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

On a WoD game I played a dockhand (or harbormaster? I can’t remember) who was a changing breed oceanborn spinner dolphin. So I heavily researched the area surrounding the fictional town, and made a map of basins and banks.

They’re as rare as coders these days, but still! Are there any minigames you’ve played with, within the mush setting, that really stuck out to you? That you found engaging but not too distracting? Maybe a better world would be narrative mechanic.

I’m talking about like… perhaps animal breeding or crafting perfume or modeling an outfit. Some of this might bleed into MUDs but I understand there was some kind of hunting system in Firan. I guess oyster shucking would count?

@Tez 1 strike for you, expires in 4 minutes.

@Muscle-Car said in RPing with Nobody:

They’d get real miserable and start adding editorial in their own posts like “because she is not needed.”

Encountered this. They added aggressive meta and moodily (ICly) sulked on the lawn to pluck blades of grass, like an unhappy grade schooler.

@somasatori said in Strike Systems:

@Jumpscare said in Strike Systems:

Some people can change. Others can’t.

Man, at this point I’m willing to believe that we’re all pretty firmly set in our behavioral ways when it comes to MUSHing and would argue that most, if not all, people in the hobby will resist changing.

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.

@L-B-Heuschkel Yeah, for me what comes to mind is RPI muds. I recall having to salute my captain on channel every time I logged in. It was just in the rules. I signed up for those rules. I can also sign up for enforced engagement (I think?) but the reasoning intrigues me.

I’d basically like someone to explain to me why having a truly, TRULY neutral player who generally RPs with 1-2 people is a NET LOSS to a game. I’d argue that this is even better than a solo player who just lurks. For THAT, you could make the case that they’re just farming XP or something, but personally I wouldn’t care. From what I can understand, ya’ll want a No Dead Weight policy, which seems like it’s usually applied to staffers.

If they are doing anything that somehow reaches you and informs you that they hate the theme and the setting sucks and everyone else sucks, that’s a player problem, not an engagement problem. As ever, it always comes back to the player problem.

I think we can all agree that it is perfectly acceptable for staff to create their own rules. I’m just trying to figure out why games might think a player engaging in this specific manner is a net loss, like they’re somehow taking up a slot that someone else more engaging would be utilizing.

@Trashcan I think player policies (rules) is different different from your version of player engagement, which you haven’t actually defined. I’d like to hear the cold hard requirements that you might expect from players and how you plan to enforce them. Hypothetically.

And if what you’re truly talking about is Wrong Fit… I mean, that’s it’s own discussion!

@Faraday

When I join a game, I’m not signing up for any sort of responsibility to the greater good of that game, nor do I expect that of any players that join a game I’m running.

I agree but I think this is a really interesting topic. We talk about what people expect of staffers a lot, but what about the average expectation of players? I’d like to know if there are more folk that think that if you app into their game, you’d better get your ass out of your room with your pal(s) and dig into the plot.

Personally I could not be happier when I see a few folks on my games kinda’ doing their own thing, being chill, not causing issues. Less overhead for me, and someone’s enjoying themselves in a framework I built. I would rather have them than not have them!

@Tez lmao OK I’m probably shouting into the void yes. GUYS isn’t it nuts we did a 3 strike system??? Maybe it’s from the change of very large games to very small, personal games, idk.

Genuinely curious if the 3 strike system genuinely benefitted the health of any game. As in a system where each strike was a warning and the warnings expired. I witnessed the application of this long ago and all it did was drag a really bad situation out for months, which ultimately ended in a perm ban anyway.

Also curious about peoples thoughts on temp bans and their effectiveness.