While reading another thread (and I please ask people to keep that SPECIFIC conversation there), I got to thinking about the purpose of logs, receipts, proof, what have you.

I think it’s really easy to conflate the two things, and in fact sometimes people may be doing so in bad faith.

If I, as someone running a game, ask Alice for logs after Alice complaints to me about Bob, it’s not because I need “proof.” Logs aren’t proof. Logs are testimony, carrying no more weight than the accuser typing “p polk=Bob harassed me.”

The reason to ask for logs, is to know what actually happened. “Do you have logs?” from someone like me isn’t “Do you have proof?” It’s “Can you show me exactly what happened so I know what to do about this?”

I want to see what happened, what was said, and the context before I do things. Misreadings happen. Misunderstandings happen. Friendships are lost over such things.

But in the case of “Bob is pressuring me for sex RP,” that’s never going to be what you’re trying to do. Not at all. That’s an entirely different situation. Even if Alice is mis-reading Bob, you’re not going to try to get them to be friendly again. No.

Some folks are so used to the “due process” of “Do you have logs?” that they believe it’s proper to ask for them before dealing with ANY complaint. But that’s not the point!

Asking for logs isn’t about proof, evidence, due process, and all that. It’s about being a cool-headed third party to mediate a dispute.

In the case of an accusation of sexual harassment, that’s not the time or the place to be the cool-headed third party to mediate a dispute. That’s the time to separate the two at once, and to keep an eye on the accused.

Watch the accused. Does the accused’s behavior fit the pattern? Are there other complaints? Are you ready to take action to protect players from this player if there is a problem?

Getting the logs might help with that, but it’s certainly not required or even necessary to start the process.

In practice, sexual harassers in games do so serially. It won’t take long to get a few red flags and boot 'em.

I think logs are a red herring in most of these discussions.

I loved my run on Arx.

Good players, good GMs. Good experience.

When Ari died, it was exciting. And well, I basically could not find another character that could top that. So I drifted off.

I tried. I tried to find a character. I tried to settle back in. But I just could not find a good fit.

Ari was lighting in a bottle for me and I will always think fondly of that three year stretch on Arx.

@Arkandel I tend to assume people who HATE it really just hate that it gets used passive-aggressively. Because that’s really the only time it’s a whole “Oh you can’t respond to that IC” thing.

When I write things like that the usual intent is that “There are 20 subtle clues that tell you that this sort of emotion / attitude exists”

@Pavel Agreed. A game doesn’t have to last 5-10 years to be a success.

https://poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/give-a-shit/

Quitting games is hard.

@shit-piss-love Definitely a way to do it.

“My character is just being like most in the era”

“Yes, but most people in the era had miserable lives and never were exposed to the outside world beyond church and local community”

“Yeah but”

“You’re a PC. You’re special. You’re supposed to be different.”

@shit-piss-love Yes. Civility cannot be the only goal. Good faith engagement is also essential.

Someone who lies while all the protocols are followed, is as harmful as someone who breaks all the protocols.

@Kestrel said in Two Elevator Pitches:

OK, hear me out:

Amnesiac space peasants rising up against the space lords and ladies, to create a better space future.

Space Nobleman, swerve

@STD said in JKER Temporarily Banned Discussion Thread:

@Polk said in JKER Temporarily Banned Discussion Thread:

Bad faith posting is generally worthy of some sort of administrative action.

I’ve no dog in this hunt (and haven’t even read the thread in question), and this might be a slight tangent, but…

The impression I had was that folk here generally assume bad faith unless they personally know the person making the post. At the very least, people sure to seem to assume bad faith about anyone who comes here to defend whatever game is currently being castigated. Many times that attitude ends up being warranted, I concede that, but it is still something about this forum that really bothers me. There are accusations of bad faith in this very thread discussing bad faith! It’s recursive bad faith! Bad faith all the way down!

I don’t know most of y’all. For me, my read on ‘bad faith’ is not from how well I know you, but my finely-honed troll radar from years moderating political comments sections.

Yeah.

I know how to spot the guy ‘just asking questions’ but is really pushing some unpleasant political view.

I know how to spot the guy who is looking to be disruptive.

I know how to spot the guy who is looking to provoke things to use against the community.

You learn how to distinguish someone who’s here to discuss, from someone who’s here with an agenda. That’s bad faith posting, in my view. If you’re not joining a community to engage with the community, but rather you’re here to use the community in some way, or attack it, or damage it, you’re not engaging in good faith.

JKER was not posting here to join here. JKER was posting here to get revenge for a perceived grievance elsewhere, hence the crazy DMs.

@mietze You can’t prevent a first time, but you can create a culture that won’t put up with it, which hopefully will reduce first times to begin with.

And will encourage people to REPORT first times, so that first time isn’t actually 5 first times of people who all just endured it instead of reporting it.

@Cobalt said in MU Peeves Thread:

@mietze God, I saw this so much on xWoD games. It felt like every time I had someone as an admin to my sphere who wasn’t already a friend of mine that was male I had to fight with them one everything. Back on TR there was a staffer who literally quit working in spheres if there was a female spherewiz. I was out right told once “blah won’t work with you because you’re female, and he doesn’t work under females”.

I get that staffing for MU is a volunteer gig and not the same, but image saying that to your manager in an RL work place?

Sheesh. If someone like that were on a game I ran, I’d excuse that person from playing on the game entirely.

Straight To Jail.gif

If you can’t be respectful to women in authority, then I don’t trust you to be respectful of women as peer players or STing you, either.

You either like being the GM, or you don’t. If you don’t, it’ll be punishing. If you do, it’ll be more fun than playing.

What’s not fun is all of the administrative stuff that owning/running a game entails: dealing with complaints, harassment, tech issues, people having meltdowns, etc.

Unfortunately all of that stuff happens at a larger scale on a MUSH than it ever does tabletop. But it still needs cared for.

I think it’s a fair complaint that you get shut out of RP in a game unless your PC is a young woman willing to, er, “put out.”

When you’re quiet about hopping from STing back to playing, because you don’t want it to get weird. Everyone figures you out right way but PLAYS ALONG, treats you as a player, and everything is happy.

@Testament Nobody’s obligated to forgive the repentant, but nobody’s obligated to think well of people who refuse to forgive, either!

I want the ability to:

• Interact with people on the game about the game. Not a discord server, not emails, not a website.

• Have a fair shot to do what the fun part of the game is. No quotas for the good characters, no ever-shifting rules gatekeeping, no game runners who break every written rule to try to be the exclusive center of attention and RP on their PC alts.

• Take things at my pace and time zone. Don’t demand I be available at specific times, when I’m an adult living on the east coast who has to get up early to commute to work 4 days a week. Don’t demand I immediately buy the book and/or read 50 pages of amateur fan fic on your website/wiki before I even begin asking questions about what makes your game neat-o.

• Be treated like a human being. Don’t act like the BOFH. Don’t be abusive, snarky, or otherwise just terrible. You’re not running a business, but you can at least be human to me.

• Have fun.

Oh yeah, and if I invite someone to your game, this person gets sexually harassed, and I come to you about it, I don’t want to hear that I’m making too much of a big deal about it because “that’s what people always do to that character.”

Not that long ago I had a character in a plot where character death was a real possibility. On my commutes home I would sometimes think about how I would pose him getting killed.

Because it was a supernatural game, there were supernatural factors involved and I could bring in a ‘third party’ who would be deeply affected by the character’s death.

Basically, if you know Mage the Ascension, his avatar (weak, one dot) was going to panic about his premature death not giving it a chance to grow and prosper. So it was to try to revive him by showing him probable futures of his children and grandchildren as motivation to Get Up and Fight. However, the effect was going to be that it soothed the fear and panic he felt while dying.

One pose, the character’s story completed.

It was intense in my head (still is really, months later, though it never happened) and I would get choked up about it. But I also completely break down at the end of Link’s Awakening.

I want stories to move me, and I’m not ashamed of it when it happens.

@mietze I’ve run into players in the past who were frustrated because nobody wanted to play with them. I feel really bad about that sometimes so what will sometimes do is coach those players.

I can tell they don’t really know how to write. They come into this hobby for the role play and the socialization, not from a more text-based background. And well, they can’t write.

So I try to coach. The advice I usually give is: mind your spelling, mind your punctuation, and in every pose try to both respond/react to things other people did, AND do things that others could react to.

It’s so often that people will write very self-centric poses not because they’re self-centered people, but because they don’t know how to do this.

And it makes me happy when this coaching works, and I get told that it’s having ani mpact, they’re having more fun in a game.

The ability to write isn’t everything. But knowing the tricks for how to write in a MUSH, sure helps a lot.

I don’t see a thread to give comments and feedback on the existence of the forum site, as a whole, so I’m starting this to give my comments and feedback.

I’m wishing you the best of luck. The hobby could use a good place to chat.

My one bit of feedback: I’ve seen in your announcements that you wish to enforce the intended tone of each forum of the site.

That’s good, but I urge you to consider carefully how you enforce that. In another place, the practice was to move an entire thread into another forum, if posts in it began to violate the original forum’s rules.

That amounts to a heckler’s veto. If a bad actor can force any thread to be shifted into your Rough and Rowdy forum, then that means a bad actor can shut down calm discussion of any given issue.

Instead, I hope you consider deleting posts that break the rules, instead of moving entire threads. If Alice starts a thread in Game Gab, and Bob wants to get rowdy, then make Bob make his own thread, instead of letting him hijack Alice’s thread.

Thanks and again, good luck