@dvoraen said in Missed Settings:

Stargate is practically an excuse for “theme park” RP of a sort, where you just say: “This world is like <theme>!” When I thought about it that way, I was like: “… Why haven’t I seen more Stargate games?”

Ha. What if all the PCs are in a holodeck simulation, or a a horrible wires-into-your-brain VR system, or something in between. They’re dropped around different ‘Westworld’ type theme-parky things, possibly deadly ones 'cause there’s a touch of ‘Saw’. Who will survive, and at the end, which characters who were picked up along the way will turn out to be real brainwashed people who think they’re from the Old West or Pompeii or whatever, and which will disappear forever?

@Jennkryst said in Character Death:

Taking a moment to think about it and remember that the L5R 20 questions includes ‘how should your character die’ because the idea of death is always in the back of their minds… Im wondering if that is a factor in the L5R MUs I’ve seen not doing terribly great for too long, or if addressing this and everyone going into it knowing there is supposed to be an almost romanticized view on a good/noble death… if that will somehow help it out? I dunno.

three cartoon characters are chained to a wall with the word death written on the bottom

@Solstice said in Your first game?:

In hindsight, I was really waaaaay too young to be on the wild west internet of 1996

oof, saaaame.

I am not quite sure I remember which one was first, but it was either The Lion King MU* or Heroes and Villains.

hilariously I tried to apply to Project Infinity for literal years and one of the appstaff replied to one application something like “I just want to say, your writing has improved so much” and I was too embarrassed to admit that it was because I had been like 13 when I first started trying, lol

@Jumpscare

Egelman et al. (2020) and Ferreira et al. (2021) both report that negative interpersonal interactions—ranging from subtle pushback to overt incivility—can provoke frustration, stress, and defensive reactions. Both highlight the role of code review processes, organisational policies, and power imbalances in shaping negative experiences. Ferreira et al. (2021) provides detailed evidence of uncivil behaviours, including name-calling, impatience, and personal attacks, with 66.66% of non-technical emails in their sample exhibiting such features.

Behroozi et al. (2019) finds that technical interviews are perceived as arbitrary, high-pressure, and disconnected from real-world work, with systemic biases favouring younger candidates and those with more leisure time. They also report that candidates experience dismissive attitudes, lack of empathy, and adversarial interviewer behaviour, leading to feelings of humiliation and offence.

So it seems, at least in corpo-professional contexts, that process design, power dynamics, and communication styles are the primary drivers of cynical interpersonal behaviours, rather than individual predisposition. But this is just based on a very brief skim of the literature, more research must be done, etc, etc, etc.

ETA: tl;dr people=shit and if you treat coders like shit they’ll not be happy, I guess.

References:

Spoiler

Egelman, C. D., Murphy-Hill, E., Kammer, E., Hodges, M. M., Green, C., Jaspan, C., & Lin, J. (2020). Predicting developers’ negative feelings about code review. Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering, 174–185. https://doi.org/10.1145/3377811.3380414

Ferreira, I., Cheng, J., & Adams, B. (2021). The “Shut the f**k up” Phenomenon: Characterizing Incivility in Open Source Code Review Discussions. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW2), 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1145/3479497

Behroozi, M., Parnin, C., & Barik, T. (2019). Hiring is Broken: What Do Developers Say About Technical Interviews? 2019 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1109/vlhcc.2019.8818836

@somasatori All 2e merits are done. Everything was reorganized, I’ve updated the lookup_data.py to reflect the new groupings. If you want to drag stuff over and test it against main, feel free. I’m going to start working on the legacy merits next.

i think you’ve got three dials: game size, nuance/specificity, and staff involvement. Cranking any of these up or down is going to affect the others. You can (and should! if you want!) make a game that is highly specific in a historical or fictional setting, but doing so is going to turn down max players and probably increase staff involvement in direct relation. You can turn down staff involvement and let your players mostly self-police if the guardrails are broad and high enough, until that player size gets to a certain limit.

I think you can pull off most any kind of niche or historical setting if you are willing to accept and spend your time curating a small and like minded player base.

@catzilla

91fa71ba-f07c-4ad8-a602-5cd4b92a4cf4-image.png

But in all seriousness, I could elaborate on it. I just vastly prefer the theme of nWoD changeling to oWoD changeling and think it fits the mould of a pet project of mine… which is kind of a small-town Americana murder/mystery thing. I could actually read nWoD werewolf, but I don’t wanna and I like Apocalypse more!

@tsar This whole entire development has just been encouraging. I think it says a lot that you were willing to acknowledge Pacha’s emotions and experience even though you were unaware of it happening and also that it wasn’t the motivation of your actions.

It also says a lot about @Pacha for being able to acknowledge your position in the situation. While also not allowing these interactions to create a negative viewpoint.

So kudos to both of you!

At the end of the day we’re all human with our own lives and struggles. We don’t know how our actions (or the actions of those associated with us too) can be interpreted by others. We also can’t know the motive of others actions who we interact with. MUSH is behind a screen and most times we don’t know the person on the other side.

We may become friends over time and we may meet some of these people, but for the most part we remain strangers who share a love of escaping our reality through adventure. Yet, somehow our interactions with these people can still impact us and others in ways we can’t anticipate.

I’ve viewed others as being part of a ‘clique’ before. Either shutting out people or monopolizing rp and I admit I’ve let myself either be offended or get self conscious about it. Likewise, I’ve found out down the road that I have been viewed as part of a clique, monopolizing rp, or having some sort of fan following.

I know on my end none of that was my intention. Which made me realize. If I know it wasn’t my intention isn’t it possible that I’m misreading others actions the same mine were misread? I’ve given a lot more grace to myself and others as a result and overall it’s made rp a lot more fun. It’s also ironically helped me create healthier boundaries as well.

Sorry for the long ramble, but this took me down an encouraging thought trail and yeah tl;dr basically:

a man applauds in front of a sign that says

@somasatori said in Multisphere pressure:

@Warma-Sheen said in Multisphere pressure:

I suspect… that some of them are looking for a “specific” type of RP.

The other meaning of the acronym “CBT”

a man with a mustache and a sweater that says i mean that 's nuts

Also contractually obligated to make that joke.

I keep glancing here, and keep meaning to make a joke about how the address involves gaslighting, but then I don’t do it, so now you all get to see that train of thought.

@MisterBoring said in Empire Discussion Thread:

@somasatori I totally agree with this. Each character in the roster could have a set of links to the important world lore that drives their character to help people find what they need to know.

Looks like this has been done! It’s pretty helpful - there’s a nice in-web-site glossary now that lets you get immediate information on what certain things are.

@InkGolem People like me but older and somehow worse.

@Superbia I don’t recognize the username, and basic attempts to check their post history did not work, so shrug

I think we all know where we should go

edit: wow that’s a big image

cce338b8-5151-4c7a-8554-d33a8821852e-cf005f61a6ab6105d4ee7f38b0ca8f127ce0d22ae0f860ed7edd51eaf0cacbf4.jpeg

@SqeakyClean
Yeah, the weight-ism isn’t necessary, and doesn’t make you look good.

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.

When you make a bigger payment on a credit card debt, but it doesn’t count as making the monthly payment because it cleared an hour before the system ticked over. And you have to make the real payment still as a result.

a close up of a toilet bowl with water running out of it .

June Lockhart, 100, famous for being the mom in Lassie and Lost In Space.

@Pavel said in General Video Game Thread:

@somasatori said in General Video Game Thread:

I think he tends to lean heavily into the parody of “sassy gay friend serving,”

If he were the only queer character, I’d agree. But I think, at least to me and in my opinion only, he simply is a sassy gay friend/foe serving. But perhaps that’s my view only because I am the sassy gay friend who occasionally serves…

I haven’t run into any others yet! that’s a good point. I was anticipating this being the only queer character.

I’m a person who often joins and becomes invested in a game on a whim - I can’t tell what the formula is, but if a game is hoping to attract people like me who just hop in without knowing someone, at least some percentage of the playerbase needs to feel open to interacting with, chatting with, getting excited about new characters and new people. Not every game has to be that - I don’t mind the existence of games that are built with a network-only approach and are meant for people who already have connections to have a good time together.

But as a new player approaching an open game, seeing people only rping with one or two others a lot sets off yellow flags that a game isn’t a place where people have the time or energy to open their circles to me. I don’t mind reaching out a lot when I’m in the shiny new excitement phase, but in order to feel welcome, it helps to see signs that it’ll be reciprocated.

I don’t think activity checks or a quota on interactions with people outside of your circle are meaningful solutions, because activity requirements can’t generate enthusiasm.I’ve roleplayed in forums like Dreamwidth where gamerunners often have monthly activity rules. The rules don’t actually stop a game from slowing down, or dying, or becoming a playground for one group. But I think the urge to implement them comes from the wish to have a particular game environment. Two people playing alone in a corner aren’t hurting anybody - but the more people who are doing that, the harder it is for new people to jump in and have a good time, and a lot of games want, at least in theory, new people to have an easy time joining, to buff up the population as people need to slow down or leave for various reasons.

And on a personal level, I find its important to my RP enjoyment to be open to new connections, because sometimes my old connections can’t RP any more! And it’s so much easier not to be bitter and discouraged if I’m not rebuilding my character’s network from scratch.