I’m so glad there is a space for people to process their feelings, not only as individuals but together. We may “just” be an online community and some of the meeting places may “just” be a message board but it is a real community, and when stuff breaks down it can really hurt.

I don’t want anyone to misconstrue my quietness to mean I don’t care. I do, very much. It’s been hard to see my name invoked in things that are incorrect to me (though I can see why it was done so), or to back up things by people who were hurtful to me personally. But sometimes that’s what happens when people are arguing or trying to cope with what they need to cope with and I’m not angry about it.

I’m not a saint, or some great person and it makes me uncomfortable. I don’t think me being present during the blow up would have changed anything, I don’t and never did have that much power. For that same reason I don’t think anyone else could influence the decisions that have been made either, except for the people that are right now making them. I thought that stepping down would relieve stress (and it did), and that it would be enough (it wasn’t), because the minute I stupidly engaged in a discussion that I should have known how it would turn out, a lot of that hurt came right back to the surface and for my part in that I’m very sorry, it’s hard to not feel like that didn’t instigate something that shouldn’t have been. I thought I was getting to be over it, but I’m not.

It’s hard to lose access to a place that you once felt like you had a part in. Or to feel less welcome and safe. Regardless of justification but especially when it doesn’t feel like it was and it was abrupt. It’s hard to let go of that and stop looking/reading/whatever. It may not even be appropriate for some people, and that’s of course a decision that has to be made for yourself. I wish I could say something that would help, but I also know I can’t. There’s nothing to say. It did not happen for me on the boards this time, but I have experienced it elsewhere and it was bewildering and angering and made me feel more grief that I thought I should.

To say this has been a dark time for me would be an understatement. Yes, 90 percent of it is factors other than what happened, but what happened triggered some pretty serious things that I still have to be very careful about (as I discovered last night too). I guess I’m not over that either.

There have been several times in the history of “the community” where different boards have existed (and yes even rivalries–ask the dinosaurs, this isn’t the first time this has happened. I think it’s easier now to find/hang on to the friends that you want, and refind others as time goes on. I’ve had friends in this hobby that were close, and then a falling out ended things for years, and then we reconnected stronger than ever. And other relationships with folks that just…didn’t ever re-engage–and that’s okay too. Real life, right? It doesn’t make it less painful in the moment.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I do really love you guys. I wish things had happened differently. I wish I’d been more capable, or it had been a better moment for a whole bunch of people. That things didn’t bubble up exactly the way that they did, because while I can see why people say it’d been building up for awhile, I don’t think it was the best for anyone how it happened. I wish that we all didn’t have so much other shit in our lives that sometimes makes stuff in THIS community feel like the last straw. I think whatever place you land at, and are able to settle into community is good. And yes, even if it’s both. Sometimes having an alternative that you feel more comfortable on and that becoming the new main (or the old main)–that’s a good thing. There doesn’t even have to be a comparison. I like what’s building here. I hope with more hands on deck both here and at MSB people will be able to build what they want. Hats off to the team here for being able to take something like this on board when a lot of the people are grieving at least a little. Sometimes that’s taking on some hard stuff that you don’t notice until later, but I think you are amazing.

There’s a lot of games I’ve been on over the years, so any omissions is more because I can’t remember the names (but I do tend to remember people/situations)

Current:
Arx: Edris, Karina past: Nurie, Ouida, Maren, tried Lailah but couldn’t mesh.
City of Shadows: Fiametta

Past:
Shadowrun Seattle: Nocturnis, Sakura Saito
Shadowrun Detroit: Milla
TCbTT (oWoD): Galatea, Niccola, Chai
A2A (oWoD): Arianwyn, Julia
Metro 2.0 (oWoD): Jade
A handful of other oWoD places, one set in Hawaii, one in Morocco, a few in US cities.
The Reach (nWoD): Ariadne, May, Fremont (changeling app staffer, then later Mortal/M+ sphere head)
CoFaB (nWoD): Gloria
Eldritch (nWoD): Toni (also at BITN)
Mystick Krewe (Buffy): Nanette
Star Crusade (Fading Suns): Naima, Verity, Samina
Battlestar Orion: Kostas
Battlestar Deimos: Enyo
RfK (CoD?): Nathalie
Savage Skies: Donovan, Enid
Liberation MUSH (new owod): Bastian

Brief appearance on Keys as the person who took Fable off the roster. Tried several other ares places at this time, but none of them took (not because people aren’t nice or I didn’t enjoy things, just it didn’t grab me like Arx has).

I’m always looking for new folks to play with/meet. If you’ve told me your alt and I don’t rp regularly with you (or honestly even if we do) chances are I will forget about it. So I’m almost always game for a background tie, ect.

for many reasons both mush related and not i’m really sick of the “keep sweet” mentality that is often pushed on people who push back when someone is being ugly. it’s honestly rather repulsive to me. i’ve had to deal with a lot of “be kind/put other people’s comfort above your own/shut up” through most of my life. i don’t feel particularly bound to be kind to someone who threw shade at a game runner about being irresponsible because the game didn’t last for the amount of time that they thought it would and then even insinuated that maybe they shouldn’t have made the game in the first place because of that. along with the ‘hmm if you’re not perfect maybe you shouldn’t say anything because you know you’re both not perfect’ stuff. that kind of stuff should have died in the 90s and i think it should be called out bluntly every single damn time.

Struggling with significant depression rn. I’m doing ok juggling most things I think. But a bit slower on the uptake/not very much energy right now. At some point maybe I will be less burnt out by life, but man it is really hard. I know I have lots of people right here with me tho.

“let’s all be nice” is a tool of silencing. i think it’s not always intended that way, but sometimes it absolutely is less about actual concern for others and more about that person calling for that being unable to tolerate their discomfort. i think that’s fine outside of the rough and rowdy section. but within it, i’m going to be just honest here with my personal opinon–i think pushing keep sweet on people is being an asshole here.

enforce respectful language. call out hypocritcal stuff. that’s needed. keeping sweet is not, and should not be. maybe my feelings are inappropriately raw for this. i am trying to be respectful, but i’m not feeling kind and i’m not a bad person for not feeling kind about this. IMO.

today was hard, but I made it through.

@CuriousGamer why are you involving me in this?

ETA: if i cared to comment on any thread on MSB, then I would. I do not know why she would want to quote me about anything regarding defending herself, as to my knowledge i’ve never RPed with her (or if I did it was unknowing or such a long time ago and unremarkable as to not really stay in my memory, so it was neither a bad experience or an ecstatic one).

So if she hates me or something, I really have no clue why, unless it’s just a flailing thing, in which case it’s certainly not personal, because I’ve never done anything to harm this person. And I can’t imagine that she could possibly say anything that would hurt me more than other whisper campaigns have in the past (and I have a pretty good track record of being vindicated with those nearly every time someone has tried it). The folks on MSB that would be eager to agree that I’m a terrible person already think that and she in no way could possibly influence that.

As Roz said. It is NOT a kindness to tell someone “hey, people are talking about you!” in a situation like this. I assume there are plenty of people out there who can say all sorts of mean things about me, and probably do. If I had to constantly be vigilant about that kind of shit then I would have even less energy for RP than I do now. I play several places, for the most part very happily, with people who are happy to RP with me, and I’d like to keep it that way.

The MSB split is very painful for me personally and it’s always going to be that way. That’s not your fault, but please be considerate and don’t tag me in like this for this kind of cross board stuff in the future.

I landed a dream job with excellent low cost bennies (yay state employment) and I’m still having fun and no stress! It was a hard decision to leave my old job as I loved the community there but it was getting too hard for me physically. But now even the worst day is less painful than the best day at my old job, and the worst day is pretty mellow. For now, it’s so nice to be able to breathe again, and have a normal level of stress. I also get to interact every day with 6 months old through seniors in high school, and seeing how much the big kids enjoy learning how to care for the littles is doing my heart a lot of good.

Feeling like you are dropping every ball and letting everyone down sucks, even if you know life goes on. I feel like a crappy RPer anyway of late, but its frustrating to fall on my face right now in particular when rl too is just relentless.

There are no “receipts” that people accept in “our medium.”

Someone shows outside of the game communication? It’s always they shouldn’t have worn that dress and also unfair/not game related.

Someone shows a log? “The log was probably edited by someone with an axe to grind!” “Maybe you shouldn’t have been so sensitive. Gee, I would have been flattered and not taken that so seriously!” " Sometimes the person i could have seen as harassing me turned out to be a Nice Guy/Gal once I just talked to them a little more, so let’s give this awkward person a break and you should be more tolerant."

People take the information presented to them and make a decision. That’s always been the case. It’s just who tends to be “the most believable” is a little more diverse than it was during 90s mushing and a lot of “awkward” behavior is a lot less acceptable, and the culture has shifted away from rules lawyering about who “should” be asked to leave.

I tend to be okay with “just talking” social RP if the characters involved are engaging enough. When I think of BaRP, I tend to think of more “primarily talking” social scenes. If that’s all I had access too would be sad after awhile though.

I think for some (maybe most?) people that may also include what I would count as more actiony type of social RP (playing a game/researching/building something) but I think that’s because I kind of like rolling dice too. I would put using abilities or little one-shot exploration stuff that isn’t really GMed and isn’t tied to a metaplot thing as mostly social too. But I can be perfectly happy with that for a long time. I’m not sure if that counts as slice of life (it certainly could, depending on the context!) or not. And then for some people dice rolling breaks immersion if it’s not important enough or it really stresses them out OOCly, or it is totally possible for someone to be a colossal showboating ass with dice rolls OOC too which isn’t super fun except to them).

Yammy, I agree with you about instant/live scene pacing, that’s been pretty consistent for the last 20+ years for me! I do notice perhaps that these days 10-15-20 can be usual for “live” unless the person organizing says something about keeping it to 15 or less. I wonder if that’s because there’s older brains working or something!

Async is so variable depending on game/r culture though, at least in my observation, that I now always ask what people intend the pacing to be. There are lots of people that do the 1 or a couple of poses per day thing. Some are like a pose every few days. For me personally I tend to mean every few hours, or a stop and then restart later in “live” mode, it’s just that it may be out of order with other game timestream stuff. I learned to ask because on one game in particular I was stuck in a huge group scene where the intent was a timely catchup but one person asked for async, I said fine because I was thinking everyone would pose a couple of times a day, but what ended up happening is that half the group reverted to posing 24 hours after the last pose, so in effect that was ONE pose in the entire SCENE per day and these were like normal live poses so like 2-4 sentences and I thought I was going to die. I’m not saying they were bad people, they weren’t. But I should have asked because I can’t handle that glacial of a pace, so that was totally on me for saying sure without asking.

I’ve been told my “style” of async may be more properly described as “distracted/work-friendly” so that’s what I’ve been calling it rather than async over the last few years.

I always appreciate when terms/pace is outlined specifically for that scene, because we all have different brains and assumptions so that seems to me to be the best way to cut down annoyance and increase engagement or to give people a friendly way to say “man thanks for your offer but that pace won’t work for me, I hope you guys have fun,” proactively before they’re feeling either totally overwhelmed or like they want to gnaw their own leg off to escape. I can’t do either end of the spectrum well (the instant OR the one pose in a scene per day/in a 4 person scene getting to do 1 pose every 4 days). My poor brain can only really keep things together for a bout a week regardless of pace, and for me the live/pause for up to 2 days/resume is better than the 4 day between posing stuff.

I would be willing to try the long delay novella RP pace though. I think that would work better for me and be okay than the : smiles and nods and says “How interesting, tell me more.” and having to wait 4 days to respond to it lol.

If I make it past the first 10 scenes on a game, I’m usually a lifer though I will have episodes of getting punched in the face by RL so there have been many times that things went down during that time or shortly after.

I can’t think of a time where I’ve been upset. Sometimes I’ve had a little epilogue dialog with players of PCs who were really close knit with mine, and that has been super fun and appreciated. But even if it doesn’t happen, that is fine too. I try to express my appreciation for staff even if I’ve been absent for most of the final months, because I always have such wonderful memories and enjoyment.

When I think about it broadly, most of time time staff has wandered off or lost steam before I did (or there was some massive staff explosion/implosion). Sometimes the game continues after that, most of the time it doesn’t. I’m glad that at least in the last handful of years, we seem to have moved on from people getting super mad and demanding and rude to staff when they close a game for whatever reason. I don’t necessarily think that it’s because nobody cares so much as perhaps they don’t get as worked up about it enough to be abusive to acquaintances? I hope, anyway.

@Yam Honestly, I wouldn’t for a stranger/unknown person. But if I knew it wouldn’t be more of a burden to the gamerunner/staff than a benefit, I would totally be willing to chip in monthly or whatever for a game.

I think though that it would be a burden to most folks who aren’t used to it. And I totally understand why some people wouldn’t. I love it when I get the opportunity to chip in for things though. And while I think (?) most people who know me would be willing to believe I did not expect special treatment or pressure them at all, I think that would be hard for many people to accept from strangers, and I wouldn’t want to cause someone more stress or see them have to deal with people who might say no pressure but would very much have expectations.

It’s hard for people even to maintain garden variety staffing boundaries/expectations, I think that only increase exponentially when money is involved.

I used to hate web-based CG, now I prefer it.

I was an application staffer on TR for a few years (for Mortal+ and changeling), but have staffed other smaller places too where I had to review some apps (TR burned me out bad though so I tend to avoid that particular task if I can).

My experience is that it’s not very useful for screening the worst kind of problematic people out. Abusive or manipulative people will almost always look fantastic on paper, you won’t find out about them until they’re hurting people on your game.

Player ooc behavior during the application process will catch more people. How do they handle being told no? How do they handle a mild wait time? How many arguments/how much showboating do they do on channels in the wait time?

It can also kind of alert you to the kinds of folks that probably won’t be problematic in a big way on the game, but will annoy people a lot because they don’t have discretion (like the folks who insert explicit and elaborate sexual content into the application bg knowing or perhaps not thinking that it’s making a real life staff person have to read that) or don’t understand the theme or splat. That may or may not be important to the game at large.

I have spent the longest time away from being active on a game than I ever have in like 30 years of being in the hobby! That isn’t to say I haven’t tried or dipped my toe in (and nothing happened to cause it, I did have fun where I dipped in!) Part of it is starting my dream job, but honestly I think some of it is that I take a med that is amazing (pretty much obliterated all my chronic illness stuff!) but now there’s an understanding that it affects satiety in a big way. I find I don’t crave the rush or busy-ness of a super active MUSH schedule, which filled a lot of that needing to keep my super bouncy mind active to be happy. I totally get being nostalgic for marathon RP and constant activity, it was one of those ways I kept my happiness meter charged for most of my adult life! Now I don’t need to do quite so many things to get that same nice feeling of contentment.

I do think if I found the right paced game that had the people I like in it, I might pick up again, but I’m also okay waiting for that too. I just find the last few places I’ve tried the pace was a little fast for me and I couldn’t keep up. The nice thing is that I wasn’t stressed out about that like I normally would fret at not being able to keep up.

So anyway. I do miss my RP partners, I’m glad I can see what people are up to here, and keep up with what’s going on so if I do wanna dip in I can. I’m sure I will at some point, but I’m also pretty sure it’s probably not going to be on a high stakes or fast paced game again!

I have seen a person get banned around constant loud complaints about asking for RP but they never accepted when people said yes. To me it was clear that they were really only interested in a few specific people, they would spam and handwring on chan when those folks were present and ignore everyone else’s invites or yeses on the lrp channel.

So it wasn’t so much a ban for asking for RP (even though thats the channel where they really were engaging in public problematic behavior) but being passive aggressive/obnoxious/extremely negative on channel.

I’m sure they are fine as a person but it was nice to not have to turn off the lrp channel and being able to use that resource again without having to also deal with their constant complaints that “nobody” would RP with then when in fact people had accepted but weren’t the intended targets of the public asking.

Usually when people act like that in public, they are equally if not more problematic 1:1 or in small groups so not an asset to the game. Maybe this person was an exception but I dunno, could never get them to accept any proactive offer of RP, they never responded to my acceptances of their public asks, and where they showed up to public scenes I or others would set up that their intended targets would come to they would go silent or stompy when that target interacted with others and it didn’t turn into a 1:1 sub scene.

I am almost positive that person’s perception was that they were banned for asking for RP too much. But that wasn’t the real issue of behavior and I doubt even if staff tried to make that clear that the person would have been open to understanding that.

@Hobbie yeah that sounds like a nightmare! There’s only so much you can do as a friend, and I think just about everyone would struggle having to deal with that, especially when it is a consistent pattern. Hopefully this will relieve a lot od stress in your life. I hope cutting out people who dont add much to your life but that level of stress ahd disappointment gives you a little more peace!

I do miss game meet ups in person! I’ve met some of my best and oldest rl friends that way, and we needed the in person meet ups because we annoyed each other on the games themselves until we met in person!

@Roadspike that is largely what I mean. If I dont think staff is able and willing to spot and remove people that don’t get it, that is where I dont bother investing/playing on that place because I know its going to go off the rails, no matter what language is used in policies/what the genuine intent is. I know many nice/creative folks who are great storytellers but suck at boundaries.