Roadspike

@Pavel Agreed, so long as that character’s well-earned no-sell of the incident doesn’t take away from the reaction of other characters and isn’t used (ICly or OOCly) to make the person who hasn’t seen a grue 15 times seem lesser.

@Kestrel It’s definitely a semantic difference, but I also think that it’s an important semantic difference. I think that seeing/using them synonymously can contribute to bleed and to feelings of competition rather than cooperation.

I don’t use CvC instead of PvP, I use it alongside PvP. You can have both on the same game (people working cooperatively OOCly to create a good story of competition between their characters versus people competing OOCly to have their characters win). I don’t even see PvP as a bad thing… it can be really fun sometimes if you’re doing it with folks that you trust. But I do think that it’s valuable to have terms for each, because they’re very different and—to bring things back full circle to the point of the thread—appeal to and bring in players of very different temperaments.

@Kestrel I agree that liking PvP in a creative writing game isn’t necessarily about being competitive. But what you’re describing isn’t, to me, PvP. I mean, it is, but not the way it usually (in my experience) plays out. What you’re describing isn’t two players competing, it’s two players cooperating so that their characters can get RP that they enjoy. It’s also a) the minority of PvP/CvC RP that I see, and b) the kind of PvP/CvC that I really enjoy.

I would honestly expect to see that sort of story being told in that OOCly-cooperative manner on a PvE game (I make sure to put some tension into the various factions in any game I’m running exactly because I like this kind of RP, even if there’s a greater threat causing them to work together).

@L.-B.-Heuschkel Yes, but…

A pure PvE environment without titles to gain or any “real” PvP… will still have people competing over something, even if it’s just “having the most-referenced posts in the community journal” or “getting in the pants of the new hottie” or “winning the quarterly basketball game.”

But you’re very right that designing away from PvP and toward PvE will limit some of the toxic aspects of PvP and competitiveness.

I tend to design games to encourage a particular playstyle, rather than to repel one. Mostly.

Most of this comes down to the mission statement that defines the whole game design (and gameplay) process. I will be very clear about what the game is and isn’t there, in hopes that people will self-select whether they’ll like the game or not. Policies are the next step, being very clear what will be encouraged and disallowed (PvP rules; alt rules; IC and OOC harassment rules; social contract; plotrunning rules; how real-life prejudices will be handled in a modern, historical, or near-historical setting; etc).

My general workflow is to determine what kind of RP I want to see on the game, how to support and encourage that, spot and remove any roadblocks to it (the waygate system in The Fifth World is my best example of that, we had a multi-planetary game, but didn’t want barriers to casual RP, so we added limited instant travel in so folks could be on whichever planet they wanted), and then let players know what the intended thrust of RP will be.

That being said, most of the choices of what I want to play: PvE, zero-tolerance-for-harassment, collaborative playstyle, combination of action and casual, clear reasons for people to work together (with IC friction), lend themselves toward the type of players that I enjoy playing with.

@Aria said in AI Megathread:

I’m pretty sure we’re all just living in the plot of Wall-E now and I hate it here.

Wall-E and Idiocracy. Yup.

There are definitely good reasons for not linking an AresMUSH handle to your account–there are creepers and assholes and rumormongers aplenty in our little hobby.

So I agree that no one is beholden to creating a last handle that goes beyond games, someone else’s safety is more important than my comfort.

But I will admit that I feel a great deal more comfortable when I recognize the handle of staff on a game and I know who I’m dealing with. It allows me to start out in a place of trust (or to avoid the game entirely if it’s someone I’ve had a bad run-in with in the past). If they have a handle that I don’t recognize, I will start out in a place of neither trust nor distrust. There should always be room for new folks to come into the hobby and start up a game, but for me at least, it always makes me feel a little better to recognize a handle that I know and trust on the staff list.

I also think that staff should always have their player bits linked to their staff bit. As others have pointed out, there’s a power imbalance there, and unless it’s recognized and called out, it can get treacherous. Sure, it can be nice to go “off duty” and pretend to not be a staffer for a while playing a “hidden alt,” but it’s also disingenuous, because you are a staffer, and you’re seeing things through staffer eyes the whole time, and can bring in the weight of staff whenever you want (either through yourself or one of your fellow staffers).

I agree with a lot of the takes here, particularly the ones around the impact of XP spend mechanics on neurospiciness.

I’m also one of those guys who really hates someone coming into a scene with a 2 Firearms and then suddenly having a 4 when they find out that shooting a gun is critical to the scene.

I’ve previously been of the opinion that setting your cooldown to about the frequency of XP drops (on games where XP is a weekly/monthly/daily/whatever occurrence) was the way to go, so that people could keep up with spending their weekly XP as it came in, but if they wanted to store XP, they couldn’t bank a bunk and plop it down all at once during a scene. But, as mentioned above, that runs into problems with ADHD and other neurospiciness (it’s not great for my OCD either because I feel like I’m “slipping” if I don’t do it at the same time each week, because I can’t ever get the hours I lost between the cooldown ending and my actual spend back).

I’m now coming around to the thought that (for FS3), the solution may be a 1-day cooldown for weekly XP (and a high XP pool cap, like 20ish). So yeah, someone can pick up a brand new skill (for 1 XP) or go from 1 to 2 (again for 1 XP) during a scene if they want to, but they can’t jump from 5 to 6, say. But if they’ve forgotten for a couple of weeks, they can go back over the next week and spend that XP one per day, and unless they’ve really been ignoring XP (like for 5 months), they won’t actually lose the XP. Should help out with the feeling that you need to “keep up” because if you forget for a couple of days, you can just spend immediately and your cooldown will be over before the next XP is given out. There’s still some waiting if you’re way back, but it shouldn’t be as impactful if you can spend XP every day if you’ve got a stash instead of having to wait a week.

@bear_necessities said in "My Guy Syndrome":

I’m going to push back a little here. … I also do my very best to know my place and try and decide if my presence in that scene is going to add to it. So if in your example the RP is happening in the biker bar, and the RP is happening because a gang of bikers is having a scene for their faction, and you are not in the faction, does your character add value to the scene?

@Faraday said in "My Guy Syndrome":

I still think there’s nothing wrong with politely bowing out of a scene where your character just doesn’t fit.

Fully agreed on both points. “Yes and”-ing yourself into a scene is great… if you fit yourself into the scene and respect the other players and characters to do it (and if they’re okay with it in the first place/the scene is open). People who come into a scene and take it over are at least as bad as My Guys.

I agree with both @Ashkuri’s list of problems, and @Faraday’s perspective that they aren’t always problems. I think that @chorus and @SockMonkey have an important point to bridge that attitude gap that Faraday mentioned: sure, there are some things that your character wouldn’t normally do… but we don’t play this game to play “normally” do we? I often like to think, “No, normally my character wouldn’t be caught dead in that biker bar where the RP is happening, so why is my character there?”