I got an A on my essays, too. If you go around flaunting your favorite child like this, I swear that me and my GRE-looking ass is gonna be hiding under your bed one of these nights :knife: :knife:

c i wood brag about u but ur only good at cheatnig on ur essays. no way u got an A on the esSAY but still can't read u illiterate no word count muthafuka cuz EXcuse me this is staffing confessions. dat means staff only. scoot skidaddle twerp! come back wen u staffing ok"?! captcha?!

but gj daddy spiral and mama **** r proud of u. i'll have my staff wifey cook up something nice 4 new year dinner @ the fam :uwu:

god wolfe calling me out icb

I just want y'all to know that I'm still dying of laughter. I sometimes forget what my username is because I've just had it for so long it's just normal and I don't notice it. The awoo made me lose my shit.

For the serious and contributing part

SPIRELE I definitely feel like smaller staff teams are better. I've just always been used to bloat in the past so I never really saw that as abnormal. 1 staff member for 5 people, even if it should have been 1 staff member per 10-15, was just such common practice that I never really questioned it until super recently. If your site has 100 members like the one I staffed on before I got frustrated enough to make my own you can have like... 100 members and 20 of them being on the staff team and needing to feel included in every decision.

None of the previous ones were that bad, but I wasn't kidding when it felt like the DMV. It incentivized people slipping through changes without telling anyone or else it'd take a month+ to do even basic stuff, which wasn't an environment I wanted. It's why for mine I went so transparent that sometimes people complain about it because I hated that secrets/politicking/etc. going on OOC. The only time I go private is for specific member moderation stuff so the 'Yo dude stop being a dick to everyone' talk isn't public. For everything site related that effects other people from the idea phase to the `ok we doing it` phase and even how sure I am of a system are all public.

Sometimes it's `Yeah I'm a genius I solved all of our problems.` and sometimes it's `Yeah idk wtf I'm doing but there's an issue here and I'm going to try and fix it with this. If it doesn't work, we'll try something else.` USUALLY it's the second one, because I'm just flinging shit on the wall and hoping some of it sticks sometimes. It also makes sure people are more comfortable criticizing things because they know I'm not sure about it and anticipate problems. If something sucks, ultimately I want people to tell me it sucks so I can fix it faster.

bc If you're the people in the creepy black hooded robes muttering doomsday prophecies, let go of the hate and you'll feel better. I'm a hypocrite and still have hangups of sites from forever ago that I'm still upset about. I still deep in my heart believe that Dheynor in 2013 was the best idea for a site I've ever played on and had a lot of really innovative and groundbreaking ideas for the time that made it THE premiere fantasy site that our staff team including me RUINED with incompetence. RUINED. I'd still be on that site in 2020 if we hadn't have made a dumpster fire out of a jewelry store, like dang.

But even the people I had massive disagreements with on other sites I try very hard not to hold grudges or anything anymore because quite frankly in the grand scheme of things that doesn't matter. If you screwed me over after like 2015 we chill and we fine. A bad staffer on one site can be a great member on another site. If you screwed me over in like 2013 and there's enough residual HATE for me to still remember your name I'll just leave if they join. There's literally only 1 person that I had a blood feud bad enough to do this with even almost a decade later, but that's not healthy. I keep tabs on them once or twice a year to feel better about myself seeing them fail in making sites even years later, but that's also really petty and not something that I would encourage anyone else to do.

If you're the edgy one trying to get mortal enemies, then I encourage you to not do that because pettiness should really not be your driving force in a hobby. Again, I'm a hypocrite and made a site with all the ideas rejected by other admins and was fueled for the first 3-4 months entirely by spite. That's not a healthy mindset to live in long term and memeing with your potential rivals is much more fun than actually hating them. Like I always try to make a point to even try and help out people who are staffing rival sites in my genre because I want the community to be bigger. The more long-term sites there are the more people there are in my genre and the more people end up watching RWBY.

Like the only people who upset me there are the people who write 30 page essays about how your favorite character sucks and how you're wrong and bad for liking them. But I just block them, because it's not worth any effort to try and convince someone that Neo isn't actually the worst written character in all of fiction. They're just saying that because I use her a profile picture everywhere and they're just trying to get a rise out of me. I'll admire the dedication, never read the 30 page long essay, and block them halfway through. Then I go on with my day as if nothing happened. You can disagree with someone without hating them, and if they don't want to do the same you just say Bye Felicia and let them wallow in their own bitterness without you.

Or to look at it more cynically, when someone explodes on you and expects you to be an angry toddler back and you're calm and not vindictive about it everyone sees the shining light you are as a person and makes the wannabe mortal enemy look even worse in comparison! You can be petty AND healthy! If you're not getting your drama fix from your own life, you can offer to let others vent about their drama so you get all the juicy thrill of seeing something burst into flames while also having the moral high ground of having nothing to do with it!

TL;DR if anyone wants to tell me some wild drama stories I am living for it because being the adult in the room sucks and I love drama but can't be part of it anymore. It's half the reason I'm so active here. Someone goes into a long rant and I'm just sitting there like:



It's why I like DMing things, because I really like drama and dramatic things. Idgaf if we win, lose, or die as long as it's dramatic enough to get me excited. My life is like that too but I'm like the most boring vanilla no avocado milquetoast person ever so I don't get any of it so gotta live vicariously through RP and other people to bring me my fix. The thing I miss the most about being a normal member isn't the lack of responsibilities or whatever, it's literally just the ability to randomly just toss in an overly dramatic HOW DARE YOU over something stupid in the cbox without everyone going all

I'm sorry - are you me?

On another topic - yes, I agree that smaller staff teams are much better. It's just super tiring now. I get too tired of not being able to fix the things without 9 different hands in the pot. I agree with this wholeheartedly. I was in several forums as a coding admin that had to take on a lot of responsibility and I'm just...not for that life anymore. If I have a 'team' it's of close friends who I know won't stare at me like I grew another head when I need to fix lore. Or people who are close enough to me to literally tell me it's just a bad take.

A few people I know asked me to mod discord servers and they have like- one of them has 15 members on staff. I just - I saw that and yeeted myself out of there.

JKLSDFJKLSDF AHAHAH nah i did it more as a joke. I MEAN i used 2 be the type to b like "hi welcome 2 your doom" n stuff but as joking!!! altho even now im sometimes all like "cat overlords yadda yadda this yadda yadda that," though my style is much more fluffy pink magical girls. ahahahahaha but ya. i just liked joking a lot. i was always dead scared of ppl hating me lkJSFLDKJFSDLK and i still am tbh.

tho tbh,,, i do think there's something to be said abt having a large staff team!

...so long as you're not in it. SKJFDLKDJF LARGE STAFF TEAMS suck to be apart of. even medium-sized staff teams r eugh. granted, it does depend on how much time you can spend on your site, but like,,, regardless large staff teams can b a pain

I've found it's much more efficient to write evil character hooks than good character hooks. Realistically, most PCs despite what they say care about #1 first and foremost it seems like and will resort to murder/maiming/etc. at the mildest inconvenience even against annoying things/people who can't actually hurt them in any way.

I kind of miss when I could write hooks that only relied on people naturally trying to be heroic, instead of being forced to have it effect them specifically all the time. Even on hero sites/genres I find it's actually rare for anybody to try and be anywhere close to a classic paragon type unless there's literally zero stakes/personal danger involved.

If I was a random villager and the so called 'heroes' acted like that, I'd be fucking terrified of them and avoid them at all costs... which only results in more evil actions because running away and hiding is suspicious.

Double posting but zero shame. It's rare that I get irritated for any prolonged period of time, but that's honestly the time I'm most productive as a staffer. If something else in my life irritates me, I'm irritated at everything including my own stuff. Any attachment I have to things I made is evaporated and I can just change a bunch of things that maybe aren't great around all at the same time that I put off because effort or I worked hard on it or whatever.

"Because this is how I've always done it" is not an excuse I want to ever use to justify why I keep crappy things in 2020. New year, new me. New decade, new ideas.

I work hard to let my staff team know that they are completely free to disagree with me and express themselves freely if they feel my course of action is wrong or if one of my ideas seems wrong, but I wonder if sometimes I lay it on a bit thick or think about it too much because I feel like when no one disagrees with me, like they might be scared to speak up at times lmao.

Not gonna lie, my favorite part about DMing events is to lead players to the edge of a conclusion and then just let whatever happen, happen.

A deranged serial killer just got free weapons from one, despite the fact that his story about what he was doing changed twice and he had already checked out a ton of weapons a few hours earlier that seem to have magically disappeared. I left all the shady behavior in, but refused to actively give it up in the post itself and outright declare he was evil OOC. I instead focused on outward behavior and his sense of righteous confidence, and what do you know -- tons of weapons!

I'm sure this will have no consequences down the line at all. I love dramatic situations, and the character finding out they just let a crazy and violent person take a bunch of weapons right in front of them and only just waved at them in response is going to be fun to read down the line. I know that players tend to prioritize their own character's safety in a metagame sense, and I hope this event helps break that a bit because the failure states have nothing to do with the PCs getting injured or hurt. In fact, it's better for the villains to not have to fight any PCs because that just makes their objective easier.

After all, what better way to show that the heroes of the setting really are unreliable cowards than presenting them with flashy but ultimately small danger and having them be too scared to do anything? Villains who try to win through raw power and murder are fine sometimes, yeah, but I've always been much more interested in villains who try to win by breaking the spirit of their opponents instead by proving character assassination correct in the moment that it happens. Someone hiding off in a safe space all boarded up while people are dying doesn't sound very superheroic to me, and having evidence of that happening just makes the kick back to the public all that more believable.

I set expectations at the beginning of the event, but I've noticed that some players still view things as player vs. DM and I'm somehow out to get them. I told them flat out the power level of their characters didn't matter so characters of all levels could join, because trying to hurt their characters wasn't the point and would need to be actively sought after. Now different people have different clues and varying levels of knowing what to do with them, and it all comes together soon.

I don't see my job as a staffer who runs events to make sure characters win, it's to ensure that any outcome that happens both reflects their decisions and is dramatic enough to be worth the buildup. Failure is fine, but having different levels of failure is just as important, so the tension doesn't die immediately when the first thing goes wrong.

Like, if you're trying to sneak into a fortress or whatever and the first time you fail a stealth check all the guards in the place start charging at you screaming bloody murder... that kills all the tension. There's nothing for the PC to do there except run, they have no options. It's much better to have different stages of failure. Maybe the first time you accidentally kick a pebble and a guard goes "I think I heard something." and another guard tells them to stop being dramatic. Maybe the second time the guard slowly walks over, all cautious like and ready to fight but you can easily just hide again until he goes away or gives up assuming it was just him being paranoid. Maybe the third time the guard alerts the others and puts everyone in earshot on high alert for a while.

Each of these things ratchets up the tension rather than killing it entirely like it would if you just had all the guards aggro immediately the second the PC stepped out of line. I see it as my job to enable and draw out that tension, because to me decisions made under that tension are much more meaningful because it's obvious to the player that their decision will actually effect outcomes -- and that's the goal. For the player to go Hey, what I do actually matters and will significantly effect the events going forward.

And part of making those choices matter are offering scenarios where player agency leads to bad decisions. The player can choose to save the day, or they can choose to let the shadiest person in the scenario randomly decide to take a bunch of high-tech weaponry right in front of them and just waving and telling them to be safe as they leave. With all the talk of 'railroading' and 'artificial choice' in at least the tabletop community, I think it's fair to point out that removing the possibility of catastrophic failure regardless of what the PCs do is also in and of itself a form of railroading. In the same way that most DMs would see a total success as a good thing, also see the catastrophic failure as a good thing so long as the decisions of the PCs are the things that drove the adventure to that conclusion. Giving players and thus PCs the choice to significantly effect outcomes means letting them fail as well as succeed, or their choices only matter sometimes.

It also has already helped curb metagaming, since I don't flat out say whether characters are good, evil, or just randos who are just trying to live their lives away from all the superpowered freakshows running around making property damage. I won't type the words This person is not normal. but I WILL type out how they twitch randomly, scratch their neck constantly, jerk their head in weird ways when they talk, stare off into space, and change their story every five minutes to something completely unrelated to the last one and never acknowledging that their last story was ever told. Not everything will be that obvious, mind, but you'd be amazed at how many of these you can throw at someone and still not have them perceive anything is abnormal OOC as long as you don't say the words This person is not normal. or the equivalent. If they fail to get it even after all of that, I still won't tell them.

I feel it's my job to lead them right to the conclusion, but let them pick up that conclusion by themselves. A catastrophic failure does not need to be Everyone dies because quite frankly that's boring and unimaginative. It removes your ability to actually let people fail by ensuring that you as the DM won't allow that outcome to happen. If you want player choices to matter, have a set of outcomes that you're actually willing to let loose into the RP and let the players decide which outcome they want through their actions.

Then sit back and watch the players make it 1000% harder by sabotaging themselves under the weight of this new responsibility. Players really are their worst enemy when they realize they can actually make things worse as well as better. Then just sit back and laugh evilly. IC infighting over what decision is best because the characters realize their choices actually matter is amazing and I wish I saw it more. It's even better as the DM because you know what decision will lead to what, and know which is more likely to work but won't tell them. It allows you to have all the warm fuzzies of giving players agency and decisions that matter, but also all the thrill of sitting back in your chair and laughing evilly as they choose their own adventure into the worst possible outcome -- or the best! It doesn't matter to you, the DM, because ideally you would have created a situation where both the best and the worst outcome is still dramatic and exciting to play. So you win no matter what!

That feel when I finally go and try to hit up all the new links in my advertising board... and half of them ends up on sites closed/under maintenance  

Or sites that require you to spend more than a minute doing an annoying scavenger hunt for their 'advertising board password'

OR SITES THAT DON'T LET YOU SEE THE BOARD'S POSTS SO IT DEFEATS THE PURPOSE OF AN ADVERTISING BOARD

deletes

worse,, there are sites out there that completely disable links for their advertising forum. why? 

That shit's gonna get deleted. I'm not sorry at all cause it's not a fair exchange to begin with. 

I guess those sites just figure that it's better to get their exposure links out no matter how short-lived it is if it means they can hit up a bunch of places, and maybe a portion of the sites would care to delete it or w/e due to lax link back times (like me). I also find those kind of sites often disable/filter out advertisement board posts from their 'recent activity' so it completely weeds out any kind of advertising, which is kind of low imo.

But can't stop everyone from running their gravy trains, unfortunately.