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IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance
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@Gashlycrumb God yes, some games are DEEP into the meta-game of making themselves seem reasonable to gamerunners as a way to win PvP scenarios. Putting on a super chill act during conflict is early stage manipul-itis - then players start designing their moves in anticipation of future staff arbitration. At that point the experience is basically dead and it’s time to get out.
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@Gashlycrumb said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
Bridget: “How about I set fire to Abelard’s lawn and he just sat there? But you know, I’m good with anything.”
I feel this in my bones. I SEE YOU, BRIDGET.
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@Gashlycrumb said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
@Solstice said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
Mostly, PvP punishes you for giving a shit.
Hahah. Yeah.
Hell, a lot of dealings regarding ‘OOC Acceptance’ do too. There’s a tendancy to vilify player investment as not chill and reward indifferent players as chill.
Over-investment is certainly a thing, but there’s also some cases where it seems like that the meta-game of the MU is to get what you want by making yourself look like the more easy-going and thus ‘better’ player in any conflict.
Abelard: “Uh, hey Awesome, Bridget RPed setting fire to my PC’s lawn. At that IC time he would have been at home staring out the front window with an uzi in his lap, like he does every night, but at the OOC time I was at work. So this is kind of a problem.”
AwesomeStaffer: “All right, how do you guys want to resolve this?”
Bridget: “Oh, I’m fine with anything. Whatever you like.”
Abelard: “Cool, how about option A?”
Bridget: “That would damage my character’s shoes, and isn’t acceptable to me.”
AwesomeStaffer: “What would work?”
Bridget: “How about I set fire to Abelard’s lawn and he just sat there? But you know, I’m good with anything.”
Abelard: “Abelard’s lawn is supremely important to him and he just would not behave that way. How about option B?”
Bridget: “That would delete all our scenes of planning to burn Abelard’s lawn, so, no.”
AwesomeStaffer: “You can’t have option A or B. Abelard, what do you want to do?”
Abelard: “… I don’t know.”
AwesomeStaffer: “You’re being a pain.”
This sort of thing is precisely why ‘simulationism’ is a dirty word with me. This veers toward the very worst of the RPI MUD experience, which is some of the most toxic stuff in the entire hobby.
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@Gashlycrumb said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
AwesomeStaffer: “You’re being a pain.”
I mean… both players are kind of being a pain in that scenario so I’m not sure who I’m supposed to be rooting for here.
Abelard is refusing to compromise because it would damage something important to their character. Bridget is refusing to compromise because it would mean they failed at their goal.
That’s because they’re both viewing it from a PVP perspective. Someone wins and someone loses.
If either would come at it from a STORY perspective, they might realize all the possibilities that could come from it ICly.
Abelard could agree it happened. He has angst from the loss of his prized lawn, blaming himself for breaking his routine of nightly uzi-guarding or falling asleep on the job or getting up to go to the bathroom or whatever. Now he has to figure out who’s responsible and make them pay! And/or rebuild.
Bridget could agree she failed and figure out how Bridget would deal with that. Maybe she and her co-conspirators try again. Maybe there are some other consequences. Maybe she’s doubly mad at Abelard now because her shoes were damaged and she has to figure out how to repair/replace them.
But no. Every flipping thing has to be all or nothing. And that’s why I do everything in my power to avoid PVP setups on my games.
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@Faraday eh i don’t think that’s fair. at least not for the scenario as described.
it’s probably not reasonable to expect someone to happily incorporate a hostile action that happened when they weren’t even online. You can’t rp with someone while they are not around. If I log in and find out pyrephox has set my prized lawn on fire while i was sleeping? I can roll with that and be delighted, I know how pyre does conflict. I trust pyre! I like pyre!
If I log on and someone I don’t much like has done that? Doesn’t feel like fun that includes me. Bridget needs to get in her fkin lane and consider for two seconds if her IC actions are going to be at all enjoyable for anyone else to interact with.
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@Faraday That is one of the biggest hurdles of a PvP game. Even if you try to rebrand it as a CvC game, it requires a very mature player mindset for everyone involved. It’s really hard for everyone to do something for the greater good of the story, especially when everyone’s vision of the story is different. Even if the staff lays out a clear direction or goal, everyone’s path in that direction or to that goal can differ, which will impact how much they are willing to give to have their vision of the story reshaped.
Another level of difficulty is that the longer the characters last, the richer the character’s story becomes as it continues to build over time. That also means it is much harder to give up on a character or “lose”. It may happen where in a scene, two characters with very lengthy experiences and rich stories clash, and whichever side loses or has to give way, can impact what they have built up rather negatively moving forward. Then a “loser” will result and can even leave a bad experience for them, which sucks for not only that person but also for characters whose stories are heavily involved with that character who lost.
So PvP games may work best on games with short episodes, where characters are “wiped” or killed off in each episode, without consequences that are long lasting. If you lose or die, it’s fine because in a month or two, the slate is wiped clean and a new story is created.
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@hellfrog makes a note to set all the lawns on fire
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@Pyrephox one time in firan i set a piece of furniture on fire on someone’s lawn and got GAME FROZEN as Leia and The Council decided whether or not to yank my character away from me because that was really immature and crazy behavior!
My character with like Sanity/Maturity 1. That Leia wrote and statted.
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@hellfrog said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
If I log in and find out pyrephox has set my prized lawn on fire while i was sleeping? I can roll with that and be delighted, I know how pyre does conflict. I trust pyre! I like pyre!
If I log on and someone I don’t much like has done that?In a PVP game, I don’t think your like of the other player should factor into what consequences are acceptable to inflict.
I agree that it would be preferable to resolve things with RP, but that isn’t always possible due to conflicting timezones/schedules/etc.
ETA: Of course a game can enact whatever policies they deem fit re: off-camera consequences, from “none at all” to “anything short of death” to “you may die from the plague while offline”. I was assuming no specific rule existed in the example given.
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@Faraday said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
In a PVP game, I don’t think your like of the other player should factor into what consequences are acceptable to inflict.
I mean, this is certainly a cogent argument, but I do not think it is based in reality. ‘Should’ is not really the metric when it comes to human emotion and human emotional reactions - which are very nearly universal, in spite of some folks’ claims to be logic robots.
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@hellfrog said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
‘Should’ is not really the metric when it comes to human emotion and human emotional reactions
Quite true, but to be clear I was referring to “should” in terms of what we are willing to accept in terms of PVP policy. People can feel what they feel, but that doesn’t mean staff has to accommodate that.
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@Faraday Yeah, this was not one of my better efforts as a playwright. I did mean for Abelard’s options to be compromise-ish, while Bridget’s isn’t really even a suggestion. Drew a blank at the time, later brain spits out “Option A is that Abelard’s uzi jams so he runs out and chases Bridget off, and she escapes by leaping into the canal, Option B is that Bridget and her friends plan better and burn Abelard’s lawn at a time when he wouldn’t be there.”
Sure, both are being a pain, the situation is a pain. But Abelard didn’t create it, Bridget did, and Abelard’s looking for a solution while Bridget is looking to seem happy-go-lucky.
It’s possible that both of them just want to win. But also possible that neither is thinking that way.
I think it harsh to jump to the idea that Abelard just wants to win. Is he objecting to the fact that Bridget ‘won’ the encounter, or to the fact that he didn’t get to RP it? Bridget declared Abelard’s (in)action for him. Maybe if they really were looking for the best story that would be okay, but it’s not how RPGs work.
Maybe Bridget burned Abelard’s lawn while he was offline because that allowed her to win uncontested. But maybe she was just keen to RP the fun lawn-torching scene at that time, and genuinely thought that Abelard’s player wouldn’t mind and would choose inaction anyway. Maybe now Bridget doesn’t want to win, she just wants to avoid making everybody sift though their memories/logs to accomodate retcon.
@hellfrog I strongly suspect that, as @Pyrephox does conflict well, you just wouldn’t log on to find that they’d set your prized lawn on fire. Or that if you did, you’d also find that they’d planned it reasonably well and even had good success on a Snooping+Scatology roll so they could time it while Abelard was at his bi-monthly colonoscopy appointment, an off-camera event.
@hellfrog said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
one time in firan i set a piece of furniture on fire on someone’s lawn and got GAME FROZEN
These are the Tales of MU Fuckery that I come here for.
'You ride the mechanical bull, you do not fight it.'
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@Gashlycrumb said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
But Abelard didn’t create it, Bridget did
I think I get where you’re coming from. To be clear, I’m not saying Bridget did no wrong, and you’re totally right that her “I’m fine with anything… oh, no, not that thing…” is obnoxious.
My main point is that Abelard could’ve just rolled with the situation. The fact that staff even was involved in the first place seemed emblematic of the the whole problem of being unwilling to accept consequences.
Like, OK, his lawn burned when he wasn’t offline. That’s annoying, but is that really the end of the world? The whole basis of his objection “I sit there every night without fail with my uzi” is rooted in inflexibility.
But I get that maybe I was fixating on your specific example and missing your broader point
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I tend to find the “I’m okay with anything,” line needling even if the player gives the impression that it’s true by accepting the first suggestion. I’m usually asking, “What critera do you want for a solution,” and Abelard’s ‘demanding,’ “I want my suburban lawn security skills, weaponry and planning to come into play when my lawn is attacked,” is way more helpful than “anything’s fine” when I’m trying to come up with something that’s both workable and fun(ish) for all. “I’m good with anything,” comes across to me as being uncooperative while trying to appear super-cooperative.
My main point is that Abelard could’ve just rolled with the situation. The fact that staff even was involved in the first place seemed emblematic of the the whole problem of being unwilling to accept consequences.
Mmmm, why does going to staff = unwilling to accept consequences? Yeah, there’s is a school of thought that says that going to staff is in itself a hostile act, but this isn’t necessarily true and I don’t think it’s good to figure that he’s just hoping to use AwsomeStaffer as a hammer.
I’ve called it “The Smelt-it Dealt-it Effect” when staff is cross with you for reporting a problem and considers you to be part of that problem as a result.
Why should Abelard just roll with it? Why shouldn’t Bridget, who made the original mistake, roll with it when Abelard said no, and accept the consequences of her error?
If Abelard does roll with it, how often is he expected to do so? Bridget has turned his gaming experience from, “You enter the tavern and see a group of goblins playing Fan-Tan, what do you do?” to “You enter the tavern, see a group of goblins playing Fan-Tan and then shit yourself, why did that happen?” That’s not the end of the world, but at some point he’s going to arrive at the conclusion that this game is shit, because other player’s whims erase his IC efforts and his sheet. And when he does, AwesomeStaffer may well be left wondering why they can’t retain players, because Abelard never brought it to staff.
I bet everybody here has experienced this one:
Abelard pages AwesomeStaffer: I just met Camille at the Small Cafe and saw her stir her coffee with her thumb. I know from Splatbook: Loggers that nobody but a logger stirs his coffee with his thumb. But do I know this IC?
AwesomeStaffer: You’ve got a three in Observantiness, but your Logger Lore is only a two, so you don’t know that. Sorry.
Meanwhile, at the Bingo Hall:
Bridget (who has also read Splatbook: Loggers but has no Logger Lore skill): I met Camille today, she’s a logger.
Darius: Holy balls.
Bridget: I know, but nobody but a logger stirs his coffee with his thumb, and I saw her do it.
Darius: Let’s tell Euphonia, Ferdinand and Gretchen, quick!
Later:
Camille’s player, opening a beer, thinks: Well darn, there goes my plan to play a Logger on the Lam.
Abelard’s player, eating cheese, thinks: Well, darn, there goes my plan to find a Logger on the Lam and blackmail them into climbing up the Intimidatingly Tall Tree to get the ocelot.
You don’t want to ‘undo’ all these scenes of spilling the logger beans, what a pain and a drag and Darius, Euphonia, Ferdinand and Gretchen are having fun with it. Rolling with it will be way easier and more fun (at least in the short term), but you neither want this to be the way the game is played nor for players to be rewarded for playing it that way. Oif.
'You ride the mechanical bull, you do not fight it.'
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@Gashlycrumb said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
Mmmm, why does going to staff = unwilling to accept consequences?
Not in all cases. But here, a scene was already RPed (with Bridget and whomever else was involved in torching Abel’s lawn) and Abel is challenging that RP (with what struck me as flimsy justification rooted in inflexibility) rather than just accepting the IC consequences of that scene.
@Gashlycrumb said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
Why should Abelard just roll with it? Why shouldn’t Bridget, who made the original mistake, roll with it when Abelard said no, and accept the consequences of her error?
Was it a mistake? Lacking any context saying otherwise, I assumed that Bridget hadn’t broken any game rules and was acting in good faith. Perhaps that wasn’t your intention but that’s how I read it.
More generally, it’s unreasonable to expect every consequence to be RPed out or negotiated. You have to draw the line somewhere, and everyone’s going to have a different place they feel it should be drawn. There have been games through the years where you can literally die to off-camera die rolls. I think that’s absurd, but to each their own. So by some yardsticks, burning someone’s lawn while they’re offline could be entirely within bounds.
That’s why it’s important to spell out explicit rules of engagement–on any game, but especially on PVP ones.
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@Faraday My bad. Yeah, my intent was that Abelard had done nothing wrong, and had written up his PC’s lawn-obsession and paid the points or whatever to officially have an uzi and officially be guarding his lawn at certain times.
Probably, for most MUSH-type games, it is breaking a core-but-unwritten rule to mess with another PC’s person or stuff without involving that player, or at least OOCly checking with them or staff, to be sure there’s nothing stopping you.
'You ride the mechanical bull, you do not fight it.'
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@Gashlycrumb said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
Probably, for most MUSH-type games, it is breaking a core-but-unwritten rule to mess with another PC’s person or stuff without involving that player
You and I have definitely been playing different games, then. Of the times it has happened to me, it did need to go through staff purely from a mechanical standpoint.
It depends entirely on the kind of consent culture the game has. Most games I’ve played in the last decade have had some version of "if you create a character here, you acknowledge that your character can and will be fucked with by other characters.’
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@Gashlycrumb said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
Probably, for most MUSH-type games, it is breaking a core-but-unwritten rule to mess with another PC’s person or stuff without involving that player, or at least OOCly checking with them or staff, to be sure there’s nothing stopping you.
I understand now. Yeah I can see where in that case Bridget’s position is more annoying.
I’ve just been the staffer in that situation who approved Bridget’s action, only to have Abel come along all: “That should be retconned. Abel sits every night, without fail, with his Uzi. There’s no way I-- I mean he–could possibly have been out-maneuvered!”
It’s all perspective.
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@Faraday I getcha. I’ve been that staffer, too. But not terribly frequently. It’s one of those things that seems to be a classic that is bound to come up from time to time, but I don’t expect it for any specific exchange.
And I am naive. Somebody once advised me to have my PC inexplicably lose interest in their lawn because the person about to mess with it would just ignore me and it would be really annoying and leave me with no way to respond but give in or go to staff with a plan of bloody vengance against a person who doesn’t care about their PC much. I went “ha, well, I’ll be bold and give 'em a chance,” and had a bad time.
I think that some Classic MU Fuckery stuff gets weaponized. So that “they just want to win!” carries more weight than, “I totally want you to out-manoeuvre my PC, but I wanted you to at least make a pass at making a manoeuvre.” (The Blackhats’ Motto).
ETA: Is any place still doing the Blackhats factions thing where the Good Guys are meant to win so if you play a Blackhat you consent to be randomly nerfed, have your engine explode at a key moment, and find that while most of your minions are competent the one you sent this time is a spaghetti squash? I kinda miss that.
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@KDraygo said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:
So PvP games may work best on games with short episodes, where characters are “wiped” or killed off in each episode, without consequences that are long lasting. If you lose or die, it’s fine because in a month or two, the slate is wiped clean and a new story is created.
This is our hope, because our theme cycles through PCs by time jumping generations every six months. This is part of the design because we feel it will give players the “freedom” to go big and do heroic things and not feel FOMO by no longer having their epic character anymore because “anymore” might be a couple of months at best.
Like supporting PC on PC conflict, we anticipate that this will cause some self-selection among players who don’t want to invest time in a character that has a 6 month or 12 month shelf life.
But hopefully it will draw in players who do embrace the idea of playing a character’s arc until it ends and then starting over with a new one.
We’ll see how it works in practice.
