@eddie I was going to go off on a bunch of your earlier points, but several others already got there with very similar things to what I was going to say. Plus… Woah… I just got to this post:

@eddie said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

Truth of the matter is…

And I’m pretty sure that your own story tells us everything we need to know about you. You “invested” time, effort, and in-game currency into something and didn’t get the attention of a player you were interested in, the attention that you felt was your due.

You realize that putting in time, effort, and money into another person without a business deal involved is called “being a friend,” right? And that you aren’t owed anything for it? Particularly not anything of a sexual nature? There is no ROI on being a friend to someone, you do what you do because they’re your friend, not because you’re going to get something out of it.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

I just think that on a game where a core theme of the setting is conflict between factions, making that conflict between players meaningless or even impossible for no IC logical reason makes the game setting just as pointless and boring.

You can have conflict between characters without having PvP. Even if the rule is “you can’t directly harm another PC” there’s a whole lot you can still do to play out conflict. Your lack of imagination is your problem, not a problem of PvE games.

It’s like making a game set in the marvel cinematic universe but no one is allowed to play as the heroes or villains, they can only play normal people doing normal things.

Um… no it’s not. It’s like making a game set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but no one is allowed to play as villains, just heroes – oh wait, that’s pretty much most comic book MU*s out there.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

Putting everyone on the same team means staff takes on the burden of being everyone else in the world.

This is actually almost universally true, unlike most of what you’ve said. A PvE game does require more Staff effort to create all of the antagonists and their actions to frustrate the PCs – but it requires less Staff effort to deal with assholes who are just out to grief other players by killing their characters.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

When the games started being about protecting the feelings of bad actors who instigated trouble then ran to staff for protection it all went to shit.

You have this backwards. Yes, there are some people who do bad things and then complain when they get consequences for those bad things, but those players exist on PvE games too, and they still try to weasel out of consequences. But by closely monitoring or eliminated PvP, you stop allowing the bad actors who instigated trouble by killing characters for OOC reasons – or just to grief the other players. The people who “make it their life goal to ruin things for everyone” aren’t the people asking that their characters not be killed off for no reason, it’s the people killing off other characters for no reason.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

What is happening now isn’t working. What people did then was working. Back in the day there were hundreds of active players on at a time. Now you’re lucky to see five.

Huh… sounds like you’re not on the games that are successful right now. Sure, they may not have 100 players at a time, but they’re perfectly happy with 30. It’s almost like MU*ing is an outdated technological medium whose primary players grew up and are now adults with jobs and lives and families rather than being high school or collect students who time on their hands.

Your issues sound like a you problem.

@sao This isn’t a direct reply to you, but you were the last one on the thread talking about this subject. For me, it’s the difference between “I don’t distrust you” and “I don’t trust you.” I’ll play on a game with Staff that I don’t distrust. I may not fully trust them, but I’m willing to offer them the chance to earn that trust. I will not play on a game where I don’t trust Staff. That is for the people who have already burned me or someone who I do trust.

And I agree that life is too short for the stress of “do I trust this person I’ve put in a position of power over my fun or not,” and this has only gotten more true as my life has gotten more full.

@Apos Agreed. Any time that someone asks me to define a term that should be common knowledge, I assume that they are just looking for clearly delineated rules that they can push the envelope on and then claim that they’re not breaking the actual rules.

Everyone should know what “creepy” means, and if they can’t avoid it, then they can’t play on any game I run.

Like a few of the previous posters, I couldn’t finish reading the log. It was disgusting. The use of the Luck point to gaslight a character “because it’s funny” was particularly heinous.

Apart from and beyond the horrific content, I also found the future-imperfect tense (or whatever ‘will’ and ‘would’ and the like are) posing grating.

Sorry, @Cobalt, that you had to deal with that, but also thank you for dealing with it so that it didn’t continue (even if it led to you closing your game down).

The parent(s) of student(s) at my district were picked up by ICE and detained. The student(s) are with family, but it’s still shaking up this tiny-ass rural, progressive island community. And it’s shaking up me too even if I’m white as Wonder Bread.

When you’ve got your brain-weasels going full-bore, and then someone reaches out about RP, and those nasty scratchy bitey things quiet down for a little bit.

@Pavel I get that you’re trying to take the most generous interpretation, and I was too – until I got to the talk about ROI. I completely understand being disappointed that a storyline didn’t work out how I wanted it to, how I planned for it to. I get that, it’s happened to me, and it’s sucked.

But, unless there was some specific agreement, no one should be talking about return on investment in interpersonal relations unless it’s some version of Prue Leith’s “It’s not worth the calories” where you’re deciding that the other person isn’t worth your time and so you’re disengaging yourself.

To expect a particular return on your investment from the other person, particularly where romantic RP/TS is involved… that’s way too close to “I bought her dinner and drinks, I deserve sex” for my comfort.

As for the other situation that @eddie mentioned – I really feel for them about that one. That sounds like an uncomfortable situation, and a boundary that they set properly and which was then crossed by another player. That’s not cool at all.

To me, the core of a Lords & Ladies game is that characters are grouped by families or groups that are competing for influence and prestige within a larger feudal or semi-feudal structure – and that the characters are influential people within the setting.

Now, this could be:

• wayfinders who lead family canoes between Polynesian islands, competing for pride of place
• competing cyberpunk megacorps all under a Corporate Court – so long as the PCs were high-level executives at the corps, rather than disposable espionage operatives
• knights and barons and viscountesses living in fantasy castles
• mafia families under a capo di tutti capi
• technoknights and starship captains in a semi-feudal, multi-system space empire
• daimyo and geisha in the Shogunate (or a fantasy version thereof)
• minor landed gentry in Victorian England (or a fantasy version thereof)

I don’t think that pseudo-European matters, but I agree that combat is usually going to be a means to gather influence or prestige rather than the point in and of itself.

I would actually love to see a Lords & Ladies game using FS3 autocombat for attacks on reputation – leave any physical combat to just straight rolls, because it’s just not as important as the social maneuvering.

@Pyrephox said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:

There are patterns of abuse that can really on be seen AS A PATTERN, because each individual incident is small and easily dismissed.

This is why reporting even just “a creepy feeling” is so important. More than once, I have gotten reports from multiple players (and noticed myself) that a player was giving off a creepy vibe, testing those boundaries with people. When confronted, the creep revealed themselves via their responses and were removed – after they were removed, several additional people came forward to say that they had been targeted.

If you are being victimized by someone, chances are that you are not alone in this. If I (as Staff) get one report of someone being generally creepy, I’ll watch them more closely, but if I get four reports from people in three different playgroups? Yeah, that person’s probably gone, even if each of the reports is just “felt like they were pushing boundaries.” Unless it’s obvious, I’ll talk with the prospective creep, but it’s definitely going to be easier a) to be direct with them about the problem, and b) to obfuscate those reporting the problem, if I have multiple reports.

@KarmaBum If you like FS3, I do happen to have the stats I put together from The Network’s Western series that y’all could use as a starting point.

@DrQuinn said in Historical Games Round 75:

Like a social contract is great, but also is going to probably ensure that your player base is mostly white.

I think that that depends on what’s in the social contract. Like, if the social contract says that no racism will be allowed onscreen, that’s going to be different than if it says you can only inflict it upon your own character, and that’s going to be different than if it says that racism is baked into the setting but that all characters will strive against it, and that’s going to be different than if the contract doesn’t mention racism at all.

The social contract can be used to set expectations for level of engagement with various pain points – at any level of engagement.

@Tez said in Historical Games Round 75:

Throw them out. Throw them the fuck out.

Agreed 100%. You don’t let the nice Nazis in your bar, or they’ll drive off the non-Nazis and bring your friends, and then you have a Nazi bar.

@Trashcan Thank you for articulating this so nicely. It’s a very blurry line that I have issues with myself. Do you disallow IC discrimination at all (as has been neatly pointed out by others, this has its own problems with telling stories of resistance)? Do you only allow it based on non-real-world reasons (“hedge mages suck, werewolves rule!”)? Do you only allow players to apply it to their own characters (that doesn’t stop someone from fetishizing the struggle that another player may have to deal with in RL)?

I don’t know that there are good, “right” answers to any of those questions.

I do agree with others above that if I don’t trust the game runners to enforce the boundaries of their playerbase, the answer to most questions is “no.”

@mietze said in Historical Games Round 75:

I’ve always told people I understand how exploring certain themes from the relative safety of RP is very appealing but that’s probably something better done in a private game or one that the playerbase is heavily vetted because on a public one, one with randos, or one with many “friends” of friends, you are increasing the likelihood of someone who has no business exploring those themes with others being able to come in. Maybe sometimes there’s staff willing to police it, and if there is and you like that avenue of play rather than whining you better treat them well, because most people don’t have time or patience for that.

I think this is a great take, but I also think that some of this can be covered with the use of a Social Contract as described by James Mendez Hodes in one of his several very good blog posts on historical (tabletop) roleplaying:

https://jamesmendezhodes.com/blog/2018/11/10/best-practices-for-historical-gaming

If Staff lays out from the start what is acceptable to see on-screen and what is not, what will be argued about on-screen and what will be accepted, then anyone who violates that Social Contract can pre-emptively be shown the door, allowing those who remain to explore the setting to the extent that they feel comfortable within the protections of that Contract.

@Raistlin said in Missed Settings:

5. Buffy. The setting is so great that I’m shocked there weren’t more of these games, and there aren’t any around today.

I think this has the same problem that Firefly does: the characters are more of a draw than the setting is. For instance, I don’t want to play in the Browncoat-a-verse as much as I want to play with Jayne and Kaylie and the rest of the crew – and no, FCs aren’t enough. Likewise, I would want to play with Spike and Angel and Faith and Willow and Oz… more than in a generic-ish vampire-slaying modern (or '90s period piece) world.

I started on a DIKU MUD called Dark Castle – no RP, just mob-killing.

After a little bit, I wandered over to The Weave, and then to A Moment in Tyme. That was the first game that really got me hooked on MU*ing as I know it now. It was an RP MUD that provided XP (eventually) for both killing mobs and for posing, and then even more eventually the mobs were removed and it was only XP for posing (but the stat system was still otherwise all MUD-style).

That was way back in 1994.

While I’m a big proponent of character-death-when-it’s-appropriate-to-the-story, one thing that I think needs to be talked about a little bit is how that death will impact other characters. Do the players of your character’s loved ones (family, significant others, packmates, etc) want to play out grief?

While I think that character death should pretty much always be done with player consent (except in the case of Aim for the Bushes, but I consider that consent-by-continuation-after-warnings), there’s also the non-death effects on everyone around the character to consider, and a lot of folks (myself included) who have gone for death-for-drama’s-sake haven’t always considered the knock-on effects.

I haven’t seen a non-consent permadeath in more than a decade. Again, back on KotOR, there was a crewman of the Sith Empire who mouthed off to both superior officers and Sith, and when threatened with the brig, attacked a superior officer and Sith. They were OOCly told by a Staffer that it would likely result in character death, and that led to OOC yelling about how it wasn’t fair and they weren’t going to the brig and they would leave the game. The character chose to attack the other PCs, was killed, and left the game. Everyone was happier (save perhaps the player of the dead character).

On another note, one thing that I really appreciated from The Network was that the short seasons (4-6 months usually) meant that character death was less painful. You could have a complete arc for your character within a season, and end it with riding off into the sunset, death, a cliffhanger, or whatever else you liked, without worrying about being “behind” people who kept their character in the midst of their story. The only downside was that if there was a second season in the same world, you might have problems bringing your character back for another go-around (except during the Soap Opera season, that one would have been easy).

I have seen factions done. I have seen it done in an… okay manner. It was baked into the theme. But there were always players who took things too hard, and went too hard, and made it less fun for those around them.

I do think that it’s possible to do CvC (but not PvP) antagonism, so long as it’s managed very carefully.

As others on this thread have pointed out, I think it starts with transparency, includes making outcomes not involve character death, and then I think that it moves on to making it clear that the conflict is Characters vs Character, and that the players are all there to work together to make a fun story. Even then, all it takes is one sore loser or sore winner and things can spiral out of hand.

As far as transparency is concerned, I think that it’s important for players to know what they’re getting into, how the conflict will be adjudicated, and what the possible outcomes will be. The example that @Aria gave is a great one – up until the one Staffer changed things up.

When character death is on the line, players get twitchy. I think that if you can make sure that death isn’t on the line, people are more likely to engage in CvC conflict in good faith. Starting a new character from scratch when you liked the deceased one, or they had some cool gear/stats, or they had great connections – it can be incredibly frustrating, and people will act in bad faith to avoid that frustration.

I do also think that one thing that can help is making sure that the opposing factions are fighting past each other, not fighting against each other. As an example, way back on KotOR MUSH, we had the Sith and the Republic fighting over a neutral system. Except they couldn’t attack each other, because if they did, then the neutral system would support whichever side was attacked. So each side had to work to make the other side look bad, and themselves look good, without ever actually fighting one another.

It’s been long enough that I don’t honestly remember how it turned out – it may have collapsed into complete crap – but I like the general idea of it as an opportunity for CvC antagonism. It means that no PC is directly beating up another PC, so there’s no chance of death (or even maiming).

I don’t see anything at all wrong with players only RPing with other players that they explicitly like – unless they’re hoarding plot in doing so. I think it’s an entirely healthy reaction to want to prioritize RP with those whose RP you explicitly enjoy.

However, I do agree with those who have said that it’s better for the health of the game (and usually the character too) if you expand that pool to at least try RPing with folks you don’t know, or have neutral feelings toward sometimes. Sure, you might find some people you have absolutely zero interest in RPing with again, but you might also find some people that you’d like to add to the list of folks you’re interested in RPing with regularly. Beyond that, it allows stories and plot to spread from group to group across the MU*, connecting play groups in organic ways so that it’s not a setting with a half dozen scattered and separate plots going on, but a world with interconnected stories taking place in it.