more falafel please posted:

my work used to have an IT guy who would constantly be browsing a forum dedicated to mafia games and i always wondered how that would work, it makes sense that it would be creepy RP

i only ever saw him eat two things, either he'd get an entire dominos pizza at like 9am and just eat it throughout the day or he'd get a giant bag of flamin' hot Cheetos and dump like a solid half cup of sriracha on them in a paper bowl and eat them with chopsticks

one time our operations guy (half receptionist half warehouse guy half office manager and former straight edge MMA fighter with cauliflower ear, extremely a "not gonna start poo poo but can definitely finish it" guy found him sleeping in the server room and this fuckin goon threatened to kick his rear end if he told on him. anyway that dude got fired and no asses got kicked

DaysBefore posted:

Tiberium Wars owns

pentyne posted:

I suddenly remember that the insane "secret trans creator is the ancestor of all modern japanese gave development" was also a Let's Play saga that included multiple people who believed some of the most bald faced idiotic poo poo possible and got genuinely angry when anyone pointed it out.

Wormskull posted:

[walks up to you and mutters in your ear] Link.

Al! posted:

presumably youd play it with people you post with which is why its dangerous b/c goons get super over familiar very fast

NoiseAnnoys posted:

oh hey, what's up fellow sagas poster, here's a picture of my tiny pierced dino dick and my tax returns!

Dandywalken posted:

its aged pretty well too imo

Al! posted:

ive only received a couple of unsolicited nudes, as a C tier poster, but i imagine forum superstars are drowning in weird dick

Daikatana Ritsu posted:

I've never posted my dick and balls on the forums or associated discords or chatrooms or online at all.

American McGay posted:

Yamai's chubby older bitches ftmfw

The Saddest Rhino posted:

If I recall the riven rape rpgs started off as mafia games which makes it even stranger

Bifauxnen posted:

This sums up my feelings too.

I was in the Riven game, and the other games related to it. It'll take me a while to figure out what if anything I feel like saying about it all, since I left that community before Bees' stuff happened. But my takeaway was similar to what Meinberg said here. I considered Pod a good friend who's run some incredible games, and I believe he does have the best of intentions. But he doesn't seem to understand just how unhealthy that RP community was getting. And anyone who's tried to tell him some why either gets not taken seriously, ignored, or...whatever the hell happened in Bees' game.

Their format of games just really sucks people in, to unhealthy levels. It's like having an always-on MUD or MMORPG. It used to be based off Mafia with a dayphase and nightphase, so you RP'ed in your area during dayphase then at least had the nightphase downtime while actions got resolved and everything was closed. And even that was already too much, with people having constant FOMO and getting way too much emotional bleed from how much it was consuming their life. I used to try and mention ideas for how that could maybe be scaled back some in future games. But from what I heard, it only got worse, with people able to move to different areas freely so you weren't even limited to your one spot and group during the phase. Now you've got FOMO about everyone.

The whole culture of secrecy thing is another huge part of what makes things so harmful. I played along with some very painful things in these games. I squashed down most of my complaints over the course of six real life months, waiting for a postgame debriefing where we could talk through things properly OOC. Only for that to seem impossible, since everyone's emotions were running so high, and my having problems with a villain character being celebrated was getting conflated with making GBS threads on other people's experience. (I didn't even dislike the villain's existence at all! I just hated that people wanted to forget that he tortured my character!) And it was too hard to discuss anything around what happened with some characters in the game, since their players had already left, and it felt like some huge taboo to even mention their names. That taboo feeling is the worst. I would have been completely fine with so much hosed up poo poo, if only I'd felt like I could have properly talked it through with people out of character. I wasn't around for Bees' game, but from what I've heard, a lot of the personal hurt feelings are around that culture of just booting people out and not giving them space to be heard.

I left after that game, cause it just hurt too much to see this crowd all patting each other on the back for how great and inclusive and emotionally-switched on they were when I still felt like poo poo. And Pod tried really hard to hear me out personally, I appreciate that he tried. But poo poo was so hosed up that it wasn't enough, and when I started hearing rumours of what went down in Bees' game, I stopped trying to stay in touch cause it looked like Pod and the rest of the group hadn't even learned anything.

It's not all entirely on Pod's shoulders. All the main "storyteller" admins besides him seem to enable each other to make things more toxic. I had a lot of great moments in some of these games (and Mafia games) thanks to Podima. I wish him and even the other people I didn't get along with the best. But even me, someone who really appreciates the good stuff he's done and played these RP games with all the good-faith trust in the mods they say they need, I still got pretty hurt by the games too. And I wasn't listened to either, at least no about the stuff that mattered. It's just really sad, and it took me a lot of time and therapy to sort out how hosed up and disappointing it all was.

pandy fackler posted:

how da gently caress did anybody have time for that. even if i broke up my relationship and quit my job i wouldn't have time for that

Daikatana Ritsu posted:

I've never posted my dick and balls on the forums or associated discords or chatrooms or online at all.

Nuns with Guns posted:

I was looking at that thread again last week because someone pointed out it's been almost exactly a year since it went down:

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4027368

And this is a big post but I think it recaps how poo poo got more and more toxic and why it went so long without being called out:

Daikatana Ritsu posted:

I've never posted my dick and balls on the forums or associated discords or chatrooms or online at all.

Heath posted:

Who's that?

everythingWasBees posted:

here's the warnings we were given (in a discord comment because we don't have access to the original anymore). none of this talked about the sex dolls. a lot of the content wasnt discussed. whenever someone raised concerns we were told to " trust the staff and the writers."

this is a pretty lengthy list! you could usually assume it to be exhaustive. you usually don't expect there to be a racist Korean caricature with sex dolls and a fixation on "supreme leader" but hey I guess we were meant to expect that.

we were also told repeatedly that " Yeah some of the stuff hasn't aged well. we're going to be spending a few months going through and editing and rewriting things because of that."

renessia posted:

This was Pod's response to some folks expressing concern over how the sex-doll game was being handled.

pentyne posted:

one nice piece of info to come out of that whole debacle was that roleplay communities have had more or less established standard rules for managing how to introduce topics like rape and sexual assault, it's not something anyone ever tries to argue without outing themselves as a freak of freaks.

some DnD streamer lucked into massive viral success and was chosen to host a live game as a DM with some popular streamers, and then he tried to drop some surprise content on them and it went over so poorly his career literally ended after that stream and his wife divorced him (may have been unrelated)

Daikatana Ritsu posted:

I've never posted my dick and balls on the forums

Meowywitch posted:

grieving for Gandalf posted:

arcadum. sorry for knowing this

pentyne posted:

one nice piece of info to come out of that whole debacle was that roleplay communities have had more or less established standard rules for managing how to introduce topics like rape and sexual assault, it's not something anyone ever tries to argue without outing themselves as a freak of freaks.

some DnD streamer lucked into massive viral success and was chosen to host a live game as a DM with some popular streamers, and then he tried to drop some surprise content on them and it went over so poorly his career literally ended after that stream and his wife divorced him (may have been unrelated)

pentyne posted:

Adam kobel.

Apparently up until that point he had also tried to position himself as Mr social awareness in the ttrpg field and always be all about safety and consent issues.

The event where he, while giggling non stop over describing what to him was comedy and to everyone else was sexual assault, went down so poorly that his subsequent various apologies, backtracking, then apologies turned him into such a persona non grata his peers fled from any project that had his name attached.

He deleted his twitter, and all his named social media has been inactive since.

Marcade posted:

Like one of the last times I ever did ttrpg. DM tried to roleplay his DMPC faerie dragon waking my character up with a bj. Just picked up my stuff and walked out mid session. No idea wtf he was thinking.