@KarmaBum Eh. I know how it is. You can run an event every hour, 24 hours a day, and some people will still only do BarP for all their interactions while complaining that there is nothing to do.

I think that there are a lot of MU* players out there that have very specific unmet interests. Most MU* players have been playing the game for a while now and know exactly what they want. A new game comes along that sounds close grabs their interest, they give it a shot, it doesn’t check all their boxes, and they move on.

@MisterBoring I have also been wondering about this recently. This thread and my partner watching a lot of reality TV series like the Bachelor(ette), the Mole, Million Dollar Secret, and also a bit of Bridgerton have combined with me recently playing Fire Emblem and Unicorn Overlord with their harem anime elements and my constant desire to run a lord and ladies game, resulting in the crazy idea of doing a parody lord and ladies MU*.

At first I was going to call it Pretty Princess Simulator, but maybe The Courtship of the Crown Prince might be better. Basically every season will start with that generation’s crown prince having his debut and all the eligible noblewomen of the land coming to try to woo him into marriage, using their wits, wiles, political connections, etc. to do so. At the end of the season, the best noblewoman (or nobleman, maybe we will have a gay crown prince or a crown princess every so many seasons to mix things up) will win. All of the kingdom’s politics, wars, natural disasters, regime changes, economic swings, etc. will take place in the background during the intervening years. Every season will have a crown prince with a different personality, tastes, hobbies, etc and the noblewomen will need to figure them out and try to use them to their advantage to snag the future queenship. Hopefully the time skips between seasons changing the world would be enough of a change to bring the bubble players back to try again with a new season.

@KarmaBum said in The 3-Month Players:

@Ominous this idea sounds neat but what will people RP?

Blatantly ripping off @Roadspike 's template:

Woo the crown prince of the kingdom with wits, wiles, or wyrdings in this fantasy setting. Characters will be trying to find out what they can about the prince, use that to their advantage, and try to thwart the efforts of others in getting closer to the prince. They will attend balls, gossip amongst themselves, participate in duels, attend events to showcase their brilliance to the royal family, and plot against one another.

Pretty Princess Simulator is a game of romantic intrigue and politicking in a fantasy renaissance setting. Players might be eligible noblewomen trying to win the future queenship, the family members of those noblewomen working to help them, servants of those noblewomen or of the royal palace, or a small cadre of the prince’s friends, tutors, and personal staff who hold the secrets to the prince’s heart.

All characters will belong to one of the many noble families of the kingdom or their servants. You will be endeavoring to get your one of the eligible noblewomen in your house selected as the bride to the crown prince or you will be one of the prince’s inner circle working to achieve a personal secret agenda. The first month will be the arrival of the eligible noblewomen to the royal palace leading up to the crown prince’s debut. The next few months will be filled with varying events to attend and make oneself known, leading up to the crown prince’s final selection and marriage.

But yeah probably a lot of BarP. Unless the royal family goes full reality show and has the eligible noblewomen participating in ridiculous contests. And, since this idea started as a parody of L&L, that might actually be the route to go in.

@RedRocket This speaks to my OSR D&D gaming heart.

@Tapewyrm You’ve got to have some crunch somewhere for the social RP fluff to be based on. How can we bemoan the ongoing war with the orcs, if there is no battles in the background? How can we gossip about the King divorcing the past Queen and marrying some nobody from a backwater house if that doesn’t happen? Meringue topped with marshmallow fluff topped with whipped cream is sweet but not very filling. You can’t make a good dessert with just that. You’ve got to have some substance under it all.

@sao You’re a doctor! Not a MU* player.

@Juniper said in AI Megathread:

People call this “hallucination”. I think we should stop letting them assign a new name to an existing phenomenon. The LLM is malfunctioning.

No, it is not. What the AI spits out is meaningless to the AI. It just spits out what the most likely next set of words are based on the input it received and what it has already given. For it to malfunction, it needs to start writing sentences devoid of grammar. As long as what it writes is grammatically correct and a somewhat rational statement, it has succeeded

It is saying things that are wrong.

Yes, but factually accurate answers are not the purpose. Grammatically correct sentences are.

It is failing to do what it was designed to do.

No. It is doing exactly what it is designed to do. It’s failing at doing what entrepreneurs, marketers, and other PT Barnum snake oil salespeople want the public to think it can do.

EDIT: To actually contribute something to the thread, about the only thing I am willing to use AI on for MU purposes is played-bys and maybe creating images on the wiki for the various venues on the grid. I have grown tired of seeing Jason Momoa as the image for Seksylonewulf McRiptabs #247.

EDIT 2: Typoes.

@bear_necessities Well, it’s not all about wooing the CP. These are more decisions made by the Imperial Family. The CP just gets a say. So there are other individuals to be making your case to. Also the fighting over who gets to sit next to the CP at dinner, who gets to dance with them at the ball, etc. is part of the competition. Perhaps there might be leaderboards for the differing events to show who currently has what spot at what event. Want to move up the ranks at the banquet? Better start schmoozing up the staff member in charge of the seating arrangements for that event or maybe try the Empress or the Chamberlain. Have you ever played the card game Love Letter? That, only more detailed and with more roleplaying.

EDIT: I forgot that that review of the card game does a poor job of explaining the fluff of the game. The idea is that whatever character you have in your hand is the member of the court you have convinced to take your letter to the Princess. When you draw a card you can either choose for the character who currently has your letter to pass it off to the new character, enacted by playing the character you had in your hand and holding onto the new character, or use your influence with the new character to have them do something to help you, enacted by playing that character. It an abstract game about using your influence at court to win the heart of the Princess.

EDIT 2: Also one person won’t play the CP. It’s going to rotate amongst staff, so hopefully no one gets too exhausted being the focus at any event they attend.

@Raistlin said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

1: Players who are willing to have characters that “lose” in these political games and who’ll accept consequences. It should still lead to engaging and imaginative RP but, in my experience, most people just want to “win” and don’t like being on the other side.

I have a solution to that, but it always gets waved away - any character can be played by any player. When you log on, there’s a list of characters available, and you select who you want to play that day. Then there’s less connection between one player to one character, and any given character “losing” isn’t going to be devastating to that player.

@Faraday Getting a computer as close to passing the Turing Test than any other computer has managed before. That’s about it.

@Raistlin @Warma-Sheen
I also think it’s a trust issue, and a trust issue that is almost entirely in the “you just have to trust me” category. Just like trusting the person on the other side of the screen isn’t a stalker who keeps changing their identity so they can chargen a new character to interact with you or trusting that people you are having a private scene with or worse TSing aren’t sharing those logs with their friends to laugh at your writing, there isn’t a way to outright protect yourself and verify that it isn’t happening. It’s too easy for the other person to obfuscate. So instead of allowing for grey area, people have to make it a firm black or white issue, because if there is grey area, when you catch someone, it becomes a whole ordeal figuring out if what they did was wrong. When it’s black and white, there doesn’t have to be any time spent on nuance.

@Faraday Getting a computer as close to passing the Turing Test than any other computer has managed before. That’s about it.

@Juniper said in AI Megathread:

People call this “hallucination”. I think we should stop letting them assign a new name to an existing phenomenon. The LLM is malfunctioning.

No, it is not. What the AI spits out is meaningless to the AI. It just spits out what the most likely next set of words are based on the input it received and what it has already given. For it to malfunction, it needs to start writing sentences devoid of grammar. As long as what it writes is grammatically correct and a somewhat rational statement, it has succeeded

It is saying things that are wrong.

Yes, but factually accurate answers are not the purpose. Grammatically correct sentences are.

It is failing to do what it was designed to do.

No. It is doing exactly what it is designed to do. It’s failing at doing what entrepreneurs, marketers, and other PT Barnum snake oil salespeople want the public to think it can do.

EDIT: To actually contribute something to the thread, about the only thing I am willing to use AI on for MU purposes is played-bys and maybe creating images on the wiki for the various venues on the grid. I have grown tired of seeing Jason Momoa as the image for Seksylonewulf McRiptabs #247.

EDIT 2: Typoes.

@Pavel Soooo, I haven’t been on any MU*s for like half a decade. Are…are people doing that? That seems…pointless. “Hey, let’s play basketball. But instead of us, let’s have robots play against each other while we do something else.” Writing is the whole point

@RedRocket said in The 3-Month Players:

The same thing is true of people who hang out in bars just to hook up for TS. Why are you on a roleplay game with a complicated combat and stat system when you could just go to one of many games where you can literally be anything and bang anything you can imagine.

Some people like plot with their porn or porn with their plot. Romance novels sell better than Hustlers. DeepThroat, the highest grossing pornographic film, made $22.6 million inflation adjusted at the box office; Fifty Shades of Gray grossed $569 million. Sure, you could log onto Shang, find a willing partner, and hammer out your best IKEA instructions for Peg A going into Slot B with gusto, but where’s the flirting, the foreplay, the slow simmer, the romance?

For those of you that think the RH only route is a bad idea, which of the other options that I presented sounded better and why? Or if none of them sounded good, what is your proposal for the premise of the server?

@sao You’re a doctor! Not a MU* player.

@DrQuinn said in Pretty Princess Simulator:

@Ominous It still seems like you’re setting it up so that people are going to mob staff NPCs and that’s going to put what sounds like burnout pressure on them. And then there’s favoritism and times people can’t get on to meet up with a staff NPC and and and…

But as @KarmaBum always says: what are people going to RP? Because it sounds like everyone is just going to be fighting for I Talk To The NPC tonight. And that’s going to get really old really fast if you have more than like 5 people playing. Will there be bonuses for people who just chat/fight during the down times ala the Bachelor/ette? Or does this sort of thing favor the person who only logs on for events, gets the NPCs ear, then logs off so nothing can stick to them?

Like this seems great for a small group of friend running a sandbox, but looks like it will fall apart the minute you get more than 10 people.

Talking to the NPC isn’t going to get you much unless you have something notable to offer. It’s like Regular Joe knocking on the President’s door (somehow he keeps getting past the Secret Service) and asking him for help on a traffic ticket every day. The goal is to stand out and one-up the others in the day to day and at the events. Wear the best dress to the ball, challenge people to friendly duels and win, demonstrate largesse to the common folk by opening an orphanage, do something notable. Just chatting to the NPCs over and over again is just going to annoy them and get the character written off as…well…annoying.

@DrQuinn Fluff-wise, the RH wouldn’t be picking in a vacuum. It’s more the Imperial Family picking with the RH having some say. Mechanically, the plan is to make it 90% algorithm and 10% staff weighing in

@Pavel Apologies, I did not know that was a common abbreviation. RH for royal heir?