Thank you, @tez!

@Roz Ok but which of these six bears would you vote for if they were the candidates? This is very important to the theme of this thread.

My own little $0,02 and tidbit of experience with this subject (as both a player and a staffer cleaning up the mess so to speak). In personal RP, with a trusted writing partner, it can work. I’ve been in private scenes that involved this material in ways that supported a dramatic arc, and just like dark RP in general, when done well, with someone you trust, and for a purpose (and I’m not a prude, that purpose can be, to some degree, situationally prurient on top of story-affecting…) it can be memorable. The two places it is a HUGE gamble: Written in spontaneous RP with someone you don’t know, or with someone who advertises it as THEIR kink. One of the two characters becomes more an object than a participant. There are games for that, sure, but this can be a severe problem on a game that doesn’t rhyme with Shmang or Shpen. And group RP, where the content is less controlled by nature.

There is a little floaty ball over the text blinker, and I hate it. I know it’s there for accessibility reasons, to find the cursor, but it’s freaking me out.

Steam recently began complying with Australian legislop and requiring age verification to view adult materials. Their ID of choice? A credit card. Not a debit card, not an ID card, but a credit card. The Reserve Bank of Australia reports that only 18% of adults under 30 in Australia own a credit card (Livermore et al., 2023, p. 21). @Faraday said: and they’re so easy to circumvent that they do virtually nothing to keep kids out of spaces they shouldn’t be in. Especially with Firefox and other browsers just straight-up having a VPN button to push, for free (with limits, but c’mon), right there. Even the least technologically interested child will learn that pushing that button gives you access to The Good Stuff. Livermore, T., Mulqueeney, J., Nguyen, T., & Watson, B. (2023). The evolution of consumer payments in Australia: Results from the 2022 Consumer Payments Survey (Research Discussion Paper No. 2023-08). Reserve Bank of Australia. https://doi.org/10.47688/rdp2023-08

@hellfrog and me

As I said elsewhere – if I had a single spoon to spare from Keys, I’d be over here, rolling up an arrogant Alphatian nobleman. Prince Haldemar, move over, there’d be a new explorer in town.

@MisterBoring said in FAT BEAR WEEK 2025: Chunk is the winner. Also, I found out he’s got a broken jaw, so the injured contender story probably pushed a lot of votes his way. “His face looks sad and that makes me sad” versus “his belly is very round and that makes me happy” definitely came into play in a few of my votes for Chunk. The broken jaw is going to be a permanent issue for him, so I hope he continues to have several more years of being a very fat bear despite it.

@Tez Yeah, I feel like we should be crotchety and stuck in our ways (in our rocking chairs on the front porch) about “pb/played by” versus “faceclaim.” >.>

I think a lot of expectations seem reasonable on the surface–if games happened in a vacuum or were run by robots. They do not and are not. I think everyone is happier in the long run if when they notice that they do not get a response in the amount of time before they start to feel resentful and this seems to be the rule rather than the exception either they need to accept that and play with what they have or it is time to move on. Staying while mad and steeping in resentment poisons the experience even when it is your turn, and can also affect everyone you are around too. It doesn’t really matter why. If the Could/Should isn’t happening for you, it probably isn’t personal (unless thats your usual experience across different gamerunners and genres, in which case perhaps some introspection is needed). But it is good to make some realistic expectations shifts in how much mental energy and time you want to invest in a game where for whatever reason there’s a mismatch in what you get vs what you feel you’re giving. And sometimes players need time off to recover from a previous bad experience elsewhere. Few things kill staff or storytelling morale (or player morale) than a player vomiting game trauma dumping all over them and having a huge chip on their shoulder about how other people have wronged them elsewhere and are unable to interact without mentioning it frequently.

@Testament But is the D&D related to the setting of Seven Nations?!

@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How: How often did you get players running things? I don’t remember off-hand, but I’d say it was probably somewhere around 75-25 Staff-run and player-run for straight up combat scenes. But this could also be because I had just fallen in love with the FS3 combat system and was running a ton of scenes. Seeding plot points to PrPs has to be done carefully, and if I’m being blunt, only with trusted plot-runners. On The Savage Skies we had a few player-run-plots that went off the rails and had to be reined back in via minor retcons. I would only provide metaplot seeds to plot-runners who have demonstrated a good handle on the basic setting, and only then after having an explicit back-and-forth conversation so that they knew what they were introducing and at least some of why they were introducing it. @Tez said in Metaplot: What and How: Did you get a feel from players or any feedback as to how the political side worked for them? There were certainly players who were chasing that side of things pretty hard. Interestingly, it was particularly the players who were on the side gaining power who were chasing after it, because they knew they weren’t doing anything, and yet their side was still gaining power and influence and they wanted to know who was doing it and why. Knowing players in general, I expect that they would have found the person who was gathering the power and done their best to shut them down – and I think they would have succeeded, but it would have caused a power vacuum in the Crown Council that would have caused short-term chaos in the war effort (but probably would have come out ahead in the long term). @Tez said in Metaplot: What and How: TWOP definition I had only tangentially heard of this source (Television Without Pity?). I think that my definitions came from working in gaming companies (tabletop and video) where there are some things that are immutable or relatively immutable (setting) and some things that can change with the story being told (metaplot). Looking at the wikipedia definition of metaplot, I don’t think that I disagree with the first two sentences at all: The metaplot (also, metastory) is the overarching storyline that binds together events in the official continuity of a published role-playing game campaign setting, also defined as an “evolving history of a given fictional universe”. Major official story events that change the world, or simply move important non-player characters from one place to another, are part of the metaplot for a game. I definitely think that that’s talking about metaplot – the events taking place in the setting that connect all the various storylines going on at once – rather than setting – the details of the world where the action is taking place – by my definitions.

@Jumpscare Time to immediately swap to it myself.