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Comic Games Are Fun!
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@Pyrephox said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
I don’t understand why someone who doesn’t like comic books would run a comics game.
It would be like me trying to make a football MU*.
The actual not joking no hyperbole answer is that he kind of likes the movies in that he likes anything that catches his attention for five minutes and he thinks he’s smarter and a better writer than absolutely anyone who has ever written a comic. Hates the genre, doesn’t at all understand the conventions and themes it’s written with. But he has spent like 5 years writing literally hundreds of pages of “timeline” and “theme,” an absolute unworkable trainwreck that at best smashes a bunch of stuff together in ways that makes none of it distinct and meaningful and at worst - which is frequent - just makes changes for the sake of changing things. The New Gods aren’t actually gods, they’re all Eternals. Mr Sinister is actually an Inhuman. Adolf Hitler had a Legion of Doom supervillain team with Apocalypse and Vandal Savage.
The only people who seem to actually like it are him and the Titans, because he wrote them into huge chunks of it. Everyone else ignores it as best they can. Shakespeare, who in theory runs the game, tells people it’s a canon place, which makes me think she has no idea all the shit he’s actually done.
Here is my HA update:
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm<* Heroes Assemble Jobs - Job 6406 *>mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Category: CONCERNS Due: 07/05/2022
Title: Are there characters I Status: Pending
should avoid?
Handlers: Helpers:Mary McPherran Opened on Jun 21 01:45AM CDT:
I’ve played four characters here, at the request of four people. Of those four people: one never finished their app, two quit (it’s possible that two never finished and one quit, I’m not 100%,) and one has massively decreased their presence here and let all but one of their characters drop. (As an aside, this shouldn’t be read as me saying it’s her fault I haven’t been active. She’s been dealing with RL stuff; so, too, have I. In the time I’ve had Mary my dad has been in and out of the hospital and ER for surgery and a bunch of gnarly post-op complications and he has another procedure scheduled for next month, so it’s not like I can say I would’ve guaranteed been super active with Mary even if she had been a total hummingbird of invitations and responses to my pokes.) Since I have been told that this is indicative of a problem with my interest level and my trustworthiness, and since concept pitches clearly aren’t sufficient to catch problems, I think I need to ask:%r%rWhat characters should I avoid?%r%rShould I avoid villains?%r%rShould I avoid anyone above a certain power threshold? If so, what is that threshold? There are no power caps, and there are closer to two than to one dozen characters who are omnipotent, so I would appreciate some sort of guideline as to what is and isn’t too powerful. Without guidelines you can only go by things that have been approved, and what’s approved is by far the highest power level I have ever seen on a comic game.%r%rShould I avoid outright anything that hasn’t already been placed on the roster, since I’ve been flatly told that my apps waste time and energy?%r%rI’m cognizant that these questions can be read as sarcastic shit-disturbing, but they really and sincerely aren’t. They’re questions I think I have to ask because I still have friends here. I’d like to do things with them. When I first asked to get Mary, I was told no, and that I should try something out of my comfort zone. But a character who was very outside of my comfort zone in terms of power and motivation, if not my aesthetic, was a hard no after it was a yes. Because I probably will not keep Mary - she was somebody I took for someone, a character I like but am not especially enthused about and I had no success finding someone I trusted to play Creel or Volcana - these are questions I do need to ask. If the actual answer is that you just don’t want me here, that’s an acceptable answer. I’m a grown woman. I don’t need to be somewhere people don’t want me to be.Shakespeare Replied on Jun 21 09:48AM CDT:
Hi Mary. I’m sorry you’ve felt frustrations along the way. Definitely is not our desire that anyone feel that way. Glad that you’re reaching out so we can discuss and hopefully help get to a better spot. And no, you aren’t coming across as sarcastic or trying to disturb things.
I’m not aware of your exact history with apping characters, and the ones I do know I’m not necessarily fully up on details of. So I’ll maybe start general with areas you brought up, to help with getting on the same page. But I don’t know how it might apply to your specifics necessarily.
Questions about villains, and power levels are good ones. Villains are more difficult to play than heroes, without ready group RP at hand, and some are not a good fit for social RP (sociopathic, appearance, etc). Villains can be great characters, but often have to drive their own RP far more than others.
With high powered villains the problems magnify. Lesser heroes being out of their league, shrinks the villain’s potential RP circle. High powered heroes, even, spend a lot of time manufacturing reasons their character can’t act fully because doing so would ruin the story for others.
You touch on a very good topic about character power levels, and I imagine there’s a big difference between perspectives. We get looking at the list and saying, “If Dr Strange why not ______?” But from our end, we focus on the difficulty that players have fitting those characters in. And wanting to avoid general power creep which results in people souring on lower powered characters. But some characters, like Strange, Superman, Wanda, really need to be present to achieve our theme goal of feeling like you’re in the comics or movies.
So on one hand “But that character was let in,” while on the other, some are there for theme reasons, and others there was/is apprehension about having included. Some get their status changed after seeing the result. Like with Lucifer. Comparing to him ends up being a net “the character struggled to work, it was probably the wrong call”. I get seeing he was allowed and saying, why not this one? But in reality it dredges back up that it ended up being a poor call, which doesn’t help when he’s a comparison. I do a lot of handwringing about not wanting to say no, trying to be consistent, but still making the best call for the game. And it’s tough to delineate a clear line.
Ok so general stuff there. But I’ll try to focus back in on what should you do. It’s fine to like playing villains, they can be fun. Focusing on their fit in the game might help. I didn’t see Claudine’s sheet myself, but maybe setting her earlier where she’s only developing her anti-social tendencies, has not yet come into her full abilities, etc, might help. And some of those high powered characters out there have had exactly that done with them.
Also, I’m not sure what was done as far as pitching her. We have a pitch before people start creating characters so something like “she’d work best early in her arc, not full power” can be established up front and the details of exactly what that would look like worked out before time is spent on the sheet. I didn’t spot a pitch job for Claudine, though it might be under a title that isn’t catching my eye. But that’s definitely the first spot to start making sure the concept is ok before proceeding into making them.
Happy to talk more though need to go focus on work again for now.Mary McPherran Replied on Jun 21 10:04AM CDT:
This was my specific experence with Claudine:
https://justpaste.it/460o7
While going from concept approval to total, flat rejection was certainly a surprise, my concern is, understandably, more that someone using a voice clearly and intentionally representing staff as a whole declared that I am not interested, not trustworthy, and that even bothering to work on this would be a waste of time and energy. -
To add to his theme, he had white space aliens civilizing an African tribe as the origin of Wakanda and their technology and did not at all understand why Rena and I immediately said it was racist.
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@Prototart said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
To add to his theme, he had white space aliens civilizing an African tribe as the origin of Wakanda and their technology and did not at all understand why Rena and I immediately said it was racist.
Yooooooo
What the what?
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@GF said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
What the what?
In his original stuff, the Kherans from Wildstorm - white, Greco-Roman inspired alien superhumans - brought civilization and technology to Wakanda.
I’d hope that’s not still in there, but he’s got space Genocide and supervillain Hitler and a ton of other insane shit so it wouldn’t shock me.
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@Prototart Yikes.
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@Prototart Yeah, I’d tap out.
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
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@Jennkryst said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
@Prototart Yeah, I’d tap out.
Like I swear to god that if anybody talked to me that way rl they’d get to meet security
But I’m curious if she’s gonna take it seriously as the completely inappropriate behavior it is or, like, just ignore it & hope it goes, cus that’s like hands down the single most out of line shit I’ve received from anybody on a game staff since UH.
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After about 24 hours with no response:
You paged Shakespeare with ‘Please let me know when you’re available to speak.’
Idle message from Shakespeare: Currently idle, please try again later!
Shakespeare (S) pages: I’m in my final day of prepping for a coding interview tomorrow, I won’t be able to deal with much mush stuff until after it’s done.
Shakespeare (S) pages: Reminds me I need to put my idle back up.
You paged Shakespeare with ‘So, I’ll speak to you on the day after tomorrow, then? Or would you prefer I just not, and all this goes away until the next time he explodes on someone?’
Shakespeare (S) pages: I made time yesterday to get a response to you so you weren’t waiting longer to hear anything. I don’t have time now. After my interview tomorrow I’ll look at what you’ve sent and we can discuss it.
You paged Shakespeare with ‘Works for me.’so, it’s going great!
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@Prototart said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
After about 24 hours with no response:
You paged Shakespeare with ‘Please let me know when you’re available to speak.’
Idle message from Shakespeare: Currently idle, please try again later!
Shakespeare (S) pages: I’m in my final day of prepping for a coding interview tomorrow, I won’t be able to deal with much mush stuff until after it’s done.
Shakespeare (S) pages: Reminds me I need to put my idle back up.
You paged Shakespeare with ‘So, I’ll speak to you on the day after tomorrow, then? Or would you prefer I just not, and all this goes away until the next time he explodes on someone?’
Shakespeare (S) pages: I made time yesterday to get a response to you so you weren’t waiting longer to hear anything. I don’t have time now. After my interview tomorrow I’ll look at what you’ve sent and we can discuss it.
You paged Shakespeare with ‘Works for me.’so, it’s going great!
Just to be clear - someone who is literally prepping for a job interview took time out of their job prep to write a fairly extensive response to you (in order that you didn’t wait too long on a response), and is now politely asking you to wait a day more until after said job interview for follow-up, on an issue involving a game that is not really time sensitive as there are no deadlines for you resolving your character issue?
I get that the response from the other staff person was not super professional, and the situation itself is frustrating.
But it sounds like this Shakespeare person went above and beyond at first, and honestly did more than I probably would if I were a staffer at a game and I was worried about something in my professional career.
Isn’t almost every motto “RL comes first” ?
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Glorified internet chat rooms always come last. It’s not remotely time sensitive, I just find that “made time” line frustrating - like, what? That just rubs me the wrong way. Nobody talked to me, I responded to a job and 24 hours later, when there wasn’t a reply, I asked about it.
And honestly, it doesn’t really have much to do with a “character issue.” Like - I spent, maybe three hours on that app? It’s an untaken character I was familiar with, with an aesthetic I like, that I could use to do stuff with my friends in the HFC. Not exactly a passion project. The total lack of consistency across apps is definitely an issue that they need to address, and it’s the kind of thing that bothers me - like, if I wanted some batshit insane powerful character there’s Blue Marvel, Exodus, there’s a ton of ultra-powerful characters on their roster I could have got approved in under ten minutes. It’s an issue, but it’s not the issue.
The issue is a staffer using the Royal voice to insult and demean me as a representative of the entire game. And it’s not the first time he’s been wildly inappropriate with me - when I requested the character I have now he told me no, that I needed to go outside my comfort zone and maybe do something with the Titans (uhm, no), and then he immediately went Dark when I told him I was in fact a grown woman capable of making my own decisions. Frankly, that this is someone I was on relatively friendly terms with for a decade makes it even more inexcusable and indefensible than it would be on its own, and it would be entirely inexcusable and indefensible on its own.
It’s an ongoing pattern of behavior with him. Every single complaint I’ve heard someone make about staff on that game has been about Chaucer, both in the colloquial sense of “people complaining” and in the official sense of, people have issued complaints. He’s exploded at guests and players for asking if they could do things from comics he thought were stupid, each time prompting lengthy tirades about why the entire genre - and especially, what that person likes and wants to do - is idiotic. He’s made abrupt pronouncements on what is and is not appropriate for someone to play, and on HOW someone should play (IE, the character I apped could never do anything social - like, The Joker was being played until the Titans harassed him into quitting the entire game). He’s made sweeping changes to played characters without ever bothering to speak to the people playing them, which I know for a fact has led to people dropping them outright.
I don’t particularly give a shit about the character. I wiped all of the character’s traits and had Shakespeare take her off of my Account. It’s, whatever.
What I give a shit about is, is this kind of behavior condoned by the person who in theory runs the game? If I stay there, will I continue to get shit on by someone who’s only interest in being there, dealing with a genre he openly sneers at, usually appears to be writing an ever-expanding timeline everyone but the friends he writes into it ignores (including Shakespeare, who I truly believe has no idea how little in common the game has with Marvel and DC) unless they’re forced to drop a character because he rewrote their entire background to fit into it one day and occasionally making bizarre posts about The Right Way to MUSH or proudly introducing rules for stats the game doesn’t even have? If I try to play another character, will I get another tirade about what a piece of shit I am from someone who repeatedly and without prompting went over Shakespeare’s head to my benefit when he liked me?
That’s the issue.
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@Prototart said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
Glorified internet chat rooms always come last. It’s not remotely time sensitive, I just find that “made time” line frustrating - like, what? That just rubs me the wrong way. Nobody talked to me, I responded to a job and 24 hours later, when there wasn’t a reply, I asked about it.
The issue is a staffer using the Royal voice to insult and demean me as a representative of the entire game.
100%. And with this added context, it does sound like that’s the problem.
It just seemed like you were upset at the one person going above and beyond to try to make things better, too. And IMO he seemed to really be empathetic.
Although if he’s also ignoring systemic bad behavior, all the platitudes to the player don’t help.
Sorry for butting in there.
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I’m not mad at Shakespeare, no, merely frustrated that she appears to believe this is a character issue and not (another) instance of Chaucer being wildly unprofessional.
Either he’s completely unethical and needs to be dealt with, or staff there thinks it’s acceptable - among all the other things he’s done - to say shit like “you’re not worth our time and effort.” For not being active enough for his preferences. During a period where I’ve seen my dad collapse and shit blood everywhere. To read three pages of text.
There’s not really much wiggle room there.
I’ve had a shocking number of current and former players tell me that I shouldn’t have bothered, that this will all just be spun as me being a ~problem player who didn’t get her way~, and that I shouldn’t expect better from a group who had no problem with how UH was run until one of their friends went from enabling it to being targeted by it, but - call me naive, because I’d like to hope that a woman would understand how this shit is not at all okay.
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I’m gonna be real, I don’t really read this person’s responses as being “wildly unprofessional” or “completely unethical.” This quote…
This is a pattern of a player not interested in sustaining the game through RP and Claudine’s too much of an investment of time and energy on our part.
…probably doesn’t feel great to receive, but I don’t see an issue with the actual sentiment? It reads to me like “this particular concept would require particular time and investment from staff to work through to reach something that fits the balance of the game as it exists right now, and if we’re going to do that, we want it to be with a player who has more history on the game.”
I don’t know this guy, I don’t know the game, but I actually think “this particular concept doesn’t work for the game right now and it’s too much time investment for staff” is actually a pretty valid thing for staff to say. It seems pretty normal to me that some concepts staff would want a bit more experience with a player before working through, I’ve seen that plenty over the years. It doesn’t sound like it’s the time investment of “reading three pages of text,” I imagine it’s the time investment estimated for negotiation and revisions to make the character workable in the game.
she/her | playlist
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@Roz said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
I don’t know this guy, I don’t know the game, but I actually think “this particular concept doesn’t work for the game right now and it’s too much time investment for staff” is actually a pretty valid thing for staff to say.
He enthusiastically approved the concept before I made him mad, at which point I was no longer worth their time nor energy.
It’s a pattern of behavior. I wouldn’t care about “I don’t think this will work.”
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@Prototart did you make him mad, though?
I wonder how much of this wasn’t like-- being too eager to approve without realizing the extent of something. I know when I staffed with like, Roz and Tez and co, I would sometimes get excited and approve something only for them to later point out something in staff chat that I didn’t think of.
Then you have to be the one to bear the brunt of like, yeah this was a premature approval, sorry about that. But mostly it doesn’t seem like there’s anything between the approval and then the take back of the approval that would have made him mad? So it had to be something on the staff side that changed; which, could be someone else pointing out the amount of work. Or am I missing context?
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@Meg said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
@Prototart did you make him mad, though?
I’ve known him for like a decade. So, yeah, I’m pretty confident in saying when he steps beyond his usual condescension to actually being angry about something. I’ve been told no plenty of times, including there, including by him
The “premature approval” note is because he thought it was just a concept pitch (which he loved) and not the entire app as well. When I questioned him during the app, it went from “give me a few days on this” to “You’re not worth it.”
The context of the game is that it’s a comic game. Somebody played Joker there. There are immortal vampire serial killers. It is, even for a comic game, an insanely high-power environment. Nothing about any of my shit was out of place, he just got pissed at me and does what he does when he doesn’t like something - yells.
ETA: like, I realize some people want to assume the best, but this has nothing to do with concept shit. If a character has at any point there been approved, they go on the roster. If you pick up a character on the roster, approval is automatic if you don’t want to make changes. There are multiple characters on the roster who could destroy entire continents and are totally irredeemably insane.
It’s not that something didn’t work, it’s that he got mad.
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@Prototart said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
The issue is a staffer using the Royal voice to insult and demean me as a representative of the entire game. Frankly, that this is someone I was on relatively friendly terms with for a decade makes it even more inexcusable and indefensible than it would be on its own, and it would be entirely inexcusable and indefensible on its own.
What I give a shit about is, is this kind of behavior condoned by the person who in theory runs the game? If I stay there, will I continue to get shit on
If I try to play another character, will I get another tirade about what a piece of shit I am
I don’t know anything about your history with this game/staffer, but I’m just going to say : characterizing that denial as “shitting on you” or “insulting and demeaning you” or going on a “tirade” about “what a piece of shit” you are is …bad. This is bad arguing, and it is bad for your name cred.
Like, someone can do something wrong or questionable without it having to be a Dire Personal Insult.
fr fr
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@hellfrog said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
I don’t know anything about your history with this game/staffer,
You’re right, you don’t.
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@Prototart Doesn’t change the fact that you didn’t show the things you claimed (that I quoted).
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@Prototart said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
It’s not that something didn’t work, it’s that he got mad.
That sounds like something didn’t work, then. If he got mad and subsequently didn’t want to deal with you, but still maintained a level of professionalism when telling you they don’t want to deal with you? That’s… fine.
