@Trashcan said in Empire Discussion Thread:

I don’t know, man. The last game I was on, somebody was rude to staff and got banned for it right away, right after the game opened. That game went on to have over 4000 scenes, so it seemed to work out to me, and everyone was pretty chill in their dealings with staff after that, at least to my knowledge.

LOL I REMEMBER THIS PERSON.

For what it’s worth, this wasn’t a ‘first offense’ kind of banning, this person had been a nightmare to deal with in CG and been given a ‘second chance’ after they finally managed to take some feedback and get themselves in shape for approval.

That’s a case where it actually might’ve been better to just show this person the door before they got out of CG because that’s often less of a headache and waste of time for everyone involved if someone is giving off ‘bad fit’ signals, but you make your choices.

I think this is what a lot of these bannings for what appears to be ‘borderline’ behavior actually are. Staff take a lot of shit the player populace never sees.

I have no interest in this game and shall never be present upon it but my friend in Beelezebub I do not think this proves the point you think it does.

@Superbia said in Aegis Company Discussion:

ETA: I put up an Artificial Intelligence policy on our Policies page here: https://delphi.aresmush.com/wiki/general:policies It’s a little brusque at the moment but maybe I’m in my feelings a bit about it. Either way, it stands.

that’s something, thanks for addressing it in the new files

Presuming this was in good-faith:

Most readily the colonies write-ups
https://delphi.aresmush.com/wiki/setting:colonies

It’s kind of everywhere but those were what prompted the question.

But also like…does this game have an LLM-use policy anywhere?

@Superbia said in Aegis Company Discussion:

Hello! I have not used it except for helping me with errors on AresMUSH. However the theme and setting of the game was a collaborative effort, so I can’t speak for other folks (as much as I would like to, in this instance). Why do you ask?

Because some of it reads as LLM generated and there’s no apparent policy. This is important to me personally in picking a game in These Times.

Hey there @Superbia

To what degree was LLM used to develop the theme and setting of your game?

https://delphi.aresmush.com/

@Trashcan said in Historical Games Round 75:

Regardless, the expectation should be that a game clearly state on the tin exactly what unconscionable things might occur to your character in the course of play. Do not leave players to discover this through play. If my guy could be killed, say they could be killed. If they could be sexually assaulted, say they could be sexually assaulted. If they could be discriminated against, say they could be discriminated against and how it could look. Gritty Games are allowed. Please put the Narrative Facts on the side. I can choose if this is right for my diet.

I had a really good experience with a Social Contract on the last game I had any staff involvement in, mostly for expectation-setting. I never viewed it as a thing that flattened RP so much as one that set some baselines for what the world was and wasn’t. Players are, in my experience, often spotty on internalizing thematic realities that are even slightly different from their RL experience. Like, I spent a lot of time doing BSG RP back in the day. The amount of people who couldn’t wrap their brains OOC around the treatment of gender in the show and lack of sexism was…not incidental.

@Tez said in Historical Games Round 75:

I think maybe more isms should be included again and we’ve gone too far to remove them. It is possible to tell stories – good stories, fun stories – inside of that structure as long as people have full awareness of what they are engaging it and the chance to opt in or out. Let players play bad guys if they want, so that other players have something to play against.

It’s partially the cultural moment we’re in, for better or worse, but I think part of it is just the audience for historical games is small in the first place, and within that small audience the population of gamerunners is even smaller. I enjoyed straight historical games back in the day but they had like 10ish players. So, yeah, there’s an element of people not doing it that is people not wanting to deal with it, but it’s also just…a very small number of people who may or may not want to support a MUSH at any given time.

My first MUSH was the old Tales of Ta’veren Wheel of Time place. I’d dipped into some MUDs before that but they weren’t really RP places. My mind was blown by the pose command.

Another fine year, with the fine bears.

@Ashkuri said in Character Death:

Killing off your beloved character and making yourself and all your friends cry is some of the best fun you can have out here.

@somasatori
Nah, it’s understandable, it just comes up from time to time and sometimes it seems to be an actual misconception about how the game operated. I assume people equate PC death with PVP. The relatively quickie CG did make spinning up a new character less arduous, but you still had people who were so invested in their particular PC they quit after they died.

@Roz said in Factions:

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.

Oh, hey, TGG has been invoked. This was one of my favorite RP experiences (bolded for emphasis). Some players were mainly there for the combat, but there were also a handful of us who treated it liked Band of Brothers MUSH and that was very rewarding. I’d say the probability you’d lose your PC made certain little character moments more impactful, as did the short-run campaigns, yeah. The headwiz referred to it as a ‘game of two halves’ and I was always more into the RP half than the combat, though the combat was fun or I wouldn’t have played it.

It was also, and I think sometimes people who didn’t play it don’t get this, a purely PVE game. Everybody was a soldier in the same unit. There were no opposed factions in-play at a given time. It’s not really applicable to this conversation.

Man, Chunk had a broken jaw this season and still looks beautifully massive.

These bears

IT’S TIME IT’S TIME IT’S TIME

@Yam
MUDs absolutely suffered more from the rise of MMOs than more RP-centric games did. You CAN RP in WoW but it’s a real different experience than logging onto a MUSH and posing with other players. There are still players left because ultimately some hobbyists will always stick with Their Thing but you saw the impact more in that space than in MUSHes 15ish years ago.

I’m not a mini-game person so I’ve kinda stayed out of this thread. This kind of thing will never attract me to a game, it’ll either me an ‘oh that’s nice’ thing I engage with sometimes but appreciate being able to avoid, or a I think that just makes me nope the fuck out because, Not For Me! That’s OK.

So, grain of salt.

For me, the big question with all this stuff is, why aren’t you just playing a single-player video game or MMO to get your engagement fix? They do a lot of ‘mini-game’ things better. So, what’s the appeal, for a person into this sort of thing, of not just having that open on your secondary monitor? What does it add to an experience that’s unique to a MUSH?

ANSI art and object descing absolutely do this. While I didn’t do much with them personally, I always enjoyed seeing what people created, and it’s a unique form of creativity you can do on a telnet-based client you can’t do anywhere else.

I like journaling. I like vignettes. I got a surprising amount of RP out of writing IC poems of dubious quality. I do it for myself for character building if there’s no outlet to post it. Also I post it.

@Yam said in Strike Systems:

I’m inclined to agree. I’m curious if anyone has actually legitimately witnessed a fundamental change in someone with regards to MUSH behavior, perhaps due to some fallout, maybe in the form of banning or lost friends.

I’ve seen people change both for the better and, unfortunately, the worse. In the ‘better’ case it took years and major life changes, not any MU punishment.

@Jenn said in Strike Systems:

Like. If you’re one of those places with an activity requirement? Then yeah, some strikes are better than a perma-ban because someone’s kid got ill and they couldn’t make the one scene a week minimum. Aside - thank eff we got rid of that ish for the most part.

Getting banned for not meeting an activity requirement seems very extreme. What game did this happen on? Is it still up? I’d love to read this policy.