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.

@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!

@MisterBoring said in Empire Discussion Thread:

@somasatori I totally agree with this. Each character in the roster could have a set of links to the important world lore that drives their character to help people find what they need to know.

Looks like this has been done! It’s pretty helpful - there’s a nice in-web-site glossary now that lets you get immediate information on what certain things are.

@Tez Spoken on game:
[Public] Ada: See someone was asking about AI use, to which the answer is it was used for a list of names, about six images, and as a programming aid. No writing at all.
Albrecht has entered the game.

I’m impressed at the roster selections for characters, and it looks like several of the Houses have some meaty problems set up for them right off the bat, including at least one House who has to deal with being the royal family in a region where the King is insane.

Not all families have THAT level of excitement going on, so it feels like you can pick your level of conflict at least initially. The setting is interesting and each region has a different take on what nobility is and what the obligations of nobles are, providing a lot of opportunity to explore differences of ideology. The staff member I’ve interacted with has been pleasant and responsive.

Downsides: the coding is still a bit of a work in progress, and it wouldn’t surprise me if early play involves bughunting and debugging. Doesn’t bother me too much, but if that’s something that will cause you anxiety, I’d definitely say give it a little time to shake the bugs out.

@Ominous I would LOVE THAT so much. There was a game that briefly tried something like that set in London, but it never quite launched. But yeah, a society of spooky investigators, whether it was ‘official’ or not, would be great if you can find a way to keep the ‘missions’ coming, knowing that 80ish percent of players will not run anything.

And all of those very good comments are the flip-side of the issue:

Players/staff aren’t necessarily GOOD at dealing with these kinds of issues. No one wants to play a game with That Guy who is drooling at the thought of playing a Klansman. Not a lot of people want to play on the game where staff are like “women can’t be anything but mothers and wives because That’s Historically Accurate” (when it never has been). It’s exhausting to try and build something authentic that is actually fun to play, so I don’t honestly blame anyone for saying “I want something that’s got the fun parts and not the unfun parts”.

I just mourn the kind of stories that could be played if more people could be trusted with these kinds of subjects.

I admit, I am a person who wants historically accurate -isms and resistances in historical games. Does that mean I want to see a bunch of racist, sexist, bigoted PCs? No, of course not.

But these societal forces shaped the era and had a lot of impact on the culture, the structure of society, and the pressures that drove people to accomplish amazing and heartbreaking things. When you remove, for example, the fact that suffragettes could be and were tortured and murdered by law enforcement for campaigning for women’s rights, then the courage it took to be a suffragette is diminished. If you’re talking about union-building, I think you have to include the fact that union-busters used racism to try and drive working class groups apart, even if that effort fails in the context of your game. If you’re talking 1920s-30s, it’s a bit repugnant to me to not make it clear that it’s an era when the people who made some of the defining music of the era couldn’t have a drink in the “respectable” clubs they played in. It also helps contrast some of the speakeasys which were integrated and even havens for LGBT folk of the era, etc. The fact that people had to find refuge in criminality because the laws were bigoted and unjust is a huge part of the story of the era.

I just finished reading Last Night at the Telegraph Club (excellent book), and it’s a lesbian coming of age story that could not exist if you took out not just the anti-LGBTQ prejudice of the 40s, but also the harassment and abuse of Chinese immigrants by immigration officials on anti-Communist witchhunts.

Does every game have to include this stuff? No, of course not. It’s your game, make what you have fun with. But there are valid reasons for including major societal pressures that have nothing to do with wanting to abuse other players or PCs by playing a bigoted character.

Valdemar.

Valdemar is really made for MU*s. You’ve got several different kinds of magic powers, Heralds are canonically pretty promiscuous, there’s light lords-n-ladies action, with familiars and Companions and bondbirds you get all the special magical animal friends you can stand, and it can be as adventurous as you want, depending on when in the timeline you set it.

I was 22, I think, and my mom had recently died, so I was sort of–floating, I guess. Looking for something to do, I was hoping to find something online relating to In Nomine, a game I love with all my heart but could never find anyone local to play with.

I found Brass and Steel, an In Nomine MU. I connected on raw telnet, and played on raw telnet for a full year or more, because I didn’t know that “clients” existed. There were only a few players on, but several of them became great friends, and one of them became my best friend, a friendship that has now lasted more than two decades, even though they don’t MU* anymore.

It was a fun game, and still has some of my most fond gaming memories.

@MisterBoring Any deets you can spill on why not? I admit I’m super intrigued by the system, but wasn’t a backer and haven’t done any real dives into the mechanics or theme.