It really feels like Ganymede has just decided to let Derp drive it into the ground out of some need to avoid losing face from reversing a decision.

Well, I’m reducing my MSB activity to lurking now. Gany just basically said that the only person who needed to be apologized to on MSB for what happened was Derp.

I get two things from reading stuff from this thread.

1. That I definitely am not the target audience for Lords & Ladies roleplay.

2. That Arx, even with all of it’s trouble throughout its history, is a pretty good example of ‘doing it right’ in our hobby.

Congrats to all you Arx players and staff for doing cool stuff.

@Cygnus said in The 3-Month Players:

Without PVP acting as a failsafe, these players often cause games to fail because no one can stand not being able to meaningfully stand up to the bully.

The failsafe against toxic players should be staff action. Going PVP just because a player is toxic seems toxic in it’s own right.

Starting a new thread, for a new year.

First up, and this one hit me hard, David Lynch, legendary director of such weirdness as Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, and the original 1980s version of Dune.

@hobos

Please stop. If you actually care, stop, step away, and come back in a few days or even a week or two. You’re making yourself look bad with each new post.

Bring back Victorian era drug problems!

I want a post apocalyptic game surrounding the events at one of the last settlements in the world struggling to survive against all manner of obstacles and threats.

@Jennkryst

I’m gonna have to run a one shot of the MMPR RPG in his honor.

Well, after that interaction with Ghost and some other odd shit I’ve seen today, I added MSB to my firewall block list. I don’t need that shit in my life anymore.

I think OOC Masq is silly given that our hobby is at its core supposed to be collaborative storytelling, and OOC Masq prevents collaboration. Also, there’s no way in the current era of speedy communication to prevent OOC conversations off game that shatter that Masq.

Also, in my experience, any time one PC learns juicy secrets about another PC through legitimate IC means, someone eventually claims some combination of cheating, OOC Masq violation, or staff favoritism. And in some cases, the person making that claim is totally unrelated to that particular instance of secrets being uncovered.

The most ridiculous version of OOC Masq drama I have ever seen went like this:

1. Player A accidentally paged Player B with an IC secret about their character that they had meant to page staff about.
2. Player B, realizing they were just given an IC secret about Player A’s character by Player A through OOC means immediately went off on public channels about it. They tried to get Player A removed from the game for the accident, claiming that if Player A couldn’t respect their own OOC Masq, how could they be trusted with anyone else’s OOC Masq.
3. Player B continued to harass staff, Player A, and other Players about getting Player A banned for the next week before finally letting it go.
4. Player B’s character took action against Player A’s character using the very secret he learned OOCly and was called out by Staff for this.
5. Player B told staff that since Player A couldn’t maintain the OOC Masq, their character should just be eliminated, making their ban from the game easier. Player B could not explain how he came to know the secret IC, and admitted that he didn’t do anything to learn it.
6. Staff banned Player B for being an arse.

@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:

Stellaris comes to mind as a really good game with a competitive scene and older playerbase, with fighting games coming in close to strategy titles. MMOs are so big that there’s multiple groups in them, so they’re a bit of a microcosm in general. Many toxic WoW guilds for example, but just as many ‘gamer dad’ guilds. MMOs are also closest to MU*s, hell the WoW Classic and Everquest games were based on MUDs. Monsters and Memories, a new PvPvE MMO similar to EQ and WoW Classic, actually goes back towards MUDs with a MUD command panel which you can use to /listen in a room and /pry coins from between walls and stuff.

Case and point, MnM has a PVE and a PVP community which has remained fairly segregated but both supported. That game in general is less toxic than say, Pantheon, which largely supports PVE and PVP is an afterthought. In that community, PVE players have distinct hatred towards PVP players. All communities are different so it’s hard to put a pin in any one, but I think it’s all about how the devs approach things – if it’s handled correctly, PVP can work. If it’s ignored or tacked on, it sucks.

Those games are designed for PVP and not RP at all. It sounds like what you want is a MUD with background writing.

@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:

OOC toxicity should be handled by staff, but let’s be real. That toxicity doesn’t usually happen in the open in ways that staff can easily handle. That’s assuming that the staff who made a game which caters to this type of thing isn’t in on it. Sadly that is often the case, see RetroMUX, Haunted Memories, Fallcoast, or the Reach for examples.

Yeah, IC toxicity should totally be handled ICly as much as possible. However, there are plenty of people that I’ve run into in my 24 years of MUing that PVP solely for OOC reasons and play under the mindset of “How many characters can I kill?”

@Cygnus said in The 3-Month Players:

Without PVP acting as a failsafe, these players often cause games to fail because no one can stand not being able to meaningfully stand up to the bully.

The failsafe against toxic players should be staff action. Going PVP just because a player is toxic seems toxic in it’s own right.

@Cygnus

I think there are actually 3 groups of players. PVE people, IC-PVP people, and OOC-PVP people.

PVE people don’t like PVP, or accept that it happens but do everything they can to avoid it.

IC-PVP people are going into a game playing a character they know will get into IC conflicts with other characters and want that conflict to provide story to the other players on the game.

OOC-PVP people are going into a game looking to generate a body count, with no regard for the story, and they don’t honestly care what happens story-wise (but are sticklers for the mechanics of the system) in the long run, as they’ll just create a new character and start over when they die.

I’ve seen all three groups, and I probably am in the IC-PVP group. If my character gets into a conflict that, because of storyline reasons, involves another PC, so be it, I just hope the staff on the game adjudicates it fairly.

The OOC-PVP people need to just leave and go play a MUD rather than trying to generate massive body counts where others are trying to create story.

@Pavel

That’s funny. I’d probably never ask an LLM to build a character. The only thing I could see doing with an LLM trained on a series of TTRPG books is ask it for specific page references. A sort of index.

@Cygnus said in Liberation Drama!?:

When the alternatives for WOD MU*'s are such slop, it’s hard not to want to return to the glory days of Liberation. But it’s definitely not a plea, I don’t think Sundance reads or cares about what is said here. It’s just commentary

From my experience, WoD players like the games they like and refer to everything else as slop or crap or just bad, so we end up with the whole “one person’s trash is another person’s treasure” adage.

@Pavel said in Numetal/Retromux:

Though I suppose to be WoD staff it’d need to be a small language model…

Strangely I would not be surprised if there’s already an LLM trained on the entire line of OWoD and NWoD / CoD books.

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

hoping Grammarly doesn’t yell at me.

Grammarly won’t yell at you now that it’s LLM based. It loves those em-dashes.

@Roz said in AI PBs:

I have yet to hear actors actively speak out about pictures from their movies being used to represent a RP character in a tiny game.

I often wonder how much of that has to do with news coverage. Is any reliable news source regularly covering our hobby?