@Gashlycrumb how did you know about the method I used to grade papers when I was a TA?

@Pavel said in AI Megathread:

@somasatori said in AI Megathread:

People have recently assumed that I was using AI (not great for clinical writing) and thus everything is over-parenthized. Over-parenthesesed?

I’ve started using semicolons more in my notes:

Client reported improved sleep this week — though still experiencing early-morning waking when stressed.
vs
Client reported improved sleep this week; still experiencing early-morning waking when stressed.

This is honestly a great idea. I’m really thankful for the suggestion!

@Aria said in AI Megathread:

@Pavel said in AI Megathread:

@MisterBoring Either @Roz or @Aria explained… somewhere up in the higher reaches of this thread. I got a cramp trying to scroll that far.

I explained it here. Roz got mad that she didn’t know the dumb reason they’re called en dash and em dash.

it is admittedly a very dumb reason. It sounds like a reason that someone from Long Island would come up with

I have actually had to unlearn using em dashes because I would do it constantly. I use a lot of parentheses now when previously I would just be like – . People have recently assumed that I was using AI (not great for clinical writing) and thus everything is over-parenthized. Over-parenthesesed?

@Wuff said in Celebrities We've Lost 2025:

Shang Tsung himself, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa

He was great in the Amazon “The Man in the High Castle” series

I did want to note that I have no issues with levity or characters being silly or humorous when the time calls for it. It can’t rain all the time, etc.

To me, it seemed like this particular person was really focused on playing a comic relief character as his whole shtick. This kind of comes down to fictional and cultural touchstones. Silent Heaven’s nearest cultural touchstones are Silent Hill and the TV series From. Both of those series have moments of humor (“It’s bread.”) The question here is: would either of those properties be improved if you had a character most likely to be played by French Stewart kicking around?

@SockMonkey said in Tough Calls:

I had someone pull off this ‘grand’ and ‘hilarious’ plot twist in a scene where their character was revealed to have a brain tumor so not only did that 1) Make all their actions ok it 2) Made my character and asshole for not instantly supporting them and me oocly an asshole for removing my char from the story and hook.

ugh, I’m sorry you had to deal with this. This is an awful, unnecessary, and annoying thing. How on earth is a brain tumor funny in any sense?

@Jumpscare said in Tough Calls:

I would prefer to play a dumb (likely brain damaged) and loud character who rushes headfirst into things, who is obnoxious and meant from a OOC perspective to be taken as a joke, while still having serious moments as it happens in rp. Is there a way for that to be okay?

ah yes, brain damage. what a laugh riot

also, I played on Silent Heaven for all of a couple weeks (much respect for it though), and yet I’m very certain that the vibe of the game isn’t “comedic levity”

If someone told me they got banned for asking for RP, I think my first question would be “what kind of RP were you asking for,” tbh. That said, I do sort of see why the person in @mietze’s example would get banned because that sounds hella disruptive. On one hand I can see the call to ask for RP, have someone agree and then getting cold feet, but it seems like this person was just engaging in a kind of whinging attention seeking based on the description.

My personal peeve these days, as an aside, is having basically zero free time to actually MUSH while actively engaging on a couple MUSH discords to keep up with some friends. I’m feeling this constant pull and still having ideas for characters.

@Pavel said in Warma-Sheen:

@hellfrog said in Warma-Sheen:

I just wanted to know what the mindset is that makes someone sock puppet on a new game instead of, idk, trying to rp.

While I obviously can’t speak to anyone’s inner world without having many a chat with them, I can speak to mine back when I did this kind of thing in my very, very, very younger days: I wanted to Be The Best. Probably from a lack of validation at home, I sought reinforcement and attention elsewhere, to that end I wanted to be the richest character, or the combattiest character, or the bestest starfighter pilot or whatever.

For a lot of (hell, probably most) folks, the first RP experience is the character they play and the second is the persona they’ve cultivated. In my youth in the hobby I was a borderline functional alcoholic hipster and would frequently overstate things and blow them out of proportion in a fake-bad kind of way, mostly for attention. Now 13 years sober, I definitely am very embarrassed about this, but it is what it is and I’ve largely tried to make amends where possible.

Anyway, likewise I can’t speak to the actual inner experience here outside of base speculation, but RPing is, for many, part of a larger power fantasy which can easily extend to one’s OOC presentation. Being respected IC can also be a very, let’s say maladaptive, stand-in for feeling respected OOC, which is probably what leads to most of the major crashouts we’ve seen in the hobby.

The hobby is more or less reliant on people being trustworthy actors within the scope of our OOC interactions, indicating that we’re trustworthy RP partners. Breaking that trust - by, for example, draining all of the resources out of your IC organization after being given a position of authority, or by breaking your word to someone in an OOC context or other similar betrayal - could lead to an attempt to manage or spin the situation so as to prevent being seen as untrustworthy. Whether the “significant other had my password” thing is real or not*^*, it’s important to take accountability and responsibility for those negative behaviors and, if unable to do so, identify why without resorting to blame.

I don’t recall Hollywood; I think they were very much after my tenure on TR, but based on this entire thread no one is particularly leaning on anything from TR being very problematic outside of the initial misidentification of Saulot; the focus is on recent behaviors rather than ones from 15 years ago.

^ Inner Soma’s reaction to using “real or not” here:

Me thinking “it’s been a couple weeks, I wonder how Empire is doing, I’ll check on that BMD thread”:

New missed settings for me as I go through my TTRPGs which have similar themes but different genres:

Black Void: During the height of the Babylonian Empire, strange black tendrils covered Earth entirely and flung the human population throughout the cosmos. The main gameplay setting takes place on a planet (ish) called Llyhn the Eternal where humans live in ghettos at the lowest of an alien caste system which is fairly reminiscent to Bronze Age empires. Adventures and whatnot take place via exploration of the world, including within the cosmos itself, traversable by void ships – which kind of look like Spelljammer ships as they’re just sailing ships that use some kind of cosmic force to travel. A MUSH would likely be city-based play where players would be humans attempting to make things work in this very cruel, strange society.

Nibiru: Ancient Assyrians went to sleep one night and awoke in a strange environment, a space station called Nibiru orbiting the star Formalhaut. In the intervening few thousand years, citystates have emerged within the different compartments of this massive space station centered around the largest point of human activity (the city-state of Ashur). The player characters in the tabletop are Vagabonds, which are people who just kind of appeared one day akin to how humanity wound up on Nibiru, containing strange memories of other places. A MUSH would likely ignore the Vagabond piece, or expand the lost memory thing to be an accessible collective unconscious. There are no aliens or magic, but there are strange AI creatures.

Then not related to the “ancient Middle Eastern people transported to alien worlds” theme:

Working Class Space Scifi/Horror: A common touchstone for this would be Alien, where we follow the exploits of a group of space truckers faced with a horrific situation. Alternatively, a good analogous game system for this would be Mothership, which (aside from the ALIEN RPG by Modiphus which is literally Alien the RPG) is basically Alien the RPG. Working class space sci-fi is a big thing for me. Another genre that this might be referred to is casette futurism, with video games like Ostranauts being a good example of the genre.

Unknown Armies: Unknown Armies is an occult RPG. If you are aware of Unknown Armies, you probably have wanted there to be an Unknown Armies MUSH at some point. The premise of the game is that occult practitioners (the players) are attempting to understand and deal with a very strange, disjointed reality. Unknown Armies is sort of like if Mage the Ascension/Awakening remained firmly in a street level, gutter magic vibe. There are vast conspiracies of both magical practitioners and just bizarre nightmare creatures. This is a terrible description of Unknown Armies.

Bas-Lag/New Crobuzon: I mentioned this above, but it would be cool to see a MUSH set in the world of China Mieville’s Bas-Lag. This isn’t an RPG (though there was good Blades in the Dark hack for the setting), but a literary setting. I guess it would be technically considered steampunk, but it’s such a deeply fucked up setting that it’s hard to ascribe that genre to it given that it’s sort of actually like how social life was for most people in the Victorian era rather than how steampunk usually presents the world. Humans are the dominant species, with a powerful city-state called New Crobuzon, which masquerades as a parliamentary republic but is far more autocratic, maintaining its status as a superpower over the rest of the world through its exploitation of science and magic (often to the detriment of its own people).

https://empiremush.org/map/interactive_map/

Channeling my inner Bilbo Baggins here. hell yeah, a map!

@Pavel said in General Video Game Thread:

@somasatori said in General Video Game Thread:

I think he tends to lean heavily into the parody of “sassy gay friend serving,”

If he were the only queer character, I’d agree. But I think, at least to me and in my opinion only, he simply is a sassy gay friend/foe serving. But perhaps that’s my view only because I am the sassy gay friend who occasionally serves…

I haven’t run into any others yet! that’s a good point. I was anticipating this being the only queer character.

If a game could be considered good on vibes alone, Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines 2 would be great. The aesthetic, vibe and appearance of the game is gorgeous and definitely on theme with VTM. It’s not really like… a true sequel to Bloodlines from what I can tell yet, maybe something will come up in the story. It’s also only tangentially a VTM game. The main character has telekinesis powers and can glide through the air like a sugar flyer, which is a bit weird for my Lasombra. Hopefully that’s explained somewhere. Phyre is extremely edgy, but I guess that makes sense for an elder from Constantinople who calls themselves “The Nomad.” Fabien, the Malkavian Johnny Silverhand, is a cool character. His interludes (or the one I’ve seen so far) is fun and more focused around investigation rather than the pure violence/conflict that Phyre does. I do kinda wish they’d just married the two gameplay mechanics into one character and if you didn’t have the disciplines that Fabien does, you would have different methods of accomplishing similar goals, but eh.

The characters are pretty cool. I like Safia (Tremere) and Tolley (Nosferatu), though in the latter case I think he tends to lean heavily into the parody of “sassy gay friend serving,” but it is a big change from the usual way Nosferatu are shown.

I don’t really know 5e as much as Revised/20th but the Anarchs are effectively the Sabbat now? They seem like super anti-Masquerade, burn-everything-down types who are militantly opposed to the Camarilla. It feels like they basically took the Sabbat scripts from the first game and copy/pasted them on this one with the Anarchs.

Outside of it having the Bloodlines tag, it’s a nice action stealth adventure game. It’s not terribly RPG-like, just an action game with some RPG elements like very limited skill progression, but that’s fine if that’s what you want to play. They do a good job with that sort of gameplay.

I have a quick suggestion for the Empire devs:

Right away in the very first section of the introduction to your world information, make a lexicon of your terms.

I still am not entirely certain what a Greytide is, despite looking through the introduction to the Empire, the explanation on magic, etc. I know there are three of them, that the empire was formed as a reaction to the third, and that according to the “ideas behind the game” document “The Greytides were somewhere between the Blights and Chaos, and an early iteration looked more like the scale of Tolkien’s War of Wrath.” That still doesn’t entirely tell me what happened. Chaos in Warhammer could be a surge of cultist humans and champions of chaos, or it could be demons. The War of Wrath had orcs. Is the Greytide all human-based, or are there other species of humanoid creature involved? I don’t need to necessarily know why or how they occurred, as I assume that’s part of learning the story, but having the basics in a central section would be great.

I’m assuming demons because of the Grey Below (referenced in the Magic document), but did my ancestors fight demons or just demon-obsessed barbarian tribes?

Some of the locations are kind of like this as well, like the Scorchlands. It’s where the Cinderkin come from, and they’re clearly distinct from the Red Waste, and it sounds like they’re very close to Wend, but I’m not exactly sure what they’re supposed to be in general.

It’s very interesting information and clearly a lot of love went into the world building. I mentioned above about the too many proper nouns. Generally people are going to look at the bare minimum they need to play their characters, so their house information, the intro to the empire, and maybe the document on magic and one of the religion documents. There are some mentions within these that don’t quite make sense if you don’t cross reference into other things and I might not necessarily know where to look (good on you for having a search feature). Being able to quickly reference a layperson’s guide to basic information on things is extremely useful, especially if someone referenced something in RP.

@Tez said in Empire Discussion Thread:

@somasatori You know, that’s fair. The tone of the question wasn’t great though, and that’s what I think I’m responding to.

That’s fair as well! For me, the comparison statement was a bit of a kneejerk on account of people using it disingenuously about certain real life things that I won’t mention.

On my part, I’m particularly interested in House Heshbeh, but there is a kind of proper noun overuse here. I think I probably just need to read the lore files more thoroughly, tbf. Especially since I always complain about people not reading the lore files on games. Be the change and all.

I’m not trying to be testy here, but it is a bit of a logical fallacy to say “X doesn’t exist anymore, therefore comparisons between X and Y cannot be made, even if Y is a direct copy of X.” I never played on Arx and to my knowledge most of my friends didn’t play there, so no skin in the game with that specific comparison or what “how is it different from Arx” is intended to mean. Just noting that something can absolutely compare to something from the past.

Cortex Prime Evennia fantasy game?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m-MUz2Rihs

I like the use of the West Marches thing! If I have time I might swing by, though I’m historically pretty bad at sticking around Ares games.

If I don’t stop by, then I can’t make my “berem? I hardly know 'em” joke and it will just remain in my head to torment me

“The staff lost interest in this MUSH and let it fizzle out so play with them at this other one where that absolutely won’t happen again”

As a wise thinker once said: “There’s an old saying in Tennessee - I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on-- shame on you. Fool me, uh – you can’t get fooled again.”

I think we all know where we should go

edit: wow that’s a big image