If you compare RPing by yourself to an artist doodling in the margins, suddenly it makes sense.

Same. If I have to talk to someone twice about the same misbehavior, they’re gone.

Some people can change. Others can’t. If they need more than one warning, they’re more than likely in the latter category. And it’s a better use of my time to RP with trusted regulars than to try to help a chronic problem player.

If they’re not bothering anyone and they’re not taking up ST resources, let them play.

This is the only AI roleplay I want to see.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1lxqbxa/i_am_actually_terrified/

@Muscle-Car said in Numetal/Retromux:

Lots of points of failure led to it but it was universally avoidable if any one of the balances had worked.

I feel like this sentence describes the world we’re living in.

@dvoraen said in Numetal/Retromux:

I couldn’t think of how to do an inverse to “Hog Pit.”

First you ban someone who replied to a do-not-interact request with “message received.” The rest just happens organically.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

I’m saying that they are dying because they are being run the way a small hand full of whiny forever-victims who instigate the problems they then complain about want.

What are these ghost town games you speak of?

What were these massive PvP games you miss?

Name them. No more generalities.

@tsar said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Jumpscare said in MU Peeves Thread:

in 2 years

Oh my god has it been open that long? I feel like we were JUST reading posts about you developing it. Two years is great, congratulations!

Thanks! And congrats on launching yours!

Running a game is a far greater responsibility than developing a game. Once it’s live, your players will be playing even when you have IRL responsibilities. There’s always the looming thought in the back of my mind that I need to check in when I’m not home, because what if a bug happens that breaks the game, or some troll has shown up overnight?

I try to relax, even though there have been 2 instances in the past 2 years where I decided that I needed to go to sleep and that I’ll check in on the morning, only to wake up to a disaster I could’ve fixed the night before, haha.

Just remember to forgive yourself and keep going forward. Some beloved players will just stop playing one day. And that’s okay.

I love a well-designed grid! If you’ve got nostalgia for a grid, please feel free to be a tourist and walk around Silent Heaven for a day. There are roughly 45 rooms in the main RP hub, and they’ve acquired quite a history in 2 years.

I think it’s a better use of time to push for reining in the corporations, rather than dissuading the average joe twelvepack (the AI gives him more abs).

I don’t like AI PBs.

I don’t like PBs to begin with. I’d rather read your desc. But I especially don’t like AI PBs.

I tolerate them on the Silent Heaven server, but they go to a separate channel below the channel for human-made creative works.

In Silent Heaven, we have between 15 and 30 open scene requests at any given time. You go up to an NPC, say, “I want to talk to you about (thing I want to do).” That opens a scene request. It’s kind of like a job system, but it’s IC, so staff can pick one up and roll with it when the character is next around.

The order that I do them? Whichever I have the energy for.

There are no tokens, no queues, no priorities. Yes, it means some people will wait a while for their scenes, but it’s more important to not burn out Storytellers.

@Roadspike said in Player Ratios:

@Gashlycrumb The whole idea of share points might work for some games, but it feels like it is absolutely rife with the possibility of the perception of bias. Like, “X told me that it only cost them 3 share points to get spotlighted at a plot, but it cost me 5” or “how does Y always have so many share points?” or even just “I never get into a plot, even when I have share points, Staff must be manipulating event signups.”

Even if none of that is actually true, the perception can destroy trust in a game.

I don’t like these systems for this very reasoning. But I just now thought up a suggestion for games that do use these things. What if any spotlight cost half your points?

I don’t know how that would work in practice, but I suspect it would discourage absurd grinding of points. And over time, the spotlight-stealers would have to put in twice as much effort to not fall behind the little guys. Inevitably, though, the little guys would have their chance in the spotlight.

I’ve got a few examples!

First, for when players try to do roleplay that’s outside of what the game’s theme supports:

Right on the front page of the Silent Heaven website is a handful of things that can’t change about the town of Silent Heaven. One of them is, “Silent Heaven isn’t in any set location. Outside contact within Silent Heaven will never happen. For what it’s worth, consider the town to be on an entirely different plane of existence.”

This didn’t stop the playerbase from wanting their first major plot to be building a radio and attempting outside contact. I told them, “Hey, this will probably end in failure. Do you still want to go through with it?” And I love my players, because they went all-in on this plan. While they scavenged all the items to build a radio, I got to brainstorming what sort of effect this could leave on the town.

When the event began a couple weeks later, they had assembled the radio at the highest point they could find in the town. With all that effort, I rewarded them with someone speaking on the other end. Someone who seemed to know exactly who they were. Someone who said they’d send some friends to their location to collect their bodies. After they dealt with that fallout, and the hostile monsters coming their way, it soon became apparent that they summoned a demon that loves putting on radio shows. And that there was likely a radio station somewhere in town!

That event set a precedent that attempting to go against the unchangeable boundaries of what the game can support will have unintended (and fun) consequences.

However, when someone wants to do something that tests the boundaries of what I’m comfortable roleplaying, I’ve had to say, “Unfortunately, we don’t have support for that kind of roleplay.” Someone here taught me that line a couple years ago and I’d encourage everyone to have that line in your repertoire when your players are going very far in the wrong direction.

In the realm of smaller changes, last year, the PCs successfully banished the campy lust demon from the town. They then proceeded to vandalize and desecrate his den of opulence, which was situated across a river that characters could only reach via raft or kayak. Given that nobody was there to stop them, we gave them a free-for-all and updated the room descriptions afterwards to reflect their destruction. One character even stole a king-size bed, but the player roleplayed the mattress slipping off their raft and sinking into the turbulent waters. There was no reason to do this other than the player thought it would be fun and realistic. I love rewarding self-induced losses, so now there’s a king-size mattress in the description of an underwater room, complete with bedsheets and pillows, that any character who can swim can see.

It doesn’t take much to give a player a sense that their character matters in the world. If they can point to something in-game and say “I made that happen,” that makes most players happy.

What makes them unhappy is if you undo what they’ve done. If a well-enjoyed Big Bad Evil Guy is assuredly dead, it makes players feel like they don’t matter if her hand rises out of the rubble sometime later. Recently, someone performed a ritual on what remained of a BBEG, causing echoes of the past to be broadcast briefly. Some characters interpreted this as the return of the BBEG and got really miffed about how their efforts didn’t matter, to the point that I had to tell folks that that wasn’t what had happened, and that’s she’s absolutely dead dead.

I hope this helps!

@Trashcan said in AI Megathread:

What most people are expressing is the desire for transparency, to know if AI was used to create the content they are engaging with in the MU* space, and if there was more of that, I expect there would be less false accusations to go along with it.

There’s even a real-world example of this! That one Ares L&L game that used AI and was quickly called out for not disclosing it.

@RedRocket said in The 3-Month Players:

The kind of people who log in to a world of darkness game just to sit in a bar and make small talk are baffling to me.

Just go join a discord or a forum.

The same thing is true of people who hang out in bars just to hook up for TS. Why are you on a roleplay game with a complicated combat and stat system when you could just go to one of many games where you can literally be anything and bang anything you can imagine.

If they’re having fun and not harming anyone, is that a problem?

In Last One Standing and LA2043, I know it was because the lead storyteller burnt out. In those early months, you need to give your players lots of story opportunities, and actionable and tangible things to do when you’re not around. And you need to be there practically day in and day out.

Launching a game is the easy part.

@Faraday said in Why MUSH?:

@Jumpscare said in Why MUSH?:

Yeah, at least with Ares games, it takes 3 months for the story to be abandoned.

I kid, but I really have played so many Ares games that fizzle our within 3 months.

Sure, but I’ve played on so many PennMUSH games, TinyMUX games, etc. that fizzle out within 3 months too. For as long as the hobby has existed, the vast majority of MUs have never really taken flight. Ares just helps more at least get to the “open” phase.

That’s a good point! And I think Ares does a great job of it.

@Juniper said in Why MUSH?:

The trailing off without resolution is why I don’t RP on forums anymore. At least in a MUSH people don’t start and abandon a story a week.

Yeah, at least with Ares games, it takes 3 months for the story to be abandoned.

I kid, but I really have played so many Ares games that fizzle our within 3 months.

I think what draws me most to MUSHes is the amount of effort that goes into making the world. It feels like you’re playing in the world, instead of other methods of storytelling where you’re writing the world. It’s more rigid than a sandbox, but less rigid than a linear story-based video game.

I prefer roleplaying where what matters most is the interactions between characters, and MUSHes are right in that sweet spot.

I love writing, and MUSHes are my favorite medium.