@Snackness I call dibs on having a tiger-cat-thing minion.

@tsar JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. I can’t tell you why, or describe this show to you in any way other than, it’s fucking BIZARRE.

@junipersky it’s all i can see every time this guy posts, i thought i was crazy that no one else was bringing it up

@tsar said in pvp vs pvp:

I think we can probably stop feeding this person the attention they’re craving.

you mean we should stop arguing with the guy who’s user name is a euphemism for dog penis? because that didn’t automatically target him as problematic to begin with…???

@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:

elderly romance novelists

I mean this accurately describes me so I ain’t even mad about it.

Anyway I think this whole conversation stemmed from stakes in a game and I go back to saying you don’t need PvP for there to be stakes. PVP games might not be my cup of elderly romance novelist tea but I do like my games to have stakes and tend to agree that most games don’t have those anymore and it’s a bummer.

@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:

Look no further than the millions of people across the world playing PVP games for an example.

Oh yes please I want my MUSHes filled with dozens of teenagers calling me every slur in the book because I didn’t play right, please please please make my MUSHes more like these video games that are held in such high regard.

I remember when I joined a oWoD game for the first time as a mortal and was told “hey, try not to go out alone because there are a lot of assholes on the game who will just kill you”. As a result, the little RP I did get was inside a private room and ended up leaving the game pretty quickly.

Maybe that’s fun for some people, but it’s definitely not fun for me.

I’ve yet to see a situation in a game where PVP was solely an IC thing and there was 0 OOC influence involved in it. The problem with PVP games will always be players, and while there are bad players on PVE games too, at least they can’t just kill you for being in the same room with them.

@Ashkuri name names, name games!

@Faraday said in AI PBs:

me. These tools are literally destroying the livelihoods of people I care about right now and threatening to do the same to more people in the future. So it just really hurts to see people shrug and be like: “Eh, whatever, I’m gonna still play with it because it’s a fun toy.” I wish more people would take a principled stand against it, because that can actually make a difference to their bottom lines.

Honestly, I don’t know how you can say this and then also say

@Faraday said in AI PBs:

I purchase from Amazon and thereby enable corruption and exploitation. I have reasons, but they’re kinda selfish. I can at least admit it.

when the exact same argument could be made for Amazon and I would argue those very real people being exploited are being hurt a bit worse here.

I’m thoroughly confused by what the argument is at this point. Is it ok to use AI as long as i acknowledge it’s harmful to artists?

@dvoraen ok but what game is that???

@MisterBoring It might be a lack of trust thing? I can count on one hand the # of times I’ve been told that and didn’t have someone freak the fuck out when that exact same consequence became a Real Possibility. I actually don’t even need one hand, I could use one finger.

@Juniper I’ve always felt that while people say they want consequences in their RP, a vast majority of people don’t really want it. At least not permanent consequences. I think most people just want to be able to write a little angst/drama into their RP for a couple of scenes, get some attention, and then move on from it. There’s a very rare few that truly want their characters to die, or to suffer major long-lasting and/or permanent consequences as a result of their RP.

I do think that circles back to tone and what people are trying to play. I don’t think a grimdark game where consequences are char-death or extreme permanent damage would be very successful, because most people want to play consequences that they can overcome (if they want consequences at all).

@Tez so it’s you eh???

@MisterBoring said in World Tone / Feeling:

Like my idea for a post-apocalyptic game where the remaining people on the world live in and around a huge metal tower. The people who have all the power live above the smog clouds choking the world below, and have access to the remaining places above the clouds, including the last bits of fertile land and potable water. The rest of the people live below, in claustrophobic spaces where their survival is only guaranteed by toiling to get access to resupply of the filters that keep the smog out of their cramped quarters. The lower class use power armor suits to try and clean the world, much like the Chernobyl liquidators, while the upper class vie for control of the remaining clean resources and do what they can to keep the lower class from climbing the tower and destroying everything.

I had a similar idea for an anthology game I was thinking of creating. Basically you are in the tower and the only way to climb is to participate in virtual reality “simulations” where your goal was to amuse the people in the upper floors, kinda Hunger Game-y except you were a different character in each sim. The purpose was to die, repeatedly and violently and epically. I just couldn’t figure out what people would do when they were killed off and waiting for everyone else.

NGL one of my favorite thing about Horror 2 was the fact that if you were in an open scene, it was fair game for the storyteller to drop in with something unannounced, but she made that pretty clear right out of the gate. It certainly made it feel like there was something that could happen at any second and was an easy way to rope people into plot.

@DrQuinn said in Player Ratios:

@bear_necessities I always felt like there should be a way for players to indicate to staff if they wanted to be involved in things or not but I have no real ideas on how to implement it. Like you could do metaplot y/n because there’s always people who are dying to get in on things, then you have people that are just there to do social scenes and never want to know there’s a dark god hanging out at the bookstore, etc.

I am that person that loves to pull people into things, though. Did you take a point of map making on your sheet for a lark? Boom, now there is a plot where you have to read a MAP and SAVE THE DAY.

Though I can see how if you made your map making pc just to romance your friend the explorer, you might be annoyed if the Gnome King interrupts your date to make you go get a group together to save the Kingdom of Butterbright.

RP prefs probably help for that. Honestly when I was running games and STing, I would just poke people and be like “hey do you want to get in on this” versus dumping plot into their lap.

Maybe back in the day when games had like 500 players it was really hard to identify the people that were lost to timezones or too shy to ask for RP, but I just don’t think that’s the case anymore. But also it really isn’t my job as a game admin to keep track of your pretendy fun-time points to determine if you’re having enough pretendy fun-time so please just reach out and poke if you aren’t getting plot but want it.

@Pavel said in Player Ratios:

metric of some kind to identify people struggling to either find time or social energy so that staff can make a point of drawing them into things

I don’t think it’s that hard to spot these players without a point system and if they already don’t have the time or social energy to play why would they want to be drawn into things?

I certainly don’t have the time or social energy to play right now and the last thing I’d want is a GM to single me out and be like YOU THERE, HERE’S PLOT because then I feel forced to spread that plot and I don’t have the time or social energy to do that and bye I’m done lol

If you think players act entitled to plot now just wait until you introduce a point system lol my bet? You’ll burn out STs even faster this way.

@Ominous I actually don’t play TT so that’s probably why lol