Standard/live for me. I don’t mind waiting for an emote that has some weight to it, but I expect my partner’s full attention. If I am waiting around because you’re trying to seduce Bridget in another window, that’s just disrespectful.

I have been known to do some novella in various forums. I fell out of it mainly because people would get bored of a story literally by the time everyone had finished doing their introductions and just bounce to the next thread. I’d started plenty of stories but god, I wanted to finish a single scene with all the people I’d started with.

I think permadeath should be wholly excluded from the Bad Things Bucket just because it’s so difficult to give a character death a satisfying amount of story lead up. Character deaths shouldn’t be a side note in someone else’s story, it should be part of a story explicitly dedicated to wrapping up your character in a respectful and awesome way.

People are always so scared to be mean to me! I wish they would do it more.

I promise I won’t whip around and start crying about being griefed if you do anything mildly cruel. I think players in general are pretty traumatised by bleedy targets and now they don’t even want to take the risk. A lack of trust all around.

Thanks all, I needed a good laugh.

I’m afraid of Arch. A do it yourself approach seems like something I’d enjoy, but I do have to be realistic about the learning curve.

I’ll look into Bodhi and Lubuntu!

A post after my own heart. I’ve been working on ditching Microsoft and Google, but it’s a PROCESS.

I have a side laptop I’ve been tinkering with as a way to dip my toes into it, but I think as a side effect of being easily 10+ years old, this thing runs like a fridge. It has Debian (LXQt) on it now, but tends to freeze and crash.

Windows ran fine on it but I do wonder if it’s just so old that it needs something more lightweight. If you know any distributions that are particularly well suited to ancient shitboxes, I’d appreciate a recommendation.

My first text game was hellMOO.

I will be taking no further questions.

@tsar said in MU Peeves Thread:

If you’ve been turned away from a game, or know that you’re probably not welcome on a game-- DON’T SNEAK ONTO THEM.

This is especially funny on games with bans that aren’t permanent, but become permanent if you try to sneak on.

@Jumpscare said in Factions:

Once, in a medium-combat faction, I had the boss NPC of the faction desire a spar with one of the PCs as a way of making up for the PC’s transgression against the faction. The idea being that they fight and all is made right in the end, regardless of who wins the fight. The PC decided to be a pacifist, passed all his combat turns, and said things like, “This won’t solve anything.” (It literally would have solved everything.)

And that’s just a spar, not even a real attack! Such a bummer.

I really like Faction conflict play. In my opinion it’s better to fight with somebody based on being in opposite factions, than it is to fight with somebody based on your character hating theirs. Players really struggle to stomach being targeted with conflict, and knowing they’re consistently going to be targeted by Faction A for reasons that are completely impersonal is reassuring.

In practice, there’s always some kind of snafu and I haven’t seen it work right. Often a bunch of players sign up for faction play and end up being totally disinterested in it, or worse, get really upset when they get affected by faction conflict they explicitly signed up for. Don’t do that. There are so many games that don’t feature competitive play that you could be playing.

Software development practices are crucial, but the kind of people who find AI the most useful probably haven’t been introduced to those practices so in addition to potentially being let down by the bot, they’re not doing OTHER project activities that would really help them and the bot isn’t going to introduce them to. Version control, unit tests, checking logs, using a debugger?

I have found AI code extremely unhelpful compared to jumping into a debugger, but those things are also learned skills that you can’t assume everyone has.

A peeve I have is sometimes staff -try- to disperse plot hooks, but like… end up giving three plot hooks all to people in the same insular group, failing to solve the bottleneck problem at all when they proceed to treat a gamewide plot like it’s their own personal treat.

Ok, let’s start some fights.

In some places there’s a level of weird showboating that goes on around “solo RP”, putting a lot of effort into writing that just goes into the void and nobody ever sees. The more pointless, the more noble.

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?

@Rucket said in Strike Systems:

At this point if I ran a game and someone spoke some right wing shit id ban them.

Amen to that.

“A-bloo-boo-hoo, freedom of speech, blah blah”
Nah. Go away. I’m tired of playing how far they can boil the frog before there’s a problem.

What is a Generic RP room?

I’ve staffed in places (outside of RP) that had strike systems and I think it was more because that was the done thing in gaming culture, rather than any deliberate and conscientious design.

It didn’t work. People get really mad if they’re given a strike they feel they didn’t deserve, it becomes a technicality and a debate-magnet. Also, we were a bunch of immature teenagers.

Growing up is realising you can just talk to people instead of issuing ultimatums from your ivory tower.

In theory, I’d like to RP at least once with everyone unless there’s some obvious red flag about them.

In practice… a good intro scene long enough to feel like I have a grasp on what that character is about can run 2-3 hours. A healthy RP community can have up to 30 regular writers. I also have to work to live, get 8 hours of sleep a night, cook, eat, wash dishes, tend to my real-life relationships, and I also have hobbies outside of writing.

Also, some people are only online for 45 minutes at 3am on Thursdays.

I can barely find time for the people who are specifically trying to follow up RP with me. So I have to be realistic. Whenever someone makes a fuss that I didn’t have time for them it really bums me out. Most of the time it wasn’t a conscious choice, that’s just how it shakes out.

If someone tells me with a straight face that they need ChatGPT because they have a disability that makes them unable to write, I view that with the exact same incredulity if they’d announced that they need Stockfish on the side because they have a disability that makes them bad at chess. It’s absurd. If I wanted to play against a computer, I’d just … do that.

I have to wonder why such a hypothetical person insists on playing a game around creative writing in a time sensitive environment if they struggle so much with creative writing in a time sensitive environment. Asynchronous RP would do a lot more for them, and we’d actually get to read their writing rather than the output of “Dave eats his porridge. ChatGPT pad this to 4 paragraphs of waffle”.

AI generated text typically looks at home in a game of Mad Libs which is why it loves words like “exudes”, “exhibits”, “emphasizes”, “highlights” etc. It’s an easy way for AI to get some vaguely related but illustrative nouns in there without actually constructing a pointed sentence. This is how I recognise it most if the time.

I don’t feed things into an LLM and ask it if it thinks something is AI written because that would be stupid.