Bad Stuff Happening IC
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@Roz I agree we’re mostly on the same page. I think I was just viewing bleed as a specific type of maladaptive behavior where one over-identifies with the character. Self-insert gone awry. The classic example being: two characters are in love and one player starts letting that bleed over to their behavior toward the other player.
That feels very different from, say, ragequitting and throwing your controller across the room after losing a Fortnite match. That’s also unhealthy, obviously, but I personally wouldn’t call it bleed.
The kind of bleed I’m describing feels closer to the parasocial relationships you see towards influencers.
I dunno, maybe they’re all just different sides of the same coin and I’m trying to make an unnecessary distinction.
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@Faraday Oh yeah, of course, it’s not ANY sort of maladaptive behavior in any sort of game. Crashing out over losing Fortnite isn’t the same thing, you’re right. Bleed is something specific to these sorts of situations where we’re identifying with characters we’re actively writing the stories of. It’s a phenomenon in RP spaces specifically because of the nature of the hobby and playing characters the way we do.
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Like everything else, it depends.
I want bad stuff to happen to my PC, because I want stuff to happen.
But.
Is it fair? It sucks the fun right out of it when it’s shit like, “The House Rule I just invented means that the action you took before I invented this rule and told you about it was not the ordinary way of things, but a crime for which you are now in deep trouble.”
Is it interactive? It could be that as a story element the Bad Stuff is in fact A Gloriously Epic Trauma Conga Line, but if it’s all off-camera it’s insufferably frustrating, not fun.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find that most players who respond badly to bad stuff happening to their PCs have had experiences of unfair non-interactive bad stuff being used to shut them out of the game.
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@Gashlycrumb said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
I wouldn’t be surprised to find that most players who respond badly to bad stuff happening to their PCs have had experiences of unfair non-interactive bad stuff being used to shut them out of the game.
And much like unhealed people entering the dating pool before they are ready, it is their responsibility to work that out so it isn’t causing them to lash out at others.
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@hellfrog Yep. But also note that making unfair and non-interactive bad shit happen to PCs is legit unfun. It’s their responsibility to work it out, and they don’t get free rein to lash out at people because of it. BUT regardless, the shitty thing about unfair non-interactive shit is that it’s unfair non-interactive shit. It wouldn’t be just fine if the mark would only shut up and pretend it’s fine.
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I voted for “just fuck me up,” because if I trust the GM, that’s generally where I’m at. I have a few absolute hard “nos” (and I have… even rped around one or two of them with a GM that I trusted) but generally speaking, the bad stuff happening to PCs is where a lot of the development comes from.
But like, I’m not a magical unicorn and if something bad happens to my PC that feels unearned or like it doesn’t belong in the story I’m sure I’ll still probably be upset.
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I want bad stuff to happen sooner rather than later, to see how the staff and community make it fun, because that’s going to be a great way to know whether or not the game is right for me.
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I love me some negativity consequences. I remeber a prp where Norwood was 100% sure he was doing the right thing by killing the bad guy. But since the fight had ended it ended up being viewed as straight up murder. I went “oh damn” to have my straight laced do-gooder suddenly having ‘murderer’ on his soul. It was awesome though because it spun a whole other prp where Norwood went on a redemption arc. It also made him more thoughtful of what was righteous. More gray, less black and white.
Or when K’vvan kept lipping off to leadership because he was an asshole and got eviserated. Led to massive RP chances and him slowly becoming an asshole that some people were okay with. He never did become someone people generally were chill with, but there was some growth.
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@junipersky I have no idea who these people are but these sound like very cool plots. That Norwood one is very neat and more consequences like that need to happen on games.
It always seems like there’s an overemphasis on wounding a character physically, where combat is going to be the thing that has the big negative consequences (speaking for WoD games mostly here), but it would be great to have more of those plots where the consequence is some kind of moral injury.
