Bad Stuff Happening IC
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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.
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@Wizz said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
how many players really do just suffer like insanely uncomfortable amounts of bleed.
I’d argue that maybe, at least in some cases, it’s not just bleed. Bleed, to my mind, is usually accidental — you need emotional distance between you and your character, sometimes that distance is unexpectedly thin, that’s when bleed happens, and can happen in either direction. But when people wholesale put their whole soul into the character they’re playing, that’s just like wandering into an emotional war zone without armour and doing so intentionally.
Calling it bleed at that point obscures the responsibility that player has to protect themselves. I don’t mean for it to sound like victim blaming, but if you’re wandering around with your entire ass out while we’re playing with lawn darts… you’re responsible if you get a dart in your butt.
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@Pyrephox said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
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!”
Unfortunately, this is true. In my experience as a GM, some players love bad things and consequences, and others just want to be heroes. As a GM, it’s not my place to judge – it’s to provide the frame for the story they want to tell, and mesh it in with the one I am telling.
So what I often do is offer choice. As an example, I just finished a quite epic scene in which the characters all died at the end. In death, they were returned to their own timeline and bodies, so no lasting damage.
Or at least, the choice of no lasting damage. Because how do you cope with experiencing a cold, wet, traumatic death on a sinking ship in the Atlantic? With knowing you just spent 24 hours trying to save that ship, and it’s still bloody sinking?
There’s a choice there, to opt out and be like, hey, that’s any day ending in y. And there’s the choice all the players made – traumatic death poses, lots of grief and misery to explore in follow-up scenes, and utter devastation all around. They hurt their own characters far more than I ever would have dared.
Which is just the way I want it. If somebody felt it was all too much, they could just ignore the trauma part and wake up with fewer memories or not too affected. Or they could go all overboard and require all kinds of drinking binges, psychotherapy and comfort cuddles for weeks after. All up to them. And nowhere in that did I have to sit down and try to judge how far I could and should go.
I find that most players are afraid of losing control. They’re afraid of being subjected to a story that isn’t fun to them. They’re not afraid of bad things happening to characters – they’re afraid to be ground into the dirt for no reason other than the GM or other player getting their jollies. And that, in my view, is a quite valid fear.
