@Wizz said in Non-toxic PvP:

it’s just someone who comes into every scene until the end of time and makes it about this and will never shut the fuck up about it or move on because their OOC ego was hurt that everyone didn’t choose their solution instead.

Sure, that sounds annoying. See also: why I don’t think that PVP with rando strangers is a good idea.

My point is simply that you could get that same outcome EVEN IF both PCs pummeled each other in open conflict. It has nothing to do with one of them being a pacifist. That’s why I think a zero-tolerance policy to pacifist characters is kind of silly. But if someone wants to do it on their game, obviously that’s their prerogative.

@howyadoin said in Non-toxic PvP:

On SH, you can collab offscreen resolution.

I have no idea what game SH is. I thought we were speaking in generalities. There are certainly places where offscreen resolution isn’t always an option.

@Kestrel said in Non-toxic PvP:

But actually, they are both engaging in PvP. PP is using social tools, MH physical ones.

Oh absolutely. They were both in direct conflict over what should happen with the mcguffin.

@Kestrel said in Non-toxic PvP:

And if he’s giving signals of, “I don’t really want to fight you, however I will have to per my role if you keep trying to sneak past the barrier” that is an attempt at conflict deescalation; ignoring it, and then socially persecuting him afterwards, is the same type of unsolicited ahole behaviour as trying to start a fight with a low xp cafe worker.

I don’t agree. Imagine if PP did fight back, and then lost. I don’t think people would be judging them for then acting pissy (ICly) with MH afterward. There was a conflict and now there’s some IC bad blood. All seems completely expected to me.

I can imagine this exact scenario played out with me and a buddy and it would all be completely fine if we just kept it IC. My PC beat up theirs at the danger pit, then theirs badmouths mine about how things went down, then mine concocts some way to get back at them, etc. etc. Maybe they end up mortal enemies, maybe they find some common ground, who knows. The IC drama itself isn’t the problem, which is why I have a hard time faulting PP in this situation.

@howyadoin said in Non-toxic PvP:

Okay I think -this- is the actual crux of the issue, then, and I agree it is very not okay.

Why? Isn’t it entirely appropriate that PP would be grumbling (again, ICly) about getting beaten up at the danger pit when all they wanted to do was find a better solution for the mcguffin? Isn’t it an entirely legitimate beef that they have with MH over a clash of IC goals?

It’s being portrayed like MH was somehow baited into something that is now being used agains them, but MH didn’t need to fight PP in the first place. There were a zillion other ways that conflict could have gone. All I see here is MH getting bent out of shape because it didn’t go the way they wanted.

This whole thing, by the way, is emblematic of why I don’t think PVP can ever be done in a constructive way among strangers on the internet. We can’t even agree on what’s appropriate behavior in a purely hypothetical scenario where nobody has any actual skin in the game.

@Jumpscare I mean, maybe we come from different gameplay styles or something, but as a storyteller I wouldn’t have any problem with that. It sounds like PP had raised objections to the plan originally, was clear about their goals and intentions, and presented an obstacle that MH had to overcome. Seems like a fine story to me.

That’s assuming the flak MH is getting is IC and not OOC. Like it’s fine for PP to ICly grumble about getting beaten up at the danger pit, but they can’t OOCly go around trashing MH’s player for playing in-theme.

All you’ve described is just two players having different ideas of what is “fun” for them. Staff is certainly within their rights to say “no” to the PP type of character, but IF they are approved, it seems like fair drama.

@Kestrel said in Non-toxic PvP:

Expecting people to uphold the theme they signed up for isn’t wrongfun, IMO.

To a point, I agree, but defining that line can be tricky. Like I agree that wrongfunning the cutthroat thief is wrong, but so is wrongfunning the thief who just got pressured into it by their friends and is actually conflicted about it. BOTH are playing within the theme, they’re just playing differently.

If staff doesn’t want a conflicted thief because it isn’t in line with their vision of the theme, they shouldn’t approve that character in the first place. Similarly if they’re worried about the hard edge of the Thieves Guild being diluted by too many “exceptions”, they can control that too.

@Juniper I dunno, that sounds like wrongfunning someone for playing the game differently. Pacifists literally do exist, and a pacifist trapped in a high-conflict faction could be an interesting character concept if done well.

Of course there should be IC consequences. Beyond the immediate butt-kicking, maybe they get in trouble, get kicked out of the faction, etc. But if there’s a reason for it, who cares? It’s still a story. I can’t see how the opposing character is harmed just because the scene didn’t go the way they wanted.

Now there’s certainly a line where what you describe can become trolling. If they are violating established rules on the game (like if it says you MUST fight) or if staff have told them they can’t play a pacifist - that’s different. But a blanket prohibition against pacifist chars seems weird to me.

@MisterBoring said in Non-toxic PvP:

After every session of the LARP, we would all gather in the main room we were using for the LARP and break out ice creams of various flavors and an assortment of toppings. We would sit around eating ice cream and discussing stuff that gave us bleed, making sure to point out positive instances and negative.

I think that’s great, but also an example of what I mean about systems not being scalable. Ice cream socials, debriefs, etc. work great for managing bleed with small groups of friends and/or modestly sized LARP groups. I think it would be virtually impossible to do that for a mid-sized MU with players scattered across a dozen different schedules and timezones.

@MisterBoring said in Non-toxic PvP:

For me, I’ve seen fully cerebral Jesper Lynd / James Bond style conflicts go rather well even in a fully transparent situation.

Same. It’s valid to want that kind of immersive experience where you don’t know any more than your character, but it’s still possible to tell a compelling story when everybody has all their cards on the table. After all, that’s what the writers of the original Lynd/Bond storyline did. The writers, the actors, the directors, etc. were all operating with full transparency.

I think that the more immersed you are with your character, the more likely there is to be bleed and OOC competitiveness. Transparency and communication can help combat that, but they’re not a magic cure-all.

@Kestrel said in Non-toxic PvP:

To be honest, I think that even games which claim not to be PvP or CvC games tend to have elements of PvP that people don’t like to think about, which means they should always also be accounting for these same issues. You can never fully prevent them, because of what @Faraday says here.

Oh absolutely. My last several games were all PvE, but there absolutely were players competing directly. Whether it was who was atop the NPC “kill” leaderboard, or who got the medal/promotion, or who got the guy/girl, or whatever. You can’t escape human nature, you can only manage it.

@KDraygo said in Non-toxic PvP:

Character vs Character is a much more accurate designation to use in my opinion.

I personally like the CvC designation, but I think it’s wallpapering over the fact that for a lot of people, it really IS the PvP that attracts them. They view the game like a game of chess, or a game of tennis or whatever, where it really is about “winners” and losers, being “the best”, etc. The fact that it’s another player involved is what elevates the stakes/conflict to a level they don’t get when it’s player characters versus non-player characters (which really when you think about it is also literally CvC).

You can call it what you want, but it’s not going to change their fundamental outlook, and that outlook is what causes a lot of drama on PvP games. (The other large chunk of drama is poor bleed management, and I really don’t know how you address that with a big group of internet strangers.)

I genuinely don’t think it’s possible to do healthy PVP en masse in a game of strangers on the internet. Among friends? Sure. One of my favorite TTRPGs was a cutthroat game of Amber diceless where everyone was plotting against each other. With the right people in isolation? Absolutely. There are MU players I would trust with an antagonistic IC relationship. It just doesn’t scale.

But to attempt to constructively answer your question - if I were going to try it, I would do:

• OOC transparency to foster trust
• Strict enforcement action against poor sportsmanship
• Make conflict more give-and-take so it doesn’t feel like a zero-sum game (like in comics - Batman can win the day, but Joker doesn’t die; that lets the conflict go on)

@Ashkuri said in When is the last time you played?:

What would you want to play, if those conditions were achieved?

Oh, I don’t know. My MU tastes have always been pretty narrow. That’s why I tend to run my own games

@Ashkuri said in When is the last time you played?:

For those who haven’t RP’d in several years, what keeps you checking in/weighing in on the forum? I’m referring here to the forum parts specifically about MUSHing and RP

The possibly vain hope that someday life will settle down enough that I actually have the time and spoons to play again.

I also stay involved in things because of Ares, though I don’t think that really counts as “playing” per se.

@KDraygo said in Scenes within Scenes:

On table and place posing, I know that it would probably make it harder on Ares in terms of posting the log. Maybe a table doesn’t want their part of the log posted, but I believe in Ares, everything is posted. Which is why it has a pseudo place code where it’s just normal posing, with a header of where that person is situated in the code.

Ares doesn’t suppress table talk. It just identifies which poses are happening in which places. It would be difficult to suppress table talk on the web portal because you could potentially be controlling multiple alts and/or NPCs simultaneously from the same window. Also Ares’ scene system fundamentally doesn’t modify / customize the pose output per player. Anyone subscribed to the scene sees the same thing. You’d have to make significant structural changes to the scene system to support old-school table talk. And since I hate it, I have no intention of ever doing so.

@Pavel said in Scenes within Scenes:

Because one can interact with people outside of their little group, should they choose.

Theoretically I guess, but in my experience this almost never happens. (see the comments above regarding interruptions, being yelled at for spam, etc.)

The only poses I ever saw going to the main room were the static announcements or the “oops I forgot to use tt command” nonsense.

But to each their own.

@Pyrephox said in Scenes within Scenes:

But I want to have a sense of being able to RP with a smaller group WITHIN that space without having to always worry about missing poses or spamming the greater room (since a small conversation is likely to go faster than the larger scene).

But if you’re not interacting with anyone outside of your little group, and you don’t want to spam other people or be spammed in return, why does the room actually matter? What is the tangible advantage of keeping everyone jammed together rather than in separate rooms / separate scenes?

You can do the same big “announcement” emits to multiple rooms in a variety of ways to keep a shared context. It doesn’t even require any special code or tools, just some coordination among a few staff alts / NPCs.

@Pyrephox said in Scenes within Scenes:

Hate Ares places system because it doesn’t fix the main thing I want from tabletalk - reducing the number of poses I see that I don’t need to react to and making it easier for me to keep up with the poses my character is focusing on.

Yeah I think a places system needs to consider several different concerns:

• Overwhelm from sheer volume of spam
• Knowing what your character reasonably hear / react to (even setting aside the “cheating” aspect someone mentioned above, there’s still a mental load of figuring out whether something is noticeable)
• Organization of what’s happening where
• Sharing in the overall story together (e.g., log completeness and not feeling isolated from one another in separate rooms)
• Complexities of the posing interface

When I was designing Ares’ places system, I concluded there’s just no way to do ALL of these things at once. You have to pick and choose priorities. For example, traditional table talk emphasizes the first few and compromises the last few. Ares’ system is the opposite.

Since everyone has different things that are most important to them, they’re going to prefer different systems.

@bear_necessities said in Scenes within Scenes:

In Ares, I really find places to be distracting and I haven’t seen it used in any meaningful way.

I don’t really like them much either, but I absolutely hated the old-school places systems so… meh.

@Ashkuri Ares has built-in places feature that simply identifies chat happening in different places. It doesn’t mess up the log because nothing is hidden from anyone.

@bear_necessities I think it’s more just a clash of expectations.

Some people see async as merely a “last resort” when you can’t sync up to play live, but still expect a degree of responsiveness to get the scene done. For example, even back when folks were doing async with LiveJournal or Google Docs, it could be considered rude to let a pose go three days without a response. At that point, it’s not really about syncing up timezones and can start to feel more like the other player just doesn’t care enough to reply, isn’t engaged in the scene, etc. (Or they, aka me, just have ADHD and forgot the scene exists. )

Other people (including those who are influenced by other, slower RP modalities like forum RP, storium, etc.) might not even think twice about going days between poses.

@Roz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

oftentimes it really just literally is “my brain cannot keep engaged in this format.”

Yeah that’s me. I’m not judgmental about async. I just don’t enjoy it as much. It’s just hard for me to stay engaged and keep track of things.