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!

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’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.

@Livia Lol yes, please. Modern Chronicles of Darkness, and some extra nudging where people get some kind of in-the-know token so not every scene outside your sphere involves tedious tiptoeing around secrets in a collaborative storytelling environment.

I’m far, far more interested in PVE than anything else. I try to avoid political games. I guess I like a bit of what Tez described? Hopepunk? The world is shitty but we’re trying anyway. Trying to stick to mood here… desperation. That team stuff that Jenn mentioned is pretty appealing. FRENSHIP. Nuanced development in characters. I guess this really depends on your players.

@Tat In stretches between games run by friends, I search for RP servers in Discord via Disboard. I’m in a few major RP server advertisement hubs. I would say about 90% of the RP I find on Discord centers around async RP. To me it’s rare to find live/active RP, mostly because a lot of these are run by younger folk who believe the pose length indicates literacy and quality of RP, so people feel pressure to make massive posts padded with meaningless thought meta and fluff.

So much of the RP on Discord is async that threads die out contantly. Story seldom moves forward unless you find pockets of very active, very speedy RPers.

When I say async I’m talking about days between poses. Which either works for people or doesn’t, but I do think MUSHes gear towards quicker, 2-3 hour scenes as opposed to week/month-long scenes. I had to dip on a Discord RP recently because one person took a solid month to pose.

• Stability
• Stability
• Stability
• Responsive staff
• Access to metaplot is nice but not all that necessary so long as I’m permitted to run my own stuff
• Not a huge fan of secrecy/player occlusion or whatever it’s called, I prefer everyone being on the same page oocly (for important things, anyway)
• My friends also happen to be there which is not a thing that a MU can control of course, just a factor to keep me around longer
• Solid, interesting theme
• Did I mention stability? I lose motivation real quick when I notice staff starting to fade off

@Gashlycrumb

ChaosMUCK. SANIC THE HEDGHEG!!! As a young starryeyed idiot, the concept of feature characters was new and insane and extremely exciting, even if MU*s were intimidating. I may as well have been RPing (poorly) with THE REAL ACTUAL SONIC. FC Sonic RPer, if you’re out there, thank you for being kind and patient and cool to someone who could barely string sentences together.

@somasatori At that point it should’ve been pulled out the IC realm and dealt with it like it was player problem. I think the… GTA RP server people call it failRP? << Sometimes people do such wacky shit that it cannot be resolved ICly. There’s a threshold of “oh, I see, this is not RP related at all”. You wouldn’t punish a player like this by killing their character. You’d punish a player like this by banning them.

@catzilla WHAT

@Ashkuri I really can’t think of any. Is non-consensual permadeath actually a thing anymore?

Curious if anyone has actually seen a PC death play out where the player certainly didn’t intend to die AND didn’t consent to being in a situation that warned the risk.

Someone explain pern to me in 1 sentence.

@helvetica The menchies!!!

I wonder how this plays out in oWoD games where these factions are absolutely enemies. From what I gather, that’s what the layer of secrecy is for. You just have to live with the possibility that it all might go to shit if people find out. Maybe that’s part of the thrill.

My only experience, as stated, was punchy campy Transformers games. And they managed factions just fine. I think people more or less accepted that things wouldn’t always be fair, and the enjoyment they got out of doing flashy signature moves outweighed most negative vibes. The only dramatic ooc blow ups I recall were purely player-based over staff decisions, rather than anyone getting upset that Megatron and his gang got away with stealing a national monument or something.

Settings where there are adversarial factions! Perhaps more than 2! Where have you seen this done elegantly? What made it work? Was it baked into the theme, or just a byproduct of having more character type selections?

Is it a fundamentally flawed approach in modern MUSHing? Can it be managed in a properly collaborative environment? Does it depend on a carefully curated playerbase?

I’m not quite talking about PVP, because in my mind, this is something that involves narrative clashing but no one generally gets KILLED. Plus I see PVP as kind of separate from adversarial factions.

Like in Transformers 2005 and TFU, it was kind of built into the theme to do punchy coded beat-em-ups very often that resulted in no death.

I’m gathering that this person might be what some people would grudgingly call a Bad Fit, which is generally a summary of someone being kind of a bummer to be around, or exhausting, or non-collaborative, or just straight up rude. There’s usually some list of smallish slights (as shown above) rather than some kind of wild, explosive crashout on pub chan (to my dismay). General Bad Behavior that you don’t want on your game.

Of course… there may be hot spicy deetz we’re not privy to. You really have to be a certain something to get barred from multiple games.

@Tez This does kind of make me wonder what MUD players get out of it, lol. I mean I imagine they’re trying to replicate MMOs. Or, well, they were the proto MMOs I guess. I see that people still play them! At least on r/MUD