I was 22, I think, and my mom had recently died, so I was sort of–floating, I guess. Looking for something to do, I was hoping to find something online relating to In Nomine, a game I love with all my heart but could never find anyone local to play with.

I found Brass and Steel, an In Nomine MU. I connected on raw telnet, and played on raw telnet for a full year or more, because I didn’t know that “clients” existed. There were only a few players on, but several of them became great friends, and one of them became my best friend, a friendship that has now lasted more than two decades, even though they don’t MU* anymore.

It was a fun game, and still has some of my most fond gaming memories.

@MisterBoring Any deets you can spill on why not? I admit I’m super intrigued by the system, but wasn’t a backer and haven’t done any real dives into the mechanics or theme.

I think that it’s generally a much better system than CoD 1st edition or oWoD. There are some places where I think the ideas were better than the execution, mechanically, but I enjoy the theme and the vibes way more, and even most of the mechanics are an improvement.

A couple of places where CoD 2E stumbles:

1. Investigation sub-system. I’ve seen very, very few people even try to use the Clue system, and when I’ve tried to run using it, I honestly find it badly explained and pretty finicky. I like the IDEA of it: there’s an intent of letting the players guide the investigation, of being able to use a clue you find to mechanically help you out with further inquiries, of your characters’ strengths and weaknesses affecting what they’re good at finding…and all of these are appealing. But again, execution.

2. Doors sub-system. I love the idea of Doors (you’ll read that phrase a lot), but again, the execution. In this case, it’s not necessarily the straight mechanics of it, but more the intent. Doors are intended to be used against NPCs to win favors/concessions over an extended basis. The thing is that very few of the things PCs want from NPCs actually work on that basis. Players, honestly, don’t tend to think that far ahead, so when they want someone to let them in a door, it’s usually three minutes before they have to be somewhere on the other side of that door, so “this will take a week and three attempts to influence the NPC” just doesn’t work. Ironically, it SHOULD work better in a MU*, but few games flesh out important NPCs to the extent that players think about earning favors/concessions from them for the future. I’d suggest taking the concept of Doors (favor for favor, being able to use skills other than social ones for manipulation, leveraging vices and leverage) and cutting it down to something that can be resolved in a scene.

3. Combat declarations. Honestly, this is just a failure by GMs and players to use this system or take it into account when planning things. It’s a SOLID mechanic. But yes, in CoD 2E, you’re supposed to start any combat by having both the PCs and the antagonists (or any other factions involved) declare their win conditions, what they’re trying to ACCOMPLISH with the combat, and if someone gets to it, they win whether the other side is dead/injured or not. It’s a great way to design combats that are more interesting than ‘let’s you and him fight’ and I really wish it was used more often. But the fact that it ISN’T suggests there’s a design flaw there, either in how it operates in situ or how it’s explained to people.

@catzilla If it makes you feel any better, I had the exact same issue. I wanted to set up an original theme Ares game and just could not figure anything out, even the really basic stuff. Tried to go step by step in the tutorial, but didn’t understand what I was doing, and eventually gave up in embarrassment.

@Yam On a colonized planet, the descendants of the colonists bond with genetically engineered, psychic dragons to protect the planet by fighting all-consuming spores from space.

While I vastly prefer 2nd Edition Lost in 90% of everything…the complaints about pledges are absolutely valid.

There’s some good things: bargains with mortals are better in that they serve a specific purpose that mechanically explains HOW they hide you from the Gentry and how that can be useful.

Likewise, Seasonal bargains are better (but badly organized - it is a badly organized book overall, with a lot of weird things hidden throughout).

But I really miss being able to strike mechanically detailed pledges with other characters outside of the few defined bits in the core book. YES, the pledge mechanics were overly complicated and desperately needed some streamlining, but they threw the baby out with the bathwater.

@somasatori Pardon my code ignorance, but it feels like you could use a variation of this to have plot attributes - i.e. someone signs up for Plot 13: The Square Bullet Hole Murders, gets an attribute like square_bullet, and could be eligible to find any of the clues for that plot…but it also might open up things like a plot command that auto-mails everyone who has signed up for that plot, or that lets GMs easily pull up how many people are involved in a given plot (or even plots as a whole, and how many people are involved in, like, 4 plots, if they want to do some quick analysis of how interest/involvement is distributed across the playerbase).

I’m not saying you want to, or that’s even the point, but it’s something that intrigues me, as a way to have a decent understanding of activity levels beyond log-in numbers, and maybe recognize if there are people who might appreciate being drawn in.

@somasatori Holy crap I love that.

It’s been interesting to read all the different takes on minigames, it’s made me think about what I actually like in minigames, and what I don’t.

When I think about minigames that I’ve genuinely enjoyed, I like something where I get to use my character’s skills and abilities (especially ones that maybe don’t get used a lot in scenes, like research, finance, social, etc.) to create something (including just an experience) that enhances my enjoyment of the game.

I don’t like grind, or minigames I must engage with on a regular basis or face negative consequences. I don’t like minigames that replace a fun scene or that become a bottleneck to being able to do the things I’m there to do.

So something like a poker game that takes into account character stats (luck, for example) or skills (gaming/gambling/bluff/sleight of hand)? That’s pretty cool. +hunt code that I must remember to use every couple of days or else Bad Things Happen? Not so much. A crafting minigame would be fun (as long as I don’t have to do ASCII), or an investigation or research minigame.

I really liked a few of the things @Jumpscare had done in Silent Heaven, even though I didn’t get to play with many of them while I was there. But you had forensic kits you could carry around and read fingerprints, or other forensic evidence from people who had been in rooms previously.

Something like that tied into a robust investigation setting would be super cool for a mystery/crime focused game.

@Pavel She was a good horse! I’m glad she had a nice retirement.

Love some cheese and crackers. Slice it up, get some good quality, rosemary and/or olive oil crackers, go to town. If I happen to have an apple or something, slice that up super thin to give a little sweet crunch layer.

But usually I’m lazy, so just cheese and crackers.

@Pavel said in AI In Poses:

Can LLMs be of benefit to people with disabilities? Fuckin’ probably, I dunno, I’m not an accessibility expert.

Honestly, I doubt it? If something existed that was what people who want to use LLMs THINK LLMs can do, then it would.

But an LLM is not that. They have no sense of accuracy, of understanding of the data they’re receiving or outputting. They’re often (like, sometimes higher than 50%) confidently wrong, which is the last thing you need to assist you with a processing or sensory disorder. They create a sense of deceptive empathy but don’t have the ability to consistently and accurately recognize distress or self-harm, so I sure wouldn’t use them for cognitive or emotional disorders.

Do some people probably use LLMs as disability assistance tools? Yes, and some people take horse deworming pills to cure COVID. In both cases, they should be stopped from doing that, because it very well may injure or kill them. “People do this” does not, in any way, equal “this is a good or effective thing to do”.

And I’m not even trying to be funny, or talking about MU*s anymore. An LLM cannot and should not be trusted with ANY situation where there’s a negative or harmful consequence to error, because they are fucking black boxes filled with errors.

@MisterBoring said in AI In Poses:

@Pyrephox said in AI In Poses:

Ooh! Ooh! I’ve seen this movie! Would you kill a member of your family because the crazed cult that’s taken you hostage says it’s the only way to save the world? What if actual airplanes started crashing? What if, what if, what if a vision from a god said you had to plunge that knife into someone or the world would end?

Ooh Ooh! I totally dismiss other people’s perspectives on things because I haven’t lived them and don’t believe they could exist.

Have you lived it?

Has anyone lived it? Can you cite a single actual case of someone needing, specifically, an LLM and not any of the other tools that have been outlined in this thread and that people with disabilities have been using with success for decades, using an LLM to “pose on time” and being removed from the hobby or shunned for it when people find out?

Or, instead, is this simply your building a torturous “what if” scenario to justify why it is Right and Good Ackshully for you to do what you plan to do anyway and just don’t want to experience any negative consequences from.

Just use your AI, man. If anyone gives a shit, it’s because what the LLM gave you to put out in the world is dreck, and people don’t like dreck. They won’t play with you, and that’s okay. No one owes you RP. Just find someone else who also uses LLMs, introduce your chatbots to one another, and discover that you can now use BOTH hands to fab to your TS.

There’s no witch hunt. Just people deciding what, and who, they do or do not want to play with. Find your fun, recognize it won’t match with others, and stop trying to make it a righteous crusade.

@MisterBoring said in AI In Poses:

@Muscle-Car said in AI In Poses:

I will never feel compelled morally or socially to treat software with humanity. Especially when it’s so environmentally and socially repugnant.

So if someone comes to you and explains that their particular economic and health situation force them to use ChatGPT to even come close to your level of expression and pose at a speed that isn’t offputting, you’d immediately tell them to get bent?

Ooh! Ooh! I’ve seen this movie! Would you kill a member of your family because the crazed cult that’s taken you hostage says it’s the only way to save the world? What if actual airplanes started crashing? What if, what if, what if a vision from a god said you had to plunge that knife into someone or the world would end?

Guess we all just hate the world and want it to die. It’s downright disrespectful to people who have reasons to murder their family members, but it is what it is.

@RightMeow said in MU Peeves Thread:

Not really what the conversation is about, but to find out if it’s AI, you post it to AI and basically say: Did you do this?

I don’t know why, but I find that both sad and completely hilarious.

And then the LLM gets it wrong, because it doesn’t actually know how to analyze anything.

I don’t spend too much thought worrying about if someone used an LLM to write their poses, their desc, or anything. I just ask myself ‘was this person fun to scene with’ and ‘do I want to scene with this person again’.

I suspect, if I’ve had LLM RP, my answers to the latter two questions are ‘no’ more often than they’re yes. And I don’t need to know that it’s because it’s an LLM: people have been boring and incoherent posers for decades without help. LLMs just, honestly, make the pablum spelled correctly and with better grammar.

(And, if anyone’s worried about being seen as posing-by-LLM, just focus on being reactive and attentive to other people’s characters and really present in the vibe of the scene, and you should be fine, more often than not. No one has ever said, “OMG, I had so much fun RPing with this person…what if they were using AI??”)

@tsar THANK YOU.

I have been using it since ChatGPT wasn’t even a twinkle in Eliza’s eye. It’s MINE. You can’t HAVE IT.

@MisterBoring If someone chooses to break a game’s rules, they are uninvited from the game. It’s not hard.

@Pavel Augh! That’s terrible; heal up soon!