IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance

[Coin]

The most important thing here is degrees. Every medium has it. Movies/Television/Novels and other classically structured storytelling (like comic books, whatever) have less fluidity in how much agency to give the audience – the story is told and we experience it without much say. Some types – mostly those that attempt to give some leeway via Choose Your Own Adventure-style interactivity or, more recently (relatively), social media-centered storytelling where the audience can interact with characters (pioneered by such darlings as lonelygirl15) – are more interactive.

For video games, you start to get into a bit more hands-on from the audience because the player is actually in charge of a character. Sometimes the video game allows you to make many choices, decide what kind of person the character is, be evil or good (Fallout, Skyrim) or give you throughlines you can explore and combine (Mass Effect) but which are still written out; and still others are basically a story that you play through and the only real thing you decide is which sideplots to take part in and your actions in combat, but the story won’t change (Last of Us, God of War).

MUing is similar, when it comes to the way people run the game. Some games are very laisse-faire: you make a character and react to the world and have relationships and take part in the action, yay. Other games are more focused on the stories and moving characters forward. Other games have actual stories they want to tell with those characters you’re choosing to play (roster games are big on this) and you have less (not ‘none’, but ‘less’) of a choice over what you’ll be involved in storywise (especially in character-specific plots) and it’s important to communicate even more with the STs and staff to make sure everyone is having a good time.

My point, though, is that (though it may not be everyone’s cup of tea) MUing is perhaps the most nuanced of all of these because it can run the broadest gamut between ‘do whatever’ and ‘look, this is the plot’.

There is probably a lot of comparison to be made with storytellers with railroad and stuff, but the important thing I think is for the game and staff and STs to be open and forthcoming about their expectations (the same as players should be) and everyone to find a comfortable way of telling stories together.

[Gashlycrumb]

@spiriferida said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

If you want your character to be perceived a certain way but can’t make people see that… it’s going to become frustrating.

Yeah. And there are levels of reasonableness for this response. There’s Darke, who wanted other PCs to have a complex and unlikely response to his - to be intimidated by him yet long for his approval and/or sexual attention (no homo) - and was constantly in a snit that it wasn’t happening. And then there’s that time I was playing the chief of police and one PC cop was just horribly off the rails and would say a snotty one-liner or two and walk out on the reprimands, but staff would not allow me to ICly fire him. I’m sure most games where there’s a chain-of-command have regular exercises in that one.

[Gashlycrumb]

@Pyrephox said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

@spiriferida I think this can be exacerbated by how unkind other players can be about a bad run of dice. In the typical MU*, chances to do your character’s Big Thing in a ‘meaningful’ way can be very thin on the ground. Getting a bad roll on your Thing can certainly hurt - and even worse when other players have their characters treat yours as a failure, or mock the bad roll OOC.

I don’t mind the OOC lulz when my PC face-plants, but not only does a tabletop generally offer more frequent chances, players don’t generally refuse to invite you on the next adventure because of bad rolls.

It’s silly, but I find it weirdly frustrating that MUs don’t have any equivalent to the superstitious dice-switching that happens at every tabletop. They really all need easter-egg code:

+cursedice
Player curses their dice, and [feeds them to a rabid rhinoceros/hurls them into an abyss/etcetc long silly list].

and player’s dice change to another colour-set 'til they do it again.

[Pavel]

@Gashlycrumb said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

players don’t generally refuse to invite you on the next adventure because of bad rolls.

This one really, really annoys me. Combine that with people trying to “optimise,” and you get my biggest pet peeves in MUing. If I wanted to play “optimally,” I’d do it by myself. Like sex.

[Gashlycrumb]

@Pavel Yeah. It’s baffling to me that the two behaviors often go together, because a lot of the time when other PCs don’t wanna team up with yours ‘cause you are a fuck-up, they actually saw the roll where the fuck-up occurred and know that you botched with ten dice at difficulty six and odds were against you failing, much less botching. Yet this is OOC knowlege they’re determined to treat as such. The OOC knowledge that they will probably never roll appearance or science and can get away with playing a teevee-handsome meteorologist with appearance 1 and sciences 0, that is somethin’ to act on. I consider this cheating.

[Pavel]

@Gashlycrumb In WoD terms, my Academics skill is probably a 2 or a 3 - Probably a 2 with specialties in History, English Language, and Psychology even though it’s a science. And I’d say my Intelligence score would be about a 2 or 3.

So I’d be rolling 5d10 and for a difficulty 6 check I’d fail/botch almost 20% of the time. One in five times I try, I’d fail.

Sure, reality and a game system don’t match up - I sure spent far more points in social skills than I ever use - but the overall point is that in reality, people fail at stuff they’re supposed to be good at all the time. That’s life.

[Faraday]

@Pavel said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

So I’d be rolling 5d10 and for a difficulty 6 check I’d fail/botch almost 20% of the time. One in five times I try, I’d fail…in reality, people fail at stuff they’re supposed to be good at all the time. That’s life.

It really depends on how you look at it. Imagine people getting into car crashes 20% of the time they went for a drive, or surgeons screwing up 20% of their surgeries.

But on the flip side, a baseball player with an 80% batting average would be the GOAT.

The truth is that skills and skill rolls are never going to mirror reality perfectly. They’re just a necessary abstraction to make the game work.

A soldier might get dozens of skill rolls in a fight scene, but an archaeologist might only get one roll to solve a key puzzle. It’s really imbalanced. Even in a system like FS3 that’s heavily slanted towards success (plus has luck points), it can be very unsatisfying.

[Gashlycrumb]

@Pavel Just so. And certainly in life you suffer from first-impressions problems if you fail at the wrong moment. But in life if I attend one lecture to assess you and you flub it badly, I (probably) don’t know if you rolled five dice (and are thus likely to succeed 80% of the time and are capable of spectacular successes) or if you rolled two and are gonna fail a lot and can never do all that great.

[Pavel]

@Faraday Shh, don’t bring logic into my example that had math in it.

You’re right, of course, but I was using it more as a metaphorical device than an actual metric of my personal likelihood of failure - I am amazing, after all.

Fundamentally I think people who want to optimise or actually exclude people based on their sheet or their dice, generally, don’t get the point of MUing. Sure, we call them RPGs, but they’re more Role Playing Game-likes. There’s no losing.

Sure, a character dies, or a scene doesn’t go your way, or the DM’s a dick, they all suck but the goal of the game is to tell a story. Did you do that? Then you didn’t lose.

ETA: And a story without failure is fucking boring. It might be horrible at the time, but it’s often the failures that make a game more interesting and more memorable than the successes.

[Gashlycrumb]

@Pavel Oh, I just mean that it’s inconsistant of people to want to optimise but also exclude people on the basis of the IC experience of seeing them fuck up badly, even when that experience included OOC information that shows they won’t fuck up badly very often.

[Pavel]

@Gashlycrumb Eh, it’s not that inconsistent. “This person doesn’t meet our expectations.” It’s just social elitism with a dice box and a character sheet.

[Faraday]

It’s interesting to see the various experiences. I’ve never seen folks deliberately exclude someone for sucking at dice rolls. What I do see is the player with the crappy rolls getting bent out of shape that their character isn’t what they envisioned, or people ICly responding to a given flub by being skeptical of that character’s abilities, and then the player getting bent out of shape about that because their character is supposed to be the expert, dang it.

[Ashkuri]

@Faraday said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

I’ve never seen folks deliberately exclude someone for sucking at dice rolls. What I do see is the player with the crappy rolls getting bent out of shape that their character isn’t what they envisioned

Same. I have never once in 25 years seen someone excluded for rolling poorly. I haven’t even heard of it happening. I don’t believe this is a phenomenon that happens broadly.

I have seen people excluded for being a vibe-killing pain in the ass about their own bad rolls. Most of those people were enough of a pain in the ass to believe their subsequent exclusion was about their rolls and not their attitude.

[MisterBoring]

I’ve also never seen anyone get ostracized for bad luck, but I have seen plenty of people ostracized for less than optimal character builds, which just makes me barf.

[Roz]

I’ve seen people get excluded based on their stats, and also people given a hard time for bad rolls (IC and OOC). I don’t THINK I’ve seen the combo of someone with good stats being excluded just for bad roll luck.

I can tell you that Arx has a rule about not being crappy OOC about bad rolls and that it definitely didn’t come about from nobody being crappy, lol.

[Third Eye]

@Roz said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

I can tell you that Arx has a rule about not being crappy OOC about bad rolls and that it definitely didn’t come about from nobody being crappy, lol.

My own experience on Arx was that this was as much because of people vibe-killing about their own rolls as the behavior of anyone toward them, though this may just be the scenes I was in. I was DEFINITELY happy that rule was there to get cited, for all that.

[icanbeyourmuse]

I have been told ‘We want someone with good dice for X thing’ many times before or variants of it (‘You don’t have enough dice, it is hard thing’, ‘You don’t have the dice we need for this plot’, etc). This is usually on long time games/games that are based on XP votes. I have a policy/rule/whatever you want to call it that if someone’s whole thing is X (AKA a combatant in a combat scene) let them shine, even if your dice could potentially be better or your ‘better’ at RP, your idea would make more sense, etc. Throw your dice behind theirs like ‘I’m doing X thing to support Y so they do even better than they are already.’ Basically, support the person’s ‘thing’ so they feel involved and part of the story, whether they succeed of fail (depending on how the group defines failure). Supporting the person can make them feel part of what is going on because their fellow players support them, even if they could do badly. This is especially important for those who play types of characters that don’t generally get to do much of main game plots. In my experience, may of the ‘main game’ plots are heavy focused on combat with a fair bit of diplomacy. Games like Arx (and Firan back in the day) gives people who like the crafter types something to do. I feel like supporting someone’s actions, IC and/or OOC, (not counting those who just don’t care if their actions make it fun for others or not or if it progresses stuff) will make some people more open to being up for consequences of their actions, whether they are good or bad consequences.

[Faraday]

@icanbeyourmuse said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

‘We want someone with good dice for X thing’ many times before or variants of it (‘You don’t have enough dice, it is hard thing’, ‘You don’t have the dice we need for this plot’, etc).

I can believe that, but that’s a bit different from the scenario described above, which was holding a single or couple bad die rolls against a player. So it’s not about needing someone with a particular level of skill (“only ace pilots need apply”) but a particular history of skill roll success… which is just nonsensical in a system where everyone is essentially using the same virtual dice.

[Pyrephox]

@icanbeyourmuse Oh gosh, I hate this so much. I was on an Ares game and had another player trying to encourage me to choose the ‘right’ characters for a plot, based on their stats, and it was so unpleasant. My sole criteria for playing with someone is is it fun to play with you and, to a lesser extent, is your thing different enough from my thing that we will have different things to do in a plot.

That’s it. I’d much rather take someone who is statted ‘poorly’ but who is fun to play with than anyone who has all top stats but is a PITA or just plain boring.

[hellfrog]

Pivoting out of nowhere, I’ll say that sometimes you might not want to get with a disruptive player and spend a lot of time hashing out what would be a fun consequence for them to rp, because you don’t want to encourage that player to keep at their behavior.

There’s a lot of awesome, valid IC character acting that can encompass being disruptive, being disbelieving, being disrespectful, taking wild risks, etc. But there’s also a point where one character flouting or disrupting is really killing the vibe of the scene/plot, and you might want their IC consequences to be something of a deterrent.

There’s also a breed of player (thankfully a fairly rare one) that will disrupt and kick up fuss habitually, because they enjoy playing some kind of iconoclast or black sheep - or worse, because they have decided they are right about some point of lore/theme, and will disrupt any and all IC around that thing in the hopes of annoying people enough that they get their way. This desire to be the squeaky wheel can become unfun for other players/staffers to interact with.