Bad Stuff Happening IC
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@Third-Eye said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
@Roz said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
I answered “if I have control over it” which isn’t EXACTLY right, I don’t want to be needing to dictate the details. But it’s moreso a level of – understanding the risk I’m getting into, and also that I definitely trust some GMs more than others.
This was both how I voted and I feel. I wax nostalgic about The Greatest Generation MUSH a lot and all my characters dying, but that was only fun because of how OOCly clear the risks going in were.
Yeah that’s pretty much how I land also. When my PC got blown up unexpectedly on TGG, it was annoying, but I couldn’t complain because I knew what I was signing up for. When my PC got accidentally spaced on SW3, it was way more annoying because that level of “die due to one bad die roll” wasn’t expected.
I generally welcome any IC drama that isn’t character-ending, but I prefer it to be collaborative. I care about story, and setbacks are important, but it’s also a game. There’s a middle ground.
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@Hobbie 10/10 would fuck your shit up again
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Fuck them up, but don’t embarrass them. I’ll embarrass my character if I feel like it.
fr fr
(she/her) -
Yes, but, only if I trust you. Burned too many times by active griefing covered by “oh it was IC!”
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I put other.
I adore failing my dice rolls and I don’t need to be the main character all the time. However, I also am a real life person that (like most of us) have some trauma that I would like to avoid in my game play.
So I’m all for it, but if the theme is going to be really dark. Please check with me first, then we game on. Also, like others, I want it to make sense. Don’t do something just to do something. If it makes sense, I’m all in. If a random house falls on me and someone takes my shoes, it better further some cause or character development.
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I put the top response because I do want it to happen regardless, but I think with the same caveat as everyone else. I also would prefer bad things to be done to my character by someone whose writing ability I respect, and who I think might have a plot or overarching theme in mind rather than just an arbitrary sniping situation.
No one wants your death pose to be delivered by someone who can’t put together a decent goddamn sentence
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@somasatori said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
No one wants your death pose to be delivered by someone who can’t put together a decent goddamn sentence
I feel attacked, having horri-bad pretendful words filling up my sentences with swollen, purple girthy prose. Luckily, I try not to kill people, instead trying to drag them to the
fundark side, so probably safe. -
@hellfrog said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
Fuck them up, but don’t embarrass them. I’ll embarrass my character if I feel like it.
i am convinced that embarrassment is actually the number one thing MU players hate, way beyond any other bad stuff happening.
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if the embarrassment feels like the other player’s intentions were to embarrass me as well on like an OOC level, I am 100% with them. but one of my fondest memories of the hobby was having my character unexpectedly embarrassed in front of others in a way that revealed something to me about him and their character, that we kept playing into and had so much fun with later.
it absolutely comes back to trust, though. I knew that player was trying to make a compelling twist in the story, not be cruel or petty to me.
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Unexpected, unintended, unplanned embarrassment is generally why when I hold the idiot ball, I try to only hold it in front of people I trust, because otherwise someone’s gonna’ post a proclamation the next morning LORD EIRAN, LAYABOUT OF THE LAURENTS, SEEN BEING AN UNMARRIAGEABLE IDIOT.
But honestly, that’s rare! A lot of people are good sports.
Bad things happening, botched shit, generally A+, gimme. It’s just that social thing of oops my character looks like a fool even if he’s not actually supposed to be a fool about this.
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Unplanned embarassment is fine, I love botching rolls and coming up with BIG OH NO things that happen from them.
… But that’s still me having some kind of say in the failure, so circles back to the control of it all. Meep morp.
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Apparently, my requirements for Bad Stuff are the same as my requirements for Saucy Stuff.
If I trust you, if it’s more than just an excuse to roll combat dice with your big ol combatty combat combatter, and if it contributes to the game/character’s story rather than detracts or distracts from it.
Real talk, though, my characters are often designed to fail. They aspire to power, authority, etc, etc, but I’m lazy and very busy RL so I don’t want power, authority, or anything more than a cup of tea. If you can help me tell that story in a satisfying way? I’m yours forever.
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I ended up putting Other, because yes, I like bad things to happen to my character, but as always there are caveats.
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Proportionality. I like bad things to happen to my character - I don’t like ONLY bad things to happen to my character. Trauma conga isn’t all that entertaining, give me time to breathe, recover, and let the character have things worth fighting for when the bad things happen.
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Trust. I’m a fairly trusting player, to be honest, and I’ll roll with what a GM throws unless I have a specific reason not to trust them, but once that trust is lost, it doesn’t come back.
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Sexual assault/mind control. These are not entirely “no go” bad things to have happen, but they are things where I would need a larger than normal amount of trust, and where I want to be brought in OOC to ensure that it remains a fun game for me.
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People are always so scared to be mean to me! I wish they would do it more.
I promise I won’t whip around and start crying about being griefed if you do anything mildly cruel. I think players in general are pretty traumatised by bleedy targets and now they don’t even want to take the risk. A lack of trust all around.
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Yeah, absolutely destroy my characters. I love the writing and the play that comes from difficult situations, poor outcomes, and otherwise “bad things” that affect a PC. Especially when it creates further story and RP opportunities in the aftermath. Of course there are limits, but these are also situations and lines that are already a hard ‘no’ in any game I’m going to play - and, as has also been mentioned a few times in this thread - trust is an important factor.
I’m generally very much of the opinion that failure is more thematically interesting than success. I love a failed roll, I love a failed mission, I love the drama. That has been where I’ve found my best success as a player and learned the most about the character.
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Oh man, I took this as GMs being mean to characters. Are you ok with/do you like to be mean to players as a player is a whole other can of worms. And I do! I do not like the ooc assumptions that most often come with playing something other than 100% friendly
fr fr
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@hellfrog said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
And I do! I do not like the ooc assumptions that most often come with playing something other than 100% friendly
Exactly this, and I feel like due to this I often will take on a more affable demeanor because my characters can be assholes and I don’t want to be labeled OOCly in the same vein as my IC.
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@hellfrog said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
Oh man, I took this as GMs being mean to characters. Are you ok with/do you like to be mean to players as a player is a whole other can of worms. And I do! I do not like the ooc assumptions that most often come with playing something other than 100% friendly
Who is/was your favorite Arx character and why is it Sapphire?
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@Nonsense said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
Yeah, absolutely destroy my characters. I love the writing and the play that comes from difficult situations, poor outcomes, and otherwise “bad things” that affect a PC. Especially when it creates further story and RP opportunities in the aftermath. Of course there are limits, but these are also situations and lines that are already a hard ‘no’ in any game I’m going to play - and, as has also been mentioned a few times in this thread - trust is an important factor.
I’m generally very much of the opinion that failure is more thematically interesting than success. I love a failed roll, I love a failed mission, I love the drama. That has been where I’ve found my best success as a player and learned the most about the character.
I admit, here’s the flipside of the question (and this is not aimed at you specifically - I don’t think we’ve ever played together):
I don’t necessarily trust when a player says this, either to me-as-player or me-as-GM because often they do not mean it, so I am absolutely reluctant to actually pull the trigger on negative consequences because it is exhausting to deal with a lot of people after you do, and perhaps even more so the people who are very vocal about “Oh yeah, destroy my life, I can take it!”
And you can never know whether a person genuinely means it and is totally fine with things actually going south, or not.
The only real way, I’ve found, to know is to see how people handle small failures in play, before trying to work through the big setbacks with them.
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@Pyrephox said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
The only real way, I’ve found, to know is to see how people handle small failures in play, before trying to work through the big setbacks with them.
So, there’s this really interesting inverse effect that I have noticed clinically in many of my patients with large capital-T trauma: People who have experienced particularly traumatic events tend to react really negatively to very small events*, or what might be might be considered pretty minor-to-moderate annoyances by a lot of people, but on the flip-side they tend to be very blasé or even good when something major happens.
Not saying that every MUSHer who endorses this attitude has this going on (though surprisingly more than one would think), but I feel like my approach to someone saying this would be more to introduce a negative element and then slowly increase the tension. Alternatively, I would have them be witness to people who I know would react well to their characters’ lives getting ruined and seeing what their opinions and perspectives are on those events. I also tend to temper my approach to evaluate someone’s reaction to certain things, which is partially because my perspective as a trauma-informed clinician is that I must be aware that we all got something that’s a no-go.
*this is obviously an “it depends” thing and isn’t intended to be diagnostically relevant in this instance, where I speak about MUSHing; while it has some research on it under the term “trauma reactivity” it’s also very anecdotal in this case
