Bad Stuff Happening IC
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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.
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What happens, happens. A roll of the dice - and my dice luck is legendarily horrific - or someone outplaying my character intellectually, politically, whatever. Bring it on, as long as the playing field is level. And as long as I’m allowed to come up with what happened because of a bad roll, botches are almost always some form of hilarious, because my characters often take themselves too seriously and I love the chance to poke a hole in that.
But when it’s not a fair playing field? When you wake up in the morning, log in and find out your character died while you were asleep for no reason? When your plot fails because staff doesn’t want their friend to be discomfited but you can go hang and they didn’t bother to mention that X won’t be changing in advance? When it’s written in the stars that you’re going to be the universe’s punching bag forever and always because you created what the source material says is absolutely normal? No. Not playing that game.
If the only real way to advance on a game is to TS a staffer’s alt, they can go fuck themselves because I’m not going to indulge them. If the only real way to succeed is to follow this nice set of rails, but no-one does me the courtesy of telling me they exist and I just have to kind of guess at what to do next and hope this is the right answer, I’m derailing myself right out of the game. Let my actions have consequences, and let me do things you haven’t foreseen. And if those consequences fuck me over sideways, as long as it’s all fair or I had some sort of chance, I’m happy with that. And if everything I do has no consequence at all, because the plot’s already written and all the roles are filled and that person over there is the shining hero who saves the world? No thanks.
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Damn!!!
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that last part read like something Liam Neeson should have been growling into a phone and now I feel like I missed something, lol.
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@Wizz Maaan I wish I felt like I missed something after reading that.
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@Evilgrayson said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
When you wake up in the morning, log in and find out your character died while you were asleep for no reason?
God I don’t even remember the circumstances but I know at least one person that happened to on Haven, and I remember thinking if it were me I would probably just… go on a multi-year rage hiatus from RP.
General +100 to the consensus of enjoying occasionally failing or losing or having terrible things happen so long as it feels like part of fun collaborative storytelling, not just torture porn or unsatisfying bad luck or impersonal griefing.
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I think permadeath should be wholly excluded from the Bad Things Bucket just because it’s so difficult to give a character death a satisfying amount of story lead up. Character deaths shouldn’t be a side note in someone else’s story, it should be part of a story explicitly dedicated to wrapping up your character in a respectful and awesome way.
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@Juniper I disagree that death should be entirely off the table, but I do think it should be intentional on the part of the player. An OOC check-in of “Hey now, if we keep going down this road, then death is very much a potential outcome” would be something I’d suggest, even if you’ve previously established that certain acts, areas, character types are more likely to provoke lethality.
Now, this doesn’t necessarily suit all game genres and types. To me, it probably suits a WoD game, or similarly mechanically driven game, than something like your high politicking Lords and Ladies game. Though I also disagree with the idea that character deaths should be solely dedicated to wrapping up a character in a respectful way. Awesome would be the ideal, sure, and it should serve the game’s story, but a death that’s inadvertent and unexpected IC is prime story fodder.
I can’t help but raise the death of Mollymauk in Critical Role’s Mighty Nein campaign as an excellent example of unexpected death impacting the story in a way that might have been unsatisfying and distressing to the player in that moment, but became foundational to the story as a whole.
ETA: But as with all high risk stories, you’d need a strong level of trust, rapport, etc, etc, etc.
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I am still of the opinion that players identify too closely with their characters in MU*s for most people to be divorced from feeling bad when bad things happen to them. I think exploring other story game designs, such as Everyone is John Dread, Microscope, Band of Blades, The Quiet Year, The Fall of Magic, Swords Without Master etc.
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam
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@Ominous said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
Everyone is John Dread,
You didn’t put a comma between Everyone is John and Dread and I immediately started looking for a strange new hybrid of two really cool games.
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@Ominous said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
I am still of the opinion that players identify too closely with their characters in MU*s for most people to be divorced from feeling bad when bad things happen to them.
I probably agree with this, but I also don’t see it as a bad thing. It’s not a problem that needs solving, the intense OOC overreactions are, and certain kinds of people are going to have those reactions regardless of system.
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@Ominous said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
I think exploring other story game designs, such as Everyone is John, Dread, Microscope, Band of Blades, The Quiet Year, The Fall of Magic, Swords Without Master etc.
hell yeah weird little story game recommendations!
Also check out Lovecraftesque, either Trophy Dark or Trophy Gold, any number of PBTA games but especially Apocalypse World itself, Pasión de Las Pasiones, Worldwide Wrestling, Brindlewood Bay, and Urban Shadows.
Each of those really takes a stab at an existing genre of RPG and shifts it into a different mechanism of storytelling. Urban Shadows is probably one of the closest analogues to World of Darkness, but really does something unique with regards to how organizations and play settings are created. Both Pasión de Las Pasiones and World Wide Wrestling seem silly on their face, but are surprisingly impactful to play (one is a game about telenovelas and the other about the lives of professional and semi-professional wrestlers). Trophy (any iteration) is great for examining our relationships to fantasy roleplaying games. You can make it as high or low fantasy as you want, but Trophy tends towards the gritty fantasy – it was described once as “if A24 made a D&D movie.” I also may or may not be suggesting Trophy Gold because I have a credit in it. Brindlewood Bay has probably the best mystery-creation-and-solving system I’ve encountered, but it also takes a “the game is a conversation” stance towards it. If you find that you like Brindlewood Bay, also check out the game Public Access,
Lovecraftesque is very similar to Everyone is John, but everyone plays a facet of a Lovecraftian protagonist, which is fun when bits of the psyche start getting warped by the mythos.
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@MisterBoring said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
@somasatori said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
Trophy tends towards the gritty fantasy
You forgot golf
I haven’t tried it, but that looks great
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Wow. This topic really made me think about some stuff (and got me to speak up on Brand MU Day for the first time!). I’ve only been MUSHing since 2013, but looking back over my decade+ of playing, it’s interesting to consider how I would have answered back then compared to how I’m able to answer now.
I answered the poll with the “Yes, but only if I have control over it” option. Beginner me understood that life for my characters couldn’t be perfect or else it’d be boring, but if bad things were going to happen, I either wanted to pick specifically what would happen in the moment or carefully plan with my scene partners what specifically would happen. Didn’t always work out well, as you might imagine.
Me with a few years of play under my belt loosened her hold on the reins and had become an actor IRL, who was learning in a very direct way how conflict propelled story and how valuable it was to respond in the moment rather than always pre-planning. During RP, I still wanted assurance that things would eventually turn out okay, but I was willing to play through the drama. I loved some of the stories I told with people during that time. However, two things started happening at once.
One was that the game I was on became very cliqueish, and communicating with people started to feel like pulling teeth – one, because there was some actual behind-the-scenes toxicity going on (that I ended up exposed to firsthand by becoming a staffer), and two, because I was afraid to “cause trouble” by trying to talk to people about what was going on. When communication breaks down…well. It just makes everything way more difficult than it should be, as I’m sure many of us have experienced.
The other thing was that I began to experience bleed. I didn’t know what it was or what was happening; I just knew that the bad things my characters were experiencing were becoming part of my own emotional state, and it wasn’t a good thing. Fortunately, since bleed is also something actors can experience if we’re not careful, some colleagues were able to tell me what was going on and helped me take some steps to deal with it. I’ll just come out and say that therapy was a big help during that time, too. (It can be pretty awesome, y’all; don’t skip it if you need a little guidance!)
At present, I’m a pretty different person than I was when I first started MUSHing. I’m still an actor, but I now have military, school, relationship, work experience, and an autism diagnosis that all shape how I play. I say I RP to escape the world’s BS and have a chance to be a hero in ways that I can’t in real life, but that doesn’t mean I’m averse to having bad things happen to my character for the sake of story. I don’t like bad things happening to my characters, but I do like the awesome stories I get to write with people that can come from those bad things happening, whether they’re physical or social. I also prefer that those things happen with plenty of communication involved. I don’t like being blindsided with bad stuff, and I prefer it not make up the majority of what I play. I really do love my friendships and romances and happy endings and such. But I don’t expect them to be handed to me, either.
I’m still also susceptible to bleed, but I can recognize it and do what I need to do to counter it. Sometimes I’m a little late in catching it and wind up apologizing profusely to anyone who ends up subjected to it, but I hope I’ve spared my scene partners pretty well thus far.
Anyway, that was kind of a ramble. Thanks for reading this far, if you did
I guess I’m just hoping that maybe someone who’s had similar experiences will see this and know they’re not alone! -
@Solastalgic said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
I’m still also susceptible to bleed, but I can recognize it and do what I need to do to counter it.
It took me a long time to realize that the positive emotional stuff I get from RP I enjoy is also bleed. Bleed, in my opinion, regardless of what form it takes, is only bad if you don’t have a healthy way to manage it and the expectations it can create in a person. From what I’ve seen doing RP in various forms for 30 years, too much ‘positive’ bleed can also lead to some negative behaviors (usually in the form of someone going to deep into Mary Sue / Gary Stu territory).
When I have bleed, I usually don’t try to just stop it or counter it, I usually ask myself, “How can I take this and use it to inform the direction of the story going forward?” and “How can my bleed help me strengthen my RP?”
I put a lot of stock in using improv techniques to mitigate bleed in the middle of scenes too. If I play with a “Yes, And” mentality, I usually don’t feel as much bleed as I would if I’m trying to control more of the scene other than my character’s responses to the fiction the others create.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@MisterBoring Improv is a fantastic tool for bleed management, I agree. Your point about positive emotional stuff also being bleed isn’t something I’d considered, but it makes total sense. The question of how to use it to strengthen my RP is something I’ll keep in mind, too.
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@MisterBoring said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
It took me a long time to realize that the positive emotional stuff I get from RP I enjoy is also bleed
I might not use the same wording, but you’re absolutely right to associate even positive emotional stuff as potentially dangerous just as much as the negative. We so often hear of, or even feel, connections that are assumed to be stronger than they actually are simply due to the positive impact someone’s RP/storytelling has had on us.
