One thing I have considered isn't so much a 'game runner/staff' thing, but having a listing of people willing to do X work for others (free or for cash or whatever), but that's things like 'set up a build with descs and details' or 'do some elaborate photoshopping/do character sketches' and similar. Granted, that's as easy as 'set up signup sheet on the wiki where people wanting to freely offer or advertise what they're able to do on what terms', ultimately.
@gryphter Pretty much, yeah. Any benefits from things like this were all designed to go to a 'player pool' that the player could then distribute among their characters, start a new character with some extra points, etc.
In part, that setup was to help manage the dino vs. newbie gap, since it'd be possible to concentrate that (within reasonable limits) on a single character to catch up more quickly with the 'big guns' and so on.
Re: being judgy... uh, yeeeeeeah, that's gonna happen.
If someone is being an asshole, I'm not going to sit back and say to myself, "You know what, self, I'm not going to make the judgment that they're behaving like an asshole, because that would make me an asshole!" because then the only appropriate thing to judge is having a bloody opinion, ffs.
That is wayyyyyyyy too twisty a moebius strip for my tastes.
Having had buckets of people who state OOC they are men tell me how I'm 'playing a woman wrong'? Yes, I judge these people. I absolutely judge these people, and not kindly at all.
Why? Because at best, they're ignorant. More often, it's a control tactic, aimed on getting me to fall in line with what they want my character to do based on what all of these other (probably fictional or imagined) women do, based on the assumption that I'm afraid of losing my right to have tits if I don't comply, at which point I judge them all the more harshly because it doesn't work like that, and there's only so much oppressive stupidity I can truly forgive.
I have to second Ganymede on this one.
"Everyone is awful and terrible and everyone is nothing but the worst sort of hypocrite at all times," is bullshit.
Plenty of folks actually walk their talk. Most actually do it most of the time, and fuck it up once in a blue moon.
Are there folks in the hobby that couldn't take responsibility for their actions if their life depended on it? Yes. Are there folks who are never willing to consider any perspective but their own, whether it's founded on evidence or 'just a feeling' or whatever else? Sure. Are there folks who try to avoid consequences for bad behavior by trying to play the victim in spasms of passive aggression and melodrama? Ayep! (This could go on and on.)
These people exist everywhere else, too. This hobby can no more 'solve' them than we can fix the problem they represent in any other aspect of life. People handle it in the same ways: avoid these people, constrain their interaction with them to a tolerable level, or leave whatever game they're presently infesting.
If you can deal with these people in other aspects of life, you can deal with them here. If you realize they exist in other aspects of life, being somehow surprised they're also here is absurdly naive, as is thinking they can be barred from entry or participation or creating the occasional disruption the same way they do in any other aspect of life.
Should there be strategies to manage crap behavior? Yes. Should the people responsible for administrating an environment apply them when needed? Yes. This is all 'duh' material. This is not grand revelation. This is not news.
...this stops precisely no one who is inclined to do it.
You have to be smart enough to realize it's stupid, see. Or not one of those people with the 'it's different because it's me and my new take on this dumb idea isn't dumb like everyone else's take on it'.
I count on none of these things being the case.
@Cirno, apropos of absolutely nothing whatsoever, are you the dude who once posted on Shang's bb4 about ritualistic zebras?
I only ask because that was the most dazzlingly creative, and yet surreal, post a friend of mine and I had ever seen appear on that board over a period of years. It stood out, is what I'm saying. Not in a 'to be snarked on' way, and not on a 'to be lusted over' way, but just in a 'a lot of creativity went into that scenario' sort of way, for which I can't help but offer some kind of 'well done, whoever posted that, well done'.
It is referenced now and then when people become and remain consistently boring.
Ahem. We now return you to your previously scheduled thread.
@Ominous ...and yet there's something so campyfun about that it would probably make a cool beer and pretzels fun game, which I absolutely cringe to admit.
I'm kicking a historical thing around. I am hoping for 'TV grade' reality for one of the sources as an ideal, which is still timey-wimey at best and still... television grade. I will still be happy to settle for 'A Knight's Tale' grade, because... ultimately, it's a MUX, and that's probably the most realistic guesstimate of where it will end up anyway.
Seconding @ixokai on this one; it's the text of the work that's copyright protected, which is why we can't, say, copy the text of a game system onto the game or its website legally without licensing. Copyright applies in terms of creating a derivative, essentially, as the game itself that isn't just cut and paste from the existing text.
For fictional worlds and characters, a lot of them are protected under trademark, which can be lost if it isn't defended. It's actually a requirement of holding a trademark: if you don't legally defend it the moment you're aware of it, you can lose it and the protections it provides.
@Ghost said in Where's your RP at?:
I'm. Just. Saying. There's. Dice. For. That.
Actually... not exactly, which is the point I keep trying to raise here: there are systems for that.
Systems include dice, but they are not limited to dice.
Plenty of games have respawns, non-lethal settings as a combat option, and so on, alongside permanent death. To insist that a game is not a game if it includes these options is utterly ridiculous on its face, because they're as viable as game systems and mechanics as dice are. The game plenty of us play the shit out of, WoD, straight up has shit in it about 'don't even let somebody roll for shit that fucking stupid because it's impossible'.
I love you to death, man, but jesus.
@Miss-Demeanor said in Where's your RP at?:
@surreality I don't see why we're being held to a higher standard than you're holding yourself, or others, to.
Let's see... because the dozen times I said 'maybe looking at the extreme cases is a useless prospect because neither one addresses the real issues that crop up 95% of the time' half a dozen times and y'all kept banging on screaming hyperbolic bullshit like this is a black and white issue? Because that's totally fucking reasonable behavior, right? That isn't even an accurate assessment of the fucking problem here.
Because respecting anybody else's play style as 'live and let live' is simply not something either you or @Ghost was bothering for a hot second earlier on•, we have @Gilette chiming in with the consent-twinking shade, and then we have the very notion of a character being removed from play by the actions of someone else as an issue brushed aside with reference to people playing selfish bullshit head games thrown into the mix that is a readily solved non-problem of its own, and watching a pile of people resorting to crazy-ass tangents and side smear-issues in ways I have not seen people not into this do has officially expended my patience with this narrow-minded only-my-view-is-valid behavior. For instance, nobody here who isn't keen on 'any death is cool for any reason at any time' has made the claim that you, personally, because you're ok with this, are the kind of player who would have a shitty day RL and decide to go after the proverbial schoolbus full of PC nuns to make everyone else as miserable as you are RL. Yet, for some reason, y'all have zero fucking qualms insisting that anyone not keen on the same thing you are 'just doesn't want anything bad ever happening to their character', that they aren't interested in playing a game, and a whole shedload of other shit that isn't even suitable to fertilize a mushroom field.
The same exact argument, reversed, has been getting thrown up here over and over again as to why games that allow non-consent PC death (whether by pvp or NPC) should be avoided or not allowed.
Please cite who said the bolded bit and where. I'll be waiting, because I haven't seen a single person say these games should not be allowed to exist, or that people should avoid them. Individual people have said they would personally avoid such games, but if there is so much as a single instance of someone saying what you're claiming here, I sure as fuck missed it.
I'm being told that because I like a game that has a risk of character death, that I am obviously advocating for PVP and PKing and that I want everyone's character to die.
Except you're not. You are explicitly not having that said about you -- at least not by me. In fact, let's go back a few pages... <time machine noises>
@surreality said in Where's your RP at?:
I think this is a mindset thing. For instance -- think about the backgrounds thing. You prefer to go in light and evolve things. It's not so much of an up front investment -- and I think that should be supported as a play style.
By the same token, others do things with a lot of work going in, which is also an approach that deserves respect -- or at least enough respect to not dismiss it was 'being so attached to one character they can't stand to see them go', which is rarely the case.
Essentially, it's just a different approach to the game, and probably a little bit of 'wanting something different from the play experience'. Dismissing the folks who do a lot of prep and get disappointed if their work is ended in a footnote as being overly attached and unable to let go is, to me, as inappropriate as it would be to suggest that you 'just don't feel like doing the work and writing an elaborate multi-step background thing'. That isn't the case at all -- in both of these instances -- and unless the game in question is designed to support one of these general approaches exclusively, it's a space that people of both mindsets are going to have to share. The first step to doing that effectively is by listening to what someone is saying and not instantly diminishing/dismissing it as being indicative of one of the red flags in the hobby like 'overly attached' and 'doesn't feel like putting in the effort' both are, and both are not often accurately attributed at all.
Oh shit, ain't that inconvenient as hell to your current narrative?
I never told anyone they had to play on that game. I never suggested that if you don't want your character to die that you should play there anyways. I'm actively saying, if you don't want that to happen, then don't play on a game where that can happen. I'm questioning why people that don't want character death to be a thing will play on a game where character death is a thing.
Most games include death as a possibility, including full consent games. Every game will have pros and cons to any given player. There aren't endless games around any more. In each case, you have to weigh the pros and cons.
Look, maybe you weren't around in the days of Darkmetal's roving PK mobs or headshots for stealing a bar stool. Maybe you didn't see a group of people throwing pages around about how they were having a shitty day and decided to off a bunch of PCs to make themselves feel better for the flimsiest of reasons -- behavior these days we'd call complete bullshit, but was ardently supported up until the earliest days of MSB post-WORA by some very vocal folk. Maybe you missed all the conversations about how if somebody wanted to get their rocks off OOC by fucking up somebody else's day OOC by screwing with their character and making them upset or being a vengeful ass after getting shot down for TS meant it was time to start threatening PK as completely and totally valid ways of enjoying a game, but I didn't, and I've seen all of the above first hand, seen it championed as super cool gamer behavior, and that's just fucking crazytown bunk. It is behavior as horrible and immature as all of the pretty snowflake princesses who can't bear to break a nail and will flail and pout and scream OOC the moment they don't get their way in the exact way they want to get it.
Both of these player types? Frankly, they can fuck right off and I'd have zero qualms banning the shit out of either extreme, having no patience for either. The problems as they exist in reality are not with these extremes, however -- now we seem to be smart enough, collectively, to show these idiots the door, whichever side of this particular argument we're on, because it seems to be recognized, finally, that both of these extremes are examples of toxic player behavior that will eventually poison a game if permitted to take root.
• And I still love you both but, jesus, you're being rabid in this thread.
@Rook said:
However, I believe that AFINGER can be used by me to mutually find RP interest, RP Hook interest, new people to a group, whatever. I believe that it facilitates player communication and link-up, when used right.
Except... it isn't. +finger provides the basic data to the person making the inquiry when the only information they may have is the other party's name. (I'm not talking about &ofinger -- that is its own creepy kettle of fish.)
Interest is not confirmed because someone doesn't recognize a new or unfamiliar name and wonders who or what it is attached to, and assuming otherwise is what causes most of the problems I rattled off earlier -- interest is only confirmed if the inquiring party makes some kind of direct inquiry beyond typing +finger <name>.
This is why I say there is zero benefit to having the other party notified, and only downside.
At best, you're stuck having to explain to some brain-dead idiot that 'I was using the command that gives me the basic information you listed yourself about your character to find out if you were interesting or not', which nobody should have to do, and no one should be required to justify to someone who doesn't understand what public, volunteered information is.
@Misadventure said:
You object to someone knowing you are reading their information?
Knowing? Not really.
Thinking this entitles them to attention -- or anything at all -- beyond that? Vehemently.
(God, I really am apparently sharing a brain with @Rince!)
@Arkandel said in WW released Dark Pack guidelines:
Sometimes I feel MU* have been really pushing the envelope on the latter with their super detailed wikis, going as far as to copy verbatim the texts, effects and of course rolls of every power or special ability, for instance.
This is partly why I'm heading away from WoD/CoD/etc. and to something original. I am really, really uncomfortable with the amount of data that gets reproduced.
Even if the worst that happens is 'the game needs to be shut down' and nobody gets sued for cash or whatever, putting a game together is a lot of work, and that's a lot of hours and effort and such wasted, even if nobody's out a buck at the end of the day.
I am not entirely sure how well some of the inspiration jives with the questions, for a big reason: a lot of what's being complained about, from the summary provided, is about wish fulfillment and people's wishes being not granted. That's a different animal by far than being shocked and surprised by the appearance of unexpectedly traumatic and highly personal subject matter that might set off somebody's PTSD or somesuch.
The former is not getting the pony you asked for when you were five. The latter is unexpectedly getting the pony you had when you were five served to you for dinner without warning, and those two things are in no way the same.
1a (players): It's a player's responsibility to be as aware as possible of their own limits and boundaries. This is possible only to a point, however. Someone may never have been exposed to <subject> before, and may not know until then that they find it troubling or disturbing to them. It may also be simply a matter of how something's played out. Taking a film example and comparing it to RP doesn't always work, because there is a greater measure of separation in material you're passively consuming vs. that with which you're interacting. I can watch a rape scene in a film and only rarely has it bothered me (exception: Strange Days, which is a great movie, but holy shit did I have to stop watching it the first time after realizing what the hell was happening). I will not go within a mile of one on a game.
That passive vs. interactive difference is huge, because while both are works of fiction, you are actively engaged with one in ways you are not with the other; that alone diminishes the separation factor. You, the player, are involved, even if the events are occurring to a character in the story. There's less separation in RP by default here.
1b (storytellers/GMs): If you know you're including something that is a common trigger, label that shit up front to enable people to make the decision for themselves as to whether or not they wish to participate. If they read the warning and ignore it, it's on them. People should be given the tools to make an educated choice, however, and there are no two ways about this one to me: this is a fundamental and genuinely baseline level of player-to-player respect in my book.
1c (game): Games should set clear standards re: the maturity level expected on their game, which subjects they will allow, and which they will disallow (if any), and whatever other conditions apply. If something about the setting or game world is commonly objectionable (sexism or slavery in historical settings, religious persecution, etc.), even if it should arguably be understood that players should know this coming in, you should still lay out how this is handled on your game. Is it minimized? Not a thing? Handwaved away? In full force IC? In full force IC for NPCs but players are exceptions? "It happens, it just doesn't happen right here... " -- whatever you're going with, say so, and say so clearly. If something requires additional approvals to go into it, say so. If anything goes, say so.
(Other two post-nap.)
@Paris I have actually seen this same pattern, unfortunately. Someone I knew on Shang played a 'phoenix' sort of character who would come back from the dead if killed. (I'm sure you can see where this is likely going.) I'll be damned if I didn't see her badger countless players IC and OOC into snuffing her IC (most of whom were just doing so to get her to leave them alone -- I saw her badgering behavior so it wasn't just a he said/she said sort of thing), after which, inevitably, she'd go on at length OOC about how disgusting they were that they had done so, even if it was only to get her to shut up and stop badgering them to do it. The type is out there in the wild. 
@Rook I haven't read it, but from what you're describing I get the general idea.
And I'm kinda giggling over here because I'm kinda doing the same thing, re: design.
I color-code things like whoa, and cringe when something falls outside of the standard header/display format that's set up. I'm still working on unifying all of that.
Also, people can pick their own colors; colorblindness is a thing and some people do use white backgrounds/etc. so the ability to customize this stuff is, IMHO, a useful thing.
The colors come in two sets: one set of four IC colors, one set of four OOC colors. This color-codes the data as it is presented in a way that subconsciously reinforces whether that information is IC or OOC info. Commands, help/news files, OOC talk, OOC notifications, even the headers and such for OOC areas all use the OOC colors. IC areas and notifications? Use the IC colors. (OOC talk and commands still show up in the OOC colors from an IC space, since they're still OOC info.)
It's subtle. It's super anal-retentive of me and I know it. I also know it's a handy subconscious cue/reminder about what's what.
@Ghost I haven't seen anyone make the claim that poor behavior should be excused, regardless of the reason for that poor behavior. (Outside of the people you seem to have been thinking of before who are shrieking every time they don't get the shiny they want and claiming it's a trigger and thus you can't say boo to them, which is bullshit that no one should be tolerating. These people are also not participating in this conversation to be addressing directly.)
The answer, to me, is between #1 and #2. It's closer to #1 because #1 reflects the larger reality: there are folks with a lot of various issues (this and others) that come to the game environment. If there are steps we can take to improve their experience or make it less inconvenient, yes, I think it's reasonable to do.
I spent ages, for instance, tinkering up a color-coding setup mentioned in another thread to let players who prefer light to dark backgrounds in their MUX clients, or players with colorblindness concerns, set up their own highlight colors to remain consistent throughout the game. That's another real, basic human issue, and another example of how a few simple steps and some consideration shown can tangibly improve the quality of that player's experience on the game. Nothing about it impinges on anybody else's rights.
The way I see it, nothing about this does, either.
It explicitly does not give players permission to show up, and then stomp their feet until the event or plot is refashioned to their personal liking. If someone knows they have a sensitivity to rape plots and show up at something clearly labeled 'this is a rape plot!' they have no one to blame but themselves if it causes an issue for them; they were clearly warned, they were given the information to make a decision, and they apparently <OldTemplarKnight>choose poorly</OldTemplarKnight>. That is not the GMs fault, staff's fault, or the fault of the other players in the scene at that point.
Most folk with genuine PTSD-related concerns are aware of the broader subject matter to avoid. Some are still surprised once in a while, but most people know 'I should probably avoid things that will directly remind me of that horrible thing that happened that time', and will self-police if given the ability to effectively do so.
There is also no suggestion that somebody be given a pass on unacceptable behavior for this reason -- or any other reason. We are responsible for our own behavior on a game, full stop, even if there are reasons for it outside of our direct control. Unacceptable behavior is unacceptable behavior. It's not suddenly OK if it's your best friend doing it, or if it's because the person is drunk, or if it's because they're having a panic attack, or if it's because they had a shitty day at work, or if it's because <this list could go on to infinity>.
There's no free pass granted here, and no special rights; there is simply a warning sign to allow people to more effectively self-police in order to avoid problems for themselves or others from arising due to certain content that's commonly considered to be controversial or problematic.
Re: the agency argument in general: like most things, there are reasonable and unreasonable objections people might make.
There are the shitheads who can't ever imagine they'd be intimidated, but there are also the shitheads who think it's niftyfunkeen to totally rewrite another player's character entirely to suit their whim and into something that other player no longer has any interest in playing with a sketchy interpretation of the rules as their excuse.
I have no sympathy for either sort of shithead and think both need to grow up and learn to play nice with others.
The agency argument typically comes up the most often with seduction for all the reasons, though. The most attempted, and the most objected to.
I don't see how PT factors in especially on this front any more than any other merit that would grant a bonus to social skills, and there are plenty of those from various game editions already, and there's not a general public outcry about every single social merit that grants a bonus, many of which are a lot more broadly applicable than what you'd likely set up for a PT merit.
I have to second @faraday here.
I know my goal was to run two things a week, as staff: one thing related to the season plot for the game, and one random thing. (Could be a battle, could be a cocktail party, ideal being a scene open to anyone on the game 'general interest' kind of scene.)
That was a personal goal. That's nowhere near enough to keep people busy all week. It's a handful of hours of 'things to do'. If people don't want to make use of what's available to them in the time other than that, well, blood from a stone after a point. Only so many hours in the day, and staffing involves a lot more than running scenes.
The alternative is 'wait on staff to run one of those two things per week, and hope it appeals to you'.
Your choice.
Nobody's going to hold a gun to your head to demand you make fun for others, but if you're not willing or interested in ever doing that, I think you lose some of your right to bitch about the people who do choose to spend their free fun time that way for the benefit of others not doing enough for your personal tastes. (Which is, in a nutshell, the definition of entitlement: giving nothing yourself, and expecting to be given everything for just showing up.)
I'm grateful for good, easy to use tools that let me do my thing without what @Thenomain quite aptly described as 'sticking my hand in the blender of bureaucracy'.
@Lithium The security issue is pretty easily handled. It isn't hard to lock down certain critical namespaces to prevent tampering. Sheets are definitely one of those things -- but even so, wiki provides a public, easily accessible record of who changed what and when. Tampering to cheat is going to be glaringly obvious to the whole internet (players and staff and everyone on this forum) because of the internal record-keeping automatically kept by the wiki in each page's changelog. That alone is going to be a huge deterrent, and it's something we don't have now.
I'm not interested in running a WoD game, nor am I. Or PvP games, on the whole. (I planned to try it on a WoD game until I got too fed up with WoD, however.)
That gets to the core of one issue, however, at least, that does rely on the trust issue: player to player, and player to staff.
We've seen the attitude grow that when staff is the only group with access to this info, staff cannot be trusted to play on the game at all, let alone privately -- and we saw that attitude spread intensely. It is simply assumed that since staff has this information, they are going to use it to cheat.
You want trust, you have to extend it, too. Collaborative environments are hamstrung without that (and also without smacking people upside the head when they do something crappy, no matter who they are). People use the wiki information currently more often to