@Ashkuri

I’m glum about a circumstance that I can’t really talk about with anyone and it’s just one of those things where I wish I had some no-judgment RP therapist to vent at. I feel dumb about it, but then also angry and hurt and offended and sad and scared/anxious. The answer is to walk away, but I don’t want to walk away. Meh. I’ll get over it.

Please enjoy my boy Casper!

@Ashkuri People love talking about their character, even if their character might only respond with mysterious grunts. So if the opportunity arises, I generally guide the RP in that direction. MORE QUESTIONS. It’s fun to learn about interesting characters!

Also comedy. I try to hold the idiot ball often, it’s usually pretty fun.

ALSO, setting OTHER characters up to kick some ass and shine.

DID SOMEONE SAY WHALES

When I lived in Florida I’d have to cross a bridge across a bay to work and occasionally I would see dolphins. I couldn’t take pictures because I was driving very fast with traffic HOWEVER I have recreated the experience to fully immerse you.

A while ago I was in an event scene with someone that could not string sentences together to save his life. No real regard for capitalization or punctuation, but he was able to communicate what he was going for. Sure I’d prefer something more polished, but his character was amusing, and he rolled with the punches. He wasn’t boring. He was real. He was genuine. It was clear to me because every word he managed to type at us, no matter how mangled, was something from his own mind. I’m not really sure what my point is. I don’t really know how to explain that it’s important, at least to me, to know that the word you’ve included in your pose was something you chose, you settled on.

I know of another player that was pretty fast and loose with punctuation, and happened to be… pretty boring. They came to an event I was running and we had a minor little poetry contest. A poet character came up with a sweet and snappy haiku. Then, noticing positive reactions, fast-and-loose belted out an 8 stanza rhyming poem in 3 minutes, perfectly formatted, entirely different from that player’s writing style. I was baffled at first. It did not cross my mind that someone would’ve gone out of their way to generate something like that for a silly poetry contest. The stakes could not be lower.

I guess I want to know what people mean by improving their poses. Making them longer. Filling in the gaps? Do you simply give the LLM a prompt like “respond posing my character takes off his coat and goes into the kitchen to make something”? Is it more detailed than that? Simpler?

I know this is gonna’ be hard to believe for some folk, but you can actually have a game of relatively decent people that, even on their off days, won’t be particularly rude or pushy directly to the game runners. It might not be a BIG game, but from what I gather, it doesn’t look like most staffers want to staff big games anyway.

@Faraday There is a human that’s in charge of disinviting people to games. If the human uses their human brain to use a tool to confirm if someone is using AI, based on the results AND their intuition, I don’t know, I think that’s fairly solid. If a human decides to just scan everyone and everything and determine to boot them off their game based on those results…

Like. Okay? If I get banned that way, I don’t want to be on that game anyway? If I go to BMD to whine about it I’d blame staffing decisions. The issue is false negatives, not false positives. At least, that has been our experience running games within the last 5 years.

This thread is about AI in poses. I think detectors are appropriate in this particular environment where human writing really, really matters.

I TOTALLY understand the impulse to have clear, hard lines about this kind of thing. I don’t like arbitrary rules AT ALL. I worry about slippery slopes. But we’re here to write human written lines at each other. This is what it’s all about! This is the CORE of our hobby. If we don’t push back against this with EVERY weapon we have, we might end up RPing with robots. Which people have! It doesn’t feel great!

I’m confused. Is genAI a fun, harmless tool to be more efficient at creating art, or is it the catalyst for the race to the bottom, a “painful and violent” future for humanity? I feel like the original argument deviated a bit.

I do kinda’ feel like… as a hobby, we need a masterclass on how to take a hint through text.

For me, I look for enthusiasm and actual action. I give someone time to reach out to me. All it takes is a few instances of someone reaching out for me to understand that this person does indeed want to hang.

If I reach out and get a response, but it’s very lukewarm and they don’t actually follow up, or offer very little assistance in the way of actually planning a scene, I take the hint. Saves us both the trouble. I’ll ask twice, generally, and see if there’s any connection there, but no more.

If NO ONE engages with me after I put in some moderate effort to be fun and friendly on channels and offer to run scenes or Do A Thing, then I tend to write off the crowd as not a good fit for me and move on.

@Ominous I think the very nature of large, multi paragraph posts (presumably with actions beyond fluff within them) doesn’t quite lend itself to the kind of flowing granular exchange most RP interaction needs.

In my experience with novella, at least in the recent years, what happens is people don’t want to wait another week for their turn, so they pack as much as they possibly can into a post, interacting with other characters and then presuming vague responses, so you get a kind of backed up out-of-order situation. If people play on the safer side, they opt to do a bunch of thought-posing, which I think is actually something that at least part of the crowd appreciates or is pleased with, in style of “Yay someone is thinking about my character”.

I’m unsure how it was decades ago, but at least presently, there is no controlling a portion of the scene. JUST your character. I got pretty severe responses when I indicated another character may be able to see some headlights or something entirely innocent like that, something to just move the scene along.

I’m actually unaware of any RP setting in which you are basically writing a book together and you aren’t controlling your character. This is the first I’ve heard of it. @Faraday is Storium something like that?

@RightMeow said in Does Anyone Even Care?:

Leaving just tends to be that I respect they can run the game how they see fit and I respect myself to know when it won’t work out for me.

An understated fundamental skill. Anyone that knows how to do this is the real MVP.

Ash and I were just talking about this! He’s RIDE OR DIE and I’m… not sure. I try to stick as long as I can, but what generally happens is the staff burns out. I have finished all of the private games I’ve personally run, but been staff on games that wrapped due to general disinterest or weariness.

Someone mentioned their Discord RP involving people all posing in with their novella intros and then moving on to the next story which totally aligns with how we see a 3 month introduction bubble on new games in the MUSH world. I think people chase that high for a bit and can coast on it even if the core concept doesn’t really resonate with them. But eventually the new car smell wears off and your friends dip and you have to contend with a question: Would you have joined this game if your pals didn’t? Does anything here really pique you enough for you to keep putting in effort?

If I’m a player I don’t really make a personal vow of commitment. I’m just feeling it out, see if anything interests me. If I start building relationships, sure, I’d like to see where they end up, but as I was telling Ash, I’m so bad with goodbyes, and I struggle deeply with sorrow, and if I’m activated, the idea of all this fun shit ENDING is very troubling to me, so I don’t even think about it. Let the waves of eventual disinterest wash over me. I guess that’s sad in its own way.

Ah the annual rediscovery of the change location button

@Trashcan said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

‘Create a Scene’ and fill out the fields, which you will need to do anyway to share it and it’s clunky to do them all from the client.

The power of web UI cannot be overstated. If you want to start a game and you want it to have a forum, working mail, working pages, play screen, events, scene system, modular profile fields, a wiki, literally all of the QoL features that apparently all of these other platforms fail to package into the core code… you go to Ares. It is a game in a box and there is a one click install mode.

I realize there are still tinymux islands out there, traditional moos, etc, but I gather most of this forum is or has been on at least one Ares game. Who would win, a stack of text syntax you have to dig up from the help file to fill out a bunch of fields, or one webpage input field boy.

I’ve run 3 ares games. I set up a grid, people go through the grid to get a feel for it, then permanently retreat to web scene system. I cannot remember the last time I started a scene on the grid. What would happen on Shattered is that I’d log into the client to do a combat scene from the grid because it was easier than working with the combat UI (I think? I never looked into the combat UI too hard), but then I’d also have the web scene open too just in case I missed a pose. And then I’d also have the combat UI open anyway! Three interfaces!

@KarmaBum said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

I just really don’t like random social fluff.

I know this is off topic but this is not the first time I’ve seen someone mention that they only do a specific kind of RP, and I’m curious about what makes something random social fluff. What’s your definition? Every scene must have a plot related throughline? And has it been effective?

I gotta say, I’m so surprised that it’s async=action but live=social, I would’ve thought the opposite. Most of the async scenes I’ve seen appear to be like… ongoing social. I know that there are async events at times and THAT one puzzles me, because when I’m running events, I have to be “on” mentally, like, ready and prepared to work with what the players are dishing out or attempting, and if I have to be that level of attentive over the span of a week, I think my brain would melt.

@lucidmaus said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

I need the slight pressure of time - and the tight focus on a single scenario - to wrap a scene, rather than let it shamble on into inconclusive perpetuity.

Saaame. Absolutely need that pressure, else it just becomes me trying to fill paragraphs with fluff. I noticed the big novella style RPers on discord doing a lot of meta posing, crafting thoughts about other characters that those characters can’t respond to, and this is either very very popular or very not. I gather that style is more about the writing part than the collaborative part of collaborative writing.

@Faraday Makes sense. I didn’t include distracted because to me that’s just like “hey I want to angle for live/standard but I’m at work, you okay with delays longer than maybe 15 mins” but it ultimately finishes within a day. USUALLY. I was trying to keep it platform agnostic, although I realize we’re all a bunch of mushers and ares facilitates a new pace within this niche environment, even if this pace has existed in forums since forever.

Curious how many people resolve their workslow/distracted scenes within a day.

I see more async scenes than distracted, spanning weeks.

THIS IS A NO JUDGMENT ZONE