@Pavel said in PSA: WhenIsGood Premium is Free:
How are they making any money…?
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@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:
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.
@RedRocket said in The 3-Month Players:
@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.
Lol these goalposts are moving like crazy. I wasn’t commenting on Dark Metal, which I have zero knowledge of. I was commenting on the broad generalizations of “every RPer responds to this situation in the exact same way and values the exact same things” that were in the specific post I responded to.
@RedRocket said in The 3-Month Players:
@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.
Game of Thrones’ willingness to kill its characters helps to set the overall tone of the piece, but people don’t watch a show just because they’re scared of characters dying; they watch a show because the show is interesting and engaging to them on some level. There are plenty of hugely successful pieces of media that had little to no threat of repeated character death.
Playing video games is also an entirely different experience from watching film or roleplaying a game. These are simply not the same things.
Some people will be more engaged in a MU* where the threat of character death is prominent. Others will hate it. It’s a really weird generality to try and make universal. 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?
@Ominous said in Pretty Princess Simulator:
@DrQuinn said in Pretty Princess Simulator:
@Ominous It still seems like you’re setting it up so that people are going to mob staff NPCs and that’s going to put what sounds like burnout pressure on them. And then there’s favoritism and times people can’t get on to meet up with a staff NPC and and and…
But as @KarmaBum always says: what are people going to RP? Because it sounds like everyone is just going to be fighting for I Talk To The NPC tonight. And that’s going to get really old really fast if you have more than like 5 people playing. Will there be bonuses for people who just chat/fight during the down times ala the Bachelor/ette? Or does this sort of thing favor the person who only logs on for events, gets the NPCs ear, then logs off so nothing can stick to them?
Like this seems great for a small group of friend running a sandbox, but looks like it will fall apart the minute you get more than 10 people.
Talking to the NPC isn’t going to get you much unless you have something notable to offer. It’s like Regular Joe knocking on the President’s door (somehow he keeps getting past the Secret Service) and asking him for help on a traffic ticket every day. The goal is to stand out and one-up the others in the day to day and at the events. Wear the best dress to the ball, challenge people to friendly duels and win, demonstrate largesse to the common folk by opening an orphanage, do something notable. Just chatting to the NPCs over and over again is just going to annoy them and get the character written off as…well…annoying.
You are thinking of this issue in terms of Objective Gain and not in terms of human behavior. The human behavior element here is that people want to talk to the NPC because the NPC is special and so you feel special getting to talk to the NPC.
I do think @DrQuinn’s suggestion of not even having the Royal Heir being vied over as a played NPC (except maybe a season finale appearance or whatever) is definitely the wiser course.
And it makes genre sense in terms of marriages being political, etc., etc.
Am I alone in kind of enjoying the bubble? I’ve always found it kind of exciting and energizing.
I do think, from a staff perspective, than you just…honestly don’t have to worry about providing personalized plot service to everyone. You do what you need to do to process approvals and character stuff, but when it comes to kicking off plot and bigger RP things, one of the benefits to the bubble IMO is that people are actively doing a much better job of entertaining each other. The new game energy means they’re excited to meet each other and play together. This sort of energy won’t last, but I do think that you don’t have to worry too much about plotting for each and every person.
@Roadspike said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:
@Gashlycrumb said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:
If Abelard has enormous influence in ‘society’ and everybody loves him based on his dice, but every single PC thinks he’s an insufferable prick and an idiot, it’s rough.
See this just tells me that Society doesn’t actually “love” him, but they fear his family’s influence (or the dastardly things he’s done to others, or even that he’ll get his stink of failure on them) so they let him do what he wants. The PCs, being special as PCs are, might stand up to Abelard despite his influence on Society.
I’d say that society might very well love him, because I have repeatedly experienced huge swathes of society loving people that I find absolutely despicable. This isn’t at all unrealistic; it’s actually incredibly common.
@Pyrephox said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:
I am not going to live up to @Roz 's praise of me, but I do have thoughts.
Joke’s on you, you always live up to my praise 
@Popes said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:
One exists. It’s called Match of the Millennium. It has SNK and other stuff too. Sadly, a chunk of us quit recently when staff decided to promote a foot fetishist, pedo nazi to a place of plot importance, and instead of going ‘oh, we’ll ban them’, instead doubled down.
lol why is foot fetishist included in this list of actual serious things
Honestly everything interesting I have to say about design of consequences comes straight from @Pyrephox’s mouth. They have a great brain for this sort of design.
