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IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance
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I think this is one of those things that is highly dependent on the situation, even more than the individual.
I think IF people feel oocly that they are seen and getting to contribute, and are having fun, there’s a lot more that they’re willing to bend for and roll with.
I think the tricky issue with NPCs in particular is that it can be really easy for that part to be lost, and for some people that does trigger a desire to poke the bear just TO be seen. I don’t know about any of the specific situations people are referencing here (I don’t think). But I have absolutely seen on several games people sitting through scenes that are largely NPCs roleplaying/talking primarily to each other and pretty much ignoring other people and forcing everyone else into audience role OR showing up to PC run events to blow them up without checking in with the person running the scene, and an ICly they get reactions from the spectators that clearly the staff running the NPCs didn’t expect, or they feel are disruptive. Both types of behavior were really super common on the WoD games in which I was largely raised. So sometimes I wonder when I see someone really stepping on that edge if they aren’t reacting to the perception of ‘oh well, might as well have my kind of fun since there’s nothing I can do here.’ Almost like the reverse behavior of the PC who comes to scenes exclusively to pose at the NPCs and dodges all other PCs’ poses to them like some kind of ninja.
When a PC is finally penalized for negative interactions with NPCs, if it’s in that context of feeling like they aren’t part of things enough anyway to feel concern or attachment (either because of something they’ve internalized or misunderstood or they’ve just hit their limit feeling like they’re spectating because that is in fact what they have to do) then they’re much less accepting OOCly of consequences. The people who are just in it to be as obnoxious as possible in my observation/experience really don’t care about losing their pc or whatever, they’ll just walk but be as obnoxious as they can be on their way out.
But I think most of the time MOST people are actually fine with consequence. But also even some of those people might have just had a bad day or something else going on where they were not in that moment able to make something fun out of an unexpected major setback or failure. (I don’t qualify poking the bear out of boredom as unexpected.)
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@Faraday said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
Some players will roll with things - I love that. But I’ve had some players quit over what I considered natural (non character-ending) consequences of their PCs’ actions, and others throw gigantic fits over the smallest of setbacks.
PC death is my personal hot-button because it ends the story and makes you start over from scratch. That’s not fun for me, so I don’t play (or run) games like that.
@SpaceKhomeini said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
I usually operate under the assumption that the character I’m helming is largely an idiot and does idiot things that will result in idiotic self-owns.
Sometimes I forget that I haven’t communicated this loudly enough with everyone around me and they get kind of cagey when I do stupid shit IC.
The fact that this needs to be communicated at all is kind of emblematic of the core issue. Most players in my experience don’t want their character to come off looking bad (in their opinion) because they think it makes them look bad. There’s such an over-investment in IC success, glory, and coolness that if someone is actively trying to embrace natural consequences or have their character do something stupid, it’s looked upon with suspicion or disdain.
I believe it’s not only the player not wanting to come off looking bad, which is part of it, but there are some who already have a concrete roadmap planned out for their character. Their character progression is like Lockheed Martin’s stock, the only way is up. In their mind, they already have an expectation that after one event, their character’s coolness and popularity is at this level, then after another event, they will attain a higher level, etc.
This means, if they perform an action that they feel is perfectly fine and cool, and the GM in that scene throws an unexpected wrench which may sidetrack, delay, or even mar their roadmap, then their character is ruined. They’re out. They do not want to go through the effort to take this new, uncertain Path B, because it was not part of their original plan. They play for the ‘W’, they don’t play for the collaborative story telling.
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@KDraygo said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
Their character progression is like Lockheed Martin’s stock, the only way is up.
The antithesis of this, the player who’s character progression is meant to repeatedly bounce off of rock bottom, is possibly every GM’s unicorn.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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it is? why is that your unicorn?
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@MisterBoring My unicorn is everyone being available at the same time on a consistent basis…
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I tend to enjoy reading and watching those types of stories, where a character is handed short term defeat after short term defeat only to finally bring things around in the very end and win when it really pays off to do so.
That’s so rare that’s not even a unicorn though. That’s like seeing a unicorn get struck by lightning on the day it won the Powerball.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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I like reading those types of stories too, but the problem is on a MUSH, a lot of times you’re not going to see things to that completion. Between staff turn and burnover and all that (nobody’s fault) or things losing steam realistically most people know that you can’t expect the big payoff. You’ve got to just kind of enjoy the moment and the fun with people you enjoy RPing with while it lasts.
Don’t get me wrong I LOVE failure. Pretty much most of my favorite mush memories are scenes that were heavily influenced by me bombing many MANY rolls. The scene my awesome statted combat dude did not succeed on a single roll while the nerds he was escorting passed every single roll in the combat. My admittedly kind of dumb jock pc failing like six perception type checks in a row and making a fool of herself. Catastropic failure roll on my healer which meant she was able to save someone in a heroic way but did it wrong so it looked like everything was fine and then her work ruptured and took him out during a critical battle scene.
But I have seen people I really have empathy for who by luck like never get to succeed, never get to shine, because there’s not room in the moment for the GM to play along. Ect.
I agree that good sportsmanship is very important. Few things are as unfun for me as having a STed scene that is mostly cluttered with people OOC getting angry or fretting about how bad their rolls are or how they don’t contribute anything, ect so that the actual poses are ecliped by the volume of the ooc. But honestly I can’t help but feel strong empathy for folks who feel a little disappointed that pretty much they flubbed everything, or for various reasons don’t get as much attention (not necessarily from staff, but even just being without a solid group to do things with and amuse each other too).
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@MisterBoring said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
where a character is handed short term defeat after short term defeat only to finally bring things around in the very end and win
That’s great in theory, but can’t often be guaranteed. More likely is that it will be short-term defeat after short-term defeat after short-term defeat… and that’s it.
Why would I want to play that when that’s just my reality?
It can be fun to read, for sure, but it’s often not fun to play.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
Amusingly, I remember one character I played where it felt like everyone was convinced that he was in control and had this Machiavellian plotting going on–and he never accomplished one single thing I wanted for him.
He was just determined not to let it show, so every time something failed, he just pivoted to grab what he could and acted like that was The Plan all along.
It was honestly somewhat frustrating OOC, because I wasn’t getting what I wanted from the game or his ‘arc’, and at the same time, because people assumed I was, they kept treating him like he was a big enemy who had to be kept in his place or else he’d take over everything.
All he ever wanted was to kill some monsters so that he felt like less of one and to have a human crime friend.
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@mietze said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
I like reading those types of stories too, but the problem is on a MUSH, a lot of times you’re not going to see things to that completion. Between staff turn and burnover and all that (nobody’s fault) or things losing steam realistically most people know that you can’t expect the big payoff. You’ve got to just kind of enjoy the moment and the fun with people you enjoy RPing with while it lasts.
Ain’t that the truth?
I don’t know why I of all people need to be occasionally reminded of this, but…
I do.
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@Pavel said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
It can be fun to read, for sure, but it’s often not fun to play.
It’s fun to read because there’s usually some kind of payoff in the end. As others have mentioned, that’s often (usually?) just not the case in MUs. Even if a MU ends up running for years, there’s no guarantees of that from one week to the next. Too many of them end up like TV shows cancelled before their time with plot threads that went nowhere. It’s hard to blame people for not wanting to play the long game.
And also let’s not forget… it’s a game. I think there’s an understandable gap between the kinds of media we might passively enjoy as a book or movie vs. the kind we want to actively participate in through a first-person type experience.
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@Faraday said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
the kind we want to actively participate in through a first-person type experience
I’d even go so far as to say that we’re not simply ‘actively participating’ in it, we’re creating it. It’s easy to equate MUs to video games, and if that’s the analogy people want to use, then we’re not just the players, we’re the writers, designers, and producers too.
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@Pavel said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
That’s great in theory, but can’t often be guaranteed. More likely is that it will be short-term defeat after short-term defeat after short-term defeat… and that’s it.
Why would I want to play that when that’s just my reality?
Yes.
Caveat being that if the IC defeat involved an excellent scene or two and was great fun and maybe has a sauce of hooks for future Doin’ Awesome RPG Shit, it’s an OOC victory and it’s reasonable for the GM to expect it to be taken as one.
But boring and opportunity restricting failures will make people whinge, or go away, or both. One Classic form of MU fuckery is the deal where the cool kids get to fart hypnotic purple fire in the Mall of America and it’s all good, but every time Abelard farts fire in the Distant Mountains somebody observes and the Grand Poot-bah tells him he needs to be more discrete or they’ll force him to take the Bean-O and lose his fire-farting powers forever.
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Personally, my experience is that people are willing to accept amazing and terrifying amounts of consequences, even very negative such, as long as they feel that it matters.
No one wants their character to lose a leg and no one cares. But if losing a leg means the villain gets outed and everyone goes around all ‘thank you for your sacrifice’, then it’s juuuuuust fine.
People want to matter.
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As said above… yeah, there is some kind of range of players from cool with anything, to the sore winners that can’t even accept rewards graciously. What percentage of the MU* population each category represents… well there’s no way of really knowing that.
But I think there’s another fundamental issue, which is a frequent failure to come up with IC consequences that are entertaining. OR maybe more importantly, the misbelief that is common on MU*s that results from actions should be viewed through a punitive lens. “Oh. You tried to do something interesting? Let me figure out how I can mess with you as a result.”
If you try to do right by all players involved in the scenario, if you adjudicate the rules of the game fairly, and if you do your best to come up with narratively interesting results that don’t remove characters from the game (unless there’s really no other option), then YOU will be able to accept your own actions, regardless of whether or not another player can.
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I think the thing that irks me the most about these situations is the specific version of this where:
- The specific consequences for a specific action are warned about both IC to many PCs and OOC through various OOC channels.
- Alternative methods to approach the current danger are offered both IC and OOC through many PCs and OOC channels.
- A single PC comes forward, and even though they are prearmed with the information that action X will have result Y 100% of the time, choose to take action X regardless of the consequences.
- That player immediately throws a shit fit because that’s not what should happen to their PC.
The first example I can think of this happening actually happened on a PBP forum game loosely based on various space faring scifi stuff like Traveller, Warhammer 40K, and Disney’s The Black Hole. The characters discovered a previously undiscovered artificial planet was on a collision course with a hub world, and if left unchecked would have dire consequences. They had roughly a year of in game time to deal with the issue, and several options were presented by staff for the players to do so.
One of these options involved reassembling the control system on the planet and it was noted both via IC play and OOC communication that attempts to reassemble the control system with less than the required number of parts would be terminal for any players directly involved.
A PC, who will be referred to as Sam from here forward, was given all of this information, and through regular adventures with their crew along side some political bargains with other PCs, managed to acquire 3 of the 4 pieces of the device, and though warned both IC and OOC that attempting to reassemble the control device now would be a VERY BAD IDEA INDEED, they chose to go alone to do this. When they opened the request for the scene, the staffer involved in running it sent the player a private message asking for confirmation that they wanted to proceed down this guaranteed suicide mission. Their response was “I just want to get this plot over with.”.
After sneaking past a few patrols of security robots, the character arrived at the core of the planet, reassembled the incomplete device, turned it on, and was promptly vaporized when the planet exploded.
Cue 3 week long tantrum on every board they could get access to after their access was modified because their character died.
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I would generally agree that people like having control of their failures - they like the points where their character does the wrong thing to be something they specifically initiate. Sidestepping for a moment from DMing into dicerolls, I know a few people who have gotten discouraged enough by a bout of bad rolls to straight up want to slip out of scenes, or avoid high stakes dice scenes for a while. The random element really got to them.
Also I think there is some degree of non-dice times when a player has a fact about their character that is canon to them - maybe that they’re a good manipulator, or a good scientist, or a pickpocket, but in a particular scene the player isn’t able to accomplish their vision of the character, when people aren’t reacting to what they think should happen, where people just can’t recover from the disconnect in time to make it fun for themself. If you want your character to be perceived a certain way but can’t make people see that… it’s going to become frustrating.
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@spiriferida I think this can be exacerbated by how unkind other players can be about a bad run of dice. In the typical MU*, chances to do your character’s Big Thing in a ‘meaningful’ way can be very thin on the ground. Getting a bad roll on your Thing can certainly hurt - and even worse when other players have their characters treat yours as a failure, or mock the bad roll OOC.
As I’ve aged, I’ve become more of a fan of both ‘fail forward’ methods with failures described not as a failure of ability, but as a consequence paid for progress, but also of ‘luck/karma’ systems where you can have a limited currency to spend for success when it really MATTERS to your character.
Because yes, it absolutely sucks to have the one chance your PC gets in a year to roll their best ability in a scene where there are actual impacts, and fail miserably. Especially when you know that now everyone’s seen that failure, and not any of the successes that the character would reasonably have had, and all they’re going to remember is ‘Annie said she was a great warrior and totally fumbled out of that fight in the first round’.
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I think it depends upon the scenario, but calling out the difference between TTPRG, Video games, etc, versus things like MUSHing or LARPing is key. I look at the latter as collective storytelling, while the former are representational/avatar situations. Lines blur with more immersive games, but when I am playing one of the earlier Final Fantasy games, I am choosing what I think the “best” choice is, not what I think is most in character.
Personally, I am one of those people who likes to think through the worst possible decisions my character can make, and find a way to do that, because I think that leads to better story. It’s part of the whole “play to lift” philosophy, and I approach MUSHing this way, kind of with that “yes, and…” approach.
I think that persistence of characters though in a campaign or a MUSH can discourage, to an extent, the kind of “bad decision” making that might work better in one-off games or LARPs or things like that because we grow attached to our characters (understandably) and also we want to see them continue and succeed. Or just not die. Which is totally reasonable.
The game that we’re developing we think is going to make this a bit easier by putting an “expiration date” on characters by default, so hopefully players will be freer to make dramatic decisions that may have significant consequences (including character death) that lead to cool scenes because going in they know the character won’t be around in a year anyway.
Of course, what we don’t know is how many people won’t even want to start on a game where every character has a 6-12 month shelf life before refreshing, but we’re willing to roll the dice and see if our idea is compelling enough. Hopefully it’ll be interesting to see either way!
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The most important thing here is degrees. Every medium has it. Movies/Television/Novels and other classically structured storytelling (like comic books, whatever) have less fluidity in how much agency to give the audience – the story is told and we experience it without much say. Some types – mostly those that attempt to give some leeway via Choose Your Own Adventure-style interactivity or, more recently (relatively), social media-centered storytelling where the audience can interact with characters (pioneered by such darlings as lonelygirl15) – are more interactive.
For video games, you start to get into a bit more hands-on from the audience because the player is actually in charge of a character. Sometimes the video game allows you to make many choices, decide what kind of person the character is, be evil or good (Fallout, Skyrim) or give you throughlines you can explore and combine (Mass Effect) but which are still written out; and still others are basically a story that you play through and the only real thing you decide is which sideplots to take part in and your actions in combat, but the story won’t change (Last of Us, God of War).
MUing is similar, when it comes to the way people run the game. Some games are very laisse-faire: you make a character and react to the world and have relationships and take part in the action, yay. Other games are more focused on the stories and moving characters forward. Other games have actual stories they want to tell with those characters you’re choosing to play (roster games are big on this) and you have less (not ‘none’, but ‘less’) of a choice over what you’ll be involved in storywise (especially in character-specific plots) and it’s important to communicate even more with the STs and staff to make sure everyone is having a good time.
My point, though, is that (though it may not be everyone’s cup of tea) MUing is perhaps the most nuanced of all of these because it can run the broadest gamut between ‘do whatever’ and ‘look, this is the plot’.
There is probably a lot of comparison to be made with storytellers with railroad and stuff, but the important thing I think is for the game and staff and STs to be open and forthcoming about their expectations (the same as players should be) and everyone to find a comfortable way of telling stories together.
