@Ashkuri

Peeve, the (bad) public chat comedian. Everything is a fumbled attempt at a joke and a convo killer. We are nothing but a captive audience to them, and they refuse to engage with players in any way that doesn’t center around them.

If you’re gonna’ go up there with a mic at least be funny, aaaaa.

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.

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.

Peeve, the (bad) public chat comedian. Everything is a fumbled attempt at a joke and a convo killer. We are nothing but a captive audience to them, and they refuse to engage with players in any way that doesn’t center around them.

If you’re gonna’ go up there with a mic at least be funny, aaaaa.

MANNERS, PPL! ETIQUETTE! AAAAA

There are various perspectives and experiences here and I think it’s swinging from big ol’ lawless crunchy traditional games where poor sportsmanship may be rampant, to ares games where by default you’re under 3 layers of thicc limits.

I got all spun up and ready to fite against bank limits and cooldowns but it looks like almost everyone agrees that it’s a silly system. Welp.

A few years ago I was so desperate to run an ares CoD game for my pals that I went the google sheets route. I think I had it so they’d be locked or versioned or something.

Then coder pal went ahead and coded an entire CoD plugin so I ended up pivoting away from this idea. It would’ve been a lot of work managing everything like this, but hey, it’s possible! The sheets were styled from some free resources, then altered so that they handled the formulas.

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

performance critiques

WHAT

Has anyone seen a system that effectively incentivizes players to run things for other players?

I ask because my pals have mused on these kinds of systems but my only perspective is like… I run scenes because I want to run them. Extra XP or perks don’t really factor in for me.

Maybe a better question… have incentives encouraged you to run scenes when you normally wouldn’t?

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

everyone just keeps waiting on someone else to Do Something, and when everyone is waiting around, no one does anything, and the staff can’t keep up with constant demands to Do Stuff so they get burned out and yeah.

This is why I really admire both the tabletop GMs and mush GMs that are able to carry a story to completion. Like, goddamn, you guys are so powerful.

I think smaller, punchier games benefit from having a set lifespan. Think of the lifespan of all those Discord RP groups out there. So many unfinished threads…

Twice now I’ve seen someone ragequit on ares via… attempting to blank their profile. Like delete all photos and then try to leave the fields empty. Then individually leave channels.

I guess on a web-based platform you can’t really slam the door as easily.

ETA: I’ve also heard stories of folk going in to edit other peoples’ wiki pages to scrub their character OUT. Which reminds me of another story about a banned person Old Transformers Game threatening to send some kind of DMCA over their own uploads.