I prefer Staff disclose their PC alts for a number of reasons.

• It’s a sign of trust. Staff is showing players who they play as, so players can hold those PCs to the same standards staff is expecting from the non-staff players.
• It can help me navigate the tricky social aspects that come up when I have an OOC issue with another PC bit. If that PC bit is a staff member, I would prefer that my request to resolve the issue be taken by a different member of staff to give the issue a third party perspective. If I have an issue with the PC of the headstaffer, then it lets me know that if I can’t resolve the issue, I need to find a new game to play.
• It gives people a good idea of how active the staffers actually are in the game.

@InkGolem said in Staff Bits Linking Handles:

I think it absolutely should be considered best practice for staff bits to have an Ares handle linked.

I agree. How would you see this translate into non-Ares games?

@bear_necessities said in Neon Protocol:

what’s even worse IMO is that the staff alt will submit jobs under their alt and then they will answer themselves in said job as the staff bit. Which is just… lol crazy IMO

I got invited to be staff on a game in the very early part of the 2000s. The head staff there (during the time period where we were working on the grid and systems and prepping our glorious metaplot) let staffers create their PCs during the wind up, and he created 2 for himself. A day later, but still weeks before we meant to open, he started having conversations with these two PC bits in the public channel, as though they were completely different people. The other members of staff became concerned after the conversations became really angry arguments about stuff unrelated to the game. We had a meeting with the headstaffer a day or two later, and he admitted he was starting to have some severe mental health issues after he got fired and had to move back in with his parents.

We ended up deciding to stop the game before it even started, and went our separate ways. I ended up using the plot bits I wrote up for it in my regular tabletop group at the time, to a meh reaction.

@Jenn said in MU Peeves Thread:

No one is forcing you to take the OOC offer. But at least they’re trying to be inclusive. And without inclusivity, a game dies fast.

Totally, which is why this is probably just a me thing. I love people being inclusive, but everybody has their own social quirks and habits and stuff that have to be worked around, and I think one of mine is “Please don’t try to throw plot at me until I feel I’ve established my character.”

@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:

has the PC always been around ICly? because i feel like that’s an important point. if the PC literally just moved to the place or something, then wouldn’t they just respond accordingly IC that they just got there?

In this particular case, no, the PC has just moved to the area in the last week and has only met 3 other people who are also unconnected to the specific plot. And the requests to have the PC join the plot have all been OOC.

@bear_necessities said in MU Peeves Thread:

IDK how to explain it better, I just feel like staff should be upfront about who their PCs are.

I agree with this. I also believe that staff should not include their PCs in the scenes they are running. In my experience it often leads to Mary Sue / Gary Stu behavior.

Possibly a new peeve of mine (I’m still mulling it over and trying to decide whether it irritates me or not):

When a player is trying to do certain scenes to help them establish a new character and get used to playing that character and speaking in that voice, but others are trying to handwave that stuff and just operate as though the character has always been around and has in depth IC knowledge of current events with no actual scenes to back that up.

@BurnNotice said in MU Peeves Thread:

Imagine a horror game where seven out of every ten characters ICly are this person

Now I want to group app a bunch of failed comedians moving together to a creepy small town to try and rebuild after getting booed out of The Comedy Store.

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

My immediate reaction to people spending XP in the middle of a scene is “Noo! Wrong!” but after taking a moment to contemplate how this relates to that all-important question “So fucking what?” I don’t see it as being a real problem.

As I said, it’s a fringe issue, and only for some people (like myself), and most people who have this as a peeve it’s a low priority peeve at best, not something that would cause me to avoid a game. That said, if I ran a game, it would have an XP room and leaving mid scene to go use the XP room and come back would be forbidden. And I would suspect that having that policy wouldn’t be a game killer.

@Gashlycrumb Yes. I find that frustrating. Even more so when someone does it in the presence of someone who’s character is focused on whatever it is. This is what they built towards, let them have their moment of triumph.

@Ominous said in MU Peeves Thread:

I think it’s more of a “Git Good Waveform.” The exact skill the XP is ultimately going to go toward is spread across multiple possibilities until the player observes a particular skill needing to suddenly be increased during a dire moment, which causes the waveform to collapse into the needed skill.

I call it the “Personal Narrative Swerve Particle”. Where a character builds a narrative of being focused on one group of things suddenly becomes a master of something completely unrelated. So like when a violent druglord suddenly becomes the world’s foremost expert on neurosurgery.

One version of this I refer to as the “Oh You Didn’t Know Corollary”, where the character in question suddenly remembers their previous life as a teacher at Harvard Medical.

@Jenn My preference (though not an RP killer for me) is that entering a scene be a soft lock for your character sheet. Basically, for the duration of the scene you don’t mechanically change as a character, outside of stuff like taking damage from a fight or spending points that are meant to be spent on actions or whatever (like Willpower in WoD or Conviction in Blue Rose).

I think this whole “when can you spend XP” thing is ultimate a fringe thing that is up to personal preference, and usually something that isn’t dealbreaking for whether or not a particular person would join a game.

@RightMeow I think it’s a situational fringe case. Example: A character with a bunch of saved XP is investigating a crime scene, their skill in Forensics is a 1, the lowest possible rating in the game. Prior to this they have not exhibited any affinity to the skill, any interest in the skill, and the only prior time they made a check against it, they failed. They have no narrative reference for raising the skill. They spend all of their saved XP during the scene and suddenly have Forensics 10, which per the system, would make them one of the Top 3 Forensics experts in the world. The character has effectively gone from barely functional in a skill to being part of the state of the art in the field, in a single scene.

This whole XP room thing or limits or whatever would be to deal with that sort of stuff. The kind of narrative record scratch that could come up in play.

I think the point is that for some people it’s narrative / immersion breaking to have characters do that. Which is fine. Everyone’s view of things is different.

@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:

this feels like SUCH an overcorrection to a fringe issue.

Being that I’ve played on dozens of games that use XP rooms (without claiming they were a response to this fringe issue), I don’t really hate it.

Wouldn’t the easiest way to avoid mid-scene advancement be to keep the commands to advance only in one specific OOC room on the grid? An XP Room.

@Ominous said in MU Peeves Thread:

I’d prefer a system where you set a skill or two that’s being worked on by the character, and, after some time, maybe with some random elements, it increases.

One of my RL friends is currently working on a tabletop RPG where the players are androids who are the only beings on a space station after a mysterious event kills all the humans, and advancement comes in the form of software updates being transmitted from a satellite light years away, so you build this little track of advancements in the order you want them, and every time a cycle happens (a nebulous in game unit of time that represents some level of narrative motion), you check a box in the top most item in your track. When it fills with checks, you add it to your sheet and start checking the next item. He’s working on some mechanics for rearranging the queue, but so far it’s been pretty fun the few times we’ve met to test it.

@helvetica All I remember from that episode is the bike.

@Roz Agreed. Both of those are dumb.

@catzilla said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

From what little I know about Ruby, we all know that she’s picking LC for two very certain assets that appeal to Ruby’s target audience and nothing else.

Pistols? It’s pistols right?

@Raistlin said in Coded Systems vs PDF Sheets:

That said, I’m also a fan of transparency with character stats. Too many bad experiences with the “OOC Masquerade” from WoD games.

Me too, but I understand some people enjoy that Masq stuff, so having the PDFs kept somewhere away from prying eyes would be ideal in that regard. If no Masq, then just have them somewhere that staff can easily see when players are updating the important bits of the sheet. If a character in a fantasy game suddenly has 18 Strength when they had 7 the week prior, staff need to notice that stuff. And yes, I’ve had a few poor experiences in games where the players kept their own sheets privately.