MU Peeves Thread

[SpaceKhomeini]

@Aria said in MU Peeves Thread:

@mietze said in MU Peeves Thread:

Sometimes there’s a difficulty in that there isn’t gatekeeping in a direct way so much as someone who is unpleasant to a person who wants to engage being all over everything but its not personal or purposeful targeting. I call that plot-licking. When someone is so all over everything they need to answer or dominate all conversations, spam everything, seem distressed if they are not able to be “helpful” to everything going on with it. Kinda akin to the toddler that just loves a thing so much they have to slobber all over it in that primal way.

A lot of times it can be just easier to stay away. I definitely have someone I avoid now because their ooc behavior towards me made me super uncomfortable (I don’t believe it to be personal in my observation and it wasn’t breaking any rules, could be they were just trying to be funny and it bombed for me, so its not a reportable thing.) and really has made me not want to proactively engage again not because they are horrible but because I just don’t want to be stressed out! But because of this person’s high activity I have to really think hard about if/how I want to engage with things and don’t pursue other things because I just find it off-putting. And other people haven’t been weirded out by this person so this is a me thing.

This. Not too long ago, I encountered a player like this who got involved in everything. And when I say that, it’s not me being hyperbolic.

I mean they made me super uncomfortable with open IC hostility for posing into a public event, when they had never met nor interacted with my character before and who I did not, as far I was aware, have any previous interactions with on other games or really know OOC aside from passing channel conversations. On the game where I first encountered them, it reached a point that there was literally one PRP left that they weren’t involved in. The PRP-runner was kind enough to include me in and then said player decided that should be under their IC purview, too, and pushed their way into it because of what type of plot it was.

Cue me encountering them displaying the exact same kind of behavior on the next three games I tried, some of which were running concurrently. It has reached a point where I have seriously wondered if this person sleeps because I have no idea how they have the energy or the brain space to RP this many things, at this pace, across this many games all at once.

Also can I possibly use their blood to sustainably power my house?

I’m fairly certain I know of whom you speak and this person is like a stinkbug infestation.

[Jenn]

@SpaceKhomeini NGL… Like. The voice in my head insists this has to be me. Because I’m usually bored af and just looking for ANY distraction to give me another ten minutes of moving forward. And I absolutely know that if I were other folks, I’d be annoying the crap out of myself. So. On the vague chance it is me, or has been me, or later becomes me… Everyone has blanket permission to ask me to cut back on the plot licking and I’ll do my damnedest to accommodate.

[SpaceKhomeini]

@Roadspike said in MU Peeves Thread:

@mietze Yeah. This is definitely something I both see and feel very much so. And I think that about the only thing Staff can do is specifically stake out some events for “people who haven’t gotten as involved as they’d like” to create some GMed scenes without plot-lickers. It’s not a perfect solution and has its own problems, but it’s -something- at least.

One of the things that got me disengaging more often than not in the last year or so was repeatedly running afoul of the same handful of sharing-averse people with a sense of manic “pick-me” energy who manage to maneuver their characters into positions of key plot importance (often just based on who they know) in ways that barely made sense to me. If I’m going to basically play an NPC, I should probably just go do something else.

[SpaceKhomeini]

@Jenn

I had no idea who you are and went to go look at your playlist and I don’t recognize a single one of these names. So no flames from me.

[Aria]

@SpaceKhomeini said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Jenn

I had no idea who you are and went to go look at your playlist and I don’t recognize a single one of these names. So no flames from me.

@Jenn What ^ dude said. I think the only game we were on at the same time was Ithir and you seemed perfectly lovely to me from our limited interactions.

[mietze]

My experience with the people who need to be everything and everywhere is that they honestly wouldn’t recognize themselves being described because either they really don’t care or they feel that they’re justified.

If you don’t try to shout over people, if you don’t feel the need to dominate every conversation to bring it back to how you are also very special and important to the thing in question, if you do not compulsively seek to make sure you’re involved in Everything Important for All The Things and getting antsy when someone else is doing something so you’ve got to be there all the time–then probably you’re not a plot-licker, or at least, not the type that is annoying to me personal.

But you, and me, and everyone else–we’ve all annoyed SOMEBODY on a game. Probably every game we’ve ever been on! Just hopefully not like that!

[Roz]

@mietze said in MU Peeves Thread:

I call that plot-licking.

that’s AMAZING

[Kestrel]

I’m not currently playing anything so I mean, maybe things are different now and better than I remember them being.

I’ll say though that I’ve often encountered the opposite problem — where you really want more people to get involved, but they’ll say stuff like, ‘Oh I don’t know if I should! I took part in a plot just last week and don’t want to take up too much space.’

I caught myself thinking to myself as I was reading some of these posts, ‘Is it me, am I like this?’ But then I also remembered the common struggle to encourage proactivity, and combat this common introverted shyness/anxiety seen in MU* players who feel obliged to toe the line more than they really need to.

All this to very vaguely say — there’s a Goldilocks Zone here. All things in moderation, including moderation.

[Tributary]

@mietze Once upon a time, I accidentally licked my friend’s plot because I was just so excited about it and didn’t realize that I was stepping on toes. It was new and shiny and I wanted to participate and…

And people clued me in that I’d gotten slobber everywhere, and I apologized to my friend who didn’t want to bring it up with me out of fear that it could make things awkward. Which, naturally, made things awkward when I realized I’d gotten drool all over this nice plot.

My friend was glad that I understood boundaries and that I didn’t want to be an inadvertent plot-licker. And our conversation gave us the opportunity to figure out the best way to engage together on the plot. Because in the end, my enthusiasm was appreciated! Just within reason, right?

[Jenn]

@Tributary You truly are and continue to be one of my very favorite interwebs people. I know I say that to a lot of y’all, but. I MEAN it to every danged one of y’all.

[Gashlycrumb]

Lots of MUs have controlled cliques since somewhere shortly after the year dot. It’s really normal and done in a +R way. Games that have +votes and XP (or some other mechanicy-reward) linked to votes tend to also not let you vote for the same person over and over. Maybe you can vote for them once a day, or once a week, or once a month. Players who get out more will earn more XP.

(Cliques will break this system if you let people award each other bonus XP for PrPs. But really, the gaining extra XP for getting to do stuff is like giving you an ice cream cone for doing such a good job eating your hot fudge sundae and isn’t a great plan.)

One might try a setup where instead of resetting after a period of time, it resets after you vote for the nth different PC. You either need to form a clique with more than n members, or you need to play outside your group. I would guess that people wouldn’t object to that, mainly because it’s not a punishment or a critique of their individual behavior. (And they’re quite justified in disliking being punished or criticised for RPing with whom they like.)

There’s also the possibility of not only spreading your plot hooks/story seeds across a wide variety of laps, but also purposefully dropping those seeds to people who actively spread the fun around. And seldom dropping them them to people who won’t, as it is a less efficient use of GM time.

[Cobalt]

When a player returns to a game your active on who directly lead to you being verbally abused RL. And then shortly after one of their buddies returns who outed another player as trans to you that would probably be uncomfortable with people knowing it IF it was even true.

Really kills all desire to continue playing.

Also, yes, I know I’m vaguebooking.

[Gashlycrumb]

@Cobalt So much feels.

Joined a game after a player who likes to attack me said they had quit. They hadn’t. Avoid interacting with them. Know full well they undermine my IC efforts without any IC motivation, and have made up a ‘prophecy’ about my PC that sentences PCs who work with him to DOOOOOOM.

Now watching player decisions turn what was a fun action scene into PC-destroying disaster and it’s very hard not to wonder how very much of that was OOC hostility.

[Juniper]

My least favourite encounter in stories/plots is the Main Character Syndrome player. The one who rushes ahead without bothering to wait for anyone’s emote and grabs the MacGuffin to take home and try to interact with the plot to the exclusion of all others. The one who gets up in front of everyone and “volunteers” to be the most important person who shall charge forth alone to solve all the problems and actually expects a pat on the back for this behavior. Basically constantly looking for a way to elevate themselves above the rest of us peons who showed up to participate.

I’m dealing with one in the current game I’m playing and I’m so fucking done with it. A decent amount of plot licking means they’re somehow constantly in the center of everything and there’s very little to do that doesn’t require going through them in some way. And they have a history of OOC aggression towards people trying to get involved in plots they’ve already licked.

Like, have friends if you want, put them first if you want, I consider this all fairly normal behaviour. But if you can’t stop acting like a monster to everyone else that’s where I draw the line. Fuck off with that shit.

[Alveraxus]

@Juniper said in MU Peeves Thread:

My least favourite encounter in stories/plots is the Main Character Syndrome player.

I’m dealing with one in the current game I’m playing and I’m so fucking done with it. A decent amount of plot licking means they’re somehow constantly in the center of everything and there’s very little to do that doesn’t require going through them in some way. And they have a history of OOC aggression towards people trying to get involved in plots they’ve already licked.

When this is allowed to run rampant, it’s one of the fastest ways to get me to disengage with a game. I don’t feel the need to win as my character (I actually prefer losing more often than not as it leads to better character arcs IMO), but if the same person or few people are the ones always doing everything and I feel like my character is just a side character in their story, and staff lets that happen? Yeah, I’ll take my time and energy and go elsewhere.

The issue I find is it happens more often than not. I’d say that most of the places I’ve played in the past year or so, if you were to do a straw poll of players and asked, "Who seems like the ‘main character’ of this game?', you’d see a vast number of players answering the same person or people. That’s a problem.

Staff needs to be cognizant of these things and while it’s hard to tell a player “please don’t get involved in this plot”, there are ways that you can urge things in other directions and not get into a confrontation about it.

But as a player? If you don’t want to share your ball, I’ll go find another sandbox to play in. There are plenty of them out there, and none of them are SO GOOD that they are worth the mental energy of fighting with bad players over it.

[mietze]

I think it’s gonna be a two pieces of cake sort of day today.

[mangosplitz]

Playing on a game where staff ardently vows to the player base that their entire goal is to prevent gatekeeping, waiting for weeks while all of staff takes a break at the same time grinding plot to a halt leaving the players to pick up the slack and run a bunch of open events involving everyone and being inclusive, and then have staff come back and immediately launch a ton of events that are all “closed” to very small groups of seemingly the same few players again.

It’s not gatekeeping I guess if you’re the ones inside?

[helvetica]

@mangosplitz Those events are in response to requests made by groups of players poking at plot, and there’s a staff-run plot guide explaining how to do that.

[bear_necessities]

@helvetica I get the complaint assuming @mangosplitz is talking about Concordia (bc really dude just name names already, vaguebooking is so 2023). Four events, all featuring the same 4 characters, is a bad look. But considering the last large plot was in October, I assume 90% of the people in those groups that did the requesting are idle or have quit?

IDK you’re never going to please everybody.

[helvetica]

@bear_necessities word. for my part on playerside, I tried to invite people I had connections to and got fatigued by them reading the mails and not responding, so ~~the group that’s there is the group that responded before I ran out of steam. c’est la vie.