howyadoin

Yeah.

Let’s not lie OOC in order to convince people to fuck us IC.

Okay?

@Kestrel Yes! A list of similarly immersion breaking peeves! Like when characters act extremely blasé about the setting no matter how horrific/creepy/suspenseful…nothing affects them ever. They’ve “seen it all”!

Yeah if the intended message was “people who OOCly wrongfun players for following the literal theme and are a tax on staff with their complaints about how the murder guild murders people and won’t reform” that makes way more sense.

But if you’re a mousey accountant for the murder guild and all you do is launder money and you don’t want to be murdering people but the cops come and don’t have enough fun shooting you in the face because you just lay down and die, I don’t see a problem.

Alright alright alright.

I just didn’t want this to turn into a discussion about policy when it’s not a matter of the policy involved but of obtaining consent under false pretenses.

There is a prohibition on relationship roleplay with characters that have been in the game for less than two weeks. The rule applies even to returning players playing a new character.

“Pat” violated this policy multiple times. Fine. But in at least two of those times, “Pat” also provably lied about how long their character had been in game (when directly asked by the other players involved) in order to obtain their consent. In both, “Pat” significantly exaggerated their character’s time in the game.

“Pat” knew the rule. A character’s creation date as well as their number of days in the game are spelled out on their sheet, which “Pat” knows. It wasn’t a matter of forgetfulness or plain uncertainty.

“Pat” was caught and removed from the game.

@Shygaming said:

The middle ground where it is technically possible but only if the victim OOCly opts into it turns it into CNC fetish play almost by definition. At that point the “evil rapist” isn’t actually imposing something horrible on another character. The two players have negotiated a rape fantasy together.

Point not exactly made. It just turns it into a collaborative story effort.

I have RPed several things things that I have no fantasies for or inclination toward. OOC consent doesn’t usually mean “wants that” it just means “is willing to experience reading / writing about that”.

The obvious question is why would you WANT to RP an SA scene, or inflict an IC SA scenario, on another player who would not opt in?

You say an OOC opt-in is ‘negotiating a rape fantasy’. Ok… So what do we call deliberately imposing SA on a player who didn’t agree to it?

And I’ve seen that dynamic poison games before. I genuinely cannot count how many times I’ve seen some supposedly awful villain doing horrific things to another character while everyone involved OOC is having a wonderful time and the “victim” is actively helping arrange it. It stops functioning as an unpleasant consequence of living in a horrible setting and starts functioning as content being provided for people who want that content.

It starts functioning as a … game? Entertainment. Holy shit. How awful! Literally putting the ‘G’ in RPG.

That also doesn’t mean someone has to sit there and explicitly RP an assault they don’t want to write. Fade to black exists.

But they can’t retcon it or act like it never happened moving forward, I’m guessing? How exactly are you going to police that?

Player A decides their character SA Player B’s character. Player B doesn’t consent OOC and fades the scene. Afterward, Player B decides to simply declines to acknowledge it moving forward. Now what?

Is staff going to come in and force the SA as canonical and compel Player B to incorporate it into their RP or get a ban?

I completely understand the argument for banning SA outright. I think that is a coherent policy. I also understand allowing it as part of a setting where players know what they are signing up for.

I just think “SA is allowed but only when everyone involved wants SA RP” produces something very different from either of those things.

Yeah. It produces consensual collaborative story telling about non-consensual fictional events. Which is how we handle a large amount of RP already.

I think we’re just looking for different things from RP. I don’t want wish fulfillment where everyone gets the scenes and outcomes they were hoping for. I want uncertainty, conflict and consequences. That lack of control is part of what makes the story feel real to me. This is probably not something I’m going to change anyone’s mind on. I think we’re starting from fundamentally different ideas of what RP should be.

Consenting to RP about subjects and scenarios doesn’t mean you get the scenes and outcomes you hope for. It just means you get players who want to play that aspect of the game. The rest will either just not play the game, or will FTB and then ignore it ever happened and won’t talk about it on screen, or will subsequently quit the game and disappear randomly from the grid in a most “unreal” fashion.

“Lack of control making the story feel real” doesn’t exist in what you are arguing for. People who don’t want to RP that scenario are just going to FTB. In which case, there is no story produced for you to “feel real” at all.

Just because you didn’t acquire OOC consent, doesn’t mean you don’t need OOC consent. You can’t ever force the person on the other end of the line to type a single pose or even a “fuck you”. The more I think about it, the more it seems this conversation is pointless. You can’t get the content you want without consent whether that’s clearly stated or implied by the fact that it’s being RPed at all.

So if the fact is that it’s only the people who do consent OOC that will stick around to RP it in any form, why not just save a ton of headaches by identifying them up front?

So I’ve been keeping an eye on the GitHub for a bit and was >this< close to opening a thread yesterday about Arx seeming a way out but coming along pretty neat! Very interested to see what you’ve got cooked up.

@Nelly said:

Particularly, I’ve been struggling with how my character is supposed to react to this blasé character in question. Another difficult topic are the characters who have quippy one-liners or otherwise unserious comments in serious scenes. Big scary dragon that’s wiped out three kingdoms is now approaching its fourth along with all its brood of whelps, and a character just blurts out how they want to adopt one as they’re rampaging through the farmlands.

Yeah this gets me most when it is their entire contribution to the scene.

Who doesn’t love a great mid-action, or mid-horror, quip when it integrates well and is incorporated into an overall fitting reaction?

The stand alone quipster though who is otherwise completely unaffected by what’s going down? Big peeve as a player, but even bigger peeve if I’m the ST.

@Faraday Not really, because PP didn’t HAVE TO get beaten up in the danger pit.

On SH, you can collab offscreen resolution.

Here, PP manipulated MH into an onscreen solution that was theme appropriate for MH, and theme-bendy for PP, that MH wanted to avoid actually. This was not satisfying to MH. (Fine - who cares. I agree this is whatever).

But now PP takes this as some opt-in to a long term, unresolvable grudge which MH actually tried to avoid, that PP uses to shit on anything further MH wants to do that is theme appropriate.

This essentially preys on the OOC empathies of other players which now come into play and start diluting the theme - requiring staff to come in and constantly assure the community that MH is acting in accordance with the theme of Faction X, so please stop DMing each other on discord about what an asshole he is and please stop messaging powerful NPCs to get rid of him.

What were some memorable scenes you’ve had over the years? Silly, emotional, outrageously boring, frustrating beyond all reason - I dunno. All of it and more!

Give a little synopsis of what went down and then say a few words about what made it memorable for you.

@Yam said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

What about you? What pace do you like and why?

Nothing beats live RP momentum and immediate character reaction.

I struggle with the yo-yo effect of Async and ultimately find I can’t get back into the scene mentally. It takes the spontaneous nature of RP out of the equation and I feel like that spontaneity is part and parcel in what makes RP special for me.

Also, acting “as” the character is important for me in RP. I can’t do that with async where I’m the character for a pose a day, or whatever the pacing is.

And maybe that’s the actual distinction: I RP to “act”, not to “write”.