes gets applied to female heroes was out the window.

To me, at least, that showed the struggle behind actually being heroic really well, and it has more of an impact to me than some other attempts I've seen over the years.

(I also think it should be required viewing for anybody who deeply engages in any of the player agency discussions sometimes, on all sides of the argument. Not particularly kidding about that, either. It's a great resource for folks confronting all the crazy powers in a variety of games that are going around and how they can linger; I thought it was a pretty good depiction of how traumatic it is to have the kind of control we so often take for granted in our lives taken away.)

That moment when you are staring at the screen, knowing there's a ton more to say or do, but one line already there that you're trying to reply to really just sums it all up so perfectly there is nothing to add. You try half a dozen times to come up with a reply, and it's just like... nope, that nailed it.

The most worth-it frustration in the hobby, srsly.

This has been linked before elsewhere on the forum, but it is to funny to not link again here.

@kanye-qwest I do see the point you're getting at, but I'm more on board with faraday on this one, in that I fully support games choosing to go this route -- but I don't agree with the underlying logic that depictions of discrimination, or settings or characters that include it, are something that should universally be forbidden in the hobby, or limited only to fantasy species/imaginary religions/etc.

Essentially, if that's what someone chooses to do with their game, I will back that choice completely. (As much as we've argued about random things in the past, you know I'm still behind you on the choices you've made for Arx and know you put plenty of time and effort into thinking them through.)

I won't oppose someone making a different choice by default, however. Some? Yes, I will. It depends on the specific circumstances, though. For instance, the game that someone was pitching that encouraged a wholly unmoderated 'stream of consciousness' channel that would allow slur language and hateful 'thoughts' to be transmitted to the whole of the connected game as an expression of 'realism' and 'how people really are' was a fantasy setting and not a historical one, but that isn't a choice I can say I'd stand behind or think was a good call as it was presented to the forum. (Could someone pull this off in a way that wasn't begging for disaster, and was instead a net add to the game? Possibly! It just wasn't that way.)

I am getting really fucking sick and tired of being asked to have extraordinary measures of understanding and empathy for people who cannot be assed to demonstrate so much as a smidgen of it themselves.