Definitely craving something in the horror-adjacent urban fantasy space - CoD, Unknown Armies, Curseborne, anything like that would be great.

My forever-want is gaslamp fantasy with a real sense of Victorian authenticity. Not necessarily “perfectly historically accurate”, but made by someone who understands what the social conflicts of the era were for the place they’re setting it, and has a real reason to set a game in THIS place and THIS time, with supernatural/fantasy elements that really lean into it. Spiritualism, for example – hell, something set in the Burned Over District would be great fun.

hello it’s me, once a minor who snuck onto games the entire time i was a teenager. Wanted to say, to be perfectly honest, it wasn’t the sex stuff or weird people hitting on me that did emotional damage, it was bullying/dogpiling/smear campaigns etc as @kestrel noted in their post. I’m also going to say the uncomfy thing that having roleplay as an intimate/sexual outlet at that age was formative, in a healthy way. I maybe unique in this; I can definitely imagine less outspoken underage ppl being hurt or traumatized by feeling backed into a corner by intimate rp. As an adult now, I less regret what I did more than I wish I’d been able to explore those things with fellow teenagers through the writing medium. I would feel very uncomfortable and betrayed if I found out someone I was roleplaying with like that was underage, and I shouldn’t have deceived people that way.
Anyway, pretty sure the best games can do is label themselves 18+ and maybe have a little agreement to sign like people mentioned. Also don’t be like fucking IRE that’s 13+ but has pests literally trawling newbie areas for sex with no administrative backlash, im not bitter.

@hellfrog The people who truly do change aren’t going around saying ‘hey, I was SOECentipede from Hello Kitty MU! I used to be terrible but now I’m great!’

instead they have probably either left the hobby like Pavel said or are truly such a changed person that they keep their head down, RP, have fun, and maybe make a friend or two like the rest of us.

This Verge article is very on point for this:

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/967630/dave-eggers-openai-chatgpt-silencing-an-entire-generation

We got word that kiddo’s parents appeal was denied. I am happy but also… so freaking sad. And mad? Like, how the hell can her parents not move mountains to get this amazing little girl (and her equally amazing siblings) back? She is my whole world right now. I love her beyond words. I can not wait to have her open to adopt so she know she will have a stable home for absolutely forever. I don’t care we still have times where she hits and kicks me. That is trauma and why we have family and individual therapy.

I also found out I owe my sister-in-law. Husband comes from a dysfunctional family. His father was a casualty of the opioid epidemic, and they went through a ton because of it. He never believed he could be a father which led to his reluctance to start this process. She sat him down and said that he could have me and get on the boat of fostering, or I would find some other way without him. He got on board and now he and kiddo have the best bond. She adores him and they giggle and play.

So peeve, that I’m still mad at parents, but also joy because I get to be in this girl’s life.

@Imagicka I’m sure @Jihgfed will eventually chime in, but it was not cancelled! About 25 people showed up to his in person presentation!

@Artemis I think lots of people want to talk about that. The community-entity makes it rough.

Like, eh. Sometimes I read Elizabeth George mysteries. I adore Barbara Havers and actively dislike(d) Inspector Linley. I enjoyed disliking him and used to want bad things to happen to him. When the worst thing ever happened to him, I felt guilty about it, and I have a new set of feelings about Linley.

If something like that happened on a MU, I’d have to be damned careful who I talked to about it. I’d fear that Linley’s player and/or friends thereof would equate me disliking Linley in the first place to me saying that Linley’s a bad character, and the player not just a bad player but a bad person.

And if it was public, people with no connection to that story at all would pop up to tell me that my level of emotional investment in the game is unhealthy, and that I should quit. This feels bad.

I say that games-of-emotional-regulation are part of why RPGs and fiction in general exist, and we should support the feels a lot more.

Sam Niell

@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.

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

Going to have to check this out.

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.

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.

@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.

@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.

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

@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.

@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.