AI is ruining this hobby. That’s my gripe. It’s ruining my respect for players, staff, my interest in games, my desire to RP. I see old friends whose original writing I’ve always enjoyed, flaunting AI use in a way that makes me feel like they must have never even appreciated their own talent as much as I did. I see promising games lose all promise the second I step on grid and see a sea of AI slop. And I see younger generation, newer players defending it in a way that makes me feel like the future of this hobby is just dead for me, an old fogey whose love of authentic human creativity, warts and all, makes me old-fashioned.

I hate it. I hate it on a spiritual and existential level.

Had a friend who consistently talked shit about other people in the hobby, and wrote them off over the most minor provocations which were generally misunderstandings.

I feel like over the years of our friendship, I have accumulated hours of lost energy trying to smooth things over between them and mostly benign enemies they’d misinterpreted, but I did it because I knew that at least some of the time their concerns were founded. and so it made sense to be extra guarded even over times where concerns weren’t founded. And I’d consistently defend them to other people as being a genuinely good person and a phenomenal writer/RPer, just someone who’s a bit touchy and needs some patience/understanding.

I guess idk why I’d be surprised after all these years to find myself on the other end of the stick, discarded and written off and shit-talked to our mutual friends, but ouch, does the feeling of betrayal really sting.

My muddy chaos demon

My peeve is me. I want to get back into MU*ing, and have not one, but two games lined up that I want to check out. (Maybe even three if for whatever reason the first two don’t work out!) Both are run by friends whom I respect and admire; whose creative projects I want to support; and whose ability to run good, healthy games that I’d enjoy I have complete faith in.

It’s just been so long since I’ve fully invested in a MU* that I feel like I’ve practically forgotten how to. I’ve been in creative lulls like this before, and I know that if I just get my foot in the door, roll up a character and get myself into a scene, it’ll all come back in an instant, like I never left the hobby at all. I’m just finding that initial step weirdly harder to surmount than it should be.

To the multiple friends who might be reading this, and to whom I’ve made empty promises about rolling up to hang out with on a MU* in recent months, I’m sorry. It’s really not you, it’s me. (A phrase I know always feels like bullshit on the receiving end, yet is legit, in this case, true.)

Marginally related peeve that I’m sure other alumni of this game can relate to: I hate the extent to which PHSD (Post-HavenRPG Stress Disorder) lives rent-free in my mind. Experiences on that game have made me intensely skittish at the very first sign of red flags on any other game I’ve checked out since, and permanently damaged my ability to put faith in game staff on the whole. It’s not the main reason I’ve been flakey about checking out the two aforementioned MU* run by friends of mine, but it has made me bail a lot quicker than others deem reasonable, on other projects, recently.

When there are so many good gamerunners out there whose proven track record makes me feel safe to put my complete trust in, it just no longer feels worth it sticking around after the first sign of trouble anywhere else, hoping/expecting things might get better or continuing to make excuses for staffers displaying strong red flags. I did that for years longer than I should’ve on HavenRPG, and I’m not prepared to do that for a day longer anywhere else.

It also makes me feel much stronger appreciation and gratitude to those gamerunners out there who’ve proven their commitment to their players’ safety time and time again. And to these boards as well, which promote healthy communities & staff practices, and which hold the hobby to a higher standard than I’m regrettably used to seeing.

There are a number of posters here on these boards who don’t know me at all, whom I’ve never spoken to one on one, whose positive contributions to this community have meant a lot more to me than they could possibly realise.

Finding out someone I felt uncomfortable with, but not uncomfortable enough to openly voice my objections to:

1. Actually has a known history of much more serious permutations of this behaviour on other games
2. Was already shown the door on my current game without me needing to say anything

Thank u yes I knew I wasn’t just crazy, and I am so happy to know I’m now playing on a game with safe, healthy, vigilant staff.

I totally feel for people saying they don’t page people because they feel anxious etc.

My quibble is that, while I have no official numbers, I estimate that if I were to take a poll, 90% of this hobby would say they are anxious/autistic/depressed etc.

I hold it against no one for not making the first move. But I do think that past a certain point of familiarity, if you’ve been playing with someone for a long time, and you care about them, you are morally obligated on some level to force yourself to be the one who reaches out and initiates stuff from time to time. It’s the same with relationships. I’d be sad and insecure if my partner was always dtf when prompted but never initiated. I’d wonder if they actually like me or just like that I’m convenient.

Labour isn’t easy for anyone but you should still make the effort for people you value. Otherwise they won’t know you value them. You wouldn’t like feeling that way. That’s why you like it when they do the work, right?

Every few days I wake up feeling creatively inspired and motivated to start something new. Roll up a new concept, join a new game/community, maybe even start my own game. The ideas and plans really turn into these full-fledged beings and worlds just begging to be written. Sometimes I even reach out to friends on Discord and let them know that I’m warming up to dive back into MU*dom or that I want to embark on an ambitious project.

Unfortunately, then I look at the date and realise I’m already late to meet RL deadlines. In the background, my mysteriously athletic Siberian Husky (seriously, how and when did my pandemic puppy get this buff?) makes her stance clear that if I’m awake enough to be sitting at my laptop, I am definitely awake enough to be giving her the first of 2-3 hours of exercise she’s owed, and no amount of focus will be permitted today until she’s been tired into a coma. And so the muse continuously dies unspent.

I miss escapism and creative writing.

The inevitable paranoia I constantly feel when friends talk shit about our other friends, and then I can’t help but wonder what they’re probably also saying about me.

Part RL peeve I suppose, but we are a gossipy hobby.

eggshells 🫤

Feeling like … I can only scene with you as long as I am very polite and mindful and watch my step and am on my best behaviour. Which is a very reasonable thing to expect of anyone. But also I don’t like feeling tense like that, so if RP always feels like a first date or a job interview, I think I would rather just avoid and hang out with friends who take themselves less seriously and let me fart around.

@Testament said in Bannings:

@Herja While I realistically wouldn’t expect it, I however would not be surprised if they somehow did the mental gymnastics to allow either Cullen or Dropkick to start posting there(I’m pointedly not including DWOPP in that because I can’t imagine any MSB staff being so oblivious to be okay with that). I would rate the things that Cullen did and what Hella/VK did to pretty near each other. So if they let one of them there…

Like I said, I’m not expecting but, also my expectations are exceedingly low at this point.

I would just like to say, loud and clear, in case anyone missed or somehow doubts this memo, that Cullen’s player is an actual, literal, real-life rapist.

I would love to post receipts. Dearly I would. Unfortunately that would be A) doxxing him & B) not my story to tell, not my receipts to share, and not one of his victims’ duty to publicly bare their trauma for the satisfaction of sealioning, misogynistic chodes.

I cannot adequately express the degree of livid I feel at some of the insinuations made on MSB these past few weeks; or how much it sickens my stomach to imagine that anyone would argue he deserves to be allowed back into community he’s abused for years to do it all. Over. Again.

I do not believe in second chances, not for him. He’s had a hundred already and abused them all. No.

But I hope making that case, or at the very least making light of the notion, is worth the internet points that MSB’s new boys’ club gets to reap at the expense of other people’s trauma. A categorical fuck you. Check your privilege, “simplications”.

Not yucking on anyone’s yum, you do you, this is just a me thing, but:

Personally, freeform>>>>>>>>>

I don’t even like roster games. Half the fun, maybe even more than half the fun for me on any game, is building my own character, my own concept, my own ideas, doing a lil worldbuilding, customising everything I can, I wanna flex those creative muscles. I like seeing what other people come up with, sometimes doing a lil collaborative improv (like hey seems our characters have some backstory features in common, what if they knew each other from before?) etc.

The more creative freedom I have, the happier I am. I’ve invented entire cultures/societies with a bit of an amateur conlang on games that let me.

@Roz said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

it’s times like these that i miss old threads from defunct boards because dang we had NUMEROUS threads of these games while the drama was happening

Part of me thinks it’s good that we’ve wiped the slate clean, and everyone gets a fresh start, because honestly 2 decades or however long is a long time to be holding grudges, people do grow and change.

But also damn if it isn’t astounding how much some people absolutely haven’t grown or changed.

@NotSanni said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

@Roz said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

NGL, to me RPIs are just a subset of MUDs that are particularly RP-heavy/focused

Largely agreed. My experience with most RPI focused players is that many (not all, but a WHOLE bunch) essentially trend towards wanting what amounts to a simulation sandbox game where they can go grind things and progress between fun little RP sessions.

I think the hard-line division likely comes from some form of elitism (RPI-ers going “well mine is more SERIOUS”, and “normal MUDders” trending towards “RPIs are full of toxic drama”), coupled with the human desire to generally put things into distinct categories.

Because even across the spectrum of RPIs, they don’t all agree with what makes a game an RPI. Ask the people who only or mainly played Armageddon, and you’d get a wildly different answer to the people who played only or mainly Atonement, or whatever.

The issue is further compounded by people having different definitions for what counts as “serious” or “heavy” RP.

From the perspective of an average RPIer, being completely immersed in your character, never communicating with anyone OOC, finding everything out IC, and following the edict of “it’s what my character would do” to the letter is what counts as the highest and most serious form of RP.

Whereas a MUSHer might look at what they’re doing and go “Wait, so it’s just bar RP? No plots? Hey why don’t we run an event, I’ll set one up — let’s all of us meet at the dojo for a training montage.”

To which some RPIers might be horrified at the prospect of prearranging RP and insist that no, they cannot just show up at the dojo, because they would be doing so using meta information, and you haven’t told their character in a scene that there is an event going on at a dojo. So they have to stay at the bar, since their character is a drunk, unless another character can organically convince them to attend the dojo. But they won’t tell you that they want you to do this, since again, that would be metagaming.

On a IRE MUD I once got chewed out by the game’s top PvPer who doesn’t really do any emoting, because he found out that a friend had encouraged me to log on for a scene in our guildhall that had no real impact on anyone else, it was just 2 people writing together for fun. From his perspective, that was not really RP, since our characters didn’t randomly bump into each other; it was basically cheating, despite no mechanical benefits.

So it’s like a bunch of elitists elitising at each other that each one’s RP is of the less serious variety. There isn’t really a hierarchy of elitism, it’s more like a spiderweb. (And I don’t claim to be innocent of any of it, I totally judge people whose RP style I think sucks.)

My point is, imho, to rank RPI as a more serious type of RP MUD is not really accurate, it’s a different type of RP MUD, but sure, RPIers would probably insist that it’s more serious (and I would disagree). I prefer therefore to define RPI by its familiar systems and policies; games like The Inquisition: Legacy, Armageddon, Shadows of Isildur, After Earth, Star Conquest.

@Faraday I wouldn’t consider your game an RPI because AFAIK it’s a MUSH, and a RPI is a type of MUD.

@MisterBoring said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

I’ve been in this hobby 20+ years now and I still don’t know what makes RPI unique. That’s what I learned from taking and reading the results of this survey.

I don’t remember whether I checked RPI as my favourite in the end. If I could, I would’ve checked all three (MUD, MUSH, RPI) because I like all of them for different reasons, and my ideal pie-in-the-sky type of game would be a mixture of all 3.

I think I might’ve picked MUD, but not because I’m less into storytelling/RP. I just consider RPI to be a very specific category with a very specific codebase and player culture; i.e., typically rules surrounding no OOC, non-consent permadeath, skills rise by grinding them out. And I actually tend to avoid classic RPIs because IME, they compromise RP/storytelling a lot in favour of gamification, grinding, and encourage behaviour that doesn’t make sense for the character.

Like I remember rolling into a post-apocalyptic RPI that was supposed to be a very gritty setting, and on the radio someone was asking who needed rubies/sapphires to train their jewelcrafting up. Took me right out of the setting lol. Why are people communicating “need” for precious jewels on the survivors radio for a supposedly dangerous wasteland?

Oh, and my character was a middle-aged doctor, but I was a newbie. I asked on the newbie channel how to use my stitches skill. People told me “find out IC :)” and then someone offered to show me IC. I later realised the reason they offered is that by doing it for me, they could get the skillup at my expense.

So, based on my experiences, I’m just not sure that RPIs really do deserve the self-proclaimed mantle of “RP intensive”. It’s more just that you have to communicate everything solely in-character, which leads people to communicate blatantly OOC nonsense through a thin veneer of IC, instead of hashing out the technical stuff separately so they can concentrate on only stuff that makes sense for the character in-scene.

@Colette said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

@SockMonkey Sorry, but this is going to be a really dull spectator sport. xD

As a spectator with 0 context, I’m having loads of fun here fyi

@Purplelamia

SuperMUD. It’s a DIKU-codebase MUD with a heavy focus on storytelling. (I know a lot of people on these boards tend to be sort of anti-MUD and more pro-MUSH, but the core community waiting on it tend towards paragraph RP.) They have a Discord as well, I’m not personally in it, but if people are interested I can nudge a friend who can invite. They currently have a test server up that people can poke around on, and I believe are planning to launch some alpha RP events within a few months or so.

@catzilla said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

Maybe one day we’ll have a superhero game not run by abusers.

I know of one in the works, but I honestly think there is something about the genre. I largely agree with Alan Moore’s perspective on it.

Close friend of mine isn’t in the hobby and has no creative interests. Nothing wrong with that. She’s not really a writer in any sense, doesn’t need those skills for her job, and typically sends fairly brief messages in imperfect grammar. We have other interests/values in common and she’s highly skilled/intelligent, just differently skilled/intelligent. Never in my life judged her for not being ultra verbose/articulate. We vibe in other ways.

This morning she messaged me a pop culture reference I didn’t recognise, so I misinterpreted it as her sharing her feelings rather than just quoting something. In response to my sincere attempt to engage with her accordingly, she sent (yes I counted) 10 perfect structured paragraphs that sound absolutely nothing like her, explaining in depth the pop culture reference, why she referenced it, and what the philosophical implications of it are.

And I’m just tired, boss. I thought people using AI to RP for them was bad enough. Now I got an RL friend delegating social interaction to ChatGPT too. I don’t consent to this shit. I don’t want to interact with pristine slop, I want my unique human friends back.

Just as an addendum to the above exchange, I’ve edited my first post on this thread to reflect that @voiceinthevoid and I ended up talking things through in DMs, and I do believe they were coming from an authentic place. I stand by the rest of what I said, and also appreciate them hearing out my discomfort and taking concerns on board.

Let us reframe that sentence into the following contexts:

“It also doesn’t make women look great to throw around false rape allegations, and can actually increase misogyny.”

“It also doesn’t make black people look great to play the race-card, and can actually increase white supremacy.”

I can’t be certain that you are who you say you are, and I will state plainly that I feel no compulsion to take at face value a post by a day-old account that, seemingly, created the account and posted solely for the purpose of discrediting an allegation of antisemitism.

But I will say that I take issue with this framing, that lying Jews cause antisemitism. Antisemites cause antisemitism. This sentence is either internalised racism, or dishonest in authorial intent.

Maybe it also really was an honest mistake to have created a whole new thread, and the intention was to reply directly to the comments in context. But I really wish this board didn’t now have a whole thread titled “Antisemitism Allegedly” about how, allegedly, allegations of antisemitism cannot be trusted. Did this need to be a topic here?

Maybe Wikibara really is a liar, I don’t know, I don’t know him from Adam. Maybe this is an attempt to discredit a game unfairly, I don’t know, I’ve never played it.

But this thread sets me on edge. If you’re being honest about why you made it, then hopefully you can understand why some people taking an interest in this topic might be on edge.

Because I have receipts I will gladly post of Actual Nazis in this hobby privately admitting in their crusty little Actual Nazi discord servers that they enjoy making false flag posts in the MU* community meant to stir up shit of this nature.

If your intentions are honest, then I really am sorry for what you and your family are going through.