@Superbia no worries, I didn’t read it as dismissive at all. you’re good

@Superbia said in Aegis Company Discussion:

@bear_necessities I’m unfortunately not familiar with Tek’s history and only know inkling through AresMUSH games that we’ve played on before.

I will just note that I did not know at the time that I was playing with the person going by Inkling that there was even a rumor that they were Tek, so my opinion formed completely independently of this.

I did not have a good experience playing with this person. They didn’t communicate well OOC, seemed to bleed IC/OOC, and ultimately left me with a sense that they were dishonest.

YMMV.

@Jumpscare The game-owner was Tek with a new handle on. The game went under a few weeks after they were outed for lying to everyone.

• Are you Tek? https://brandmu.day/topic/53/mu-peeves-thread/1490?_=1760278262487
• “I wasn’t lying; I just wasn’t telling the truth.” https://brandmu.day/topic/53/mu-peeves-thread/1512?_=1760278262489

@MisterBoring I don’t actually know anything about Monster Hunters, but - based on the name - that’s probably a fair assumption.

Most of the material is focused on the mechanics of forstalls, weapons, monster abilities, hunting grounds, etc. And the whole thing came out of episodic YT content that was basically a guy describing a Monster of the Week.

There’s more to the world when you get into the goals of different factions, but the TTRPG is very much designed around groups going out and hunting monsters.

If a person was trying to set up a western sandbox, I wouldn’t recommend this IP at all. But if a person was interested in having focused or episodic adventures, this is a great place to start.

@MisterBoring said in Missed Settings:

Wild West microcosm in a dome floating in space, psychic powers, secret alien schemes…

This doesn’t excite me the same way. I love Dark City. I love cowboys. I don’t love them combined. But it’s a “different strokes for different folks” situation.

A Dark City game would be dope, though.

@Gashlycrumb said in Missed Settings:

I wonder if the Wild Imaginary West set says anything about the -isms.

No, it doesn’t really address that at all, but instead rewrites history from 1876 forward, giving you the United States and the Uncivilized West. The implication is that things are kind of as they would be/have always been, but even the map is a little different.

The over-arching conflict is between the East (steam) vs West (electricity), peppered by Faction conflict, like the US Railroad has a lot of economic power, the Tulos Mob runs crime, etc.

The Frontier Conservation Society has a brief mention of working with Native Americans:

The Frontier Conservation Society aims to preserve nature, both its fauna and flora. While many at this time don’t believe extinction of a species is possible, Charles Darwin helped some to see that the natural competition of things can lead to the complete loss of anything. The Frontier Conservation Society was born from a group of biologists studying the West. During their travels, they especially learned from the Native Americans how to rely on the land and coexist with its creatures.

And there’s one NPC mentioned that’s half-Native American, and it’s commented that “most of the European immigrants saw him as a Native, and most of the Natives saw him as a European immigrant.”

But there’s nothing specifically addressing social issues at the time.

My take is that the Uncivilized West is a place for everyone, from all walks of life, as long as you have the mettle to survive; they have real monsters to worry about, so they don’t have time to worry about skin-color or religious views, but that these notions still exist, especially in the East.

@Roadspike said in Missed Settings:

@KarmaBum If you like FS3, I do happen to have the stats I put together from The Network’s Western series that y’all could use as a starting point.

Appreciated, but I don’t have the spoons to make fun for other people right now.

@Gashlycrumb might want this, though.

@Gashlycrumb Yep. We started watching circa lockdown, and I kept thinking… this would make a great RPG setting. So we backed the kickstarter.

The guide is mostly mechanics that seems fun for a TTRPG, but also has some good setting information about various factions, and tons of monster info.

I would play in this world, sort of tongue-in-cheek but with real peril out there! I just don’t have it in me to set up another game right now.

It’s someone else’s turn.

But not historically accurate cowboys.

More like Wild Imaginary West - https://runefoundry.com/products/wild-imaginary-west-rpg?srsltid=AfmBOooAEp1NVTXF0ZeDBoSmAawCkPK1_tbzkyC8kqVi8MVvUz60WwxQ

@junipersky @Tez @Pyrephox Can we fork this off into a discussion thread, please?

There are people that I played with for years who are so boring, so uncreative, so repetitive and lacking spark that - by the metrics above - they are definitely being controlled by an LLM. There are times that my own writing is so flat that I would be less embarrassed if ChatGPT had written it.

While I don’t particularly want to RP with a robot, I don’t have space in my brain to start worrying about whether or not someone I’m writing with is now or has ever been an AI.

^ part of that reply was written by ChatGPT

…or was it?!

abigail williams told me @tsar uses an m-dash

@LeeRoyBatty said in Numetal/Retromux:

THIS IS WHO I REALLY AM INSIDE, BELLA

coming off mute 'cause this is comedy gold

@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:

This is the kind of absolutism I’m talking about, I completely reject this.

I cannot tell if this was meant to be funny or not, but it made me giggle.

Where I go, he goes.

@Testament totally unrelated to this nonsense, but I was just thinking about you the other day and am glad to know you’re still kicking around.

TY for poking your head out.

@Faraday said in AI PBs:

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.”

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.”

And I think that’s why you have people responding the way they are. The upstream problem is Midjourney, but there’s a sense in this thread that players who use it are somehow to blame for that corruption.

people with AI PBs : steal from artists :: people who shop on Amazon : run a sweatshop

Midjourney : steals from artists :: Amazon : runs a sweatshop

It may not be intentional, but that’s how it comes across, and why I personally felt the need to defend my use of image generators.

I’m not a bad person! I just can’t do art and get bored!

Edit to add - @sao enmeshed is a great way to put it. They’re so everywhere that even actively trying to avoid them doesn’t always work.

@Tez ooooh! Thank you for the tip! Added to the knowledge bank.

It’s a jungle out here. (get it??? cuz the Amazon is like a jungle and the company is called…)

@Faraday said in AI PBs:

If you want to boycott Amazon…

I do this. It was a huge inconvenience at first, as it’s really hard to find anything for sale online not through Amazon. Like, I’ve even bought things off Etsy that turned out to just be repackaged Amazon stuff.

I don’t judge MUSHers who still use AWS or bought their keyboard off Amazon just because I choose not to engage with that company. Not everyone can or should make the same choices I do.

@Faraday said in AI PBs:

We can each choose what causes are important to us.

And how we engage with people who align differently.

@lordbelh said in AI PBs:

I’m more comfortable using an AI generated image than the image of a real person who didn’t in any way agree to be used in that way.

I’m not sure I’m more comfortable, but you touch on why I really waffle on the whole “we’re still using someone else’s copyrighted work.”

Something like 15 years ago, I took two copyrighted images of Ben Affleck and Ray Stevenson and clipped them together (very badly) so it looks like they’re kissing. I don’t think either of them would have consented to the existence of this image, and now one of them is dead, so he definitely can’t.

Today, I’d ask Midjourney to create the same image and it’d probably take about the same amount of time and probably create close to the same image I did.

I know that people are going to insist that using MJ is more exploitative of artists because it was trained on artists’ work without consent, etc., but Ben Affleck and Ray Stevenson are also artists, and I never paid them for their likenesses; the photographer who took the pictures I snipped and clipped is an artist, and I never paid them for their work; nor the websites I right-clicked to take the hosted art from to begin with…

I dunno. It feels like a weird hill for MUSHers to want to die on. It’s a writing hobby.

@Third-Eye said in AI PBs:

I can’t make myself care.

+1