I’m going to go on a little rant here but stick with me, I promise it is on topic.

DarkMetal was the most well designed WoD MUSH to ever exist. Wanna fight about it? Here we go!

The reason your players are burning out after 3 months is that there are no stakes in your game.
I hate to sound like one of /those/ people but… game devs today are too soft on their players.
It practically takes an act of God to kill off someone’s character so they get stuck with the same character for long periods of time, or they make alts and that results in burn out just as quick because they can never find in-depth character development with their focus divided between multiple alts.

Dark Metal got a few things right that no one else did.

1. Anyone could die at any time.
2. There were safe zones for each sphere if you wanted to just do soft RP. You never needed to be in danger as long as you stayed in your zone.
3. Making a new character was fast and easy! If you died it wasn’t a big deal.
4. Staff didn’t give a s*** what you played, as long as you played, so approval was automated.

On Dark Metal you had to fight tooth and nail to survive long enough to get to a point you could walk in the mixed spaces without being in danger of being made into someone’s midnight snack and you were never fully safe.

You had to struggle to become enough of a bad-ass not to have to live in fear all the time. I can not emphasize enough how important that feeling of progression is to the health of a game.

People want their actions and choices to matter.
When they don’t, people get bored and they wander off.
It’s the same reason people add stakes and drama to TV shows. If nothing changes, there is no point.

If you want your game to survive, learn to crush your players hopes and dreams. Learn to let players kill each other off.

Character churn will save your game from player churn.

I am but a week away from getting a computer capable of running baldur’s gate 3. Once I make sure the machine is actually going to work I’m going to buy it on steam. I cannot wait to play this game. I’m old and about to die so I’m going to spend the last few years of my life acting like I’m 14.

@RiotDawn Check Jenn’s other devices. If they ever logged in from a phone that phone or a different web browser on the main PC might have the log in information stored in the password files.
That’s about all you can do.

@Roz said in The 3-Month Players:

For many people, knowing that your character could die at any moment will mean they’ll invest less in their character; after all, what’s the point if they can lose all that effort in a moment’s whim?

That’s why every DM faction had a safe zone. You could log in every day and play all day long in the forest or the reclaimed suburban sprawl next to Forest and never leave the protection of the werewolf zone.

If you wanted to be a boring person who stays home and does laundry while occasionally banging your werewolf boyfriend in his crinos form you were able to do that.

That’s why I’m saying Dark Metal was a very well designed game. It had something for every kind of player. Modern games lack that variety. The range of danger that you could be in at any moment is much more limited and more vaguely defined.

Most games don’t have a safe zone for their factions that is larger than one building or a few rooms deep in an isolated location.

One of the things that Dark Metal did properly was creating an entire distinct environment for each faction that you could play in and never run out of things to do ICly.

@somasatori said in Dies Irae:

The power levels of characters in Dies Irae are at a low to medium level …

@somasatori said in Dies Irae:

Mage: the Ascension and Changeling: the Dreaming as its core rulesets …

One of these two statements must be untrue.

Today I got the itch to WoD again. I tried out LiberationMUSH but the part of creating a character I always hated the most was the formating of the +selfstat nonsense so I thought I would try ChatGPT and see if it would do the work for me.

It was surprisingly good. It formatted everything nicely and even gave me helpful suggestions. Out of curiosity I asked it if it knew about LiberationMUSH specifically and it said it did. I started asking it questions to test how much it knew.

I asked it to summarize what people had posted online about LiberationMUSH and the answer I got was… interesting.

It told me that the game was most well known for the vampire sex parties, Polk (One of the administrators) wildly abusing the rules for their own benefit, and a debate about the number of nipples a person has influencing the amount of gnosis they have.

The last statement included a link to this forum which is how I found you all.

So the next time you are thinking about trying out a new game, ask ChatGPT about it. You might find something interesting.

@Faraday said in The 3-Month Players:
te core players)

There are plenty of successful TV shows that avoid the Game of Thrones style of knocking off main characters left and right.

There is no one-size-fits-all game.

Yet, few shows were as successful or as well known as GoT. The stories where your favorite characters might be lost at any moment are the ones people become most invested in. Investment is what we are looking for.

It’s like playing a video game where you only get one life and then you have to start all over. You will be very careful in that video game to try to stay alive with your one life but if you have three lives he will be less careful and less invested. If you have infinite lives and lose nothing when you die the game becomes less fun because you can just rush headlong in without needing to think or plan.

Knowing that death doesn’t matter or that you are not going to die unless you choose to means you will invest less energy and effort into your character. It’s less challenging if you aren’t afraid of death.

@GF said in TV series, news, recommendations:

Hazbin Hotel

Can’t recommend enough! 10 out of 10.

@Buttercup
I can’t imagine many world darkness games would not be roster games if you asked. I’m sure staff has a long list of NPCs that they would like someone to take up and flesh out the world with. It’s probably just a matter of asking.

@eye8urcake said in Real life happy:

With the 8000000 spiders born here in the past month, that’s going to be one mighty busy spider-vac.

~ Spideer-Vac! Spider-Vac! For when the spiders are on the attack!
Sucks up bugs, any size! Catches them, just like flies!
Look out, here comes a Spider-Vaaaac! ~

@InkGolem

Reality_is_often_disappointing.jpg

There’s not even internal consistency, forget about citations.

You’re just not patient enough to see the big picture. We are all trapped on this train. It’s going to crash wether we like it or not. Just sit back and enjoy the tea while you still have service.

It’s going to suck for a while but long after you and I are dead that bright future will happen. Just not for us.

@Pavel
He stole it from Russia. Trust me, all wisdom comes from Russia. My Babushka would not lie to me.

@Trashcan

Yes, A.I. is making it next to impossible to make a living as an artist, but it’s doing that to a lot of industry and it’s only going to get exponentially worse until it gets better, but here’s the thing, it will get better.

One of the very core concepts of capitalism is that you have to have a consumer base with money to buy the shit your robots are making.

It’s a race to the bottom, I agree. But when we reach that bottom there will be no choice but to implement some kind of universal income where people will be paid simply to exist because if they are not there will be no consumers left to buy anything. Also there will be no politicians left because we will have murdered them all.

When we talked about the promise of AI freeing us from menial labor, this is what that looks like. This is a stepping stone towards that future.

It’s going to be a painful and probably violent next few steps because capitalism is very slow to adapt and people who have resources do not want to give up anything to the people who have not. But it will change.

Even the smartest economists in the world have warned that we need to get ahead of it and start implementing some kind of new system before the total collapse of capitalism happens.

You look at this as greedy people taking away your opportunity to make a living off of doing the things that you want, but I see this as a greedy people dooming themselves to the destruction of the very capitalism that they bade their entire value as a human being on.
Just try and hold on, try to adapt during the transition and let them destroy themselves.

There is an old Russian proverb, “When your enemy is making a mistake, do not interrupt them. It is rude.”

@Evilgrayson I agree with you 100% on the morals. It’s just another way for the rich to take every last opportunity from the rest of us, but until we learn a better way than capitalism, this is what it we have to work with so I’m adapting because I want my crumb of the pie to be big enough to live on.

@Pavel said in AI PBs:

We should be arguing about vampire sex.

I’ve always found the idea of vampire sex silly. Who wants to bang a corpse and also, why would the vampire want to bang a sweaty, stinky, meat-sack that smells like day-old urine and too many chemicals? It’s bad enough you have to eat them to stay alive-ish, why would you want to rub your bits against them? It’s just gross!

@Pax
I thought I was pretty clear on that but if you need an itemized list…

• Let people play what they want (within whatever theme you have) even if they are the “bad guys” because those kinds of characters generate IC drama that staff doesn’t have to spend their limited time manufacturing.

• Make Chargen fast and easy to get a basic character so if you want to make an alt or if you want to kill off your character because you have grown tired of it you don’t have to spend weeks waiting to get back in the game.

• Make retirement easier by making it so you can create a bog standard character using a quick CG system then once you kill off your main in a dramatic event have the XP transfer from them to the new guy.

• Make factions actually matter. Give them territories to defend. This gives players something to RP off of outside of everyone hanging out at a doughnut shop.

• Make clear rules about PVP where you need a justifiable reason to be engaging in PVP. Someone entered enemy territory, they attacked you, they attacked someone you are close to, etc. Then if you think they are just being a douchenozzle and attacking you for no reason you can call in a staff member and have them make a judgement call. If the reason for the attack is lame the staffer can just say no, this isn’t happening, both of you go back to your homes and don’t start fights with each other in the future.

If the reason is legitimate and it’s because of your IC actions but you don’t want to deal with it, you should have the right to negotiate the outcome and skip the battle itself. Maybe you have better shit to do?

If you can’t come to an agreement on a reasonable conclusion without the fighting happening then you could set terms, (to the death, to incapacitation, being taken prisoner, etc.) for the battle and do the fight or if you really just don’t want to do the combat mechanics, choose to do a roll-off to see who wins. Say for example, you are playing WoD, you could both add up the dice you would roll for your primary attack and the dice you would roll for your primary defensive roll, pool them all together, then roll them. The other guy does the same, who ever gets the most successes wins the fight.

You can skip hours of combat with one die roll or if you want to make it even simpler, have both people roll 1d100+their total XP spent. Who ever rolls higher wins. Or you can both roll 1d100, see who gets the highest number to see who wins then look at the difference in the numbers and let that determine the severity of the consequences of the combat.

There are a lot of options that don’t involve having to use chunky combat rules. Lay those options out ahead of time and let people have a choice.

• Make it clear that going around picking fights for no reason will get you removed from the game. Also make it clear that just because you and one other person are in the game room it doesn’t mean that you are necessarily the only people in the room of the story. “I was mad and he was there so I picked a fight.” isn’t a valid IC reason for starting PVP. Unless the other player agrees to it you can just have them pick a fight with an NPC.

• Don’t tell people what they can and can not do in the privacy of their own latex sex dungeons. Do tell people they can’t go around banging on the subway without suffering consequences. Make those consequences IC. Have the cops show up at their door step with a warrant for their arrest. Make a post about their public fuck session on their faction board because someone posted a video of it on TicTak so everyone can role play about seeing it.

Make the results of breaking the rules an IC response as often as possible because that moves the story forward instead of grinding it to a stop.

• Do let people make stupid character concepts that you know will not work. Do also tell them why it probably won’t work out well for them. Maybe they are just new to whatever game you are running so they don’t know better? Maybe they want a challenge? Maybe they want to explore the dynamics of love and marriage by playing an ageing shoe salesman with a red-headed wife who he loves but can barely stand and two ungrateful kids? Let them do their thing.

• Do let people innovate. (Within reason) Don’t be such a rules lawyer that you lose sight of the goal of people playing fun characters. Let them try novel things.

• Do let people establish their own places of residence and customize them. Using coded apartment buildings you can rent is cool, but why not have coded houses that work the same way? Then if a player bails on the game, the rent comes due, the game sees they aren’t online for X number of days, then it kicks them off the lease and puts the house back up for rent with a default, fresh coat of paint, description.

• Do let them blow shit up from time to time just for fun and leave it 'sploded until a reasonable amount of repair time has passed then let the owner of the property re-build.

• Finally, and most importantly, don’t give a fuck about people’s feelings. Don’t punish people for telling dirty jokes or saying things that are offensive on the non-public com channels or in pages.

It’s great to have a SFW channel like Public or Chat but for faction chats and such you should do as little forced censoring as possible.

Players should all be adults, they shouldn’t need a staff member to protect them from hurtful words. If you don’t like what someone is saying, tell them so politely.

They should be an adult and respect your wishes or maybe they will tell you to fuck off with your bullshit, and that’s also okay!

You can tell them to go to hell and get ass-fucked with a pinapple then +ignore them because that’s also something adults do.

We don’t all have to agree or think the same way.

They will piss off enough people in your faction that eventually they won’t be able to enjoy the game and move on to a new place to play because no one wants to be around them.

Staff doesn’t need to step in, players don’t need Staff to fight their battles for them. Staff’s job shouldn’t be playing thought police.

Staff’s job should be enforcing the rules of the game system, whatever system that might be, and facilitating play for people who do actually want to be around each other.

This concludes my Ted Talk, thank you all for coming.

@Roz Democratizing art is exactly what A.I. does.
I can’t draw worth a lick these days because my hands are shot but I can still make passable art for my hobbies because of A.I.
I can even run it locally. No corporation can control what I make.

I mean, I get that you’re mad that the fact so many people can enter the market and fill it with content that your content is devalued but that’s just progress. You too could learn to use it and flood the market. Plus, because you have actual skill yours would end up looking better and sell more than the people with no actual training or skill.

It is a total pain in the ass to get A.I. to understand object positioning so all those prompt jockeys who can’t draw have to take hours and hours to do something you can do with a simple sketch fed into the A.I. engine because you understand perspective and how distance should change scale and line width on a work.

Plus you are overlooking the radical advancements in what you can do to your images using open source image to image A.I. like Flux Kontext.

Have a sketch you want to turn into a detailed digital drawing of a space ship on a strange alien planet? You can spend 6 hours doing that or you can have the A.I. do it in seconds. Want the ship to have rusted metal plating? You can spend an hour painting in tiny, detailed, rust patches or you can lightly sketch them in and have flux add more detail the rust. You can make art with coloured pencil which the A.I. will understand than translate over into any style of art you want.

You are looking at this as if it’s taking away from artists when it makes you magnitudes more productive. You just haven’t given it a chance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gh_g9uBd0m8

@Pax said in AI PBs:

This analogy only works if the pencil is made of stolen materials.

Again, it’s not “stealing” anything. Not any more than any person with a pair of eyes seeing an image. It learns what things are by breaking them down into a format that it can understand and reference later. That’s not stealing. There are no copies of images of Micky Mouse in the files used to run the A.I.

It’s just math and code. You are making this thing seem way more magical than it is.

@Faraday said in AI PBs:

We’re talking about an “intelligent” … tool

That’s where you’re wrong. It isn’t intelligence. That’s why I linked the video that explains how A.I. works. It is no more intelligent or capable of free will than any pocket calculator. It’s a very complex series of pass or fail checks that have become robust enough to give the appearance of intelligence but it has no will, no motivation, no real intelligence. That’s why image generation can have such freaky errors. It has no actual concept of what body parts are attached where or what any of the context of your prompts mean. It’s just taking a bunch of random noise and reducing that noise in a pattern which is likely to be similar to other patterns that it has seen before.

It’s not aware at all, at least, not yet. Once we get true A.I. then you can start making the arguments you are making now with some legitimacy but with the way it functions right now, it’s still just a very fancy pencil.

@Pax said in pvp vs pvp:

they wouldn’t be the bulk of what people are running and playing nowadays.

Oh, yes, such wildly successful games that have what, 12 active players who do maybe 3 scenes a week? That’s totally a thriving model for success you have there! No need to ever question it or try to improve! What was I thinking?! Must be the dementia!