@GF said in New Concept:

if you can’t suspend your disbelief for less prejudice but can for God being a space squid who hates you, then maybe sit with that and really think about it.

If it’s a fictional setting? I absolutely can suspend my disbelief for that. But history is established. Someone (sorry can’t find the quote) mentioned “it’s just the 1920s but without discrimination.”

I don’t know what that means.

I’m not being snarky. I hate discrimination with a burning passion in RL, and I fully respect someone not wanting to deal with that in their pretendy funtimes.

The problem is that discrimination is so deeply baked into societal systems that it’s just not as simple to me as snapping your fingers and saying it doesn’t exist.

Everyone always points to Wild West settings and says: “If you can imagine a world where the PCs don’t die of dysentery, why can’t you imagine a world without discrimination?”

Easy. You’re not pretending dysentery doesn’t exist, you’re just saying the PCs are lucky enough to not contract it, or to contract it and survive – both of which actually happened.

“A world without discrimination” is just not the same thing. How did it get that way? Let’s start from that Wild West setting…if racism isn’t a thing, then logically slavery wouldn’t have been. There wouldn’t have been a Civil War (or it would have gone very differently). Heck, the entire economic basis of the south would probably be dramatically different. Oh and would America even exist at all if not for the genocide against the native peoples? How far back do we go with this?

If you want to do alt-history, that’s cool. That’s what Savage Skies did. They picked a divergence point (something about “when dragons appeared” IIRC) and then wrote the history from that point forward to explain why their imaginary world is different from our real world. It’s a bunch more work, but it addresses the issue cleanly.

Less clean is “racism exists but we don’t want stories about it here” because of systemic discrimination. What about the laws of the land? What about PCs who have discrimination in their backstories? It gets thorny.

I’m not telling people how they should RP. I just wish people would stop ascribing evil motivations to those of us who just have a hard time imagining a historical setting as an egalitarian utopia.

@helvetica said in Wyrdhold Discusion:

@Serafine Logs are publicly available, their placement on the site just isn’t in a very obvious location.

I think their custom portal has a bug actually, because the “Recent” view on scene logs was initially blank for me. Once I switched it to “all” and back to “recent” it behaved itself. That might lead one to honestly believe there were no public logs.

But it’s oh-so-pretty. Seriously. Kudos for the aesthetics.

@Roz said in Wyrdhold Discusion:

@Serafine said in Wyrdhold Discusion:

True to its name, I’ve seen nothing but war and strife from ARES.

I mean, Ares is just a codebase, it doesn’t really have any influence on whether or not there’s drama on a MU*.

Whatever do you mean? I’m quite certain it’s the first and only MU codebase to ever see drama. I designed it special that way.

@tsar said in Los Angeles 2043: A Blade Runner MUSH - Discussion:

Man, thank you. Because this vague insinuation that Director bailed and crushed all these people’s hopes and dreams of stories really started to get my blood pressure up. He’s a really cool dude, who is engaging, funny, and a great time.

I don’t know Director from Adam, but even if they did completely bail, so what?

Staff are volunteers, and players are not entitled to anything from them that they are unwilling to give.

If they open a game and close it the very next day because some horrible experience caused them to reconsider the whole thing? That’s their prerogative. If they open a game and close it the very next week because RL got too hard? That’s their business.

Yes, it’s disappointing when games close. But guess what - even running YOUR OWN GAME doesn’t mean you’ll get a chance to finish the stories you imagined telling. Enjoy it while it lasts.

@De-Villefort said in But Why:

I’ve been thinking about it and maybe I’m just mad because the Lords and Ladies type games are glorifying some of the worst kinds of people to have ever existed on the face of the earth.

There have been Star Wars MUs where people play members/supporters of the literal fascist Empire; Wild West games where people play racists, outlaws, and robber barons; supernatural games where people play vampires and werewolves; and modern-day games where, indeed, people play super-rich elites.

This fixation that fantasy settings are bad and other genres are good seems weirdly out of step with what people actually do in those other settings.

People point to the staff tools and FS3 design in Ares as like: “This enables folks to run games with fewer staff,” and while that’s true, it’s backwards. Ares and FS3 were designed the way they are because games, including my own, were having trouble finding and keeping staff.

I personally experienced too many cases of staff blowups or abandonment through the years, some of which harmed relationships with friends. So for the last decade or so, I run games myself. That means not only do I need tools to support that (see: Ares and FS3), I need game design to support that. So generally I stick to single-sphere, PVE, narrowly-focused games. ETA: Also with de-centralized storytelling like @L-B-Heuschkel described.

@doodletilidie Be aware that if you allow players under 18 you’re subjecting yourself to the COPAA laws. Additionally, you may be opening yourself up to liability if you allow R-rated content on a wiki that is geared towards 13-year-olds (per your NSFW policy) or by allowing mature RP at all without the players involved having any means to verify the age of the people they’re playing with. Big can of worms. Don’t recommend.

ETA: COPAA is specifically for under-13 but other regional laws may still apply for under-18s, especially European players. Still don’t recommend.

@Kestrel That’s very interesting. I only skimmed the thread, so maybe I missed something, but I wouldn’t consider their attitude “disdain” so much as a different emphasis.

We want people to be able to emote with each other while focusing on one thing at a time, not doing that awkward thing that plagues MUSHes where you end up addressing five people in a single emote and having five conversations at the same time.
…
What we’re trying to do here is provide an immersive atmosphere for a playstyle that resembles improv acting more than collaborative writing. It’s difficult and jarring to immersion when these two styles clash.

Much as I enjoy MU RP, they’ve got a valid point, don’t they? I’ve literally had 1-on-1 MU scenes where there are three different conversation threads going simultaneously between the same two characters. Traditional MU paragraph style resembles neither organic character interaction nor normal creative writing.

TGG, for instance, had shorter poses during action scenes by the necessity of the code. Storytelling still occurred within those constraints.

Like they said, these are styles. Neither intrinsically better or worse than the other, but each having pros and cons. At least they’re up front about it and setting expectations about what they’re going for.

@RedRocket said in AI PBs:

Everything the a.i. makes is entirely original.

GenAI makes nothing original. Every single thing it does is algorithmically based on the work it’s been trained on. Without that trained work, they’ve got no product.

That trained work was used without the permission of the creators. That is the crux of the lawsuits, and while the results have been mixed so far, I believe ultimately the creators will prevail in some form or another (probably a watered-down global licensing pool, but it’s at least something). I believe this because one of the cornerstones of the fair use doctrine is that the transformative work does not replace or compete with the original. That is demonstrably not the case here. This has been theft and plagiarism on a scale that would make Napster blush.

ETA: The Getty and Disney lawsuits are probably the strongest, as they show pretty compelling evidence that their artwork/photos are baked into these GenAI tools to such a degree that it can faithfully reproduce them when prompted. It’s not just stylistic inspiration.

@RedRocket said in AI PBs:

The training process teaches it to draw in the same way humans learn to do art…

GenAI does not learn in the same way a human does. It’s a false equivalence. People keep wanting to anthropomorphize these things like they’re actually intelligent, but they’re not. They’re fancy word- and image-predicting algorithms. Autocomplete on steroids. They do not fundamentally understand the world the way a human does. They have no actual creativity, insight, or originality. They match patterns and generate similar ones. They do it really well, which is why the tools work, but that is not the way humans think or learn.

@Pyrephox said in D&D Licensing Agreement:

I don’t begrudge Hasbro making money off of D&D. There’s a lot of the merchandising and expansion of the IP that I love. I know it’s only there because it’s profitable, but as long as it’s fun, it’s good. However, I don’t like the way this thing has been played…

That’s where I land. D&D is their product and they’re entitled to stop letting other people make money off it without getting a cut. But their terms are utterly ridiculous.

It would be like me saying that not only was AresMUSH no longer free, but if you use it you have to send me all your game’s wiki/css/etc. that I can use for whatever I want without paying you a cent. That’s just absurd.

Some players will roll with things - I love that. But I’ve had some players quit over what I considered natural (non character-ending) consequences of their PCs’ actions, and others throw gigantic fits over the smallest of setbacks.

PC death is my personal hot-button because it ends the story and makes you start over from scratch. That’s not fun for me, so I don’t play (or run) games like that.

@SpaceKhomeini said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

I usually operate under the assumption that the character I’m helming is largely an idiot and does idiot things that will result in idiotic self-owns.

Sometimes I forget that I haven’t communicated this loudly enough with everyone around me and they get kind of cagey when I do stupid shit IC.

The fact that this needs to be communicated at all is kind of emblematic of the core issue. Most players in my experience don’t want their character to come off looking bad (in their opinion) because they think it makes them look bad. There’s such an over-investment in IC success, glory, and coolness that if someone is actively trying to embrace natural consequences or have their character do something stupid, it’s looked upon with suspicion or disdain.

@Yam said in Historical Games Round 75:

when you’re down there in the trenches, you see how things unfold in ways that are difficult to predict, and you’re there in the crossfire feeling the heat of just how bad things can get.

Yeah I highlighted a couple instances that stick out in my mind, but it’s been almost 15 years and a lot is hazy. What I remember above all was coming away from the experience thinking: “I love historical settings, but I am NEVER doing this again.”

So I can totally understand the folks who don’t want to deal with that stuff in their pretendy funtime games. I just also have trouble with the idea of sanitizing history. Apart from it breaking my brain because of how interwoven oppression is, it feels dismissive somehow to the oppressed.

@Gashlycrumb said in Historical Games Round 75:

not “we want to do this,” but “If this game was historically accurate, this would happen.”

Oh, no, they 100% were going to do it. Two things stopped it - one was me saying that I wouldn’t stop them trying, but I would not allow them to succeed. I wasn’t going to do anything bad to them, but their efforts would be thwarted. It was just a bridge too far for me. The other was that the players involved got so upset over the situation that they wrote the PCs out of the game, so it became kinda moot.

@Gashlycrumb said in Historical Games Round 75:

I want to hear your war stories.

I liked that game. And RPed some stuff that was about racism. I don’t remember it beng a problem at all. My PC just had some elaborate ghoulish scheme to help hide somebody’s relationship and their child’s parantage. There was some chat about how it wasn’t necessary 'cause the rest of the PCs would be fine with it anyway.

Spoiler alert: They weren’t fine with it (well, not all of them).

For those unfamiliar, the setting was a small town in Wyoming just after the Civil War. There was a whole article on historical plausibility, but the most relevant rule was this (paraphrased for brevity):

This is a historical game, and on-screen portrayal of prejudice is permitted. Staff in no way endorses racism, sexism, or any other kind of -ism, but we are not trying to rewrite history. Keep it IC.

Most of the PCs were super tolerant. That was nice in many ways, but it got to the point where:

• Some of the players doing storylines about overcoming prejudice felt kind of gaslighted (like they were overreacting / their struggles weren’t real)
• Some of the players who stuck closer to historical norms felt ostracized (like they themselves were racist)
• It felt jarring any time a NPC acted with historical prejudice.

I got caught in the middle a lot, and it wasn’t fun. The worst situation was when two good players (whom I considered friends) left the game after other PCs threatened to

Spoiler

Were the other PCs acting historically? Yes. Did it suck? Also yes.

There was also tension in how to handle the conflict between settlers and Native Americans respectfully, which made me personally uncomfortable.

The biggest drama was people throwing fits over the number of “exceptional” characters. I approved PCs by looking at their character in its historical context: could that character exist in 1866? Many were bothered by the cognitive dissonance that occurred when you had all these exceptional characters together in this small town. But I wasn’t about to say yes to a female ranchhand but then turn around and say no to a Black doctor because we’d met some arbitrary quota of folks who didn’t adhere to historical norms. Some likened it to Twin Peaks 1866, and I was ok with that. Others weren’t.

@Pyrephox said in Historical Games Round 75:

But these societal forces shaped the era and had a lot of impact on the culture, the structure of society, and the pressures that drove people to accomplish amazing and heartbreaking things. When you remove, for example, the fact that suffragettes could be and were tortured and murdered by law enforcement for campaigning for women’s rights, then the courage it took to be a suffragette is diminished. If you’re talking about union-building, I think you have to include the fact that union-busters used racism to try and drive working class groups apart, even if that effort fails in the context of your game. If you’re talking 1920s-30s, it’s a bit repugnant to me to not make it clear that it’s an era when the people who made some of the defining music of the era couldn’t have a drink in the “respectable” clubs they played in. It also helps contrast some of the speakeasys which were integrated and even havens for LGBT folk of the era, etc. The fact that people had to find refuge in criminality because the laws were bigoted and unjust is a huge part of the story of the era.

This exactly. It’s not that I WANT to see -isms in my RP. They’re just interwoven into society to such a degree that I cannot separate them from the time period.

You want to do alt history and show how history diverged? Cool.

You want to do a sci-fi / fantasy setting cosplaying as a historical time period? Cool - though I think Firefly demonstrated that even this can land problematically.

You want to say: “We acknowledge that these things exist in the real world but they are not the focus here so here are some boundaries”? Also cool, but tricky.

But if you’re going with: “It’s the 1920s but all prejudice has been solved” I’m just gonna be like…

@Ashkuri said in Historical Games Round 75:

@Gashlycrumb said in Missed Settings:

Really, Westerns seem like a very easy setting to run.

There are a few historical -isms to navigate in those

Having run a western game, this is the understatement of the century.

Also I stink at formatting today apparently.

@KDraygo said in Your first game?:

If I recall correctly, I got into MUSHing in the mid to late 90s and my first game was SW1. This kicked off because I had finished reading the Heir to the Empire Trilogy (Thrawn trilogy) and I started reading more post movies Star Wars novels.

Same! My buddy in college recruited me to SW1. That was where I learned to MUSHcode, making some stupid datapad object or something.

I also loved Robotech. I was re-watching it recently with my kids and realizing how much my interest in post-apocalyptic settings started so early with Robotech and Battlestar.

Battlestar Galactica (the original 1990’s version). though I was only there briefly. The flight sims and immersive code systems weren’t my jam, even back then. The game that really got me into MUs was Maddock (consent-based wild west game).

@Yam said in Character Death:

Curious if anyone has actually seen a PC death play out where the player certainly didn’t intend to die AND didn’t consent to being in a situation that warned the risk.

It depends on what you mean by “consent to”.

The first PC I lost was on a (very old) Star Wars game where they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time and rolled poorly on an Athletics check. On another SW game, my character was sniped in the town square by a bounty hunter acting on a dubiously-initiated bounty. My PC didn’t die, but easily could have. On TGG, I generally played non-combatants, but one time my nurse char was killed because I forgot to +takecover before going AFK and the (usually safe) base got shelled by artillery.

One can argue that just by playing on a game with the possibility of PC death I was implicitly consenting to whatever came my way. That’s fair. But I certainly didn’t enter into any of those scenes thinking it at all likely my character was at risk.

@somasatori said in PyReach:

For real, @Tez is right and a lot of very simple things we take for granted in Rhost/Ares/Tiny/Penn is not included in base Evennia. Mail, for example, is handled via contrib file, page is a custom thing, etc.

That’s true, but I will say that same lack of built-in features offers tremendous flexibility, and is why I steer folks to Evennia for super custom projects.

When you come into things with the pre-baked idea of what a MU should have, as Ares and (to a lesser extent) the Penn/Rhost/Tiny family, it makes it difficult to depart from those paradigms. Just think of all the drama caused by built-in commands vs +commands over the years.

Everything being a plugin/contrib isn’t necessarily bad, because it can lead to developers who focus on making a really good (insert system here). Just think of how Myrddin’s BBS or Anomaly’s jobs or Theno’s WoD were de-facto standards in Penn/Tiny even though they weren’t baked in.

In the early Ares designs, everything was intended to be a plugin to offer that same degree of flexibility. But I quickly realized that there are a LOT of dependencies across systems. Far more than I anticipated. To make everything work together seamlessly out of the box, which is Ares’ main “selling” point, the code has to be very “opinionated” about how things should be done.

Everything is a tradeoff.

@MisterBoring said in Character Death:

I think after reading a lot of stuff in this thread, I realize that I don’t necessarily want characters to die, I want characters to have their story end.

Dang, I have the opposite problem in MUs. I have a hard enough time getting my characters’ story arcs to a meaningful conclusion, let alone to bring the entire character to a nice ending.

There are exceptions of course. BSP ended in a way that gave everyone a chance to wrap things up and write epilogues. That was nice. TGG’s campaigns had fixed endings, so we could bring things to a natural conclusion.

@Pavel said in Character Death:

I do. They very rarely appear, and when they do, there’s no guarantee it’ll matter.

Good point. Also, it fundamentally prevents me from doing anything else with that character, which as I said above - is pretty much the whole reason I’m there.

I liken it to how ensemble TV shows rarely kill off their main leads. Occasionally they’ll do it as a shocking twist or something, but mostly they only do it when people leave the show. I realize there are those who prefer the Game of Thrones model where nobody’s safe. They like feeling like the characters are in real peril. It makes the show feel more gritty since the main chars aren’t protected by plot armor.

And to be clear - there’s nothing wrong with liking that. I’m not trying to wrongfun anyone. All I want is a little non-judgemental understanding that there are those of us who get attached to characters - both in TV and in MUs - and who don’t like having to get invested all over again when they get bumped off randomly.

@Pyrephox @catzilla Don’t feel bad. Coding is hard. Trying to jump into coding by making a CoD plugin (or worse, trying to get somebody’s else’s half-built one to work) is like trying to learn to play the piano by jumping right into a Mozart concerto. It’s frustrating to have to start with the code equivalent of Hot Cross Buns and work your way up, when all you want is to get a game going.