@MisterBoring Silent Heaven already exists

ETA: joke

You joke, but Silent Heaven players will 100% sign up for all of that and have a great time. The first event I ran that was tagged “risk of character death” had 31 characters sign up for it. I’m impressed by their ability to find brief moments of IC fun, relief and happiness for their characters, even in the direst situations.

@MisterBoring Horror MU was like this when I played it, PCs will die or be maimed. Bad things will happen. Was quite a bit of fun.

Same with TGG. It can be fun when people go in knowing what they’re signing up for.

ETA: joke

Full-send, hard-in-the-paint effery across the boards.

Even if I don’t trust the GM.

…If I can trust the GM.

@Yam said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:

I think negative bleed is less of a problem than someone just being a butt about things.

I sort of disagree with this, but I think it’s because different people and groups handle negative bleed differently.

Some circles take negative bleed and resolve it in a healthy manner, so it’s not a big problem.

Other groups (including a few major LARP organizations I can think of) seem to delight in using negative bleed to drive perceived rivals away to make sure their characters are dominant in all situations.

that’s literally what yam was saying though: the issue isn’t the feeling itself, it’s if people act like a butt because of the feeling. you could be feeling bleed like CRAZY, utterly miserable because of the stuff happening to your character, but also being self-aware enough to take a break and keep it off the game and away from the other players

“handling negative bleed differently” is the point

“Bleed”, to me, is something else. It’s a crossing of boundaries that’s more than just the simple emotional response.

the part I meant specifically when I originally brought up insanely uncomfortable amounts of bleed is where the boundaries between someone’s understanding of events as happening to their character and happening to them have gotten so hazy that they start taking purely IC things intensely personally, and it changes the way they make their characters behave and affects their relationships with other players.

bleed itself by the definition people have been providing here is absolutely something that happens to everyone and isn’t that extreme on its own, I think, as long as you’re being self aware enough to recognize it and manage it, as already mentioned.

The issue is when you are making things weird with your character reactions due to your ooc read on situations.

Look. I absolutely believe that there have been occasions where player/s decide to be mean on purpose in order to drive someone else away. I am SURE it has happened. I am also 100% sure that it doesn’t happen even half as often as people assume it is happening to them. The vast majority of people who step on your feelings are not doing it ‘on purpose’. They aren’t even thinking about you.

As far as this discussion is concerned, I don’t view “having an emotional reaction” as being bleed. That’s the intended purpose. You’re supposed to have an emotional reaction to RP, that’s the whole point.

Yeah, that’s how I view it as well. Having an emotional reaction to fiction is perfectly normal. Even outsized reactions can be healthy if handled responsibly IMHO. “Bleed”, to me, is something else. It’s a crossing of boundaries that’s more than just the simple emotional response. That said, I acknowledge there is not one universal definition. But if we’re going to make proclamations about whether bleed is problematic, it’s helpful to know if we’re talking about the same thing.

I do kinda’ think we’ve blurred the lines between positive bleed and negative bleed at this point.

Bleed is a complex topic, with a wide range of definitions depending on how deep into the research rabbit hole one goes. We should, probably, use a different term to ensure consistency but we’ve never really been about consistency…

As far as this discussion is concerned, I don’t view “having an emotional reaction” as being bleed. That’s the intended purpose. You’re supposed to have an emotional reaction to RP, that’s the whole point.

Bleed, for me, is always an extreme reaction—extreme as in sitting at the extreme ends of a spectrum, not necessarily extreme in terms of outlandishness. Too far in either direction is a problem, as extremes almost always are.

ETA: To emphasise: Bleed is the feeling and the reaction. Therefore it includes the “being a butt about things.”

Other groups (including a few major LARP organizations I can think of) seem to delight in using negative bleed to drive perceived rivals away to make sure their characters are dominant in all situations.

Sounds like they were being a butt about things!

I think negative bleed is less of a problem than someone just being a butt about things.

I sort of disagree with this, but I think it’s because different people and groups handle negative bleed differently.

Some circles take negative bleed and resolve it in a healthy manner, so it’s not a big problem.

Other groups (including a few major LARP organizations I can think of) seem to delight in using negative bleed to drive perceived rivals away to make sure their characters are dominant in all situations.

I think negative bleed is less of a problem than someone just being a butt about things. Someone venting to me in DMs about their IC problems with my pals, MAYBE they’re experiencing negative bleed, but it’s manifesting in them being a butt.

It took me a long time to realize that the positive emotional stuff I get from RP I enjoy is also bleed

I might not use the same wording, but you’re absolutely right to associate even positive emotional stuff as potentially dangerous just as much as the negative. We so often hear of, or even feel, connections that are assumed to be stronger than they actually are simply due to the positive impact someone’s RP/storytelling has had on us.

I’m still also susceptible to bleed, but I can recognize it and do what I need to do to counter it.

It took me a long time to realize that the positive emotional stuff I get from RP I enjoy is also bleed. Bleed, in my opinion, regardless of what form it takes, is only bad if you don’t have a healthy way to manage it and the expectations it can create in a person. From what I’ve seen doing RP in various forms for 30 years, too much ‘positive’ bleed can also lead to some negative behaviors (usually in the form of someone going to deep into Mary Sue / Gary Stu territory).

When I have bleed, I usually don’t try to just stop it or counter it, I usually ask myself, “How can I take this and use it to inform the direction of the story going forward?” and “How can my bleed help me strengthen my RP?”

I put a lot of stock in using improv techniques to mitigate bleed in the middle of scenes too. If I play with a “Yes, And” mentality, I usually don’t feel as much bleed as I would if I’m trying to control more of the scene other than my character’s responses to the fiction the others create.

I answered the poll with the “Yes, but only if I have control over it” option. Beginner me understood that life for my characters couldn’t be perfect or else it’d be boring, but if bad things were going to happen, I either wanted to pick specifically what would happen in the moment or carefully plan with my scene partners what specifically would happen. Didn’t always work out well, as you might imagine.

Me with a few years of play under my belt loosened her hold on the reins and had become an actor IRL, who was learning in a very direct way how conflict propelled story and how valuable it was to respond in the moment rather than always pre-planning. During RP, I still wanted assurance that things would eventually turn out okay, but I was willing to play through the drama. I loved some of the stories I told with people during that time. However, two things started happening at once.

One was that the game I was on became very cliqueish, and communicating with people started to feel like pulling teeth – one, because there was some actual behind-the-scenes toxicity going on (that I ended up exposed to firsthand by becoming a staffer), and two, because I was afraid to “cause trouble” by trying to talk to people about what was going on. When communication breaks down…well. It just makes everything way more difficult than it should be, as I’m sure many of us have experienced.

The other thing was that I began to experience bleed. I didn’t know what it was or what was happening; I just knew that the bad things my characters were experiencing were becoming part of my own emotional state, and it wasn’t a good thing. Fortunately, since bleed is also something actors can experience if we’re not careful, some colleagues were able to tell me what was going on and helped me take some steps to deal with it. I’ll just come out and say that therapy was a big help during that time, too. (It can be pretty awesome, y’all; don’t skip it if you need a little guidance!)

At present, I’m a pretty different person than I was when I first started MUSHing. I’m still an actor, but I now have military, school, relationship, work experience, and an autism diagnosis that all shape how I play. I say I RP to escape the world’s BS and have a chance to be a hero in ways that I can’t in real life, but that doesn’t mean I’m averse to having bad things happen to my character for the sake of story. I don’t like bad things happening to my characters, but I do like the awesome stories I get to write with people that can come from those bad things happening, whether they’re physical or social. I also prefer that those things happen with plenty of communication involved. I don’t like being blindsided with bad stuff, and I prefer it not make up the majority of what I play. I really do love my friendships and romances and happy endings and such. But I don’t expect them to be handed to me, either.

I’m still also susceptible to bleed, but I can recognize it and do what I need to do to counter it. Sometimes I’m a little late in catching it and wind up apologizing profusely to anyone who ends up subjected to it, but I hope I’ve spared my scene partners pretty well thus far.

Anyway, that was kind of a ramble. Thanks for reading this far, if you did I guess I’m just hoping that maybe someone who’s had similar experiences will see this and know they’re not alone!

@somasatori said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:

Trophy tends towards the gritty fantasy

You forgot golf

I haven’t tried it, but that looks great

Trophy tends towards the gritty fantasy

You forgot golf

I think exploring other story game designs, such as Everyone is John, Dread, Microscope, Band of Blades, The Quiet Year, The Fall of Magic, Swords Without Master etc.

hell yeah weird little story game recommendations!

Also check out Lovecraftesque, either Trophy Dark or Trophy Gold, any number of PBTA games but especially Apocalypse World itself, Pasión de Las Pasiones, Worldwide Wrestling, Brindlewood Bay, and Urban Shadows.

Each of those really takes a stab at an existing genre of RPG and shifts it into a different mechanism of storytelling. Urban Shadows is probably one of the closest analogues to World of Darkness, but really does something unique with regards to how organizations and play settings are created. Both Pasión de Las Pasiones and World Wide Wrestling seem silly on their face, but are surprisingly impactful to play (one is a game about telenovelas and the other about the lives of professional and semi-professional wrestlers). Trophy (any iteration) is great for examining our relationships to fantasy roleplaying games. You can make it as high or low fantasy as you want, but Trophy tends towards the gritty fantasy – it was described once as “if A24 made a D&D movie.” I also may or may not be suggesting Trophy Gold because I have a credit in it. Brindlewood Bay has probably the best mystery-creation-and-solving system I’ve encountered, but it also takes a “the game is a conversation” stance towards it. If you find that you like Brindlewood Bay, also check out the game Public Access,

Lovecraftesque is very similar to Everyone is John, but everyone plays a facet of a Lovecraftian protagonist, which is fun when bits of the psyche start getting warped by the mythos.

I am still of the opinion that players identify too closely with their characters in MU*s for most people to be divorced from feeling bad when bad things happen to them.

I probably agree with this, but I also don’t see it as a bad thing. It’s not a problem that needs solving, the intense OOC overreactions are, and certain kinds of people are going to have those reactions regardless of system.