@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.
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. 
@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?
@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.
With or without:
@Gashlycrumb said in Historical Games Round 75:
(Okay we have mining claims, and a valley with a couple of competing cattle ranches and homessteads, and a ridiculous frickin’ castle that some freak had built by Italian masons that he imported for the purpose and had guarded by Pinkertons while they worked, then released to run wild across the plains, and now it’s the Manor House like Downton Abbey, but if those PCs go into town it’s more like Deadwood. But it’s Boylei guy’s Wild Imaginary West so you have to carry this steampunkish antenna thing around to prevent weird monsters or giant versions of normal animals coming near you. Later in this story the abandoned Italian masons will appear, having survived by taking over a troupe of giant apes.)
@Faraday said in Historical Games Round 75:
Having run a western game, this is the understatement of the century.
I want to hear your war stories.
I liked that game. And RPed some stuff that was about racism. I don’t remember it beng a problem at all. My PC just had some elaborate ghoulish scheme to help hide somebody’s relationship and their child’s parantage. There was some chat about how it wasn’t necessary 'cause the rest of the PCs would be fine with it anyway.
I remember some people having their hackles up about location-inappropriate architecture. Or too much of it, or something. Now that I think of it, that ‘Darby’s Castle’ thing is almost true. In the sense that some rich blokes built miniature but still quite large castles for houses in Colorado.
(Okay we have mining claims, and a valley with a couple of competing cattle ranches and homessteads, and a ridiculous frickin’ castle that some freak had built by Italian masons that he imported for the purpose and had guarded by Pinkertons while they worked, then released to run wild across the plains, and now it’s the Manor House like Downton Abbey, but if those PCs go into town it’s more like Deadwood. But it’s Boylei guy’s Wild Imaginary West so you have to carry this steampunkish antenna thing around to prevent weird monsters or giant versions of normal animals coming near you. Later in this story the abandoned Italian masons will appear, having survived by taking over a troupe of giant apes.)
@KarmaBum I agree totally and would love to see that.
Have you watched that guy’s youtube mini-building channel? I thought "I want that as RPG setting’ before he announced its release as a game.
I live in Colorado, which makes that kinda easier.
@Jenn said in Missed Settings:
Personally, I’d say Texas, along the Rio Grande.
Yeah – very different setting. Really, there might be Mining Town westerns vs. Cow Town westerns, or towns with both. Alas, there’s not a lot of places to graze cattle near Leadville, which has a fun history. (Somebody said, “Hey, you know that black stuff in the tailings of your lead mines? That’s silver.”)
@Ashkuri said in Historical Games Round 75:
@Gashlycrumb said in Missed Settings:
Really, Westerns seem like a very easy setting to run.
There are a few historical -isms to navigate in those
Indeed there are.
it’s a known quantity of like-minded people. A public MUSH is a different animal.
Honestly, though, a MU does not have to be so different from aTTRPG. You can show people the door if they are not like-minded enough. This is not really all that hard.