Concordia Thread

[Prospero]

@Rinel said in Concordia Thread:

It’s a bummer, but it won’t drive me away from the game by itself. I’m here to play with other humans. Folks using AI for their roleplay is a total dealbreaker, of course.

Waaaaay back in the day (we’re talking late 90s) there was an AI experiment being run by a PhD student in Canada where he was training an AI to MUSH. After having “her” play a character on a couple, he started up his own Star Trek MUSH to have a more controlled environment, but never told any of the players.

I remember being shocked when I found out, because I had no idea (I wonder if I looked back now, knowing how ChatGPT and such works, if it’d be better able to do a Turing Test) and never would have suspected.

Probably not as shocked as the guy who was TSing “her” on the regular, though.

(I only dodged that bullet because apparently I wasn’t even interesting enough to get an AI to TS with me back then. Talk about a hit to the ol’ ego.)

[bored]

You can definitely improve your work by providing GPT with the text you have written, which will serve as the input for the editing process. (Requisite ‘I had ChatGPT edit my post for me’ joke. In this case, I let it fix absurdly bad grammar. Input: “Edit this into better language please: you can for sure get GPT to make some good edit on your work if you give it them things you did wrote first as what goes inside!”)

While the ChatGPT interface is designed for chatbot-style exchange, the underlying model (GPT-3/4) still involves feeding inputs through functions with parameters to generate a given output. You can give it anything for a prompt and ask for any length of output (or let it decide how much to give you), and you can control, in numerical terms, how much the input and output are correlated. If you set it to discard all but the most likely probabilities, you can get something that will resemble your initial text very closely (or exactly). Thus, while it isn’t going word by word or sentence by sentence and fixing things, it is instead creating a ‘novel’ text that may be 99% similar to the original.

This is easier to demonstrate with image generating AI, as they can operate with a text prompt or with another image. So you can ask for a dog, or you can give it a dog and ask it for a 95% similar dog. This is useful in photo editing as a blend pass on what would have previously been ‘obvious shops.’ But the idea is pretty much the same.

[Vulgar Boy]

@hellfrog said in Concordia Thread:

@Coin I’ve asked it to 'edit" some text blocks and all it does is paraphrase or rephrase. Granted, I wasn’t asking it to change things to a british spelling.

Either way, I don’t think someone is bad or even wrong for using it to generate IC text for their game, I just don’t want to engage. So transparency is the ask.

It really depends on what you’re after in terms of editing.

Even that’s not very good. It barely even mentions the bear!

I haven’t tried to have it do any grammatical editing: since my grammar is spotless. Maybe it’s good for that?

[Cobalt]

Can I get a tl;dr for those of us too depressed to read back a hundred or so pages?

[bear_necessities]

@Cobalt tl;dr summary
L&L games bad
L&L games good
AI art bad
AI art good
dont use chatgpt for poses
but is ok for descs maybe

[Cobalt]

@bear_necessities perf, ty

[bear_necessities]

@Cobalt oh i forgot
is ok to ban w/o giving reason bc you shouldn’t have to have people on your game that you don’t like
unless it’s someone i want a reason for, in which case you better give me a 3 paragraph post w/ proof

[Tez]

@bear_necessities ChatGPT could never replace these summaries.

[bear_necessities]

@Tez jokes on you, I am an AI generated person to begin with!!!

[Cobalt]

@bear_necessities said in Concordia Thread:

@Cobalt tl;dr summary
dont use chatgpt for poses
but is ok for descs maybe

I am guilty of using it for character desc’s because I hate character descs.

[Tributary]

@Cobalt said in Concordia Thread:

@bear_necessities said in Concordia Thread:

@Cobalt tl;dr summary
dont use chatgpt for poses
but is ok for descs maybe

I am guilty of using it for character desc’s because I hate character descs.

I suppose that’s more reliable than making me write your character descs because I’m prone to forgetting if I’m busy when you ask me.

[Evilgrayson]

@mietze said in Concordia Thread:

I love the fact there are no huge disparities, really. Everyone’s of roughly same social class. you see a little whisper of that with the distant bloodline people but I really REALLY hope that staff never tries to do a hard disparity in class. I have literally never seen that be sustainable long term on a game and it just seems to set up so many OOC resentments and fights I personally hope they keep it out of their scope of game. I really love that an org belongs to all its members. my experience on Arx is that while yes, all orgs on paper had to have multiple people in leadership, in practice and just by fiat it often fell solely to one person just because of rotating rerostering or life or whatever. Even worse, sometimes people would try to gatekeep each other sometimes between leadership pcs ICly and OOCly which was…not good. when it was bad, it was so so bad.

Where everyone’s a Prince or Princess, though, there’s a whole slew of things that just can’t be RP’d about. You can’t have someone ennobled in play if everyone’s already a noble, and there’s a whole slew of potential conflict just… missing.

A lack of disparity in class makes everything feel shallower, to me at least. But then I’m one of those players who thrives on IC conflict, so having it removed wholesale just makes the world feel flat.

If everyone’s a Prince, no-one’s a Prince.

[dvoraen]

@Evilgrayson said in Concordia Thread:

@mietze said in Concordia Thread:

I love the fact there are no huge disparities, really. Everyone’s of roughly same social class. you see a little whisper of that with the distant bloodline people but I really REALLY hope that staff never tries to do a hard disparity in class. I have literally never seen that be sustainable long term on a game and it just seems to set up so many OOC resentments and fights I personally hope they keep it out of their scope of game. I really love that an org belongs to all its members. my experience on Arx is that while yes, all orgs on paper had to have multiple people in leadership, in practice and just by fiat it often fell solely to one person just because of rotating rerostering or life or whatever. Even worse, sometimes people would try to gatekeep each other sometimes between leadership pcs ICly and OOCly which was…not good. when it was bad, it was so so bad.

Where everyone’s a Prince or Princess, though, there’s a whole slew of things that just can’t be RP’d about. You can’t have someone ennobled in play if everyone’s already a noble, and there’s a whole slew of potential conflict just… missing.

A lack of disparity in class makes everything feel shallower, to me at least. But then I’m one of those players who thrives on IC conflict, so having it removed wholesale just makes the world feel flat.

If everyone’s a Prince, no-one’s a Prince.

A bit of a peanut gallery comment on my part, but there is (at least?) one OC character that was ennobled by marriage that was approved, so. There’s that.

[Aria]

@Evilgrayson said in Concordia Thread:

@mietze said in Concordia Thread:

I love the fact there are no huge disparities, really. Everyone’s of roughly same social class. you see a little whisper of that with the distant bloodline people but I really REALLY hope that staff never tries to do a hard disparity in class. I have literally never seen that be sustainable long term on a game and it just seems to set up so many OOC resentments and fights I personally hope they keep it out of their scope of game. I really love that an org belongs to all its members. my experience on Arx is that while yes, all orgs on paper had to have multiple people in leadership, in practice and just by fiat it often fell solely to one person just because of rotating rerostering or life or whatever. Even worse, sometimes people would try to gatekeep each other sometimes between leadership pcs ICly and OOCly which was…not good. when it was bad, it was so so bad.

Where everyone’s a Prince or Princess, though, there’s a whole slew of things that just can’t be RP’d about. You can’t have someone ennobled in play if everyone’s already a noble, and there’s a whole slew of potential conflict just… missing.

A lack of disparity in class makes everything feel shallower, to me at least. But then I’m one of those players who thrives on IC conflict, so having it removed wholesale just makes the world feel flat.

If everyone’s a Prince, no-one’s a Prince.

I’m of two minds on this. Personally, I wouldn’t mind a little bit more variety in social rank for the sake of variation, especially if it were balanced out by other things…

“Well, yes, that House is a Duchy, but their power is all in the past. The real powers in the south are Count JohnDoe, who has more money than half the continent combined and Marquessa SallySmith, whose has the largest army we’ve seen in a generation and holds our border against the biggest rift we’ve seen since the Genesis Rift.”

That said, I’m also someone who spent actual literal real life years slowly grinding my way from “County that has stats that don’t technicaly qualify as a County” to “March that’s closer to Duchy than not in everything except Area” on Arx. And not just because this seemed like the goal everyone was supposed to want, but specifically so I wouldn’t have to deal with a single intolerable asshole of a player that was in my fealty chain and who took advantage of that while bullying me and a few other people.

Not having whatever luck of the draw rando that apps into a roster decide they’re my boss and that they want to be a jerk about it, no matter how may theme files said “that’s not how this works, that’s not how any of this is supposed to work”, is kind of… nice?

[Polk]

@Aria The model you want, in my opinion, is the Holy Roman Empire. A bunch of Kingdoms, Principalities, Archbishoprics, Bishoprics… and lots of other things that all had representation in the Reichstag.

Kings were more important than Princes, but a King of one Kingdom couldn’t order around a Prince of another Principality.

[SpaceKhomeini]

In terms of “What can we do with fantastic feudalism:”

Something that would evoke a twinge of familiarity while being “new and novel” to probably the majority of players would be something that was modelled after, say, the Parthian (or Sassanid but they kinda became a bit more dickish after endless beef with Rome) empires.

Frank Herbert toyed with this a little bit in Dune but mainly (IMO, I am happily proven wrong) limited such dabbling to terminology and flavor text.

[Polk]

@SpaceKhomeini Oooh yeah Dune’s was interesting. Sort of a post-Magna Carta-ish Feudal system. The Emperor was sovereign, but the Houses of the Landsraad had rights.

[mietze]

@Evilgrayson that’s nice in thought, but it’s rare that staff attention can fully flesh out to support a huge scope of classes. my experience playing a non-noble was that nobles pushed themselves into everything, or when they couldn’t they made it so unpleasant with complaints or just straight up being oocly rude that it was offputting, and there weren’t enough non-nobles to not have to engage with those folks. that’s been the case with pretty much EVERY feudal style game I’ve played (so like…5 or 6. Not a huge amount spread out over 20+ years). And on the last feudal game i played it was a real downer every time someone got promoted to the next rank to hear all the stupid ass catty comments and complaints ooc (including ye olde standard well they just fucked the right person and i didn’t see them do anything even though I don’t RP outside my circle so obviously it didn’t happen.

People are still going to be rude assholes no matter what. But I’m actually kind of excited to see the class tension storylines already in motion might actually get to play out instead of being nerfed like they have been on several other places. I think that’s easier to do when you aren’t trying to support a wide scope of PCs where you are going to run into PvP conflict between different classes of pcs where there is a huge power differential.

[somasatori]

coughs Fading Suns coughs

[Aria]

@Polk said in Concordia Thread:

@Aria The model you want, in my opinion, is the Holy Roman Empire. A bunch of Kingdoms, Principalities, Archbishoprics, Bishoprics… and lots of other things that all had representation in the Reichstag.

Kings were more important than Princes, but a King of one Kingdom couldn’t order around a Prince of another Principality.

I mean, I guess so, but not specifically? What I actually want is the ability to opt in to conflict that I enjoy and that all the players are on board with and find fun, not have it dropped on my head by some rando who has anger issues and confused “I picked this character off a roster” with “I have proven myself as a leader and earned this position”.

If setting adjustments can fix or even alleviate that, cool! Great! I fully support that or even just attempts at reducing that! I’m pretty sure that’s what they are attempting to do with the relatively flat structures and titles on Concordia.

More likely the only way to guarantee people won’t get away with behaving that way is the people who are actually in charge (by which I mean staff) going, “Hey, fuckface. Would you knock it off?”, though that isn’t particularly pleasant for anyone, either.