Then I'd like to distill many of my thoughts down to one line:
PC Antagonism Done Right requires the player to accept that their character is not the hero of the story, while their character does.
I also think the game should have a system in place where death, pain, suffering, and loss are meaningful, but as I believe that a player's job is to buy in to the theme and setting of the game they play on, this can be easily mitigated by the bolded statement above.
Wora, Swofa, Soapbox, et al., have been the OOC Room of the hobby: A lot of people think it's pointless or even toxic, most of the real work is done behind the scenes, but still important to keep conversation and socialization alive and a surprising number of useful things comes out of it.
Mind you, only a fool will keep moldy bread around just in case they need penacillin, but if you can keep your skunkworks separate from your core development, then keep it around.
The original goal of the Wora Wiki was to have a place to permanently file game information. It was about 40/60 useful vs. trash; having a place where every game any one of us ever played on was surprisingly helpful when people were snapping their fingers saying, "That ... one game with the ... thing that happened?" Well 'the thing that happened' may be on the wiki, or some other mnemonic reminder, and blamo!
The 'user' page was sacrosanct. Nobody was allowed to edit what someone had to say about themselves. The rest of the wiki, tho, was fair game, so there was one entry where I listed a bunch of thoughts I had ("Rules of Staffing" was an ongoing pet project), and another entry in the main wiki by @RDC where he leveraged my disgust of anything scatological to post a picture of a giant turd, which he did after I said something he didn't like or something like that. (I honestly can't remember and am over it.)
It would be pretty trivial to have and enforce a few basic rules, in spite of @Ghost's ongoing negativity understanding of human nature. Unfettered, it would be a scat-show. Gently moderated, it could be a lot of fun.
It's not like Wikipedia isn't a haven for drama llamas at its highest level. (It is.) People will try to abuse the rules. (They will.) I personally think that a common-sense approach somewhere between Wikipedia's rules ("don't make us care") and Stack Overflow ("ze must follow ze rules achtung!!!") with a hobbyist flavoring ("this is for fun, folks"), and I believe that it's entirely possible.
@Botulism said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:
more MUers probably play or have played WoD than read American Gods.
Thus predicting the downfall of literature. This should be fixed right goddamn now.
@mietze said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
Jesus. If there was some expectation as a prp runner that I input every thing that I thought could possibly come up into some code every single time (for others who probably didn't bother to list all their +nopes in the same code or who don't know them), shit if I would run things for people I don't know.
This is part of the current social expectation, and a little why I'm a little jealous at MUDs being able to say, "Fuck off if you don't like our system." (note: Hyperbole.)
But it's why I gave a thumbs-up to Ark's idea; if someone can't take a scene with ... I dunno, sadness or something ... then the person running the scene can go, 'Warning: May have feels.'
What I agree with you completely is that the societal expectation that we cater to everyone. When I was a kid (warning: "in my day" story), if we stepped on a nail we'd get some cortisone and a tetanus shot. Sometimes we would choke on pennies. We were stupid. It's what we did. My doctor was honestly surprised when he said I was almost up for my tetanus booster and I said, 'Yeah, okay, let's do this.' Most people don't like needles, he said. I don't, I said, but if it means I don't get sick when I'm being stupid then let's do this.
Needle now? Possibility of lockjaw? Needle? Lockjaw? That people think there is math here baffles me.
Accidents happen. Accidents between people happen. Sometimes it leads to beating the shit out of someone for it. Sometimes it means yelling, then realizing that you're the jerk, apologizing, and moving on.
I am never against information. I'm against the expectations of socially mandated happiness.
I don't run scenes, because I suck at them, but from a player perspective I wouldn't mind knowing that there will be an 'ugly surprise'. I mean, you go to a horror movie because you won't be surprised that there's horror, but you don't know what, and you don't know when. That's not a spoiler.
I will add to my note that I've always considered the most adult people to be the least tolerant of staff or player fuckery. That is, the people you're most likely to want to keep are the first people to recognize when things are not worth the effort. I do not frown upon anyone who walks away from a game no longer being fun, and I often feel bad or guilty when I'm in charge of something and that happens.
@crusader said:
@Thenomain
Honestly, if you weren't a decent coder, website builder and community organizer, I don't think anyone would have a use for you.
Nope, I'm good. Likewise, stop hitting yourself.
@Rook said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:
Here's a question... how does someone like this come back into the community and NOT try to do so, if their intention is pure and honest, anonymously? Doesn't the consideration of that question lend some credence, one way or the other, to understanding intent?
Hello, my name is Thenomain and I fucked up.
During my headstaffing tenure at The Reach, as a part of trying to maintain my anonymity in a character, I lied to VASpider and her husband to try to take it easy on me. I knew at the time that this wasn't a good idea, but anxiety and depression got the better of me and I thought I could make it work.
It backfired. Of course it backfired. One of the extremely few people I trusted with that anonymity told Spider and she almost immediately tried to blackmail me with it, in order to get some space, in order to justify that she wasn't wrong.
I've never done anything like this before and I'm unlikely to do anything like this again, but it happened. Sorry.
--
That's how. Be honest. Be forgiving. Be understanding. Be an adult. I would also accept "back away and hope it dies down and try again", but after the fifth or sixth time then I doubt this is going to be effective. In any case it has to start with recognition of the problem. If you can't recognize the problem--whether or not the problem was your fault--then I sincerely doubt it will change. One can always hope.
To extend Gany's "this"...
@Ganymede said in How Do I Headwiz?:
Trust your players, but verify their claims.
Trust your staff, but verify their claims.
You can get away on a game not trusting your players (and players can get away not trusting their staff), but you cannot run a successful game if you don't trust your own staff, because every staffer is an extension of your game, and therefore a reflection of you.
Even the shittiest game runs better, even successfully, if all staff are on the same page, with the same goal, or enough trust to believe and back up the goals of their fellow staff. "Ashes to Ashes" lasted far longer than it should have because of this. "Dark Metal" worked because of this. Some of the shittiest, player-unfriendly staffers came from these games, but they were passionate about the game and worked together.
Strive to be better than this, but this is how low the bar really is. People will put up with a lot of crap, even appear to smile and nod to the staff to keep them happy and off their backs, if they get to play. But, yeah, be better than this.
...
Brus (wherever he is) made this post long ago on WORA. It's one of the only things I bothered to dredge up from the old, messy flat-file. Not everyone agrees with it, but it's the most forward, most succinct, and most organized document of its kind I've ever seen: Brus' Five Pillars of Good Staffing.
Enjoy.
As @Derp said, there is a way to do it. One of the things that @program does is lock the player into no other input. If you're in the middle of this, you cannot type, say, 'p staff=Hey, question!'
I would be more likely to build via commands, rather than a strict answer/response system. e.g.:
> xp/build Gnosis
What level do you want to buy Gnosis to?
> xp/build 4
If you want to spend certain xp, type 'xp/build <amt> <type>`, else type 'xp/build done'
> xp/build 3 arcane
3 Arcane XP spent. If you want to spend certain xp, type 'xp/build <amt> <type>`, else type 'xp/build done'
> xp/build list
You are currently buying Gnosis 3->4 with 3 Arcane XP and 2 Normal XP - I'm waiting for 'done', 'cancel' or more xp
> xp/build cancel
Okay, I've stopped building your 'Gnosis 3->4' spend
> xp/build done
You don't have a current spend build
(edit: added more informative response from 'xp/build list'; I need to know where I was in my build somehow!)
Tabletop RPGs are games too!
Bundle of Holding has:
Enjoy our rich gaming history! Also, enjoy Demon if you're into it. (I am.)
Forcing a rocket age game to be an old IP would be horrible, either Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers. Letting you and players collaborate to make your own universe sounds like a great time, and I wish you all great success.
@auspice said in Mac OS Sierra Client:
You're stuck with Atlantis
That's like being stuck with ten million dollars cash, untaxed, that you can spend however you want, no strings attached.
@girlcalledblu said in Mac OS Sierra Client:
Perhaps someone who is savvy can just let me know how to change the input box so it's white with black text and that text is a different font than the monospace of the output window?
If someone else doesn't get to it shortly, I'll edit this to explain the process.
He was a good guy who I really only knew through this site, and yet he was light hearted and humane. His passing diminishes us.
And to restate what has become a mantra to my life lately: Fuck Cancer.
Recently started playing Tyranny.
This is a much, much better game than Torment: Tides of Numenera.
I enjoyed Paris:FdM and that New York City one. They were just goofy, therefore fun. CrackMUX before the staff got Srs Bznz.
Really, a lot of these games were fun before the players got Srs Bznz.
I had fun on Haunted Memories in spite of staff, and that our TLs let the sphere pretty much run itself, which was amazing for the players and fostered an environment where the Good Players
were allowed to make things up with mostly a thumbs-up, and I know a Good Player because they mostly do things that involved the sphere, adding to it, not absorbing and therefore subtracting from it.
There were plenty of OOC complaints/reactions/fits. I was one of the problem children, sure, but I was handled well by the other players, which allowed the sphere to continue on. Acting like an adult and expecting others to act like adults is the best counter I've ever seen to this.
--
The point of oWoD as written was to be silly. Oh I know that they wrote it with grimdarque in mind, but doing silly things for grimdarque reasons is practically part of grimdarque's MO. Taking it too seriously is usually there too, but you look at Warhammer 40k and go, "Being self-aware works too."
In my very first tabletop game of Vampire, my character with help of another worked out that we could ghoul about 15 hamsters a night, so we did this and let them loose in a park in a rival city just for the laughs.
And maybe that's why we don't have many oWoD games anymore: "Just for the laughs" does not seem the direction games or gamers want to go with their urban horror.
Not that you'd know from OOC channel chatter. I wonder if people would jump all over "just for the laughs" if given the chance, to get it out of their system.
--
edit tl;dr:
oWoD was stronger on the tongue-in-cheek. People didn't like each other's tongue-in-cheek so things got more serious. I think more tongue-in-cheek, as long as it's thematic, would be a very good move.
@Lithium said in Eliminating social stats:
When there is a game system that /has/ social rules, not using them, or just refusing to abide them is tantamount to cheating in my book.
Except that one of the key rules of WoD and some other systems (notably The Strange) is "only use the system when it's interesting". These games were made for The Table, where The Table is a group of people who can spend quick bursts of time deciding what they want to play. There are very few RPG systems out there that are suitable for "do this always no matter what". They exist, but we tend not to play them.
Dragon's Dogma (Dark Arisen) has ended up being the game I wish Skyrim was.
It could use more punch in the characterization, but I'm having a hell of a fun time tripping over little secrets and distracting myself from the main plot because, oh, what's this cave for? And: Oh shit I didn't realize that there was one of those there shit shit shit run run run!