Stories from RhyDin & The Rings

Hello RhyDin Community!

During our discussion on Lobby Behaviours and Best Practices, many of you expressed interest in a Green Room/OOC Players Discussing Play channel. We are looking forward to a trial run of a Green Room channel on our Discord Server. The trial period will run for ten weeks, from March 1st to May 9th. During this time we invite you to post your feedback and thoughts to this thread.

How is the Green Room different from the Lobby?
The lobby is a place for all kinds of OOC chatter where we can create connections with players in our community. The lobby is also used for welcoming new people to our server and talking about non-RP related topics. In contrast, the Green Room is an OOC space to focus on roleplay in our IC settings. The intent is to make it easier to find RP related commentary and discussions by creating a separate OOC space for that purpose. Just like our Lobby, the Green Room is an unmoderated space, and we will not be policing its use beyond enforcement of our Community Guidelines.

How might someone use the Green Room?
Below are some examples of how the Green Room might be used; this is by no means an exhaustive list.

• making positive or humorous comments about live play
• asking clarifying questions about where people are
• sharing your character’s outfit of the day
• providing a link to music for an event or performance
• organizing or coordinating during a group fight scene
• using the dice feature (?roll) during an event

We look forward to seeing how the Green Room is used and hearing your feedback!

I'm really enjoying this feature! The Lobby can be a fun place to hang out. However, the Green Room helps the RP related commentary from getting lost in the often fast paced scroll of the Lobby. I'm able to provide things like translations of foreign phrases without having to send out a half dozen DMs.

Love the green room, it seems almost flawless with the RP rooms to help with communication, coordination, and well just silliness, cause...talking about the RP when silliness is happening is..really nice, or having a silly moment when stressful RP is happening. It's made settling in to the community for me, a hell of a lot easier. Made me feel safe to RP whatever, and kinda be friends with people.

I'll be honest. I both love and hate the Green Room.

When it's being used for its intended purpose, I absolutely love this channel. I love how it works to keep everybody communicating and coordinating their RP experiences. "Hey, Mallory! Is it okay if..." For instance. As well as, "Where is Rhys in the room right now? At the bar? Cool. Thanks!" Things like that are very nice. I have also been enjoying the large group battles where rolling dice has helped enhance the fairness of play. It's a nice balance, especially considering how some characters can be OP (not pointing fingers or judging because I have some of my own that certainly qualify!). I also love it when people post outfits of the day or other helpful visuals.

What I don't like is how it can too often devolve into just a secondary Lobby, where people are chattering about things completely unrelated to any of the writing (or play) that is currently going on. And a good deal of it can become ... to put it mildly, disconcerting. I keep the Lobby muted because of a lot of the topics make me disgusted or uncomfortable. When I'm not presently engaged in play, I keep the Green Room muted too. Hell. Even when I am presently engaged in play I'll keep it muted more than half the time, because it can become too much. And it can get extra hectic when there is more than one channel active with play and people from two or more groups are using the same space to coordinate different scenes!

And that's all I really have to say about that.

I have to agree with Dris: I really love it when it's used as intended, for the immediate play. Because it's easier for me to grab that than someone's messages. It's aggravating for me to find it filled up with the stuff that should be in the lobbies or in private messages (inside jokes, sexah stuff, silly stuff, stuff that doesn't relate to the play at hand).

Hopefully, people can remember what it's for with a reminder or two. I mean, people will hit the wrong channel and such, that happens, but the green room does have its function.

I'll start this off with the admission that, much like the lobby, I don't use the Green Room all that much. So if that's something that disqualifies my opinion in someone's eyes, fair enough. I can live with that. With that said...

I think that it is a good idea in theory. Posting character outfits, event music, asking questions about play in a room, organizing fights, all good things. For me personally, I've noticed it tends more towards the "positive and humorous comments about live play" side of things, and that's not really my bag. More power to those of you that use it that way, it's just not my thing, so I mostly keep it on mute, occasionally put an outfit in there, but I tend not to ask RP-related questions in there -- I typically go to DMs for that. And I realize that that's a thing that differs us from many RP servers -- in a lot of places, DMing a player is considered an "opt-in" system, where you have to specifically say "I'm okay with people DMing me on this server." And that's very different from the way we've developed over the years in previous chat systems, where it was more of an "opt-out" system, and there was an assumption that it was okay to DM somebody unless they said otherwise.

As far as dice rolls go -- it's generally not my bag either. I think there are times where it adds to the RP for me (rolling dice for a wheel of drinks, rolling dice to pick a weapon to fight with) but still keeps that FFRP flavor. I'm not a fan, personally, of attack rolls and opposed rolls and saves a la Dungeons and Dragons -- that doesn't feel like FFRP to me. I'm not saying that it should absolutely not be done, but it's not something I'm going to take part in.

More generally, and maybe this is more philosophical than this thread needs, I think there's space on these forums and in the Discord rooms for people to do whatever they want. I'm not going to like everything everybody plays, and you're not going to like everything I play, but as long as we can respect that people have different play styles and interests and not jump down everyone's throats about it when those differences come up, I think we'll be fine.

While this might be better served as a separate topic, I leave it to the management to decide.

Along with what Dris said, I like the Green Room when it’s being used for its intended purpose. Based on what I learned last night, the purpose is apparently a bit different than what was originally discussed in the thread on Lobby behavior.

I realize that not everyone is comfortable with every subject brought up in chat. I don’t want to make anyone feel unwelcome in any place in our shared community. However, I don’t want to be made to feel unwelcome either. I'm not looking to point fingers, name names or otherwise single out any given individuals. I would find the behavior troubling no matter who initiated it.

Since it doesn't really fit the purpose of the room as a form of RP support, the Green Room isn't really the place for discussing personal sexual history. I'm not passing judgment on anyone for their intimate relationships. I'm not offended, but I am uncomfortable when it hits the screen. We have/have had members that are assault and abuse survivors. If I'm having difficulty, with my thick hide, and seeing this type of content, I can't begin to imagine how someone in those shoes would feel. We never know what might be a trigger for someone that has suffered that kind of trauma.

It's easy to say mute the OOC channels so it doesn't bother you. People have already been muting the Lobby because they get overwhelmed. Muting the Green Room, however, might cut players off from enjoying part of their RP experience.

As Karen Wilder used to say ... Thank you for your time.

PrlUnicorn wrote: ↑Fri May 22, 2020 9:35 pm It's easy to say mute the OOC channels so it doesn't bother you. People have already been muting the Lobby because they get overwhelmed. Muting the Green Room, however, might cut players off from enjoying part of their RP experience.

I agree with the bulk of what Collie-mun said, but I wanted to highlight this in particular, because I think it's the most important take-away, and, honestly, something I had only sort of considered. Muting the lobby, whether it's done to keep your attention focused on the room you're playing in or because you just don't want to participate in OOC discussion, probably isn't going to get in the way of your (general you) play. It mostly gets used for OOC chatter or, if it's stuff about characters, it doesn't pertain to immediate goings-on in the room typically. If you mute the Green Room, though, you miss seeing the music that characters are playing or singing karaoke to, players' attempts to orient characters in a setting, the previously mentioned wheel of drinks, etc. I mean, you can always pop up and read it (or the lobby) but, at least for me, a muted channel is a bit "out of sight, out of mind" and those fun RP details end up getting lost in the shuffle.

I don't know if there's a good solution to that if the channel is unmoderated; I know we've been very careful about not overwhelming people with channels, and I appreciate that immensely. Creating a channel just for people to post clothes and music and things, or one for rolling dice, or one for shooting the breeze about characters, seems to go against our goal of keeping channels minimal. But the only alternative for me is to sort through it to find the stuff that relates to play in the room I'm currently in, and that's not always an easy task.

Appreciate all the recent feedback now that the green room has been in testing for a while. There are a lot of important points and perspectives being shared. As our community grows, some of our channels get busier. That's a good thing! But it can also create challenges we didn't have before.

The green room, like all of our channels, is a shared space, and we should always be considerate of others' enjoyment alongside our own. Sometimes that might mean DMing something on a sensitive topic instead of sending it in the lobby or green room. It also might mean being aware of how much you're sending to the green room with respect to one scene while others might be struggling to keep track of another. As long as everyone tries to be aware in the spirit of sharing, I think the green room can continue to be a fun asset to our live roleplay spaces.

I continue to feel that we don't need strict rules or restrictions to define these spaces. We just all need to remember to be considerate of others and share the space. That might mean it's not perfect for any one of us, but it's as good as it can be for most.