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.

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”.

@Roz not to mention the disruption to my eyes from rolling so hard at the inevitable max cringe attempts of returning players to struggle-bus their old characters through amnesia.

Oh no my what about my hog pit nostalgia

@MisterBoring Silent Heaven already exists

ETA: joke

@bear_necessities said in Does Anyone Even Care?:

What’s stopping you from being a stay to the end person? Or, alternatively, what makes/made you a stay to the end person?

I am a “stay until it stops being fun person”.

When the something-other-than-fun to fun ratio tips to a certain amount, I leave.

There are a million factors involved in that, and honestly a game runner couldn’t hope to manage them all. I don’t expect them to try.

Just run a good game, try to keep it as interesting as you can, and if you need help, find smart people of proven skill to help you keep the players engaged. Have a clearly defined code of conduct for your game and be fair, public and predictable in how you enforce it.

Beyond that, there’s not much you can do. Of the games I’ve left, few were because I didn’t like how the game was run or the community. I lose interest in playing my own character and that’s mostly on me and my willingness and/or availability to breathe life into an idea that is only entertaining and not otherwise contributive to my existence on this planet.

@Roz said in Scenes within Scenes:

@Roadspike said in Scenes within Scenes:

I think that -in general- places code is trying to police a social problem (players having their characters react to things their characters shouldn’t be able to hear) with a code solution (making it so players can’t hear some of what’s said). And I’m generally not in favor of that.

that reasoning has honestly never occurred to me. for me, places/tt has always been about making large scenes more manageable by reducing the overall spam levels.

That reasoning has definitely occurred to me and is fully legitimate as a reasoning because - well - not everyone can control themselves when there’s tea / a great pun opportunity / or a fantastic ‘that’s what she said!’ just hanging there for the taking.

But the real purpose of table talk is to isolate the inane peanut gallery chatter from the actual important shit going on.

And also to make mostly one-way scenes (such as sermons, lectures, ceremonies, giant meetings and concerts) less boring.

You have to walk them through the absurdity of their actions, framing each rung of their decision ladder in the most ridiculous way possible, as a “just double checking…” that’s what their character would actually do.

Server Message of the Day: We will probably be taking down the sandbox soon, to start the conversion of server hosting towards Arx 2 as it goes into alpha testing.

<.<

Bob Weir

My approach as a player has been to try and consider myself a guest in the house of the Head Wiz and be respectful of the staff and try not pester them beyond a gentle, occasional, nudge if warranted.

If I’m doing that and shit there sucks anyway, I feel confident it’s not my fault and I leave.

You will be miserable trying to demand attention from people who either can’t, or don’t want to, give it to you - and you will make them miserable in the process.

@Roadspike said in Scenes within Scenes:

If there’s “important shit” going on that the peanut gallery can’t interrupt? Don’t have the peanut gallery at the scene. Have them in their own side-scene, either happening at the same time as the “important shit” scene that they can watch freely, or RPed after the "important shit* scene but ICly taking place at the same time.

I can’t think of anything more annoying than reading a scene in one window and then flicking to another window to react to it in a separate scene. I also don’t see how this isn’t a “coded solution” to a social problem.

Plus, not everyone uses the web portal, so this two-scenes at once isn’t a great solution.

We just want to react to a scene in real-time. The way we might do - you know - if we were at a real event, sitting at our own group table in a real event setting?

Yeah - it takes some code to make that happen. It’s more realistic. A lot more realistic and less of a pain than trying to schedule a whole other scene where we have to read the log from the first scene and then react to the log while pretending we’re there. And it cuts down on a lot of spam for others who wouldn’t ICly be interested or able to hear what’s going on.

If it’s a one-way scene that again, can’t be interrupted? Don’t make it a scene! I’m sure we’ve all been in plenty of scenes where we thought, “This didn’t need to be a scene, it could’ve been a post/vignette/scene-set.” So don’t make them scenes. Have the GM post up their too-important-to-be-interrupted scene as a Vignette, and then have the actual scene be everyone’s reaction to it afterwards. You know, when people can actually interact with each other without interrupting.

99% of what is being talked about are player-run parties, ceremonies, sermons, etc. Not GM-run scenes or plot-important settings. Just RP events where the entire point is for people to gather.

One stand-out example were these dinners someone on Arx would put on that were blind-folded dinner dates with strangers. There would be hostess emits of the waiters, etc. and what was going on in the environment, and then with some exceptions we would primarily tabletalk with the blind dates we were paired up with.

Your solution for such an event would be a vignette written by the hostess, who would have to private message every attendee who they are supposed to sit with, and then like 10 individually scheduled one-on-one scenes tying into that. Sounds really exhausting.

@helvetica Kind of beside the point because the gripe is lying OOC to obtain consent where it would not have otherwise been given.