I’m also grateful that as a hobby we collectively kicked all the edgy racists and misogynists to the curb. It’s the best.

I think the short answer is that the person making the decisions doesn’t know for sure that they’re a bad actor.

They might have heard rumours. But people lie. And every messy conflict has two sides coming away with two different inaccurate stories even if they don’t -think- they’re lying. Gamerunners aren’t wrong if they want to judge a player by their firsthand experiences with that player rather than an incomplete narrative.

Disclaimer: I’m not on the grapevine so don’t take this as commentary on any specific situation that might be currently unfolding.

@bear_necessities said in World Tone / Feeling:

I’ve always felt that while people say they want consequences in their RP, a vast majority of people don’t really want it. At least not permanent consequences.

You’re definitely right here and I think players could do more introspection about what they actually want before they commit to a less forgiving game.

I think I’m just scarred from previous experiences though because we’ve now said “consequences” so many times that it’s starting to lose its meaning to me.

I take “consequences” to mean “oh no I went adventuring without a light source and ran away from a bear and fell into a ravine and now I’m stuck until someone rescues me”.

But sometimes “consequences” means you pissed off someone with a lot of friends and they’re going to petition the admin to fire you from your IC job because you did not use the correct hand to wave to Ms Pennybottom at the annual fair. Sometimes “consequences” just translates to player infighting and yes people generally hate getting socially punished over made up minutae.

Breaking your ankle though, let’s do that more.

I think a game can have genuine dangers and consequences for losses other than unceremonious death. You can get injured, cursed, trapped, etc. I think you can also sit players down and set expectations that they won’t endlessly throw themselves into unwinnable battles just because they aren’t deleted upon a loss.

I also don’t see it as an issue of conflicting playstyles between mechanically-focused minmaxing and collaborative storytelling. What I’d like is firmly collaborative storytelling. It’s just not collaborative storytelling about tea parties and everybody being friends.

One day I’ll get my gritty survival post-apocalypse game where it really does feel like there’s danger around every corner that’ll get me if I slip up for a moment. And hopefully it won’t immediately devolve into hot tub weed party time, because a shocking number of players who sign up for a horror / struggle bus experience don’t respect that theme even though there are already countless games where you can party all day.

On the other hand, a lot of “harsh survival” games feature permadeath and that’s not my jam. It makes people risk avoidant and boring. I’m okay with my character getting hurt, getting knocked out, getting trapped somewhere. I just don’t want to slip on a banana peel and be unceremoniously deleted without so much as a story beat.

Half of these words are made up, I swear. It must be tough living in such a bizarre self-made delusion.

Good fucking riddance.

Totally normal and well-adjusted behaviour from these knuckle-dragging chuds.

Honestly, could anything else bring the community together this well?

ok

Oh, this shit absolutely happens everywhere. It happens in my game.

I interpreted this thread as a warning about two specific players residing in a specific game.

This kind of mobbing behaviour where a couple of people choose a victim to isolate and corral a bunch of flying monkeys to harrass them (because they “deserve it”) is such a classic move in this hobby that I could name a few players off the top of my head.

I think I’m safe though, because WoD isn’t something I play in.

Part of the reason we’re now drowning in content slop farms that themselves use generative AI is because advertising revenue made content profitable and incentivised creating content as quickly as possible while eliminating any kind of standards for quality.

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for advertisers or those who are paid by them because they form part of the ecosystem that put us in this mess. Let the model collapse, it stopped serving us long ago.

If LLM chatbots weren’t so chronically wrong, using them to dodge adverts and engagement bombardment might actually be a decent use case.

I don’t have anything against AI generated images for face claims, though these images aren’t art and shouldn’t be referred to as such. I generally prefer human-made digital art and have my own personal image folder of stuff I’ve collected over the years. Whenever I make a new character I just flip through and pick something.

Again though, I’m coming across less authentic art these nights and my cache isn’t growing as much as it once was. Annoying.

And it’s getting harder to find good context for verbally describing things especially hairstyles when the internet is full of AI slop. Try looking up a medium chunky bob right now and see how many different visuals that can mean, because the infrastructure is aimed at gathering as much traffic as possible and not at being actually receptive to the specific meaning of words.

There are some writing resources out there for facial features, clothes, hair, but they’re getting harder to find. Maybe we could start a sort of library for it.

The bar RP is lubricant. It needs to be there for the RP to work. And it’s fine, as long as you’re building towards the next plot thing.

Because if all you have is lubricant you don’t have an engine, just a bathtub full of grease.

I don’t know where I was going with this.

People call this “hallucination”. I think we should stop letting them assign a new name to an existing phenomenon. The LLM is malfunctioning. It is saying things that are wrong. It is failing to do what it was designed to do.

@SqeakyClean What did they have to say for themselves?

Interesting but I’m sure you’d have found the same thing by googling LiberationMUSH. I can’t fathom using a tool for research when it’s wrong like… Most of the time.

@RedRocket Man, I’m a little sad I missed this game. Sounds like something I’d have tried.