The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson :C

@dvoraen if you pay save up 50 share points, you can get a cool new player skin

@MisterBoring It was very cool and all you have to do is grind your staff into dust for years trying to keep up with players

ETA: Also relevant that one of Arx’s big struggles was in how to structure and allow for PRPs to exist in an impactful way, because of how dense the lore was, and how much of it was locked behind mystery. So my examples were all very staff-handled in response to actions players undertook and submitted to staff in various ways. It was a huge amount of work all centered on staff and absolutely unsustainable.

@KarmaBum said in World Tone / Feeling:

@Roz said in World Tone / Feeling:

But we did make some pretty big changes over the years, both in regards to regaining magic in the setting and in pretty notable cultural shifts, such as restoring the Lost Gods to the Faith and all the plots surrounding thralldom in the Mourning Isles.

I’m curious if you can share any specific examples of player actions driving this. (NB: I don’t know if you were staff on Arx. I think no? But I am looking for player perspectives if people have them.) Was this something players started and staff facilitated? Was it part of the metaplot plan all along and waiting for players to engage with it? Genuinely curious.

I wasn’t staff on Arx, nope! So all of my perspective is as a player. Various members of the Arx staff have spoken many times about planned vs unplanned content, and my impression is that the vast majority of all of it was entirely unplanned, and that the things that players ended up pursuing were almost always unexpected.

The lore of Arx was incredibly dense, so there was a ton of secret history, and I’m sure there was a lot that wasn’t exactly planned for specific metaplot reasons, but just details that never got unearthed. There was a lot of strictness when it came to the history of the world and the rules of how the world worked, but how the world developed was very player-driven.

My experience is that the plot on Arx was hugely reactive to what players pursued. Some examples:

1. At the very start of the game, evil forces were manipulating humans to try and trick them into thinking a certain race of dark elves were their enemies. Staff expected it’d be likely that the players would end up killing these dark elves. Instead, with many bumps along the way, the players eventually managed to eventually make a new alliance and treaty with these elves, and as a result, they featured in the game in various ways for all the years to come.
2. The “Big Bad” of the first major metaplot arc was originally just a throwaway NPC. He was meant to be one of many people corrupted by the evil force of that arc. But players kept pursuing researching him, and eventually staff decided to give him more power and importance until he was the main big bad to defeat.
3. The King was originally an NPC and the very start of the metaplot kicked off with him being put into a magical coma. Staff did not expect him to survive, but players were very determined and pursued it and were able to figure out how to first get his soul back, and then how to heal it.
4. There were three gods of the setting’s pantheon whose names and identities had been forgotten over the years. Characters discovered their identities early on and pursued not just learning about them, but reintegrating them into the setting’s dominant/primary religion (which they hadn’t been a part of even historically when their identities were known).
5. This one comes to the closest to a fundamental shift of setting: out of the five primary houses making up the setting, one of them had a form of slavery/indentured servitude. It was illegal everywhere else in the kingdom. Thematically, the other regions didn’t like it, but it was important to the ruling nobles to not open doors of “people from entirely different lands can criticize how you run your own house.” The criticism and pursuit of abolition of the practice was entirely player-based, and also connected back to #3 – because one of the gods newly-integrated into the dominant religion was the god of freedom. (This also had very big impacts in terms of resulting in a civil war in the region.)

Arx had the benefit of having a really expansive setting with a lot of areas you could impact without fundamentally altering the setting itself. I would say that the most core metaplot story that was planned was: dark magical beings stole humanity’s knowledge of magic and its own history, and the characters slowly learn about this and learn how to magic again. That’s the thread that I do think was planned, it was there from the start until the very end, and the finale of the game involved finally defeating the evil being responsible. Otherwise, I think a lot of plot threads were planned, but in the sense of “there are a LOT of powers out there in the world, and we know what their status is and what they’re up to at the start of the story, but how things actually play out depends on what people do.”

So there were fundamental shifts, but there also weren’t: no one solved feudalism. No one solved class divide. No one solved poverty. The basic foundations of the setting’s structure remained largely intact.

@Gashlycrumb said in Player Ratios:

@Roz Yeah, but the actual numbers for that ratio will vary depending on what pace you want to keep and how much time individual GMs want to put in.

Yeah, the ratio number will be different depending on the specifics of the game. My point was more that I don’t think that makes the ratio unimportant; it will always be important for every game. It’s just that it’s dependent on the situation.

@Tez said in World Tone / Feeling:

@Faraday said in World Tone / Feeling:

Yet there are always players who want to civilize a Wild West game, create a superweapon that will defeat the Cylons in a Battlestar game, cure the zombie virus in a zombie game, etc.

This bit caught my eye. You are absolutely right. Not every game or gamerunner has or even WANTS this scope. Even if they do, you may have players with very different ideas of what fixing feudalism means. Being clear about scope can help shape expectation.

It’s definitely an interesting tension. Some aspects of a setting I tend to be fundamentally uninterested in changing, because they’re too foundational. I never wanted to just – somehow overthrow feudalism or cure class divide on Arx, for instance; it was too core to the structure of everything. But we did make some pretty big changes over the years, both in regards to regaining magic in the setting and in pretty notable cultural shifts, such as restoring the Lost Gods to the Faith and all the plots surrounding thralldom in the Mourning Isles.

So I’ve definitely experienced both sides of this: I like seeing the impact of my actions, but I’ve absolutely also get annoyed at players who seem to be attempting to just – change the entire setting.

@Gashlycrumb said in Player Ratios:

The actual ratio probably isn’t the important bit.

People don’t mind a long queue if they can see that it’s moving.

Can I take an action on a reasonable timeline compared to the other PCs?

The ratio is still important with the timeline being able to generally keep a steady pace, even if that pace is slow, and not constantly and consistently fall behind, though.

@Ominous said in World Tone / Feeling:

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

I feel like Nobledark and Grimbright are my favorite sandboxes to play in.

guys stop feeding the fucking troll, you are literally giving him what he wants

@Juniper said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:

I interpreted this thread as a warning about two specific players residing in a specific game.

idk that something really be a warning about a specific game or specific players when it doesn’t name the game or players

@Pavel said in PSA: WhenIsGood Premium is Free:

How are they making any money…?

‍️

@Ashkuri said in PSA: WhenIsGood Premium is Free:

Somebody tell the When Is Good people that they’re single handedly propping up this entire community on their pillar of weirdly free neon green scheduling tool

It’s kind of amazing how whenever it has issues, literally none of the other options are as good/effective as this jankass site.

@Aria said in PSA: WhenIsGood Premium is Free:

omg lol. NEVER DIE, WIG

It’s 2 years later and I just discovered that this is still the case. Free premium for WiG for all!

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

@Roz said in AI Megathread:

If you program a calculator, you instruct it on immutable facts of how numbers work.

I mean… kinda? A calculator app doesn’t really know math facts the way a third grader does. It doesn’t intuitively know that 1x1=2. It just responds to keypresses, turns them into bits, and shuffles the bits around in a prescribed manner to get an answer.

Yeah, sorry, my point is more that – computers know as much or as little as they’re programmed to know. The calculator is given strict rules to calculate input, whereas LLMs are literally just guessing at a probable answer.

@Jynxbox said in AI Megathread:

@Pavel said in AI Megathread:

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

The LLM doesn’t know whether something is true, and it doesn’t care.

I know this may seem like a quibble, but I feel it’s an important distinction: It can’t do either of those things, because it’s not intelligent. It’s a very fancy word predictor, it can’t think, it can’t know, it can’t create.

(This very obvious rant is not directed to anyone in particular but I still feel like it needed to be said…)

Neither can a computer. It can’t think, it can’t know, it can’t create any more than an AI can. It can’t get nearly as close as AI can.

This seems like a strange separation: AI is run on computers. A computer is simply a larger tool that you can run all sorts of smaller tools on.

A computer can know some things, if you program it to do so. If you program a calculator, you instruct it on immutable facts of how numbers work.

If GenAI successfully reports that 1+1=2, all it’s saying is that a lot of people on the internet have mentioned that’s probably the case. It’s searching a massive database of random shit and finding a bunch of instances where someone mentioned the text “1+1” and seeing that a bunch of those instances ended with “=2”. It’s giving you a statistically probable sentence. Due to this, it’s ridiculously, laughable easy to manipulate.

The calculator on your computer knows that 1+1=2 because it knows what 1 is, and it knows what addition is, and it knows how to sum two instances of 1 together. Computers are very good at following strict rules and working within them when they are programmed to do so. And computers are very good at analyzing and iterating, and people have written really effective automation and AI tools (of the non-generative variety) to do that over the years.

But yes: as you said, computers can’t produce raw creation. Which is kind of the point being made.

@dvoraen said in General Video Game Thread:

I need to know what everyone who has finished Clair Obscur — Expedition 33 felt about the story right meow.

(No spoilers. FEELINGS ONLY.)

Just finished tonight. It was like a gut punch.

@somasatori nice! i have added both of these to the first post

Not a repository, but a tool! This got posted to Reddit just today: Visual Studio tools for PennMUSH

@InkGolem said in AI Megathread:

@Tez

I never share a scene in progress, and I only share ones that are publicly viewable on the internet.

Just because something is available to potentially get scraped automatically doesn’t mean you need to help it out by personally spoon-feeding other people’s writing into the GenAI database.

@Pavel said in Re: Dies Irae:

Also, we/they just banned Polk, so.

lmao what’d he do this time