Posts made by surreality

@Wavert Yeah, pretty much my take on it, too. The stuff I'm working on now is pretty over the top on transparency re: characters and the game world. There are spoiler tags people can set up for the folks who want to preserve secrecy for themselves, but otherwise, almost everything but alt data and complaints are public information. World lore? Character sheets? It's all out there, because I want people to be able to find the RP they want. That's easier to do when you have information about what that is, and can brainstorm up something fun to do together.

I've seen people use this to good ends more than abuse it for bad ones. The bad eggs can be handled if necessary.

@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.

@acceleration said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

Similarly, it is unusual to see players actively asked to stop making running ooc commentary in the middle of an active scene in these types of games unless they get particularly disruptive, or the reverse but related problem of players asked not to overshare the details of their characters oocly when they should be role-playing it instead. Granted, the latter happens everywhere but some games are better at minimizing it, while other maximize it by encouraging posted logs and wiki's full of ic information.

Here's the thing: the games that post logs and wikis to share information do not consider sharing information OOCly a problem, and not everyone agrees that it is one.

@Bobotron said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

Myself, I think there's use in an OOC Room as a place to wind down/be between scenes; the whole 'backstage' thing mentioned previously in the thread is a great example. What seems to be the PROBLEM is not the OOC Room itself, but peoples' culture and concept of it. People need to be willing to police themselves, and this probably should be implicitly said, not just staff going 'hey, stop, that's a topic that's not cool'. You're never going to get a topic that is weird or divisive, like politics, that everyone has the same views on. Change the culture and fix the symptoms.

This is pretty much my take on it. I have a 'no RL political discussions' rule for the place I'm working on, for instance. It isn't just 'keep it to designated areas', it's 'no discussions of current RL politics, period'. Want to discuss the politics of the era of the game? Have at. Want to have that same argument about things we can't escape anywhere else on the internet? No, sorry.

Heavy-duty PDA is another issue in OOC lounge spaces (and channels generally) and that has its own designated space as well. I am not inclined to be the person who says, "Ew icky gross don't do that!" but considering how genuinely uncomfortable it makes many people, disallowing it on non-Adult public channels and in the OOC lounge gives players a space free from those antics pretty easily. There's an 'adult lounge' to go with the 'adult channel'. I don't mind if these things go on generally, but I am not keen on them being crammed down everyone's throats, everywhere. IC is IC -- if people are going to be lewd or snugglefucky IC it can be dealt with IC -- but OOC, that stuff's gotta get corralled off of channels with other purposes, because it quickly diminishes the usefulness of those channels and/or spaces by making others uncomfortable or just drowning out useful content.

...so some of us make rules. I am a tyrant, though. I even made a 'no snugglefuckery ever from a staff bit' rule. Of course, to me, that's common sense, since there's no better way to create an appearance of favoritism than to be engaged in snugglefuckery from a staffbit, even if it's only directed at other staffbits. And you know? That is not what staff is there for. I have never, ever been so uncomfortable as being on a staff that creates 'cuddle piles' in the staff room or spams half the staff channel with glomps and licks. Want to talk 'problem behavior'? Whoooboy, that one is a real can of worms. (Civil and respectful is important; so cuddlyfluffy snookum-boo-boo-kins your teeth rot to aching nubs in seconds and everything rings so shady and false and high school fluff-my-ego game... is bad news for many reasons.)

@Gilette I am not a huge fan of OOC chat lounge rooms, but I do feel they serve a few useful purposes.

Mostly, it keeps the 'I'm just feeling randomly chatty' chatter contained. There's a level of this no matter what you do or don't allow. The majority of it is harmless, and not something that you need to make a rule about, let alone a harsh one. I'm saying that with a straight face and I have rules for everything -- though that also includes what is and isn't cool for general OOC spaces on the game. I would much rather see this in a room designated to that end than see it spill all over channels intended for a game-specific purpose to render them even more useless than they often are already.

Socializing, within sensible bounds, does serve a purpose on a game that's important: it reminds people they're actually playing on the game with other actual people. It's fairly easy for people to lose sight of that, and it's fairly relevant for many of the types of games discussed here that do make use of OOC communication, planning, etc. (Just getting rid of, or never having, a space like this may be preferable in no-OOC-communication/RPI style environments, by contrast.)

Most games these days already do have a 'quiet room', which is an OOC room where you can't speak or emote. If one you're on doesn't, suggest it; spaces like this are a genuinely good idea for the folks who don't like the chatter spam without treating the people who enjoy chatting with fellow players like they're doing something wrong by socializing at all. (That's a pretty bad message to send.)

FWIW, I have had good luck asking for help on the code forum here. Very good luck, actually. Though my project doesn't have a dedicated coder on staff, and I'm in more or less the same boat as you are re: code aptitude (though I'd bet mine's lower, actually), it's been workable thus far. A number of folks have all pitched in and been incredibly helpful, which is a big thing. The help is out there, if you need it, pretty much!

@ixokai said in PC antagonism done right:

@faraday said in PC antagonism done right:

Antagonism makes for good stories, but in a MU* environment I think it's a lost cause. Mostly for the reasons you mentioned, but it's even more than that. Let's pretend that there's a totally mature player who won't start OOC drama, needs no encouragement to play antagonism, and is an awesome RPer. I don't want that person playing my character's antagonist, I want them playing my friend.

Man I could not disagree more. If I can find someone who is cool, who I know is OOCly not crazy, who will be wanting to play a rival, antagonist or enemy, I'd value that person 100x more as my antagonist then my friend.

Making friends is easy.

Having meaningful rivalry (where its entirely IC and doesn't bleed over into OOC powergaming) is the true gems and value of what makes quality.

My ideal lands right between these two ends of the spectrum, but is somehow harder to find than either: my favorites are the "best of enemies" sorts. The long-standing rivalry with mutual respect for the other's talents, or the duo that utterly loathe each other to the core but have to team up from time to time against a common adversary.

This is one of the reasons I'm sorta against "designated antagonists", but strongly encourage games with factions in conflict, in competition with one another, or with rivalries or opposition to each others' end goals. Allegiances are more likely to shift in those cases depending on the circumstances, and the adversary of today becomes the uneasy ally tomorrow, and the double-crosser of the day after that, and so on. It strikes me as more dynamic, less black and white, and more flexible and versatile on the whole.

I agree in spirit with the idea that people should be familiar with the subject matter, but practically speaking, labeling is just good practice.

Some folks may assume that subject matter is omitted, for instance; some games might actually insist it not come up even if it's canon -- it isn't unheard of, after all. Being direct about what stance the game takes on it is a good idea.

Avoid assumptions from all directions, including 'ignorance due to no clue about the source material'.

If it spares you one self-righteous rant from someone who finds out after the fact that these subjects are a thing, or one channelsplosion from a white knight type who gets plowed under by the forces that be when trying to white hat their way through all and sundry, it will have been worth the time. (Not just for you, but for the whole game, really.)

@Thenomain It isn't the tentacles that bother me so much. It's the anime cons. There is really quite a lot of unexpected hugging.

Unexpected hugging and I have never gotten along very well.

@Bobotron My husband would make a point of dragging me to more anime cons and hinting that I can sprout tentacles. We just can't have that.

@Bobotron Oddly enough, I have plans for something across the back and shoulders and down the arms and don't want to mess with that. Higher up, it's the one place I have one now. I could probably put it on one of my calves or something. (They're huge creepy muscle calves no matter what size the rest of me is, gods only know why.)

I could arguably put it in the tramp stamp spot but... <flinch-wince> ...just no.

@GangOfDolls said in RL things I love:

You could go hardcore with it and get them tattooed on you.

...if I had a place that wasn't going to get screwy from die+t'ing later this year I'd be doing this with the Tzimisce one already as my 'zomg still aliiiiiiive' thing.

(I probably wouldn't be if not for a wonderfully crazy doc who more or less built me a custom organ. I have been fleshcrafted, soooooo... )

@hedgehog This reminds me of a thing that never fails to press my 'I hate people, but that shit's funny' button.

Freshman in high school, make some of my own clothes and such (or mod things/etc.). Bear in mind, I graduated in 1991; the 80s had some of this, but not tons of it in the suburbs outside punk or new wave circles. More or less anything you didn't buy at The Limited or Express was, according to the people who thought they knew anything, was made of pure crap.

It was a big deal when my mother and I would go to this big fancy fabric store that was a couple hours away; it was one of those once-per-year-pilgrimage special occasions. That year, I pick up two colors of this pretty sheer fabric and made a long skirt out of it, layered one color on top, the other peeking out at the bottom.

Cue endless torment the moment I wore that to school.

Fast forward two years. I'm dragged along to that very The Limited that is my bane by a friend, and see a flash of something familiar. So help me god, it was that same skirt. Same fabric exactly. Same colors exactly. Same layer order exactly. Same cut and length exactly.

I spent the next six months cheerfully chirping, "Nice skirt!" at the people who spent $90 late-1980s dollars on the same skirt I made in less than an hour for $12 or so, and had been saying the same thing in a nasty-ass tone to me for the past two years.

Chirpy instant karma cuntbaggery is the best cuntbaggery.

I know it's been forever since I asked about this, but I finally got this all set up and working and wanted to pass along a thank you to @Seamus and @Ashen-Shugar for their help.

I was able to tweak it just a teensy bit and work a title change for the room in to adjust how it displays on +where and in the room list, too, which I'm hoping will also be helpful.

Thank you again, this was enormously helpful.

@Arkandel said in PC antagonism done right:

When it comes to it good players won't mind if their rival gets some rewards out of such things - I feel all this thread really is (or should be) about is ways to mitigate drama by compensating the conditions which prevent it.

Pretty much this.

It sounds like Arx is one of the relatively rare places where you could designate a group as game-wide antagonists (seek to end the world), but others, in a fairly reasonable representation of reality, aren't so cut and dried. It's a faction in opposition or competition with yours, and so on. (Everybody reading this thread needs to go watch Black Sails right now, seriously.)

@Arkandel said in What do you play most?:

Many games put their metaplot on a wiki and promptly forget it exists.
...
Good metaplot is a roleplay-generating engine. The vast majority of MU* don't have good metaplot, they have a wiki with someone's fanfic scribbled hastily in a couple of its pages.

Honestly? IF ONLY. It's not even that good. If the actual information was on the wiki in full and available to players, they could arguably do something with it themselves -- but many games are so wedded to 'secrets' that the actual information players would need to do something with that 'here's our basic storyline' statement is not made available to them. So it's not just a case of 'here's the idea, now back to watching my movie... ', which is bad enough, but 'here's the idea, now back to my movie... HEY STOP THAT THAT DOESN'T WORK BECAUSE SECRETS! THAT ISN'T ALLOWED!'

...so much hate for that.

@Gilette Honestly? No. Unless it means whapping them across the face with them, old school duel-style.

That saying about how 'what you reward is what you encourage' applies here, too; coddling this behavior encourages it and makes it seem acceptable when it simply isn't so.

Provided there are options to negotiate, various opt-outs someone can take, limitations that can be agreed upon, etc., these folks are not in the position of 'innocent bystander with a gun suddenly at their head before the trigger is pulled, cope!'

The folks who can never lose, never look 'bad', never let someone else have the spotlight/etc. generally need a reminder that the game (in my case anyway, and in most others I have seen this is equally so) is intended for adults, and they'll be expected to behave like one even when things aren't going their favored way•. This is where things get into the territory others have mentioned re: 'won't accept anything bad happening to them ever/won't make sure they outshine everyone else in the scene at all costs' types, and they're typically pretty toxic to the game's ecosystem.

Being extra gentle with them really isn't the answer. Reminding them about the old playground rule about sharing all the toys is pretty essential, and this is more than most staff are ever willing to undertake. It's rare someone will speak up to say: "Hey, we've had repeated complaints about spotlight-hogging/unwillingness to take even a minor hit/etc." to this type, and generally ignore them in the vain hope that they'll shape up on their own.

There are fairly freeform, full-consent games where people can generally do this with impunity, and it's generally not a problem. Otherwise? Yeah, it's a problem, and it's not gonna fix itself. You can delicately mention it all you want, and generally it's not going to make an enormous difference if we're talking about one of the soap bubble ego types -- if they can't take a hit, they're generally going to be even less open to OOC criticism of any kind, no matter how constructive or kindly in its delivery.

• Most of what we need to know to play nice with others we really did learn as kids on the playground. (I have a whole theory about this just waiting to get flung at some poor, unsuspecting wiki somewhere, some day.) That said, as adults, maybe we've strayed too far from those days to remember those lessons, no matter how critical they tend to be to getting along in daily life. Share the toys. Toss the ball to other people, too! Don't throw a tantrum when the ball was thrown to somebody else; you'll get a turn, too! Share your snacks. Don't crack dirty jokes in front of the nuns. Staff needs nap time, too. If you get hurt, it's OK to cry and ask for help from the nurse, and it's not cool to laugh at somebody who's crying because they've been hurt. Don't break somebody else's toy just because you can when they've shared it with you.

The list goes on and on, but really, imagine how many problems would be averted if folks kept what we all learned as little kids in mind, you know?

@Ganymede said in PC antagonism done right:

If failure simply is not an option, so be it. Some of us might find you to be a horrid bore.

These folks are the ones I am still really not sure how to handle: the spotlight hogs/can't ever fail types.

I have notes in policy re: 'consent options don't mean you always 'win' and can never be on the losing end of a particular conflict', but when it comes to this particular crowd, I feel like I'm going to end up writing a monster of a long-winded thing about 'how to play nice with others' as a general advice/resource file on this specific point. (This is stuff that isn't policy, but gives examples, some of the reasoning behind why things are set up how they are, general advice to help someone find play, style guides, and general resource whatnots; that glossary thing is an example of the kind of thing that lives in 'resources' vs. The Rules, which live in 'policy'.)

There's also something to be said on the negotiation front to prevent the kind of buttmonkey behavior @GangOfDolls mentions -- if people are discussing the forms a potential loss can take, it's easier to find a 'loss' that's going to be a more productive RP outlet than might be possible otherwise.

For instance, "I'm going to throw him in a cell where no one can get to him for the next month!" is an RP-killer. "I'm going to blind him for his insolence!" might be a harsher and longer-term horror for the character to suffer, but it doesn't close off the character's RP opportunities in the same way, even if it may be a permanent loss rather than a temporary one.

@tek said in What do you WANT to play most?:

I would give my left foot for a good MU set in Seanan McGuire's October Daye universe.

...I would laugh pretty hard if she didn't allow M's based on it. It wouldn't surprise me in the least, but I would laugh. More than a little. (She's an infamous former M'er.)

@Arkandel I have some things I'm going to try for the pirate place along these lines.

Negotiated outcome is absolutely an option, and there's an XP benefit for even trying to accomplish this, even if no agreement is reached, even if it's (initially) small. It grows if a resolution can be agreed on, and there's a bonus for taking a loss that scales some on the magnitude of the loss. If I have to essentially 'pay' people to collaborate/play well/be mature adults with each other in this regard, I have precisely zero qualms doing that.

One option is absolutely, "Let's see what the dice say, but cap maximum damage at X," because there's no sensible reason to not include that option. If you can cap the 'worst case', people chill considerably, and there's good reason for that. That so many games completely ignore this option in favor of one extreme or the other makes me shake my head enough that one of these days, I'm gonna get whiplash.

This is one of the reasons I like the 'seasonal arcs' approach to metaplot. You can have guaranteed endings to a major story, but it is not the only story, and another will follow in its wake (or potentially overlap, or be spawned by the events of the previous arc, etc.).

You can have time jumps in this, but it's not at all necessary.