@Testament kink unlocked

@shit-piss-love said in But Why:

@STD My experience was more that if you are playing a character whose goals run at odds with the norm, and you’re trying to do it in a way that respects the consent of others, your situation is that you will succeed at nothing unless those others consent to lose.

My take is that in a setting/theme where there’s a clear-ish line between villains and heroes, choosing to take a villain role means you consent to lose. The aggrievating bit for me hasn’t been losing but having ex machina stuff keep my long-simmering thoughtful villainous schemes to a low challenge-rating so heroes could thoughtlessly foil them between tea-parties. And that’s actually something I feel like a villain’s player consents to, just not every time.

More relevant to the thread is the disturbing experience of playing a nuanced villain and finding the heroes are all just as horrible, but the narrative never acknowledges it.

@mietze said in But Why:

My experience with most “I’m the Villian” people (but certainly not all) was that they tended to be ready to accuse people oocly of being not as great/hardcore a RPer at them, not wanting good stories, ect when rolls or RP didn’t go their way. Just like a lot of people who aren’t villains, but there was a lot more just…personal attacks.

I associate that with the themes where everybody’s morally ambiguous at best, and players who don’t identify their PC as a villain, but want to play a ‘dark hero’ and are all cheesed off that people aren’t playing along with a fantasy of being both intimidating and admired.

Hi.

We pretty much know my feelings about DWOPP and the history there. This is why I’m a bit sad this came down this way. I know it is not personal because most (not all) don’t have an axe to grind with me. Yet, it feels a little personal and I’ll tell you why. I don’t mean this in a gaslight way, just… an explanation.

I don’t feel as they weaponized DWOPP so much as they weaponized MY trauma with it. That doesn’t sit well with me. At all. Here’s why I personally (no receipts to give it’s an opinion) think that.

The person in question had a known Ares handle that was in use before this game? Not DWOPP.
If Betsy (?) was in another relationship with someone that Rich Playboy was jealous of – it was NOT isolating behavior, like DWOPP does.
I did not see where Rich Playboy messaged B girl and said bad things about OP. Again, not a DWOPP red flag.

Now was the person creepy? Yes, perhaps. Maybe. Not sure. I have opinions but they are knee jerk. It should have been hey this person has creepy behaviors and then looked into it. When you come to a forum (any forum) people are going to grab some pitchforks around some names.

I feel like (and it’s a feel not a real) that’s what might have happened. It might not even have been intentional but their own knee jerk. The problem is like stated I don’t feel like DWOPP was weaponized, but the trauma of those who he dealt with. This sits badly with me.

It’s okay if you don’t agree, it is truly just my opinion. It’s why I asked (thank you btw) for the title to be changed.

Now autumn is here - plan your pumpkin spice (gross) stuff and let’s be kind.

@Jumpscare

Egelman et al. (2020) and Ferreira et al. (2021) both report that negative interpersonal interactions—ranging from subtle pushback to overt incivility—can provoke frustration, stress, and defensive reactions. Both highlight the role of code review processes, organisational policies, and power imbalances in shaping negative experiences. Ferreira et al. (2021) provides detailed evidence of uncivil behaviours, including name-calling, impatience, and personal attacks, with 66.66% of non-technical emails in their sample exhibiting such features.

Behroozi et al. (2019) finds that technical interviews are perceived as arbitrary, high-pressure, and disconnected from real-world work, with systemic biases favouring younger candidates and those with more leisure time. They also report that candidates experience dismissive attitudes, lack of empathy, and adversarial interviewer behaviour, leading to feelings of humiliation and offence.

So it seems, at least in corpo-professional contexts, that process design, power dynamics, and communication styles are the primary drivers of cynical interpersonal behaviours, rather than individual predisposition. But this is just based on a very brief skim of the literature, more research must be done, etc, etc, etc.

ETA: tl;dr people=shit and if you treat coders like shit they’ll not be happy, I guess.

References:

Spoiler

Egelman, C. D., Murphy-Hill, E., Kammer, E., Hodges, M. M., Green, C., Jaspan, C., & Lin, J. (2020). Predicting developers’ negative feelings about code review. Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering, 174–185. https://doi.org/10.1145/3377811.3380414

Ferreira, I., Cheng, J., & Adams, B. (2021). The “Shut the f**k up” Phenomenon: Characterizing Incivility in Open Source Code Review Discussions. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW2), 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1145/3479497

Behroozi, M., Parnin, C., & Barik, T. (2019). Hiring is Broken: What Do Developers Say About Technical Interviews? 2019 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1109/vlhcc.2019.8818836

@Cobalt Not your fault! 🙂 I don’t blame you in the slightest. What RP I did have was enjoyable, especially in what staff-run scenes you had the time for.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

If the reason for the attack is lame

There was so much drivel that I ghosted right past this but jesus christ it’s a hell of a thing to double down, triple down after someone has politely asked you “hey can you don’t?” and admin has already had to use the mod voice.

Honestly, guy, leap into the sun.

alt text

honestly, the only reason I didn’t love it is because there was enough material there for at least one more season, if not two, without any real concern about filler. every “ONE YEAR LATER” smash cut made me wince and groan.

The game has been running for a while now and while new games tend to fizzle out and die I’d just like to give kudos to Silent Heaven for going strong and continuing to mature.

In particular I think the gamerunner has done a lot of work addressing and removing negative influences, and the community has never been such a welcoming and chill place to be.

i think you’ve got three dials: game size, nuance/specificity, and staff involvement. Cranking any of these up or down is going to affect the others. You can (and should! if you want!) make a game that is highly specific in a historical or fictional setting, but doing so is going to turn down max players and probably increase staff involvement in direct relation. You can turn down staff involvement and let your players mostly self-police if the guardrails are broad and high enough, until that player size gets to a certain limit.

I think you can pull off most any kind of niche or historical setting if you are willing to accept and spend your time curating a small and like minded player base.

@Cobalt said in Stupid Memes:

IMG_0818.jpeg

A million years later i just wanted you all to know i now have a custom made t-shirt that says “not friendly, do not approach” on it.

That was a doozy

Felicia.jpg

@KDraygo said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

So PvP games may work best on games with short episodes, where characters are “wiped” or killed off in each episode, without consequences that are long lasting. If you lose or die, it’s fine because in a month or two, the slate is wiped clean and a new story is created.

This is our hope, because our theme cycles through PCs by time jumping generations every six months. This is part of the design because we feel it will give players the “freedom” to go big and do heroic things and not feel FOMO by no longer having their epic character anymore because “anymore” might be a couple of months at best.

Like supporting PC on PC conflict, we anticipate that this will cause some self-selection among players who don’t want to invest time in a character that has a 6 month or 12 month shelf life.

But hopefully it will draw in players who do embrace the idea of playing a character’s arc until it ends and then starting over with a new one.

We’ll see how it works in practice.

@Pavel fr tho, who are these kids that don’t know what a phb is??? didn’t your parents teach you anything when you were coming up?!

get off my lawn

It’s impossible to play on a Mu* anymore for me. Asking for RP and finding RP is such a chore and then when it’s found it’s usually some weird slice-of-life stuff that people want to play, which in a lot of cases isn’t what I’m looking for.

So it’s a constant circle of building PCs, getting amped, trying to find something to do, and failing and just realizing hours/days/weeks/months/whatever of my life has been wasted.

My biggest issue with character progression is that the only way most characters progress on a game is through xp and stats.

XP and stats should not be the only way a character progresses. There should be other achievables like rank or resources or territory or a combination of all of them that allows a character to progress without simply racking up xp and spending it.

If people had more objectives to achieve besides MOAR XP, then a game wouldn’t need to give out so much xp per week to keep people interested and uber stats become much less of a problem.

But handing out scads of xp is the easy, traditional solution. It takes very little monitoring and is often completely automated. So that’s what most games do.

Not saying that is bad or wrong, just that it really puts the burden of character progression on xp if that’s all the game has.

@Tat said in What stops you from running a game?:

I see lots of people with cool ideas or themes they’d love to play in.

What are the things that keep you from actually running a game? What are the barriers?

Code and time.

People want a certain amount of stuff coded to play on a game. Coding that stuff takes time. I don’t have it.

I was coding my own engine to be able to launch a game, but I ran out of time when I inherited Liberation Mage. 🙂

Hailee Steinfeld >.>

Also whatever classifies as a “science nerd” in the theme, or total occult junkie.

@Floof said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

I have no idea how it’d work but I’ve always kind of wanted a game inspired by Ark: Survival Evolved/Ascended

If you want dinosaurs, go play a WoD game.

a man playing drums with the word travis behind him

@Cobalt I will have to check hers out. The focus of so many that I have read being abuse is kinda putting me off the omegaverse stuff. I like that gender, typically, is not a big factor.