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(01-11-2016, 03:11 AM)LiadansWhisper Wrote:With all due respect, I think you have latched onto one single concept when I laid out several as a whole. I did advocate not responding sincerely. I suggested taking a few thing into account and reflection before passing judgement on a particular idea and framing things constructively. I did not say "don't hurt people's feelings." I said "treat others as you wish to be treated." There is a very significant difference between those two concepts. I also laid out that everyone has a different way of interpreting the lore we currently have. While we often frame our responses based on our own individual interpretation of lore, we do not often make clear that that is what we are doing. We put forward the illusion of authority over the lore when we have none. I am not advocating complete non-compliance with the lore. I am advocating keep an open mind about what could be possible. Leave yourself some room to be wrong.(01-11-2016, 02:58 AM)Yssen Wrote: We need to remember that we are all RPing to have fun. To take our creations and trot them around in the game, and interact with other people doing the same. We all want a positive experience as a result of the time and effort we put into RP, and with that in mind we need to remember that that is all someone else we come across is looking for too. You get exactly what you put out into the world, and we should treat others as we would want them to treat us.
I think it's important to remember that what is fun for you isn't necessarily fun for everyone else. Â And since we, individually, don't have any way of knowing what is "fun" for another person, we tend to answer from the perspective of what we consider to be fun.
I do not personally consider ignoring lore to be "fun." Â Lore is an important part of what I enjoy about a setting. Â A lack of lore actually turns me off of a setting, and makes it much harder for me to RP within such a setting. Â Ignoring lore when it's there just seems silly - why even play if you don't want to play in the world that you're playing in?
What's more, how is it a "kindness" to fail to let someone know, "You can play whatever you want, but this, this, and this are going to cause you problems"? Â If I know that the water is blistering hot and is going to burn you, and you ask me, "Hey, is the water hot," and I fail to tell you for fear of hurting your feelings, is that really kindness?
Because it's not in my book. Â That, right there, is cruel. Â Throwing someone into a shark tank without telling them ahead of time, "Hey, there are sharks in there" when they think it's empty of anything but water is pretty freaking cruel in my book. Â (Most especially if they asked me ahead of time, "Are there sharks in that tank?")
I have yet to see anyone post anything abusive or demeaning towards anyone showing up with really off-the-wall concepts or ideas, even when those concepts are breaking the in-game lore three ways from Sunday. Â If anything, people almost trip over themselves to try to be as kind as possible when they point out to Suzy that, well, that's an interesting idea, but you should be aware that x, y, and z are established in the lore, and that she might want to take that into account because it will cause problems for her down the road.
Again, knowing that a blind person is about to step out on a busy interstate and failing to warn them of what they are doing is not kindness. Â At all.
It is not out of meanness or a desire to hurt anyone that people who enjoy lore offer that lore to players asking questions about concepts or theories they have. Â It is out of kindness. Â I would not want to throw myself into RP, thinking I had a good grasp of what I was playing, only to find out after the fact that I was making a fool of myself and people were laughing at me behind my back. Â And worse, that people knew that what I was preparing to do would make a fool of me, but they never said anything because they thought it might hurt my feelings. Â Well, my feelings certainly are hurt now! Â It is out of that specific worry that I let people know when they're running roughshod over the lore - because I would never, ever want someone to be in that situation because it fucking sucks.
If someone asks a question, I'm going to respond sincerely because I care more about people rolling into RP and feeling like a fool later than I care about people on the internet thinking I'm just a huge mean person because I told someone, "Hey, that's not how it works exactly, but here are some ways you can play with that."
A prime example is DRG lore. We went from "there is only one Dragoon" to "Well there are several, but they are just random knights, only the Azure Dragoons does the jumps" to "Okay, they are not just random knights. They all do the jumps and wear the armor and have Gae Bolgs, but they are all Elezen and Hyur. No cat people or lalafell" to "Well crap. That is a miqo'te DRG, and that one is a Lalafell." At each reveal of new information, things that went contrary to what we had seen became "lorebreaking" and "off the wall" concepts. People were bad RPers for even thinking of doing that. No room was made to simply say "we don't know, this is what we think, but we could be wrong" resulting in an endless fit of back pedal by the most vocal. All of those points were taken as absolute fact. No open mind was kept and threads on this touchy subject became rife with venom as an echo chamber shouted "YER DOING IT WRONG!" This is by no means the only example, but it is a big one.
In short. It is not that there are no boundaries that we must operate within. It is that we must leave room with where those boundaries are and keep more of an open mind. Less trouble exists when we do this. Less trouble exists when we treat others as we wish to be treated. There are numerous threads here, all locked for getting out of hand now because these exact things did not happen. I suppose you could argue that doing such was "fun" for someone, but what image are we trying to put forward collectively? Are we willing to be helpful and trying to make sure that someone is coming up with an interesting story? Are we more interested in shooting things down left and right based on a belief that we could very well be eating crow over later? Are we willing to think critically and offer reasonable criticism? Are we just going to band wagon because we happen to like Bob more than we like Jim? All of those are things we have seen done, or done ourselves. I advocate taking a step back and figuring out which of those things we wish to be seen doing, not only as individuals but as a group.
Sidenote - It is all well and good to say we have not seen people be abusive or demeaning toward concepts, but this is false. There are a dozen or so locked threads that were locked because people got abusive and demeaning toward touchy concepts/subjects. They are there, monuments to how fervently awful some of us can be. Monuments to a few other issues too, but this isn't the time and place for that. Yet. Saying that it did not happen doesn't make it go away. Our solution should be to stare at it in all it's terrible, horrific glory and in doing so find resolve that we can do better than that. We can change the equation and see that it does not happen again.