A few decades ago, we had more of a bell curve of gameplay styles among MUSH/MUX games.

TTRPG/often-PVP games on one end, full-consent on the other. One highly authoritative (through GMs or code), the other highly collaborative (at least until you hit a wall and someone picked up their toys and went home.)

Both extremes were (and probably still are) super popular among a subset of players, but had dramatic issues. TTRPG/PVP games became known for capricious behavior. Full-consent games often devolved like schoolkids playing cops and robbers. “I got you!” “Did not!” “Did so!”

So over time, we saw a shift toward the middle. Fewer headaches for staff, more agency for players to run their own plots (since GM staff became harder to come by), and a wider appeal to potential players (which became even more important as MU populations dwindled.)

That’s not to say you can’t make a successful game in the margins these days. I just don’t think the shift to the middle was random, or the result of PVP players going to video games or whatever. I think it was just collective experience into what kinds of games appealed broadly and weren’t nightmares to run.

@Jenn said in pvp vs pvp:

Could you expain how it’s possible to MUSH without collaborative storytelling because I’m super confused and not understanding what you mean.

There is no one true universal definition for what a MUSH is. For some it’s more TTRPG+some writing. For others it’s more storytelling with (maybe) some dice or cards or something. Different players and games fall at different points along that scale.

But even if we accept the supposition that collaborative writing is the core, how you collaborate is open for debate.

Think of an improv troupe. It’s more about going with the flow on the fly, not knowing detailed backstories and collaborating OOC about the details and stuff. I think that’s akin to an OOC Masq.

@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:

People tend to blow these things out of proportion – if there’s any PVP at all, diehard PVE players have a tendency to distort things and overstate how bad they really are. This happens in all games.

This has literally happened to many of us. Repeatedly. Please stop telling us that describing our actual lived experiences is “blowing things out of proportion”.

It’s like your argument about PVP video games. I’m glad that you’ve found at least one game or one guild with a non-toxic PVP community, but there is a very real and serious problem with toxic behavior in online multiplayer games, and it’s worse in competitive ones. Especially if you can be identified as a woman or other minority group. This problem is rampant, and many of us believe (backed by some research, though admittedly not enough, and basic human psychology) that it is a direct result of the core game design combined with inadequate moderation.

I’m not saying that all PVP games are doomed or that nobody should run one. I’m just saying that the “golden days” you’re yearning to go back to were literally miserable for many of us, and the drift away from them wasn’t a bug for us, but a feature.

@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:

It’s not that they don’t exist, but older gamers have PVP communities as well.

There are toxic older people too. My main point was not about age (my teen and their friends are quite decent little humans who are fun to play with) but just that going into an open lobby in many (most?) mainstream PVP games is opening yourself up to abuse. It’s pretty well-established that there’s a lot of toxicity in online multiplayer games, and it’s worse in some genres and settings.

@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:

PVP games are not filled with teenagers throwing slurs. That’s nonsense. There’s huge communities of PVP gamers that aren’t like this.

I have played several online PVP games with my teen. I can assure you that many of them, in fact, are like this. Obviously I cannot speak to every single one so YMMV.

@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:

PVP players went on to play PVP video games mostly because video games became a thing in the first place. I

And at the same time, PVE-inclined players went off to play solo or co-op video games. This is a red herring.

Literally nothing is stopping PVP-inclined individuals from running a PVP game. Seriously, you could make one tomorrow.

If your argument is that there’s some huge untapped mass of PVPers just waiting for a game, then it’ll be wildly successful. Maybe so successful that it spawns more.

I think it more likely that, at best, it’ll be a small niche game for a minority of players. But that’s still okay.

The only thing I take issue with is the argument that being anti-PVP is just some kind of unfounded bias. I have had nothing but negative experiences on PVP-MUs, going all the way back to my very first Star Wars game where some random guy shot my PC in the town square for no dang reason. I won’t touch them with a ten-foot pole, but that doesn’t mean nobody else should run one.

@Cygnus said in The 3-Month Players:

There’s so many benefits to PVP in a game that have been outlined which are generally ignored by game-runners based on personal preference – the reason they’re the only people making text-based MU*s is because the PVPers have been driven away from the hobby due to a rather vocal minority and lack of gameplay which they find engaging.

You talk about game-runners making games based on their personal preferences like it’s a bad thing. But people have always run games that they’re going to enjoy playing on.

I remember a time in MUSHing where there were a lot more PVP games. There became fewer and fewer not because of some arbitrary exodus, but because the people willing to run games became less willing to play on PVP games.

Why is that? You blame a vocal minority, I blame the extra toxicity and headaches involved in running a PVP game amongst internet strangers.

How much of that is accomplishable in Ares, I don’t know.

I mean, anything’s possible. But Evennia gives you a pile of LEGO bricks and says “build what you want and have fun”. Ares gives you a LEGO castle and says “here’s a castle already built for you, have fun.” If you want a spaceship, it’s far more sensible IMHO to take Evennia and build a spaceship than it is to try to turn Ares’ castle into a spaceship.

@Cygnus said in The 3-Month Players:

but Ares sadly does not offer the OOC masquerade that is necessary in PVP-type games

I disagree with your assertion that OOC masq is necessary for PVP games. (The TTRPG PVP games I’ve been in certainly did not require any such thing, and if we imagine the hypothetical mature playerbase you described, they wouldn’t need it either). Nevertheless, you are correct that Ares has OOC transparency baked in and it would take a lot of custom code to undo that. Rhost and Evennia would probably be a better bet.

@Cygnus said in The 3-Month Players:

There should be a place for mature players to throw dice at each other and still be friends afterwards.

One of the most fun TTRPG campaigns I was in involved a bunch of backstabbing (figurative and literal) amongst PCs. My reporter PC stuck her nose in where it didn’t belong, and ended up getting killed by my BFF’s PC. Good times!

The difference between that and MUSHing is that we were all friends.

You say there “should” be a place for mature players to throw dice and still be friends, but that presumes:

• You’ll be able to create a game with only mature players.
• They were even friendly in the first place.

Ample experience with MUSHes over several decades shows that getting either of these things (let alone both) on an open game is nigh-impossible. PVP games have all the same inter-personal drama as PVE games plus the drama inherent in players working against each other. That’s just objectively more drama, and I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t want to deal with it.

The good news is, that with the cheapening of cloud computing and the advent of newer platforms like Evennia and Ares, it’s easier than ever to spin up your own game where you can PVP to your heart’s content.

@STD said in AI PBs:

You are paying for everything being above board. If the corporation is pulling funny business, then that’s on them (and Disney’s lawyers will undoubtedly made them pay).

That’s just not accurate. Tools like Midjourney provide absolutely no claims that they have the rights to the materials used in their training data or that the images they generate are safe from copyright or trademark infringement claims. Mainly because they don’t. That’s why there are eleventy billion lawsuits against GenAI companies from artists, authors, publishers, and more.

And EVEN IF the law concludes that training these GenAI systems on copyrighted material is fair use (which is still very much up in the air), that still doesn’t protect you if something you generate with them infringes on someone else’s copyrights or trademarks.

I can ask GenAI to make me an image of a golden space robot and slap it on a T-Shirt to sell, but that’s not going to save me from a DMCA takedown or lawsuit once Disney sees that it’s the spitting image of C-3PO.

@Third-Eye said in AI PBs:

Anyway, if this was going to go anywhere in terms of litigation it would’ve come up in the 2000s when fan fiction and websites that did ‘dream casting’ for movies were just becoming things.

That’s what I was alluding to when I mentioned fancasts/faceclaims not being unique to MUSHes. Like fanfic/fanart, there are certainly those who take issue with them. And like fanfic/fanart, they exist on shaky copyright ground, relying mainly on the good graces of the creators.

Even so, there never has been anywhere near the widespread outcry from creatives over these things than there has with GenAI. If you have a personal problem with them, that’s totally fine! But thinking that GenAI is better than fancasting because it somehow harms creatives less feels like it’s almost willfully ignoring what creatives themselves are saying.

@Pavel said in Star Trek Games:

So please don’t “gentle reminder” your way through ignoring my experience.

100%. I’ve played on (and run) tons of military games, and the rank divide has always caused issues. There are ways around it, but it needs to be acknowledged and planned for.

@Pavel said in Star Trek Games:

Gentle reminder that I’m talking about the enlisted crew, who constituted the vast majority of the ship’s complement and generally didn’t get to go on wacky adventures.

Yeah, one of the things that always bugged me about Trek is that more of the wacky adventures rationally should have involved the enlisted crew. It’s a Hollywood-ism to always have the heads of departments doing everything, but that mentality also pervaded the Trek games I tried through the years.

Then again, Trek has always been weird about its handling of officers/enlisted. At one point in the 60’s, Roddenberry even insisted that Starfleet had no enlisted ranks at all. (This is seemingly contradicted not only by simple logic but also by various characters throughout Trek canon.)

I know Star Trek isn’t RL, but just for reference/scope, a US aircraft carrier would have ~3000 enlisted crew and ~200 officers. So even the most junior Ensign is still in the top 6% of personnel, rank-wise. Lower Decks seems to contradict that conclusion, so who even knows.

@MisterBoring “The crew” in that example could just be the crew of the shuttle, not necessarily the entire crew. But yes, you’re right about the general problem. My point is just that there needs to be something more going on besides just “Ensign Bob technobabbles the broken thing”, and players on the whole are not great at driving stuff like that (in my experience).

@Jennkryst said in Star Trek Games:

There is a whole chart, for roll d20 to [science] the [device] for [techbobabble].

@Raistlin said in Star Trek Games:

Find some available people and do “Star Trek-y” things; take a shuttle out to explore an anomaly, run some training scenarios, tackle an engineering problem that’s cropped up

Those aren’t the kinds of things that make Trek interesting, though. A team can’t just take a shuttle out, get some readings, and then go home. An engineer can’t just throw technobabble at a broken drive. That would be really boring to RP.

Stuff has to happen. There have to be stakes. The drive needs to be fixed in time to get the ship away from some threat. The anomaly has to put the crew in peril somehow.

Some players can generate those stories for themselves, sure, but many (most?) are going to need it handed to them. It’s much harder to craft engaging stories like that for a random assortment of characters from disparate departments than it is for a fixed group of series regulars + the occasional guest star/redshirt.

@Jennkryst said in Star Trek Games:

Tangentially important to point out the entire point of Lower Decks is that we don’t focus on the primary crew, and it has given us some of the finest Trek in decades.

True, but that’s - what, one show out of a dozen that went that route? The default Trek would play like a FC-driven game, with the department heads as coveted positions and everyone else feeling like second fiddle. That was also how the old-school Trek games I tried felt, and why I believe they were never as popular as some of the other genres.

I certainly think it’s possible to make a game that worked differently, but you’d have to deliberately make game design choices to break that mold.

The other challenge is figuring out what people actually do. Like, say I’m a junior Engineering crewman. What is my RP about?

@Superbia Just be aware that FS3 is not very “crunchy” and so does not have a lot of the kinds of systems you’d typically find in a TTRPG. Like for Mechs in Battletech - there’s no concept of heat, ammo, range, critical hits, etc.

For a light-touch story driven thing, FS3 vehicles would surely do fine. It’s just not going to resemble any of the “mech wargame” systems.

@Pavel said in AI PBs:

The use of AI feels worse for a lot of us because we’re creatives, or move in creative circles, and that’s what generative AI is directly impacting right now.

That is true, but also not the whole story. GenAI is causing widespread disruption in everything from the fundamental business model of the internet to critical thinking skills. It may be impacting entry-level jobs, hurting an entire generation because companies are too short-sighted to realize that today’s entry-level people are tomorrow’s senior people. It has profound implications for propaganda, which is increasingly dangerous considering the threat of authoritarianism. These impacts are not limited to the creative fields.

And that’s not even touching on the alignment issues that make generalized intelligence (which we do not yet have but these grifter companies are trying desperately to build) so dangerous. My favorite thought experiment is the rogue stamp collector AI because it’s pretty hilarious yet illustrates the problem very well.

I am not saying that all machine learning is bad, but I personally see GenAI specifically as a threat on par with climate change in its ability to really screw up society. Amazon is bad, but GenAI is way worse IMHO.

@bear_necessities said in AI PBs:

when the exact same argument could be made for Amazon and I would argue those very real people being exploited are being hurt a bit worse here.

The relative evils of Amazon vs. GenAI is a valid debate but pretty off-topic. Unless your argument is that exploiting artists is OK because Amazon also exploits workers, it feels ultimately irrelevant.

Also did you miss the part where I admitted my reasons were kinda selfish? If someone wants to rail at me for being an imperfect human with inconsistent priorities, that’s valid. But at least I’m not going to try to argue with them that buying from Amazon is completely innocent.

@Third-Eye said in AI PBs:

I also don’t care if people like playing with it as a toy, even if the company sucks and the whole industry needs to pay the contributors it sucks inspo from and also be regulated.

Yeah I mean… in the grand scheme of the AI industry, is MUSHing going to be the make-or-break thing? Obviously not.

It just bothers me. These tools are literally destroying the livelihoods of people I care about right now and threatening to do the same to more people in the future. So it just really hurts to see people shrug and be like: “Eh, whatever, I’m gonna still play with it because it’s a fun toy.” I wish more people would take a principled stand against it, because that can actually make a difference to their bottom lines.

Most of us are old enough to remember Napster. Imagine what would have happened to the music industry if that had been Apple’s model instead of some little indie that could get crushed by the big corps. If they had just said: “Yeah we know it’s illegal, but we don’t care. Come sue us. By the time it gets through the courts, we’ll have a monopoly and nobody will be able to stop us.” I don’t really like that image. Yeah, I know the current streaming services aren’t great to musicians either, but it could have been a lot worse.

@KarmaBum said in AI PBs:

There’s also a big difference between “I don’t purchase things from Amazon” and “I feel that people who purchase things from Amazon are enabling corruption and exploitation.”

I purchase from Amazon and thereby enable corruption and exploitation. I have reasons, but they’re kinda selfish. I can at least admit it.

Someone using GenAI tools is supporting a tool that steals from artists. Full stop. You can argue that your support is a drop in the bucket (as someone can for Amazon), but it is undeniably contributing to that bucket. Every GenAI query harms the environment more than its alternatives. Every GenAI query is a number reported on a spreadsheet of “look how many users we have!” that is used to justify more corporate investment in tools that harm artists.

Where I draw the line is “people who ((do thing I disapprove of))” are evil/bad/scum of the earth/deserve harm/etc. That’s going too far, and I feel it can be avoided with a tiny bit of empathy.

@KarmaBum said in AI PBs:

And how we engage with people who align differently.

Sure. But there’s a big difference between “I understand the harm that Amazon does but I still choose to use it because (reasons, which may even be wholly justified given your personal situation)” and “I don’t get why everyone keeps saying Amazon is a big deal; it really does no harm when I order from them; people are just overreacting.” I see a LOT of the latter when it comes to GenAI, and that is what I push back on. (not from you specifically, just in general)

Like, piracy sites actively harm authors on a large scale. You can argue “I wouldn’t have bought the book anyway so I didn’t personally do any harm”, but that’s discounting the real harm caused by the very existence of those sites. (including that the pirated material was then used to train GenAI, bringing us full circle…)