Absolutely get a copy of the video, but remember that HR is there to protect the company, not you.

We recently had three female employees come forward about sexual harassment from a male coworker. They contacted HR and the union. HR told them they’d investigate. The union told them they’d investigate, but he was also a union employee, so they’d need to protect him too. He was told to stay away from them while it happened.

So of course the first thing he did was corner one of them by the copier and say “So I guess I’m sexually harassing you huh?”

In the end they didn’t interview any of the witnesses and decided it was just a real he-said, she-said and he had a VP backing him so it was fine. No sexual harassment actually happened.

He still works there. Other male employees have stepped up to ensure that when those women (and others) are in the office they act as a buffer, but every single one of them is looking for a new job right now and HR made it clear they don’t want these women causing any more problems.

Get the video and get a lawyer.

@bear_necessities I think it all comes down to staff working with players. What I commonly ran into was a conversation that went like this:

Me: I’d like to run something for this group. Is there a hook I can use? Or I could do X?
Staff: Eh. They will never succeed at X.
Me: Oh, okay. I think they’d have fun just trying even if they couldn’t actually succeed, but I can do something else. What about Y?
Staff: I’d rather you didn’t. We’re going to do something similar later.
Me: Okay, is there some hook you had for them that I could run with?
Staff: Yeah, but they’re not really that active.
Me: Right, I wanted to try to give them something to do to get them active.
Staff: I mean I guess so but I don’t really like anything you’ve pitched so far.
Me: Okay, could you maybe give me some idea of what you’d like to see?
Staff: never replies again

And then I never run a plot.

The Network was pretty open for people running just about anything (hahah I got my dynamite) and I REALLY liked how they’d have little mini sessions to teach anyone that wanted to how the combat/dice system worked so people COULD run things.

Even for games that have a Super Sekrit Metaplot I think that kind of thing can work, along with making sure to write like, PrP hooks for certain groups. This faction has a haunted mine, wanna run something? This group has no real reason to get involved with the metaplot BUT if they pull on a certain lamp in their library they’ll find an old book that will give them a hook to it, want to run with that?

etc.

It does take me a LONG time to want to run something on a game though, because I get very very nervous I will screw up the system or run something that’s not in theme. Having someone willing to teach you the ropes of the system and then an open staff who wants you to help add to the game really, really helps with that anxiety in my experience.

Anthony Stewart Head

@Pavel said in "My Guy Syndrome":

Yes, let us simply discount and ignore any experience that doesn’t fit within our own.

Yes, AND let us simply discount and ignore any experience that doesn’t fit within our own.

I’m a little confused by the specific situation and I think it’s not going to be entirely clear to people not on the game but: are we then defining PvP as just physical combat? Is social ‘combat’ not okay?

Because it seems like that’s what PP was doing (snark) and it seemed to all be IC (it was other people OOCly deciding MH was OOCly an asshole and messaging admins? Not entirely clear there). Like it seems from these examples that PP was pretty good at painting MH in a bad light ICly, which to me would be PvP on a social level (gossip, manipulation, just controlling the IC narrative that gets spun, etc.)

If the game is all just about PvP being physical combat (which it seems like so many are) and they don’t want the social aspect of PvP or see that as ‘bad’ why allow pacifist characters at all? And it sounds like PP was using the coded aspects of PvP (blocking the exit) as intended, but is that command only supposed to lead to physical combat where two people fight?

I guess I’m just not seeing where the OOC bleed was from the examples. If the snark was in the OOC communication or PP was saying to all their friends “MH is such an asshole not going with my plan IC” I can absolutely see that as being toxic for a game. But if PP is just being a snarky pacifist jerk IC, but OOCly is like “Oh it’s fine, go ahead and hit me I’m absolutely being a jerk IC” that seems ok?

But if the game is just not okay for pacifist characters and PvP is supposed to only be about punching each other, I think just a flat out ‘we won’t approve these characters’ would be worthwhile since they would appear to be at a real disadvantage.

The character and the other players usually make me stay. If I really love a character I’ll stick it out–probably longer than I should in some cases, especially if I made some good friends there. Even if the plots suck or the source material is questionable if I can find a group of people I like and can joke around with that usually makes it worthwhile.

Unlike a lot of people on here I don’t have a huge list of games I’ve been on. It’s not too shabby, but I never did WoD so I missed out on a lot of that. I was a play on one game at a time sort of person for a long time and then when I started branching out was probably when Ares took off and I tried out a couple of things outside my wheelhouse. Usually the game would close around me/be short lived before I ever left.

For the few times I wandered away it was probably just because I either couldn’t get into the groove of the theme or the character I picked.

Sometimes I REALLY like a game, but there’s only like two other people there to play with. And even if they’re great, which they often are, there’s just not enough to do.

These days I just do not have the time to do a deep dive into a complex theme. I have my kids’ schedules to keep straight and work deadlines and I just don’t have it in me to read lore files in depth and then I feel bad and then I just don’t play even if I like the character and the other people. So I look at some games’ sites and I think ‘wow that seems fun’ and then I remember I’m fucking old now and there’s a million RL things I should probably be doing instead.

These are both from Tenebrae back in the day:

Being in a dungeon crawl scene and having the warrior PC have a breakdown IC and OOC because “no one is searching for traps!” He ragequit and the next thing posted was a pose with a character saying, “I found a trap!”

It’s been like twenty years and the players I keep in touch with from there still reference it to this day.

The other was when my head of the thieves guild was in a territory dispute with another thieves guild that was trying to take over at the same time as the city was being raided by an outside force. I had some bad rolls and got captured and the Bad Thieves insisted that she lead them to the secret thieves guild lair in the city.

She lead them to the headquarters of the people invading the city instead and they slaughtered each other. The GM didn’t realize what I was doing until the very last second and then was like “goddamn. That was a good plan.”

Then there was one on Devilshire that I REALLY wish I had a log of, where my character interacted with a character whose mind was broken and scattered in time and he did the entire scene BACKWARDS (like started with “See you later!” and ended with “Hello!”) and I still don’t know how it worked but it was amazing and hilarious.

That time Wren and I cornered the market on Arx to make a dress with 1000 lace to model. It was so stupid but so fun. Also breaking the modeling code early on by rolling a crit during an Assembly of Peers with every high ranking noble including the king in the room. That was great. Sabella and Nik making a sketchy plan with Alessandro and Margaret just in case both marriages were nixed by their families to ensure they could still be together. Luckily all families went for both matches, but it otherwise would have been hilarious!

Oh, and helping to blow up a werewolf on the Network. The whole Redemption run was some of the most fun I’ve ever had on a game and I regret to this day @Clarion and I were never able to finish our scenes!

I said Other – I don’t mind bad stuff happening if there’s good story/plot behind it. Not ‘I, as a GM, think maiming your female PC in some way is cool plot development for these male PCs’

That’s not fun. That’s I don’t want to RP that and I think about retiring my character time.

@Warma-Sheen said in Empire Discussion Thread:

I cancelled a bunch of others cause having a bunch of actions open that we’re being addressed was really making me feel a kind of way.

This is the key bit of that log for me. It seems like this person was already being kind of passive aggressive and establishing a bad behavior pattern over waiting five days for a response from the lone staff member running the game. And it sounds like the other characters hadn’t even weighed in on the action yet for the staff member to even respond.

I don’t think log/no log was the real issue here.

I think when doing something like this you also need to be very aware that “historical prejudices” are still very real today and that mushes are still overwhelmingly white. So while it might be fun for one person to play being racially discriminated against in the old south, there are a whole lot of people who deal with that every day and might be going online to escape from that and not want to see that in their fun-pretendy-time game. Especially since there are definitely players out there drooling to put that white hood on and let the things they don’t dare say in real life to a person out online.

Like a social contract is great, but also is going to probably ensure that your player base is mostly white.

@bear_necessities I loved when The Network did their cowboy thing. It was so much fun!

God this thread just reminds me how ancient most of us are.

My first time RPing was a total accident. I used to watch the Disney Afternoon and at the end of a Gargoyles episode they were like “Come join us to chat at #gargoyles on IRC!” and i was like what is that?

We had a brand new tiny computer at home and I figured out how to get in (with Homer!) and joined and…there was no one there. Eventually someone came in and said “Hey no one is ever in here. Come into this place instead.”

‘this place’ was a RP room. I want to say like Red Dragon Inn but I think that’s wrong and I ended up in Gryphontavern for years and @Herja and I have a shared Infamous History with a Certain Someone who is like a legend of powergaming in the early online RP world.

Then I drifted away and one day a friend from there sent me an email and said hey, I’m playing on something called a MUX, you should come play!

And I made a truly horrifying stereotyped Irish character (as we all have done at least once) on Project Infinity.

I am still friends with people I met there like, 30 years later. WE ARE OLD.

I missed all of WoD though. Just had no idea it existed and then it just…it just sounded bad, guys. You all tell so many horror stories constantly, so I don’t feel like I missed out!

I always thought of vignettes and journals/blue books and things like that less like solo RP and more like RP hooks–you’re putting it out there hoping someone reads it and is like gee this person sounds cool or hey I have information on that I could help them with.

So I guess it is kind of like throwing a (long) pose out into an empty room and hoping that someone sees it when they come in and wants to pose back.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner. He was 54 and unconfirmed reports saying accidental drowning while he was in Costa Rica on vacation

Decades ago, Tenebrae put something in place where you would basically rate your plot before people signed up. I think it was like ‘Risk of Death’ ‘Risk of Maiming/Weapon Sundering’ and then just ‘No Risk.’

It worked for the most part. People who signed up for the risk of death scenes knew that it was possible their PCs could die and they were usually Big Plots where it was cool if they did. Did that stop some players from still being super mad about it when it happened? Nope. In a big Save the World scene I remember a staffer had a monster with an insta-death ray that would kill anyone with a bad fort save. So he made sure it targeted the PC in the scene with the best fort score and thus the best chance of nothing happening. Like I specifically remember the conversation on the staff channel where a bunch of us weighed in on who it should target because while it was high stakes we didn’t really want to kill anyone.

The PC then rolled a 1 and accused the staffer of doing it on purpose and declared the whole scene had been set up just so they would die and it was a whole thing.

@bear_necessities I always felt like there should be a way for players to indicate to staff if they wanted to be involved in things or not but I have no real ideas on how to implement it. Like you could do metaplot y/n because there’s always people who are dying to get in on things, then you have people that are just there to do social scenes and never want to know there’s a dark god hanging out at the bookstore, etc.

I am that person that loves to pull people into things, though. Did you take a point of map making on your sheet for a lark? Boom, now there is a plot where you have to read a MAP and SAVE THE DAY.

Though I can see how if you made your map making pc just to romance your friend the explorer, you might be annoyed if the Gnome King interrupts your date to make you go get a group together to save the Kingdom of Butterbright.

Honestly the world is on fire so much lately that I want something not so depressing when I try to disconnect from the news so I stay away from grimdark and horror, but pretty much would be looking for a game where the PCs would get to be heroes. Which is not to say they win all the time hooray, but more like a place where the PCs could work towards the greater good without getting smacked down for trying.

I’d be down for a good supernatural cowboy game. Where you can shoot a werewolf or a ghost or something and then go to a rodeo or watch a bar fist fight. Something fun!

@Ominous It still seems like you’re setting it up so that people are going to mob staff NPCs and that’s going to put what sounds like burnout pressure on them. And then there’s favoritism and times people can’t get on to meet up with a staff NPC and and and…

But as @KarmaBum always says: what are people going to RP? Because it sounds like everyone is just going to be fighting for I Talk To The NPC tonight. And that’s going to get really old really fast if you have more than like 5 people playing. Will there be bonuses for people who just chat/fight during the down times ala the Bachelor/ette? Or does this sort of thing favor the person who only logs on for events, gets the NPCs ear, then logs off so nothing can stick to them?

Like this seems great for a small group of friend running a sandbox, but looks like it will fall apart the minute you get more than 10 people.

Just don’t ever have the Royal Heir played by anyone. No one has ever seen them. They’re off fighting a war/building treaties with other people/etc. And while they’re gone, their family has just decided to get them married.

Then they appear at the final event to select the person by…points, cards, gossip, whatever.

@KarmaBum It’s funny that you bring up the Network because when you mentioned a cowboy game earlier I was like damn the most fun I had in YEARS was when the Network did their cowboy season, I too would like a wild west game!