@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.

@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.

@somasatori said in RPing with Nobody:

I forgot that this was a thing on Ares MUSHes

It’s not really Ares-specific. I first encountered this with people posting solo vignettes on LiveJournal way way way before Ares. More recently it was a thing on various games with MediaWiki/Wikidot wikis. I think it just gets a little more formalized/visible on Ares games because of the scene type tagging.

@Juniper said in RPing with Nobody:

That’s weird. Like at that point, at least write a vignette and post it on the forum so someone can read it. Or write a book offline?

The showboating part is weird to me, but I’ve written a fair bit of solo stuff with no intent to share. Sometimes it helps me flesh out a character. Or it can be fun to put down the details of how an off-camera scene went down. I just like to write, really. It’s like someone above talked about doodling.

@MisterBoring said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

@Faraday said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

If you’re going to expect players to somehow guess at your intent in creating a game, I think that’s inherently misguided.

I would never have them guess. In any future game I run, my intent will be documented in the game’s documentation, and pointed out on the front page of the game or in the initial room upon connection.

OK but this thread as a whole is not about players who are willfully ignoring clearly stated rules of a particular game. We’re talking about general, tacit expectations for behavior in the broader MU community.

@MisterBoring said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

someone joining a game to play Uno in the basement with their BFF has either missed the cue that the game owner is trying to build a more social storytelling experience, or noticed the intent of the game owners and willfully chose to ignore it.

If you’re going to expect players to somehow guess at your intent in creating a game, I think that’s inherently misguided.

There’s nothing wrong with setting expectations for your personal game based on your personal preferences. People can judge whether that’s the right game for them.

Like if you set up a board game night where you say “We’re going to play Settlers of Cataan together” and then someone wants to go play Uno in the basement - sure, that’s more of an issue. (Though there may still be a good reason, such as due to disability or neurodivergence - communication and understanding are key.)

But players aren’t psychic. And there are PLENTY of games out there that have no issue whatsoever with players who are just merrily playing by themselves and not causing any trouble.

@L-B-Heuschkel said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

Whether it’s social anxiety, bad health, busy life – at least on Keys, we have a couple of folks who never or almost never actually RP. When they do, it’s one on one, with only a few chosen folks.
… I think Roadspike put it well above; if the player isn’t hoarding plot or otherwise obstructing things for others, they’re still a gain for the game.

This 100%. The person who is only minimally participating is still participating! They are still bringing value, and they have the chance to participate more in the future if they choose to.

@Trashcan said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

Let’s say a person invites friends and acquaintances over for a board game night. Snacks and games are provided, just show up and have a good time. Most people come in, find a table, and join a game or start a new one with a few others. People are migrating between different games, pairing off in some cases for smaller games, getting up to get snacks and chatting in the kitchen, and generally socializing together.

One couple shows up, takes an Uno deck and a bag of popcorn, and adjourns to the basement. They stay down there most of the night, and occasionally other attendees overhear them talking or laughing but they’re not making a scene or anything. Is that a crime? No, of course not. Is it rude to the host and the other guests? At least a little, yes.

I don’t think that’s rude in the slightest. You even said that people were “pairing off in some cases for smaller games”. How is that any different from what the people in the basement were doing??? Unless the basement was off-limits for the party, or the people in the basement got snarky or rude when someone came down to see how they were doing, what on earth is the problem? They came, they played board games, no one was harmed. If I had a board game night and that happened, I’d be happy they came and had fun. Why do we need to wrongfun them for being less social?

@MisterBoring said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

You must have stopped reading when I mentioned “often times become hostile when asked to join RP / plot”. I have politely approached a duo like this and asked them if they’d like to come join a plot, as they were nominally part of the same faction as myself, and received a rather angry response. I’ve seen staffers on other games politely send a duo like this an invitation to a plot event and get told very plainly to get bent for trying to force them to play the game the staff intended to run. I’ve also witnessed these people throw tantrums when they were suddenly touched by plot they refused to be a part of.

Then that goes back to the part where I said: “Unless they are engaging in other problematic behavior” (paraphrased). If someone’s being rude to staff or throwing a tantrum or whatever, then talk to them about their inappropriate behavior and/or show them the door. Otherwise, they’re not actually doing any harm sitting their in their private room playing with each other. It’s not like the game is charged for the bandwidth of their bits (at least on any normal modern server).

@Trashcan said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

Best for the community of players that make up “the game”, which is all a Mush really is. The good of the community, of which all players participating in the game are a part, absolutely is the responsibility of each individual player.

We’ll just have to disagree then. When I join a game, I’m not signing up for any sort of responsibility to the greater good of that game, nor do I expect that of any players that join a game I’m running. It’s just a game. Players should be free to engage with it in whatever way meets their needs / playstyle (within the bounds of the rules of course).

@MisterBoring said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

If they never respond to the goings-on of the game, and never leave a single grid square, are they really active? What structure are they using?

You’re making a leap from “prefers to play with their friends” to “never responds to the goings-on of the game.” That may be true for a few people, but it is simply not true in all cases (or even most, in my experience). There are plenty of folks who engage with the game in their own way, and plenty of people who contribute the logs of said RP to the public repositories. It’s really not that hard.

But even in the most extreme strawman, assuming there are two players who only ever RP with each other, never share anything, and literally never leave a private grid room, I say again - so what? They’re having fun. They’re not hurting anything. Why do we need to shame/wrongfun them? Nobody gets any more RP if you run them off the game.

@Trashcan said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

You can, but the question is whether players should, I assume from the perspective of what’s best practices.

A Mush, if it’s healthy, feels like a world. You can “go” there. There are people there. Some of them, yes, are not your favorite people, but that is what a real place is like. You can certainly choose to ignore certain people, as I described in the analogy. It doesn’t break the game. It’s also not productive to building a healthy community that feels like there are possibilities and unknowns rather than another window for chatting with pals.

When talking “best practices”, you have to ask: best for whom? Every player comes to the game with different desires and different needs, and I really don’t think it’s fair to expect them to put those aside for some vague “good of the game”. That’s not their responsibility. As long as they’re not doing active harm to the game (toxic cliques hogging resources is one example of that) and are playing within the established bounds of the story, who cares what they do or who they do it with?

@MisterBoring said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

That said, if a person intends to RP with a single other person to the exclusion of both the rest of the players and staff run plots, I seriously have to question, especially in the age of Discord and Free VTTs, why people are choosing to pad a MU’s numbers with their secluded RP that might as well be inactivity as far as the census and statistics for the MU in question is concerned.

That’s easy - MUs have structure. Even if you don’t directly engage in scenes with people outside your circle, you can still respond to the goings-on of the game. You can make your own stories within their world. You can even cause ripples that generate RP for other people. And sure, maybe occasionally you step outside your circle for a big event or to take a chance on someone. You can’t do those things on a private discord.

I cannot fathom how people having fun with each other telling stories and generating scenes would be considered “inactivity” by any sensible MU metric. Would you seriously rather them just not be there than be there having fun in the world you built?

@Trashcan said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

At the same time, a Mush is too big to be treated like a tabletop game and has more in common with a sports team or even a sports league. Past a certain size, you simply do not know enough people that are your favorite people to make up a team with, and necessarily there will be some you do not enjoy

The sports analogy doesn’t really fit for me. If I sign up for a softball league, we need 9 players on the field at any given moment to actually play the game. You have to work together, and I think that signing up for such a thing is more of a group commitment. But that’s just not true for a MUSH. I absolutely can RP with just a single other person, and that’s not stopping anyone else from playing with others.

Sure, at some point the gamerunner might decide that there’s “not enough RP” to make it worth keeping the lights on, but even that isn’t a given. I’ve seen sandbox games with just a handful of players. Either way, gamerunners shouldn’t expect me to spend my free time not having fun just to make their game work. I may choose to, but I’m never obliged to.

I play with people I enjoy playing with. Expecting players to do otherwise feels like trying to control who you socialize with at a club/party. It’s just not what people are there for.

If a clique is being exclusionary to an unhealthy degree (in terms of rudeness, hogging resources, etc.), that’s a different story, but I don’t think that players should be penalized just for playing with their friends.

As staff, there are things you can do (public events, involving players through your PCs, offering incentives through cookies, etc.) to spread the RP out a bit, but I think those efforts should be encouraging, never punitive.

All that said, I do think it’s helpful to play outside your normal circles sometimes just for the overall health of the game. That benefits you as well, presuming you like playing there and want the game to continue.

@Gashlycrumb said in Not MU-related daft question:

Since those files on a disk with personal information already exist, I just have to paste into them, I think the security concern is either already taken care of or already deemed unimportant?

The email server probably won’t be able to run on your PC, so the information will likely wind up on a second external server and need to be FTPed down or something. Regardless, whatever computer it’s running on will now has a new attack vector (the email server). These are potentially solvable problems, it’s just a question of whether the tech team will go for it.