Posts made by surreality

I'm going to add a little to what @Faraday is saying here about the importance of clarity and ease of use.

A handful of years ago, I was doing graphics stuff. It needed to work with two different bits of software. No, I won't name either. Some dev had to be done in one application, and the rest in the other.

One of the two was thoroughly intuitive to me, because it used the sort of interface I 'grew up on'. It's the kind of interface that was considered 'intuitive' and 'poke it to see what happens', especially in mac software, in the early/mid-90s. That's the kind of stuff I learned on -- lots of 'this is the most expensive toy ever' Kai Krause interfaces and such.

These interfaces are generally regarded by people who didn't first lean on them as among the most horrible of all possible experiences, and the general feeling is that they're looking at the controls of an alien spacecraft that's about to crash into a mountain and they have to pick the right glowing dot to roll around with their mouse before the whole thing goes up in flames and it's all over but the crying.

Despite being cool with that kind of interface, I get that.

The other software used a much more 'here are endless drop down menus and hidden sub-menus and clickable text you don't know is even clickable until you click it and commands buried in sub-sub-sub-sub-sub menus under headings that have only the loosest connection to the command you want to run, etc.' approach. When you've put an essential command to save hours of work in a hidden right-click export menu you can only access if you know that tiny line of text is clickable (because it is completely indistinguishable from all of the not-clickable text that's crowding your screen), you have a problem.

Those of us running into issues brought this problem to our rep (who is a saint), but did not seem to get it. He kept insisting, "But it's so easy!" and then not telling us the steps to take to do it. No mention of the hidden clickable text, no mention of hidden drop-downs, etc. Just "It's easy!"

This added insult to injury in ways that did some real damage -- a number of us ended up with whacks to our income every time one of these new 'hidden changes' would go in (which would happen without warning) and we'd end up having to spend 2 weeks trying to figure out where they moved our basic essentials, or haunt the back channels to track down that one developer who would actually give us the list of required steps that no one ever bothered to write down in the first place.

Once we had those things, yes, it was easy -- but you can't operate from the assumption that people do. It sounds like you have the steps laid out, which is good. Don't assume people know what it means, though, or you run the risk of becoming the "it's easy!" guy.

Pretty much this, all of this.

@Bobotron said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:

I find house rules only necessary when something obvious is overlooked or the RAW doesn't work for the situation.

...or when, as is especially typical of WoD throughout the years, there are two totally different and wholly reasonable possible interpretations of how something works from the source text, but for the sake of consistency -- when you have potentially dozens of STs on the game -- you have to pin down which interpretation is going to be in use on the game to help ensure fairness in how the power is applied, regardless of who is running any given scene.

That's the kind of judgment call every tabletop ST ever has and will make on the fly and they will generally stick with it; this is so common, and we're so accustomed to doing this in tabletop, it isn't even something people typically think about.

When you have multiple storytellers in play, this dynamic changes dramatically, as you can't have the same power working in completely different ways depending on who is running the scene and what their personal favorite interpretation of the rule is; you end up with endless inconsistencies. Potentially, it gets worse: accusations of favoritism/cheating/unfairness when a power works one way in one scene, and another way in another, even if the STs with different ideas about how a mechanic works allowing this to happen aren't staff. Down this road lies rules lawyer arguments vomited all over channels and potential retcons, none of which are wheeeeeee fun.

This one is, I think, the most common kind of house rule I've seen, provided a game isn't creating piles of custom stuff (which isn't bad, either, if they pay attention to shit like balance and fairness and whether it fits the vibe/etc.). It's been the most common one I've dealt with, anyway.

I think house rules vary in method of importance and necessity. IF we're strictly talking MU* to tabletop, it's why I'm in the camp of 'make a MU* using an original ruleset and coded system that adjudicates and facilitates everything' so that, if an ST isn't present, people can still get their game on for things like combat.

Ditto this. It would take longer and be more of a pain in the ass to convert even CoD, let alone nWoD or oWoD, to something that isn't going to run into an inconsistency, unclear mechanic, or otherwise problematic system to maintain.

What you describe re: insane mechanics, there really are a lot of those. A lot of things require judgment calls on the fly or direct ST intervention in the simple daily upkeep of the character, with some splats. This is not unreasonable for a group of 5-6 people who meet once a week to do their rolls, and it's not for a larger LARP group that might be sending in one downtime report every <game interval>, even though that number of players is larger. On a MUX, you have the larger number of players, and you have daily maintenance of those things if someone logs in every day -- which is just not terribly viable. 'Once per game session' in TT or LARP is generally not more than once a week; compare and contrast with 'potentially daily' and a large player group? Nnngh.

@Warma-Sheen said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:

@surreality said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:

@Warma-Sheen said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:

@surreality Doubtful. I think you're just willing to cater to worse behavior than I would be.

What I -- as player or staff -- tolerate or not has precious little bearing on what some people will attempt to get away with on any given game, period.

That's exactly what it has to do with. What you allow players on your game to get away with is what people will try to get away with. That's the culture your game develops.

If someone tries something you think is wrong for your game, just say no. It doesn't matter if they are trying it because they think they're anonymous. Say no. Its that simple. Say no. Grow a spine and say no. Don't be traumatized and paralyzed with fear of what someone might do. Just say no.

If you can't do that you should run a game or be on staff and have no business being around house rules in the first place.

Frankly, I think you just keep compounding your fallacies here, and you keep making a number of assumptions that are pretty profoundly unintelligent.

Let's break this shit down, shall we?

#1: You assume a player on a game has the authority to dictate how others behave on that game. This is fundamentally and wholly false. The sum total of control a player has over how someone treats them is by not being around the person, reporting to staff about their issue, and employing page/@mail blocks, possibly just leave -- the end. A player does not make the rules on any given game they set foot on. The sum total of a player's power essentially amounts to: "I don't want to interact with you any more than I absolutely must."

#2: It's just as breathtakingly stupid to think any given staffer has this level of authority on most games. Your average staffer absolutely does not.

#3: You are essentially assuming that whoever is making any given HR is headstaff; this is rarely the case.

#4: You assume flawless reporting of issues from the playerbase. This is part of that 'living in a dream world' problem, because that simply isn't a thing. Most people do not report. Many people who do report end up reporting things that aren't actionable ('my boyfriend is TSing that hussy over there, do something!').

#4a: If you're not assuming flawless reporting from the playerbase, you're assuming that staff are aware of every single action taken on the game at all times. This is hilariously unrealistic and bears precisely zero relationship to reality.

#5: You assume that people will follow the rules they're presented with. Wouldn't that be nice? Most do! That's awesome. Plenty don't.

#6: You assume that players will actually even bother to read or be aware of those rules, which, from long experience staffing, I can pretty much promise you, many people simply don't. Many don't even own the books or know the material in the books, let alone any given house rules.

#7: You think that examples of action being taken are an effective deterrent. For some? Sure! But we still have people going to prison regularly in the real world, so punishment is clearly not a universally effective deterrent.

#8: You actually -- oh you sweet summer child -- think that telling some people 'no' will stop them from doing it anyway. That is adorable.

Again: if you don't think there's a notable difference in the way the game is played when people think they're anonymous and are detached from the consequences of their behavior by physical distance/ability to directly observe their fellow humans, and that these conditions can require changes in the way the game itself is played I'd say you're the one who has no business running a game or being on a staff, because that's shit you have to be prepared to handle. Sometimes, it is by telling people 'no', absolutely. Sometimes, it's by changing the requirements for a mechanic.

And this is even before we get into the problems of scale on a MUX, even though they certainly feed in to the ability to know what's going on at any given time.

It's cute that you don't think I have a spine. I would have banned Rex from Reno three days post-chargen because of his more detestable attitudes. Could I? Nope, not even as headstaff at the time, as all headstaff had to agree on such things. Is that stupid? YUP! So, yay for jumping to (hilariously incorrect) conclusions about how I handle things, I suppose; that's extra douchey and narrow-minded of you.

This week's stupid needed thing: something that would allow someone to add a temporary desc to a room designated as 'off-grid' space, or redesc a rented room with some custom tweaks.

I have seen rooms that will allow this (on shang, for instance, one can add a new desc with a special command to rented apartments) and I recall TR's temproom RP area allowing someone to set a custom desc on the room while it was in use (I may be misremembering this?), so that's essentially what I'm looking for guidance on.

I know more or less nothing about code, so being pointed in a general direction re: where to begin would be a huge help. (If somebody has this handy and is willing to share it or is willing to tinker with some things to create something along these lines, hey, epic, you rule and I'll love you forever•, but not asking for that.)

Super general like 'look at permissions' is unfortunately not going to help me much; I've beaten my head against those walls and it doesn't sink in very well even with very good teachers attempting to explain, but a general direction on this one would be hugely helpful.

• Warning: this means I'll probably end up arguing with you more. Blame my crazy Italian relatives, they taught me this approach.

@Warma-Sheen said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:

@surreality Doubtful. I think you're just willing to cater to worse behavior than I would be.

That's almost cute as a bad strawman dodge attempt, but it ain't gonna work.

What I -- as player or staff -- tolerate or not has precious little bearing on what some people will attempt to get away with on any given game, period.

You seem to be living in some mythical place where I'd admittedly love to live where the combination of anonymity and a large population of potential targets means people don't try to get away with shit they would never dare attempt were their identity known, or if they had to look someone in the eye while they were doing it.

These are the real social pressures of a tabletop or LARP group, individually or in combination. If you genuinely don't believe that their removal has a profound impact on what a great many people will try to get away with online, you're in for a very rude awakening some day, and have never heard of The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, or it's more serious descriptor, the online disinhibition effect.

@Warma-Sheen said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:

Not: 'in a MU* environment, it doesn't offer the practical applications that a tabletop as written blah blah blah Bob Loblaw blah...'

That's what I'm talkin bout.

If you do not think that being in the physical presence of other players vs. being an anonymous entity outside punching/dice-throwing/ability to see horrified looks on people's faces range makes a profound difference on behavior, you're pretty dangerously ignorant of human psychology.

@Catsmeow said in The Apology Thread:

I would like a writing career. Of course, that probably means I'd have to focus enough to wri ..... oh look something shiny

...clearly, we have the same life. I am the ADD poster child, so, so much empath--WAIT, THERE'S A SHINY?!

@Coin No snark intended, that sounds like a happy ending for all involved. Why can't more shit like that happen? Get on with that, universe.

Some games deliberately say to discard the rules, powers, setting elements, and whatever else in the canon content that don't work for your game.

Others include optional systems explicitly labeled as such.

WoD, from oWoD 1.0, has been very vocal about this, and actively encourages game runners to do these things. A lot of other games have followed suit since then, with similar advice, but they seem to be forerunners here amongst the more well-known systems out there.

This is important, IMHO. Even the canon in these cases says: our canon is not sacred, you should change what you need to make your game into what you want it to be.

Different groups, different group structures, different play style goals, and different tastes change a lot. We wouldn't have a different set of rules for LARP and tabletop from the same companies if this was not a known, recognized, and understood reality.

If someone wants the tabletop experience, they should frankly go to an online tabletop. If they want strictly LARP, go to a LARP. M* is somewhere in between the two. Until some company writes up a M* rules variant to be a canon system, we do not have one for our environment. That means tweaks are going to be necessary to the existing systems to come up with something that works, which is ultimately what the canon tells us to do in the first place.

@Misadventure Cue more volumes of that crazy end times book and movie series, I guess. And more bananas. But really nothing is more bananas than this.

...why is it always the day after the night I didn't get any sleep at all that they send the fire truck around blaring the siren and Xmas carols?

Because seriously it is fucking always. ,,,o.0'''

@Hexagon It isn't that the idea doesn't have value -- for instance, I'm pretty sure you'd probably get traction with the RPI crowd on this one much faster than the typical MUSH crowd, since they're more into the code+mechanics-heavy simulationist experience, generally speaking.

It was pretty much a ton of work to put 60 characters through respec within a month. It is not something I would ever consider doing again as a staffer. We had the extra stress of the entire mechanics and system being new, but that wasn't the hardest part of the process: it was getting people to reply to their jobs and simply tell us what they wanted.

People don't seem to have a huge problem with 'work harder to advance beyond X point', as was the case with RfK's decreased value per beat, or even with oWoD/nWoD's multipliers in costs.

Paying more just to keep what you've already earned and paid for is a different animal, though.

Now, I actually do get the argument re: passive earning, and I think that's a very valid area to examine. People have looked at all manner of ways to try and figure out some way of making this 'fair' or somehow tied to activity (which some people feel is in itself unfair) or slow it down after a point... nobody has found a universally satisfactory answer to that one. I don't feel this one is it, either, though, even if I think the idea comes from a reasonable application of observation of the real world.

Looking at Reno specifically, I feel the starting total definitely allows players to make a pretty dang capable character. Maybe not their dream badass, but definitely a very competent and capable character, especially if they go for the background incentive. With that starting amount, personally, I would have dropped the passive gain from 2xp/week to 1xp/week, and let the rest flow from activity/beats/etc. That's me, though.

The average lifespan of a game lately doesn't seem to be terribly long (before it becomes a ghost town, and I'm not counting the ghost towns), barring a few exceptions (FC, Shang, Arx will get there I'd bet, etc.), and this becomes a factor, too. While it's not a bad idea to plan for what happens if the game runs for 4 years and players are getting 104XP passively per year for just avoiding the freezer, it's the kind of problem people seem to go to extremes about preventing with very low starting amounts, or incredible amounts of hoop-jumping to earn XP through activity, etc. to prepare for a problem that will arrive on a later day that is simply not in the cards for that particular game to reach. Often enough, these methods -- and the hassle associated with them, or the feeling of sucking at everything all the time and it being difficult to advance at all, or whatever else -- will actively contribute to the game not succeeding to become one of those games that lasts long enough for this problem to actively manifest.

I have ideas, but no answers -- at least not for this problem on any given oW/nW/Cod game. (I don't, heretical as this idea is in most parts, feel oWoD or nWoD or even CoD are terribly well-suited to this hobby, at least not without some major overhauls. Which then becomes a new problem, because fans of the game as written will feel like they're no longer playing the game they like as it is, etc.)

@Hexagon said in XP Tax:

@surreality I love that I'm getting a lot of time to discuss this and think about it.

Each dot on a character sheet represents an amount of XP spent with the exception of the fiat dots granted at character creation. If the amount of automatic XP granted is in excess of what is needed to support that, then it becomes immaterial. You will never lose those dots as long as you have the XP to pay their maintenance. Since the "soft cap" of automatically granted XP is arbitrary, to be set by whomever is running the game, that value could be just above chargen (effectively a 0 XP character) or a very powerful character (such as a 500 XP character).

I don't own VtR 2nd Edition, so I had to reference the Reno wiki for XP costs. If they're incorrect, please let me know. It looks like Blood Potency is 5 XP per dot and merits are 1 XP per dot, so luckily there's no equivalency there. If maintenance is 10%, and each XP is 5 beats, one point of merit is 0.5 beats to maintain (its own potential headache, but most MUs seem to have fractional XP gain already) and one point of Blood Potency is 2.5 beats.

This is a lot clearer and more sane, yes. The previous example had everything as 'per dot' -- which doesn't balance out on paper, with those dots costing various amounts to acquire.

If it was viewed as maintaining your current abilities, the way you might keep going to the gym or regularly play trivia or do it every day as a part of your job, is that less egregious than viewing it as tax? I wonder if the connotation is offensive to some people, I mean, who likes paying income tax?

Honestly, no. There's a reason a lot of folks here don't go to MUDs where you have to grind to maintain or sustain what you've earned -- that is not something everyone wants out of their play/game/roleplay experience.

I know I am not in any way looking for something that emulates RL in this way, and I don't even think it's a terrible accurate emulation; it's something I consider hassle and drudgery RL, and that's not what I go looking for in my relaxation/creative/fun time at all.

Most people actively cringe about games where you need to post a simple 2-3 sentence written justification to raise a stat, because it's considered too much hoop jumping and needless hassle.

What you're suggesting is leaps and bounds beyond that. It does involve more or less a forced respec every so often, unless people want to just sit on points, which... I dunno how much staffing you've done. I was in charge of the 1e -> 2e respec on Reno1 for weresphere. Allow me to be brutally clear: this quite literally ate my life for more than an RL month of stress, hassle, and generalized nightmare stress. Getting players to go through respec under threat of ending up in the freezer if they didn't make the deadline (which was a month from when respec opened, this is plenty of time) didn't even motivate several folks; we did absolutely have folks freeze on account of this. On the staff work and player stress front, I really can't emphasize enough how many problems this will actively create -- which is far more than it could ever hope to solve.

@Hexagon said in XP Tax:

Paying maintenance represents all the things you have to do to stay where you are. Does that seem to close to RL? It can. I wouldn't want to do the math myself, at least not beyond a test case or three to prove my coding worked out. So I hear you, I really do. I brought it up here as a question about systems. It's about nitty gritty math and how do we advance and what does it cost us. I think there could be interesting ways to implement it, but that's a conversation for coding I think.

As a philosophical abstract, it's interesting to ponder, sure. It is not something I would ever in a million years suggest implementing on a game.

The problem is that it doesn't just remain a problem of code. It becomes something players need to be thinking about at all times, with every spend they make, every XP they accrue. I am not interested in having that be a part of my MUX experience.

What Ganymede is describing is a much better approach if you want some sort of advancement throttle.

@Hexagon Mostly to do with paging, @mail, etc. I'd think. That could get tricky. Setting it up for display in room and other informational commands, though, is probably something that could be done pretty easily.

@Hexagon said in What is your preferred method of function creation?:

@Bobotron What concerned me at the time was seeing a John, Johnathan, Jonathan, and Jon all on the same game. Last names give us a chance to differentiate ourselves. I've had problems with internal functions like page, and softcode like +finger, when using them with @names that contain a space. I remember thinking it would be great if they could all have a sort of &last.name and &first.name that together composed the @name, and alternately an @alias because typing the extra characters could be irritating.

You could potentially do something fairly cool with this, actually; while the @name itself remains whichever short variant it is (because first+last can get to look incredibly awkward in posing), something like +glance or in the room contents, which typically lists name and shortdesc, could list the &first.name &last.name variance in place of simply @name. That would be pretty dang cool, really.

@Hexagon said in XP Tax:

@surreality I was composing a post that addressed maintenance as you posted, but I don't think it quite addressed what you're saying. Wouldn't the 4 dot merit cost exactly the same for the mortal and the vampire? I would be wary about mixing apples and oranges, though I try to address that by suggesting to use the XP costs as given by the books as the basis for maintenance.

The human never has the opportunity to purchase the out of clan discipline, so there's no real conflict there. I prefer playing mortal, though that's immaterial here. I will say that if everyone, regardless of template, approaches the same limit or cap, where one spends the XP becomes very important. Items with high utility tend to cost more. Increasing Dexterity and Athletics will both make you better at football, but increasing Dexterity costs more and reflects that increased cost by increased utility; it can also make you better at using a sword or hiding.

I don't think the system benefits building tall (characters with a few but expensive stats) or wide (characters with many low stats), but it does make building tall and wide difficult. The only real variation seems to be with the innate abilities granted to a supernatural template at character creation. When given characters that approach a limit at 50 XP, this is dramatic. When given characters that approach a limit of 200 XP or 400 XP, isn't this less of an issue?

In your initial example, you're discussing a charge per dot, not a charge per amount of XP spent. That's what makes this a problem, because different dots have different costs. If the 'tax' on a dot of Blood Potency is the same as the 'tax' on a dot of Resources, you have a real issue on your hands.

It also fails to account for things like Professional Training, which grants a pile of 'free' merits, skills, specs, and things that otherwise will drastically increase the character's 'tax burden'. Not only would you be paying on your PT merit, you'd be paying on the two free dots of contacts, on the free specs, the free skill dot, and so on, in addition to paying the 'tax' on the merit itself.

I really just don't see this as a good idea. Diminishing returns on earning has been shown to work quite effectively. This kind of maintenance is a hassle, it's more work for staff, and I don't see a single upside to it that can't be resolved through much less complicated, high maintenance, and grief-inducing measures. I would not even consider a game that had this setup -- and I'm not the only one who's said as much. Meanwhile, people regularly play on games with hard caps or diminishing returns, typically without complaint.

I think the inspiration here is clever and insightful. I really do. I also think it's one of those aspects of RL that no one looks forward to and we all more or less consider a teeth-grinding hassle that is not something we'd necessarily want to be forced to do/waste time on, and I don't think adding that kind of hassle to the gaming experience is going to improve the gaming experience -- it's going to bring part of RL most of us loathe into it, instead.

To be fair, I do not loathe it in my case. Self-employed artist. I'm always learning new shit for work and am a font of useless skills and specs, were I to be written up in CoD. Everyone else I know loathes this, loathes having to spend a small fortune on it in some cases, and really, really hates it. My mother? Teacher. It was endless. My husband? Massage therapist. He has to do tons of additional 'refresher' training that is not cheap annually that's just a review of things he's already learned, he maintains nothing he doesn't do by working at his job day in and day out, learns nothing new, and is out money for the privilege of that waste of time.

Is this the kind of experience and frustration anybody wants to invite into their relax, unwind, and play a game time? I mean, really? It strikes me more as exactly the kind of thing we enter into the hobby to avoid having to think about or give ourselves the chance to destress from.

@Hexagon said in XP Tax:

What I'm learning is that this method may be suitable mechanically, but it hasn't been tested or applied by any known system out there.

Er, not really. It is heavily biased toward certain types of characters and certain types of spends.

You haven't remotely touched on the problem of a 4 dot merit costing more to maintain than 1 dot of an out of clan discipline, for instance, despite the fact that their initial XP cost is the same. This is a real, functional problem that impacts supers considerably less than minor templates or mortals. Both of these things cost 4XP to buy, but the merit will cost the player 20% to maintain, and the discipline dot will cost 5% to maintain, despite the fact that the power granted by each in play is likely to be about on par.

While that may not matter to you, it matters to plenty of players out there who enjoy these character types -- and they're already weaker on the whole, so adding yet another detriment to playing them is a very bad idea under the heading of 'well they already aren't as special'. It also heavily penalizes characters who invest in social merits like contacts and so on, to the extent that it may make those character concepts considerably less viable on the game.

The way you've laid this out, it is best to play a super, and buy high-cost-per-dot powers instead of skills or merits, because that will ultimately be 'taxed' less, despite the fact that these things are considerably more powerful that things that would 'charge' the player the same 'tax cost' to keep.

If you can't see that glaring problem, I dunno what to tell you, because it is one. @ThatGuyThere raises a very good point re: characters freshly created, too.

@mietze Was this the raku stuff you were working with? I'm sorry to hear it. It sounds like a good call for now, but I get how it can be frustrating and feel like a giant let-down. Will keep fingers crossed you're able to get back to it, and have absolute faith you'll be able to do it.

@gasket said in The Apology Thread:

So where is the line between 'holding a grudge', and 'you have proven to me that you are a horrible person and I'd like to keep my friends from dealing with the same ugly shit I did'?

Looking back over my list of people? I would, actually, warn people about #2. Someone who will put six months into wedging themselves into your RL with a fake persona for their entertainment, has done so repeatedly, and has stated clearly that they have no conscience whatsoever regarding the way it has drastically screwed up a lot of lives (he's broken up marriages, cost people real money, etc. in addition to the emotional abuse and craziness) in the process is someone I have no problem raising an alarm about. I would do the same if I had met this person initially RL; they've made clear that it's a pattern of behavior, and it's a pattern of behavior they see absolutely nothing wrong with, even when fully aware of the damage it has historically caused and inevitably will cause again.

#1 seems to dig his own graves fast enough on his own.

I think there's a difference, too, between thinking someone's awful and horrible, and just realizing: I really can't deal with this person, they're unhealthy for me to be around, and I should not be around them. It doesn't necessarily make them horrible, or mean I'm horrible, it just means there's a fundamental incompatibility there that makes us oil and water. It's OK -- and I would argue not just OK, but a good thing -- to be able to recognize that and step away in a 'no harm, no foul' context, and remain at a distance.

I think there's a lot of worthwhile stuff to consider there, @Monogram.

I do think there are some folk who are not deserving of second chances. That said, I don't mean that as a universal 'no one should give this person another chance', but simply that I, personally, would not do so, were I in the position of decision-maker.

The way I'm reading, your experience involves not forgiving people more often than doing so; mine is somewhat the opposite, and it comes with more than its fair share of regrets and wince-filled hindsight, too.

I would like to be able to say, "At least I did my best, gave them the benefit of the doubt, and tried my hardest to make things right," is a balm to the times when it goes horribly wrong, but while it helps now and again, it is, in itself, a double-edged sword. There are times it will, yes, be a comfort; you'll know, even if no one else knows -- or would ever believe -- that you did all you could with honest intentions and efforts. There is, absolutely, something to be said for that. Other times, it will cut the shit out of your hands as you try to hang on to that, and you'll hurt, you'll bleed, and you'll start to wonder why the hell you carry that damned sword around at all, let alone by the blade -- but frankly, there's no other way to carry it.

It, like much of life when shit gets real, doesn't come with safety padding.

And even though we're talking about pretendy fun time games, these things rarely come up -- at least for me -- from small things, but from things that are, on some level, a fairly extreme betrayal of an actual friendship, or the realization that the other person is simply incompatible with my fundamental understanding of the universe, the way things work, the way things are, etc. I will pound my head pretty hard against the latter until I'm bruised as hell and dizzy from it, trying to see the other person's perspective if I think they're worth it, but in the end, not everyone is worth that effort, sometimes they actually are just not quite 'right', and sometimes, those people need to be cut loose.

I can, for instance, understand why someone might think, for instance, that because they have a day job/child to raise/business to run/major daily RL responsibility, they should be able to behave IC and OOC with as much selfishness and disregard for their fellow players (even people they claim are close friends) as they can get away with, but that understanding is not going to make me any more willing to deal with them any more than I have to, because I know they have justified, to themselves, that they can do whatever they like, whenever they like, to whoever they like, and whoever objects to this treatment for this reason is in the wrong. And, yes, I have absolutely heard more than a few people say this, out loud, and see nothing at all wrong with it.

You essentially have two options with people like that: continue to be their doormat and tolerate that treatment, or walk away. You don't have to walk away angry, and it's better if you don't (even if that's hard to manage sometimes), but past a certain point, trying to get through/past this sort of thinking is tantamount to impossible.

I'm a loudmouth around here. I'm snarky and generally outspoken as hell and I have enough 'hills to die on' (that I've argued well past their death) that I could probably be mistaken for a brand new roller coaster much of the time. Most folks around here would not peg me for 'stereotypical doormat', but that's absolutely how I've spent the vast majority of my life, even recently.

As someone who typically would reach out to these people -- including the type described above -- when something went wrong, and would try to help/make things better/make things right/etc., often convinced it was my fault (even when it wasn't), I got stepped on more than just 'a lot'.

There is, essentially, a third way: not forgive and forget, not fester in wrath, but just peaceably live and let live, apart.

It is not easy. This is one of those 'do as I say, not as I do' sorts of things; I've almost never managed to do it.

It is almost always the only answer when confronted with some of the more abusive and manipulative personalities out there, in the hobby, and out.

For example, I'm going to describe three people who fall under the description above, with a brief overview of what happened.

#1 Seemed to be a friend. Seemed to be a good friend. Some things about them vibed wrong to me, but that's more or less inevitable with anyone, and I'm sure there's a laundry list of things people could list about me that are the same way. I ignored those things, and unfortunately, in so doing, missed a lot of pattern-based red flags. I ignored the arrogance, the condescension, the lying, the victim complex, etc. until one day, out of the blue, with no change at all in the way we communicated with one another, he began to behave as though I was one of the many people he was convinced were out to get him. To this day, I have no idea why. I just know that the day before, he seemed to understand my meaning and intention perfectly well and we had no significant issues with each other, and the next, everything I said would be contorted into an attack, even if it had to be twisted up like some poor balloon animal to get there.

The downward spiral from there was horrible. There was literally nothing I could say or do that was not taken as an attack. Every choice I made -- on the game or RL -- was somehow focused on him, in his perception. I think it's safe to say that's pretty ridiculous for someone to think, but that was the situation I found myself in. I couldn't log in or out of the game without an extended critique of precisely why I must have done so. I would be told not to speak to the person, then asked a question by them, and if I didn't answer because I'd been told not to speak to him, he'd yell that I was disrespecting him by not answering. If I answered, I would be told I was disrespecting him by talking to him at all. (Meanwhile, if I asked him to leave me alone for a little bit, he simply ignored it. I would get yelled at for not answering him immediately if I was AFK doing my RL job.)

The final analysis I heard from him on all of this was so divorced from reality I literally can't even begin to fathom how he got there, and I still have no idea why any of it happened. I don't need to shower this person in scathing wrath and venom, but I absolutely want nothing to do with them in my life going forward, in or out of character.

#2 Pretended to be someone they absolutely were not, OOC. Actively and aggressively pursued a relationship for roughly six months until I even caved to a hug. It got bigger from there, hitting on a moment of weakness so thoroughly bizarre it would take too long to ever even start to explain -- needless to say, it worked. Cue eight years -- to the day, believe it or not -- of some of the worst head games I've ever experienced.

Then he just never showed up. Vanished. From the kind of life he claimed he was leading, I had genuine cause to believe he was dead. (@WTFE remembers the drama of this dude, I'm sure.) To this day I couldn't tell you if, when he showed up again and came clean about who he actually was, I was so relieved that the person I cared about was actually alive that I somehow managed to overlook the fact that the person I actually cared about was just a construct in the first place.

I tried the empathy route, because the empathy route actually wasn't hard at all; as much as some of us joke about our perpetual awesomeness, I would sincerely doubt there's a single one of us who has never been dissatisfied with themselves and wished they could be someone else, someone they thought was somehow better than they really are. I won't even pretend that doesn't apply to me enormously from time to time, either. While most of us wouldn't make the same choice he did, myself included (I actually have a pathological honesty problem, yes, problem), some of us have. Some of the people I consider among the best of us, most of the time, have made the same choice.

It's because we all do fuck up sometimes. Sometimes we're selfish. Sometimes we're weak. Sometimes we're stubborn or pig-headed (hi) or blind to our own behavior and even if we were thoroughly adept at self-examination -- which few people are -- we saw no reason to apply it at that one critical time, to that one critical choice. We all fuck up. It is important to remember that.

One of the key aspects of healing this kind of break when it occurs is realizing the mistake, and internalizing that lesson. The people who have made the same fuckup around here? There are plenty I still consider to be among the best of us, and people I would not hesitate to count as friends -- even good friends -- and go to bat for, help with whatever I could on game or off. The difference is, they realized: this did more harm in the long run than the temporary gains it won me, including real harm to myself.

This guy didn't. Years into this disaster, someone came to me from out of nowhere. Someone who was being lied to, just as I was. Another false identity seemingly designed to appeal just to that other person, another years-long target of mind games and emotional manipulation. I was shocked. With all he and I had been through, I genuinely thought nothing could shake me. He'd 'cheated' plenty of times, accused me of the same even though I never had (I can be loyal long past any rational degree of reasonable sense in regard to the people I care about), and so on. None of that broke me like this did. Nothing, frankly, could compare to having to look 'me, the girl afraid the person she cared about was dead' in the eyes, and tell them: it isn't the first time he's done this.

And I felt responsible. Even now, I feel responsible. I wonder if the empathy and forgiveness somehow allowed him to think what he did was OK on some level -- which is, I know, far more responsibility than I should take on myself here, when he's the one actively pursuing the awful behaviors. I still do it. I remember what it felt like to be that 'me', and I would not wish that feeling on the person I hate most in the world.

When last we spoke of it, he claimed he had felt bad lying to me, but not the other person, and that he'd done the same to others before he met either of us for several years and felt no guilt for what he'd done to them, either. This did not make me feel special. It only made me feel more guilty. It didn't, somehow, make what he did all right. It only confirmed he could not ever, ever be trusted, even if I was this magic special person who he felt bad for lying to. (And let's be real here, what are the odds of that? Oldest trick in the book: "But you're different!")

So empathy, understanding, and even the best-intentioned attempts to forgive... they can backfire. I don't say this to discourage anyone from making the attempt. I say this because that? That was hell. I say this because I don't want to see anyone else go through that.

I ran into this person on Shang, and he's the reason I don't play there, now. When I went to TR, he followed. He came to BITN, too. All of the stalky/controlling behaviors he had become accustomed to getting away with on Shang were fairly glaring to folks around me on TR and on BITN. Things he thought he could explain away, or that there was nothing wrong with, everyone around me could see: this is not all right, surr, please let us do something to get rid of him.

And really? I owe them an apology for not letting them, because I was afraid of the torrent of abusive crap I'd get from him if anyone reacted at all, or even somehow let on that they knew there was a problem. That's the level of 'terrified doormat' we're talking about, and that was just, what... 5-6 months ago, tops?

#3 ...is complicated. While the previous situations are over and done with and I have no reason to engage with those people again (thankfully), this one is ongoing. There have been lies. There has been a lot of damaged trust, a lot of frustratingly and needlessly shady nonsense. Thing is, one hell of a lot built that trust in the first place -- and that, ultimately, counts for more. This person was there through it all with #1, and for about half of #2, and is, I can say without overstating the matter in the slightest, is why I am still here at all and not ashes mixed into the dust in a suburban Delaware side yard and the sand and pebbles on a beach in Cape May. (This is not an easy thing to admit, but it is true.)

Even so, #3, when called on shit, does not evade. #3 owns their shit. Admits it. Actively works toward means of making it right, which is not always easy, even when it is not easy.

It's probably easy to see why #3 will get every shred of effort I can manage to work toward a positive 'forward', just as surely evident why #1 and #2 no longer have a place in my life, and are no longer welcome in it, whether they're forgiven or not.

Ultimately (and unfortunately), for many of us, shit will go wrong with the people who do matter that we've met through this hobby. Having been involved for twenty years now, I count myself lucky to have had only three of these that have gone into the deep waters. The ones I actively bitch about? The Jeurgs and the Rexes and the Spiders? Relatively speaking, even with the thousands of dollars in damage Spider did to my actual RL house, they're footnotes, by comparison.

As for the people who don't mean much, they're fairly easy to make a fair call about -- just figure out how much you're willing to trust them and with what, overlook the rest as best as you can, and keep going.

Sometimes, empathy won't work. Sometimes, forgiveness will be taken as permission. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is walk away, and do your best to forget. Scream if you have to. Vent if you have to. Get the cringe out, or the rant, or whatever else -- but keep going, even when that damned sword feels like it's going to cut your fingers off sooner or later and you're gonna fall a long way, and hard.

As much as this community can be a petty collection of bitchy whiners and grudgewank rantophiles, I will honestly -- and with no small measure of thanks -- say it has helped. The folk with less than wholesome intent, like examples #1 and #2, will do their damndest to isolate you, because it gives them more control. While I have not really mentioned them here much -- and if so, have made a point of doing so without names and somewhat obliquely -- especially compared to some others, the simple fact that there is a place where people can share their gripes, happy moments, goals, and concerns in the most general of ways is an enormous help.

While we can get petty and demanding and bitchy, it's still a baseline that's grounded in more than one control freak's perspective. Never underestimate that shit; it's actually priceless.

So while it's laudable to look at ways you can increase your empathy, accept apologies, offer forgiveness, apologize yourself for your own mistakes or choices you've made that have done someone harm (intentional or otherwise), repair damaged connections, or otherwise work toward all of those best-intentioned ends, please do make sure to take the time to learn from and then forgive yourself for your anger, your pettiness, your bitchy moments, your mistakes. Learn from them first, and accept and internalize that they were/are mistakes, but do it. (I could go into reasons why from 'guilt makes us do stupid shit/tolerate what we never should as a perceived penance' to 'nobody actually wants to read blurt like this and it's best to not let it get to that point in the first place', but I don't think I need to at this point, right?)