@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 Age Verification & Games:

So if a MU wanted to connect with, say, Yoti ID and could get a token from them that “the person you’re asking about has demonstrated to us that they are over 18” that would be a different question, and I’d encourage such a thing.

1. That’s assuming you trust Yoti. Do you really want to give THEM your government ID? ETA: Are you comfortable with them being able to build a database of all the sites that ask: “Hey, is Faraday over 18?” And then sell said database to marketers, the government, or heaven-knows-who?

2. Services like that cost money, putting them out of reach for your average free-to-play online RP game/group.

@Kestrel Yeah, one of my kids told me about seeing “RPs” on Scratch of all places several years ago. Their friends play via discord - only with people they know, but it’s a short hop from there into other forms of text-based gaming with strangers.

As a parent, this stuff concerns me greatly. People can bark about “just use parental controls”, but I wonder how many of them have actually tried to keep a kid safe on the internet these days.

Even so, I take issue with the current laws because they are a massive invasion of privacy and a security risk. There have already been instances of leaked documents and other identifying info. It will only get worse. The anonymity of the internet certainly has its problems, but tying your RL governmental identity to every platform you visit is a free speech and information nightmare.

@Muscle-Car said in Age Verification & Games:

especially in this hobby the chances of encountering underage players is slim

Underage players have been playing in this hobby since the 90s. With the resurgence of TTRPGs among teenagers, I wouldn’t be surprised if some number of them stumble into text-based games.

But regardless of whether they’re there or not, MUs most likely do (or will) fall under some of the recent age verification laws imposed by places like Texas and Australia. EU regulation is probably coming soon. A “I’m over 18 I swear” tickbox is not sufficient under these regulations.

Even big companies are struggling to figure out how to conform to these rules. On a MU? Good luck.

@ham I didn’t start the business owner analogy, I was responding to a previous comment. Any kind of RL analogy is going to be flawed because once you meet the people in person you can be like: “Oh no, not Harvey again. I’m out.”

You’re never going to get that same 1-1 correspondence in an online system. What we’ve been talking about is whether staff OWES people that same level of transparency.

I think being transparent is a good way to build trust. I think being cautious around staffers you don’t know is reasonable. I just don’t think “they have no handle therefore they have something to hide” is appropriate or fair. YMMV.

@dvoraen said in Staff Bits Linking Handles:

“ok but who owns the business?” “You don’t need to know.”

I view it more as: “Who owns this business?” “No clue. <shrug>”

Which is honestly how I feel about most businesses. Most places do not plaster their owner’s identity on their front door, and most patrons just don’t care.

There’s nothing wrong with caring. By all means, give your business to a place that you’re not comfortable with. I just reject the notion that not advertising your OOC identity is some kind of shady practice.

@Pavel said in Staff Bits Linking Handles:

NPCs are a different thing, they’re storytelling tools, but if your personal player character is in a position of authority and you are in a position of OOC authority, I do look upon that with askance.

I can understand being wary of that. Heaven knows there have been enough staff shenanigans through the years to warrant such skepticism. But I’ve also been on games where staff PCs were in authority positions and it worked out just fine. I’ve done it myself, though I usually avoid it.

It all depends on the staffer, so I agree it’s nice when you know staff’s reputation. I just prefer if the default “trust-o-meter” is at neutral for someone without an OOC rep rather than “OMG they must have something to hide”.

I still see all of it as kinda separate from Ares player handles. Everyone knew me as Faraday on MUs (from staff char names) looooong before player handles existed. Even on games where staff had wacky themed names, I’d still announce myself in my +finger. And we’ve had alt tracking systems for forever (I already mentioned the auxiliary alt tracker mechanism baked into Ares).

@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.)