@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.

@Faraday I think these war stories are profoundly important to relay, because it’s pretty easy to discuss approaches in abstract, but when you’re down there in the trenches, you see how things unfold in ways that are difficult to predict, and you’re there in the crossfire feeling the heat of just how bad things can get.

That heat fades after a while and people may forget the details. We don’t need to wonder too much when there are actual cases. Players can have good experiences, but staff might be sitting there shell-shocked about it, and that should be a factor considering we generally need staff to run games.

@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.

Aight so we can’t use tools to check, and we can’t use our guts to check, and we apparently can’t use both to check. What the fuck do we do, lie back and think of England? Hope for structural change in society? Assume the doofus that wrote like a chimpanzee 1 pose ago mustered the will and intelligence to get their shit together for this poetry contest?

@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

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.

Has ANYONE gotten banned, not suspected, BANNED, for use of LLM in poses/profiles/etc when they HAVEN’T used it?

This is the only thing that concerns me. I’m a FOOL and was tricked by at least 1 AI app that slipped through. Sorry to catzilla for having to RP with this ai person for a week I recall you lamenting.

@Tez Oh my GOD how dare you compliment me SO STEALTHILY by @ing me

AND THE PPL THAT UPDOOTED YOU

I LOVE YOU ALL im cry ;_;

I love comedy in RP. A lot of my friends are fucking great at it and I am 100% shamelessly biased. My favorite kind of RP comedy is the kind where it’s not just amusing, it’s side-splitting hilarious and it affects YOU as the PLAYER so now you get to channel that mirth AUTHENTICALLY through your character.

There have been multiple times where I’ve posed my character trying to resume the flow of the scene but then having to continue laughing in the middle of it because I was still cracking up. Shout out to @ham @sao and @Pyrephox

Naturally, @Tez is amazing at it too. I haven’t played too much with @tsar but I STILL remember how amused I was when Erik came to patch up Gil’s broken nose. scar has been absolutely killing me.