wankgate | 239: how does one become popular on dreamwidth rp?

gotta agree with this. i love my cr and the events are fun, but the mods can be so rigid and inflexible. whatever happened to working with the player so they have as much fun as possible? i don't mean say yes to every single idea, but try to do so whenever possible, at least.

i know someone who dropped because their character was a doctor, and the mods said that most, if not all of their business HAD to come from LIERs. no natives to keep the character busy during the 99% of the time when PCs didn't need medical attention. is it really so fucking hard to say "the locals are wary of a LIER doctor, but will go to see one anyway"? this is the kind of thing i mean.

it really does feel like getting stonewalled every time you go to the mods with an idea. and they take things so literally, like if you link a pic to them for your character's housing they seem to think that's actually what the housing is going to look like and will make judgements based on it though it's supposed to just be an example of the style!

what gets to me the most is when they don't put any of this info up front so players often make mistakes and only find out that they can't do something when it's too late to take it back. this plus the fact that it usually takes ages to get an answer from them means that you might have an idea for a plot and get excited and everything set up only to find out the consequences aren't what you wanted and now you're stuck playing out something you don't want to do or scrapping it completely

(before someone comes in with 'take this feedback to the mods' the above reasons ^ are why feedback never works. every player idea is met with 'no we won't do that' or promises that it will be done that never turn up. there's no point trying to tell them anything when they won't listen)

Is it bad that I'm relieved it's not just me? I've got to the point where I assumed the mods had a personal issue with me as they cockblock even the smallest plots or ideas I ask about. So at least they don't hate me... just creativity?

I wouldn't mind if there was any kind of plot to the game that might be disrupted but that's not the way it's run so they could let players use the setting more themselves.

they've done it to everyone i know in game anon so you're not alone. most players i've spoken to about it are just doing what they want and not asking permission now because it's easier to just not bother. at this point i think it's just one or two mods on the team who refuse to let anyone interfere with the setting because they want it to be a smut sandbox that they don't have to put too much effort into

it's a big game that has been running for a long time so maybe this sort of thing is inevitable but it's really frustrating that even the smallest things that won't have any impact on the plot or setting get shut down

I think the mod team has changed hands so many times that we’re down to the most abrasive, controlling players doing the job. The mod team wasn’t always like this, it’s gotten a lot worse over time.

yeah at this point the restrictions as written would put a complete stranglehold on the player characters being able to self-sustain, much less acquire housing or improve businesses like the asset rules state they should be able to.

if the mods refuse to make it make sense, then i'm just going to do what i want. let them kick me out or send me to sexy jail or whatever the fuck, i don't care anymore

anon, at this point i would bite my own hand off for anything resembling plot or action in this game

Plus a big old one

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(Anonymous) - 2022-03-07 16:59 (UTC) - Expand

It's not just you, my plurk timeline talks about this semi-regularly in terms of we're all really wary of asking for anything and when we do we're almost always shut down.

Don't forget you can't name a non player business or refer to any location in game the mods haven't specifically listed as existing. In an enormous city there can only be these half a dozen named places!

Lol really? Fuck, I make up shit all the time, did not know this rule.

that's not true any more, they posted an encouraging comment about it in the last sotg saying players can make up new locations. but you can't have your character own or work anywhere except official locations.

what confuses me is the way the mods are strict about this but there's nowhere to track what jobs characters actually have even though this is a common mechanic in a lot of other games. it seems like they don't actually check or care unless they can use it as a reason to tell someone they can't do something.

Re: DUPLICITY

(Anonymous) - 2022-03-08 00:05 (UTC) - Expand

what i hate most is how this makes no fucking sense internally speaking.

you mean to say that the entire city of billions of people is so xenophobically racist to the PCs that they wont even see them on pain of fuckin death.

what does that even mean for people in less serious jobs trying to run their cafes or whatever, 200 PC characters does not a separate economy make when no one has any money to start with.

why the fuck isnt the entire player character population living in character slums pooling their last $5 for bread at the rate of upheaval that happens in events, if not just out and out planning their glorious revolution.

I remember this sort of "the PCs are a distinct group and are absolutely excluded from NPC society" thing being bog standard in early DWRP city games and it just feels so...dated now?

I understand the purpose of such a thing (to make a lived-in world while minimizing the need for NPCing, and to curb powergaming by ensuring all PCs have relatively similar status in the world at large) but it also just means that characters have no real stake in the world beyond their CR and creates awkward scenarios like this where we're supposed to believe character businesses get by on 200 customers. Not to mention most of those old games were just casual SOL hubs.

Nowadays I don't think anyone expects mods to NPC random city folk, nor do I think most players are out to create personal NPC armies or anything ridiculous like that (and for those that are, a simple 'be reasonable' guideline seems more efficient than 'basically assume NPCs will barely even look at your character').

It's made even worse by the fact that just this month, they're letting PCs join the NPC equivalent of the police.

PCs that are never trusted by the Natives should never equal PCs being allowed to join this enforcement group run by NPCs. I mean who are they going to be allowed to enforce? The entire city?? Or just the 200 PCs with zero authority towards native citizens. Why would they even give any level of authority to characters that they don't trust?

I might be remembering it wrong, but we used to have PCs working with/in the government. There was less "the NPCs will never trust you" back then.

It feels more like the older the game gets, the more things we used to be able to do and the interaction with the population as a whole gets walked back.

There is literally no internal consistency, like do not get me started on how the gangs make no fucking sense with how the PCs are interacting with them.

And then they get so huffy and upset about players coming to them with plots and ideas they don't like and are super fucking rude about it.

well, sharon, you didn't give anyone any internal consistency to know where to aim ourselves, did you? why are you fucking surprised? sometimes its okay, you support all of it, and then other times you scream loudly at the top of your lungs how we all broke your rules and good luck for players to know when and what you meant.

plus on the one hand, you're told that NPCS are so hostile that they'll barely interact with LIERs, no matter how long they've been in the setting or how they've interacted with it

but also characters can make quota with them

maybe it's because of the person previously mentioned but in the faq now you can't even interact with or mention duplicity's children population without being auto warned/banned

on one hand it's a good way to avoid creepy convo but... who is having the creepy convos that need this weirdly rigid rule?

iirc this rule was put in place when a pc opened an orphanage the mods were okay with that but didn't want any actual interaction being played out with the kids or the kids used in general threads

not in dup but this is so fucking bizarre to read?? if they didn't want kids to exist in the setting then just don't put them in the setting. tanagura had all their kids sequestered off to be raised in an inaccessible facility. there's no reason dup couldn't just do the same if the mods were gonna be weird about it.

i feel like it's way more weird for the mods to just assume by default that people are going to be weird about it instead of, idk, having their character kick a stray soccer ball back to a kid or something.

This. Their reasoning is bizarre as well. It leans heavily into the Natives not trusting the PCs. Natives absolutely won't allow PCs anywhere near their kids.

Which, the Native trust thing is pretty bizzare in general. PC are allowed to handwave quota by saying they're getting their rocks off with NPCs. So, the Natives refuse to trust them but will still fuck them??? And it doesn't take into account that some PCs have been in the game for literal years now.

A PC could totally integrate into society and the NPCs still won't trust them. Added with that, the citizenship granted after a year means pretty much nothing. There are zero perks to "graduation". It doesn't leave a lot of motivation for characters to toe the line or even try to integrate.

that's... weird. i can understand why they would nix it for any sexy or adult-themed threads but what's wrong with interacting with kid npcs in a 100% gen thread?

lol where

looks like a bunch of generic twenty somethings and a cat

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