@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.

@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.

@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.

@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.

@RedRocket said in The 3-Month Players:

You had to struggle to become enough of a bad-ass not to have to live in fear all the time. I can not emphasize enough how important that feeling of progression is to the health of a game.

Many players enjoyed DarkMetal.

Many other players wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole because that style of gameplay holds no appeal to them.

TGG was a game with permadeath, trivially easy chargen, XP-based progression, stakes, drama, rotating “seasons” to keep things fresh, and the some of the most impressive immersive code systems I’ve ever seen. It still had a lot of player turnover. (and about 10 very passionate core players)

People want their actions and choices to matter. … It’s the same reason people add stakes and drama to TV shows. If nothing changes, there is no point.

This I agree with, but routinely killing your PCs off is not the only way to accomplish this. There are plenty of successful TV shows that avoid the Game of Thrones style of knocking off main characters left and right.

There is no one-size-fits-all game.

@Pavel said in AI PBs:

The use of AI feels worse for a lot of us because we’re creatives, or move in creative circles, and that’s what generative AI is directly impacting right now.

That is true, but also not the whole story. GenAI is causing widespread disruption in everything from the fundamental business model of the internet to critical thinking skills. It may be impacting entry-level jobs, hurting an entire generation because companies are too short-sighted to realize that today’s entry-level people are tomorrow’s senior people. It has profound implications for propaganda, which is increasingly dangerous considering the threat of authoritarianism. These impacts are not limited to the creative fields.

And that’s not even touching on the alignment issues that make generalized intelligence (which we do not yet have but these grifter companies are trying desperately to build) so dangerous. My favorite thought experiment is the rogue stamp collector AI because it’s pretty hilarious yet illustrates the problem very well.

I am not saying that all machine learning is bad, but I personally see GenAI specifically as a threat on par with climate change in its ability to really screw up society. Amazon is bad, but GenAI is way worse IMHO.

@bear_necessities said in AI PBs:

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.

The relative evils of Amazon vs. GenAI is a valid debate but pretty off-topic. Unless your argument is that exploiting artists is OK because Amazon also exploits workers, it feels ultimately irrelevant.

Also did you miss the part where I admitted my reasons were kinda selfish? If someone wants to rail at me for being an imperfect human with inconsistent priorities, that’s valid. But at least I’m not going to try to argue with them that buying from Amazon is completely innocent.

@Third-Eye said in AI PBs:

I also don’t care if people like playing with it as a toy, even if the company sucks and the whole industry needs to pay the contributors it sucks inspo from and also be regulated.

Yeah I mean… in the grand scheme of the AI industry, is MUSHing going to be the make-or-break thing? Obviously not.

It just bothers 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.

Most of us are old enough to remember Napster. Imagine what would have happened to the music industry if that had been Apple’s model instead of some little indie that could get crushed by the big corps. If they had just said: “Yeah we know it’s illegal, but we don’t care. Come sue us. By the time it gets through the courts, we’ll have a monopoly and nobody will be able to stop us.” I don’t really like that image. Yeah, I know the current streaming services aren’t great to musicians either, but it could have been a lot worse.

@KarmaBum said in AI PBs:

There’s also a big difference between “I don’t purchase things from Amazon” and “I feel that people who purchase things from Amazon are enabling corruption and exploitation.”

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

Someone using GenAI tools is supporting a tool that steals from artists. Full stop. You can argue that your support is a drop in the bucket (as someone can for Amazon), but it is undeniably contributing to that bucket. Every GenAI query harms the environment more than its alternatives. Every GenAI query is a number reported on a spreadsheet of “look how many users we have!” that is used to justify more corporate investment in tools that harm artists.

Where I draw the line is “people who ((do thing I disapprove of))” are evil/bad/scum of the earth/deserve harm/etc. That’s going too far, and I feel it can be avoided with a tiny bit of empathy.

@KarmaBum said in AI PBs:

And how we engage with people who align differently.

Sure. But there’s a big difference between “I understand the harm that Amazon does but I still choose to use it because (reasons, which may even be wholly justified given your personal situation)” and “I don’t get why everyone keeps saying Amazon is a big deal; it really does no harm when I order from them; people are just overreacting.” I see a LOT of the latter when it comes to GenAI, and that is what I push back on. (not from you specifically, just in general)

Like, piracy sites actively harm authors on a large scale. You can argue “I wouldn’t have bought the book anyway so I didn’t personally do any harm”, but that’s discounting the real harm caused by the very existence of those sites. (including that the pirated material was then used to train GenAI, bringing us full circle…)

@KarmaBum said in AI PBs:

I dunno. It feels like a weird hill for MUSHers to want to die on. It’s a writing hobby.

Fanfic (which is what most MU writing feels like to me) and handfuls of people using movie screencaps to support their imaginations have existed as long as the internet has, and haven’t really done any tangible harm that I can tell.

GenAI is doing TONS of real-world harm every day. Creative professions, journalism, critical thinking, toxic deepfakes, the environment… it’s literally staggering to me. The more we normalize it as being OK, the more we’re supporting that harm.

And sure, there is other harm in the world. If you want to boycott Amazon or gas-powered vehicles, or whatever, more power to you. We can each choose what causes are important to us. Opposing GenAI is one of mine.

@Pavel said in AI PBs:

I think that it is theoretically possible for it not to be. If I trained my own model on photos I took, or art I did, then that could probably be reasonable (from an art use standpoint, at least). Whereas all commercial generative models, at least so far as I am aware, are prolific in their art theft.

The problem with that theory is that most of the current generation of LLMs only work at scale. Unless you had a gazillion of your own photos, or had written an entire series of novels, it’s unlikely that you could train an AI model just on your own work and have it work effectively.

But hypothetically – if you did, and then only used it for your own personal use, then it would be completely ethical from a copyright standpoint.

There was an article recently about how some research group made a LLM out of solely public domain works, which was interesting. I don’t know how well it stacked up against other models, and I still think there are ethical concerns around the harm caused by such a tool, but at least it would be legal.

@Roz said in PBs:

@STD said in PBs:

Secondly, if the model is made for a for-profit system like Midjourney, then they already have the requisite rights and permissions. That’s part of what you’re paying for when you buy a license for Midjourney.

You cannot be serious.

Come on.

@Roz I completely missed that in the first post. Yeah that’s an absurd statement, as the twenty bajillion copyright lawsuits – everyone from Stephen King to the New York Times to Disney and Getty Images – will attest.

@STD said in PBs:

. It’s mostly Python anyway.

It’s not the source code that’s the problem, it’s the data that you’re training it on.

Nobody’s ever going to universally agree on ethics and morality; they’re always in the eye of the beholder. Personally I feel a lot less bad about using a screencap of an actor from a Hollywood movie (where both the film and the celebrity have put themselves “out there” into the public eye) than I do about generating some fake person from the work of unwilling artists and/or real everyday people whose face was scraped off the internet somewhere.

Let’s not pretend that fan-casting is a thing unique to MUSHes.

@Pavel said in World Tone / Feeling:

To be honest, most of the consequences I’ve experienced in games haven’t involved dice rolls at all. They’ve been the result of stupid decision making, some of which was because of stupid players trying to win stupid prizes, but plenty of others could be chalked up to a misunderstanding between players, or player and storyteller. So there’s often no ‘I am going to attack him with my longsword’ pre-action discussion time. Someone calls the Prince of Vancouver an American and suddenly there’s a blood hunt, all because of a lack of communication or clarity.

Same. Most of the serious drama I’ve seen has resulted from “I didn’t expect your character to react that way”, not “I didn’t expect that falling into a deep chasm might result in a broken leg.”

But this is all getting down to the age-old story vs. game continuum. It’s not one or the other, but every game and every player falls somewhere along the scale, sometimes variably.

On the more “story” end of the scale - I don’t care how much you as GM warn me about the chasm. A story that has a main character die because they slipped and fell into a chasm is dumb IMHO. It’s just ridiculous. (unless it’s a comedy then maybe being ridiculous is the point) Story absolutely can have setbacks, even deaths, but those setbacks should fit organically into the story and do something to propel either the plot or characters forward.

On the more “game” end of the scale - the unpredictability is a feature, not a bug. Not knowing if any die roll can result in tragedy can be exciting. That time when your PC failed his athletics check and flew his jetpack straight into a wall? Telling that story never gets old.

Neither is superior or inferior, they’re just different. I favor story when I MUSH and game when I play tabletop, but YMMV. The important thing is to set expectations.