A somewhat silly one:

I am a solitary person. The reasons for that are not all good nor all bad, but the results have been that I rarely ever invite people back to my house for anything, or really initiate hangouts (largely because I have a crippling fear that if people say yes, it’s only because they pity me and are good enough people to put up with the boring person for a little while).

A few weeks ago, I invited my gaming group to a dinner at my house. They came! I cooked + they brought sides, and…a good time was had by all.

As stupid as it sounds, it’s really the first time I’ve invited a group of friends over to my house for a dinner/hangout since high school (which was quite a while ago). I’m very happy that it went well.

My general guide for Not Being Creepy On Games, which is by no means inclusive, but will catch…at least 80 percent of basic creepiness:

1. Be honest and straightforward about what sort of play you are looking for. There’s nothing wrong with being there primarily for the TS OR primarily for the combat OR whatever, but:

2. Accept without complaint or attempt to ‘win someone over’ when someone is not interested in the RP that you want.

3. Do not solicit real life details from other players. If they want you to know, they’ll volunteer it.

4. Do not share more than basic RL details to anyone who has not specifically asked. Freely shareable details may include the general line of work you’re in, what region of what country you live in, or the sort of hobbies you would tell your grandmother about. Details that no one needs to know unless they’ve specifically asked and you feel truly comfortable sharing with them may include but not be limited to: your address, your real name, pictures of any part of your body, your kinks, your salary, and any hobbies that you would not be comfortable explaining to a ten year old in front of their loving parents who are also holding shotguns.

5. No is a complete sentence. If someone says that they DO NOT want to do a thing, no matter what that thing is, then they do not have explain themselves and you should not try to persuade them to do the thing. That includes ‘talking to you’ or ‘playing with you’.

6. If someone says “Stop”, OOC, then stop. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. If someone says “Stop”, IC, then stop, and make sure OOC that they are enthusiastic (not just ‘will tolerate’) about the direction a scene is going in, and let them know that if the scene is not fun for them at any time, you can absolutely do something different or end it without any sort of argument or retribution. Then follow through with that.

7. If an IC event is going to involve harming, humiliating, dominating, punishing, or otherwise doing something painful to another character, check in proactively with the player, and work out boundaries for the scene OOC. This doesn’t have to mean planning out every moment, but you want to establish early and often that communication is good, and that just because someone’s PC is on the bottom of the IC event, it doesn’t mean you’re trying to harm or punish the player. It’s a game. Everyone should have fun.

8. Remember: Nobody on a game owes you anything. Not other players. Not staff. They don’t owe you scenes, or benefits, or specific relationships. No, even if it is written into character backgrounds - it’s a game, and people change. If someone doesn’t scene with you for a while, don’t assume that it’s because they’re avoiding you, or they hate you, or because they’ve been stolen away by that TS hog over there. Usually, it has nothing to do with you, but if you throw a tantrum over it, it WILL. And also, you will be creepy.

9. Helping a new player is not an exchange. Do not do it if you think you’re going to “get something” out of it, or that the new player’s character is going to owe something to yours. Especially do not page new players to see if their character is available for relationships for your desires - and if it is not, do not advise them on how they ‘should’ change their character so it is.

10. Comments on PBs or descs should be family friendly. Again, imagine the ten year old and the parents with shotguns. Do not volunteer the various sexual things you desperately want to do to the actor whose face a character has - or anything you’ve done to your self while looking at a gallery picture or desc. Ten year old. Shotguns. Don’t.

Hey all,

Putting my mod hat on for a moment. After talking with the rest of the mod team, we’d like to ask that you not include screenshots or links from MSB in this thread, or use this thread as a method to encourage, cheer, or organize action towards the other board. We know that people are sore about what happened, and this remains a place to vent about those events, but not to create or continue an atmosphere of cross-board drama. Thank you all!

As always, please feel free to discuss this decision in the discussion thread.

I wish I could get into something. There are several games that are, theoretically, up my alley, run by people I like who do things I enjoy.

But just can’t muster the energy. I feel bad, because I want to play with people and I have fun. But just nothing sticks to me right now. Hoping that if I don’t force it, I’ll rediscover my mojo at some point.

Another random thought:

PCs should not be at the highest levels of power. There are a few reasons for this, mostly related to the nature of players.

1. The people who most want to be “in charge” of other PCs are generally not the people you actually want to have that power. And often, they want it as an achievement…and once they get it, they disappear.
2. If your game relies on themes (like, say, conflict between factions or internal societal tensions) then you should not rely on PCs to enforce those as leaders. Most players won’t enforce theme, and the ones who do often end up burning out and miserable because they’re thrust in a position of “fun police” that isn’t actually very fun (ask me how I know).
3. “Good” leadership is actually not great for the game part of the game. Leaders who try to make friends, decrease tensions, and set up long-term successes push things towards stagnation. PC leaders who lean into creating thematically-appropriate conflict often catch whole loads of shit from other players. NPC leaders only have to make decisions that are aimed at making the game fun/exciting/tense for everyone - PC leaders often make decisions based on what they feel will make other players like them, or just get off their back.
4. Likewise, absent or rapidly rotating leadership makes it hard for players to have continuity of play, and PC leadership positions usually exist in a state of either functionally absent or flipping through PC leaders like a rolodex as new people show up, burn out, leave.

foksthery said in MU Peeves Thread:

@bear_necessities your friend is a fucking gaslighter who was really weird to me elseMU to the point where being on the same game as them made me super anxious and I was doing my best to respect their boundaries and drove myself batty. I should have left on my own. That was on me. You were right to boot me. No quarrel there.

I’ve removed the ‘at’ for foksthery because she’s said she’s not reading the forum anymore, and it doesn’t seem fair to ping her.

However, by context, it’s pretty clear that she’s referring to me, here. Because the previous incident of me being “really weird” and “gaslighting” her is on MSB, I’m going to summarize it here, in case those things go away from MSB at some point. You can find the details - including quotes of logs - on MSB if you care to.

The previous game was The Network. I was playing a character with wings, her character indicated that she was going to take his feathers without permission to put in her pillows. I OOCly mentioned that I found that a bit creepy, she said she didn’t care, her character was doing it, and I just decided not to argue about it. Later, a couple of people were making jokes about stealing my character’s feathers, and I asked people to stop - I freely admit it’s a stupid thing to get weirded out about, but it just hit me wrong and I didn’t want it to be a running joke. She said something about not realizing it upset me, I pointed out that I’d mentioned that in the scene.

She paged me with this big, anxious apology, and followed up with something like, by the way, don’t ever call my character ‘exotic’ again. Then vagueposted on MSB about it. Problem was, I’d never done that - and it being an Ares game, I had the logs to prove it. She tried to backpedal about how it wasn’t about me, so I pointed out that there’s no logs backing up the idea that anyone had done so. At which point she broke down, apologized (almost exactly like her apology earlier in this thread) and I figured it was over.

Later game, Santa Rosalia, I realized she was on the game. I had advertised for a play group I was putting together, and she signed up. I reached out to her, let her know who I was (I don’t have an Ares handle), and that I really prefer not to run anything for her or play with her. She was very understanding, and we avoided each other from then on. I gave a head’s up to staff so that they wouldn’t put us in any GMed scenes together if it could be avoided. I genuinely thought that was the end of it, and didn’t much think about her after that.

So, that’s the story, as far as I know and understand it. Whether I’m manipulative or a gaslighter, I guess I leave to everyone else to decide.

I’ll also say that you really do have to separate out two concepts:

In-character conflict, which may be between player characters

and

Player vs player conflict, where the PCs are mainly proxies for beating ‘the other guy’ on an ooc level.

I’ve had far more rich, rewarding, and intense conflict and competition between characters when there is no OOC masque, when players OOCly communicate about stakes, outcomes, desires, than when that conflict is treated as a competition between players. Like, I’ve had intrigue and espionage plots/scenes that could only happen BECAUSE we were talking OOC and cool with things happening. Also, being able to chat with people OOC about how we see this conflict helps me identify at a much earlier stage if this is a player who can handle conflict, or who it’s just not going to be fun trying to have these sorts of scenes with.

A secondary issue is something I learned as a newbie GM and which has never steered me wrong in the days since: “You can’t solve an OOC problem with an IC solution.” If the problem is “this player is playing their character in a way that makes the game unfun for other people”, then punishing/beating up/demoting/killing their character is never the solution. Having an adult conversation with them OOC about the effect their play is having on others’ fun is, and if that conversation doesn’t go well, then removing them from the game is.

Killing someone’s character because you’re OOCly annoyed with the player is one of the ways PvP gets real toxic, real fast. It’s not ‘policing the community’, it’s just taking your frustration out on someone who you usually know that you can beat and have often taken every measure to make sure that fight is as one-sided and humiliating as possible, because you’re there to ‘teach the player a lesson’, not to have fun with them.

I won a writing contest and will be paid for my fiction for the First Time Ever.

I think this thread is valuable as a venting thread, but I also think we should be careful that we’re not encouraging or organizing trolling on the other board from it.

It would honestly be better for everyone if we just left them to…whatever thing they’ve got going on there. With only themselves for company. That’s probably consequences enough.

There’s nothing quite like running a session where every player is engaged in the scene and having fun, even when things don’t go perfectly. Tense IC, chill OOC, and just a whole lot of fun from start to finish. It reminds me why I love to GM.

@somasatori I think the big thing is that I’m not running a controlled intervention to see if someone can handle bad IC events - I’m just observing what happens naturally. And I’ve never really see someone who, for example, throws a sulking fit when they have a couple of bad dice rolls, who can also handle a big loss with grace and mutual fun.

I’m sure they exist! And people have bad days, where one small event is just the grimy cheese on the shit sandwich and you are just done. Which is why I try not to judge people too harshly for one bad reaction.

But if, over time, I notice someone who melts down regularly about the small stuff, I’m definitely not going to even hang around for the big stuff. It’s not worth my time or my hobby joy, and I don’t really care if it’s trauma, or a multitude of bad days, or whatever.

@Nonsense said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:

Yeah, absolutely destroy my characters. I love the writing and the play that comes from difficult situations, poor outcomes, and otherwise “bad things” that affect a PC. Especially when it creates further story and RP opportunities in the aftermath. Of course there are limits, but these are also situations and lines that are already a hard ‘no’ in any game I’m going to play - and, as has also been mentioned a few times in this thread - trust is an important factor.

I’m generally very much of the opinion that failure is more thematically interesting than success. I love a failed roll, I love a failed mission, I love the drama. That has been where I’ve found my best success as a player and learned the most about the character.

I admit, here’s the flipside of the question (and this is not aimed at you specifically - I don’t think we’ve ever played together):

I don’t necessarily trust when a player says this, either to me-as-player or me-as-GM because often they do not mean it, so I am absolutely reluctant to actually pull the trigger on negative consequences because it is exhausting to deal with a lot of people after you do, and perhaps even more so the people who are very vocal about “Oh yeah, destroy my life, I can take it!”

And you can never know whether a person genuinely means it and is totally fine with things actually going south, or not.

The only real way, I’ve found, to know is to see how people handle small failures in play, before trying to work through the big setbacks with them.

I ended up putting Other, because yes, I like bad things to happen to my character, but as always there are caveats.

1. Proportionality. I like bad things to happen to my character - I don’t like ONLY bad things to happen to my character. Trauma conga isn’t all that entertaining, give me time to breathe, recover, and let the character have things worth fighting for when the bad things happen.

2. Trust. I’m a fairly trusting player, to be honest, and I’ll roll with what a GM throws unless I have a specific reason not to trust them, but once that trust is lost, it doesn’t come back.

3. Sexual assault/mind control. These are not entirely “no go” bad things to have happen, but they are things where I would need a larger than normal amount of trust, and where I want to be brought in OOC to ensure that it remains a fun game for me.

A somewhat silly one:

I am a solitary person. The reasons for that are not all good nor all bad, but the results have been that I rarely ever invite people back to my house for anything, or really initiate hangouts (largely because I have a crippling fear that if people say yes, it’s only because they pity me and are good enough people to put up with the boring person for a little while).

A few weeks ago, I invited my gaming group to a dinner at my house. They came! I cooked + they brought sides, and…a good time was had by all.

As stupid as it sounds, it’s really the first time I’ve invited a group of friends over to my house for a dinner/hangout since high school (which was quite a while ago). I’m very happy that it went well.

@Ashkuri Yeah, agreed.

I strongly suggest not crowdsourcing this. It’s a good way to get every petty grudge for twenty years crawling out of the woodwork. Consider who you’re uncomfortable with, if anyone, by personal experience or reputation as shown on forums like this (but be careful with that).

@Tez To keep you humble in your great and terrible power over the userbase.

@bear_necessities said in Prove Tez Wrong:

@Pyrephox you’ve gone mad with power, I called it

I prefer to think of it as “gleeful with power”. I’m not mad about it at all.

@Yam said in Prove Tez Wrong:

@helvetica Lmfao ahahaha

ETA: TO BE CLEAR to everyone Tez abuses me with love, don’t worry. She’s not a forum despot.

No, I’m the forum despot.

@bear_necessities said in Empire Discussion Thread:

@Ominous said in Empire Discussion Thread:

one clearly has power over the other

No they don’t. Let’s not be super ridiculous here. That’d be like saying Pyre has power over us because they are mods of the forum

And while we’re on the topic of being super ridiculous, we’re going off a log that was clearly copy-pasted instead of screen shotted so we have no idea what happened. Literally everything could be editted.

There’s a degree of power that, realistically, I have. It is small and stupid and very easily revoked, but it exists. But, conversely, everyone on this forum has the power say “fuck off, Pyre” and demand I be removed from modstaff or they leave to make a new forum. Which is how we got here!

So, yes, a staff member has the power to make a game experience suck, but in this case, I think with a game with a single gamerunner, that GM recognizes that someone is going to be a Problem early on and just removing them is a pretty good decision. If Ada removes a lot of people, or removes people who aren’t, uh, pretty well already established as being Problems across several games, then the game will die and the problem will self-correct.

For the record, I had a case where I didn’t receive a response for an action for a while, and I added a polite (I hope) ooc message to the action asking what my next step was, and Ada simply pointed out that I had an outstanding roll to do and I hadn’t noticed. Problem solved, nobody got banned, and I didn’t feel “some kind of way” about it.

That looks amazing! Great work!