@Ganymede said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
So long as we understand what normal people consider to be an acceptable definition, why does it matter that unreasonable people will attempt to subvert its meaning?
Because the normal people, when they go, 'huh? why is <thing> bad?' will get told by the assholes or poor ol' google spewing out the endless repetitions of the assholes' meaning.
@Thenomain said:
I kind of do think that you are social-contract obligated to involve everyone in your scene, which means playing off their character and poses and making space for them to add to things. If they don't take it, if they don't want it, if they don't engage then hey, you did your part to create that upward feedback spiral of awesome that is an engaging situation.
I agree with this on some levels, and not others.
I suppose it depends on how someone defines 'being included', first. Some need a bigger invitation than others. For instance, some feel a glance toward That Person You've Never Met with a 'I notice another person her' sort of nod like you'd potentially exchange in an office waiting room is enough to say: 'hey, let's find a reason to interact', which is perfectly reasonable for most modern settings. Others want an engraved invitation signed in triplicate by everyone in the scene for an 'OK', or instant complete focus from all parties thrown their way when they put a pose even if nobody knows them yet IC -- even if it's that same basic nod pose and scenario.
You can have two people with these differing expectations in one place, and both are going to sincerely believe to have done the right thing, but feel others have not. How reasonable either set of expectations actually is can be argued in a variety of ways.
Sometimes the culture of a game trends toward one direction or another, which can leave the person with the style less common to that space the odd man out, and feeling that they're doing something wrong or are unwelcome there. This can vary a lot based on experience -- good or bad or even if the trend that week seems to be headed in one direction or the other -- confidence levels, and how well the player does or doesn't know the play styles of others present.
My basic take on this boils down to some fairly simple principles, but they have the same ultimate failing "don't be a dick" ultimately does. Most people have some general areas of agreement about how to go about them, but differ on a lot of the fine points. It can be summarized as this: "Be observant. Create openings. Be willing to take risks."
...you can probably see how that works and how it doesn't. 
I'll actually try to write up what that all means while snowed in this weekend in hopes it might be a help, but for now... coffee.
@Goblin The husband: 'So, not a flashmob, but a trashmob. I approve.'
@VulgarKitten said:
Or start making lists of people they don't want to play with and post it up.
I'm on the same page with you re: 'there is a very short list of people I will not go near if I know it's them'. It's about six people long after 20 years, so it could be worse.
I wouldn't list them on +finger. Here's why:
Nothing provokes certain personality types to engage in creepy bullshit than being called out for engaging in creepy bullshit. One of the people on this list, while he didn't do this to me, has been known to deliberately deceive players that have told him, "Do not interact with me OOC, I want nothing to do with you ever again," in order to fuck with them without them realizing who he is.
Most people are nothing like the example above, and the reason we don't get along with them isn't some deep-seated malicious intent, but because we simply don't get along. They might be 100% fine interacting with everyone but us, and it's just not kosher to label someone a 'problem' like this -- because people will see it no other way -- and potentially avoid that person. Which is not fair. People used to do this on Shang; it's now one of their few rules that it's not allowed. I agree with them on this one.
It prolongs whatever drama inspired them to be added to that list long after it's best left dead and buried, and can contribute to further hostilities on that front. If you added them because you don't want whatever drama interacting with them entailed? This is not the way to get there.
That one hits me in the feels pretty hard.
I have no idea if he was still doing it, but in the 90s, while I was in Los Angeles, he would have his driver take him down along Hollywood Blvd, and he'd hand out religious books to all and sundry without pushing them at people who didn't seem interested 
in a really joyful way. All the books were signed (in pen), "Jesus loves you, and so does Little Richard." I still have the one I was too stunned to think twice about; he was just such a ray of sunshine about it.
Shit, sniffles.
@mietze said:
And I 1000 percent agree that if someone is using the "I'd be all over you but poor me my other lady friend won't let me" excuse? Maaaybe the lady friend is a total bitch, but it's 99.9 percent the case that the poor guy caught "in the middle" is an even bigger asshole.
Yup. I have seen exactly three exceptions to this in 20 years. (In that the people caught in the middle were not worse assholes, that is.) In all three cases, there was a lot of passive-aggressive 'go ahead and do the thing' 'YOU SHOULD HAVE MADE THE DECISION TO FORSAKE ANYTHING THAT DID NOT REVOLVE AROUND ME ON YOUR OWN!' crazy motherfucker head game bullshit. In all three cases it also involved RL relationship-foo resulting in the head game control freak having more influence than they would over the average stranger.
That saying about exceptions proving the rule comes to mind... fast.
@Macha ...that is like the whole forum some days, so I'm on board.
It's definitely an area in which people have to set their own comfort zones, re: what they're comfortable with.
I've been living with the same person since before I started MUing (OMG... 20 years) though he doesn't MU; it was actually one of his friends that introduced me to MOO way back when. We used to tabletop together, though, and he keeps insisting he'll join in on playtesting anything I eventually put together, so inevitably, he will someday, heavens help him. He's heard 20 years of MU drama stories and is still willing to do that -- now that's dedication.
@bored ^ THIS. All of this. All of it. All of it forever.
How has he not killed literally everyone. Everyone. How is there still a human species at this point, between the dead girlfriends and the people worthy of a smite that some other idiot didn't wrongly smite causing the need for their smiting, I mean seriously HOW?!
I am a lifelong pacifist and have never thrown a single slap or punch in 46 years and so help me there are so many people I would have bruised knuckles on over the course of that hellscape.
@Sunny said:
@faraday said:
And btw, in either case Jane could've avoided the conflict by coming up with an internal justification for Jane wanting to move on, rather than making it have anything to do with a presumed IC reason for Bob's OOC absence.
And this is what I'm advocating for at the end of the day. It's possible, and I do think people should take that little bit of effort to do it -- it causes less problems for everyone involved.
Here's the thing: say Jane has decided to take up basketweaving and leave Bob to pursue her career as a basketweaver extraordinaire.
If the absent Bob is of such concern, Bob's player can just as easily say, "Bob would have actively pursued Jane to prevent her from leaving!" for that reason, too. Realistically, he would have been present IC, and if 'what Bob would do IC if he could be bothered to be around' was critical, it is entirely reasonable for him to believe he could have taken action to prevent this from happening. Whatever the reason, Bob has lost his spouse, and if he's mad about the 'neglect' reason, odds are very good he'd be just as annoyed about the basketweaving reason.
There are horrible ways people can overdo it on this front, but forcibly tying the hands of active players for the sake of players who (usually, barring the far more rare actual emergency) have for whatever reason gotten bored and flittered off is simply not that reasonable.
There is an onus on a player who is being made uncomfortable (and considering departure due to their unease) to communicate this. It is just as possible for the soon to be absent player to communicate this to staff if they're too uncomfortable talking to the other player, rather than pulling a vanishing act, and it's weird to me that I'm not even seeing this come up as so much as a suggestion. Not only is it the responsible course of action, it's entirely possible that the intending-to-remain player they are having an issue with has caused the same kind of trouble in the past, and staff should absolutely be made aware so if intervention is necessary, it can occur before anyone feels they need to leave, or feels like they have to sit there twiddling their thumbs for weeks on end.
Instead, everyone around them is supposed to sit on their thumbs, their RP stifled, sacrificing for the sake of someone who has either gone off chasing pixies on another game or in another hobby, or could not be bothered to express their concerns to their play partners or to staff.
I just don't see that behavior as the kind of thing to encourage, or to severely disadvantage others to coddle.
A lot of people treat a MUX the way they treat a video game. They expect all the little sprites to be at the same save point where they were left a week ago, or a month ago, or a year ago. That just isn't how it works.
@bored said:
PRP-only games also require next to zero staff work, so there's that.
Not so true as I'm sure a lot of people wish it was. This isn't actually the case at all.
Saturday self-indulgence:
Add fresh coffee, watch merrily froth.
Ooof. Yeah, that's the stuff. I'll definitely be awake soon at this rate. Awyiss.
@faraday What you're describing is fairly reasonable. In the systems currently out there, though? The modifiers for things like you describe are either not present, or are left to GM discretion. If they exist at all, the players making the rolls love to fall back to, 'you're just trying to weasel out of losing!' when, absolutely, a priest is probably going to be harder to get into bed than a horny college kid, even if their stats on sheet are the same. This is 100% common sense to me, too, but it goes straight out the window the moment someone wants to make one of these rolls, and it is head-desk-worthy. No one argues you'd have a mod for sword-fighting in a hailstorm, but a mod for 'not my gender of preference' apparently means 'that guy is cheating!'
@Pyrephox I think the suggested 'no go' zones are a good start (and they would need to be fairly broad, not loop-hole ridden specificity), but it does, absolutely, need pairing with staff with enough balls to curb stomp abusive players right out the door. Neither of these things are 'true to the system' as what was being described as a laudable ideal, though; in our environment, mods of some kind are necessary to make that system remotely viable. 'Being true to the system' should never be a higher goal than 'players not being abused'.
Our favorite local place reopened last month, to much joy and rapture in the house. Knowing they closed due to concerns about harassment rather than an obligation to close? (They were takeout only even back when.) We're ordering from them once a week now vs. the once every 2-3 weeks we used to. They've been there for probably 20 frickin' years, have always been awesome, and there's a whoooooooole lot of pissed-off that shitty people made them feel unsafe remaining open at the start of the chaos. So, yeah. We are super fucking grateful to have them back and are trying to show it as much and as often as the budget allows.
@Pyrephox I was pretty specific about what I said, namely that 'true to the system' is not viable in this case for M*, and that it isn't a solution that suits this medium, and in many ways, 'true to the system' is a less ideal aim than is remotely practical when translating from one medium to the other.
I didn't say 'social dice shouldn't work on PCs' for any reason ever. As a result, we're not even having the same conversation here -- you're arguing things that are not, not even remotely, what has been said.
Instead, we're getting the same tired-ass argument about combat twinks as a reason to allow free rein on all things social, which everyone knows and everyone agrees are also a problem that also needs to be addressed by staff reinforcement and potential bitch-slap HRs for those who abuse the system in that direction. Everybody knows these asshats are a problem, just like everybody knows the people who want to force someone to go against sexual preference for their OOC jollies factor are a problem. The rules similarly don't forbid the classic, "He sat on my favorite bar stool, so I killed him dead," but somehow we all manage to understand that a player who pulls this one is an asshole, and HRs or policy to control that breed of asshattery are also not unheard of.
ADD: it's like being a time lord without a Tardis, and you can't remember where the fuck you left that goddamned screwdriver.
@Pyrephox I'm more a fan of restricting certain subject matter to consent-based, typically: rape, pregnancy, sexual preference changes, romantic relationships. These are the places where the most abuses seem to occur -- and by restricting the specific subject matter rather than the stats, you diminish the possible loopholes. For example, some of the above could be done socially or physically through force/etc. and if it's the subject matter that proves problematic, no amount of mechanics change is going to prevent the people dedicated to asshattery from seeking out alternate means of being that asshat.
@Rinel said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
and the spelling "grey" so I'm not so much principled as I am chaotically pretentious.
...I use whichever spelling I saw last on paint or an art supply, since I always forget which is which.
So it is possible to be even more chaotically pretentious! Though I swear that one isn't intentional.
Keeping my fingers crossed this goes well. It sounds very promising thus far.
