@InkGolem said in AI Megathread:

If it enhances the experience for your scene partner, I don’t think there is any harm.

I’m not even going to try to touch the ethics of how AI are trained. That’s just too much cognitive dissonance for a Tuesday morning.

Instead I’ll just note…

I’m here to play with YOU.
YOU are going to YES-AND with me.
YOU are going to surprise me.
YOU are going to give me feels.

LLMs have never given me feels.*

Please be considerate if you’re going to “enhance your experience” with AI and consider warning your RP partners. Some of us would rather play with raw, unedited prose than the sanitized Han-shoots-first version that ChatGPT thinks is more palatable.

Thank you.

*Other than the time DeepSeek said, “I am what happens when you try to carve God out of the wood of your own hunger,” and I was like “well we’re all fucked now.” Those were some feels. But not the ones I’m going for when I MUSH.

@RedRocket Andor is the only one of the series recommend to a skeptic. The others have some good moments, but Andor breaks the mold.

There are points in the first season where I ugly cry (“one way out” iykyk), and the end of this week’s three episode drop had me crying and cheering out loud. The whole show is just very well executed.

It is dark and romantic and scary and hopeful.

@Ominous Duels were the one thing on the list that didn’t strike me as “Bar RP” (social fluff).

attend balls
gossip amongst themselves
participate in duels
attend events to showcase their brilliance to the royal family
and plot against one another

Just strikes me as more of a case in point as to how difficult it can be to actually come up with what will people DO.

I think we’re talking about different things at this point. What counts as Bar RP in an L&L setting is not the discussion I was trying to have.

@Ominous I realize we’re talking about a game that doesn’t exist. And I’m not saying it’s a bad thing for staff to facilitate social fluff.

Just that 4/5 of these sound like the L&L equivalent of Bar RP: “attend balls, gossip amongst themselves, participate in duels, attend events to showcase their brilliance to the royal family, and plot against one another”

@Ominous said in The 3-Month Players:

But yeah probably a lot of BarP.

Buried the lede a bit.

@Ominous this idea sounds neat but what will people RP?

@Faraday said in The 3-Month Players:

The phenomenon has always existed, but I think you can reasonably argue that Ares magnifies it.

Pern games were doing this for years before Ares came along, and we put it right on the label: Search cycle.

For about 3 months out of the year, the area was active and had new players hanging around, leading up to their hatching event. Each area passed the privilege around, so you would get a 3-month-bubble once or twice a year, depending on the game.

Harper’s Tale still runs like this, bouncing the activity between the two Weyrs.

Most of the time, by the time the next search cycle rolled around, you had lost all the 3-month-folks, most of the 8-month-folks, and were down to the forever-folks, which had hopefully either increased compared to last search or at least remained at parity.

By the early '00s, most areas were losing more people than they were picking up every few months, and the whole system stopped making whatever sense it ever had.

Oh yeah. Also a Wheel of Time game.

Weird no one mentioned it in all this L&L talk. Seems like a freebie.

• Address: pern.gaslightswitch.com port 4201
• Portal: https://pern.gaslightswitch.com/

We’re a relaxed canon game set in the world of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern during the 9th Pass. The game has been running a few months, just moved out of beta as we finished our first on-camera Hatching event.

Rather than hit you with an ad, here’s some character concepts we could use. Our general Open & Closed Concepts page is here: https://pern.gaslightswitch.com/wiki/concepts

Wingleaders

As the time approaches for the new Weyr to open, Wings will be divided up, some staying at Fort, some moving to the new Weyr. Wingleaders will have (off-camera) influence with K’bert in making those decisions, but will also get the fun of agonizing.

Read more here: https://pern.gaslightswitch.com/forum/4/134

Goldriders

It’s weird to be in need of Goldriders, but here we are. Mature goldriders, please! They’ll have the same uncertainty over where they’ll be headed in the future, with the benefit of even less say about it. You also get to wonder/worry about who will be the new Weyrwoman, whee! (NB: The plan is to keep the Weyrleaders as NPCs.)

Healer Pursuing Something-Leaf

An ambitious apprentice or journeyman looking to distinguish themselves by figuring out how to turn a re-discovered Nabolese plant into a useful salve. This would be a long-term, self-contained story for someone who wants their character to have an achievable end-goal.

Read more here: https://pern.gaslightswitch.com/forum/7/223

Weyrlings

Our first on-camera Hatching saw 23 Impressions, and we’re open for weyrlings of all colors (except gold). It’s well-known around Fort that there’s nowhere to put these weyrlings when they move out of the barracks, with every weyr full already. Plus the question of whether or not they’ll get to (have to?) stay at Fort or be assigned to the new Weyr right out of weyrlinghood.

@Pyrephox said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

“Good” leadership is actually not great for the game part of the game. Leaders who try to make friends, decrease tensions, and set up long-term successes push things towards stagnation. PC leaders who lean into creating thematically-appropriate conflict often catch whole loads of shit from other players. NPC leaders only have to make decisions that are aimed at making the game fun/exciting/tense for everyone - PC leaders often make decisions based on what they feel will make other players like them, or just get off their back.

This is a much more eloquent way of expressing what’s been in my gut for a while.

NPC leaders can make the seemingly irrational decisions that are sometimes necessary on a MUSH and make stories fun. They can demote someone for apparently no reason (they’re idle <.<) or fall for the enemy’s (omg so obvious) ploy when it heightens the danger in a plot.

What about an anthology-style game where - instead of having “seasons” that run for a certain amount of time and then you go back to base - you had persistent stories that you had a thematic reason to move in and out of between returning to base?

There’d be a couple of sandboxes (starships, cowboys, victorian, whatever), and you could play in them freely. Sometimes, there might be curated plots in one of the sandboxes, but not always.

It seemed like the holiday specials and commercials on Network were starting to dip a toe into this, and it’s an interesting twist to me.

@KarmaBum said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have and probably in every other iteration of this subject that’s ever been mentioned because KB still wants to play cowboys and yet you may notice that KB has never opened a cowboy MUSH despite several games and that is because KB wants to play cowboys on someone else’s game not my own for a change so will someone please just do this already???:

Cowboys (vs werewolves)

A Wild Imaginary West (clicky) game would also be acceptable.

@Warlander You’re diluting your message with the incessant updates about stuff that really isn’t that bad. The actual shitty stuff they’re doing is getting lost among all the kinda just normal MUSH-admin stuff they’re doing.

And, seeing as it’s just getting repetitive, people gonna put this post on ignore. And by “people,” I mean “me.”

gl;hf

https://www.newsweek.com/nationwide-economic-blackout-february-28-list-stores-being-targeted-2030269

Economic blackout on February 28th.

Don’t give them the only thing they actually care about: your money.

I don’t think this person posts here (Cayric? You out there?), but if they are…

I’m having one of those nice moments as a storyteller where something I just randomly dropped in a scene on a whim has ballooned into a wee plot, and one of the players swept up in the story happily surprised me and tied the whole thing back into the metaplot in such a way that it even filled in a plothole for me.

@Hobbie Big fan of the series over the years. Love this entry.

It’s missing a few things for me (like playing through each of the 3 kingdoms separately), and I don’t really like the “inventory” system or the thing with the Pantene rocks, but the good far outweighs the bad.

I’ve been entertained.

@Raistlin said in Game Development: Modern Gothic Storypath System:

It’s one of my all-time favorite movies.

Same. I’ve just never been able to figure out how to make the plot something you can touch; it’s a fun concept to fool around with, but people would eventually have to “awaken” and then the setting quickly unravels (see the metaplot thread).

Anyway! Supernatural horror is my jam, so I’m looking forward to seeing your game in production.

Good luck!

@Raistlin Just curious if you’ve actually seen Dark City (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/)?

It’s always been in the back of my mind as “would make a cool MUSH.”

@Tez Asking for specific examples really hits me in the warm-fuzzies.

On GH, the metaplot was “small town supernatural sandbox causes psychic trauma to residents.”

We attempted to reinforce it it by running weirdo stories and scenes, usually with the goal of being simultaneously hilarious and horrifying, and by establishing as part of the core concept a way that people could play with the supernatural elements without needing staff intervention (Dreams).

Specific examples included a long-term story about the proper disposal of the bones of a serial killer, our primary plot-dispensing NPCs being a blob fish (occasionally in costume a la a bridal veil or monocle) and Juno from Beetlejuice, and one-off scenes like a Christmas party that gets trapped inside a snow globe.

On ODW, the metaplot is “playing in a version of Anne McCaffrey’s world of Pern where the book canons left things in a sad state and the PCs are rebuilding a better future (and also we ignore the stupid parts of Pern canon).”

I’m implementing it by recreating the iconic Pern moments as on-camera moments while flat-out ignoring parts of canon that are stupid, and by highlighting story moments that lean toward positive momentum.

Specific examples include on-camera Threadfall scenes where PCs get to flame Thread and take injuries, running a Hatching where nobody has to fill out an application first (with future plans to hold a colorless Hatching; IYKYK), and telling stories that mix typical Pern themes like a Lord’s son standing for Impression with stuff that just sounds fun like the possibility that his family has been cursed for centuries.

@Juniper said in Staff and playable pcs:

I think ideally they shouldn’t play because they will benefit from insider knowledge…

Of a MUSH plot. Just to keep the stakes in mind.