Bad Stuff Happening IC
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Apparently, my requirements for Bad Stuff are the same as my requirements for Saucy Stuff.
If I trust you, if it’s more than just an excuse to roll combat dice with your big ol combatty combat combatter, and if it contributes to the game/character’s story rather than detracts or distracts from it.
Real talk, though, my characters are often designed to fail. They aspire to power, authority, etc, etc, but I’m lazy and very busy RL so I don’t want power, authority, or anything more than a cup of tea. If you can help me tell that story in a satisfying way? I’m yours forever.
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I ended up putting Other, because yes, I like bad things to happen to my character, but as always there are caveats.
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Proportionality. I like bad things to happen to my character - I don’t like ONLY bad things to happen to my character. Trauma conga isn’t all that entertaining, give me time to breathe, recover, and let the character have things worth fighting for when the bad things happen.
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Trust. I’m a fairly trusting player, to be honest, and I’ll roll with what a GM throws unless I have a specific reason not to trust them, but once that trust is lost, it doesn’t come back.
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Sexual assault/mind control. These are not entirely “no go” bad things to have happen, but they are things where I would need a larger than normal amount of trust, and where I want to be brought in OOC to ensure that it remains a fun game for me.
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People are always so scared to be mean to me! I wish they would do it more.
I promise I won’t whip around and start crying about being griefed if you do anything mildly cruel. I think players in general are pretty traumatised by bleedy targets and now they don’t even want to take the risk. A lack of trust all around.
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Yeah, absolutely destroy my characters. I love the writing and the play that comes from difficult situations, poor outcomes, and otherwise “bad things” that affect a PC. Especially when it creates further story and RP opportunities in the aftermath. Of course there are limits, but these are also situations and lines that are already a hard ‘no’ in any game I’m going to play - and, as has also been mentioned a few times in this thread - trust is an important factor.
I’m generally very much of the opinion that failure is more thematically interesting than success. I love a failed roll, I love a failed mission, I love the drama. That has been where I’ve found my best success as a player and learned the most about the character.
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Oh man, I took this as GMs being mean to characters. Are you ok with/do you like to be mean to players as a player is a whole other can of worms. And I do! I do not like the ooc assumptions that most often come with playing something other than 100% friendly
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@hellfrog said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
And I do! I do not like the ooc assumptions that most often come with playing something other than 100% friendly
Exactly this, and I feel like due to this I often will take on a more affable demeanor because my characters can be assholes and I don’t want to be labeled OOCly in the same vein as my IC.
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@hellfrog said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
Oh man, I took this as GMs being mean to characters. Are you ok with/do you like to be mean to players as a player is a whole other can of worms. And I do! I do not like the ooc assumptions that most often come with playing something other than 100% friendly
Who is/was your favorite Arx character and why is it Sapphire?
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@Nonsense said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
Yeah, absolutely destroy my characters. I love the writing and the play that comes from difficult situations, poor outcomes, and otherwise “bad things” that affect a PC. Especially when it creates further story and RP opportunities in the aftermath. Of course there are limits, but these are also situations and lines that are already a hard ‘no’ in any game I’m going to play - and, as has also been mentioned a few times in this thread - trust is an important factor.
I’m generally very much of the opinion that failure is more thematically interesting than success. I love a failed roll, I love a failed mission, I love the drama. That has been where I’ve found my best success as a player and learned the most about the character.
I admit, here’s the flipside of the question (and this is not aimed at you specifically - I don’t think we’ve ever played together):
I don’t necessarily trust when a player says this, either to me-as-player or me-as-GM because often they do not mean it, so I am absolutely reluctant to actually pull the trigger on negative consequences because it is exhausting to deal with a lot of people after you do, and perhaps even more so the people who are very vocal about “Oh yeah, destroy my life, I can take it!”
And you can never know whether a person genuinely means it and is totally fine with things actually going south, or not.
The only real way, I’ve found, to know is to see how people handle small failures in play, before trying to work through the big setbacks with them.
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@Pyrephox said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
The only real way, I’ve found, to know is to see how people handle small failures in play, before trying to work through the big setbacks with them.
So, there’s this really interesting inverse effect that I have noticed clinically in many of my patients with large capital-T trauma: People who have experienced particularly traumatic events tend to react really negatively to very small events*, or what might be might be considered pretty minor-to-moderate annoyances by a lot of people, but on the flip-side they tend to be very blasé or even good when something major happens.
Not saying that every MUSHer who endorses this attitude has this going on (though surprisingly more than one would think), but I feel like my approach to someone saying this would be more to introduce a negative element and then slowly increase the tension. Alternatively, I would have them be witness to people who I know would react well to their characters’ lives getting ruined and seeing what their opinions and perspectives are on those events. I also tend to temper my approach to evaluate someone’s reaction to certain things, which is partially because my perspective as a trauma-informed clinician is that I must be aware that we all got something that’s a no-go.
*this is obviously an “it depends” thing and isn’t intended to be diagnostically relevant in this instance, where I speak about MUSHing; while it has some research on it under the term “trauma reactivity” it’s also very anecdotal in this case
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Interesting to me that no one (yet) voted for “Yes but only physical peril, not social.” Social to me covers the like
@Yam said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
someone’s gonna’ post a proclamation the next morning LORD EIRAN, LAYABOUT OF THE LAURENTS, SEEN BEING AN UNMARRIAGEABLE IDIOT
that kind of thing. I would consider that a Social Bad Thing for a person to encounter.
But I think it’s pretty clear across the board that bad-things-likers enjoy them from a trusted source and people who decide to humiliate your character socially are maybe not a trusted source.
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@somasatori I think the big thing is that I’m not running a controlled intervention to see if someone can handle bad IC events - I’m just observing what happens naturally. And I’ve never really see someone who, for example, throws a sulking fit when they have a couple of bad dice rolls, who can also handle a big loss with grace and mutual fun.
I’m sure they exist! And people have bad days, where one small event is just the grimy cheese on the shit sandwich and you are just done. Which is why I try not to judge people too harshly for one bad reaction.
But if, over time, I notice someone who melts down regularly about the small stuff, I’m definitely not going to even hang around for the big stuff. It’s not worth my time or my hobby joy, and I don’t really care if it’s trauma, or a multitude of bad days, or whatever.
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@Pyrephox Oh, fair enough, yeah! I was mostly using that as an example where people might be good at handling the big stuff but might have issues with more minor inconveniences. Definitely not to excuse the behavior or attempt to convince anyone to engage in it, for sure. My point was that levels of reactivity might vary or be surprising based on what the stimulus is. I think I’m also perceiving this from the older school staffer perspective of “everyone gets to play” even if the person isn’t a good fit for the game (and also not from a player perspective).
I’ve met a handful of people who get really aggravated when small rolls in social scenes don’t go their way, but who can handle poor rolls in larger scenes. I feel like this maybe falls into the “mushers don’t like to be humiliated” point mentioned elsewhere in the thread.
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@Ashkuri said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
Interesting to me that no one (yet) voted for “Yes but only physical peril, not social.” Social to me covers the like
@Yam said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
someone’s gonna’ post a proclamation the next morning LORD EIRAN, LAYABOUT OF THE LAURENTS, SEEN BEING AN UNMARRIAGEABLE IDIOT
that kind of thing. I would consider that a Social Bad Thing for a person to encounter.
One thing I find interesting is that other people tend to transfer IC humiliation onto the humiliated player. Like I had one character who was constantly screwing up (by design), and a non-trivial number of players acted like I was the idiot. It was very puzzling. I don’t know if it was just so alien to them that someone would willingly set their own character up for humiliation, or if they just genuinely thought I was dumb because my character did something stupid or what. But it wasn’t a particularly fun experience.
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For me it depends in large part on what’s going on in my RL. If I’ve had a frustrating day, and my warrior gets hammered in a combat scene because the dice betray me on the GM messed up the balance, I can get frustrated. If I’ve had a normal day or a good day, I’m much more open to random disappointment in my gameplay.
That being said, I’m also a big fan of screwing my character up through choices that I make myself (whether it’s choices that the character makes or the player). I also want to be able to react to the bad stuff and maintain some player agency through it. If there’s nothing that I can do about the bad stuff (either to mitigate it or to have some fun with it on the way down), it’s a lot less fun for me.
I agree with a lot of the statements above, but particularly @Pyrephox’s note about Proportionality; if my character has been doing great lately, having them be absolutely humbled can be entertaining, but if they’ve been on a bad streak, sometimes one more failure is all it takes for me to not have a good time.
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@Faraday said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
I don’t know if it was just so alien to them that someone would willingly set their own character up for humiliation, or if they just genuinely thought I was dumb because my character did something stupid or what.
I don’t have any like professional psychology background or anything outside of personal experience to reinforce this opinion but I honestly think it’s projection. I think a lot of players have a very strong image of their own characters in their minds as someone who is strong/unflappable/cool, someone who can maybe suffer setbacks but not actual outright embarrassment, because it’s part of the power fantasy they play for. so having something happen to embarrass a character in their minds just doesn’t fit with that narrative and makes them upset.
also, separate but related, it’s kind of an unspoken problem how many players really do just suffer like insanely uncomfortable amounts of bleed.
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@Wizz is it unspoken? Are you sure?
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how many people? sure.
