@Gashlycrumb don’t be ridiculous, they obviously got dinner from the theatre news site and forum BroadwayWorld

@MidnightCreature said:
But I still don’t exactly vibe with leaning so heavily on the volunteer aspect of it. It’s not as if game staff are performing a service in the way that going and working at a food bank or an animal shelter is. It’s more like going to a theater group and offering to work as part of the stage crew to help put together free community performances.

all of those things are volunteer work tho. when people bring up the “volunteer” aspect, it’s not (in my experience) to try and call to mind some specific form of volunteering that involves feeding the hungry or something. it’s literally just to say that you can’t expect performance consistency at the level of a paid job.

volunteering for a theatre is just as much volunteering as for a food bank. the point is someone not being paid and only working in a limited capacity, not making a moral point about the work being done.

So a person shouldn’t staff on a game unless they’re actually into doing the work of being a GM/Storyteller/Dungeon Master. Like, if you don’t enjoy being a storyteller and interacting with players, then you probably shouldn’t be staffing on a game.

most people do, though. most staffers IME do so because they enjoy some aspect of staffing. the problem is that no amount of enjoying helping players or running plots can survive having to do so for players who make the work miserable to do.

But I don’t think it should be used as a blanket response to criticism about someone consistently not doing the basic things attached to a role they voluntarily chose to take on or when they break their own rules with the regularity of the tides. If someone wants the authority and control that come with staffing a game, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for players to expect them to actually perform the functions of that role.

to me, i feel like the comments are often more about perspective, particularly because these issues often get brought up as big moral failings. which — no. it’s a hobby frustration. someone dragging their feet on jobs is an annoyance, not a moral calamity.

Saw this on Bluesky and thought it appropriate to share:

“A joyous fat bear week to all ”

https://bsky.app/profile/lollibeepop.bsky.social/post/3mwbbihwvo222

@Gashlycrumb said:

@Roz I have already ceded the “It’s Not Abuse” Point. Call it something else, I will adapt, it’s not my call.

i hadn’t read your replies as such. that’s really the only part i was arguing, so godspeed

I know there are some people on here who find me extremely annoying. Who am I to say they are wrong? I over-explain shit and I write these +requests that are too damn long and then I go, “But no, that’s not what I mean, I’m sorry,” and do it all over again, and I talk funny and I’m moody and I do other annoying shit like fail at sarcasm.

okay. i mentioned it in the context of you presenting the response you eventually received (the “you don’t take no for an answer and i didnt’ want to deal”) and then seemed to connect it with “i am indeed very annoying” so i took that to mean you didn’t disagree with the idea that you were being a difficult player to deal with. that’s all. i just meant that i was going off of your words.

Are you not annoying?

lol probably?

@Gashlycrumb said:
@Roz This is the GM that I need to do anything that needs a GM. They withhold all of this service interminably because I annoy them but leave me to believe I am in the queue. They did not tell me I annoyed them or that they were doing this because of it. They knew I had been frustrated by this long term.

okay. bad behavior? sure. still not abuse.

@Gashlycrumb said:

@Roz said:

i mean…i feel that i am responding to how gashly characterized the situation themselves. in which they seemed to agree that they were being a difficult player.

My bad. I don’t agree that I am a difficult player. I think the opposite. But if you find me annoying, who am I to say you’re wrong?

i don’t know that i’ve ever played on a game with you. you called yourself “legitimately extremely annoying.”

And you still shouldn’t cheat at RPGs to avoid annoying people when you’re the one who can just tell them to leave the table and avoid them properly.

yes, you shouldn’t cheat at things. (what behavior that you’ve described is the cheating???) cheating at an RPG is, again, not abuse.

@Gashlycrumb said:

@Roz said:
, breaking them down, punishing them, belittling them.

someone trying to avoid you is not doing those things. like, unless you have additional context to add to indicate that these actions were taken to punish you and not to simply — not have to interact with you.

@MidnightCreature said in Liberation Drama!?:
Ultimately I have no idea what @gashlycrumb was so persistent about or what their particular situation was but added context there could potentially be meaningful. I am going to assume good faith and the Crumb was reaching out to Siren in a way that was perfectly normal for a player to do.

i mean…i feel that i am responding to how gashly characterized the situation themselves. in which they seemed to agree that they were being a difficult player. they presented the complaint as “you repeatedly wouldn’t take no for an answer” (which is not normal good player behavior) and didn’t refute the characteristic. so i am taking their presentation in good faith. just not agreeing with the resulting descriptor.

@Gashlycrumb said:
Siren informed me that she deliberately ignored all communication from me for half a year because I “don’t take no for an answer,” so she “can’t be bothered” with me. I am legitimately extremely annoying, but what she didn’t do is tell me that I was being punished or why,

(Nor indeed did she tell me to close the discussion and take no for an answer until after this lengthy silent treatment, which extended to all communication with her and rendered all but BaRP play out of reach.)

By the way, covert punishment is a form of abuse. It’s not a mere red flag, it’s one of the crevasses that red flags warn you against. It’s wrong and abusive even if you do it to a horrible person like myself.

okay i don’t think this is great behavior. but not every instance of someone ignoring you is abusive. the silent treatment can absolutely be abusive in intimate relationships – familial, romantic, friendship, etc. but it is utilized for specific purposes when it’s abusive: controlling someone, breaking them down, punishing them, belittling them.

a hobby acquaintance ignoring you because you’ve made yourself repeatedly unpleasant for them to deal with could be immature, it could be irresponsible, it could even be assholeish. but i am hard-pressed to call the specific scenario you’ve described as abusive.

Duncan Sheik at just 56

@Evilgrayson said:

Ah, yes, another active player who was running things for others removed.

AddisonPlayer could be annoying. We butted heads on a few things, a few times. But he did a lot for the game, and a lot for other people.

I mean, idk the specifics of this game and this player, but. That is the story for plenty of banned folks who definitely deserved banning. I really don’t think “they do a lot for the game” should be a variable in this sort of equation at all; it implies that a certain level of wrong-doing can just be made up for if you’re active and productive enough. That’s how you end up with the classic “coder we ‘can’t’ get rid of.”

And “players show different faces to different people” ought to go without saying.

The game may still be a trashfire being run into the ground or whatnot! I don’t know. But whenever people react to a ban with “but they do a lot for the game” or “they weren’t that bad to me” it makes me sigh a bit.

@Kestrel said:

Calling it wish fulfilment is wild. I had my character attacked at sea, drowned, swallowed by a whale, and kept trapped in an underwater dimension for a week at one point, none of which I wish to experience IRL, nor did I require control over the story, or need to know what was going to happen in order to enjoy it.

to be fair, it can be wish fulfillment in the sense that people are into the topics in a fictional setting that they don’t want to happen IRL; that would just mean the wish being fulfilled is doing RP/story around the concepts. you can find folks happily kinking on any of those scenarios. these can just be masochism, breathplay, vore, and confinement

which is, again, why i think it’s silly for a line to get drawn around the idea of not wanting CNC kinky players to enjoy the noncon RP in a kinky way. like, buddy, people kink on all types of horror a whole lot

@Shygaming said:
Can you imagine how compelling The Handmaid’s Tale would have been if all the women were actually secretly into what was happening to them? If everyone in Gilead had enthusiastically consented then you have not made the story safer. You have removed the entire point of the story.

The same is true more broadly. A kidnapping story where the hostage wants to be kidnapped is not really a kidnapping story. A horror story where the victim wants to be hunted is something else entirely. A dystopia where everyone genuinely enjoys being oppressed has lost the thing that made it dystopian.

buddy i don’t know how to tell you that the CHARACTERS are not the same thing as the PLAYERS. the CHARACTERS are not secretly into it. the CHARACTERS are experiencing a horrific nonconsensual trauma.

if you think that a player cannot happily RP a thing that their character is horrified or traumatized by — sorry, but that’s a skill issue.

and, again, you are still going to be attracting players who are into the CNC aspect! you have built tools for it. they will still have their kinky fun. CNC refers to the PLAYERS engaging consensually with the topic, not the characters. it’s non-diegetic kink.

it’s just that this overall perspective actually prioritizes players who are into inflicting stuff specifically on those who don’t want it. they want the other PLAYER to feel violated, not the characters.

so it’s just like — you are disdaining the players who might enjoy this together but in a way i guess you find icky?? But you are enabling the players whose goal is actually OOC harm.

you should much prefer having the CNC kink players to the latter.

@Shygaming said:

The middle ground where it is technically possible but only if the victim OOCly opts into it turns it into CNC fetish play almost by definition. At that point the “evil rapist” isn’t actually imposing something horrible on another character. The two players have negotiated a rape fantasy together.

counterpoint: instead of encouraging CNC fetish play, you’re instead enabling the people who are getting off on violating the other player, rather than the character. that is: the people for whom the enjoyment is in making the other player feel upset and being able to do stuff in the game to them the other player doesn’t want.

but also you’re still gonna get plenty of folks signing up for CNC fun. seems a little silly to get precious about it. like it just feels like "okay nobody better get gross and kinky and enjoy this, we’re above all that! it’s only okay to RP this if it makes the players miserable.

And I’ve seen that dynamic poison games before. I genuinely cannot count how many times I’ve seen some supposedly awful villain doing horrific things to another character while everyone involved OOC is having a wonderful time and the “victim” is actively helping arrange it. It stops functioning as an unpleasant consequence of living in a horrible setting and starts functioning as content being provided for people who want that content.

it seems weird to frame this as “a horrible thing is no longer being imposed on another character.” cause it is? like, in this scenario the character doesn’t want it. it’s just that the players are having fun while the characters aren’t. isn’t that usually the goal? is the goal instead for players to be upset/unhappy???

@Jennkryst said:

@Pavel said:

Code should never override a player’s agency in such a way; it is anathema to how I believe MU stories should be told.

Hyperbolic example that is hyperbolic on purpose because I think there are some things that should actually be enforced, roleplay vs rollplay (everyone take a drink!):

note the “in such a way” in that sentence. it wasn’t using an example for a general point about code vs player consent. it was talking specifically about that specific topic. that is: sexual assault of a character forced on a player.

it’s not hyperbole; it’s the literal topic of the thread.

this is getting wildly over the paygrade of a MU hobby forum but i’ll just say that it’s real common for people to get titillated by taboo in fictional format that has literally zero presence in their real life attractions. because the human brain is fucking weird. oftentimes the taboo is doing all the heavy lifting.

game staff are in the position of basically needing to be available to potentially arbitrate whatever content they allow on their game. so if a game’s staff doesn’t want to deal with a particular topic, they should feel free to disallow it. game themes are naturally exclusionary: every game has to define what it’s about and what’s allowed there, and that includes everything from “no guns in our medieval-esque fantasy game” to “none of this particular topic that is likely to need to be arbitrated eventually that i don’t personally want to arbitrate.”

i think decisions like that can be made alongside the acknowledgment that this is just one gamerunner deciding what they want to deal with on their game, and not a statement about whether it’s okay for two adults to RP a thing. it doesn’t have to be a judgment or condemnation.

@Yam said:

I want everyone’s opinion of what counts as gritty realism GO

everyone’s parents have now been murdered. Revenge Orphan MUSH

@MisterBoring said:

@Roz There’s also the idea of a setting that focuses on children as the main character. That can be acceptable as long as the content isn’t horrible. Examples would be things like Kids on Bikes or Tales from the Loop. Both focus on kids as PCs, but in both cases they’re very Goonies / Stranger Things adjacent, so the worst thing that happens to the kids is minor injuries or getting chased by a robot bent on rewriting history.

i’d say that’s a whole different topic. that’s children as PCs, not children as NPCs.

@bear_necessities said:

If you log into a game and there’s people trying to rape your character immediately upon chargen why did you continue playing there?

i mean, it was stated pretty clearly on the post?

@Jumpscare said:

I knew of all the horrible stuff that went on in Haven, so my quest was to study it to ensure nothing of that sort could happen in Silent Heaven.

@Jumpscare said:

So I went into Haven with the intention of taking notes.

@MisterBoring said:

Mentioning them in passing without them being present in a scene is fine, but them actively being a part of the ongoing scene / storyline is not (for me).

to me, a child NPC being part of a scene is very different from them being part of an ongoing storyline. the latter implies an actual plot. the former can be a passing accessory or flavor to the scene.

i had a kid NPC i greatly enjoyed on Arx and it definitely wasn’t wish fulfillment lmao. i don’t want kids at all. but he was specifically a weirdo kid i’d just bring along now and then (if it was the right season for him) to be weird. and tbh he was specifically curious about other characters and would ask them questions about themselves, which is usually a good route for RP fun.

anyways yeah what sao said. when done well it’s fun, when not it’s annoying. and tbf there’s a lot of mileage may vary. some people hate it no matter what. i tended to ask first if people were interested/okay with it.