The grim/noble dark/bright alignment system might be helpful: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/s/bB0gvqrwjL

I am firmly on the Noble side of settings. I am down for anything on the Bright-Dark setting with slight leaning towards Bright, but I don’t have Grim in me anymore. As @DrQuinn said, if I want Grim I’ll look at the damned window, and I’ve been in that state for about a decade now.

EDIT: After thinking about it more, I’m going to take it back. I’m down for anything but Grimdark. I’ll take Grimbright. Arx felt Grimbright to me.

This may have already been brought up, but I’m too lazy to scroll up and see.

A setting in the X-Files, Delta Green, SCP, Control, Triangle Agency, etc. vein. You could even include World of Darkness stuff, but the setting would mostly from the viewpoints of a government agency of “Hunters” and the occasional Mage, Vampire, Werewolf, whatever that decided to work with the agency. The server is mostly PVE as PCs work together on missions they take, but the server could also can go the Paranoia TTRPG route by having some NPCs and PCs belong to secret societies, have ulterior motives, be given contrary secret missions from the Directorate, etc. to keep people a little uneasy and wary. Operations could be investigations into weird shit, neutralization of weird shit (more tactics and combat oriented), covert ops (cause weird shit to happen so we get a funding increase), etc.

@KarmaBum Eh. I know how it is. You can run an event every hour, 24 hours a day, and some people will still only do BarP for all their interactions while complaining that there is nothing to do.

@catzilla That’s clever and a good use of AI for MU* purposes.

Honestly, I am coming more and more around to the idea that all PBs should be custom created art and/or AI generated images. The use of images of real people who didn’t agree to be used for such purposes has been making me more and more uncomfortable over the years.

I have hesitated to post anything in this thread, because I very much do not appreciate being drafted into the role of OP for this particular topic. Anyways…

@ProperPenguin said in AI PBs:

Hi, tech writer here.

I am job hunting (as I left a toxic work environment right before the AI obsession began in corporations). I have been job hunting.

The work disappeared for a good while. And reports from people who weren’t laid off basically came down to them being piled on so high with work they couldn’t manage. One person even reported that her coworkers had nicknamed her AI. ‘Send it to AI.’
Which was hugely demoralizing (understandably) to her.

I know a developer who runs a team: he was made to lay off his tech writer and told ‘just use AI.’ Except he’s in the financial sector. They cannot use it (for security, accuracy, etc.) and when he pointed it out, was told ‘it’s just writing, do it yourself.’

And this is the core issue, the lack of appreciation and respect to a profession from other professionals and industries. “Anyone can write. Anyone can draw. Anyone can take a photograph. Anyone can shoot film. Anyone can work an assembly line.” No, anyone can’t, and no a robot cannot give you as good a quality, yet. If you need specialized, expert, professional work done, you need to pay for a specialist, expert, and professional.

I like AI for hobbyists, people who don’t have the cash or the level of personal investment into whatever hobby it is to pay for a professional. “I want a PB that isn’t a photograph of a real person, I don’t have any artistic talent at all, and I don’t want to pay $150 for an image I am going to slap on a wiki and never really think about again.” “I need a desc, but I hate writing them. I’ll just have an AI write one over and over until I get one I like.”

And I am now going to exit the thread again. Have fun, y’all.

The snack of all gaming champions, both tabletop and video: Cheetos. With a Mountain Dew to drink, because it compliments my X-TREME hobby that involves sitting at a table and/or computer for hours at a time.

@catzilla Who gave you permission to access my MU* TS logs?

Belated reply. Put me in the “prefer the grid” group. I very much dislike off-grid RP rooms. Why even log into a server? You might as well just be RPing on Discord or by email at that point. I am fine with small or large grids, but I prefer location based.

I think that there are a lot of MU* players out there that have very specific unmet interests. Most MU* players have been playing the game for a while now and know exactly what they want. A new game comes along that sounds close grabs their interest, they give it a shot, it doesn’t check all their boxes, and they move on.

Because at this point, I think how much the leopards are being force fed is intentional.

@Ominous said in Missed Settings:

A setting in the X-Files, Delta Green, SCP, Control, Triangle Agency, etc. vein.

And of course Forged in the Dark already has a system for it.

Let’s try this again without any comparisons to currently existing or previous games, so hopefully it moves in a more constructive direction.

I want politicking and intrigue in my L&L, and I want it at the forefront rather than something hiding in the background that you have to search out to engage with. I am looking for Dune, not Bridgerton.

The website has limited information, which is to be expected for a game still in the works. With that limited information, I get the feeling that the game will be very heavily focused on PvE. Furthermore, while there are different cultures, I do not get the feeling those cultures are hugely dissimilar to each other other than some religious differences, differences in the noble to commoner ratio, and differences in succession norms. It feels more like differences between France, the Holy Roman Empire, the Republics in Italy, and maybe the Ottoman Empire in the 1400s (societal and cultural differences not technology), rather than say England, India, China, Polynesia, and Meso-America at that same time. So the cultural tension points don’t seem strong enough to support a great deal of RP about them. As there is a focus on PvE over PvP, economic and territorial tension points seem to be off-limits. Religious tension points also seem as though they will be muted, as it’s a bit hard to have a Crusade/Jihad/Schism/insert your preferred term for religious war here when PvP is strongly discouraged.

Thus, I am not sure what much of the RP is going to be about, as there doesn’t seem like there will be much competition or conflict amongst the factions. Not even token victories, like getting the seat next to the head of the table at Imperial Dinners or who gets to marry the heir or who has the Lord of the Hunt position for the Empress seem to be emphasized. I am concerned that this will just be pretty princ(ess)es primping and preening for parties, parades, and promenades without any crunchy politics and intrigue underlying it or flowing from it

What am I missing or what hasn’t been said that points to politicking and intrigue being a part of this game?

@bear_necessities said in Empire Discussion Thread:

@Ominous I mean, why ask the question “what about this game is different from Arx” when Arx is no longer around? Even if it is a 100% complete rip-off of Arx, the comparison doesn’t matter anymore because Arx isn’t a thing and hasn’t been a thing for a few years now.

And Arx was, for all intents and purposes, an extremely successful game for several years so people found stuff to RP about clearly lol

Because I didn’t like Arx. It was basically the only game in town, so if you wanted L&L, you played there. I want to know if this is essentially more of the same, so I can avoid getting my hopes up and getting back into MUing for something I will not enjoy in the long run.

@Roz said in Empire Discussion Thread:

this isn’t even an accurate description of Arx tho???

That was my experience, and I am the one asking.

EDIT: See below.

@somasatori said in Missed Settings:

@bear_necessities said in Missed Settings:
Take the guiding principles behind a West Marches game for this: make the standard town area be your home base where people get refueled and are generally safe. The plots and scenes run by GMs/Keepers/player-STs-if-you-allow-PrPs are where the danger comes in. All of the in-town stuff is handled by players and any player ST reps you have, the only staff involvement in plot stuff happens when you assemble investigatory teams to search out the Mythos lore. You wouldn’t be running a town MUSH, the players would just be doing their social RP and whatnot while you occasionally (weekly or semi-weekly basis) come in to run mythos stories.

This is what I was going to say. In my vision of the game, the base the agents are stationed at is like Los Alamos for the Manhattan Project, Groom Lake (Area 51), or something. The base is the town and has facsimiles (bars, restaurants, a theater, etc. staffed by soldiers or their family members) and no one leaves except for missions, until they and their family, if any, are “decommissioned”. Mages, vampires, werewolves, etc. can’t be decommissioned; well, they can, but the agency uses the sun, silver bullets, etc. instead, which probably adds to the uneasiness people have around their supernatural allies. Just how allied are they, when there is no opt out option?

@MisterBoring Academia? I had to do that when I was a Chemistry major. The Physics department’s computers, which we had to use for some thing, were Macs, we used Microsoft, and the computer the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance machine was hooked up to ran on Red Hat Linux.

This may have already been brought up, but I’m too lazy to scroll up and see.

A setting in the X-Files, Delta Green, SCP, Control, Triangle Agency, etc. vein. You could even include World of Darkness stuff, but the setting would mostly from the viewpoints of a government agency of “Hunters” and the occasional Mage, Vampire, Werewolf, whatever that decided to work with the agency. The server is mostly PVE as PCs work together on missions they take, but the server could also can go the Paranoia TTRPG route by having some NPCs and PCs belong to secret societies, have ulterior motives, be given contrary secret missions from the Directorate, etc. to keep people a little uneasy and wary. Operations could be investigations into weird shit, neutralization of weird shit (more tactics and combat oriented), covert ops (cause weird shit to happen so we get a funding increase), etc.

I’m still with Windows, but at least I’m not part of the Apple ecosystem like my partner and almost all of my coworkers.

Since we are talking Weird West, how about Weird West but D&D fantasy? This is a really good OSR adventure: Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier

Here’s a YouTube review of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUkPt9VcsWw&pp=0gcJCRsBo7VqN5tD

And here’s the creator’s blog posts on the expanded universe: https://alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com/search/label/Crystal Frontier

@bear_necessities Crispin, the very young Lord of Copper Run who inherited because his dad got executed.