@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.

This has been insightful. Thanks gang!

@catzilla Is there tea or is this just general vibes

For the sake of finding or shaping tools for the mechanic here, let’s assume that a hypothetical game has enough players that warrant occasional large meeting scenes that people might get real cranky about missing, or that some people may even look forward to.

It’s true, you don’t need to show up. But some people want to. Naturally bbpost updates are a good idea in general. The whole concept of larger factional scenes or even events could potentially be its own thread.

Table talk! Places! Mechanics where if you go to an event, you can slip into one of these locations/items/settings and have your local conversation contained in some way, whether it blocks out the rest of the scene chatter from other locations except purposeful text from the GM, or it simply applies a label to make it clear text is coming from your specific location… or maybe there’s a different variant you’ve seen?

I want to know what you’ve encountered, what works for you, what doesn’t, etc.

@Trashcan Damn! 75% of all scenes. I wish I could dig this data up on my old ares games.

@KarmaBum said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

@Yam said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

I definitely agree with this, which is why I’m always baffled about why people declare no bar RP/no social fluff.

Hm. Are you equally baffled by people who declare no smut? Or no lords and ladies?

Nope, that doesn’t confuse me at all. The subject matter there is crystal clear, whereas what counts as plot versus… well, anything else seems hard to pin down. What if the characters briefly talk about some vague plot related thing and then decide to go drinking? Like, I’m trying to figure out where the line is. What’s the threshold for the right amount of plot? I feel like I’m missing something.

@Wizz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

there are a lot of people who are just bad at this period

I definitely agree with this, which is why I’m always baffled about why people declare no bar RP/no social fluff. All RP has the capacity to be bad (or GREAT). I can trust @Ashkuri to make mail sorting somehow entertaining, heart-wrenching, and character development rich.

I suppose in the end there are MANY factors that feed into “good” or “bad” RP… but that nuance is too confusing to talk about. <<; Or maybe just less fun to talk about.

Lol man, I really tried hard to craft an intro that didn’t imply ares was the sole creator of async. Forums existed! It’s just that this setting firmly didn’t permit it, or at least much of it, and now it does, and that does have an effect in some manner.

I MUSH because this is one of those few places that I can find live RP that’s not MMO. The way that I had to beg people to give me a single paragraph of detail in MMO RP, instead of just pure dialog… Like, they wanted to RP with me! But I had these pesky conditions. I need meat!

But I’m not blind to the future, and Discord is full of async/long format style RPing. This is clearly what most younger (and some older) RPers want. If you sense any rankling, it’s because someone’s favored style may be dying, which means less people to RP with. It’s the nature of the game.

@Ominous I think the very nature of large, multi paragraph posts (presumably with actions beyond fluff within them) doesn’t quite lend itself to the kind of flowing granular exchange most RP interaction needs.

In my experience with novella, at least in the recent years, what happens is people don’t want to wait another week for their turn, so they pack as much as they possibly can into a post, interacting with other characters and then presuming vague responses, so you get a kind of backed up out-of-order situation. If people play on the safer side, they opt to do a bunch of thought-posing, which I think is actually something that at least part of the crowd appreciates or is pleased with, in style of “Yay someone is thinking about my character”.

I’m unsure how it was decades ago, but at least presently, there is no controlling a portion of the scene. JUST your character. I got pretty severe responses when I indicated another character may be able to see some headlights or something entirely innocent like that, something to just move the scene along.

I’m actually unaware of any RP setting in which you are basically writing a book together and you aren’t controlling your character. This is the first I’ve heard of it. @Faraday is Storium something like that?

@RightMeow said in Does Anyone Even Care?:

Leaving just tends to be that I respect they can run the game how they see fit and I respect myself to know when it won’t work out for me.

An understated fundamental skill. Anyone that knows how to do this is the real MVP.