Best posts made by Warma Sheen

@Pyrephox said:

While I would like to see more games with a stronger theme, I don't think that the theme drifters are actively setting out to "ruin" a game, and I don't think they're a unified crew of saboteurs - they're just players. Playing what they consider to be fun. I feel like, if you want a stronger adherence to theme among the playerbase, you have to show the players WHY and HOW playing to the theme you're hoping for is going to be fun for them.

I agree here. I don't think things are malicious and people will tend towards things that are fun. But it gets out of hand when there should be consequences and none come. This is where the staff can't be afraid to enforce their theme ICly if it is drifting from theme. The question is: IS this really out of theme or do I just personally think its cheesy?

To answer that, you ask: How would the rest of the world (not the actual world, but the immediate environment) react to this?

If you have a Pooh bar in the hedge, does that really affect anything? Are there other weirdly themed bars in the hedge? If so, this one wouldn't be so weird. However, if it stands out or if it becomes very popular among the Lost of the city, then it would probably attract attention. Both good, followed inevitably by bad. So make sure that happens. No one's intentionally trying to smash people's fun, but if the theme involves secrecy and hiding and you make something that stands out and/or allow it to be publicly known, then you get what you get.

As an ST, I ask myself, if I had a Loyalist, what would I do here? How would my character react to finding out about this place? It might not be an immediate burning and smashing, but it could certainly be a good way to infiltrate or to do surveillance and track people back to their hedge gateways and/or beyond. And it may be a while but when I finally drop the hammer, I will also make it known, ICly, how and why. If the players don't learn to stop drawing attention, then I don't stop dropping hammers. The theme is not, don't make Poor bars in the hedge. The theme on my game is that when you attract attention you get hammers dropped on you.

However if this bar is kept a secret, or it is no different than any other hedge bar (I don't even know if there are hedge bars or how common they might be, I'm just saying 'if'...) then smashing it up just because I don't like that particular choice of theme is just mean and players should feel slighted. This is how enforcing theme becomes unfun.

@Miss-Demeanor said:

@Pyrephox And I have personal experience with getting shut out of a sphere because I tried to play a game TO THEME, while the other group decided it should be all pretty princesses and tea parties. They aren't necessarily trying to ruin the game, but they have zero qualms about ruining YOUR experience if you don't play the same game they are. And yes, this is multiple time occurrences.

I won't say that isn't your experience... but I think this is usually a case of those group of people not wanting to let you in because you ruin their fun. If they are all pretty pretty princesses at tea parties and you come in dragging down the mood and spoiling their fantasies you're not going to be fun to be around or fun to interact with. If you're reminding them, verbally or otherwise, that they aren't princesses and shouldn't be having tea parties then you're the downer, you're the stiff. I'm not saying they are right, but if they want to be pretty princesses at tea parties and there's nothing ICly which stops them from doing so, and no consequences come from it, then that's not on them, even if they look like total fucking retards while doing it. This is very similar to the plot of Mean Girls from what I can tell.

It happens.

But in seriousness, it sounds like you played to the stated theme, but the actual theme on the game was something else. And that's why staff's role in theme is important. To stop the 'drift'.

@Apos That's a great example. African dialects definitely aren't one of those things people line up to experience. But that's why it is called a risk. Sometimes it pays big. Sometimes it sucks. You never really know what is gonna pay out. If you did, it wouldn't be a risk... So playing it safe is often the call. Especially in big franchises.

But Marvel has taken a lot of big risk that have payed out. Then again, as was pointed out, there were some risks they did not take which we'll never know how that could have turned out (admittedly, I don't know anything about the Captain Marvel stuff so I can't say to much there).

And at the end of the day, it isn't our millions of dollars that are at risk so it is a lot easier to make those calls form the cheap seats.

@Cirno I don't think there's any high honor in not being banned from a game. That's what is supposed to happen.

@TNP Nopes. I'm not signing up for alien abductions.

@Thenomain said:

@Ganymede said:

If you're going to run a Vampire: the Requiem game, for instance, paranoia and power-mongering are essential to the theme and setting, and, very often, players have to bend over backwards to find a reason to be inclusive.

That these games or players on these games don't think of ways to be inclusive to players (not necessarily the characters) is I think a major part of a larger issue, but I boil it down to "how these games are presented to be played need to be fundamentally changed to really work on-line".

There is that line that people sometimes unintentionally cross... player vs character. And the problem of expectation. Do you feel unwelcome as a player on a game if your character isn't included in scene, with the understanding that you are not your character? Do you expect that others find a way for your character to be involved even when they shouldn't be ICly? Do you feel unwelcome if the Sabbat don't let your Cam PC join their super secret meeting? There's no single defining line as to how much the IC has to be skewed in order for someone to feel welcome. One person might think its good to bend over backwards 30 degrees while another feels unwelcome if someone hasn't bent over a full 90. In short, its an impossible task to "fix".

There's also the feeling of not being welcome vs. feeling disliked. It is completely possible to not feel welcome without anyone actively doing anything to you, whereas feeling disliked should involve someone actively doing something to cause that. But then we're also talking about feelings... so... yeah. But plenty of people will sit and do nothing, then feel unwelcome because they aren't dragged kicking and screaming into RP or plot.

All you can really do is take the worst of the worst and try to skim that off the top and be content with whatever ambiguity is left behind.

I don't think Morey knew the kind of backlash he would receive for himself, for his team or for the NBA as a whole. Admittedly, I wouldn't have thought one little tweet would have had such a major reaction. I was just as ignorant. But once I looked up a little bit about it, I learned that this is exactly what China does over things like this even to people much less important than the GM of an NBA franchise. They are ridiculously petty. I didn't know, but I'm not really surprised either.

There are a long list of people that have been targeted by the Chinese political machine. They had a Mariott hotel customer-care manager fired for liking a Tweet from a Mariott account because it involved a survey listing Tibet and China as separate countries. A bunch of clothing makers, big and small, have had to apologize publicly on the sovereignty of China for depicting simple silhouette representations of the country of China on clothes without including Taiwan or Tibet or Macao or Hong Kong, or any combination of the above as part of the country. They are super anal and vindictive about stuff like that and have been for a long time.

So in that regard, Morey was definitely ignorant. Either that or he knew what might happen and just didn't care - which isn't likely based on his apology. However, specifically because the Houston Rockets organization had a special relationship with China, he definitely should have known.

Edit: I'll also add that to me, the craziest part of this whole thing is that after costing untold millions of dollars to the Rockets and the NBA in general with one retweet, he still kept his job.

I have to back up @shayd on this one. Saying someone is a "shitdick" online is not very specific. The reason why you categorize someone as such is sometimes important. People get called that or worse not because they are rude or insensitive or mean, but because they nitpick rules or "twink" a character a lot. Which can easily make someone intolerable on a game, but completely cool in real life.

And who someone is online can be very different than who they are in real life. A person might not change, and that's debatable. But how a person is perceived can be wildly different than who they really are. I probably often come across as cold or impersonal on games because I don't sit and chat or emote silly, goofy things to other people in the ooc room or make winky or kissy emoticons at people I don't know in real life. I log on, I look for rp and play and then I log off. And it may seem cold or cruel, but I'm not interested in purely online social interactions much. At least not to the extent many other people are. But does that make me, as a person cold or cruel? I don't think so. But others might disagree.

And I have to second @arkandel here. Don't tell me you guys have never heard of (and experienced) internet bravery. And I know there has to be plenty of you who have had one impression of a person online then went to a convention or a meetup and met that person in real life and had a completely different impression.

And I'm not saying @roz is wrong in the most recent post, I just think people are more complex than what they are being made out to be, especially in terms of being accountable for how you treat others in a digital space. Some people are exactly who they seem to be online. Others are not.

@Sunny said in Dead Celebrities 2020:

There is a point here, folks. Why is this objection not OK and others have been?

IMO it seems to depend on who has the objection. Or the comment. It doesn't just happen on this thread. It happens on others too. If you're just noticing that, congrats, you're not at max cynical mode.

I was not a fan of Kobe. I despised his style of selfish play (and selfish everything else). But as a person, this is a tragedy that hit home for me. I felt it. Good or bad, he was a substantial part of my basketball experience for a lot of years through the TV screen.

And I feel for the other families that lost people on that crash who will inevitably get overlooked or minimized while people express their sympathies for Kobe and his family. They lost people too. No one who has that happen to them should have to also feel less important than someone else who went through the exact same thing. I know that's just how people are, but it still sucks.

@skew said:

As a rule, I try not to murder people's children.

Another bleeding heart liberal softy...

@Aria said in Bad TV:

@Ghost said in Bad TV:

@Auspice said in Bad TV:

Supernatural should have ended where it was written to end. Season 5. They wrapped up the story nice and neat. Then it became the dead horse that kept being beaten for views.

I gotta give it to the cast, though. Good on them for making good money across 15+ years on a show that I'm sure they're well aware is repetitive and tropey. You git that money, boys.

I love Supernatural, but I love it knowing full well it's garbage. And really, so do they -- a fact which I give them full credit for. Everything after season five is best summed up in a quote from "Chuck", an in-world author writing Supernatural as a book series that is accurate to the character's lives before they happen* and which will later become the Winchester Gospels, because he's actually a prophet:

"It's not jumping the shark if you never come back down."

I give them full credit for the recognition of the general garbageness of the show and also that they continue to very clearly and obviously have of fun making it and a boatload of fun with their fans. Good on them.

(*Yes, I really just typed that. >.<)

If they tried to take themselves seriously, it would be sad. But they don't. At all. They laugh at themselves right along with you, which makes it awesome. On one episode, they literally laugh at themselves. That is one of my favorite shows.

As a heads up, if you only watch the first season, you won't understand what I'm talking about. It isn't until later that they gave up on trying to be a spooky scary show and just started having fun.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in The 100: The Mush:

I feel like the 'Game sucks' and 'Game is awesome' sides have been pretty evenly split here, and even in being kind of annoying about their positions in spots.

Chalk me up for the former category. I couldn't even get out of chargen before bailing.

@seraphim73 I'm sure @faraday would be able to help you with that lightsaber problem in no time at all.

The coronapocalypse is real. Not as bad as a zombie apocalypse, but real enough to have a definite effect.

The coronavirus is thought to have a higher mortality rate than the flu. Because we can't trust all the numbers coming from different countries, there's no real consensus. Still, the yearly flu we see are deadly. I'm not why people overlook that so easily.

But the perception surrounding the coronavirus is the real effect. Its sending economies crashing and people fearing for their lives. Its inspiring racial hatred (like that needed any more help). It is affecting businesses from meeting financial targets and causing political upheavals.

You know something is really bad when it can affect the untouchable 1%.

The coronavirus has really bad PR and it just goes to show that perception is reality.

Holy moly. People are rabid for this game... That's good, I think. Everyone else's eagerness makes me want to play, even though I've stayed away from Mage like it had the plague.

I guess its kind of cool that I can still find something new to experience.

Yo, if I don't have an underwater basket weaving skill, my concept is nigh useless. So, don't leave that one out.

Governments impose social distancing rules.

Nerds across the world become instant heroes, with decades of experience leading by example.

(Sorry, I didn't make it meme-form.)