@kalakh said in Unspeakables: The Politics Thread 2024:

@NotSanni said in Unspeakables: The Politics Thread 2024:

@Kestrel said in Unspeakables: The Politics Thread 2024:

One side is accidentally doing Nazi salutes twice

And the other side suddenly cares now that it’s not their side’s cause du jour doing it

I’m stressed. I’m concerned.

lol “accidentally”

Look, sometimes you just caught up in the moment and invade Poland.

I mean there are currently German tanks pointing towards Poland (maybe even driving through it, I’m not totally caught up on the minutiae of the movements) but it’s not what it looks like.

@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:

I’m always trying to solve for the issue that there seem to be more people who want to be in stories than people who want to run stories.

Hey, if you solve this, can you post it all over the internet? TTRPG groups the world over have been trying to solve this since the 60s, and the best we have is cool ranch Doritos.

On a serious note, I’ve not done it on MU-scale, but I have designed plots (both meta and non-meta) for MU groups, tabletop, published works, etc. @Faraday is correct in that there’s no one size fits all: What works for you and your group won’t work for me and mine. But I can offer some design-related advice:

Start with themes rather than story beats. It’ll feel a little mad-libby at first, but write out something like Tez’s Super Awesome Game is about <genre> with <mood> and <tone>. For myself I’d say “Pavel’s Super Awesome Victorian Vampire Game is about personal horror with dread-filled tension and sardonic nihilism in the face of bleak futility.” Then you take that and expand upon it here and there, while throwing your ideas at trusted people. Not players, but cheerfully underpaid co-authors like Roz. Because:

Don’t write it by yourself. You need editors, critics, and people to tell you that they love you but your idea sucks because… If you keep it inside, (a word document only you ever read counts as inside) it’ll be shit, and you’ll stew in it, and you’ll come to resent it, and then you’ll throw it away only to discover it ten years later in a Dropbox folder…

And always remember that your metaplot isn’t important. A metaplot may be, depending on the game, but the metaplot you have now and the metaplot you end up with when the game closes are not going to be the same. It’s going to break, twist, bend, flip, translate itself into Greek and then Portuguese before finally settling on an Anglo-Sindarin creole. And nobody is going to remember the handful of events that ran long because you had to think things up on the fly, but they will remember slaying the dragon and meeting up at the tavern after for a pint.

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ETA: tl;dr: Stop. Collaborate. And Listen.

@MisterBoring 3. People exist outside of staff’s availability, so don’t have the opportunity to join staff events. The metaplot has a thing happen, and it changes the game universally without the input of those unable to participate. This requires either empowering player GMs/DMs/STs to influence the metaplot with their PrPs, or having staff available for larger swathes of time.

@Faraday said in Staff and playable pcs:

Just maintain a healthy balance and most players aren’t going to care

Unfortunately, for every Faraday there’s ten… you can fill in the blank yourself. So for staffers just starting out, “it’s probably best that you just don’t” might be solid advice. Until your players have worked out whether you’re a Faraday or a James Watson, at least.

@Roadspike said in Staff and playable pcs:

I also think that a staffer’s PC should never be “out in front” of a story.

I keep going back and forth on this idea, though I think I agree with it generally. I know it makes me grumpy when staff seem to be hogging the spotlight. But, I also know that our perceptions of things like participation are terrible (in general: studies have shown that men see women as more talkative/participatory than they actually are (Crombie et al., 2003)). So I’m more cognisant of the fact that just because I think staff are participating in the plot a lot more, that doesn’t actually mean that they are.

Additionally, given the limited number of games in any given genre, I’m a lot more forgiving than I used to be about “letting” staff take the lead in a plot run by a different person. It’s not as if there’s a hundred WoD games out there these days, so if you’re staffing on the only V20 game, it’s likely you really like playing V20. So it’s only fair that you get to shine occasionally, too.

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Reference

Crombie, G., Pyke, S. W., Silverthorn, N., Jones, A., & Piccinin, S. (2003). Students’ Perceptions of Their Classroom Participation and Instructor as a Function of Gender and Context. The Journal of Higher Education, 74(1), 51–76. https://doi.org/10.1353/jhe.2003.0001

@STD said in MU Peeves Thread:

go the Old Man Henderson route

For those unfamiliar, here is an excellent audio rendition: The Tale Of Old Man Henderson

A. Staff should play on their games. That’s not even optional, they must play on their games. Especially as the game gets larger, they’ll lose touch with the average player’s needs and wants if they’re not down in the dirt with them. (ETA: Specifically staff who make the decisions. Coders can just code, if they really want.)

B. It depends on how staff is organised. If you are the Starfleet staffer, and you have a Starfleet character, then you should have that information publicly available. There are likely other instances, but I can’t think of them off the top of my head.

While I acknowledge the desire for privacy, I think the playerbase’s right to staff transparency is more important.

My problem with backgrounds is that I constantly do the thing where I put all the interesting bits of a character’s life in the background, and leave very little room for interesting stuff to happen on the game. But nobody wants my 125,000 word fan fic of a fallen Ottoman prince-turned-vampire.

@Lemon-Fox The colours themselves are skin dependent, which can be found in the User Settings section (click/tap your picture at the top, then ‘Settings’). But from my limited testing, all the skins seem to have some level of difference between quote and post body.

@Gashlycrumb

@Gashlycrumb said in Consensus on Roster vs OC vs Mix:

Ask B.F. Skinner about it.

He’ll just go on, and on, and on, and on about pigeons…

I can still see posts I don’t like or disagree with. This update sucks.

@Jumpscare said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

According to their reported numbers, the population practically doubled just a few days ago.

The number of active characters practically doubled.

@DrQuinn said in MU Peeves Thread:

which sucks when you know a student did it but there’s no way to call them on it.

Get them to write a 500 word reflective statement on the essay they submitted.

@Kestrel said in MU Peeves Thread:

There are apps that can detect with relative accuracy whether something is AI-written or not.

I am aware. They’re often crap.

@Third-Eye I wonder how long it’ll be before staff start requiring people defend their applications like one does with a dissertation, just to weed out those who wrote their backgrounds with an LLM.

It sounds like that information will be in the database somewhere anyway, so if one really wants to use it, one can presumably whip up some code to do so.

That said, I can entirely understand someone coming from the perspective of “how will these bastards break/abuse this feature?”

@Faraday said in Blocking Players:

Not letting someone get a word in edgewise is not generally a bannable offense or anything

Well maybe it should be!

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But still, I’m only suggesting that it could add context/further information to a complaint situation.

@Faraday said in Blocking Players:

I don’t quite follow this example.

[Conversation Happens]
Pavel blocks Faraday.
Pavel unblocks Faraday.
Pavel: AND ANOTHER THING…
Pavel blocks Faraday.