It sounds like it’s largely about good sportsmanship and deciding on an OOC level to poison an IC victory of another player so that it’s a misery to actually engage with it. It’s not really about “pacifism” so much as someone just not being a good sport and setting out to make other players’ experience worse because they didn’t get what they wanted how they wanted it.

Although it definitely does bring up memories of the time when we invited a new player to our post-apocalyptic Shadowrun game and when we didn’t go along with what his character wanted, he suicided that character, then made a new character who was an “avowed pacifist” and ruined our attempt to ambush some targets because “he wanted to stop the violence”.

We uninvited him, obviously. Sometimes a person just doesn’t fit with a group or isn’t capable of playing nicely with others. I suspect it’s less about it being PvP and more about just some people don’t get that it’s obnoxious to set out to ruin other people’s experience because things didn’t go as you wanted.

@Roadspike said in Non-toxic PvP:

@Kestrel said in Non-toxic PvP:

One system I’ve been thinking about which I’d like some feedback on:

I think that this is incentivizing the wrong behavior. I think the behavior that you want to incentivize for both CvC and PvP conflict is proportional response. One of the issues with it that I’ve seen is when one character “wrongs” another, the second character (or player) turns their response up to 11 and immediately goes for the kill in order to remove the threat. That might be an effective strategy, but it doesn’t tell an interesting story.

I would find ways to incentivize (whether through XP, FS3 Luck points, public acclaim, or whatever) minor escalation that furthers the story rather than ends it. If someone says something nasty about your outfit at a gala, you don’t send a herd of cattle stampeding through their next gala, you bribe their modiste and have their next dress be the wrong shade or cut.

From a PvP perspective, that leaves the other character to respond and perhaps defeat your character… but from a CvC perspective, it leaves the other character still with the power and influence to continue telling the story with your character.

At one point, I had been kicking around the idea of an escalating relationship system that would work for both friendship/allies and enemies/rivals, where if you and the other player agreed that your characters were in that relationship, you would get a series of benefits based on the length and depth of that relationship, where some of the greatest rewards would come from the biggest sacrifice - i.e. when you lost a major conflict with your Rival, you would get some significant meta-bennies (what those were would really need to be worked out on a theme basis) so long as you accepted the loss gracefully on an OOC level.

I never got as far as fully mechanizing it, but I do like the idea of incentivizing difficult relationships. (On the allies side, the benefits came from taking risks or losses to help your ally/friend.)

One of the issues which hasn’t been brought up yet is “who is involved”.

Because, honestly, I’ve had more problems in IC conflict from people who weren’t involved but now are sticking their oars in without anyone requesting their “help” than I have from straight conflict. Two characters have a bar fight or an argument, and both players are fine with it, but suddenly five other characters all want to jump in and make it a much Bigger Thing than it needed to be, and usually they’re nowhere near as respectful of other players as the original conflict-folks were.

That’s where a lot of PvP resentment and clusterfucks come from, in my experience, and neither of the original folks have any control over what those players do, even when it pretty much ruins what WAS a fun, rich conflict plot.

@somasatori said in Numetal/Retromux:

Someone once told me (paraphrased) that the primary difference between maintaining OOC respect for your fellow players after a PVP/tense situation at a LARP and maintaining OOC respect and kindness towards your fellow MUSHers in the same situation is that MUSHers are not obligated to sit in a booth with each other at IHOP at 2am after we’ve finished our scenes.

Anonymity can be a real motivator in being a serious asshole towards others – which is interesting, because I’m fairly certain we’ve all known each other (or of each other) for the better part of a decade (which is perhaps also what leads to PVP situations).

That said, PVP is a difficult one. On one hand, if you explicitly prohibit PVP in a WoD environment, it takes some of the bite out of inter-sphere relations. On the other hand, allowing for a no-holds-barred environment will make the game – from examples I’ve seen – into a tedious free-for-all. I’m not sure if it’s just my perception based on the people I talk to, but I feel like interest in PVP has dropped off in the last little while.

I used to be in a gaming club in college where a whole lot of people were Mind’s Eye Theatre players. For my money, I’d say there’s not a whole lot of difference in toxicity: lots of vicious personal enmity, gossip, blurring of OOC/IC boundaries, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and cheating. Having to look people in the face afterwards didn’t really seem to help any of it.

Big things for me:

1. Is the house rule clearly explained so I know how it is likely to affect my play?
2. Does it pass the “smell test”? Which is to say, when I read the rule, can I see what it’s trying to do, do I agree with what it’s trying to do, and do I think it will actually accomplish that? (And, honestly? WoD/CoD generally DOES need a little more houseruling than it gets when trying to blend spheres that have conflicting powers/themes/foci.)
3. Do I think it’ll be fun and fair to all players?

If those three things are a yes, then I’m willing to run with it. When you’re talking about big changes–adding or removing or completely rehauling a system like pledges or whatever–then I do want the new rules to maintain the theme and appeal of the game for me. Like, HR rules to streamline making spirits and how they interact with the world from the rather complicated setup in CoD? Sure, I’m in, as long as spirits are still CoD spirits in recognizable ways.

@Pavel said in Scenes within Scenes:

In my experience, it’s not even the case that the code is used to avoid people interrupting; it’s to avoid people having to keep track of fifty people’s poses to find the people their PC is closest to. If there are twenty or so people in a scene, it’s legitimately difficult for some of us to keep track of what’s going on, with places the ‘main’ scene turns into a bit of a pantomime, and the places scene is where we actually do the bulk of the RP—occasionally stopping to shout ‘he’s behind you’ to the main stage.

It’s a surprisingly elegant solution to that problem.

Yeah, this is what I like places for. I do not mind large scenes; I can actually really enjoy a large scene, even an announcements-and-meeting scene! But I want to have a sense of being able to RP with a smaller group WITHIN that space without having to always worry about missing poses or spamming the greater room (since a small conversation is likely to go faster than the larger scene).

Places help keep me engaged and on track. I’d want any replacement for them to be able to tick those boxes. (I get why Ares can’t, and I can’t even imagine the nightmare it’d be for logging.)

@KarmaBum said in Scenes within Scenes:

@Roadspike said in Scenes within Scenes:

If it’s a one-way scene that again, can’t be interrupted? Don’t make it a scene! I’m sure we’ve all been in plenty of scenes where we thought, “This didn’t need to be a scene, it could’ve been a post/vignette/scene-set.” So don’t make them scenes. Have the GM post up their too-important-to-be-interrupted scene as a Vignette, and then have the actual scene be everyone’s reaction to it afterwards. You know, when people can actually interact with each other without interrupting.

Shouldn’t the solution be to find a way to make it more interactive? Like, if the King is making a proclamation that affects all the PCs, wouldn’t you want that scene to be something people show up to?

Even if they know they can’t stop the speech, can’t they RP trying? Throw the ST a curveball and bring a rotten tomato and wind up getting arrested?

It seems like the assumption of “all the PCs show and watch like good boys & girls” may make it easier for the ST, but it’s not giving characters much room to maneuver.

Honestly?

No. Please don’t do this. It’s not fun for anyone but the troublemaker, and as much as large scenes with announcements can be trying, they become five thousand times worse when people decide they want to make it “exciting” by acting like dipshits so that maybe Leader Daddy/Mommy will spank them and justify their hate boner.

It’s a bit different if a PC has a real stake/influence in what’s going on - if someone announces that they’re going to be taking over X business or attacking Y faction, then obviously I expect X and Y to raise an immediate ruckus. But keep the edgy tomato-throwers as far away as possible.

Or be as snarky as your heart’s content…at a place where the rest of the scene doesn’t have to deal with it.

I feel like there were a few games – Star Trek games, maybe? Back in the Days of Yore that had where you could spectate scenes in viewing rooms - like watch an Away Team get into wacky adventures. I wouldn’t mind that sort of set up for the Big Scene People Need To Be At…but honestly, traditional places are more flexible.

You can get up from one place and find another. You can choose to pose to the ‘bigger’ scene and so can other people at other places, so it’s not really posing to an empty room. It honestly works pretty well, even if it’s not 100% ideal.

In Ares, some games tried to emulate it with having multiple rooms per scene that represented areas you could move to, which isn’t a horrible workaround, but still a bit clumsy.

Very much a fan of traditional places. If we MUST have large scenes where a few key characters are going to Do Stuff and the rest of the characters need to sit there and watch, then at least give me the opportunity to RP with a few people while watching without spamming the rest of the scene.

Hate Ares places system because it doesn’t fix the main thing I want from tabletalk - reducing the number of poses I see that I don’t need to react to and making it easier for me to keep up with the poses my character is focusing on.

For me, it’s all about…matching energy.

I’m typically an enthusiastic player. I’ll be out there, approaching people, trying to set up scenes, I’ve got ideas for small scenes or PrPs, and my character has goals and things they want to accomplish.

But that takes energy, which I get back from feeling other people’s enthusiasm coming back to me. In poses, in reaching out with ideas or wanting scenes, in responses from staff, in plotty scenes that seem to accomplish something.

If the energy is off balance, especially if I’m bleeding out more than I’m getting back, then I’m going to end up drifting away. Usually, I realize I’m done with a game when I haven’t logged on in 3-5 days and I realize…I don’t regret it.

But it’s all about the energy exchange, not really about the completeness of the story or the structure of the game itself. When I log on, do I feel like my excitement is matched by other players/staff? If yes? I’m locked in for whatever is going on. If no? I’ll drift away.

I’m probably unusual in that, in theory, I would be happy to pay for playing in a MU* on some sort of subscription model. I’ve kicked in for tabletop games before, so contributing to someone taking the time and energy to make entertainment for me isn’t a hard ask!

In practice, though, it would raise my standards for what I expected in return to the point where I’d want a professional product, as opposed to the hobbyist arrangements we have now. And I doubt that’s sustainable with a persistent online world on a price point where I’d feel comfortable signing up. (It works fine in tabletop, because you schedule your time, you outline what the parameters are going to be, etc. But with a persistent setting, you need to guarantee, for example, that a player in the UK or China is going to get the same quality of experience as one on the East Coast of the US, which means GMs guaranteed to run relevant plots at those times, etc. And MUDs probably have an advantage because many/most systems are automated.)

But…I dunno. I think it would depend a lot on the experience and value that was offered, how trustworthy I considered the person offering it, and what the cost was.

Man, I wish. I would play the heck out of that game. All the players can be the quirky townsfolk with our own farms, and the Harvest Festival is this MASSIVELY OVERWROUGHT thing that nobody in the surrounding towns understands and thinks is kinda weird, but you know what, it means we somehow manage to grow bizarre and magical variations of all sorts of fruits and veggies, so they just…let us do our thing and buy our food.

Meanwhile, we’re all gearing up and marching into magical wildernesses to try and find the Perfect Turnip Seed and grow it in our special soil made from dragon manure, the soil beneath a dark cult’s sacrificial altar, and shards of sunlight taken from the peak of a frozen mountain.

And if our Perfect Turnip weighs even an ounce less than our Rival’s we will throw the biggest tantrum in the county.

@tsar said in Brainstorming Game Ideas:

I think the biggest pull for a game, more than theme, is how excited the game runner is to be there. If you’re connected, if you’re putting in the energy-- you’ll get someone. You might not get dozens and dozens of people, that’s rare these days anyway. But frankly you can run a very successful game with a core group of players who are excited with you.

This.

A game creator who has a strong vision for their game and is excited about the things they want to do with the game will hook me in if the game is even vaguely in my thematic wheelhouse. It might not KEEP me, for various reasons, but if a GM can talk with great enthusiasm about their farming fantasy MU* where everyone is trying to grow the best crops for the Harvest Festival in Autumn, going out to track down rare seeds, magical fertilizers, and whatever? I’d be drawn in!

@Roadspike said in Tips for GMs:

@Pavel Agreed. And there’s nothing wrong with calling for some Wits checks and then just providing them with the necessary information if they can’t figure it out based on your clues. Maybe your clues aren’t as brilliant as you thought they were, maybe the players just had a bad day and aren’t braining well, or maybe they’re shy of putting an idea forward for fear of being wrong. There’s no shame in either just giving them the information they need, or going the Brindlewood Bay method of “whatever solution the PCs come up with was the correct one, so long as their rolls were good enough.”

My life became a lot better, as a GM, when I really understood that the things I thought were So Clear as clues were only clear because I knew what the plot was. Expecting players to read my mind to understand what I was hoping they’d get was really just frustrating everyone.

Besides, I have come to believe that it’s rarely the process of getting information that is the most exciting–it’s seeing what players do with information once they have it. (Which isn’t to say I don’t love a good research or questioning scene, but I try to focus on ‘failure means consequences, not a shutdown’ as much as I can. (Which isn’t always as much as I want–a tired brain drags us all down, on occasion.)

I got my only accusation of racism as a school counselor over schedule changes, and upon investigation, realized where it came from. I was denying schedule changes according to the written policy, but certain students (mostly wealthy and white) appealed over my head to a vice principal who made the schedule changes they requested, so it very much looked like some students were receiving favorable treatment (which they were, just not from me).

Unfortunately, there was no denying that the school and district had issues with systemic racism, which made it understandable that parents would become frustrated.

I prefer web-based, but echo what people have said about anything being fine so long as it’s clear and well-documented.

Breaking prohibitions against politics, and being a bigoted piece of shit. No Nazi bars here, thanks. We’ll be deleting their posts.

@Lain-Iwakura You’re pretty behind the times, then. Plenty of MUDs still exist - you might find r/MUD more to your preferences. This forum doesn’t generally talk much about them because they’re different audiences and different design philosophies.

But there’s plenty of discussion on r/MUD, and MUDs are still being made!

I try to do a couple of different things, some of which have already been mentioned:

1. Try to read up on available plot hooks and backgrounds on other characters to find out what other players are interested in working with. (Sometimes this backfires, because people don’t necessarily always want the RP they put in their plot hooks/backgrounds - especially things like police/detective backgrounds.)

2. Seek people out. Don’t be afraid to say “Hey, I saw X on your RP Hooks, or that you’re involved in Y organization–my character is interested in that,” and see where it goes.

3. Listen! Pay attention to what people are throwing out in scenes, and respond to it. Give them a chance to talk about the things that excite their characters, do things their characters are good at doing.

4. Ask them for help in their characters’ areas of specialty. Sure, you can PROBABLY do whatever it is by yourself with a little prep, but it’s so much more fun to say, “Hey, I could use a face/muscle for this thing I want to do and I hear you’re good at that.”

5. React. Don’t be determined to be “too cool for school” about other characters’ weirdnesses. They were built that way for a reason - be grossed out, scared, weirded out, whatever. Go ahead and show a little emotion about other characters’ schitcks.

6. Reciprocity. If someone asks you for help IC, or gives you a bone–do the same in return. People notice, and in my experience, they’re so excited to have a real back and forth.

@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.