@MisterBoring

Bold to assume that Larry Leader was asking. As if it was a normal RPG story where Lord Larry Leader fills the narrative role of plot-hook-distributor and says, “You peasants, bring me the head of Fred the Foe or I’ll set these puppies on fire!” Yeah, that’s fun, and my IC response is where the fun tends to happen.

But no, that’s not the situation I am describing. Larry’s not asking. There are no negative consequences to Larry if he waits forever to make a move on that head, so he can do it himself when he feels like it, or give it to his bestie, or forget about it. Any loot or interesting information picked up from going to get the head will be his.

@MisterBoring said in Numetal/Retromux:

@Gashlycrumb said in Numetal/Retromux:

Having to force my character to act against his own interests in order to participate was the problem.

This is a very interesting statement, because for some people, asking their characters to act against their own interests is good RP.

Erm, what?

Larry Leader tells your PC, “Fuck you, you useless fuck. Now lick my asshole for a few hours every week if you want me to give you the chance to do something that will benefit me and almost certainly harm you. I will not pay you for it. I won’t even let it improve your reputation if I can prevent that, and I can.”

So your PC does it 'cause that’s good RP?

@Wizz This.

I, and others, stuggled to come up with IC reasons to deal with this character, and staff knew it. I, and many others, reported this player’s OOC rudeness to staff repeatedly. (Including a comical moment where the staffer told me how they’d had a talk with the player about their rudeness and the problem was solved, while at the same time the player was paging me rudely, and I told the staffer that was happening and the problem clearly not solved.) Staff knew.

I don’t mind an antangonist/antagonizing PC around. That’s fun. Having to force my character to act against his own interests in order to participate was the problem. Having him launch a suicide attack is, y’know, the same damn thing.

The lesson is more: a) Listen to players when they say another player is a problem, and before they decide to give up and leave or try to blow up the game and leave b) restrain your model-world building at least to the point where you do not need to assign plot-armour to PCs, ‘fudge’ rules to save them from their mistakes, or put up with them being rude, because losing them would lay waste to the setting, and c) Avoid Retro, where supposedly a player who enjoyed such a situation, considered it fair and cool, and bitched about how hard done by he was that nobody liked him, is staffing.

@Jennkryst Eehh. Well, fact is, I told the GM what I was trying to do and was told I couldn’t try. It required. GMing. And NPCs and stuff. I guess I could have just run in and tried to shoot him or something, but an intelligent plan that ought to have had a chance of working rather than just being a disruptive kamikaze scene, no.

@Pavel Yeah. This resemblence makes it all the more infuriating.

@Jennkryst Stupidly enough, I was actually directly told that I wasn’t allowed to try to do that.

@MisterBoring said in Numetal/Retromux:

Isn’t this just on-theme for… Vampire?

Erm, yes, in the sense that drinking blood is on-theme for vampire. No, in the sense that dropping Peter Dinklage into a wood-chipper and enjoying him as a slurpee on stage during the first act of Twelfth Night in Central Park is not.

You’re not supposed to be able to maintain power by making everyone refuse to cooperate with you. There was a fair bit of “well, I have to quit the game because I’ve got a herniated disk from bending over backwards coming up with IC excuses to continue to deal with this ass and there’s no other way to get involved.”

Which is the staffer there who played the de-facto PC leadership for vampire on Liberation and appeared to make it so players could choose between a) taking risks for and licking the ass of a “leader” who insulted them, openly informed them that he’d fuck them over at the slightest chance, and never rewarded them, and b) being unable to be involved in any plot?

Nicholas Brendon

@Third-Eye said in Paid Role-Playing:

The idea of dealing with players who think they’re a paying ‘customer’ always gets a legit, IRL, full-body shudder out of me when this comes up.

Yeah. I think we have problems with players and staff viewing the games as transactional when are meant to be reciprocal, and making them literally transactional would make it worse.

Michael Hague

Go back in memory, back to the children’s library, and you’ll remember him.

I got to meet him at story-times a couple of times as a kid, he was a nice man and his hair was very very shiny in the '80s.

Dan Simmons

@MisterBoring said in Celebrities We've Lost 2026 Edition:

Robert Duvall, legendary actor and filmmaker.

Gus! Nooooo.

@MisterBoring

@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

Are people trying and failing to run live scenes? If so, why? Perhaps there are tools to help.

I’m gonna just take a guess…

Scheduling is a pain and if you’re doing it through messages that somebody might take a day to answer the proposed date can roll past before you’ve heard back from everyone that it’s good.

With asynch on the game a player is more likely to discover and interact with players whose habitual online-times don’t match their own. This creates RP groups with greater than usual scheduling conflicts. And it meaans that timing-incompatibility problems that you’d otherwise never even know about become evident on an Ares game. Of course, you also wouldn’t know about the player and characters either.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Gashlycrumb I think there’s honestly a lot of nuance and discussion to be had on job queues all together

Yeah. The original AnomalyJobs came with the coder as the headwiz yelling at people for using it wrongly and establishing by force of virtual lung-power, a standard for single-topic +requests and what sorts of things you could page about without being told it needed to be a +request, etc, and rode herd on the rest of staff about that, probably unpleasantly. As a gamerunner I had a vetting process for them that was meant to keep pacing more fair but would not have been robust enough for a game with the level of GM involvement and plot complexity I wish for lately.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

some people just absolutely cannot explain what they’re actually asking for in a job request for whatever reason that is

I know I’ve been that guy. Well, my hyperbolic joke about it is that there are those staffers where you ask if your PC can have a housecat and they tell you that a talking green ridable tiger isn’t themely, and you try to explain housecat until they get sharp and you feel anxious and bad about it and still don’t know if your PC can get a kitten. But of course in actuality it’s nothing simple like a kitten, it’s some complicated scheme that I’m explaining badly.

@MisterBoring That’s very true. Honestly, I don’t mind a slow turnaround and can be very patient (all my forum whinging aside). What grinds on me is observing that other characters are getting tonnes more shit done in the same time-period. If you do 'em all in order and some players flood your jobs system, they get to do more shit.

I always felt like it was rude to have too many jobs going at once, just like I wouldn’t send you a bunch of emails one after another without waiting for a reply. I was really happy with the ‘you can only have so many jobs open at a time’ feature. (I would add to it some sort of +request/FIRE function so a player with too many +jobs could make an emergency sort of one, but that’d be icing on the cake.)

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

The subgroup of players that exist across all MUs that I refer to as “The Job Mill”. These players will generate more jobs than the entire rest of a game’s players combined, in some extreme cases multiple jobs a day.

For players outside that group, this is a frustrating explaination for non-responsiveness. Certianly the unending job-mill could tire a staffer out, but “I am too busy responding to a small extremely active group to get around to you,” just makes people wonder why you don’t do one job from each person who has one open, and get to those second and third and sixteenth ones from Job-Millers after you’ve dealt with the one from the guy who hasn’t made a request in weeks.

@Noraaa said in MU Peeves Thread:

But for me, I think the fatigue mostly comes from what I’d call a “creative tax.” When you tell stories for folks, you put your love and energy into it. But you are not drawing from an endless well. Creativity comes in bursts and windfalls, and there are droughts. The ask is that you basically draw from an endless well, though.

This is totally legit. Staffers should say it when it happens. I think players will understand. Of course, if you tell me that you’re just drawing a creative blank on my PC and don’t know what to do with him, I’ll probably want to talk about stuff I’d like the character to do or have happen to him.

I wonder how much resentment of players comes from feeling that creative exhaustion and associating it with the player who just happened to be the one in your queue when the block attacks.

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Gashlycrumb we sure could

I think you mean, “I” by “we” and forgot the “wish.” As in “I sure wish I could openly accuse Gashlycrumb without anybody finding out that my ‘evidence’ is hearsay, speculation, and affirming the consequent.”

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

@MisterBoring it’s always about specific incidents. People just don’t own up to them because they don’t want the scrutiny - for a variety of reasons, I’m sure.

All patterns are made up of specific incidents, but we can still talk about patterns.