Getting past inertia/nerves and just reaching out to ask people if they want to RP

The notion that a romantic partner to my character should be the person I spend the most time RPing with - 70% of it, apparently.

unsurprisingly my character is no longer in a relationship

@Istus

Talk openly about the atmosphere you want to create, give examples of behavior you don’t want to see. When people are acting shitty casually, don’t let it slide in the moment - call it out. “We don’t do that here” is a good phrase. Don’t wait for people to report things to remove someone, if you’re seeing red flags. As a game runner you’re insulated from some of the shitty behavior, but it can still come out - in high stakes GM’d scenes, for example, or in how people try to play your systems to get an advantage over others. Use those moments to demonstrate your own patterns of behavior to your players.

@Prototart

Are you trying to victim-blame or was that just an accidental target of your vitriol there?

Like, I know I’m on the mild side here for critique of vaspider. If you’re trying to say “if you read all our discussion of vaspider and still think they’re not a shitty person that’s on you”, that’s one thing, but “anyone who falls for it” can be a bigger pool than just people who read a gossip forum for a niche hobby. To someone who is manipulative and seeking to take advantage of others in a consistent fashion, their strategy by nature is usually to seek out people who don’t know them or their reputation, once they’ve burned their bridges elsewhere.

I think on an OOC level, I appreciate the cathartic negative emotions in bursts, but there needs to be a buffer between them to help me be able to stay engaged. In long-term RP, especially group RP, I’m more likely to accept something that errs on the side of the lighthearted than on the dark and emotional, because aiming for sad RP can turn into an absolute arms race,

Someone connected to my broad RP circle went through a real spiral around trying to evoke emotions in the players around them, and it ultimately ended up burning out them and their rp partners until they quit. First their character was suffering from a family illness. Then the illness was actually a poison used by their secret half-sibling, then the secret half-sibling killed them. Then it turned out that their half-sibling was being used as a pawn by their traitorous uncle… and so on, and so on. When they finally quit it was with a post about their character having gone dramatically missing, presumed dead.

Every time a new plot thread developed in this whole thing people would start drawing back, because it became more and more apparent that the player was using these plots to try and get a sympathetic response from people, and was pushing harder each time to try and get more. If there hadn’t been that constant push, if there was some more time to breathe between each plot, maybe it would have been better recieved. As it was, once they were gone, people felt it easier to retcon that character out entirely, just because they didn’t want to RP about the grief that their characters would ICly be going through, because of the OOC burnout.

Really fighting the insecure brainworms the past few weeks and I am. Just tired and feeling bad. My brain keeps looking right past the established, meaningful, and fun IC connections I have with chill people I like to rp with to poke at the ones that just haven’t quite worked out and insist that it’s THOSE ones, those are the ones that count.

@tsar we didn’t get to that point in the discussion, but they were kind enough to clarify that they only meant my RP time, not my time in general.

@Serafine

“I’m out.”

“And one more thing…!”

@Polk

You know what would have stopped you from having to put up with this thread? Instead of confirming with someone “four times” that they wanted you gone, and then taking it to the public channels five minutes before you turned things off.

Saying “I’m hurt. If you want me gone, fine - I don’t want to be involved a second longer than I have to be, so confirm with your new team what you need from me if anything, otherwise I’ll do x to disentangle myself by y date.”

Or just stepping away from the computer for those five minutes, instead of kicking the game over.

This one isn’t actually MU-sourced, to spare people the need to wonder what game is having drama, but it’s baffling enough to need to share, so.

If you have a problem with a person on game staff, messaging them to say “so when are you going to be demoted?” Verbatim. Is not actually going to fix that problem.

@Juniper

I’m sorry to say that this is just human behavior and can happen anywhere. There might be features of oWoD games that can make it easier for the perpetrators to get plausible deniability or excuse their hostility with IC factionalism, but creating an in group and an enemy happens because some people simply do not know how to operate without one.

@Gashlycrumb

This is part of why I prefer no dice for my personal rp, because I fine the conversational interplay fun! But if I have to use social dice for RP, my personal preferred order of operations is

1. OOC note of a social roll being needed and some discussion of what they’re attempting
2. Base roll
3. Socially savvy characters can use a buff to bump up their number
4. RP out the results. If it’s a failure, the player gets to decide how they fail. Maybe they offhandedly mention ties to someone the other character/npc hates, maybe they talked a bit too long when the other character prefers brevity, maybe they leaned a bit too hard on Intimidation and figured they could back it up when they couldn’t. That way you avoid the thing of “player makes speech but dice say no” thing, or the failure becoming out of character.

Then again I’m one of those people who enjoys playing out failure because I think how and why a character fails and how they react to it is absolutely fascinating

I think staff should be fine to have characters in any game, even a plotting one. I think on a practical level it’s not a good idea for the staff character to be taking the lead in a story plot they’re running, if only because in my experience it’s really hard to both GM and actually meaningfully pilot a PC! I’m sure it can be done, but I think it’s hard to do well. ime it’s much more likely for it to be ‘and staffpc was also there in the background’ than ‘this was actually the staffpc show’ but I am not surprised by the existence of the second.

In the hands of a conscientious gamerunner, i think a staff PC is another tool to help build game wide engagement. I think there’s a lot of little things those characters could do to encourage plot involvement that are hard to do with NPCs. A staff PC can “just run into” someone to organically bring them into a plot in a way that more formal NPC involvement could make favoritism, for example. “Passing along” IC gossip from other PCs is honestly a really important function in games so having a character on the ground to do that now and then is probably nice. Though I’m thinking of smaller games where it makes sense for everyone in it to be able to talk to each other.

Every few years there’s an absolute panic over a social media or art site’s ToS using legal wording to describe letting users host and reshare their content using the site’s built in reblog/retweet/whatever mechanics. The legalese is almost always being misinterpreted to be scarier than it is

@Jennkryst said in MU Peeves Thread:

Untrue! I disprove the very concept by usually playing them with conventionally adorkable women with fairly un-boob’d bodies.

She’s not like other girls!

@Snackness

This is a double edged sword when your plot runner starts taking your joke NPC name suggestions seriously and you end up with a villain whose name is ‘Stephyn with a y because the y makes it fantasy’

@RightMeow

My usual strategy at that point is to look at whatever info is available on their character, brainstorm 2-3 locations our characters could conceivably overlap, and offer all of them as suggestions.

Then once we’ve picked a spot and the scene starts, it’s just a matter of picking something that brings the characters into contact ASAP. Either that’s posting a starter the other person can directly respond to, or responding to their starter in a way that gives them something to work on. A scene can still be shaped a couple poses in - you’ve almost always got more time to figure out what you’re doing than the 30 seconds before you have to answer that question in your scenario. You’ve just got to break it down into smaller steps.

I don’t mind the dance of setting up RP, because in the same way I like to tailor my suggestions for location and event to the person who’s responding, mostly because I prefer smaller scenes to setting up an open thing in a location. The thing that does bother me is when people respond to an ask for rp in a way that doesn’t make clear whether they’re actually volunteering for RP in the moment or not. I have mixed feelings about a response that’s “I’m busy now but maybe some other day,” but it’s at least a clear response.

I’m not the target audience for episodic games because when I get into an RP and a character properly, I tend to want to keep going with them for a couple years, and while I might take breaks, I don’t tend to get turned off by game or character plots continuing around me.

I think full stop breaks might work best when you know you’ve got a dedicated group who will be able to consistently follow the scheduled active and hiatus periods. For a broader population, being able to continue the momentum if they’re feeling it is probably pretty valuable, and might make the transition into a new setting easier if they’re building hype through the shared social activity, even if they won’t be carrying over the character or setting.

@Meg

Agreeing with this - considering the point that was being made earlier about this being unique as a way of handling this kind of ooc story, it doesn’t follow that such a particular solution wasn’t going to need any retcons. Maybe they don’t need to write a baby out of existence- fine. But it changes pretty strongly how I as a player would think of and interact with the setting. It’s pretty niche fantasy territory to go with this as your ooc population control mechanism, and not everyone who’s cool with playing in a fantasy lords and ladies with magic scenario may want to play in a ‘hey humanity is Different in this one unspecified way that could or could not have major effects that would shape this world’s culture.’

Like I said if this is the kind of story they want to explore, more power to them, but the rippling effects of this kind of decision on theme and culture feel like something it’d be good to have baked in to the initial idea.

I think Concordia mods have talked about not expecting to get as much hype as they did (wrt using chatgpt to make some of their theme files) so I’m guessing this decision is related to that - they’re figuring out something that accounts for it in retrospect. Which isn’t a bad idea in itself, it’s just one of the odder choices they could have gone with to justify oocly asking people to hold off on family building.