Sunday, April 5, 2020

Have You Ever Been In a Chatroom Orgy?

If you've never been enough of an IRC Maven to have participated in a Chatroom Orgy, I suspect you're really not about role-playing  beyond buying D&D and Chaosium books whenever their approved outlets tell you to. The first time I walked into a familiar "Books and Literature" chatroom and read the dialog be a debased but correctly-spelled cesspool of pornography, I quickly jumped out. The second time, I observed and had a couple good conversations in PM windows. I realized that anybody typing as much as these chatters were needed both hands and what I was reading took a whole lot of effort to produce. As I was a regular at the rooms I knew it wasn't the norm. As I was not in the inner circle, I didn't know exactly what the Mavens were doing. Later, I'd become a Maven in soccer games on-line and realize where they were coming from. It can get fucking boring being on-line despite the fun that you want to attach yourself to. It is then you have to decide, what are you really on-line for.

The Matt Mercer Effects Meets Adam Koebel
While I watched a GM make an embarrassing pass at a woman on his YouTube "show", I didn't see rape. I saw a bunch of people that were not friends doing a performance art piece that was supposed to depict role-playing.  Everyone was over 18 and any roleplayer could've interjected themselves OOC over the scene being played, but none of them did. Indeed only the two PLAYER-CHARACTERS in the scene worked through the incredibly creepy performance of pathetic seduction by Adam Koebel and whoever his player was presenting as a naive waif allowing the intercourse to occur. And the culmination was supposed to be "sex positive" but ended up being tone-death and not reciprocated by the room around the GM.
If you're not a point in sexual development where the above paragraph makes sense to you please stop reading.

Playing a PC Does Not Have to Be Demeaning or Dirty, Unless You Want It To
You as an adult role-player in the tabletop realm of things, are not supposed to do anything but what you want to do. GMs are people that stage manage events from a well-scripted format bending towards chaotic happenstance with hopefully some notes, or many situations in-between. They are not masters of anything accept their players wanting to explore roles outside of their places in life as they know it. 
Now if you're not running an RPG but making a piece of performance art replicating an RPG, you're rather pathetic already and should just stop. If you need a photogenic cast of  "Players" of people that aren't really tabletop role-players, you're putting your foot in the litter box of adventure gaming already. If you an ARSE ( Approved Rules Systems Expert), you really should be learning how to type a lot while not being an expert on anything. If you're a disinterested would-be actor, you might want to find a real job ALREADY.

Guys like Koebel have done nothing for the RPG hobby
Look if  on-line "role-playing" is your claim to fame, I suggest you get a job. I don't care if you're the lovechild of Gygax, Arneson, and Bat-Boy and have four credits in 13ed Call of Cthulhu, you are deficient.
Adam Koebel's problem is that he is not dealing with the break-up of a tabletop role-playing group. He is dealing with a bad decision in a made up, might-be market place. He has been providing nothing much for anybody and skimming off the top of what he has been doing. Of course the 9 year-olds of the Frog Club are singing about  his demise, they have been praying for it since finding out girls are allowed into "our" club.

So, as much as I gossip, I just don't really care.
By the way, Adam you ever do that to my daughter in one of her RPG sessions, I'll break your wrists. Creep.

5 comments:

  1. I'm not going to defend what he did or anything, but you should probably get some facts straight here.

    A) Adam is Gay. Out. He was not seducing or making a pass at anyone, just being gross.

    B) Adam's claim to fame is being the co-creator of Dungeon World, and having a very successful YouTube series called Office Hours, which is actually full of excellent advice for running games.

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  2. Oh "he's gay"
    Does that make it all okay?

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    1. Of course not!
      But he wasn't making a pass at her. He was just being gross, and a bad GM for not asking if his players were cool with what he was asking them to do. That's all.

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    2. In truth, I don't really know what was going on in the man's mind. I have hung out at gay bars invited by friends, met women and went home with them. As that was real world and not on-line, I guess the rules aren't as clearly understood.
      Now it's not the sex was gross. Sex happens all the time in games among friends. It worked well as an RPG scene, but the man did not know his crowd enough to tell that he was having problems. And his crowd did not know him well enough to help him out nor forgive him when the perceived transgression occurred. My anger at him about his treatment of the woman involved in the scene, who did great RPing to show what a sport she was, was that she clearly wasn't comfortable with it.
      I'll go further and critique his orgasm narrative as one GM to another. It was pathetic. He could've either said something quippy and clever and left it as the grade C session that these sorts of scenes usually are, or he could've gone for the long goal of really working it. By work it, I mean even long and wordy with a build-up and then a release. So we watch a "C" session fall off into the D minus as the guy describes a bathroom masturbation finale. Given the recipient's reaction, that's where the ultimate failure comes in.

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