@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.

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

That said I would personally avoid any formalised ‘welcome wagon’ team. Purely due to experiences in the past where bad actors have used such a “thankless” and “honoured” position to act badly and draw people in to unhealthy cliques or harems. Formalising the role can also lead to burn out and frustration, especially as we remember that most of us are in our early-to-mid soon-to-be-deads and we don’t have time to sit and work out the roster for who’s sitting at the park gate to welcome the newbies this week.

Having been a person who was in a ‘welcome wagon’ role both formally in that it was a thing my staff-bit position was supposed to do, and informally, there is nothing that kills a person’s desire to RP broadly and inclusively than turning it into a clock-punch gig. This is how you make staffers or active players who do this naturally turtle up or quit.

@MisterBoring said in AI In Poses:

I could reasonably see imposter syndrome being just as much of a cause for jumping to ChatGPT for posing. I know I struggle with imposter syndrome regularly, and when I make a 2 line pose that describes my characters actions and dialogue in only the most basic terms, I honestly wonder if I shouldn’t just quit for being abjectly bad in comparison to some of the excellent prose I see my scene partners producing.

I’ve said my piece of my dislike of what LLMs generate (what they are doing is not writing) on a qualitative level before so it didn’t seem necessary to say it again. It also gets into matters of taste that are whatever, if someone loves playing with ChatGPT that ain’t my business. But, I assure you, there are some of us out there who would much rather play with a real person whose writing wasn’t the best than try to read purple autocomplete nonsense.

ETA: This gets back to the original peeve that restarted this conversation. If a game allows or doesn’t care about players or staffers using LLM-generated content, then whatever, my problems with it become Me Problems rather than the game’s problems and I’m probably just in the wrong place. But it seems like it’d head off a lot of problems if people doing it said they were doing it so people who didn’t like it/weren’t comfortable with it didn’t have to waste their time

@RightMeow said in MU Peeves Thread:

I don’t know why, but I find that both sad and completely hilarious.

There are a couple times I’ve gotten an LLM to almost 90% replicate what someone has ‘posed’ or ‘written’ (LLM’d) on a MUSH by using a prompt that was more or less asking for the same thing. It is, indeed, both hilarious and maddening.

@catzilla
A hilarious amount of That Guy’s hatred of PBs feels tied up in ‘I associated with Emma Stone at a barbecue once and she told me how much she hated people using her likeness’. Which I kinda love because I’m a person who lives in Phoenix, and people developing a whole personality around one association they had with Emma Stone (she went to high school in a 'burb of the Metro area) is kind of a meme for a certain person in the late 30s/early 40s demographic who came up here.

@catzilla
This is another one that doesn’t really read like Ghost’s MO to me, unless he’s decided to change his personality for like the fifth time. He also never had an issue with PVE games, whatever one can say about his other annoying qualities. But I’ve been wrong before.

@Gashlycrumb
Aww man I LOVED the Dead Bob show (there’s a pretty big Ren Faire near me and it was always a stop once a year). I’m glad it lives on, I suspect the new guy will get into a groove with it.