@Faraday said in "My Guy Syndrome":

@Roz said in "My Guy Syndrome":

we’re not talking about TTRPGs, though; we’re talking about MU*s. they may take systems from TTRPGs, stats and dice and such, but the social structure of how players have to persistently interact is entirely different from a tabletop experience.

Yes, I realize MUs are not TTRPGS (obviously). I said it was because of the TTRPG influence, which I believe came over along with the “stats and dice and such”.

plenty of MU*s have been entirely divorced from TTRPGs. like – plenty of them haven’t had stats or sheets at all. that was the majority of the games i played growing up

Seriously - have you seen “yes-and/no-but” as a commonplace principle in your MUSHing experience? Because I haven’t, even on games with a cooperative focus.

i would absolutely say it’s commonplace in nearly all of the games i’ve played. despite arguing about MU*s =/= TTRPGs just a second ago, i would in fact say that this philosophy has also extended to most of the TTRPG games i’ve played at, too.

maybe we’re just understanding the philosophy differently? to me, this is just a description of the basic philosophy of cooperative storytelling and trying – where appropriate, yes – to build upon what your fellow players are giving you. we even have a common phrase that gets trotted out for when people play against this philosophy in a particular way: no-selling. no-selling is frustrating and obnoxious for players because it tends to be a refusal of story rather than building on story.

“no, but” is a hugely common piece of advice given to GMs, both in tabletop and on MU*s – the idea that you be able to give characters something to keep moving forward, even if it’s a more difficult or more dangerous path, in cases where they fail.

@Faraday said in "My Guy Syndrome":

@Roz said in "My Guy Syndrome":

i really don’t think anyone was likely intending citing this to mean they think everyone should literally be saying yes to everything every single time

I was challenging it even as a general rule / starting point. “Yes, and…” is a perfectly valid improv technique, but that’s not the framework that most TTRPGs (and by proxy many MUs, which have one foot in their TTRPG roots) operate within.

we’re not talking about TTRPGs, though; we’re talking about MU*s. they may take systems from TTRPGs, stats and dice and such, but the social structure of how players have to persistently interact is entirely different from a tabletop experience.

That aside, I think @Trashcan raises an important point that “No, but…” is an equally valid improv response.

yes, i do agree there. i think that’s really just an expansion of the same philosophy. it’s about the collaborative building on what the other player is offering.

@Pavel once again, my point was only that i didn’t think the people in the conversation bringing up the “yes, and” tenet were meaning a version that was devoid of common sense and reasonable guidelines. just as a general effective philosophy of MU* RP being by nature a collaborative multiplayer improvisation

@Pavel said in "My Guy Syndrome":

@Roz said in "My Guy Syndrome":

@Pavel said in "My Guy Syndrome":

@Roz said in "My Guy Syndrome":

@Faraday said in "My Guy Syndrome":

Collaboration doesn’t mean always saying “yes” to everything. It means trying your best to find a mutually-fun solution, but also recognizing that sometimes people want opposite things and someone’s not going to get their idea of fun.

i really don’t think anyone was likely intending citing this to mean they think everyone should literally be saying yes to everything every single time

Here? Maybe not. Elsewhere? It’s absolutely been a thing.

it’s useless to try and account for every extremist view of a given perspective; they exist for every opinion. i was indeed talking about the conversation happening here

Yes, let us simply discount and ignore any experience that doesn’t fit within our own.

that literally wasn’t my point??? i wasn’t saying that that extreme take could never exist in the world. just that i don’t think anyone here in this conversation was expressing it, because it would be nonsensical. and that it would be exhausting trying to defend every single position from the angle of “i must always acknowledge the possibility for someone to take this to the absolute extreme,” because there’s an absolute extreme for everything, but it’s okay to approach conversations with a certain expectation of common sense.

because i do think it’s common sense that a game could not reasonably survive “everyone says yes to every single other player” and if someone came in her seriously positing that idea, we’d all just call it ridiculous and unsustainable. it wouldn’t be worth wasting time on

@Pavel said in "My Guy Syndrome":

@Roz said in "My Guy Syndrome":

@Faraday said in "My Guy Syndrome":

Collaboration doesn’t mean always saying “yes” to everything. It means trying your best to find a mutually-fun solution, but also recognizing that sometimes people want opposite things and someone’s not going to get their idea of fun.

i really don’t think anyone was likely intending citing this to mean they think everyone should literally be saying yes to everything every single time

Here? Maybe not. Elsewhere? It’s absolutely been a thing.

it’s useless to try and account for every extremist view of a given perspective; they exist for every opinion. i was indeed talking about the conversation happening here

@Faraday said in "My Guy Syndrome":

@chorus said in "My Guy Syndrome":

Just in general, MUSH RP is a “yes, and” medium.
Collaboration doesn’t mean always saying “yes” to everything. It means trying your best to find a mutually-fun solution, but also recognizing that sometimes people want opposite things and someone’s not going to get their idea of fun.

i really don’t think anyone was likely intending citing this to mean they think everyone should literally be saying yes to everything every single time

@Autumn said in Long or Short? Application Process!:

At the risk of sounding like I’m victim blaming, we also have to be willing to take “yes” for an answer. If staff explicitly say something like “If your background is more then N words, you’re probably going into more detail than we really need,” and I proceed to write a background that’s 5N words in length … that’s not something staff can fix.

idk who the victim being blamed in here is — players being blamed for writing more BG than they need? but anyways yeah this is very true and frustrating when it happens. when a game has a maximum word count for BGs, it means that they literally do not need that level of detail and aren’t interested in reading it. i’ve definitely been a part of sending back apps that went over the cap.

idk this game or the people running it, but i can tell you that the description of behavior offered by who i presume to be someone on staff aligns very closely with my experience with this player from when they were banned from a different game i staffed on a few years back

from the mention on the ares discord, it sounded like it may very well have just been a random coincidence

@Tez BRING BACK DOWNVOTES

@Ashkuri stop silencing me!!!

ETA: omfg just learned that the forum will give you a maximum of three exclamation marks. this is getting in the way of my comedy!!!

@Ashkuri i’ve been in the hobby a very long time and i’ve never run out of opinions in my life

@Coin said in Scenes within Scenes:

If you don’t LIKE the big scenes, don’t GO to the big scenes. If you do, GO.

for real. the comments in the thread about hating big scenes in general are just kind of irrelevant here. if you hate big scenes, then don’t go to them. if you’re on a game that requires you to go to huge scenes, find a new game.

the thread is about what people like and don’t like out of tabletalk systems, not whether or not you want to go to the scenes where tabletalk is commonly used.

@KDraygo said in Scenes within Scenes:

On table and place posing, I know that it would probably make it harder on Ares in terms of posting the log. Maybe a table doesn’t want their part of the log posted, but I believe in Ares, everything is posted. Which is why it has a pseudo place code where it’s just normal posing, with a header of where that person is situated in the code.

i mean, in a hypothetical world where there was a tabletalk system on a game that kept it quiet during the scene for spam reasons, but then posted everything into the final log — which is actually an idea i was muddling over with friends earlier today — then it doesn’t matter if a table does or doesn’t want to have their tabletalk posted; if that’s how the system worked, that’s how it would work, and people would be forewarned and they’d adjust to the code or bail.

i tried to figure out when the last time i played was and i’m honestly still not sure, but it’s at least been over a year, so i put that. kind of shocking for me to think about, because it’s longer than i’ve been away from the hobby for a very, very long time. but i’ve just been doing other things! doing a lot more writing and reading and the like. i’ll be back when my whims change.

making giant scenes OOCly mandatory — and saying that your character is shirking on their IC duty if you’re not at the scene — is indeed bad game policy. i understand that this was more common back in the day in certain areas of the hobby.

but i do think that it’s not strictly relevant to the more fundamental question of how tabletalk is and can be used. it’s a bad policy that games shouldn’t have, not something that’s inherent to all large scenes as a rule.

@Faraday said in Scenes within Scenes:

@Pavel said in Scenes within Scenes:

Because one can interact with people outside of their little group, should they choose.

Theoretically I guess, but in my experience this almost never happens. (see the comments above regarding interruptions, being yelled at for spam, etc.)

The only poses I ever saw going to the main room were the static announcements or the “oops I forgot to use tt command” nonsense.

But to each their own.

raises hand i saw it happen a lot on places like arx. depending on the event, it would be a mix of posing to the room and posing to tabletalk, people would pose indicators of reactions that would be notable enough for others in the scene to see, move between different tabletalk areas, react to something happening outside of tabletalk, etc. these weren’t rarities, they were things i’d see at nearly every event scene of any size.

@Roadspike said in Scenes within Scenes:

@howyadoin said in Scenes within Scenes:

But the real purpose of table talk is to isolate the inane peanut gallery chatter from the actual important shit going on.

And also to make mostly one-way scenes (such as sermons, lectures, ceremonies, giant meetings and concerts) less boring.

Again, this seems like a code solution trying to fix a social problem.

If there’s “important shit” going on that the peanut gallery can’t interrupt? Don’t have the peanut gallery at the scene. Have them in their own side-scene, either happening at the same time as the “important shit” scene that they can watch freely, or RPed after the "important shit* scene but ICly taking place at the same time.

If it’s a one-way scene that again, can’t be interrupted? Don’t make it a scene! I’m sure we’ve all been in plenty of scenes where we thought, “This didn’t need to be a scene, it could’ve been a post/vignette/scene-set.” So don’t make them scenes. Have the GM post up their too-important-to-be-interrupted scene as a Vignette, and then have the actual scene be everyone’s reaction to it afterwards. You know, when people can actually interact with each other without interrupting.

what if some players like it, though? like, we all have different experiences here, and i very much recognize that plenty of the experiences being talked about here are indeed very unpleasant. but also there have been people talking about how this scenario has been enjoyable to them. i have been in big scenes about Official Stuff where maybe my character present wasn’t a part of the Official Stuff, but i was able to discuss it while it was happening, and sometimes there would be in fact be reason to respond to things publicly in the scene.

a wholesale hatred of all large scenes of all types isn’t actually universal. if you’re coming from the assumption of “everyone hates this,” then yes, it will look like just trying to solve a social problem with code. but instead, you have to accept that you have a population of people who are actively interested in these scenes and just want it to be more easily parseable.

i am a FAN of the traditional places/tabletalk system; i have been at countless big event scenes that would have felt entirely unmanageable without them.

@Juniper said in Scenes within Scenes:

But if a scene is so busy that you need to split it up, just do that? Move to a different room. Take your friends onto the balcony. Actually commit to moving far enough away to experience some quiet. Don’t just move to a table and listen to everything anyway.

the situations where i have most often used tabletalk/places code, that’s just not viable due to the nature of the scene. it would generally be at a large event of some kind where there’s specific need or reason to stay in the main room for the events going on.

@Roadspike said in Scenes within Scenes:

I think that -in general- places code is trying to police a social problem (players having their characters react to things their characters shouldn’t be able to hear) with a code solution (making it so players can’t hear some of what’s said). And I’m generally not in favor of that.

that reasoning has honestly never occurred to me. for me, places/tt has always been about making large scenes more manageable by reducing the overall spam levels.

@Wuff said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

@howyadoin said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

@Prototart said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

Asynch: It’s like you and a friend swapping poses over @mail because their dick game is completely and totally insane

No one - and I mean no one’s - dick game is good enough to suffer through async.

Async is better than no sync sometimes. Some people are worth the effort and the patience.

fwiw, i really don’t want to frame this whole thing as a matter of just having patience, or some people “not being good enough” to async with.

oftentimes it really just literally is “my brain cannot keep engaged in this format.”