@Cygnus I mean I guess I don’t specifically NEED private communication, just being able to chat on channels etc would probably be enough, but I also don’t really see how limiting it is beneficial. I know some people really like it though.

I guess I can’t see how, in a system as complex and full of niche interactions as World of Darkness or Chronicles of Darkness (and others), you can really take away OOC communications. Even if we’re just RPing in a room and some conflict arises at some point I’m going to have to explain ‘I’m using X power with Y modifiers due to this merit and that clan bonus.’ Because I can’t imagine you can (or want to) automate absolutely every niche interaction in these rules systems.

Paging people as a way to get RP happening is also pretty standard in my experience, and you don’t always want to broadcast that on public channels for a lot of reasons. But I could probably make do with just public channels and the like if the game was interesting enough.

@mietze To be fair, I didn’t really do a lot of the OOC discussion stuff really either back in the day, at least not to begin with, but I would have moments of it. I played some pretty antagonistic characters that I thought should’ve ended up dead or whatever but no one really seemd to want to because I guess it was more interesting to be threatened/attacked by a street ganger than yet another bar scene? idk really haha, but I do remember my Haunted Memories days having a lot of people coming to me and my antagonsitc character for combat tutorials and the like. I do miss the thrill of that sort of non-consent place too, but I also do remember losing a PC unexpected to IC conflict and it wasn’t that fun at all to just have my story be over now. So in the end so IDK. I like conflict and understand that sometimes it ends in PC death but I try to avoid actually ending PCs in the end, maybe I’m just too soft after all.

Generally, I enjoy conflict with other characters. I tend to shy away from the use of the term ‘pvp’ because when it’s done well it’s just the same as any other collaborative storytelling effort we do on these games, and while your characters may be in conflict the players aren’t. I’m with @Pyrephox’s points above. Having OOC communication available for these sorts of things heightens the experience for me.

I’d probably join a WoD game with a lot of ‘pvp’ in it just fine, but the idea presented earlier of having no OOC discussions at all would really turn me off. Half the appeal of being on a MU* for me in general is the OOC community, the chatter, and all of that. If all my games were just log on, role play, log off, then I wouldn’t have this cool group of online friends I’ve made over the decades, and I think that’d be unfortunate.

I know some people really like that entire OOC disconnect, that’s great but it’s certainly not for me, though I don’t tend to shy away from the confict with other PCs that much.

@MisterBoring said in AI PBs:

• Use stock photos or other art published online for free under a Creative-Commons (or similar) license.

I actually did this once, way back when in the Haunted Memories days for a character. Though it was less an ethical reasoning and more that I just happened to find some stock photos that were so perfect for what I envisioned that I had to use them, so I paid a few dollars to remove the stock image watermark. It did feel kinda good though.

I did the AI thing when Midjourney first came around and before I knew better (I didn’t really look into anything around it I just went ‘oh cool AI images’ like so many people). I wouldn’t touch that sort of thing now.

I’m kinda in the same boat as some others have echoed, I kinda dislike PBs in general. Most of the time it’s the last step on the process and I rarely find something that truly matches what I was thinking of.

@Pavel Ahh, but ideas come easier when you know who wants to be involved. ‘Who wants to have a scene at X’ might make people who don’t want to go to X just never say anything.

I don’t put the onus on others – I just wait and see who I’m working with before figuring out what to do.

@bear_necessities

Yeah I’m not sure, and as with most things one persons forever is someone elses ‘oh man I didn’t get enough time to touch base with everyone I wanted to!’

I feel like we got 2 weeks on HorrorMu? Mostly? I admit it’s been a minute and I can’t remember, but it seemed about that. Network I never really played through a hiatus as I have kept on drifting away from the game unfortunately.

I recall from conversations with The Director on early days of HorrorMu* that the plan originally was to just tell short horror stories. Then everyone makes a new character for the next one, with no real connection between them at all.

But she figured people would like some sort of consistent flowthrough of the story from one to the next, so that’s how the whole facility and the ‘archetype characters’ like The Penitent and The Bravo and so forth were created.

I think I agree with Roz, the downtime between the episodes, and to explore having memories of being different people, personally I found that fun.

@Cobalt Come baaaack!

@Tez Hee.

All the CoD stuff have spaces for creepy folks to hide behind ‘I’m just acting IC!’ unfortunately. I’m sure a lot of game systems might. I don’t think I saw it in Mage more than anywhere else, but it’s been ages since Mage was allowed in a lot of these games.

@RedJellyBean I think you’re thinking of Jeurg (Juerg? I can’t remember the spelling) from Haunted Memories who I think got a reputation for that kinda weirdness. No idea if it’s the same player though.

Mastigos and Mind Magic seems to be one of the common IC creeper covers. They’re meant to be confrontational and do awful things to make you think! Which can be a fine concept if handled properly oocly but I feel like a lot of weird folk have hidden behind it over the years.

@Pavel Prism ponders Percy’s pernicious Prism prison prism.

I like the idea of rebranding to CvC but it’ll never take – though I have seen PvP that really is about just beating the other player. OOC lies to convince a player to join a scene in a specific way ‘I’ll help you evade the authorities!’ only the then ICly set them up to get got.

I’ve had the ‘Hey I’d like to scene with you’ chat with someone I didn’t ICly get along with, get warned ‘Depending on how this goes, this could turn to violence’ and then when I agreed, extra people suddenly show up to help the other player out. Violence was a 100% guarantee, not a maybe, and it ended with my character dead and over out of seemingly nowhere.

That said, I really do enjoy going against other players sometimes, but like most forms of RP, it’s always been at its best when it really is a collaborative effort like other forms of RP. Discussions with the other parties, talking about what could or shouldn’t be attempted – sometimes you do want to surprise people so you might not mention everything, but sometimes with some chatter people will happily engage.

I don’t mind serious or permanent injury being done to my characters in the course of it either. Back in the days of Haunted Memories I had a mortal+ character built as a sort of ‘Hunter’ archetype, and one of my good friends needed to go away for a bit and volunteered to have his vamp be torpored by her to explain his absence. It drove so much RP as people looked for him and looked for her, and she ended up getting got but I had so much fun.

But I generally wouldn’t engage in serious PvP shenanigans with pure strangers anymore either. Some OOC communication beforehand needs to be done.

@Testament Yeah, I am with you on this one. I used to RP smoking all the time as a former smoker. Now I find that RPing smoking is one of the few things that gives me big cravings again so I just stopped, but I kinda miss RPing about it, weirdly.

@Cobalt said in Livia List.:

What was LAmush 2043???

It was the Bladerunner game! I only did like 2-3 scenes there, I joined too late and it was already pretty ghost town.

Look, a single character!

@junipersky said in Staff Capacity:

I’m too old for the bullshit that cones with staffing any more.

In my recent playing of CoD games this has basically been the overwhelming response. I saw games note that they need staff pretty badly and mostly just got ‘nah, I don’t wanna’ from the player base.

Plenty of folks willing to run stories and one shot scenes and all that, people are happy to ST, but very few seem to actually want to be staff anymore.

Seems to have resulted in a lack of CoD games, I’ve been tinkering off and on with a tinymux CoD setup of my own, with making an Ares plugin for CoD (which I do think would be good to have out there; for me personally the ‘WoD/CoD-but-not’ games for some reason just do not interest me much), but having the time to continue such projects remains an issue. Which is probably why there’s no one willing to staff these things, heh!

@junipersky Hah! There were two! One was a more freeform RP with no real system or dice or anything, the other was a pure D&D 3.5 game using the Age of Mortals sourcebooks. Round the late 90s - early 2000s era.

I hear updating this is a thing it’s time to do!

I’d really love to see a Vampire and Changeling game using some of the content from Dark Eras 2 – there’s a merit that allows Invictus Oaths to be sworn with Changeling vassals, and I had ideas of setting up the Changeling Freehold courts with an extra court. The vampires aren’t others, they’re just the ‘Night Court’ of the freehold, and are bound up in the freehold oath as well. Probably can’t really embrace all the vampire covenants this way and it changes that game dramatically, but still.

@Pyrephox Contagion Chronicle has some good stuff, though it feels like it would be hard to implement and run! (In a game sense, not code wise) Also the actual God Machine Chronicle stuff has never really been embraced by the CofD MU*ing community, I feel like.

But I did consider it a while back.