@Ominous said in Empire Discussion Thread:

What about this game is different from Arx? It looks veeery similar based on the limited info on the website. It is PvE focused (which I really don’t understand for L&L, as the whole theme hinges on politicking and intrigue which you can’t do without competition against each other (well, I guess you could if, instead of outsiders filling the role, other factions/noble houses that are only filled with NPCs are the “bad guys”)), has an empire consisting of loosely affiliated kingdoms that are only held together out of the enlightened self-interest of “united, we stand; divided, we fall,” and has said kingdoms that seem superficially dissimilar without any apparent major cultural differences to serve as tension points.

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

Diane Keaton at 79 :C

Redwall MUCK waaaay back in the day. I was too young lol.

i think this one is pretty simple: players push for the spheres they specifically want to play in. they’re not thinking about the big picture health of the game. people just want their favorite splat

I feel like “consenting to death” for me is, like — fully giving a player the choice. Or the player chooses to have their PC die in a scene. I think any death where a character’s death comes down to dice rolls in some way isn’t a fully consensual death.

That said, I do think it’s a sliding scale. A lot of games nowadays fall somewhere in the middle, rather than on the extremes; I feel like a general attitude of “keep players informed when they’re getting into situations where death is a possibility” has become a lot more common, and “you can be PKed on a whim for dumb, petty reasons” has become a lot less common.

I think I’m moreso surprised that Evennia hasn’t seen a community collection of solid tools for very common use cases, the way we often saw on MUSH and MUX back in the day. Not that Evennia should be shipping with it, but that it sounds like there hasn’t been much collection of community-built plugins of sorts.

@Yam said in Character Death:

@Ashkuri I really can’t think of any. Is non-consensual permadeath actually a thing anymore?

Curious if anyone has actually seen a PC death play out where the player certainly didn’t intend to die AND didn’t consent to being in a situation that warned the risk.

I think it depends on how we’re defining things. Because I’d say that non-consensual permadeath would include situations where the players consented to the risk, but still took it, and the dice went how they went. That’s definitely something that still happens on games. Because, to my mind, they still weren’t choosing the PC death.

@somasatori That’s just games sharing a setting/theme with its source material, which isn’t the same as emulating the experience of playing that specific TTRPG. Playing a Star Wars MU* is not the same thing as watching the movie. Playing a Mass Effect MU* is definitely not emulating the experience of playing the video game. But I feel like people always trip over this when it comes to TTRPGs in a way that can be actively detrimental to a MU*'s development, because if people are thinking about emulating tabletop on a MU, they’re not thinking about the process from a MU-first perspective.

Playing CoD in tabletop and playing a CoD MU are wildly different experiences. Playing tabletop and playing MUs in general are wildly different, and the challenges they face are also entirely different. The core structure is different: one is a private experience with a small handful of players getting constant DM attention. The other is a persistent lobby of numerous players, many of whom don’t know each other. The systems require a different approach in order to support a persistent environment that players can exist in without constant DM attention.

@MisterBoring said in Character Death:

I think it’s odd when people say MUs aren’t TTRPGs, but I could take the rules of almost any MU, print them out and run a tabletop group with them.

And yet that experience would still be different! Sharing some mechanics doesn’t make the needs and experience the same.

ETA: Baldur’s Gate 3 shares rules with D&D 5e, and yet no one would say that the experience of playing these two things is the same!

I’ll die on the hill that MUs are not TTRPGs, even when they’re using the bones and theme of a TTRPG system, and that trying to insist on a connection between them has been to the hobby’s detriment. Unless you’re playing on a private game with a small group of people, the fundamental structure of MUs is just too different from a TTRPG table.

@somasatori said in Factions:

If I had to guess, part of CvC/PvP conflict being such a provocative issue is directly tied to how difficult it is to create, get, and build a character on a game. A game where you have a fairly lengthy cgen process that requires putting together a build has that added tang of wasted time when your character that you carefully constructed mechanically over a period of months (or years) dies to another player’s character.

People always say that, but I actually question is that’s the core issue. I think it’s more about expectations and investment. It doesn’t matter how hard or easy the app is: if you’ve spent months or years since then getting emotionally invested in the character’s story, it’s hard to give up.

I only played a couple different characters on it during its runtime - and there certainly wasn’t loss without drama - but one of the things I remember from The Greatest Generation’s gameplay was that it was pretty easy to join the game, get enmeshed and equally very easy to die. It was a bit of a bummer if your medic died because the place you were in got (suspiciously specific reference here, hmm), but there were other options you could jump into. I think TGG was less of a true RPG as we know Star Wars, WoD, Pern, Arx/L&L games more in the vein of a combat simulation a la (what I’ve heard about) BattletechMUX, so maybe that’s part of the difference too, as you kind of expected the characters to be short-lived.

I wasn’t on The Greatest Generation, but my impression of how people have talked about it really points at the expectation aspect to me. People went in knowing their characters were almost surely going to die. That was, from everything I’ve heard, kind of core to the game’s conceit: there were limited-time campaigns, and PCs would die. When players expect to lose their characters, it reframes our entire approach.

@mietze I’m so happy for you!!

@catzilla said in Re: Dies Irae:

@Wyrmsign said in Re: Dies Irae:

@Pavel
I’m old! Gotta keep up with the kids lingo! In simplest terms, “You should play with me and not /them/ because I’m better at everything.”

Also “I’m not like other girls.”

yeah it’s an intensely sexist meme lol. i’m gonna side-eye anyone using it sincerely

@Pavel said in Re: Dies Irae:

@Wyrmsign said in Re: Dies Irae:

a Pick Me Girl of psychotic proportions

Could someone translate this into Old People, please?

You’re not THAT old, this meme started almost 20 years ago.

The other reason why you need to design plot dispersal around the possibility of things getting stuck is because sometimes players who are usually good about dispersing plot around will disappear, sometimes they’ll get RLed in various ways, sometimes they’ll just burn out or lose interest, etc. It’s not just an issue with insulated players.

And, like, if some players are clearly giving you indication that they’re not good plot vectors, you can stop giving them stuff that’s meant to be spread around. It’s okay to make judgments on which players are engaging with what you give them.

@SockMonkey I NEVER EVEN GOT TO BAN ANYONE

@Faraday said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

@MisterBoring said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

You must have stopped reading when I mentioned “often times become hostile when asked to join RP / plot”. I have politely approached a duo like this and asked them if they’d like to come join a plot, as they were nominally part of the same faction as myself, and received a rather angry response. I’ve seen staffers on other games politely send a duo like this an invitation to a plot event and get told very plainly to get bent for trying to force them to play the game the staff intended to run. I’ve also witnessed these people throw tantrums when they were suddenly touched by plot they refused to be a part of.

Then that goes back to the part where I said: “Unless they are engaging in other problematic behavior” (paraphrased). If someone’s being rude to staff or throwing a tantrum or whatever, then talk to them about their inappropriate behavior and/or show them the door. Otherwise, they’re not actually doing any harm sitting their in their private room playing with each other. It’s not like the game is charged for the bandwidth of their bits (at least on any normal modern server).

Yeah. The example here isn’t problematic because a couple players sit in a room and only RP about each other. They’re problematic because they act nasty to people for extending an offer of RP/plot and get mad about plot impacting the game’s setting.

Back in the day of three strike rules, I remember giving what felt like endless WARNINGS before even getting to the first strike.

It was a bad system.

whenever people complain that someone doesn’t RP with people they don’t like I’m like ??? that’s how hobbies work??? you do hobbies for fun???

@MisterBoring said in AI In Poses:

Question:

If you found out that a person was using ChatGPT to help write their poses in an effort to work past a physical limitation, what would your opinion be in that case?

what physical limitation would need chatGPT instead of actual tech accessibility tools??

A few more:

• Oh Brother Where Art Thou is The Odyssey
• Cruel Intentions is Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons)
• Roxanne is Cyrano de Bergerac
• O is Othello
• West Side Story is Romeo & Juliet
• Bridget Jones’s Diary is Pride & Prejudice
• RENT is La Boheme
• Apocalypse Now is Heart of Darkness
• Kurosawa’s Ran is King Lear