she/they
KB is right. There is nothing to be gained. There is no understanding to reach. There is no communication to be had. The other night I was so profoundly disappointed in what has become of a good place that I was honestly pretty bummed out.
It is what it is. They are what they are. Let them be. And leave them there.
Hi, guys:
Any posts elsewhere will be moved to this thread.
This is not a thread for arguments or nasty debates. We will be closely monitoring and moderating this thread in a way that we usually do not.
This is a thread for grieving, sharing resources and help for people who are impacted by all of this (which is all of us, but some more than others).
I’m just glad Ghost is there to lead the way to a brighter, more positive future.
Let’s not be reductive genitalia-essentialists about gender no matter where we are in the forum.
I think it’s pretty obvious why HannahBanana has been banned, but just in case it’s not obvious, I don’t care where you are: ablelist language isn’t okay, gatekeeping sexuality isn’t okay, none of this is okay.
https://forum.aresmush.com/t/v1-0-0-released/923
I don’t know if you guys have heard about this new fangled MUSH server called Ares–
Ares has brought a lot of new life into the hobby. I’ve watched people who hadn’t even logged into a MU* in their life launch and run games. Congratulations to @Faraday, and THANK YOU!!
While users can create new threads, they cannot create new categories. I believe that’s what you mean when you say new boards, yeah? We made a conscious choice not to include a politics category when we created this forum and right now that is not changing.
Politics isn’t a team sport. It’s life or death for many of us.
It’s not that we don’t think it’s important, so we won’t make space for it; in many ways, it is TOO IMPORTANT. This is especially true given the hands-off moderation stance I’d rather see on this board. We just don’t have the time, bandwidth, expertise, capacity, etc. to be able to moderate those discussions.
I’m sorry.
@Dreampipe said in Bannings:
There are actually a fuckton of literal fascists in this hobby;
There are fascists in a lot of places, alas. Fascists in gaming is an interesting area people are working on, but the far right were early adopters of online spaces (including back in the BBS days). Their methods will only ever get a small percentage of the population, but if you have so many people you can access, you can get to a much greater proportion of that small number and…well.
As someone who is super into history, Norse mythology, Crusader Kings, punk rock, and RPGs, the amount of time I have to spend squinting at people with common interests and going “Okay, but are you a fucking Nazi?” is both alarming and exhausting.
Seconded. I’m a white dude and it’s sometimes really anxiety inducing to talk about those kinds of interests without feeling like, “guys I swear I just like the stories, I’m not a white supremacist”. Double whammy because I also like power metal.
At least a lot of them usually don’t take long to go mask-off. I remember people using SS designs in medieval games like Mordhau or Chivalry. No it’s not a pair of lightning bolts, I know what you are.
Look, I can’t lie. I would use a pair of lightning bolts because I think lightning bolts look cool.
AND THEN I WOULD BE FUCKING MORTIFIED WHEN SOMEONE TOLD ME.
Pour one out for everyone born in 1988 who is innocently making very poor choices about their usernames.
I am glad that we have largely left behind all-white games in the L&L space. I think the expectation that most people have is that you will see a diverse cast of characters. I appreciate that about Concordia, particularly where they have course-corrected with their pantheon. I think they are doing some other interesting things in that space, too.
There is maybe no perfect way to handle the issue of cultural diversity and real-world inspirations, but I still think that what they are doing is worth an upnod. You got your Targaryens, sure, and your red-heads, and your Romans–
But there is also a house that has clear East Asian influences and one with South Asian influences. I grabbed one of those from the roster because I am always dying to see something – anything, please, god – that isn’t just your standard Western French-British-Something take on fantasy. Then I ran into players who maybe had been expecting something more Western in the house, so I popped in a request to get more clarity. I wanted to know what staff’s intent actually was, and I like the answer I got.
Rather than directly copy and paste real-world cultures into the game, they’ve made a choice to draw on multiple places for inspiration to avoid generalizing, tokenizing, or fetishizing any real-world culture. In this case, yes, the house has elements of North India, but also Moorish Spain. I’m kind of curious if there’s a connecting thread of thought in that they were both extension of Islamic power at times, what with the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire in North India, but I haven’t sat them down for details – and I actually enjoy classical India better so DON’T FEEL THE NEED TO DRAW THAT LINE ON MY ACCOUNT.
Right now, at this moment, all I really care about is that they are doing something different, something interesting, and something coming from a place of curiosity and thoughtfulness. I wouldn’t say that they are a perfect game, and there’s choices I wouldn’t have made, but holy fuck please I hope more fantasy L&L games in the future draw from a wider well than the tiny Western European fantasy well.
@Roz There’s also the case where someone might have set up a robots.txt file to reject the robots, but it would still be visible to people. I have done that, for example. You wouldn’t necessarily know if it can be scraped or not.
I’d personally have some real reservations introducing someone else’s writing to the great chatbot in the sky.
@InkGolem I suppose the robots are out there scraping the mines regardless. I’m glad you seem to recognize that as a boundary for people though. I think that would be a particular hot spot for many people in the RP world.
@InkGolem Do you share their writing with it as well, for example sharing the scene in progress?
@InkGolem Do you tell your RP partners you are using AI?
@Trashcan Just FYI, I’m taking a look at this. The console is having issues so I’ll give it a bit. TY for finding a potential solution.
@Roadspike said in Metaplot: What and How:
Players were welcome to run general combat scenes, and if they wanted to try out something particular, we asked that they check in with us first.
How often did you get players running things? If you made it a percent, how much was staff-run vs. player-run? I like the idea of seeding things with player-plots by giving them tidbits to include, but I wouldn’t say I’ve been very successful at it yet.
We closed down before we could get to fruition on that story thread, but we had a dozen or so players chasing it and looking to impact which NPCs had power and influence on the Crown Council. That in turn would have impact on how the war was prosecuted, as well as how efficient the Crown was at prosecuting it.
Respect. It sounds like you had a lot going and I’m curious how it would have played out if you were able to continue. Did you get a feel from players or any feedback as to how the political side worked for them?
@Warma-Sheen said in Metaplot: What and How:
Respectfully, IMHO, that’s because that example doesn’t really sound like a metaplot. That just sounds like a setting.
LBH’s definition of a metaplot may be different, but it clearly works for them. I’m interested in the whys and hows of different approaches. Keys has found a formula that works well for them. I tend to think of metaplot as a season or series arc and individual plots as being episodes, but I’m interested in how others do it.
Clarity of scope / meaning / etc. is obviously important. @L-B-Heuschkel and @Faraday have noted it, among others.
ETA so I don’t double post:
@Roadspike said in Metaplot: What and How:
I think that this is an important point: setting and metaplot are different.
Not everyone agrees on this point. If you look at how Wikipedia defines it, they talk more about what you would call setting. I think metaplot as you are using it more of a TWOP definition. That also tends to be how I think of it.
@L-B-Heuschkel That’s a great set up for that kind of play. I’ve mentally filed that kind of thing under ‘Stargate games’, and I think it can work VERY well for games set up for it.
I’ve tried similar things on games I’ve run, although less as a literal portal to other universes structure and more as in there is a homebase and people can go out and run missions on other planets. (Because my bias was scifi rather than fantasy. You could call them portal games too!) The idea being that the distance should empower people to freely do what they like. I think Spirit Lake played with the portal thing too.
The problem I’ve run into is that players don’t necessarily feel that it connects back to the metaplot if there aren’t changes to the homebase region or overall story. Is that just out of the scope for your game?
@Pavel said in Metaplot: What and How:
@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:
I’m always trying to solve for the issue that there seem to be more people who want to be in stories than people who want to run stories.
Hey, if you solve this, can you post it all over the internet? TTRPG groups the world over have been trying to solve this since the 60s, and the best we have is cool ranch Doritos.
lmfao yeah, I’ll make sure to let the world know when I solve it. I almost made a crack about it being the fermat’s last theorem of RP.
@Roadspike said in Metaplot: What and How:
@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:
@Roadspike TSS, I get. With Fifth World, can you talk more about your metaplot and how the politics and stuff were in relation to it?
Certainly! I’m (almost) always happy to talk about The Fifth World.
So the overarching metaplot there was a regularly-occurring and long-anticipated invasion from mysterious-ish forces on an outer-system planet with an elliptical orbit around an inner system with several inhabited and connected planets ruled by knights-in-space.
There were invasions in particular areas, and updates on the state of the conflict, but with that as a backdrop and a shaping force, there were also politics between the noble houses for power and influence within and over the war effort. Some houses thought that the war should be handled one way, others thought it should be handled another. Some people just wanted power. There were also Citizen-based (non-noble “commoners” but with many, many, many more rights) Senate elections that had an impact on how the war would be prosecuted. There were efforts to raise morale from the home front. There were alliances that were built and fell apart. There were efforts to advance the science and technology for fighting against the invaders.
Welcome to me intensely digging for more details. Were the invasions handled as GMed scenes? How did you make the politicking real for people? Was it jobs and rolls? Was it all staff run?
@KarmaBum your examples give me warm-fuzzies. I saw your Pern game and got HARDCORE nostalgic.
@Faraday I think broadly most of us agree about what metaplot is, and largely we all agree that in the ideal world it would be nice if all players can contribute.
But I’m not really curious about the ideal. I want to know where it gets messy, and where it gets real. That’s why I’m mostly curious to know examples about how people are dealing with it. What their metaplot is and how it is enacted.
Maybe I should have just said HOW for the thread.
I’m always trying to solve for the issue that there seem to be more people who want to be in stories than people who want to run stories. Picking over the how of other people helps me refine my thoughts.
