@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.

@Roadspike said in Staff Bits Linking Handles:

ut it’s also disingenuous, because you are a staffer, and you’re seeing things through staffer eyes the whole time, and can bring in the weight of staff whenever you want (either through yourself or one of your fellow staffers).

Yeah, it’s always felt icky to me to be “undercover staff”.

I think it’s better for a game when everyone knows who everyone’s alts are, staff included. It just avoids a bunch of particular kinds of drama, and it boosts trust.

And to clarify, when I say that folks don’t owe anyone their OOC identity, I meant across games. Forcing people to share alt info within the same game is different IMHO.

@catzilla I agree with the principle, but you don’t need a player handle to link alts on a game. You can do it with tags.

@bear_necessities said in Staff Bits Linking Handles:

As far as staff having a handle, I prefer to play on games where I know the admin. I do think staff alts should be tagged.

I’m 100% on board with this as well.

@bear_necessities said in Staff Bits Linking Handles:

If you don’t have a handle, you have something to hide, and my brows immediately raise.

As the creator of the handle system, this kind of bothers me. The system was never intended to pressure people into identifying themselves across games. There has been enough stalking, creeping, and other shenanigans in the MU community (and the internet at large) that I don’t think anyone owes anyone else their OOC identity. Ever. Staff included.

That’s why even Ares games have a built-in alternative method for alt tracking that doesn’t require a player handle.

It’s meant to be a fun tool for those who choose to use it. I’m not a fan of it being held against those who don’t.

(Also in practical terms a creeper can just make a new handle, so I’m not sure what it gains you really.)

@Jennkryst I don’t believe that’s accurate. The writers didn’t have a plan for Head Six. She was a Mystery Box because they thought it was cool. Even in a recent interview, RDM was still insisting that the final season writers’ room didn’t want to come out and call them “angels” because they didn’t want to put a name on it and kill the mystery.

There was a copy of the original BSG series bible floating around the internet years ago. Some relevant snippets:

Our show is built on the idea that a science fiction series can employ ground-breaking special effects, dynamic cinematography, realistic situations, believable characters and explore contemporary social and political issues without sacrificing dramatic tension or excitement.

(Our new) approach is to introduce realism into what has heretofore been an aggressively unrealistic genre.

We will eschew the usual stories about parallel universes, time-travel, mind-control, evil twins, God-like powers and all the other cliches of the genre.

My favorite aspects of the series were the things mentioned above. The fact that they extinguish the fire in the pod by venting it to space. The running count of people left alive in the fleet. The time they spend worrying about supplies. The commentary on social issues and moral dilemmas. Even most of Head Six’s original shenanigans could be attributed just to Baltar being insane (like when he points to the place they should strike on that one moon and then Six attributes it to “God guiding his hand”; they deliberately left it vague enough that maybe he just got lucky.)

So yes, quite clearly they ENDED UP where you describe, but I think there’s a ton of evidence that this was something they backed themselves into, and not a clear plan from the start.

@Jennkryst for me, there’s a big difference between “religious themes” and literal on-camera angels. I also think some of the giant plot holes you pointed out were theme-breaking. But of course reasonable people can disagree on such things, and none of that stopped me from enjoying the show. i just would have enjoyed it even more (probably in the same storytelling tier as B5) if they’d had a better plan from the start.

@Aria Yes, B5 was the best.

IMHO BSG fell into the same “Mystery Box Storytelling” pit that Lost did at around the same timeframe. Set up a mystery, and hope you can come up with a satisfying resolution by the time it matters. The trouble is that’s NEVER been how satisfying mysteries work. Seat-of-your-pants storytelling has its place, but not in a mystery. @Jennkryst is exactly right about how that wrecked the plot. They painted themselves into such a corner that the only way out was divine intervention.

BUT I still love the show. Low-tech sci-fi military stuff is my jam. The characters are great. The writing in any individual episode is usually stellar, especially in the early seasons.

For all the various Battlestar MU* peeps, you might enjoy this react series in which Katee Sackhoff (aka Starbuck), her husband, and the occasional former cast guest star all react to the BSG episodes in order. They’re up to Season 2 now and it’s so entertaining.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiHvVvKZ9lt4-IZiosUjdxqB7IEQJJ6RU

It’s been awhile since I watched all the eps from the beginning, and it’s reminding me both of how great the show was, and how maddening the lack of a coherent “plan” was lol.

@Ominous said in When is the last time you played?:

To find out how the story resolves? Just because everyone knows all the details of a setting doesn’t mean they know how it plays out.

Even if you DO know how things play out, it can still be fun. I’ve been on plenty of games based on established settings (Star Wars, Battlestar, Babylon 5, etc.) where the lore wasn’t in any way opaque but we still had lots of fun playing in that sandbox.

@Jumpscare said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

With everyone’s responses, and to my surprise, I guess that makes Silent Heaven a MUSH, haha. Strange that I didn’t think of it as one.

I mean, Silent Heaven call themselves:

RPI-lite: MUSH-style RP + coded support for supplementary skills.

So it seems that they’re trying to straddle the line a bit. Nothing wrong with that.

There’s a very clear distinction between minimal-RP, code-heavy MUDs and code-light, RP-heavy MUSHes, but there are also varying shades of gray in-between. And the MUX distinction, which is usually just MUSH but with a different codebase. I have no idea where MUCK falls. Is it just MUD with a different codebase?