Best posts made by The_Supremes

@Thenomain said in What do RPGs *never* handle in mu*'s? What *should* they handle?:

@Ide

It comes down to how I play the character. I wasn't thinking too much about it, but what @Duntada said about an 18th level mage nuking a street game made my entire history of posting on Wora (both of them) and Swofa and here swim into a particular focus: Tabletop games put the character in the role of the most important thing, while a Mush cannot easily be played this way.

On a tabletop, throwing a fireball at a street gang may put your character in jeopardy with the local law, it's not going to end your character. The storyteller and your fellows at the table are going to roll with it and keep things interesting.

On a Mush, it's likely that most people don't have that level of interest of you as a player. They're not going to cater to your play style.

Extending this line of thought: MU*, of necessity, involves telling a different kind of story. It's no longer about the PCs directly, it's about the community, or the place. A common pattern for sphere metaplots in oWoD (which is basically all I've enjoyed playing in this format) involves eventually facing some kind of ultimate big bad. This is, fundamentally, a tabletop plot. It has a clear ending, a clear beginning, and you know when you've won.

When you run that as a sphere plot on MU*, you end up eventually getting there and then.... what? Season 2, bigger and badder than before? That's a diminishing returns curve, and eventually every TV show that relies upon it either shuts down or jumps the shark, eventually.

Arcs like that aren't metaplot, they're now subplots, and a lot of the meta is going to be player-generated, emergent content that happens as social circles, conflicts, and tensions are forged through general RP. I try to make my sphere metas be situations or conditions of the place. They're not things you fix (at least not without tremendous work, and generally all you end up doing is changing the status quo to some new thing that you now need to contend with), they're things you adapt to and they color all the smaller scale stories you're telling.

Your character's story is braided together with plenty of others. You can still have your beat-the-badguy story arcs, it's just A story instead of THE story.

@Pyrephox said in What do RPGs *never* handle in mu*'s? What *should* they handle?:

However, just capping or eliminating experience/improvement isn't a solution, either, because a lot of players are primarily incentivized by seeing their character become more power and get more Stuff. Remove the opportunity to mechanically grow and change, and you lose a lot of people's interest.

Retirement is an alternative to capping. Congratulations, you won. Time to start over with something new, maybe we'll keep this bit around for use as a powerful NPC and we'll ask you to cameo, etc. Still rubs people the wrongway sometimes but I think it's a nice enduring reward that doesn't necessarily unbalance the stock of active PCs as hard.

@Derp said:

As much as I would want to play this... I wouldn't. I would find my eye twitching at every third pose and going on 'oh my god that is not how that works' monologues, probably much to the annoyance of other players.

So while I encourage this, I'm also big enough to realize I'd be one of Those Players, and leave the rest of you to have your funtimes in peace.

I would also be one of Those Players, but I suspect my will to not at least give it a try would utterly fail about three months in. On the other hand, if it hadn't degenerated into a massive OOC shitstorm by then...

But yeah, pilots shouldn't attend movies about airplanes, etc.

@EmmahSue's and @Ninjakitten's checklists are very close to my own method. If/when those fail me, I will also go troll the site's wiki, checking out people's 'hooks' field and looking for ways that my character can ping those hooks, reaching out to such people with pages. Yes, it's the MUSH equivalent of cold-calling, but it works surprisingly often, people like it when you read the things they wrote and approach them on the terms they laid out.

As RP Staff, I also appreciate people who create jobs. Jobs give me an automatic list of: here's a bunch of people who have specific RP needs. If anyone's online who created a job, I start poking them in order of oldest, actionable job.

@faraday said in Finding roleplay:

Tangential note: I understand why sometimes staff wants to require approvals on PrPs - I used to be that way myself. Trust is hard when you're worried about players doing crazy things. But in time I've realized that strict PrP policies will discourage even the most enthusiastic players from running anything. Or they'll just ignore them and run it anyway. These days my policy is just "run what you want, just don't wreck the theme."

I require approvals for PrPs on my site, but it's not so much about players doing crazy things as it is two other concerns, collisions with established canon, and what I call New Puppy Syndrome(tm).

Player wants to run a PrP. Great. I love it. Before they do it, I ask for a basic synopsis up front and give it a quick scan to make sure they're not running into problems. E.g. if their PrP needs the city's vampire prince to do X, but another PrP or TP has explicitly established that he's magically prohibited, or incapable of doing X, we need to amend because otherwise the game's canon winds up self-contradicting. I've seen years-long meta-arcs go completely off the rails over this. Collisions aren't a reason to reject a PrP, and historically when PrP STs needed to borrow established NPCs they were perfectly happy to take advice or requests about substitutions.

New Puppy Syndrome, however, is a big drain on staff time and resources. An ST may have a finite interest in their own PrP. They want to run the scenes, they want the things to happen, and then they're done. But their players, and folks who hear about these events second and third hand may want to poke at these goings-on or the aftermaths. The PrP ST, however, is done with it and no longer has interest. This is fine, but that means the aftermath RP (usually investigation type stuff) lands in staff's laps. I need to keep tabs on what PrPs are running, have been run, etc, so that when I get weird +requests from players that make absolutely no sense to me otherwise, I know who's new puppy this is that they got bored with and sent back to the shelter. Unlike with the real puppy, there's no ethical failing here, but taking a first look at a PrP before it goes live lets me be ready for the secondary and tertiary effects it might have.

I certainly don't think the approval process needs to be anything more than a look-over. The only PrPs I'd actually reject are on the order of "I want to run the PrP where the world ends and everyone on grid dies."

@Pyrephox said in Finding roleplay:

I have no objections to random plot dropped out of the sky, but if you REALLY wanted to rev the engines and storytellers had time, it'd be even better to page the people involved and say, "Hey, I've got a few hours to run something for you guys - what would you like to have your characters do that could happen where you are?"

When I run out of jobs I can take action on (Hah!) that's a thing I've been known to do.

@Seraphim73 said in Finding roleplay:

As for +requests sitting forever... I know that Staffers are busy running things, reading apps, and with their RL, but I don't generally think there's any excuse for a +request sitting in the queue for more than a couple of days. After that amount of time, you should at least get a response back of "We're discussing this, we should have a resolution by X time."

Anything less... is uncivilized.

Staff really need to heed due dates. RL shit happens, whatever, but at least be checking in, yeah.

The city of Detroit has gone through a major economic and demographic decline in recent decades. The population of the city has fallen from a high of 1,850,000 to 701,000. The automobile industry has suffered from global competition and has moved much of the remaining production out of Detroit. Some of the highest crime rates in the United States are now occurring here, and huge areas of the city are in a state of severe urban decay. Upon these real-world stresses, we lay the Classic World of Darkness skin: The city, in 2003 opted to carry out a shrinking of its municipal boundaries, forcibly relocating anyone who lived in the newly disincorporated territories (with race and class disparities rampant in the outcomes of this policy) and essentially surrendering huge swaths of the former city back to nature. The move was called 'Measure 2' and it saved the city a mountain of money woes at still uncertain costs and a stigma of capitulation.

From The Ashes is a Classic World of Darkness game running with 20th Anniversary rules (or as close thereto as we can approximate, absent M20 and C20), and set, as you probably worked out, in Detroit, Michigan. Our game is themed on reclaiming lost things and as such all spheres face an uphill battle and (as of this writing) no 'home base' or organized community. Garou have no caern or sept, Kithain have no freeholds, Mages have no chantries - each for different but (at least tangentially) related reasons. We're telling the stories of how these communities get by in the absence of their usual social apparatus, and likely how they go about re-organizing and staging a comeback. Player characters will be expected to self-govern and self-organize, as well as earning their happy endings.

We are open for Mortal, Mortal+, Changeling, Shifter, and - with caveats and heavy screening - Mage spheres. (Sorry, no Vampire. Maybe someday we'll open it, but as of right now we have no staff competent to run Vampire, and no we're not looking for cold-call applications for staff.)

If you're interested, come check us out at darcness.net:2860 or give our wiki a gander at: http://fta.darcness.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Best person to contact there is The Supremes, (the guy who wrote all this), his schedule is Tuesdays/Wednesdays all day, Thursday mornings, Fridays after 10AM, and Saturdays until 5PM (all times Eastern US). All else is catch-as-catch-can.

tl;dr - EVE is described as "a so-so spaceship game with the world's best Meta."

The Mittani is the Something Awful (Goonswarm) faction's dictator. He doesn't have a current account, he just plays the metagame and makes a solid income on the side running a set of fansites including one that used #gamergate as a springboard to launch into broader games 'journalism.'

His history's really a fascinating read if you like space politics. But he's winning an MMO: he doesn't pay to play, and he makes money off of other people who do, without working for the publisher.

@Admiral said:

I've never seen a case of eminent domain used to force people from disincorporated areas to move -into- the city.
I've seen it used exactly the opposite, to force people to move out of the city.

To date you are correct, EmDom hasn't been used in this fashion. RL Detroit, ultimately concluded that voters wouldn't accept it (they were right) because it would feel like a major invasion of personal property rights (and it would've been, not that this stopped people from doing it in Kelo.')

Maybe my experiences in major cities differs from yours. I'll give you the strange 'We love our people and want to take care of them so we move them into the city where we can do so' Detroit.

Again, you're reading stuff that isn't there. There's nothing about 'we love our people' in this move, by the city. It's a budget-saving measure. They write-off huge (read: poor, mostly abandoned, high-crime) neighborhoods as total losses, legally divest the land from what is 'City of Detroit' and cease water, power, policing, fire coverage, and all other city and emergency services. In order to avoid people who live in these places having the right to sue the city for not providing mandated services, they move the few hangers on who still live there to other neighborhoods that they're not writing off. There's no love here, and the process is spectacularly horrible for all parties.

What about the 'Werewolf has to be cuddly and safe and no stereotypes allowed!' business?

First of all, once again, you're reading things that aren't there. There's nothing about our Werewolf sphere that's cuddly or safe. What we are doing is making the game a safe place for players. Since we have players who are POC and all manner of minorities besides, we're not interested in character concepts that rely on (e.g.) racist stereotypes. They are a form of aggression against the stereotyped minorities and - frankly - they show zero effort on the part of the apping player.

If you can't imagine a Bone Gnawer except as an alcoholic black guy who's behind on his child support payments? You've got some work to do as a writer. If you can't imagine a Black Fury except as a vengeful misandrist, you've got a damagingly incorrect understanding of what feminism is about, and again, we're not interested - our Black Furies have more depth than that. That shit wasn't actually okay in the 90's either, but it's become a staple of WoD gaming in large part because WoD was written by and for people who didn't know any better - I sure didn't get it.

That's what the 'no stereotypes' thing is about though: protecting players from well-meaning folks who don't even realize that playing a character who perpetuates damaging stereotypes is part of the problem. Hell, usually they don't even realize that the character they're playing is a damaging stereotype. This shit's hard.

Example of Stereotype we do allow: Ahrouns are violent and full of rage. Why? because no actual real-life people are being harmed by the perpetuation of that stereotype.

Or the 'white people aren't welcome in the ghetto' business? I don't recall if that was your game or just discussion we were having about opinions of the ghetto in general though.

I was not party to, nor witness to, any such conversation - I suspect you're bringing this in from somewhere else.

@wizz said:

but it's not like the game creator was implying anyone who played oWoD was racist or misogynist. (Presumably.)

Confirmed. I don't even believe the folks who wrote this are, necessarily, racist or misogynist, either. But what White Wolf wrote down, and what a lot of us play with is damaging stuff, and we don't even realize it... which is one thing when you're playing around a table of white guys and while it perpetuates the invisible damage, it's the kind of drop-in-the-bucket stuff that's not worth worrying about. When you've got actual people of color, actual gay people, actual trans people, etc, playing on your game though? You need to be more aware. It's really fucking hard work, too.

@Admiral said:

I apologize if I came off strong. Racism is one of my twitchy points. I absolutely hate it and part of that hatred is hating when people try to turn pretendy-funtimes into a battleground for their particular viewpoint even if it coincides with mine.

It's totally understandable that this is twitchy-making stuff. We put the notices of the problematic stuff on the wiki so that the pretendy-funtimes don't end up the battlefield. We write, on our sleeve, where we stand on this stuff so that there are no surprises three months in because I hate that shit too.

@Arkandel said in Finding roleplay:

See, what you view as perfectly reasonable and benevolent approval process ("just talk to me, we'll figure it out") is very often seen as an obstacle, a reason for staff to look down at a creative task that's often fuzzy in the early stages. Having someone trying to poke holes into a plot before it even gets off the ground isn't fun, after all, and few people can take rejection or even constructive criticism well.

This is true, as with everything I look at this as a balancing act between maximum functional freedom and a minimum of me spending my time running down the details of a PrP on IC hearsay alone when I could be running scenes.

The phrasing in our PrP policy is different than the frank discussion I gave here for exactly the reasons you state. Most people never even realize that I've actually thought about the implications their intended PrP might have. (In all but one case the implications were nonexistent, the scope of the story was so localized that all I did was say 'have fun, send me logs when you're done.' In that one case it directly overlapped with a player-requested TP I was running, and I basically offered the PrP ST a full hand-off of my stuff for them to shape as they pleased. They accepted and took off with it, it was great.)

How you frame a policy is at least as important as how you execute the policy, though. And any policy at all is going to offer some kind of resistance, you're right.

I'll never get tired of saying this: Storytellers and coders are by far your scarcest resource as a game-runner, so the more staff can do to stay out of their way until something goes wrong or if they ask for help - as opposed to putting obstacles up - the better it is.

So very, very true. Also, staff can be reaching out to their players. With only three staff, we have a number of players who are on during times that staff aren't on-hand. I've had a couple of players comment on this and let drop a story idea or two without even realizing it. Those are opportunities to suggest to the player that they step up and PrP ST. The usual concerns of "what if I do it wrong, etc." come up, but that's an opportunity to coach a new ST, share a few tricks, and help someone get over those first-timer cold feet. Most people who do it enjoy it, even if they never do it again. Some folks catch the bug.

@Sunny said:

@The_Supremes said:

To my mind, though, the 1990s style app process was 'write a novella' rather than 'answer 10-15 questions about your character and show me a sheet.'

Sure, but you're not asking for just a sheet and some questions. This is misleading, as anyone who spent ten minutes (that is being enormously generous) looking at the application process could see.
...
The combination of the 1-5 page background PLUS the questions. One or the other, and if you decide on the questions, bring them down to something that's not going to take a damn essay to reply to. This amount of work is great for an OTT or something with a small group of people, but an actual mush, not so much.

What is actually written on my wiki (emphasis added):

Changeling/M/M+: It needn't be very long. Anything from 3-4 paragraphs to five or so pages is sufficient - whatever you feel is appropriate for your intent.

Werewolf: Often that will include a short story or a historical narrative, but it doesn't have to.

You say I've been misleading when I say that the background component is truly minor, because of the above requirements, (which could be more consistently written, I'll admit). 3-4 paragraphs of "this is what this character is" doesn't seem like a big deal, to me. I can stamp that out in six minutes. I'm not looking for the best prose of your life, I'm looking for an understanding of what this character is, that you want to play. And, (and the wiki will be edited to reflect this) the narrative-style backstory is actually optional. I've just found that very few people can give me a working understanding of their character with only answers to focused questions.

So in response to your suggestion that I should choose one or the other: I would choose the questions, then, because those are there for my benefit as a storyteller. I care less about your character's history than I do about how they're going to interact with the TPs, PrPs, and other characters and themes already on grid.

The follow-on to this is your objection to the length of the answers to the questions.

Again, our wiki:

All questions should be answered in 'short answer' format. An essay is too much (although more information never hurts), but more than a single sentence will often be needed...

2-4 sentences per question has been the norm for approved characters. Don't get me wrong: That you see that there's a TON of room for depth in the answers to these questions is a thing I see as a good sign that you're a player who gives a shit about story, but 'essay length' response is explicitly NOT the requirement that I put into place. That is a thing you are reading into this on your own.

@Sunny said:

@The_Supremes said:

That said, I've been running tabletop games for 20+ years and this isn't my first time to the MU* staffing rodeo, either. In my career as GM/DM/ST I've presided over five character deaths. I think I know a thing or two about balancing setting with story.

If you have to throw out how long you've been doing something to prove your point, you don't actually have any business talking.

Actually, you insuinuated that my setting was designed to kill characters off, or in your own words, that 'investment vs. . risk is not balanced.' That's a newbie story teller mistake you identified and that this isn't my first rodeo becomes absolutely germane to the issue. Claiming Appeal to Authority fallacy only works if there's no logical link between someone having credentials and the issue at hand - the issue at hand was whether or not I know how to balance investment vs. risk.

@Sunny said:

@The_Supremes said:

I mean, it's WoD, of course a character /might/ die. If I understand you correctly, you're basically asking about the risk vs investment balance. The danger a character faces is a function of their actions. If you want to play a character that lays low, doesn't make waves, and withdraws from threats rather than confronting them your character can be very, very safe. If that's your style of character, though, I would suggest that they probably wouldn't go near Detroit in the first place, in our setting.

This is the response to 'it looks like investment vs risk is not balanced'. OK, then. These statements make a whole lot of assumptions that don't actually follow the questions I asked and the statements that were made, and for you to get a condescending, insulting tone with me is ridiculous. Your ideas can go fuck themselves.

then, if you're still interested in answers to your questions, I suggest you re-phrase them, as I responded to the statements I saw.

@Sunny said:

@The_Supremes said:

I'm also curious what part of the app process you object to, in particular, so that I can review. Feedback is always a welcome thing.

I'm being critical because there are things about the game that really look interesting and I'd like to play -- the setting / premise is GREAT.

Thank you, both for the critique and the compliment. I worked really hard on the game for a couple of years before I opened it up.

But between the ridiculous House Rules and the condescending attitude in response to valid questions pretty much squashed that. So I do appreciate, at least, being given enough of an impression to ensure that I'm not going to waste my time.

No condescension is intended. You simply were in error when you reported things about my game, I sought to correct those errors, did so again in this reply. I'll be blunt: you sound like you're responding to phantoms of MU*s past, rather than to my game, itself.

I can't speak to specific house rules you object to, but it's not like house rules are a new thing. WoD's canon systems were - by the authors' own repeated admissions - never meant to play together under one roof. House rules are a necessity of so many disparate systems, every site has them. I do you the favor of writing mine down to the best I am able.

@Arkandel said in Finding roleplay:

@Bennie just said something that's very true - a lot of plots aren't planned in advance. In fact I'd say there might actually be more of those impromptu ones than well thought out multi-part storylines - basically you have 3-4 people sitting around on their thumbs and one of them gets the urge to 'run something'. It might be something they were inspired to do from a TV show they watched or book they just finished or just a flash of inspiration. If this is to happen it will be right there on the spot, once the moment is gone... it's gone.

Yeah, we frame our policy to explicitly allow for those things to come to us after the fact. The major reason I want to know about these things happening is so that I can be prepared to pick up when the ST's done, and also so I can hand out XP. To the extent that things happen out of my earshot... shrug folks don't get XP and possibly wind up having their character look like an idiot if they take those events as canon into TP I'm running. It's not like there's enforcement action or whatever. I'd never chew someone out over it.

Some of my favorite scenes, as a player, happened in that spontaneous fashion. We explicitly define 'PrP' in our policy to exclude single-scene pick-up stuff like that, too. For exactly that reason, with the option, if it turns into more, to send us logs for XP.

I suspect we're actually in agreement in what the workable form of this looks like, but have different communication styles.

Re-ordered for rhetorical impact:

@Ganymede said:

This genre operates by credibility and appearance. This is why "the truth" is irrelevant.

@Sunny said:

I don't know you.

But one, folks know me, and two, they know I'm not going to kill their character without them either disappearing on me. Neither of these facts apply in your case. That's the sad fact of the matter.

This is really what this all boils down to, too, it would seem. I think @Ganymede and @Sunny nail it there. This is, actually, why we have the 'you can do better than stereotypes' disclaimer up front.

@Ganymede said:

I want to play a man-hating "feminist" Black Fury stereotype ... When it comes to offensive stereotypes, the issue isn't what the character is, but who is playing them. And you're really not going to learn who your good and bad players are until you get them in the door.

You're absolutely right that stereotypes are just tropes, and tropes - as they saying goes - aren't inherently bad things. In a skilled writer's hands, they're brilliant tools. I believe that someone could play an character that's built off offensive stereotypes well enough, thoughtfully enough, and compellingly enough, that it paid off in the long run.

But I don't know you.

And I'd rather get to know someone before I let them go out on a limb, because just as there's a list of horror stories about this site and that site as long as anyone's arm, there's a list of horror stories about players, and cliques, and cultures, of equal length. And you're right, I'll still have to put out fires. But this isn't just about flood-filling a game with apps. This is about finding players who see the conversation we've had here and decided that this is worth a shot.

The big message I'm trying to send here is: No, you don't know me, but I give a damn. I have a particular storytelling style, and have particular storytelling strengths and weaknesses, same as anybody. The game I run isn't going to appeal to everyone, and that's okay.

I don't mind that folks bristle at the 'no stereotypes plox' policies. I engage with the objections because it's feedback, and having these conversations is valuable to me. It makes me think about why, and how much this stuff matters to me.

And, importantly, it's not just, as @Ganymede so eloquently put it, "the truth" not mattering, it's anything the FNG says not mattering, either - because it's just talk. And there isn't a single thing out there beyond talk that can be offered - I mean, we're talking about online text-based RPGs... it's talk all the way down. My interactions here aren't about defending my policies, they're about explaining my policies. My questions aren't about challenging people's opinions, they're about understanding people's positions - and through that my own.

And along the way you learn a little bit about who I am, and maybe that helps you with the decision. Because the guy with the #1 bit's personality is kinda a big deal for these kinds of things, and lord knows all of us who've been at this a while have been stung more than once.

@ThatOneDude said:

Wow, we are saying that "a poor black person raised in a single parent home" would get more scrutiny in CG? What's the statistics on that vs the 18 year old hot model chick that has 2 doctorates and is also a badass psychic detective with 13 masteries in various forms of kungfu?

That gets rejected outright for other reasons.