Peanut gallery: Leader PCs should be required to fade ERP

Holy christ the Arm community... *popcorn.gif*

In brief...

A known troll (Lotion) incites the player base on the forums with a generalized accusation that should have been a player report and handled with the specific individual. (if it even happened)

This led to parts of the community using the topic as a platform for SJW commentary from their either very specific personal trials, or hypothetical ones.

This (of course) devolved into the broader and entirely unrelated topic of gender roles because the community is split between boomers and millennials and (broad generalization) they don't agree deep down on these morals.

All in all, who fucking cares? Play the game IC and react IC as is appropriate for the setting, i.e. if a PC is misogynistic let them know how your PC feels about that.

Mods need to do better and ban trolls from the OOC channels when they throw gasoline on the community and toss a match in and lock threads with a firm statement on OOC conversations having no place in the context of the game's culture.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

an excellent example of the thought-terminating posts that happen on the gdb.

if you hate x, you hate women with no justification or explanation for a braindead take.

This is going to kind of meander but the TLDR is that Games are a form of escapism and a central pillar of escapism for many people is sexual fantasy. The only question that needs to be answered is whether Armageddon (or hypothetical game) permits it / wants to try and police it.

Meandering bit... So I've been around the block. I've done in-person tabletop (mostly d&d or WH40k by fantasy flight) and online tabletop (same mix) and Forum RP and MUD/MUSH/MU and FiveM RP (that's the GTA Streamers RPing in fictionalized Los Santos). I can tell you that ERP existed in every one of those but its level of acceptance/appropriateness varied greatly.

Tabletop Games, ERP is generally frowned upon because it's often extremely character centric and so you occupy 1-2 people and ignore everyone else. If it happens it should happen away from the table and if drama happens, then definitely keep it away from the table.

Forum RP, same thing normally forum based collaborative storytelling is more big picture focused keep the super personal bits private and go to DMs or Private Messages.

MUDs/MUSH, this is probably the place that ERP is the most common. Within MUDs people tend to treat ERP as either something to ignore, something to weaponize, or guilty pleasure. Realistically you can't police ERP because again we look at previous escapist games and ERP still happens it's just whether it happens within the main game. So does Armageddon want to nix sexual content completely? If so go for it and people will just do it in DMs or discord or whatever. If Armageddon isn't going to remove it completely than why bother policing it except for consent and certain taboo topics? It becomes the never ending elephant in the room.

FiveM GTARP, so this is that new fangled RP and actually it's pretty fun. I would say ERP is fairly uncommon here if only because the average age of these users tend to be under 20 and the female to male ratio skews pretty heavy depending on the focus of the particular server like NoPixel or Purple or Onyx or whatever. Even on these games ERP still happens, it's normally trolled pretty hard if someone gets caught, sometimes people make fake videos of someone ERPing to like character assassinate them. I don't know weird kids. I was a Senior Developer for an Australian server with 5000 unique logins a month. When you're dealing with that many people even like 1-5% interest in ERP and it happens. I was just lucky that as a dev I only got asked to check the logs to see if complaints were legit or not I never had to talk to them about why /emote on a street while moaning on public announcement was a bad idea and violated the PG-13 content.

Anyway as noted in the TLDR, escapism and sexual fantasy go hand in hand and I have yet to experience a single form of RP that didn't have some form of ERP in it. I have only seen forms of RP that discourage it as part of the game. I don't think it really merits a discussion really of whether ERP is good or bad if it's being done privately and you're not forced to watch it than what do you care? If there's something unethical happening like grooming or sex pest or abuse than yeah staff should act on that but even banning it from the game you still have the fallout from stuff happening off game so there is no escaping it. Besides didn't Armageddon figure this out like a decade ago sex corruption and betrayal aka Apartment Ganking

It's a common theory Lotion is a troll and this is incorrect. They're actually just autistic.

In my experience I think when the gender ratio skews you tend to see more relationship based RP. So in relationship RP I would define relationship as choices on who you spend time with, who you have supported, and who you have not. Like a Telltale Game where it went SOANDSO WILL REMEMBER THAT or Crusader Kings 3. When it skews the other way you'll see a lot of grinding, linear based gameplay but those that are interested in ERP tend to just want the smut. In GTAV FiveM RP you're dealing with like 14 - 25 year olds roughly and they want the booba as much as the next kid they just lack the ability to rizz. Oh yeah you pick up stupid slang when managing a game for kids. Also the future of humanity is lost.