magistrasa wrote: ↑Mon Jun 12, 2023 1:20 pm
I wish we lived in a world where nuance could exist in these kinds of conversations, and people understood the incomprehensibly vast gap between, "Minimal OOC communication to preserve narrative integrity," and, "Dragging unwilling players along with the story."
I also wish people understood that you literally can't "force" anyone to follow along with anything when the option to log out is readily available but whatever I guess I'm the devil for adopting and encouraging practices to minimize OOC bleedover and reducing exposure to manipulative emotional blackmail. All I can say is, I'm having a good time and so do the people who play with me, so I think it's fair to say that whatever I'm doing has some merit to it, and if you're experiencing the same with your own thing then that probably means whatever you do also has some merit. good luck have fun
This is exactly why - speaking personally - I DO want to use a little bit of OOC.
If I'm in that area of empowerment, i want to stress to the other player that my expectations are pretty much 0 and that whilst my pc may have the reigns, OOCly they're still very much in charge of their characters destiny, but we can work together to make a more interesting story.
Communication... in general... is good. You're right of course, there's a difference between a massive greentext wall of 'You should agree to be my pcs slave, because if you don't you're a terrible roleplayer and I'll tell the DMs on you!'
And
'Haya, considering slavery as a rout to go down? If you're potentailly OK with that OOCly let me know, if not absolutly fine, we'll work out something else!'
So yes, as Eira said, the type of communication and amount of it definatly matters. Indeed, if anyone experiences that first type (pressuring into something, especially something like slavery as a consequence) I'd strongly consider reporting it, as that's just terrible form.
But a bit of gentle ooc, in my opinion, does no harm.
The Stakes are not high, it's just a video game.
This is a fantastic attitude to take. I honestly truly admire it. It's something I keep in my mind when I play. It's something I VERY strongly recommend other people keep in mind.
But.
Sadly - it's also evidently not true.
If all of our playerbase had the above in mind, we'd never get any reports about bad PvP. Because everyone would laugh it off and go 'Lol It's just a computer game!'
If no one was bothered or upset by things that happened in game, we wouldn't have rules against mentioning rape, homophobia, Real Life Racism, graphic harm to small children, ect.
You don't have to even be a survivor of such things, to find them increadibly uncomfortable.
An example - since having my son, I've found scenes in films/TV where small children are put in peril/extremely upset to be... much harder to watch, if I can watch them at all. I don't object to such scenes existing mark you, but they're that bit harder for me to feel comfortable with.
Likewise, maybe someone doesn't like gorey scenes, or mutilation scenes, or so on even scenes of beatings, or scenes where they're even just menaced. Like - don't get me wrong, our Rating system should really cut out the worst of this stuff... but it can be useful to make sure the other player is Ok with a quick 'Haya, things may get a bit nasty so please shoot me a tell if you want me to tone back/stop/anything bothers you ect.' Or to assure someone that such things won't happen - but to continue with the capture rp in away that makes everyone comfortable.
Further more - it's not even just about ooc comfort.
I love capture RP personally. Like you, I t end to be pretty good with seperating myself. I don't mind if my pc gets beaten, tortured, humiliated ect. Pile it on! It's generally just a character to me and suffering builds story for me. (Maybe I'm wierd in that? Fair enough if I am!)
But that said - I do have a small child who I may need to drop everything for and attend to at any moment, so I may have to vanish unexpectedly.. You might have captured me at 1am when I was just about to log. You might want to enslave my pc and my reasons for 'no' might not be trauma or dislike of the slavery system - it might just be t hat I don't see it working for /that particular/ character. but at the same time might be ok with something else, which might be fun for us both (being a prisoner, being randsomed, beng brainwashed, being tormented by unending puns...)
Again yes - there's definatly bad ways to communicate to people. But that doesn't mean all communication is bad.
This too shall pass.
(I now have a DM Discord (I hope) It's DM GrumpyCat#7185 but please keep in mind I'm very busy IRL so I can't promise how quick I'll get back to you.)