@Juniper I hear you. I do. But… a game where there’s danger around every corner that’ll get you if you slip up for a moment SHOULD make characters risk avoidant. The problem is that most games don’t provide a reward that is worth characters overcoming that risk avoidance. The flip side is the player that constantly throws caution to the wind because there’s never an outcome bad enough to stop them. Solo attack 20 ninjas? Sure. Why not? Oh no, I lost. But I just got knocked out. Oh well. Wake up and try it again tomorrow!

One of the things I’ve noticed is that when the above is true on a MU*, it negates a very strong reason for people to RP with other people. If you need others to accomplish goals it fuels RP and discussions and planning and IC collaboration. But if you can get everything on your own, why bother wasting your time with people outside your play group that might not be a perfect fit for what you want when you can get it on your own anyway if you just try it enough times???

A big difficulty with theme that gets overlooked is what is the MU* even about? Is it a game? Is it collaborative storytelling? Something in between? I’ve mentioned it before, but so many people show up to a MU* with their own notions of what this hobby is or what it should be or what it is supposed to be and most of those different ideas are conflicting.

So one person shows up for a game, another person shows up for collaborative storytelling experience and the MU* hasn’t been explicit and concrete in what it is supposed to be so when these two players encounter each other, they clash and problems begin between players instead of characters because the other person is a <insert insult here>. When really they just showed up to the same space for very different experiences. And these experiences range from game mechanic die-hards to the artistic wannabe novelists.

One type of player is there to play a game and they crunched the numbers and the game mechanics to perfectly engineer their character’s sheet to their liking and the dice rolls just ARE what they ARE and if someone dies, then they just DIE, even if its in the prep to a scene, instead of the actual scene. Too bad so sad. Go chargen again.

The other type wants full autonomy of their character and their writing and is insulted if you don’t understand that their writing is works of art and their IP and you need their permission to even look at it and only they dictate if anything bad ever happens to their characters. Ultimately, they just end up using the MU* to write fanfic for their characters and conning other people into reading it by pretending to MU*.

Obviously most people are not on these extremes, but most seem to be on one side or the other. And if you have both of these types on your MU* with no direction or expectation of what that site is supposed to be, there will be continuous clashes that fracture the stability of the player base on the MU*. We’ve all seen it multiple times before, I’m sure. A lot of it just comes down to setting expectations at the start.

So when it comes to the World Tone / Feeling, it is about more than just describing what you want. You have to set the expectations for players in multiple areas (theme, plots, mechanics, descriptions, HRs, policies, etc.) in a way that guides everything back to what the tone / feeling is supposed to be so that the way the MU* actually plays out organically stops players from hijacking that tone / feeling for their own purposes to make it what they want for themselves (intentionally or unintentionally). Pretty much every WoD MU* is a perfect example of how this goes wrong consistently.

@Raistlin To be fair, I think it started with the intent to have meaningful discussion. But it just devolved into hyperbolic rhetoric with all the name calling and shaming after a while. Sometimes people who “feel passionately” about a subject justify less-than-great actions with their emotions.

Maybe that’s most threads that go on long enough. But I do think it started with good intent.

@Tapewyrm said in The 3-Month Players:

Okay, then we’re talking about BarRP, by those terms, and the question then is: can BarRP alone sustain activity? Not in my personal experience or observation.

But even using such terms, what actually sets Social RP apart from BarRP, aside from the existence of a plot?

Meaning.

If the RP means something to one of the characters or the plot, then it is Social RP rather than just BarRP. And what is BarRP to you might be Social RP for another player, or even Plot RP and you might not even know it.

But you don’t always know the difference because 1) you aren’t in control of all the players so you don’t know what has meaning/value and what doesn’t and 2) you don’t always know what will come next for any of the characters. All you know (usually) is what it means to you and the enjoyment you get from it.

Just shooting the shit with someone in a bar because you’re filling time and waiting for plot or more meaningful RP can sometimes turn into something that creates meaning for your character or between the characters. This ‘nothing’ scene could actually be the very important meeting of two characters that end up saving the world! Now more often than not, this doesn’t happen, but sometimes it does turn out to be more important than it seemed at first, especially with follow up - which usually requires intent and interest on both sides to do so, which is why most times that doesn’t happen AND why BarRP doesn’t sustain a MU*. If the RP happening on a game doesn’t spur interest and/or intent, its doomed to fail.

Which, IMHO, is why Social RP can sustain a game, but BarRP can’t, even though they can seem very similar a lot.

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

@InkGolem said in AI Megathread:

I don’t think there is any harm.

Generative AI is harmful to artists. It’s harmful to the environment. It’s harmful to students. It’s harmful to teachers. It’s harmful to critical thinking.

I understand that most people don’t realize this, so I try not to hold a grudge against the people who use it “for fun”, but it’s really hard when it’s destroying so many good things.

ETA: I’m speaking specifically about the mainstream GenAI implementations. The underlying technology itself could (theoretically) be used for good. It just currently isn’t.

I don’t necessarily disagree…

I just think the same thing can be said for so many other things that exist in the modern world and are used constantly. Cars. Planes. Pharmaceuticals. Food. The list kind of goes on and on. We all still use them (if we can afford them). It just seems very -insert appropriate word here so no one is too offended, but you get my meaning- to drill down on this one thing. (Add drilling and oil to the list if you haven’t already…)

Admittedly, I haven’t looked too far down the rabbit hole but…

I get that one of the big objections it is trained on other people’s work… but isn’t everyone? What school teaches stuff that isn’t based on other peoples’ works? Haven’t artists looked at other people’s works and been influenced? It seems like the actual problem is just that it does it better, wider, and faster than a normal person can.

I’m certainly open to changing my opinion with more info, but the issue that it is just better at learning and reproducing than people… well I’m very ‘meh’ about it. I’m not a big fan of people to begin with and that’s where the problem is. People. Hunger could be easily erased. Diseases could be far more eradicated than they are. Look at COVID and how fast that was addressed when it was deemed necessary. If we did use what we have as a planet for good, things would be so much better in the world. But we don’t. Not to go too much into politics, but people in the US voted and look what is happening and remember that people voted for that - everything happening was campaign promised.

People complain that AI “steals” jobs. But it doesn’t. People do that. They use this tech the way they want, then they keep the profits for themselves. Until AI starts doing things itself without a person directing it to do so, I’m not going to blame it for what’s happening in the world, no more than I blame a car or a plane. The epi pen didn’t jack up its own price a bajillion percent. A person did that. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop using an epi-pen (unless I just can’t afford it). Its just an example, but you get my meaning, I’m sure.

Using AI to make my funtimes more fun, I don’t have a problem with that. I also know its just my opinion and I respect everyone else’s for what they want and believe.

@Pavel Sorry, I didn’t mean that part about you, specifically, though I should have been more clear about that cause I can see how it came off that way. You have your preferences, that’s fine. But I’ve definitely seen people on games be very shame-y towards OTHER people about it saying things like “people that use AI are…” “if you’re using AI, then you are…” and those kinds of phrases and phrasings.

Just saying, “I don’t want AI anywhere near me.” is, to me perfectly acceptable, because everyone is entitled to their opinion about what they want in their own RP, even if it is kinda harsh because that affects your fun, but it doesn’t make judgements on anyone else.

There definitely should be a section in the +finger categories about whether people want to RP with others who use it so no one gets triggered.

I’ve actually had a great time with AI and I’ve never been able to run so many PRPs and plots for so many people in such quick succession at such a high level thanks to AI and in an age of plot runners becoming an endangered species, I think this is a pretty useful lifeline - if used well.

Prompt engineering is a very necessary thing with LLMs if you are going to try to use them with RP to get ideas, develop dynamic NPCs, or branch out story or even character ideas. If you don’t know what prompt engineering is or how to do it well, your results may not be well received. If you just hop on a free LLM and tell it to write you a pose or write a background, it will scream “written by AI” and people may look at you sideways - which would be understandable.

@InkGolem I agree with that in principle. The problem, as Pavel illustrated, is that some people dislike AI on principle so they’re violently opposed to better writing because it was created with technology, so you can’t always tell if it will enhance it for your scene partner without asking. And with the way some people react to it, there’s this elitist/shaming quality people are espousing about using it that makes it risky to even ask.

Personally, I prefer better writing over shittier writing, but when it comes to RP, the writing isn’t nearly as important to me as the story. If the AI can help create better, more interesting story, bring it on. If its going off on weird tangents that aren’t in the flow of the story, which inexperienced AI users often do, then its horrid. I could care less if the AI is writing the poses or playing the whole damn character, I have 0 problem with fun, interesting character interactions regardless of the source. Its one of the reasons I don’t mind play -insert any fun video game here-.

But that’s just me. I show up to RP for the fun of playing my character without may restrictions on that. Other people show up for different reasons and everyone has fun in their own way. Some people want a connection to another person. Some people just want to know their effort and creativity are being respected, if not matched, by the person on the other end of the character bit. I get that. Everyone has their own thing.

Overall, though, I don’t view it much differently than I view most artificial things. I see it like plastic surgery. It can enhance things naturally and beautifully, but it can also be grotesque and wildly unnatural, depending on the artistry with which people use it. For me, I don’t mind it at all, but I proportionally dislike it the more I can tell it is artificial. If you are using AI, but I don’t know (or even if I’m just not sure), then you’re probably doing it right and we’re having a blast. But being able to use it that way is a skill, like anything else. Some people do it well and its awesome. Others do not and its awkward and uncomfortable.

@SqeakyClean said in MU Peeves Thread:

Internet friends are fake. Don’t ever trust them. (A lesson I keep having to learn.)

As it turns out, MOST internet friends are people. And people are the worst…

@Pavel said in Re: Dies Irae:

@Jynxbox Okay, I at least somewhat agree with the majority of what you’re saying, except that last part.

The game’s been open in beta for a handful of months, and the primary setting is San Diego. So that’s where the work should be done. Staff have previously indicated that they’d like to expand Tijuana at some point, but it’s not the primary focus of their efforts.

I think its more of an issue of what is considered “San Diego”. If you’re building out a city of just over 50k people 25 miles north of the city of San Diego, but ignoring the city of 2 million people 17 miles south… that can make some people feel some kind of way, especially with some of the cross-border themes and culturally-minded beliefs baked into the game. I do get that.

I’d prefer to believe, academically, that political borders and such can be the anchoring point for the decision, for sure. Focusing on San Diego County rather than the City of San Diego. Everyone seems to agree that there’s no malicious intent by the staff, so its no harm.

But I do agree that the proximity and size and political status does make for a big missed opportunity for a more interesting and dynamic game theme, especially in terms of sources of conflict and antagonists. It is tailor made for a MU. Not a BAD thing. Just a disappointing one.

BUT it isn’t one that’s completely wasted yet. I’d encourage them to really take a look at the opportunities there and in the future open it up like a DLC expansion pack with a full complement of themes and integration, not just some grid spaces. Dies Irae: TJ!

@Faraday said in The 3-Month Players:

People MU for all kinds of reasons.

This. There’s no one magic bullet to MU success, 3 month or otherwise. It takes a number of things. There are a lot of things to be handled to address all the many reasons people join a game, some of them mutually exclusive. It is a delicate balancing act. Not everyone can do it. Not everyone wants to do it. Some people want to and can do it, but not forever.

A lot of the games that get trashed often handled all this better than others. People tend to focus on their complaints about a game without acknowledging all the things done right and the reasons games keep going strong for years, despite the problems. I’ve been guilty of this as well, especially when it has affected me personally, negatively, or unfairly.

But it doesn’t take away from the fact that running a successful game is a daunting feat, however one defines success.

@spiriferida I prefer no dice when I play with people I know well. Otherwise, I prefer the dice because generally I don’t trust other people I don’t know to play in a way that keeps it fun for everyone.

@Jumpscare TL;DR

Still love it!

@Artemis It could be that no one is going to try to live up to Arx. Everything else might just be a lackluster comparison. I never played there but I heard people talk about it for years.

@Gashlycrumb said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:

@MisterBoring

Yep. I dislike the sphere system because (among other things) it makes it super easy to let this happen. Frankly, it regularly happens within spheres anyway – the magical tank vs phone call thing really happened, though my character was actually taking a forty-five minute bus ride, not making a phone call. The tank-builder was in the same sphere as I, same GM, it was just, eh, indifference to the issue, or favouritism. It was not actually as frustrating as spending five RL weeks waiting for twenty IC minutes to pass while the staffer I needed to tell me what happened in those twenty minutes was having weekly adventure and daily sphere-baRP with their PC.

It kinda blows me away that gamerunners don’t all acknowledge the timeliness problem and have a stated course of action to deal with it. In my long experience, if you want to lose friends over an RPG the easiest way is to SKIP SOMEBODY’S TURN A LOT. That’s pretty much the simplest way to be a shitty GM. (If you want to really guarantee that friendships’ death, skip their turn a lot and then have a hissy fit when they point out how unfair and shitty it is.)

An aside, I wish we’d all get over the idea that MU staffing is volunteerism. Yeah, sure, it’s voluntary. But volunteerism implies community service. And okay, yeah, sort of, technically, but also, no. GMs are players playing a different role in the game. Yeah, we need them or we can’t play, but. Weellllll. You need a pitcher to play baseball, but you can play without a left fielder if you must. This does not make the pitcher a volunteer whose services you must constantly applaud and the left fielder a mere player who owes the pitcher. (For the same reason, gamerunners and players should all remember that GMs are players too, and they, too, should be having fun.)

It sounds like your bad experiences with MU staffing have soured you on staffers and their value. But don’t let your bad experiences with bad staffers blind distract from the importance staffing has on the hobby or the value in the service they’re offering the community. If anything, your bad experiences should show you just how valuable staffing is and how damaging it can be to have someone stepping into that role who won’t/can’t do it well. They should show you why good staffers should be applauded whenever they can be. Because good staffing is invaluable, even though many people take it for granted and are happy to sour on all of it because of the bad apples.

I thought I was relatively safe in California, but I was very wrong. Watching Trump operate unchecked following the Project 2025 playbook has been a surreal horror.

@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:

@L-B-Heuschkel That’s a great set up for that kind of play. I’ve mentally filed that kind of thing under ‘Stargate games’, and I think it can work VERY well for games set up for it.

I’ve tried similar things on games I’ve run, although less as a literal portal to other universes structure and more as in there is a homebase and people can go out and run missions on other planets. (Because my bias was scifi rather than fantasy. You could call them portal games too!) The idea being that the distance should empower people to freely do what they like. I think Spirit Lake played with the portal thing too.

The problem I’ve run into is that players don’t necessarily feel that it connects back to the metaplot if there aren’t changes to the homebase region or overall story. Is that just out of the scope for your game?

Respectfully, IMHO, that’s because that example doesn’t really sound like a metaplot. That just sounds like a setting. Stargate’s setting was that there were portals to other universes and the team could go through them and do stuff. You can run a bunch of scenes off of that setting and have a bunch of fun with it, but that’s not a metaplot. Plots in general usually have a conflict (a problem that drives the story forward) and causality (where one thing affects another). Stargate’s metaplot was some action being done by individuals (or forces) over a larger span of time (usually over a season, or multiple seasons which makes it “meta”) that affected things in the universe (causality): like a rebellion forming across multiple worlds to take down Apophis and be free (I’m actually not a Stargate fan, so don’t quote me on accuracy here). The main characters would sometimes be involved with that or sometimes not, same as on a game, sometimes players can have stories involved in the metaplot, sometimes not.

If the metaplot can’t be affected by the players in any meaningful way (or at least work towards being able to affect it), that’s not a metaplot (usually). Its just a setting.

@Roadspike has a great example with The Fifth World. That’s a metaplot. A thing is happening in the game over a long(er) period of time. Characters can be involved in it or do things not involved with it directly. But the thing is happening and the characters can touch that story, but not enough to shut it down right away or overtake it until they’ve built up a good amount of momentum. Some players want to be involved, others not. But a metaplot tells a larger story that’s happening besides the day to day.

A metaplot can sometimes change the setting. I personally think a good metaplot WILL change the setting, even if it is in minor ways.

Players can ignore the metaplot, but not the setting. If the setting changes because of the metaplot, that’s just the game.

Aside from that, players grumbling about the metaplot and setting and changes are a different beast, though. People are unhappy for a variety of reasons on staff and player side that just have to do with people being people and the limitations of MU*s.

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

My problem with backgrounds is that I constantly do the thing where I put all the interesting bits of a character’s life in the background, and leave very little room for interesting stuff to happen on the game.

I don’t think that’s only your problem. Its a problem built into the system that you have to self correct for. You’re told to make a background and usually told that you have to justify your stats. So you come up with whatever ridiculousness you need to to justify the stats, then after approval, you’re not actually allowed to do half the interesting stuff that was approved in your background for various reasons, many of which are completely valid. So you end up in this weird twilight zone of having this very cool character who will not likely accomplish anything near as interesting as what you had in your head. As a result there’s more than a few people who have made characters they really liked, but then have done little to nothing with them before fading out completely.

@Kestrel said in MU Peeves Thread:

I don’t think we shouldn’t describe stuff. I just think we should only describe stuff that matters, when it matters.

It’s the Chekhov’s Gun principle. If it’s not going to go off in the second act, it doesn’t need a paragraph describing it in the first.

I agree completely, which is why I hate writing backgrounds now - when they are mandatory. All things being equal, I’d love writing a background for a character, but when I know that every letter I type is one more letter that is going to be ignored by staff it just kills it for me. But on games where a full background isn’t necessary or only a few bullet points are necessary, I will usually write out the full background all on my own and enjoy the process.

That said, I also don’t hate AI the way so many other people seem to, as long as it is used well. Everyone shows up to the hobby for different reasons and that has a lot to do with why different people feel certain ways about it. And I would love if people kept an open mind to the fact that not everyone shows up for the same reasons as they do. When people don’t do that, I guess that would be one of my MU peeves.

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Third-Eye I wonder how long it’ll be before staff start requiring people defend their applications like one does with a dissertation, just to weed out those who wrote their backgrounds with an LLM.

This is what they get for still having people write out backgrounds that will never again have relevance once the app is approved.

It doesn’t really sound like drama so much as same ol’, same ol’ gripes that a lot of players have on games.

The only thing that adds fuel to the fire is the fact that they just ripped the post down like they had a secret to hide.

Nothing says ‘don’t let all the people in the secret sandbox learn that there are others with the exact same complaints’ like suddenly removing a player’s post on a public board and then announcing ‘Nothing to see here, folks.’

@Meg said in Inuki Ban Thread:

i agree we can get a little echo chamber-y here, but calling this place an echo chamber in a thread where we’re literally disagreeing and arguing with each other is always the funniest thing to me.

I didn’t mean the place as a whole is an echo chamber. Like you said, it can get that way some times. This was one of those times. And not in this thread, but the other one. Everyone pretty much agreed in that thread that Inuki=blech…

So to log onto anything, including a thread where everyone is in virtually unanimous agreement of how bad you are can, like you said, get a little echo chamber-y. Especially in a thread that she popped into to say ‘hey, I didn’t bother you guys, please leave me and my game alone’ (not that anyone has to comply with that) But that has to be hard to take for anyone, regardless if its warranted or not.

Again, I didn’t disagree that she shouldn’t be here. Just not for that comment.

@hellfrog said in Inuki Ban Thread:

@Warma-Sheen said in Inuki Ban Thread:

If the experience of someone here is such that it brings them to empathize with people who have taken that drastic action, is the best reaction to boot them?

Yeah. It is when the ‘experience here’ is being reminded of their own words and actions, and the sympathy is displayed to make people stop talking about their own words and actions. Go read Thirdeye’s post if this is a real question of yours.

It was a real question and still is. I don’t completely know for myself what the answer to that is. I did read the post you mentioned. I just didn’t agree that just because the ‘s’ word was mentioned, that it is a nuclear bomb that shuts down conversation or that it can’t be responded to. I think if you really believed that was real, booting them and isolating them is doing way more harm than good. And if you don’t know if its real that’s what having a conversation is good for, even if it is in the form of a warning.

I think people show up to these forums in war paint with weapons drawn, ready to draw blood. That certainly happened here with at least one poster. So no one should be that surprised when blood is spilled. Even the worst of people can crumble under their weight of their own actions.

I think its fine that people get called out on their bad behavior, good if they recognize their mistakes, better if they change it. Everyone seemed to agree that she has a history of bad behavior, so why wouldn’t she start to feel the pressure of it when it all immediately gets thrown back in her face whenever she shows her face? If I had said those things, I would be feeling pretty shitty too.

I think what it comes down to was that I took her comments at face value and others thought it was just a manipulation tactic. I can see it from both sides.

And I recognize the staff had a tough call to make and it could have gone either way. They made the call they did and I’m sure it was the best call they could make with the information that was available to them.