I outlived my hospice diagnosis.

So… I really thought all of this shit was just done and over with. It’s been a month, and there’s been a lot of RL happening since, and plenty of other games. Once someone decided that me trying to say that @inuki didn’t deserve to be threatened was me beating a dead horse… I closed this thread and didn’t look back.

But that’s before I woke up to three different DM’s in my Discord about Sophia, asking if I was back. Apparently, a month after being banned, and a month after having been moved to the ‘dead’ part of characters with a note that was just awful…

Sophia lives again? At least long enough to have had her password changed so that scenes set private - and only to her - could be shared game-wide. WTF? How petty can shit get? @inuki - Any ACTUAL answers this time? I kind of thought you’d sunk as low as people can, and had found the hard rock bottom for game staff. But I guess you continue to surprise me!

Deals with very heavy physical health issues, please avoid is such topics are triggering for you.

Spoiler

@Warma-Sheen said in Neitherlands:

You coming back to take more digs at @inuki kind of makes it seem like you’re just trying to bait her. She very obviously made a conscious decision not to do the thing you say you think she’s going to do, but you showed up to insinuate she’s gonna do it anyway while calling her a horrible person for it.

I mean. You’re going to read things however you wish, and it’s clear how you wish to read these comments. But I am pretty certain that this is not me coming back to take digs. It was a month ago she banned me. I have not looked back. But when old friends page me on Discord to ask if I’m back behind Sophia’s keys? Yeah. I pulled the game site up Saturday to see wtf they meant. “Coming back to take digs” is when someone logs into someone else’s account, reads through their personal shit, and then posts scenes that had nothing to do with them.

So I came by to ask if there was a reason for that. She’s clearly been by here since then, but there are no reasons for that. It’s not a dig at someone to point out that someone else is snooping through their things with massive abuses and violations of staff powers.

I know she is an easy target which is why the thread has gone the way it is, but you’re just being a bully.

Like I said. You’re clearly reading things how you want them to read, not from any factual stand-point. Pointing out what she does or doesn’t choose to do is not being a bully. It’s informing others on the playground that there’s someone near the swings trying to steal lunch money. It’s a suggestion that folks maybe stay out of the lines of that theft by playing on the jungle gym instead. This was dead, over, and far past done. I was not the one who decided two days ago that it should be opened back up again.

Not to mentioned the part where you started telling other people that she was forcing your character to be sexually assaulted, which wasn’t true.
She said “Go bigger on the curse. This is hell-realm (edited typo) torture. THink the worst you can imagine. go bigger after”

You inferred sexual assault, then made it seem like she was forcing that on your character and you weren’t okay with it, without ever checking in on whether that was actually what was intended.

Yeah. Hell realm. Worst torture you can imagine, then make that imagination infinitely worse… Maybe I just have too much imagination. Maybe she really didn’t mean to add that to the curse. But it does not at all mean it wasn’t implied, and that I was not CONSTANTLY paged in EVERY scene - even ones private because we didn’t want to deal with her, being told I wasn’t writing out that it was as severe as I should have been.

I know I’m not the only person in the past to have suffered SA. I believe Inuki at face value that they have, too. But hurt people hurt people. Being harmed doesn’t mean you can’t harm others. But I find it a very large cognitive stretch to believe anyone who has suffered from SA in their past would not imagine that non-consentual subject matter would not be part of the worst that could be imagined.

During the scenes of Sophia’s curse, she woke up the first night with coverable bruises. Was told go bigger. Obvious bruises she couldn’t cover, and injured enough she was limping. Got told again to go bigger. Broken ribs and a crushed kidney. Breathing is so hard, so is existing in general. No. Once more. GO BIGGER.

So could I have been wrong about what the implications were supposed to have been? Absolutely. I’m wrong on a lot of things, a lot of the times. But I don’t know what bigger I could have gone from broken bones and organ crushing that DOESN’T include the allusions I think she was making, and I know that I’m not the only one who read that curse the same way I did.

When she washed her hands and did not want to deal with you anymore she passed you off to another player, but you continued to antagonize.
That’s untrue. Just, in all directions, that is untrue. OTHER people asked her to storytell from it, because they wanted to see the curse broken. She storytold curse breaking for her friends. She didn’t storytell it for anyone else. Conrad and Leto trying to bust her out of hell? That was them. Laurent, Ilaria, and Luka wanting the Sparrow story told? Again, their choices. I’m not sure why she thinks I can control what stories other people do or don’t write. But people requesting ST and job things about how they can help someone else? That’s not anything I can control. Blaming me for other people wanting to do things about plots and stories is weird at best, and manipulatively gaslighting at worst.

After all that came Leto teaching the super secret family magic to Sophia almost immediately (you were only on the game like 2-3 weeks), then getting upset when the family comes at you for it.

LOL. Honestly, I don’t know where you’re getting your info, but your facts are not correct. Leto did not teach Sophia Erikson magic. Over the off-screen first year they were at Brakebills, she learned what some runes meant. It was Wizard’s own suggest that one of the two dots we were given as second years for languages and background skills would have made sense to be Old Norse. I dropped that by his typist, and he said cool. Sophia never did nor planned to write/weave/ecth/whatever runes into something magical. But it doesn’t mean she didn’t watch him do enough of that to where she could look at a stone and know which of them would be hot to touch, and which frozen.

SHE TOOK A SINGULAR LANGUAGE POINT.

And two weeks after that point was added, Wiz changed her mind. Knowing the language was the SAME as being taught horrible, secret, private danger magics. So we had to fix it, or face the ICC of our characters being killed. We pitched a FEW things, so she could pick among them for what best fit her game.

• Just retcon the language part. Sophia never learned it, the dot point can just be tossed and trashed.
• Leto could refuse to tell Sophia about the dangers, and he’d take the risk and punishments for having taught her how to read runes if/when anyone ever found out about it.
• Leto could make Sophia into an Erikson. He would tell Sophia about the risks her reading runes poses, and she’d begrudgingly accept a proposal. If anyone lived long enough to graduate, they would get married after, but long engagement to finish their education first - because untrained magicians are dangerous.

NONE of those options were accepted. She told two PC’s that they had to elope and marry, literally that second on the spot… Or they’d be put to miserable deaths.

So yes. I got snarky af about that. I was not a saint. I am not a saint. But I don’t think sainthood is required for being seriously pissed off when a character takes a sugggestion from staff, and then staff decides to use that suggestion as a reason to either force the character into unwanted marriage, or die a terrible death. So yeah. I was waiting for the ban, at that point. Because it’s not like I was going to take either of those other two options.

But then you kept up the antagonism until she had no other choice to ban you. … But looking at them, they were all pretty reasonable. I’d say they were lenient to you.

LOL. Whatever, man. If you think forced content and blaming a singular character for the choices of others is leniency? Huh. That’s a choice and world-view you can have, I guess.

So now you think your embarrassing TS logs are gonna be put out there to get back at you,

Oh, honey. No. I’m not embarrassed over anything I typed. If I didn’t want to have written it, I wouldn’t have. But unlike that vignette, I wasn’t the only person who typed them. It’s not embarrassment. It’s the super disgusting choices to invade the privacy of other characters and typists, a month after none of us are even there, because for whatever reason she just can’t let this shit go. I will never apologize for being worried and upset that someone would choose to write vulnerable stories with me under the pre-agreed boundaries that the scenes were and would be and stay private… And now I cannot keep those promises. Those scenes are in the hands of someone who has shown time and again they hold no scruples, principles, or respect for others. So yeah. I’m scared af she is going to hurt other people alongside whatever this vendetta my way is, too. If you want to pretend that being sad that other people are being hurt makes me non-saintly? Feel those feels. Emotions are things we’re all entitled to feel and to have validated. But after you’ve finished feeling them? You might want to look at the facts and experiences those emotions are based upon. Because there seems to be some disconnect between your beliefs and what actually happened.

Is this enough of the drama you are clearly craving?
Again. The craving of drama was someone logging their staff bit into the private scenes and conversations of a character who has been dead and gone over a month. She’s the one who decided to re-open all of this nonsense. I’m not going to apologize for pointing that nonsense out after she did so.

@Pavel said in How dangerous is VASpider?:

Who cares what we have to say? Let the normal person doing real-world things form their own opinion.

Nah. This isn’t it. If there is a predator known for hurting people in the real-world, and you know someone that predator is invested into as a potential next target… You don’t just stand back and possibly wait for someone just to be abused about it. They absolutely deserve to know the histories and the risks that are associated as fore-warned. We break toxic cycles any time and every time we can.

@insomniac

I met a new gamer on a new game a few weeks ago. And they asked through the grapevine about my reputation… The answer they got was:

Kind.
SUPER AuDHD!

I’ve never felt more seen by a stranger in my life.

@Solstice - I’m putting this under a spoiler tag, because I hope maybe talking through similar things will provide some assurance and support. But. I also don’t want to trigger those fears further, or make things worse. So. If you don’t want to read it, PLEASE don’t. Either way. I’m so sorry you experienced that. I’m glad you came out ok on the other side. And I hope your mind gets gentler and kinder about how stressful drastic illnesses can be - even after they’ve physically healed.

Commentary re: unpromised time and having to come to terms with the impossible beneath the tag.

Spoiler

Given what unshared scenes often consist of, I felt the idea of someone walking into a roster game and seeing that sort of activity with their new character might be off-putting.

But I am so sorry this person keeps finding new ways to victimize you.

A few things:

• I think it would be AMAZIGLY awesome to be able to share private scenes that makes them readable only to the characters who wrote them - and to wipe those if/when one of those charbits enter a scene/delete command.

• At least the two she posted weren’t embarrassing. It’s just that one of them was being in the middle of being written when I caught my nuke… And the other was a vignette that was unshared because as I was writing it, things on the IC screen changed circumstances, so it was irrelevant. But I also figured in the future it would come back around again so I let it idle rather than needing to write it.

• There are still three scenes that WEREN’T shared by her yesterday. One is a very ugly verbal fight while my character was in the hospital between her, her best friend, and her not-boyfriend. The other two were absolutely nothing at all except some pretty explicit smut. At this point… I’m absolutely expecting revenge porn posting of those at some point. And I’m not gonna lie… That triggers my CPTSD in some truly significant ways. But I realize how irrational that is, too. If it happens, it happens, and all I can do is hope anyone who may read it at least has popcorn. If there /is/ a line @inuki is actually willing not to cross… I’d be ridiculous amounts of surprised and grateful.

@De-Villefort

I feel like it’s super weird how hard you’re going against the concept of people playing fantasy while ignoring a lot of the exact same issues in sci fi. But at the same time, I also absolutely get when one thing is just your thing and something else isn’t.

But either way, I’m really sorry to hear about your mom, and the circumstances y’all are facing. And you’re not the only person I know for whom $12/month to spare on games is an unattainable luxury. I hope at some point soon that will change, because it’s terrible going check to check that way and knowing the only place to cut back is from your own plates.

@helvetica said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Coin said in MU Peeves Thread:

@CuriousGamer said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Coin What game was that for?

Neitherlands.

Yeahhhhhh, haha. This bitch is out of pocket. So, she currently head-admins that game, where she’s gone gradually more and more power-mad in the mere three-ish weeks it’s existed. I have some receipts, but honestly, none of her behavior is particularly creative. A lot of knee-jerk redacting of rules and previous decisions, and revising history in an effort to isolate and provoke specific players of characters that she deems rivals, particularly those who seem to draw romantic attention. If players leave, even politely, she refits their characters as brutally murdered plot fodder regardless of last will.

… along with a lovely shamy public post. She loves an all-caps shamy redaction post.

All in all, a low score on the creep scoreboard. I rate her an avoid, unless you’re a cat who likes to play with your food.

I have a LOT of receipts. Please make popcorn if you want them. Creep score is OFF THE RAILS. Like. First ban I’ve ever had on a game in 25 years. Taking this one as a badge of pride.

@Gashlycrumb said in Player Ratios:

@Jumpscare said in Player Ratios:

The order that I do them? Whichever I have the energy for.
Awesome feels their resentment and says, “Bridget and Camille’s demanding additudes burned me out on staffing. Imagine how fast it would have happened if I’d been expected to interact with them.”

So. I played a game where the head (and only staffer) was Awesome. Also, it was one of the WORST token handout spots I’ve been on, too. Bribes all over the place.

The solution to AwesomeStaffer here isn’t to tokenize the game and the RP. The solution to AwfulStaffer is to recognize some games just are poorly run, or don’t prioritize equality in a way that suits you, or is just not the experience you signed up for.

But AwfulStaffer isn’t a part of player ratio to storyteller needs for a game. AwfulStaffer is an entirely different headache. And trying to solve that headache with tokens and trades to be bartered with less Awful or maybe even ACTUALLY AwesomeStaffers isn’t going to solve it. It’s just going to make both the Awesome staffers AND the Awful ones awful by having tried to fix what wasn’t broken with the wrong fix for what was.

@bear_necessities said in World Tone / Feeling:

@Tez so it’s you eh???

If it weren’t for your busy schedule, based on premise, I would have been guessing YOU.

@Pavel said in Player Ratios:

Some people like points. Some people don’t. Some people fucking crave points and the associated validation like their lives depend on it.

Agreed. It was mentioned early on. I wasn’t a fan then, but it was early on, so figured I’d give it longer, and read more.

More folks agreed with points.

I still think they’re weird. Games that I’ve played that use them, and especially rely on them, usually they’re not the best games I’ve been on.

The best games, in my opinion, have been ones where people don’t keep track. They just write. The majority is PrP with staff support/guidance on questions, but where story-tellers weren’t NEEDED for any scene, though, when able would host events or dole out new plot trickles or whatnot. But. In between, folks are just responsible for telling their own things in ways that makes sense to the characters and game themes.

If you and others see relevance or want to tie rewards to stories for whatever reasons, feel free. I’m just a player, I’m not gonna stop anyone from doing what they’re doing. But to me? They’re not at all the same. It’s apples and oranges. Sure, they’re both fruits and you can store them in the same bowl. But if you do… The apples rot faster and the oranges dehydrate.

I think maybe part of this is you think I’m talking to you specifically, @Gashlycrumb. But other than this specific comment, and the one where you asked me a direct question, I was just replying to the most recent end thread.

It’s absolutely fine that for you, that’s a mechanic that would be interesting and might work out. If it would, I really do hope that you and others who enjoy that same reward points make it work and have amazing successes! Not every game is for every player, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that.

It’s just, that at least for me, they’re two separate things, and I only enjoy one of them. My dislike of the other is strong enough that it would ruin my fun and I’d personally find the games where that isn’t true to be weird. But weird is just different from how others see it, not wrong or bad. It makes the vibes off, for me, that so many folks are I guess ok with the concept of it, but. Again. It’s ok that a lot of us like and enjoy different things.

I’m not trying to wrong fun anyone here, and I’m sorry if it came across that I was. I’m just having different fun as my opinion on it.

@Gashlycrumb

Points make me think of keeping score, and days of PvP. I like the modern vibe of games where we’re all on the same dysfunctional team together, telling the stories, and we survive it or we don’t, but. we’re doing it together.

Once we start tracking points on something that’s a spare time pretendy collaborative writing game, that loses the creativity and story-driven side of it - at least for me. I maintain that the only thing needed for an active, involved game is an understanding of your scopes and limits, and letting the characters who want to write and play in it do just that.

We’re all adults. We don’t need every scene to have story-tellers, or every piece of plot spoon fed. We can figure it out pretty well by just asking each other for the scenes we want, and saying yes when they pitch back at you and it sounds like fun.

Is it important to have a vague expectation of how much official ST plot your playerbase needs? Probably.

Is it important to look at bribes and rewards just to figure that part out? Probably not.

But. I’m also super low crunchy. I rarely look at dice outside the wondering of hey, this is iffy, am I able? Even as a ST, I rarely ask for rolls unless something isn’t natural and normal to the character. Most of the time, just letting them do their things with their words while I steer the plot part doesn’t need it. They usually all write good mixes of both wins and losses, and the few who miss that vibe usually are super fine with it once they’ve been politely paged.

I think getting bogged down into mechanics of things makes it lose some of the magic. And I think that goes double when the opposite side is lets bribe people into making sure there is RP, the thing they’re here to do and should be mostly able to manage on their own.

And, if folks WANT bribe games, like, sure. Build them, have fun, and that’s ok. Not everyone likes everything. I’m just not sure why bribe mechanics are the main topic on a thread about how many story-tellers are needed per average number of players. To me… Bribe mechanics aren’t what tells or even shows there were or are good stories. They’re entirely separate. And if a game is relying on the bribes to ensure there are stories getting told… That seems more game issue than ratio problem.

NGL. The vibes on this are getting weird. I feel like most every game these days is pretty strong anti-capitalist vibes.

And like, don’t get me wrong, I’m HERE for that.

But. If we’re all hanging out designing new worlds and games and governments that aren’t based around profiting from labor…

Why do we think that buying/selling stories with points and perks is going to make anything better?

You’ll always have some players who have more time than sense, and they will farm those points and buy things that no one else wants.

And you’ll always have the folks with two jobs, or kids, or sick parents who may only be able to go to one single social scene a month. And they’re not earning points, and even if they were, they wouldn’t know how to spend them. But they chat a few minutes every day on chat while they commute, and answer questions, and since they’re on the game, so are all their friends, two of whom are storytellers - but wouldn’t be if their friend wasn’t barely sometimes there. And that person’s on monthly scene and the friends who are there for that are contributing SO MUCH MORE than your points farmer ever could.

And now, we’re not telling our anti-capitalist stories and building our fictional dreamt of utopias (IC’ly, OOC’ly we’re planning to fail because we don’t want to kill the game and theme) by instead making the game itself the example of the capitalist hellhole we’re all trying to escape in our pretendy happy fun times…

It’s getting too complicated.

Plan out what parts of plot need to be super secret, and how/when/to whom it will or won’t get doled out.

Put all the rest of plot in your lore pages and outline the acceptable scopes of PRP, ST arcs, and Plot in a Boxes. Give folks a few bingo cards and scene randomizers. Make one or two totally normal looking bingo card entries actually tie into one of the few secret plots that aren’t just lore-filed and up for everyone so that they can run for each other and their friends or just do whatever they’re doing.

And if you get innundated and can’t keep up, be honest about it. Say so on the forum. Pause new characters or ask folks hey, can everyone chip in and find a buddy, and each of you tell a story about THISTHING for each other, and up to 2 of their other friends. By then, we should be caught up enough to finish up plot stuff, and after that catches up, we’ll look at re-balancing things and then repoen. CG, or instead realize this is our limit, and where we’re going to keep it.

Like. Honestly. Micro-transactions aren’t the answers here. Honest communication, periodically re-evaluating capacities, and trusting each other to take care of our own fun, and to help others do the same is the only solution I personally think it would take.

But. I’m also not known for being a game runner. Maybe ymmv. But as a player? Those were the setups I always found to be the most fun to write in. And they tended to be the best ran and most stable player-bases, too.

I’m kind of with Faraday here. As long as the lore files on what is and isn’t allowed on PRP are clear, and especially if there are a few ‘plot in a box’ options that get pinned up now and then to be claimed…

We’re all here to be telling stories with, to, and for one another. We take turns running, or we just pitch and idea and co-run, or we just tell the stories we want and trust others to do the same.

But as long as there aren’t barriers to people starting, seeking, and running their own RP, a lot of story-telling needs take care of themselves just as long as a +req about:

Gonna run this plot, out of A/B/C which big bads are most appropriate, what outcomes need avoided at all costs, and any information in that setting I should know while running it.

It takes a few minutes to drop that knowledge onto a PRP that anyone (no storyteller needed outside the participants) can run, and that group is off and going, same as any of the others. If they overlap, cool. If they don’t, also fine. But for the most part… As long as we’re trusted with the pieces of plot that are relevant, we’re all capable of entertaining ourselves without hopefully becoming overly burdensome.

@Roadspike said in World Tone / Feeling:

I want to be I want to be able to punch it in the face.

I also would like to punch most of the universe in the face. When and where do we start swinging?

@Tez

Mostly, I get Discords at random from folks who have more players than stories and pop by to tell some. Then folks peep I’m there and they get MORE players but I’m already telling stories and then things begin to explode.

I dunno. I’m spammy and I write a lot and it seems to usually get my friends both out of and into lots of troubles on the regular.

And yet. Most of 'em still keep putting up with me. And messaging for more.

@MisterBoring

LOL. I’m being such a bully about it that they still haven’t told me the IP because then I’m unstoppable.

But the lore/setting/theme-y stuff we’re workshopping on Discord while our coders figure out how they wanna put together sheets and assign splats is at least danged entertaining.