Non-toxic PvP
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There’s social conflicts, espionage, vandalism, and more on SH. But just because something is IC doesn’t mean it’s automatically fun. Here are three examples of when a PP became too much effort to allow them to continue playing.
One PP was secretly exploiting code to stalk other players in order to show up immediately where the RP was happening in order to get in the way. I’ve since patched those exploits.
Another PP had been given a no-contact request from a number of characters who were tired of their shenanigans. (A no-contact request is a last resort when two people’s RP styles are untenable with each other. It means no direct RP, no plotting against each other, and to keep interactions minimal in public events.) The PP then sent their friends to get in on the scenes on the PP’s behalf, then report back so the PP could influence things nearby (e.g. vandalism) in an “I’m not touching you” plausible deniability manner, giving the people on the no-contact list zero recourse to react.
A third PP was asked to tone down the snark. When the snark was not toned down, we said to stop the snark entirely. This resulted in the PP repeatedly saying IC something along the lines of, “I have no opinion I can voice on this matter,” as a way of getting around the snark ban.
In all three examples, their goal isn’t to provide fun conflict, it’s to wear down the other players by getting in the way as often as possible, while also denying any satisfying resolution. They typically don’t care about the win or the loss in the plot, because they score a win simply by disrupting the scene and forcing everyone to deal with their antics.
Game-runner of Silent Heaven, a small-town horror MU.
https://silentheaven.org -
@Jumpscare That has nothing to do with these people playing pacifists. It sounds like you have some jerk players. But there are jerk pacifists and there are jerk combatants and there are jerk everythings. It’s not a pacifist thing.
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@bear_necessities said in Non-toxic PvP:
@Jumpscare That has nothing to do with these people playing pacifists. It sounds like you have some jerk players. But there are jerk pacifists and there are jerk combatants and there are jerk everythings. It’s not a pacifist thing.
In a thread about non-toxic PvP it seems pretty on-topic to bring up the issues caused by both jerk combatants and jerk pacifists? And I notice that people often discuss the former but rarely acknowledge the issues with the latter. No one is saying you can’t play a pacifist, pacifists ruin PvP games, any more than anyone is saying that all combat characters are domineering murderhobos. But problematic pacifists exist, as do problematic combatants. There are specific issues with each that healthy community management needs to account for.
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@Kestrel said in Non-toxic PvP:
No one is saying you can’t play a pacifist, pacifists ruin PvP games
That was literally the statement that kicked off this entire tangent. A proposed zero-tolerance policy towards pacifist characters in high-conflict factions.
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@Faraday said in Non-toxic PvP:
That was literally the statement that kicked off this entire tangent. A proposed zero-tolerance policy towards pacifist characters in high-conflict factions.
Looking back to @Jumpscare’s original post about zero tolerance for this type of player, I want to know that they are describing an archetype that they’re calling “the pacifist,” not players playing pacifist characters at all.
Here’s the actual description.
@Jumpscare said in Non-toxic PvP:
The pacifist is a player archetype who will join a moderate or high conflict group, then do as much as they can for their faction without engaging in the central conflict. Then, when they get backed into a position where they’re called upon to resolve a conflict by fighting it out, they’ll agree to the fight but refuse to fight back, letting the opposing side win, in order to give the other players the most unsatisfying resolution possible.
@Juniper then clarified with:
Pacifists don’t just sit out, they tend to belittle everyone participating and take a revisionist approach to the faction’s raison d’être.
Again, referencing the character archetype, not anyone who wanted to play a character with pacifist beliefs.
@Kestrel kept up with the idea that this was about a character archetype who uses their character’s pacifism as a bludgeon to wrongfun people playing characters who fit with the purpose/vibe of the faction.
I admit that I lost the thread a little bit with the specific example mentioned later, since it refers to some situations and mechanics specific to a game that I don’t play, but I don’t believe that there was ever an intention to ban people from playing pacifist characters, just characters who fit the archetype of a character who is (irony intended) a militant pacifist who uses their beliefs to demean and socially bludgeon characters who engage in violent IC actions within the designed theme and setting of the game.
Formerly known as Seraphim73 (he/him)
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@Roadspike said in Non-toxic PvP:
The pacifist is a player archetype who will join a moderate or high conflict group, then do as much as they can for their faction without engaging in the central conflict.
This is what I’m reacting to. It’s not just someone who is OOCly trolling, which is an entirely different matter. It is someone whose very existence is predicated on being part of a moderate to high-conflict group and then avoiding conflict. Some of the previous examples cited bore this out (like the person in the Murderer’s Guild who was only there reluctantly or whatever).
The discussion took this broad, general archetype and then kept moving the goalposts to talk about a highly specific situation on one particular game, which may or may not have been out of theme.
I fundamentally don’t have a problem with somebody bad-mouthing the Murderer’s Guild for doing murder. Yes, it might be annoying to some of the murderers. So? That’s the IC consequences for the faction you chose and the actions you took. Being annoying ICly is different from trolling OOCly, though there can be overlap between the two.
Again, I’m not judging any specific game from putting rules in place that suit them, I’m responding to painting things with an overbroad brush.
To use BSG as an example, it’s completely valid to say:
“I want this game to be about fighting cylons, so I don’t want to deal with the headaches of non-combatant characters.”
Fine, cool, you do you.
But that’s very different than:
“There should be a zero-tolerance policy against non-combatant characters on all combat games ever.” Especially if it seems predicated on an assumption that all such players will engage in OOC trolling. That’s just… not the case.
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It sounds like it’s largely about good sportsmanship and deciding on an OOC level to poison an IC victory of another player so that it’s a misery to actually engage with it. It’s not really about “pacifism” so much as someone just not being a good sport and setting out to make other players’ experience worse because they didn’t get what they wanted how they wanted it.
Although it definitely does bring up memories of the time when we invited a new player to our post-apocalyptic Shadowrun game and when we didn’t go along with what his character wanted, he suicided that character, then made a new character who was an “avowed pacifist” and ruined our attempt to ambush some targets because “he wanted to stop the violence”.
We uninvited him, obviously. Sometimes a person just doesn’t fit with a group or isn’t capable of playing nicely with others. I suspect it’s less about it being PvP and more about just some people don’t get that it’s obnoxious to set out to ruin other people’s experience because things didn’t go as you wanted.
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Well, to clarify: if the sentiment being discussed is that pacifist characters don’t belong on PvP games and should always be disallowed, I don’t agree with that sentiment. I think you ideally want to cultivate a kind of healthy player ecosystem, where people with different playstyles can engage in ways that are compatible. For instance, I’m generally happy playing villains, but I don’t really care about winning or losing, I just enjoy drumming up excitement and giving people something to bounce off of. I don’t see a pacifist character as incompatible with that, because as long as we’re both having fun, me twirling my moustache and someone else going, “Oh my god! Someone stop that villainous scum!” can create good story for both of us, and solidify both of our concepts.
With that said, and with the explicit caveat that I don’t see outliers as inherently problematic, it can and often does become a problem when the outlier ethos gets normalised in the setting it’s supposed to be pushing back against. So if the theme is space war between humans and aliens, it can be cool to have one or even two guys on the ship going, “Have we even tried talking to them? There has to be a better way than killing each other!” And they can play at being morally upstanding rebels defying the majority consensus. But once one of two things happen:
a) The majority of characters aboard the ship are now Team Peace With Aliens
b) Players start to get very caught up OOCly in wanting to ensure their IC ideology wins, and get frustrated when the aliens still want to kill them or the staff-run space-guard can’t be persuaded against warThen you will no longer be having a good time playing the Space War game. IIRC this kind of happened on The 100 MUSH, for instance.
This is also the Drizzt problem. One Drizzt is OK and shows drows can be different. But if every drow is Drizzt, then thematically what are drow even? What’s he rebelling against?
I have no skin in the game for whatever happened on SH, and I apologise if it seems I’m moving the goalposts; I realise this isn’t the point that was previously being made, I’m just broadening the discussion.
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@Roadspike said in Non-toxic PvP:
@Faraday said in Non-toxic PvP:
That was literally the statement that kicked off this entire tangent. A proposed zero-tolerance policy towards pacifist characters in high-conflict factions.
Looking back to @Jumpscare’s original post about zero tolerance for this type of player, I want to know that they are describing an archetype that they’re calling “the pacifist,” not players playing pacifist characters at all.
Here’s the actual description.
@Jumpscare said in Non-toxic PvP:
The pacifist is a player archetype who will join a moderate or high conflict group, then do as much as they can for their faction without engaging in the central conflict. Then, when they get backed into a position where they’re called upon to resolve a conflict by fighting it out, they’ll agree to the fight but refuse to fight back, letting the opposing side win, in order to give the other players the most unsatisfying resolution possible.
@Juniper then clarified with:
Pacifists don’t just sit out, they tend to belittle everyone participating and take a revisionist approach to the faction’s raison d’être.
Again, referencing the character archetype, not anyone who wanted to play a character with pacifist beliefs.
@Kestrel kept up with the idea that this was about a character archetype who uses their character’s pacifism as a bludgeon to wrongfun people playing characters who fit with the purpose/vibe of the faction.
I admit that I lost the thread a little bit with the specific example mentioned later, since it refers to some situations and mechanics specific to a game that I don’t play, but I don’t believe that there was ever an intention to ban people from playing pacifist characters, just characters who fit the archetype of a character who is (irony intended) a militant pacifist who uses their beliefs to demean and socially bludgeon characters who engage in violent IC actions within the designed theme and setting of the game.
People seem to be largely ignoring the brunt of the argument (that is, "there is a specific brand of OOC troll that weaponizes pacifism in a game designed and built around conflict and violence), so that they can instead fixate on an argument that isn’t being made by anyone as far as I can tell (that “pacifist PCs shouldn’t be allowed in PvP games”).
Deeply frustrating, and frankly doesn’t seem like the folks doing this are arguing in good faith, but are instead letting their own anti-PVP biases or whatever get in the way of an actual discussion. Goalposts, at no point, have been moved. Multiple people have gone to great lengths to point out they’re talking about broad archetypes, and then citing specific incidents.
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@Faraday said in Non-toxic PvP:
It is someone whose very existence is predicated on being part of a moderate to high-conflict group and then avoiding conflict.
I think we have to clarify whether we’re talking about someone playing an IC pacifist and the narrative of such a character. The character should strive to avoid conflict, sure, but at the same time, in order to create amazing story out of that, that pacifism should be tested by them being backed into a situation where they either maintain their pacifism and have to escape harm, or their personal ethics break and they evolve as a character.
On the other hand, you could have someone who’s character isn’t a pacifist, but they as a player choose to avoid CvC whenever possible, and also wish to stop the rest of their group from participating in such narratives with their PCs, regardless of their players intentions.
I think we need to really separate the IC pacifism vs OOC pacifism in this context, because I can totally see amazing narratives coming out of someone playing an IC pacifist in a CvC heavy faction, but can also see how OOC pacifism can lead to other OOC pitfalls.
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@NotSanni said in Non-toxic PvP:
People seem to be largely ignoring the brunt of the argument (that is, "there is a specific brand of OOC troll that weaponizes pacifism in a game designed and built around conflict and violence), so that they can instead fixate on an argument that isn’t being made by anyone as far as I can tell (that “pacifist PCs shouldn’t be allowed in PvP games”).
Because I didn’t see that as the core of the argument. I’m sorry if there was a misunderstanding, but it genuinely seemed that it was about these outlier characters (as @Kestrel alludes to) rather than a specific brand of OOC trolling. Especially when every post about the specific example just kept talking about IC Behavior. Like people keep saying “oh they were weaponizing their pacifism” and whatnot. Maybe they were - I don’t know them from Adam - but I just don’t see that from the facts presented here.
