These Age of Heroes people are never going to own up to lying, failing to credit where credit is due, or using AI to steal other people’s work. However it’s pretty uncool behavior in this small community, it is obvious behavior in this small community, it is rude, and it is shady.

Reminder to all of this very poor etiquette in our small community, lest it get buried under someone defending this poor, poor Chaucer fellow.

@Artemis I think you’re in good company, even if that’s not something people like to talk about.

@Juniper said in Neon Protocol:

The elephant in the room is how Neon Protocol straight up looks like a scenario in AI dungeon. I was immediately repelled by it.

This – aside from terrible AI in general, the aesthetic is very jarring with the NEON colors juxtaposed with the “small town farmer’s market flyer” sort of AI slop.

I get that it’s trying for small town supernatural but definitely missing that mark. Also I get that not everyone’s an artist or adept at PhotoShop but we existed for decades without it on Mu*s, we don’t need it now.

@tsar said in Staff Bits Linking Handles:

@bear_necessities said in Staff Bits Linking Handles:

ETA: I would also play anything @tsar made so long as it’s Janitor: the MUSH. I’m still waiting @tsar

We were janitors once!! And you threw it all away!!!

…wasn’t that literally the job

sorry I have nothing to contribute, I just couldn’t leave that one be.

@Coin said in Freeform or Systems?:

That’s why any game I run promotes joint narrative storytelling; Batman doesn’t become a joke because everyone works to make Batman be Batman. I also typically do not allow villains and any PvP is strictly plot-dependent.

100%. And that’s why my personal feeling is to rely on filtering rather than stats. A player who barges through a scene flexing will usually reign it in after a quiet conversation with them explaining the issue. The ones that don’t rapidly find that nobody wants to play with them.

@Jumpscare The short-desc stuff is what I was meaning. I forgot to elaborate my thought in the previous post, but that’s exactly how it worked in a few of the RPIs I played.

@Raistlin Writing code for an even moderately complex RPG system really hammers home the lesson that not having a robust data structure design before starting on anything else is a recipe for pain.

@Pavel Okay, so I didn’t invent her presence on that one whole cloth. Whew.

Going to have to check this out.

Sam Niell

@Ominous said in When is the last time you played?:

To find out how the story resolves? Just because everyone knows all the details of a setting doesn’t mean they know how it plays out.

Quite. If the PCs have agency you can’t know how the story will resolve because you don’t know what they will do.

It’s not a ‘I don’t care because I already how will things play out’ issue, it’s a potential-cheating issue. Like how we had to make up new monsters for our HS D&D campaign because one player would read the Monstrous Compendium and then somehow his character knew the weaknesses of every monster.

If the PCs don’t have agency and are just watching NPCs and weather cause events to unfold, then yeah, they will lose interest if they know what’s going to happen by reading the game lore pages. But they will probably lose interest without reading the lore pages, too, because they probably think reading novels is a lot less frustrating than RPing as a character who is utterly incapable of affecting the world, and that if all you can do is watch, most published novelists produce better stories than most MUSH STs.

I don’t play M&M but I also won’t pretend this isn’t impressive as hell. Great job!

@RightMeow said in Real life happy:

As my return to school isn’t a big deal to anyone in my actual life, I just wanted to share because I can. I am about halfway through my estimated timetable on my degree. I am double majoring with 18 credit semesters while working management for 40+ hours. I’m in accelerated courses to achieve the goal faster. I just got my certificates to say that I have again maintained my dean list holding that I’ve had the whole time and a merit award for taking part in the student insight committee.

That is all. I return you back to the game opens, closes, and dramas.

Thank you for reading.

From someone who was also an adult student carrying a full-time course load while working a full-time job for something like seven years over two degrees:

What you’re doing is incredibly hard. Anyone who doesn’t think it’s a big deal doesn’t know what they’re talking about. You should be enormously proud of yourself.

imagine, if you will, the end: our hobby falls into Dead Internet Theory territory and eventually it’s all just LLMs endlessly baRPing.

alt text

@Jihgfed Yay, glad it went well! Thanks for spreading the word about the hobby!

@Jihgfed
Greetings…

Did you have the event cancelled on you?
I happened upon the event listed on Toronto.com, but it was taken down later, thinking that it was cancelled.

Imagicka

My father lived in Rome for about eight months once, but he’ll complain at restaurants if the pasta is not overcooked.

Our latest plot has wrapped up! The wingleader of the rogue dragonriders was killed in battle.

fiery shitsplosion.jpg

The ambitious goldrider behind it all has been defeated and imprisoned while her dragon waits to lay her eggs. The Weyrs are still navigating the sustainability and resource-sink of this arrangement, as well as how exactly they want to hold her and her supporters accountable. (There already aren’t enough dragons, and the rest of the world does need them to survive.)

The next leg of our rogue dragonrider plot begins to kick off in August, and the next hatchings are slated for early July and mid-August. For anybody on the fence, it’s a good low pressure time to ease into the theme.