@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.

@Pavel said in Scenes within Scenes:

Because one can interact with people outside of their little group, should they choose.

Theoretically I guess, but in my experience this almost never happens. (see the comments above regarding interruptions, being yelled at for spam, etc.)

The only poses I ever saw going to the main room were the static announcements or the “oops I forgot to use tt command” nonsense.

But to each their own.

@Pyrephox said in Scenes within Scenes:

But I want to have a sense of being able to RP with a smaller group WITHIN that space without having to always worry about missing poses or spamming the greater room (since a small conversation is likely to go faster than the larger scene).

But if you’re not interacting with anyone outside of your little group, and you don’t want to spam other people or be spammed in return, why does the room actually matter? What is the tangible advantage of keeping everyone jammed together rather than in separate rooms / separate scenes?

You can do the same big “announcement” emits to multiple rooms in a variety of ways to keep a shared context. It doesn’t even require any special code or tools, just some coordination among a few staff alts / NPCs.

@Pyrephox said in Scenes within Scenes:

Hate Ares places system because it doesn’t fix the main thing I want from tabletalk - reducing the number of poses I see that I don’t need to react to and making it easier for me to keep up with the poses my character is focusing on.

Yeah I think a places system needs to consider several different concerns:

• Overwhelm from sheer volume of spam
• Knowing what your character reasonably hear / react to (even setting aside the “cheating” aspect someone mentioned above, there’s still a mental load of figuring out whether something is noticeable)
• Organization of what’s happening where
• Sharing in the overall story together (e.g., log completeness and not feeling isolated from one another in separate rooms)
• Complexities of the posing interface

When I was designing Ares’ places system, I concluded there’s just no way to do ALL of these things at once. You have to pick and choose priorities. For example, traditional table talk emphasizes the first few and compromises the last few. Ares’ system is the opposite.

Since everyone has different things that are most important to them, they’re going to prefer different systems.

@bear_necessities said in Scenes within Scenes:

In Ares, I really find places to be distracting and I haven’t seen it used in any meaningful way.

I don’t really like them much either, but I absolutely hated the old-school places systems so… meh.

@Ashkuri Ares has built-in places feature that simply identifies chat happening in different places. It doesn’t mess up the log because nothing is hidden from anyone.

@bear_necessities I think it’s more just a clash of expectations.

Some people see async as merely a “last resort” when you can’t sync up to play live, but still expect a degree of responsiveness to get the scene done. For example, even back when folks were doing async with LiveJournal or Google Docs, it could be considered rude to let a pose go three days without a response. At that point, it’s not really about syncing up timezones and can start to feel more like the other player just doesn’t care enough to reply, isn’t engaged in the scene, etc. (Or they, aka me, just have ADHD and forgot the scene exists. )

Other people (including those who are influenced by other, slower RP modalities like forum RP, storium, etc.) might not even think twice about going days between poses.

@Roz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

oftentimes it really just literally is “my brain cannot keep engaged in this format.”

Yeah that’s me. I’m not judgmental about async. I just don’t enjoy it as much. It’s just hard for me to stay engaged and keep track of things.

@Pavel said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

Could you make it blank or unknown, if you will, and require the field to be set before it can proceed? I don’t know if that’s implementable, nor how easy it would be, nor whether it would be worthwhile.

On web you could, but I think it would annoy people. And so many scenes are started from the client just by doing scene/start; it would definitely be annoying to try to require a pacing parameter there.

FWIW Ares 2.11 comes with a new scene/stats command.

+==~~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~=====~~~~=====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~~==+
Total Scenes: 13

Scene Pacing
Traditional.........12....(92.3%)
Asynchronous........1.....(7.7%)
+==~~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~=====~~~~=====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~~==+

The stats should be taken with a grain of salt since many people don’t bother changing the pacing from the default (Trad), but I don’t really see a good way around that.

Minutes between poses is too easily skewed by outliers (one slow guy tanks the whole scene even though everyone’s mostly posing around him).

Making the default “Unknown” will give better fidelity when it IS set, but then most scenes will just be Unknown. So that’s not super helpful either.

I dunno. Just something to play around with.

I think folks are dramatically underestimating just how much mathematical averages can be skewed by outliers when there are sample sizes as small as most MU scenes have.

This really doesn’t have to be this hard. We’ve been having scenes with different pacing since I started playing in 19-fricking-95. All Ares does is provide more tools so that adults can communicate and collaborate with each other in the hopes of finding people who like to play in the same way. And it even includes a handy guide to explain said tools:

MUSHes have traditionally been focused around live, synchronous RP, with players all being online together. With the web portal, Ares supports more varied playstyles. You can specify a Pacing for your scene to let other players know what to expect before they join.

• Traditional: Live, synchronous RP with poses coming minutes apart. (Default Setting)
• Distracted: RP that is still synchronous, but with longer time between poses due to work or other distractions.
• Asynchronous: RP with poses coming in at various times, possibly in different timezones or schedules, or even over multiple days.

If you wish to add extra detail about your scene’s pacing, use the scene notes field.

If you can’t find people willing to RP in a way compatible with you, that’s not a tools problem, that’s a people - I hate to call it problem, because it’s not really a problem, it’s just you being at the wrong party.