Posts made by Warma Sheen

@Cirno said:

I didn't even get to roll a character. I said "Hey, is this the Fifth Shit?". And the wizzes banned me.

So clearly this place had some redeeming qualities.

@Admiral said:

I started ignoring everything Warma said when he tried to justify there being a safe happy bar in the Hedge on a Changeling game by saying it didn't hurt the theme of the game. No. It hurt the theme of the game. Darkwater dove straight into Carebear land and never managed to get out.

That's why you should read entire posts, so as not to miss the point.

Edit: The point wasn't that it should be there. The point was that it is staff's responsibility to show why it shouldn't be there instead of blaming players for creating it.

@Miss-Demeanor If they aren't fun, then don't play with them. If you are being bullied by other players and your staff refuses to do anything about it, the fault there lies again with the staff not the players. But being chased off the game is different than being shut out of a sphere. If you got Mean Girl'd, then that sucks and it shouldn't happen. But it sounds like you didn't like how they play anyway and didn't want to interact with them.

That's true. There's lots of those too.

@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'.

I think most shows take half a season to figure out who/what it really is. Once they get it rolling, things settle into place and everything improves.

@Ganymede Who can't make just a little bit of space for Demarco Murray? For reals tho...

@Ganymede said:

Do you intend to try out for the Philadelphia Eagles offensive line unit?

Give it a shot. They need it.

Attention spans have shrunk. And not just with younger generations. I can agree that the waits for MU*ing is more than most young people want to deal with. Its barely anything I want to deal with. A lot of time you wait for someone else to pose and they crap out some rushed line because like the younger people their attention had been elsewhere and a 20 minute wait was spent with 19 minutes of it focused elsewhere and 1 minute to bang out a pose. Its a chore to get people to pay attention during a combat scene to what's going on. As though other people's turns have nothing to do with them. Then when their turn comes up they take 10 minutes to decide what to do as though they haven't had more than enough time to decide already.

Add in the drama and the negativity and all the other stuff we gripe about and can anyone really wonder about it? In fact I'm surprised there is as much activity as exists right now.

I would love for more people to be into the hobby, but I'd prefer if the few people who are into the hobby were of a higher quality. I think if we had the latter, we'd get more of the former.

@Thenomain I'm sure Cirno's a nice guy, but I'll pass on that and go straight to publishing the book and selling the movie rights.

@Cirno said:

I dunno, man.

No, you really don't know.

You rambled on and on about nothing relevant because of one phrase that kind of sounds like something you've heard of before from something you read one time on the interwebs? From the over exaggerations, the jumping to baseless conclusions, your eagerness to look down on people who aren't like you, contradicting yourself, a string of prejudices and biases, and a compulsive need to put other people down, it is clear why you have trouble in "normal society", which supports my point. Someone like that would immediately turn off anyone of quality, male or female, potential partner or potential friend. So being open about the fact that you RP is just beating a dead horse.

@Thenomain said:

Besides, are you going to have a continued relationship with someone you hide your hobbies from? If you're just in it for "dat ass", it's not going to come up anyway.

If I'm in a continued relationship, its different. I tend to know when she's into me enough that knowing about my RP isn't going to hurt the relationship. At that point, if a girl is into she's into you and RP is just a minor quirk - so long as you don't let it get into the way of your time with her. If you're blowing off spending time with her to RP, then it will become a much bigger issue.

But I rarely do that, which is fine with me. I've never dated a girl I liked spending time with less than RPing, generally. Almost all of my RP now is online and I can get in plenty from work. So it works out great for everyone involved. In the rare occasions old friends get a tabletop game together, just saying I'm gonna be hanging out with friends generally does the trick. As far as I can remember, I've never really had to say exactly what I'll be doing. Usually after I'll get questions about what I did, but 'gaming' usually does the trick since when I am hanging out with the friends I have now, video games is actually what we normally do. Every now and then a tabletop night with other friends will get thrown in and gets lost in the shuffle...

@Cirno said:

If, in actuality, we must hide MU* ing because normal people will think we're weird, that's a bullshit reason, because conforming and trying to be normal is a nonsense objective. We're not all a hivemind. We're allowed to be different and unique, surprisingly enough.

If you believe we're allowed to be different and unique, then it seems a little ironic to condemn someone else's reasoning because it doesn't conform to yours, doesn't it

@Cirno said:

And that brings me to my next point: is MU* ing such a terrible thing that it must be kept under wraps? Is it as bad as being a pedophile? Because that is the inference being made here.

Not even a little bit. You're taking an open and honest conversation and using hyperbole to pander to your own point of view.

So forgetting about race for a second... Our hobby isn't socially flattering. I don't think I have to argue that point. Hiding it because normal people will think I'm weird isn't a 'bullshit reason' as you say. Its a calculated move to allow me to have a greater number of quality social interactions, which I prefer immensely to being up front about what I do in my spare time. There's near zero benefit to telling someone I RP. While there's a great deal of benefit to NOT telling someone I RP. A basic cost/benefit analysis of that scenario tells us that doing anything other than keeping my hobby to myself is a "nonsense objective".

Please keep in mind is that everyone is different. You seem to push that point when arguing your own point of view, but forget it completely in any other context. The quality of my social interactions might be far outside of your experience. When I go out downtown at night and hit the bars and clubs with friends and I talk to people, RP isn't being brought up. The friends I'm with aren't bringing it up. And at the end of my night, I'm very happy with that decision. Universally. I've never had a night where I said to myself 'man, I really wish I would have told that extremely attractive woman that I like to play D&D'. Never. Not a single time in over a decade.

You are definitely welcome to your opinions on the subject matter, but I would guess that your lifestyle isn't similar to mine. In your situations and social encounters, you might not lose anything at all by telling people all your freaky proclivities. Your social ceiling might be such that it wouldn't really matter what you say to the people that would actually engage with you socially, being in "Fringe Society" and whatnot. So you do as you want. I won't judge you either way. But please don't be so myopic to think that fitting in socially is a ridiculous notion for everyone. And don't be so insulting to say that wanting to present ones self as we prefer to be seen is a bullshit reason for doing anything.

It was a good conversation up to this point. It was interesting to read other people's stories and experiences. But I think we can all do without the value judgements.

I don't actively hide it from girlfriends. But its never come up with girlfriends unless we moved in together. There was never a reason for those two worlds to cross. If I'm hanging out with her, I'm not RPing. If I'm RPing, I'm not hanging out with her, so it hasn't really come up. For those I have moved in with, they'll ask about it if they see it, I'll explain it, they'll say its weird and we move on to something else. I've yet to run across anyone that broke up with me over it. Once a girl knows me and is into me, its not really an issue. But it is a much bigger barrier to someone wanting to get to know me if they find out about my roleplaying interests up front.

As far as I know about Star Wars and the Force Awakens, there were very few Jedi. But also remember that you don't have to be Jedi to have the force. I can definitely understand why there wouldn't be many Jedi characters. I don't know why there wouldn't be many force characters. Even if every PC that apped was a force character, you wouldn't even scratch the surface of the number of force sensitive people that would exist in the galaxy, even during that time period.

It really does seem to be a case of holding back for no better reason than to allow only certain people to be special.

AoA has interesting points, but the policies make it unsustainable. If you want to scratch an itch for the new movie and make a character, that will be great, but I suspect the itch will fade fast, especially when you run up against the crazy policies, some of which were mentioned at the beginning.

GoD was good for a while and the best of the group, if you can manage the SAGA system. Soresu is the bright spot of the staff there with others getting progressively worse. If you like to run scenes, that's the place for you because you pretty much get free reign with your PC if you become a consistent scene runner. There's no such thing as conflict of interest in running scenes with your own character and people consistently advance their own causes all the time just by running scenes with inevitably favorable outcomes. It also has very few old players - which is both good, but also telling.

There's also another game out there, Omens, which uses a custom FS3 system. Combat goes quicker with it, but after the first several run throughs it made it seem stale and distant and disconnected. I missed rolling the old systems. Also, it seems to heavily nerf force characters in favor of blasters, which is completely in contradiction to the theme. But if you never liked how powerful force characters were compared to everyone else, this might be a game to look for.

Interesting topic this has fallen to on this particular board.

I'm black. I got into RP through reading comic books when I was young and being enticed to try D&D from the ads in the comic books, usually at the back I think.

And while I hesitate to share many of my opinions on the topic, I will say that I don't have any other black friends who know I MU* or RP who don't also do it themselves. Any black RPers I know I met through showing up to RPing events - conventions, tabletops, etc. And not one of them would I put into a social situation with other black people. They would be completely out of place.

This just isn't a popular hobby. Quite the opposite. It will quickly make you unpopular. So I hide it. Like a deep dark secret. You wouldn't look at me and guess I RP. Probably one of the last things you'd guess. But I don't tell a soul about it.

But I love it and just because I won't tell anyone about it doesn't mean I don't love doing it. So I do. As far as characters go, I almost always play black characters. But it seems to me, and this is just wild presumption, that I see a great percentage of black characters than there are black players on a game.

There's no point to any of this except to give purely speculative observations from a black RPer.

In answer to the original question: Very, very hard.

Theme isn't something decreed by staff at the beginning of the game. Theme is "living" and evolving. If someone doesn't enforce the theme, then that becomes your theme. Does player X drive through the city in invisible cars and nothing happens to him? Then your game's theme is now one in which you can drive through the city in invisible cars and nothing will happen to you.

The theme that the books set out is one in which "everything happens for a reason". There is a reason a sphere has a rule against X, Y, and Z. Because when you do X, Y, and Z - bad stuff happens. If I get into your game and do X, Y, and Z and nothing happens, then those rules mean less and less to me each time I get away with it. No different than RL, really. So if I'm breaking thematic rules ICly in private and no one finds out, that's fine, because no one found out, therefore no one knows to apply the consequences. But if anyone does find out and no consequences are applied, I'd be less and less concerned about following those rules. The same goes if I see other people breaking those rules and nothing happens.

Having the Masquerade in place wasn't just for the cool factor of being a vampire. It was because there would be consequences for all vampires if the world at large acknowledged the existence of vampires and therefore, vampires policed themselves harshly for breaking the Masquerade. As a result, the enforcement of the Masquerade led to many other rules/policies being in place, politically and socially, and was a major part of being a vampire in a civilized society. So if you lose a major pillar of your theme to non-enforcement, many other pillars collapse as well. For example, if breaking the Masquerade isn't important in this city, what does it matter if I make childer and set them loose without proper instruction? (This is a very, very elementary understanding of Vampire from many editions ago - but I think the point still gets across.)

I can't tell you the number of times there were reminders in nWoD Changeling that Changelings were supposed to be very secretive and shy away from public attention because of True Fae and Loyalists when the reality of the game was that there were beaches of glitter flooding the streets of the city from Glamour being thrown around with abandon in public and no one was ever, EVER carted off back to Arcadia from being tracked down by True Fae, Loyalists, or anything else. But when a PC was killed by another group of PCs and the promise of actual consequences was a reality, PCs got real secretive, real quick, and turtled up with friends for protection (exactly how the entire sphere should have been acting, according to the established theme) - except neither side of PCs were Loyalists, just feuding.

The supposed theme was one thing, the actual theme on the game was something else entirely. What it all came down to was consequences.

So theme enforcement should happen. How varies. You can go with direct staff intervention, NPC interdiction, or if you're brave enough - PC enforcement. But your theme will be what it will be, with or without you.