Hi. This has been a hard thread to read and try to figure out what I should be saying in it, but I do feel like I need to be saying something. I tended to play Haven in six month to year-long stints, getting a character in, established, meeting some kind of goal, and then bouncing for a bit until I could come back and do so. I can’t say I didn’t have a character in Blackfield; I can say I did not enjoy it and got that character out ASAP. The real question that keeps coming around is people wondering what compels people to play a game like Haven, and all I can really offer there is my own experience. I joined Haven in roughly 3.0, which I want to say was around 2014 or 2015. This was one of the lowest points in my life. I was sleeping on a couch, had recently gotten out of the most toxic relationship of my life by far, had no work, no prospects, and my mental health was in the gutter. The answer was therapy, but I couldn’t afford therapy. But out of all the hurt and pain I was experiencing that time was a real sense of wanting to change myself, and that meant engaging in more negative parts of who I was. I had met my ex playing Achaea, and I tried to pick up and radically change my old Achaean character, but it was too many memories to go back there. I had met one new friend (spoilers: this was bad), and started looking at other games to play with them, and found this game on … I want to say Top MU sites. It was a horror game, and I liked horror themes, and so I poked in, looked around at some of what was there, saw the theme that corruption is power, and decided that I wanted to give it a try. Let my friend know, and we made characters that same day. And thus began one of the most intense roleplaying experiences of my life. I lost myself into Haven, because what Haven became was, functionally, shadow work. I heard rumors that there was an even seedier underbelly than what I was seeing, but it wasn’t really on the surface, and honestly, coming out of world of warcraft RP, people play some very, very, very messed up things. I just decided that wasn’t probably actually a thing and mostly ignored the players taking part in it. Later iterations of the game made that harder to ignore, but so it goes. By then, I was invested. I was not always the best player. I engaged in what could generously be called light griefing, including keeping characters locked in rooms largely inaccessible from the grid, punishing people who i perceived as misbehaving with making it so their character couldn’t speak for RL days on end, and IC harassment campaigns. Other people hit back just as hard, and I had my own little Grima Wormtongue in my ear in the form of my friend - Azazello - telling me that these actions were right and proper and nothing like the things HE had been made to go through on previous games, and that people who complained about it were just weak. I also endured my share of griefing, including someone who actively threatened the characters of anyone he knew were OOC friends with me ICly if they even stepped out of their grid homes anywhere he could get to them, just because he didn’t like me. People in this thread were part of that, they’ve acknowledged it to me, the reason I bring it up is because I was both the victim and the beneficiary of a lot of staff favoritism. I got hooked into metaplot, I played an unhealthy amount, it was toxic as hell and it’s pretty impossible to deny it. I’m only hinting at things. There are more stories. And all of this was basically in version three and early days of version four. That’s when the griefing hit a point where I basically had to take a break. I want to talk about what kept me going back in those early days, though, and why I bounced off of WoD games at the time – similar settings, similar vibes, but they just didn’t have what I was looking for. I wanted a game where I felt in constant danger and adrenaline, where we could be nasty, vicious little creatures, where we could be cruel and punishing. It opened up a steam valve I hadn’t realized I had glued shut my entire life, and it let me get a chance to really review the nastier parts of myself, figure out which ones I liked, which ones I didn’t, shape the ones I could into something better and discard the ones I couldn’t, and what was just going to be in my nature that I would have to learn to live with and learn to work around. Shadow work, just done in a much more informal way. I liked that I was in a community of people just as messed up as I was, even if I had major issues with a lot of them, and that I could test wild things and see how people reacted to them. The speed and quantity of RP was completely unlike the MUSH scene. The quality was a significant step above the MUD. There were game elements that gave me a solid sense of character progression, and storytelling tools that really let me branch out, and all these things were fun. They weren’t why I kept playing. Eventually, I realized the rumors that were creeping into my ears about who Azazello was were true, and after about a year, I withdrew from him pretty heavily. I took my break, I tried other games, I took a step back and watched what people wanted out of RP, and I came back in with a character with which I tried to do my part to reshape the culture of Haven into something a little less toxic; I think, to a degree, it worked, but only temporarily. The sharp edges I still had on me from Haven got honed away on other games, but the ability to slip into a character immediately like she is a second skin is still there. The game is fucked up. I actively told people to never play it even when I was there in full force. A lot of people describe it like a drug habit, and that’s not an inaccurate way to talk about it, but it was also a lot of other things. I made friends from Haven I literally spend 15+ hours a week hanging out with, talking to, chatting with, a decade later. We have all, by and large, moved on and grown as people. I stared into the abyss of who I was and came out the other side with a much firmer grip of what I believe and value and who I want to be. I learned that things which I saw as immutable are anything but that, and things that I saw as inevitable weren’t actually that big of a thing. I learned to be okay with not being okay. Haven was a crucible of an experience where I got to tell some really good stories, refine my writing chops, put myself through an emotional wringer, do terrible shit, and come out the other side. But, honestly, I should have just gone to therapy.

Big things for me: Is the house rule clearly explained so I know how it is likely to affect my play? Does it pass the “smell test”? Which is to say, when I read the rule, can I see what it’s trying to do, do I agree with what it’s trying to do, and do I think it will actually accomplish that? (And, honestly? WoD/CoD generally DOES need a little more houseruling than it gets when trying to blend spheres that have conflicting powers/themes/foci.) Do I think it’ll be fun and fair to all players? If those three things are a yes, then I’m willing to run with it. When you’re talking about big changes–adding or removing or completely rehauling a system like pledges or whatever–then I do want the new rules to maintain the theme and appeal of the game for me. Like, HR rules to streamline making spirits and how they interact with the world from the rather complicated setup in CoD? Sure, I’m in, as long as spirits are still CoD spirits in recognizable ways.

@Pavel right and i think it’s better to focus on creating culture/implementing rules that determine how those systems are utilized rather than scrapping a nice thing

@bear_necessities I think it’s more just a clash of expectations. Some people see async as merely a “last resort” when you can’t sync up to play live, but still expect a degree of responsiveness to get the scene done. For example, even back when folks were doing async with LiveJournal or Google Docs, it could be considered rude to let a pose go three days without a response. At that point, it’s not really about syncing up timezones and can start to feel more like the other player just doesn’t care enough to reply, isn’t engaged in the scene, etc. (Or they, aka me, just have ADHD and forgot the scene exists. ) Other people (including those who are influenced by other, slower RP modalities like forum RP, storium, etc.) might not even think twice about going days between poses.

@Third-Eye said in Paid Role-Playing: The idea of dealing with players who think they’re a paying ‘customer’ always gets a legit, IRL, full-body shudder out of me when this comes up. Yeah. I think we have problems with players and staff viewing the games as transactional when are meant to be reciprocal, and making them literally transactional would make it worse.

@Pavel said in Web-based CharGen or in-game CharGen: @hellfrog said in Web-based CharGen or in-game CharGen: yeah applications are to tell you about the player more than the character, I think. "Name a non-fictional woman that is smarter than you’ would be a perfect application prompt. Faraday and Cobalt. Next question. you’re in, buddy!

Oh, it’s a troublesome character even if you remove the ableism. Deep in my little black heart I have this desire to app a comics game as the demon Baytor, a sort of tube with teeth that shouts “I AM BAYTOR!” a lot and does little else. [image: 47318045_2287119871301085_7913387447998742528_n.jpg?_nc_cat=110&cb2=99be929b-bd9a46d7&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=127cfc&_nc_ohc=pgzN1u7T-_kQ7kNvwHuU9aF&_nc_oc=AdlNtNIigrmBrbEXOWWKNufbWG8GLC03A0MAQ3MOo3jbxTH74JY79dgseR3laJf9C_fHfHW9ZZ5unZ_q6zx9U44-&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent-dfw5-1.xx&_nc_gid=ZrWMoXrBTkJyXsSMSXcdOg&oh=00_Aflm6SljyoShYagRfUzUCsTAvuNMDw3IDsSfGPO1pRHVQg&oe=69599200] This is a bad, bad idea, obviously bad. It might be okay if I made sure Baytor could only be found where it’s found in the comics, working as a bartender at a certain pub, completely easy to avoid, and treated it as a sort of NPC I depict while playing a reasonbly PC-written-PC primarily.

This is a community-building issue.

 Okay, yeah, probably you can never have outright let’s-murder-each-other-on-sight factions and have it work. But why would you want to? If they only interact to fight, there is no reason for the opposing group to be PCs. But stuff like “Green apple Fossoways hate red apple Fossoways and they’re each trying to be the ruling branch of the house,” and the deal where everybody’s trying to steal the McGuffin from whoever has it right now, can be fine fun. It needs a supportive community to be fine, though. It works on private games because everybody there thinks everybody else’s feelings count and actively wants every other player to have a good time. When this trust is broken things crumble.

Which is no surprise. There are big differences between:

 Dracula: “Well shit.”
 Van Helsing: “Yeah, the dice were cruel to you! But that was great, loved the way you played it out, I had a blast.And you’ll get yours once you climb out of that hoiy-water-contaminated well.” And: 

Dracula: “Well shit.”
 Van Helsing: “I understand that you’re very upset. In this essay I will explain how you are wrong and a problem…”
 And: 
Dracula: “Well shit.”
 Van Helsing: “It sucks to suck.” 


Also, yeah. There’s gonna be drama. There’s just gonna be drama. Making some space for the dramas of RPG-related fee-fees is part of gaming. Gamerunners and players can draw a line about how much space and what kind of expression of ye feels. But “never express any kind of upset about the game or your interactions with others on it” isn’t reasonable. Games nobody cares are not good games. You want players to be invested. Passions will rise. Characters don’t have to die for passions to rise. 
Players in general and game runners in particular really ought to try to avoid drawing that line at who’s drama rather than what kind of drama. 

Drawing the line at a who is how you get bullshit like it not being ‘drama’ when Abelard raises a “Bridget refuses to compromise in RP!,” fuss, but when Bridget replies, “You refused to turn off your camera, you were obviously bluffing, I’m more afraid of proposed-betrayee I am of your threat, and I don’t even have the information you were trying to blackmail me to get,” somehow Bridget is the drama-creating problem.

@Pavel said in Minigames in MUSHes: @Muse said in Minigames in MUSHes: @Pavel Or maybe a self limiting factor, like clues know how long since the last clue and will stay in hiding until it’s time again. Just let me have my slap-upside-head tool okay. Fiiiiiine, but only because I’m a sucker for a sad face.

@Jenn if this was discord I’d respond with a laughing emoji. Holy shit my brain is rotted

I need enough people to have variety, and to also have nice soft buffers from people I don’t mesh with. (Not necessarily bad actors, but people who just don’t like me or I don’t like them.)

@Polk Well, at least one of the major difficulties has been made pretty publicly apparent on the boards in very recent memory.