@SockMonkey I’m strongly with that living room model. They say it’s wrong to compare a MU to a tabletop, and there sure are big differences, but the living room gaming sessions of my young-adulthood are what I’m aiming for in text-format.

It’s your living room, you provided the space and the bog-roll. You make the rules and so long as you make them clear or they’re just aligned with general and MU-specific norms, you’re not doing it wrong. Not letting people you actively dislike in is natural and will spare everyone trouble.

I tried to insist that players who couldn’t stand each other avoid each other with grace and not snipe at each other, because we may not all be friends but we’re going to act friendly in my living room. And tried to encourage OOC socialising and be available and friendly for it myself, since to me this is the real meta-game of RPGs (what you can win is friends) for Gary Gygax is the godfather of most of my oldest and most treasured friendships.

@Ashkuri I’m sure I didn’t imagine it would make them happy, but yes, actually.

If my RP is halted because I need some answers from a GM, and I have asked and each time the GM stops responding to the conversation before giving those answers, then yes, in a reasonable world I would be able to say, “Hey, can we have a conversation you don’t ghost so I can get this cleared up?” and have the GM recognise that I am not asking that to offend them, but because it’s a legitimate problem.

I say things like that at tabletop all the time and nobody gets into a tizzy about it. “C’mon, quiet, I can’t hear the GM answering my question,” and, “Yeah the party isn’t getting much done because you guys never actually declare an action, you just make a plan and then another plan. Do you mean to be declaring actions I’m not picking up on?” and so on. I’m actually getting pretty close to, “Could we maybe have the whole group stay at the fucking table for more than five minutes at a time?” some sessions, and I could say that, too, without drama.

What is one supposed to do on a MU? People say “vote with your feet” but honestly, I’d be hurt if one of my tabletop players left because they can’t hear me over the chatter or I keep accidentally skipping their turn, or whatever, without them first at least telling me there was a problem. Even though this implies that it’s, like, my responsibility to do something about the problem in spite of all the other work I already did to GM…

ETA: And indeed, I was bummed when players left my MU over stuff I could have/should have fixed. if I ever found out about it. Though I assumed that people usually left for other reasons.

If you can’t stand them and don’t want to deal with them? Yeah, ask them to leave the moment they show up.

@Tez said in Tough Calls:

That’s actually a really interesting point. You’re totally right. I would tell my friends to knock shit off in a way where it doesn’t register as a warning as such to my brain – which probably makes me more likely to do so.

I just don’t have the same sense of needing to be cautious or delicate with them, because I know that they will take what I say in the spirit in which it is intended, and change behavior.

Yep. That’s a thing.

Really it can be a major fairness issue.

If staff is a friend and we chat, I know more about the game and they know more about my PC. They’re more likely to make story that has a place for my PC.

Also, I tend to know when it’s a good time to ask them for something and when they’re tired and pissed off.

And more closely akin to what you’re saying – they might tell me to cut it out without considering it to be a ‘warning.’ They are more likely to tell me to cut it out before they wish they’d never approved me.

AND I am more likely to be permitted to tell them to cut it out without it being taken amiss. This ‘need to be cautious or delicate’ thing is, I think, largely overblown with MU staffers. You think you need to be delicate with players? Remember how delicate players feel they must be for staffers? For example, from what I see this threat was at least somewhat in response to a player asking a staffer when it’s appropriate to poke a +request, and the staffer feeling attacked because the player said their +request had been ‘ignored’ when it had, indeed, been ignored, just not for very long. Or there was the time I requested to have a conversation with a staffer where they didn’t stop responding with no warning before the discussion got anywhere, and instead of taking my point (that this was chronic and problematic) staffer appeared to be more interested in being offended at how I phrased this. And probably I couldn’t have phrased it right, because seriously, the whole damn trip is about erasing context and flattening nuance in order to feel attacked. Or feeling attacked and finding some reason to run with that feeling rather than taking a moment to give consideration to what the other person is saying rather than the ‘tone’ that is probably a blank you’re mostly filling in yourself.

Fellow players may not be your friends, but for a game to not suck, people need to at least act as if they are friendLY. This includes putting down the scepter, taking off that shiny hat, accepting that it’s not an insult when people notice that you’re not perfect, and having an ordinary conversation.

@Jumpscare Having actually looked at the other thread and read their paged exchanged, I don’t see it either.

Seems to boil down to one of those ‘if you have a problem you’re the problem’ exchanges, topped with tone-argument.

@Yam said in Banning Bad, Actually?:

It’s okay for them to expect some kind of service, and when they don’t get it, deride someone’s hard work,

Well, yeah, it’s okay to expect some kind of service when that’s what’s written on the box. The idea that everybody gets a turn is pretty built in.

@Pavel said in Banning Bad, Actually?:

@Faraday Well yeah, but you’re Faraday. You can speak braille and have counted to infinity twice. You won a game of connect four in three moves.

Oh, the same approach has worked very well for me. And I tried to win connect-four by using tablespoons of mashed potato instead of chips.

@Aria said in MU Peeves Thread:

At that point it’s not harassment, it’s just the other person being annoying by not taking the hint. And my dudes, dropping a hint is not clear communication. It’s deliberately vague communication,

Yep. My own experience with that was finding out that someone felt harassed by my asking for RP and chatting. Thinking, “Yeah, they never actually want to play and they never seem enthusiastic, but they always say they’re stressed/sick RL, and they always say ‘another time’ and they engage with the chat.” Everything about the interaction but the ‘hint’ in their tone said I should continue to reach out, and I thought that ‘hint’ was just them not feeling chipper because illness.

As a staffer:

Summarily banned, with no warning or even notification, a player who’d been RPing sex with child PCs.

Banned somebody who wanted NPCs to be dumb for them and refused to accept “no” for an answer and shut up about it.

Banned somebody who was edging up to gross teen sex stuff, and also was just a problem for not complying to course-corrections regarding theme, so I was already every week telling them stuff like, “No, animals are just animals and you don’t have a gull friend that steals food for you,” and such. This player was actually a lot of fun, I thought, but they just wouldn’t stop being a little too special.

Banned someone who refused to RP IC consequences and tried to escape them by disconnecting or going OOC, and got really rude when told that their PC would have to deal with the situation, not wait for everyone to forget it.

Didn’t ban, but had a player cuss at me and leave because the game was not what they wanted it to be. Which was fine, though I am sorry he’d wasted enough time thinking things were otherwise that it felt like a cheat to him.

Didn’t ban, but should have, somebody who was really bothering other players by using them for emotional support when they didn’t want to take on that role. I knew this was a problem and had talked to the player about it, but I didn’t know it was as big a problem as it was, and the players being harmed were shy to tell me and just left. I ought to have been more proactive about that, the fear-of-staff thing is a problem to overcome.

I didn’t have other staffers to ask. There was no backlash that I was aware of. Three in five got subdued cheers.

As a player:

Not banned, but asked to make a new, less depressing, PC, or leave, since I didn’t fit the intended tone of the game. It was polite and clear, and I did as asked.

Actually banned. From my PoV, it was that the staffer, a former friend, had decided abruptly that they didn’t like me/want to play with me any more but didn’t tell me in words, but by treating me like shit and responding to my “why are you treating me like shit?” and “that was shitty,” by claiming it was a mistake and that we were friends while campaigning against me to others, getting really wound up about it, and imagining/claiming that twice monthly interactions with me were daily rants and harassment. It was far from without warning, but the warnings all came with denials, and direct ‘am I even welcome on this game?’ questions answered with repeated lies of ‘we’re friends, you are wanted, stay’ to me but seen as a violation of boundaries as if an autistic guy is gonna see the unstated line when you’re directly communicating that it’s not there.

@hellfrog I am pretty sure the statement is that they’re harrassing people. I think it’s upthread, about me doing this. The other person I know who was banned seemingly for asking for RP wasn’t told why, just got blocked off the game shortly after asking for RP. Old news now, But anyway, the ‘what if I get in trouble for bothering people?’ fear is legit. Kinda like the ‘how often is too often to +request or poke about a request?’ anxieties.

@Yam

Once we all had anxiety, or we had emotional/mental fatigue from being the person who did the who-where-aboutwhat? scene-organising labour too often.

Now we can top those legit reasons off with the fact that some get away with treating asking for RP as a violation of boundaries and a bannable offense. So yeah, who’s asking these days?

@Cobalt I’ve asked. I’ll message you privately if I get a bite.

Degrees?

@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?

@Alamias Dammit.

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy.

https://www.advocate.com/news/miss-major-griffin-gracy-obituary

@KarmaBum Crossing the threads again, but now I wonder if the Wild Imaginary West set says anything about the -isms. If I am remembering it right from the videos, everything west of the Missisippi is monster country. Bleeding Kansas seems unlikely if moving to Kansas to influence its vote involves not merely the horrors of moving to Kansas, but also getting eaten by a gru.

@Faraday I remember them leaving, but not the why.

I would respond just the way you did.

ETA: + telling them that while maybe I wouldn’t do anything bad to them, if other PCs tried to, well, I wouldn’t stop them and the universe would be on their side if it came to that kind of call.

@KarmaBum I’m interested, but probably won’t actually do this. I mean, it’s possible, but how will I feel next week?

@bear_necessities I am all for bad guys if their players acknowledge that the PCs are bad and join the Black Hats Club.

@Faraday Yeah, we are talking about the same PC-couple. I either forgot the magnitude of the kerfluffle or wasn’t aware of it. I know my scheme to hide the origins of the mixed-race baby never came to fruition. I didn’t think the lynch-mob talk was serious at all – not “we want to do this,” but “If this game was historically accurate, this would happen.”

Heh. That might have been fun RP if it wasn’t freaking people out. (Though if things went then as they’ve gone the last few years, I’d have asked them to schedule their lynching attempt so I could be there, since my PC would be on guard 'cause he lived there, had 'em say “sure,” and then logged in to find that it happened exactly when I said I couldn’t be there but that they’d acknowledged my PCs presence by RPing that he just sat there doing nothing, and then framed me as the bad actor for remarking that that’s kinda shitty.)

I remember the discomfort with the issues regarding indigenous people, but not any actual indigenous characters.

@Yam is right – well, certainly your perspective as gamerunner was of a much less OOC-peaceful game than mine as a player.