@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.

@Pyrephox said in Paid Role-Playing:

In practice, though, it would raise my standards for what I expected in return to the point where I’d want a professional product, as opposed to the hobbyist arrangements we have now.

This is exactly why I would be uncomfortable making any kind of “pay to play” mechanism. It’s one thing to ask people to chip in for the collective costs of something they’re using. In RL, a club that needs to rent a venue might ask members to chip in to cover those costs. Likewise, I see nothing wrong with a MU having a tip jar or something for folks to help defray the server costs. But as soon as you start charging more than the costs, you’ve turned it from a community club into a profit-making venture, and that just feels different.

There have been lots of awesome scenes over the years, but I think the one that stands out the most is the finale of Battlestar Pacifica. It was an epic three-pronged final battle that paid off a bunch of story threads. Really proud of how it all turned turned out. It was nice to have a game go out with a bang instead of just petering out as MUs tend to do.

Blowing up the namesake ship was kinda bittersweet though:

As the fleet begins to stand down from Condition One, the damage control officer calls over for Starr’s attention. “Sir - the mains are drifting into the red. We have massive decompressions along frames 122-200 -” He points to the board. “Fires and structural damage are hampering damage control efforts in the starboard flight pod.”

Starr eyes the board with a grim frown. “You’re saying we could lose the ship.”

The officer replies back, in a low voice. “Sir, I’m saying we already have. It’s just a matter of time.”

Starr stares at the board for another long moment, before she finally nods. She picks up the handset again. “Attention all hands. This is the commander. Execute emergency evacuation procedures. Launch all Vipers and Raptors. Salvage critical material where you can and report to the escape pods.” There’s a sad tone to her voice when she says with finality, “Abandon ship.”

@Yam There was definitely monetization via the book sales, but I thought there was also some kind of more direct payment too. Some kind of character perks you could buy? I might be mixing up games, but I know it was a thing somebody tried once.

I think the more freeform story-driven RP experience is too subjective to work well as a paid endeavor. I shudder to imagine “pay to win” applied to storytelling.

That said, I’m pretty sure there were some monetized games in the early 90s that were more RP-oriented. Maybe they were closer to RPIs. I think Otherspace had some things you could pay for? Or maybe it was just a patreon style tip jar? It’s been forever, and I was only there briefly, so apologies if I’m misremembering.

@Third-Eye said in Brainstorming Game Ideas:

The only thing that will motivate someone to create and put the hard work into starting a game long-term is to build what YOU want, to some degree with no eye toward whether it might be popular or not. That doesn’t mean ignoring advice, though frankly sometimes it does.

This. Also you’d maybe be surprised how much fun you can have with a handful of really passionate players.

@Yam said in Web-based CharGen or in-game CharGen:

I’ve often wondered how much applications actually filter anything.

Apps for me are more about filtering out players who don’t understand the theme. I can’t count the number of times that the app process has blocked an “oh heck to the no” type of character. And games without apps have led to some pretty forehead-slapping retcons.

This is harder to do with roster chars because the backstory is already written for them. Those “job interview” type apps have always icked me out as a player, so I’ve never wanted to do them as staff.

@Pavel said in Web-based CharGen or in-game CharGen:

Faraday and Cobalt. Next question.

Aw thanks.

@Yam said in Web-based CharGen or in-game CharGen:

This extremely social hobby requires you to understand nuance in text, requires you to be able to read the room, requires you to take queues gracefully, requires you to be able to put yourself in another person’s shoes, and generally requires you to be GOOD at other human beings, which is actually kind of hard and involves actual work! COMMENCE FIGHT.

I don’t disagree with any of that, but I’m not following how that’s related to web vs client chargen?

I don’t think you can generalize that much. It’s going to vary greatly by game and skill of the coder.

In Ares for example, I think the FS3 web chargen is much easier to use than the in-game one. But if you’re a player who prefers client over web, that isn’t going to matter. Or if you have a visual impairment, you may find a client-based chargen easier no matter how nice the web one is. Some chargen systems are going to be nighmarishly complex on web. etc.

@KDraygo said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:

@MisterBoring Horror MU was like this when I played it, PCs will die or be maimed. Bad things will happen. Was quite a bit of fun.

Same with TGG. It can be fun when people go in knowing what they’re signing up for.

@hellfrog said in Other People:

I have fielded dozens of ‘why don’t more people want to rp with me’ type questions. I have never fielded "I am not having fun, how can I have fun?’

I mean, I’ve fielded plenty of the latter and fewer of the former. YMMV of course.