@arkandel It is still impressively well done. It's not an easy watch, even for an adult, but it is incredibly well done. For a lot of us who grew up before the age of cyberbullying, it's certainly an eye-opener. It isn't just teens doing this, too; it's interesting to see how many of the issues we have in the hobby are reflected in that series in some form or another.
I'm kinda with Lotherio on this one. It depends on whether they want to be involved with the metaplot or not, pretty much. They may just want to chill out and play the bartender who hears all the crazy stories that come in from chaos in the metaplot, or be a team medic who is just struggling with patching up the people who keep coming in bruised and bashed around. There are usually roles like this in fiction that aren't core to the plot but still add a lot to the story and the enjoyment of watching it, so I'm pretty low key on this one. They may be a great information vector (bartender), or provide an essential service (medic). Even something like someone who knows how to farm and is interested in creating a crop in a setting like The Walking Dead may mostly be picking beans, but they may be giving people a reason to go out and quest through the dangerous wilds to get seeds or stock they know they can grow effectively in the space they have, and so on. If they expect to be the star while doing this, that's clearly an issue, but there are enough examples of this in fiction and media that are useful and engaging for someone who is a casual player and wants to stick to something simple with minimal time available for the game.
@arkandel said in Managing Player Expectations:
- As long as you're spoiling things for your players, stomp on false expectations. If some things definitely won't happen in the scope of your game inform players early OOC. "No, you guys won't find a cure for the zombies and restore the world to a pre-apocalyptic state" is a fair thing to say, then they can then still work on that IC, but you did your part. "You won't discover gunpowder and invent muskets in my fantasy game". Done.
1000x this. "That's not something we want in the game."
@arkandel The 'absurd on its face' part of this is that there are movements on all of those fronts as well.
Many counties and states have deer culls. If someone wants to shoot and kill something, many parts of the country will ask you to please please please go shoot some deer at various times of the year.
Drugs are already illegal, barring prescribed drugs and a handful of over the counter drugs (since people can overdose on those also).
Suicide is a mental health issue, and the mental health resources in this country are less than ideal, but since they're health issues... have fun with that one; lots of people are loud on this, too. (This applies to all the health-related concerns, too -- yeah, sure, that kid could have prevented their birth defect? Really?)
Anti-gang initiatives exist.
Kids can't go get a flu shot without parental consent, and again are part of the health care issue. Has this guy even heard of anti-vaxers? Kid in question may not even be getting a say here.
Healthy food choices were the previous first lady's main issue to push for 8 years; industry changes on this front are consistently moving forward in support of ensuring people know what they're putting in their body and what it can do to it.
Not even going to touch the abysmal state of sex education in the US, or the aggressive stance taken against women's health clinics where many women (not just teens) get their primary gynecological care, including pregnancy and prenatal care.
Plenty of folks are involved on these fronts, too. It's laughable to think otherwise.
@rizbunz I think a playlist is in order. Definitely. It would also need 'Miss Atomic Bomb' by The Killers on it, just on principle.
@rizbunz I actually kinda just really love that song. (The video is kinda neat storytelling, too.) It's good for a quirky dystopian apocalypse, though, for sure.
@tyche ...most recent? Sure!
Go ahead and keep trying to have this argument with someone trained in fashion and costume design, it'll be cute.
Most people at my high school had trench coats. This is because -- like most other local regions of this place called 'earth' -- it sometimes rains here.
Many schools already have dress codes, including public schools.
If we're looking for commonalities, aren't the vast majority of these shooters... male? Maybe we should ban anyone male from schools?
Let's put it this way, then:
Would an appropriate response to that statement from the student have been, "Oh, sorry, got my gross student crimes mixed up, I thought you were talking about raping an unconscious girl and posting video of it online, they were all prep jocks, right?"
I'm thinking no.
Keep your grossness to yourself, please. It's fucking disgusting and inappropriate as hell. People in this thread are talking about having lost personal friends -- who were wearing trench coats. Have some goddamned shred of human decency, for fuck's sake.
ETA: I am not even going to engage with this further, actually. Ignore time; the only appropriate response to this level of sheer ignorance.
Wasn't the latest shooter wearing a trench coat?
Clearly, guns don't kill people, trench coats kill people. </sarcasm>
Kate Spade, dude. Perky, lively, upbeat label and design ethos. Major depression, suicide. So if an actual fashion designer's fashion sense couldn't be predictive of behavior on this point...
(I'm going to assume you're genuinely ignorant and not trolling, because if you're trolling on this one, that's abhorrently fucking gross.)
@killer-klown I still miss the Moon Moon memes all over my old Reno page, I really do.
@ganymede In fairness, sometimes it just demonstrates it from the perspective of some other group. The art freak group suddenly isn't 'freaks' when they're at art school in college, for instance -- and different roles get tried on based on different criteria. It's the same bullshit 'classification' setup, they're just different classifications (weirdo abstract person, doodles because being stoned makes them want to doodle person, fussy perfectionist, person just there because they thought it would be easier than 'normal college', etc.). We self-sort a lot in college, at least regarding some of the standard high school classifications. It probably saves a lot of sanity for the folks who do, even if it means 'oh, fuck, maybe I'm slightly more mentally well-adjusted having gone to art school as an art freak rather than standard general college, but, uh... would you like fries with that?' can easily later introduce a whole new set of problems and classifications.
@saosmash ...again, I am fucking speechless.
I would have been charged with contempt if I was just sitting in the gallery because there is not a snowball's chance in hell I would have been able to stop myself from doing this:
...probably followed by repeatedly slapping myself in the forehead. I would have zero regrets, but my budget simply does not allow for that kind of thing. 
Not even kidding that you get 'self control of a saint' points for not doing precisely that.
@saosmash Yeah. A lot of people were talking about very similar things.
SCA or similar? They were screwed. (Parents who were in the SCA were starting to get threatened with having their kids removed from the home.) One player was a parent who had been a gamer, was still a gamer, and played video games with his kids -- same thing was a constant fear for him.
Another friend I only heard stories from years later; we were the same age, so he hadn't experienced this directly. He helped teach lower-level kids in martial arts classes. The class composition changed fast almost overnight, too; kids who had been involved for years withdrawing because of the risk of being perceived as a threat, and a bunch of new signups from new kids who were afraid, or whose parents were afraid.
There just aren't words. It is utterly heartbreaking. Sincere hope there's something you're able to do to help (read: that something stupid isn't tying your hands, which I know happens a lot, and has to be incredibly painful to deal with when it happens). Hug of thanks and support sent (if welcome) for being aware and on the front lines of this. And, like back then, wish like hell there was more than that I could do to help.
I think part of what might be overlooked here is that @Arkandel wasn't a staffer on BITN, either. He was a player, running a PrP for fellow players.
The player went not to the actual ST running the plot, but to staff. Which the ST wasn't. Now, what @ThatOneDude is talking about re: 'use staff to coordinate with the ST if we're not around at the same time' is a valid possibility regarding intent. Schedules being what they are, that is a thing that sometimes happens and it's easier to handle through a cc'd +job with everybody all on the same page (especially if +comms or whatever the players-only version isn't installed, and it wasn't on BITN from what I recall... and most people don't know about it even when/if it is installed somewhere).
It's more, 'this isn't something you'd get every detail of in a single roll'. It's more suited to a collection of different rolls for different aspects of the very complex problem. It's not a single action required to understand the totality of it. In another thread, I used the example of 'players need to blow up a satellite'. This would require a number of steps to accomplish, and it wouldn't be reasonable to do it in one roll. Similar issue, and would involve a number of different skills depending on what the thing actually is. Academics would be the step that helps get there, but is it an (Occult) paranormal gateway? A (Science) singularity? And so on.
“If the shooters had been wearing Abercrombie & Fitch, this wouldn’t have happened,” the administrator replied.
Shit, that brings back some memories. MU*-related, even.
At the time, I was on an all-ages game (Ghostwheel MOO). It had lots of teenagers who could admit they were teenagers (unlike other games where there were still piles of teenagers, but they couldn't admit it, and thus couldn't talk about this).
And just like now... hey, this hobby has a lot of oddballs. Always has, always will. Almost universally harmlessly odd oddballs.
Hearing about what people were going through day to day as all of this unfolded, directly, from teens all over the country in a 'safe space' for oddballs was... I actually don't have words for it. I have words for every fucking thing, and I just don't. Not for that.
It's not like I was way older, either. Early 20s. Things that had been actual assignments for me in 8th grade were now getting people I knew arrested in their teens. (Our 8th grade honors English class had four sections: comedy, theater, horror, and sci-fi. Our assignments for each quarter were to write a long-form joke, team up with a few fellow students and do a scene from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', write a short horror story, and build an alien world(1).) I know someone threatened with expulsion and required psychological examination and so on for writing a horror short story at his teacher's request, knowing he was a huge fan of Stephen King, and that he was an extraordinarily talented writer. Not based on the content, just that he'd written a horror story... when asked. I just... there aren't words. There aren't.
It was one of those moments when the world more or less changed over night, and not for the better.
(1) ...maybe I should have clued in back then on the wordy when most people were handing in worlds on three hand-written pages and mine was over thirty, typed and illustrated...
@derp She could just love me to death, though! I mean, that would be really scary.
(I don't actually know her and don't think I've ever met her, so obviously no offense intended here, just wordplay on the name.)
Per my icon, I could just be a grumpy moon and wait for the deluge of
Respectfully, I think you're both (Theno and Roz) saying something very similar, and using different language to do it.
I've played with folks who have insisted that playing anything but 'hunt the monster' was a waste of time. I've played with folks who thought that not going into every personal detail of their character's purely social birthday weekend party trip were missing a critical character development opportunity.
These two types people are probably never going to see eye to eye on what an ideal game would entail, and that's ultimately fine. They just have different ideas of what constitutes fun, and they want the game they are on to be promoting and enabling and supporting the kind of fun they want.
In an ideal world, there will be games that cater to both, and sometimes, the same game will suit both (in part because side trips are something players can do amongst themselves off in a temp room on their own), but more often than not, they're going to be happier on different games that focus more in the direction of the kind of fun they're into. This is also totally fine. It really, really is.
Also, goddammit, I really liked the ideas I had on this specific front, which I'm not going to go into, but consider a fist raised to the sky and shaken at both of you because my waffling-fu has me on the fence again about dev. DAMMIT, people. This fencepost is giving me splinters on my butt. 
I went outside today! We saw a really pretty giant moth and everything. And then every single old lady on the beach wearing so much perfume I could smell them from twenty paces with the wind against them had to stop to ask me what I was looking for amongst all the little pebbles -- clearly, the answer here is 'little pebbles I like', right? -- had to chat for twenty minutes, so we fled back home, and the peace and quiet of having my house to myself for a week is like heaven.
Hermit powers, go. I choose GrumpyCat to be my avatar.
@apos said in Earning stuff:
I think that this stuff comes down to tradeoffs and just what staff are willing to deal with, and more importantly, what they enjoy doing. Like I worry that we'd drift into talking about design in a way of best practices, when a well run sandbox game with no metaplot could be infinitely better than a plot driven game that just isn't run well, and I think because of people's experiences on good games they might be more inclined to say, 'this is the best way to do it' when really it was just colored by that particular approach being well done.
Adding to this, some players are just looking for something completely different from other players. It's why the 'more games is better' principle is one I still believe in pretty strongly. It's why I worry when there's too many loud voices pushing for a 'one true way' all games must be in some respect or another, whatever that is. It could be: metaplot, y/n? sandbox y/n? heavily coded economy? y/n? -- it really could be anything. And for every one of those things, there are people who like that thing and people who don't.
I would rather see fifty games with 12-30 people having a blast on each of them than five with 200 trying to please everyone. And having a mix there is fine, too! We sorta have that now, but a lot of the smaller projects get smashed by the loud voices making 'one true way' demands. These people should be making their own projects in their 'one true way' and leaving the people wanting something else, or even wanting to just try something else, to do so in peace to sink or swim; criticism or inquiry is fine and dandy, but the non-stop bashing of other ideas starts to have some eerie parallels to the 'only I can be special' problem. Namely, 'If someone else is doing it differently, they are simply wrong and bad and should feel bad!', or 'If someone else is doing it differently, the very act of them doing it differently is making the claim that I'm doing it wrong! It's working fine for me, so they're obviously wrong! I must defend my way by attacking them!' This is pretty dang toxic, and it's a big ol' bootheel ground into the face of trying new things, or even things that are not currently loud-voice popular.
@faraday said in Earning stuff:
If you apply that ratio to a MUSH though, assuming somebody plays 3 nights a week (which is pretty typical for an active player), you're talking about one action-oriented hero plot per month. That doesn't seem like a terribly unreasonable expectation for an individual player, and it's eminently do-able if you have a setting/character/player-staff-ratio that supports it. It's not practical everywhere, though, which is a problem if people expect it.
I don't think this is an unreasonable expectation, either, and it's one that a game of even moderate size could probably maintain fairly well. Probably even double that.
There are unfortunately a lot of loud voices that will insist that if each of those three nights of the week, there's not a chance to go be John McClane, staff is lazy, the game is dying, and "nobody does anything good". As much as I may want to dangle these people off of something really high by an ankle until all the entitlement drains out of them -- fate has cruelly denied me this magical power -- they are very loud and very insistent and their persistent loud insistence about this can do bad things to game morale over time.
@three-eyed-crow That's totally a conversation that'd need a Pit version if it's in Constructive otherwise, because I really will invent new profanity to throw at these people. I really will. Triply so when they're in/seeking/expecting/demanding leadership positions of some kind. I will absolutely invent new foul language just for them, and they'll deserve every new four letter word of it.