Best posts made by spiriferida

Getting past inertia/nerves and just reaching out to ask people if they want to RP

The notion that a romantic partner to my character should be the person I spend the most time RPing with - 70% of it, apparently.

unsurprisingly my character is no longer in a relationship

@Istus

Talk openly about the atmosphere you want to create, give examples of behavior you don’t want to see. When people are acting shitty casually, don’t let it slide in the moment - call it out. “We don’t do that here” is a good phrase. Don’t wait for people to report things to remove someone, if you’re seeing red flags. As a game runner you’re insulated from some of the shitty behavior, but it can still come out - in high stakes GM’d scenes, for example, or in how people try to play your systems to get an advantage over others. Use those moments to demonstrate your own patterns of behavior to your players.

@Prototart

Are you trying to victim-blame or was that just an accidental target of your vitriol there?

Like, I know I’m on the mild side here for critique of vaspider. If you’re trying to say “if you read all our discussion of vaspider and still think they’re not a shitty person that’s on you”, that’s one thing, but “anyone who falls for it” can be a bigger pool than just people who read a gossip forum for a niche hobby. To someone who is manipulative and seeking to take advantage of others in a consistent fashion, their strategy by nature is usually to seek out people who don’t know them or their reputation, once they’ve burned their bridges elsewhere.

I think on an OOC level, I appreciate the cathartic negative emotions in bursts, but there needs to be a buffer between them to help me be able to stay engaged. In long-term RP, especially group RP, I’m more likely to accept something that errs on the side of the lighthearted than on the dark and emotional, because aiming for sad RP can turn into an absolute arms race,

Someone connected to my broad RP circle went through a real spiral around trying to evoke emotions in the players around them, and it ultimately ended up burning out them and their rp partners until they quit. First their character was suffering from a family illness. Then the illness was actually a poison used by their secret half-sibling, then the secret half-sibling killed them. Then it turned out that their half-sibling was being used as a pawn by their traitorous uncle… and so on, and so on. When they finally quit it was with a post about their character having gone dramatically missing, presumed dead.

Every time a new plot thread developed in this whole thing people would start drawing back, because it became more and more apparent that the player was using these plots to try and get a sympathetic response from people, and was pushing harder each time to try and get more. If there hadn’t been that constant push, if there was some more time to breathe between each plot, maybe it would have been better recieved. As it was, once they were gone, people felt it easier to retcon that character out entirely, just because they didn’t want to RP about the grief that their characters would ICly be going through, because of the OOC burnout.

Really fighting the insecure brainworms the past few weeks and I am. Just tired and feeling bad. My brain keeps looking right past the established, meaningful, and fun IC connections I have with chill people I like to rp with to poke at the ones that just haven’t quite worked out and insist that it’s THOSE ones, those are the ones that count.

@tsar we didn’t get to that point in the discussion, but they were kind enough to clarify that they only meant my RP time, not my time in general.

@Serafine

“I’m out.”

“And one more thing…!”

@Polk

You know what would have stopped you from having to put up with this thread? Instead of confirming with someone “four times” that they wanted you gone, and then taking it to the public channels five minutes before you turned things off.

Saying “I’m hurt. If you want me gone, fine - I don’t want to be involved a second longer than I have to be, so confirm with your new team what you need from me if anything, otherwise I’ll do x to disentangle myself by y date.”

Or just stepping away from the computer for those five minutes, instead of kicking the game over.

This one isn’t actually MU-sourced, to spare people the need to wonder what game is having drama, but it’s baffling enough to need to share, so.

If you have a problem with a person on game staff, messaging them to say “so when are you going to be demoted?” Verbatim. Is not actually going to fix that problem.

I don’t mind the dance of setting up RP, because in the same way I like to tailor my suggestions for location and event to the person who’s responding, mostly because I prefer smaller scenes to setting up an open thing in a location. The thing that does bother me is when people respond to an ask for rp in a way that doesn’t make clear whether they’re actually volunteering for RP in the moment or not. I have mixed feelings about a response that’s “I’m busy now but maybe some other day,” but it’s at least a clear response.

The colloquial definition of PvP is broader, but when it comes to game classification PvP is a genre description in my experience, one that usually denotes a formalized faction system where the main draw is combat and warfare against other player groups. As such, games that classify themselves as non-PvP or PvE are drawing a distinction on their playstyle, not forbidding all degrees of player conflict, whether that’s combat or interpersonal conflict.

With regards to the colloquial definition, Ive spent basically all of my RP time in PvE environments. I’ve been on an RP game where the setting was a closed environment (a scifi spaceship crew) where the premise required explicit opt-in from characters. There were thematic tensions in the background between groups, but the premise was that everyone had agreed to the rules to be there, which included cooperation with their former enemies. I’ve been in other games where the setting was much more loose and cooperation was much more ad-hoc happenstance, and had a pretty sandboxy approach to storytelling.

I’ve engaged in the colloquial definition of PvP - IC conflict and opposition- in both of those settings, and had a blast with it. To my mind, the ability to engage in fruitful “PvP” in PvE settings just requires having enthusiastic consent on both sides, and an agreement on the stakes of the conflict. And PvE games can facilitate that in different ways.

@L-B-Heuschkel

The only way this would be a reasonable suggestion to make is if you were someone familiar with the situation, had observed a pattern of behavior from the person, and were offering support. ‘Please consider the possibility that there’s a conspiracy against you’ is such a wild thing to say from the popcorn gallery, regardless of what’s going on in other discussions.

@Polk

Are you trying to damage control your reputation here? What is even your end goal, really. “See, I’m being helpful, except for the part where I trashed the game in 5 minutes.” The problem here isn’t that you didn’t literally delete the game without records and backups, that’s just quibbling over minor details when the facts of the matter are that you acted rashly.

@Evilgrayson

See, I look at that scenario and feel the opposite - if it might be a full day before I can talk to them, I’d feel inclined to include the reason in my first message

ETA: probably with a caveat that they should only write back when they’re free though

Most recently, debridement. Got a bit into the wiki page, then immediately went to the other people in the scene and just went, “okay we’re going to time skip until the procedure is done, cool? Cool.”

@Serafine

Between this and the Wyrdhold thread, do you just like jumping to hyperbolic offense at first blush? I know this is a forum for petty drama but you don’t have to work so hard to contribute

@Warma-Sheen

Well, it doesn’t entirely take the burden off of staff, though it is a different kind of burden that they may find difficult or not. Keeping up to date plot documentation in a concise format easily accessible to new players is it’s own kind of work. It is often work worth doing, but it does require a lot of upkeep.

I think the length of the response time changes what feels rude to me a lot. In person, rushing past a greeting to tell someone what I want would be rude unless I specifically knew they didn’t give a fuck about a ‘how do you do fellow humans’ ritual.

When the communication is going to be offset by a couple of hours though, sending a message feels a bit to me like leaving a voice-mail or sending an email. I’ll still include pleasantries, but I’ll also try and bring up the context for my message - and it’s for me just as much as it is the other person, because I’m often sending a message to remind myself to do things later, like scheduling follow-up RP.

I also find that I’m more comfortable getting a contextless greeting from someone I know well, mostly because I already have a sense of their communication style and the topics they’re likely to bring to my attention. With someone I’ve talked with less, I’m curious what has them contacting me, so I’m more likely to follow up a message like that with nudging them to get to the reason for the contact, rather than continue casual chatter.

Some of it also is online culture specific, though - I’ve had bad experiences with unfamiliar people messaging me out of the blue with ill intent, so that makes online messages without context something I’m more inherently wary of.

I would generally agree that people like having control of their failures - they like the points where their character does the wrong thing to be something they specifically initiate. Sidestepping for a moment from DMing into dicerolls, I know a few people who have gotten discouraged enough by a bout of bad rolls to straight up want to slip out of scenes, or avoid high stakes dice scenes for a while. The random element really got to them.

Also I think there is some degree of non-dice times when a player has a fact about their character that is canon to them - maybe that they’re a good manipulator, or a good scientist, or a pickpocket, but in a particular scene the player isn’t able to accomplish their vision of the character, when people aren’t reacting to what they think should happen, where people just can’t recover from the disconnect in time to make it fun for themself. If you want your character to be perceived a certain way but can’t make people see that… it’s going to become frustrating.