New Mexico represent

Masquerade was set in Albuquerque. When I went, I was able to navigate a little based on what I remembered from the MUSH, lol.

@Snackness When you’re done making my character for me can you code my game for me? My idea is so good I just need a coder

@Gashlycrumb said in Historical Games Round 75:

The tabletop game I’m running has all these historical -isms

A TTRPG works for historical games for the same reasons a private MUSH would, it’s a known quantity of like-minded people. A public MUSH is a different animal.

@Gashlycrumb said in Missed Settings:

Really, Westerns seem like a very easy setting to run.

There are a few historical -isms to navigate in those

I have bad experiences with “the -isms” on games. Some of those experiences still make me very sad and very angry OOC, years later. What happened to me in the name of “theme” was wrong, and it sucked.

But on a broader view than that: Books and movies can and do tell stories about these social injustices and those who overcome them, as they should. But a MU is not a book/movie. A MU does not have a single author/filmmaker viewpoint, a MU’s content cannot be completely verified or monitored. A MU is about many narratives and many interpretations, for better and worse.

Player A might be great at writing a powerful and nuanced struggle, but Player B might be mid and Player C is reductive and fetishy about it. Public games are not made of just Player As. Everyone has at least once run into some well-meaning person out there who is RPing the world’s worst representation of an oppressed minority.

These stories need to be told. Is a Public MU* the best medium in which to tell them and give them the care and nuance that they deserve? I don’t know that it is. Private, maybe.

@Tez YEAH YOU BETTER

@Aria said in Missed Settings:

The thing is, the first person that I brought the idea to was like, “But what about the racism, Aria?!”

This comment made me go and read through this thread about MU* historical accuracy again. I guess some players find it disruptive to delete The -Isms from a historical setting, some find it disruptive not to delete that, and (like your friend and yourself) these types don’t easily mesh together.

@somasatori that is my point, though. It’s not upfront until AI starts really being asked about. In your own snip there, Catzilla is thinking you didn’t use AI based on the content of your previous posts. It’s not clear.

AI is a personal choice. You can use it or not. It’s just good to be clear about its use.

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

this is sort of where it comes from, being honest. I hadn’t taken the time to figure it out and Claude said it would be fine

Okay

Why did you lead off with this then?

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

From what I’ve heard other people say, and based on what was said behind my back, all I did was boil a bunch of water and churn toxic sludge out of an AI data center.

If you want to use Claude the AI, good. If you learned a lot with your experiences using Claude the AI, good. Just be honest about it upfront. These tea sipping winkyface comments early in the thread land awkwardly when there was demonstrably a major problem with AI that had a major impact on everyone’s experience with the game.

Don’t wait for someone else to have to ask into it before you go “oh, yes, I did use AI.” Just be upfront, man.

When I RP’d a preacher on good ol’ Fort Bloodshed I had a tally of how many weddings I did vs how many funerals. Weddings were ahead but just barely. The funerals were far and away the better RP of the two.

What currently-active MUSHes have a risk of non-consensual character permadeth?

Retromux/Numetal I guess? I don’t know of any other ones, and I don’t play that one so I don’t even know if it’s the case there.

Killing off your beloved character and making yourself and all your friends cry is some of the best fun you can have out here.

I’ll die on this hill (which is also good character death)

I have so many Feelings about this, haha

Can it be done elegantly? I have no idea, because the places I’ve seen it done or tried to do it myself were not particularly elegant games to begin with, and also inherent in running adversarial factions is the feeling of loss.

These are my main thoughts about it:

1. It’s fun to win and it sucks to lose
2. The amount of empathy, perception, and emotional intelligence required to navigate point #1 is vanishingly rare in any group of humans who compete for fun, be that mushes or video games or dog sports (did you know there are hobbies with crazier people than MUs) or anything else.

People spend a lot of time on their characters, a lot of time on their games/factions, and RL is hard and shitty. All of that means that nobody wants to come home from work after a long shitty day and fail to achieve whatever it is they wanted to do because the other faction won today. It feels bad in a way people don’t like and sometimes have outsized reactions to. Sometimes it feels bad in a very personal way, and people do lash out against that.

How do we keep it fair enough that people will accept a loss without thinking it’s the end of the world? I don’t know, honestly. A few things can be tried, all with their pros and cons.

Pre-determined Staff Verdict: X will win the contest of this particular goal/fight and Y will lose

• Takes away some of the drama around player machinations
• Is somewhat boring
• People complain about staff favoritism
• People complain about railroading

Organic Player Clash: X and Y just run into each other/into the same goal they both want, and go for it via whatever measures are at least sort of understood

• Exciting
• Total fkn chaos
• If something is unclear about how to resolve a conflict, this is really going to become apparent
• People complain about the other side being unfair

Arranged Events with Strict and Orderly Rules: Staff has set specific parameters within which X and Y can compete and determine an outcome

• The rules need to be spectacularly clear with no room for doubt
• People complain about staff favoritism anyway
• People complain about any possible reason the other adversary could be better: More active players, timezone favors them, dino characters/FCs with better sheets, they have better gear we can’t get, etc etc

You can navigate around this stuff as best you can by trying to have those very clear rules, lots of transparency, and as much give and take between “winners” as the story will support. It’s just hard.

In terms of everyday RP, adversarial faction encounters are some of the best fun and the worst drama IMO. Everyone wants to look cool and come out on top, nobody wants to “lose”, even if it’s just social banter. Some of my favorite scenes of all time have been with opposing factions, but no amount of carrying the idiot ball, pulling punches, making sure people aren’t taken out of action, and being kind and sensitive OOC ever got everyone on board with me. Some people hated me because I was on the adversary team, and there was no way to change their minds on that.

Adversarial factions are really fun, really exciting, and I honestly do love them, just as I love PVP. But like PVP, it’s extremely hard to separate those big feelings from the drama that ensues.

I would love to see it work without the drama. If there’s a game that can do it I’d be there. Humans are messy though, and that can be difficult to sort out online. Or anywhere, lol.

@Roz said in Re: Dies Irae:

You’re not THAT old, this meme started almost 20 years ago.

TIL I have been wrongly assuming what a “pickme” is for almost 20 years

@Trashcan As if you’re just going to gloss over my coded soda machine in the rest of the list like that wasn’t the best piece of minigame on anything ever, the most outstanding and revelatory achievement of all time

@Faraday said in Minigames in MUSHes:

Once the initial novelty wore off, I never liked these kinds of systems much. They either got in the way of creativity, or were annoyingly tedious, or both.

This is true though, soda machine included lol

@Yam said in Minigames in MUSHes:

Please explain how the coded bounties for players worked.

There were bounties for me on there all the time, and I let people collect them from time to time. However, me putting a bounty on anyone or anything else was huge drama 100% of the time. I don’t want to get into PVP, we have another thread for that, but the bounty minigame definitely emphasized that different people have different tolerances for it.

My favorite minigame of all was when we ran Space Cargo on Into the Black MUSH, but the flight was not automated, you just had to sit there and be ready to navigate the proper coordinates at the proper moment for an hour. If you failed to do it properly then you flew off (into the black, I suppose) and ran out of air and died and staff had to resurrect your entire crew from the dead room.

That sucked. lol.

The code was so broken on Dies Irae that people could not RP because it just fundamentally didn’t work. People couldn’t see each others’ poses, couldn’t see when someone else came into the room sometimes, couldn’t see OOC messages in the room sometimes, it was very difficult to get even simple scenes done.

Staff was as stressed out about it as anyone, but the issues were (apparently) far reaching and difficult to determine due to the hallucinations of AI code which had been applied to the game. The fatigue of trying to deal with this, and being unable to fix this, surely burned out staff and players alike.

I don’t have the facts or knowledge to say who applied this AI code to the game or why, or if that is really what happened. I do know things were very, very broken though, and that the message given to staff and players was that AI code was the reason.

@Yam said in Strike Systems:

I’m curious if anyone has actually legitimately witnessed a fundamental change in someone with regards to MUSH behavior

I have encountered:

• People behaving very differently to me from one game to another game, in that the game structures and communities themselves brought out the best or worst of that person
• People making a big effort to change their toxic MU behavior after fucking up so bad that they realized they need to get their house in order. This would probably be the ‘lost friends’ or fallout aspect you mentioned above
• People who went on mental health medication and/or therapy and as a result developed more community-friendly and cooperative patterns in their MU spaces

Things that can’t get you banned from AOA:

• sexual misconduct and harassment
• bullying
• cheating with alts, fake dice rolls, and abuse of the item system

Things that can get you banned from AOA:

• requesting that people with the above behaviors not be staff
• shipping wrong

womp womp womp

@Cygnus said in Numetal/Retromux:

she can’t be assed to RP with people she doesn’t like–which, fair enough. I also don’t think it creates a healthy community in a MUSH either, since it’s a shared space

@Gashlycrumb said in Numetal/Retromux:

I think it’s a neutral thing in itself. Where it goes foul is when there’s ST cooperation to make it so the group can fully engage with every plot without ever RPing out-of-clique. Or making rulings that allow them to defeat PC foes without engaging, or remove the consequences

@Pavel said in Numetal/Retromux:

If one refuses to RP with people they dislike, that’s fine, but avoiding RP with people they don’t specifically like can make a game feel very unwelcome indeed if it’s the norm.

@Roz said in Numetal/Retromux:

whenever people complain that someone doesn’t RP with people they don’t like I’m like ??? that’s how hobbies work??? you do hobbies for fun???

Harvesting some viewpoints here because I feel like this topic deserves its own thread outside of the Numetal/Retromux thing.

No one thinks people should RP with players/characters they actively despise. But there is some gray area here in RPing with people who are not your top 8 favorites, RPing with people who are “just ok”, RPing with total strangers, and ST obligation (or lack thereof I suppose) toward attention/activity/fairness to the entire game population, crappy people and great people all.

I’m interested in people’s thoughts here.

@MisterBoring said in AI In Poses:

when I make a 2 line pose that describes my characters actions and dialogue in only the most basic terms, I honestly wonder if I shouldn’t just quit

I’m sorry you feel this way, and I’ve heard people say this before, but ChatGPT churn is not the answer.

@tsar said in AI In Poses:

Just write the short pose. I beg. I’m tired. Don’t make me read all that, lol.

In this very thread people are saying they would just prefer your short pose. Short poses are fine. Sometimes tiny poses are excellent and desirable. Like @tsar and @Third-Eye, I would much prefer to read a normal small pose than an LLM-addled longer one.

We all, in the end, RP with people who like our unique (human!) pose style and we avoid or less frequently interact with people who don’t like our unique pose style. If someone doesn’t like what you do, you probably don’t need them in your online life.

Use your unique human pose style, short or long or whatever it is. ChatGPT churn is not the answer.

@bear_necessities said in AI In Poses:

@KarmaBum This. At this point, if someone is secretly an AI? Fine. As long as they bring more spice to the table than “grim man in a trench coat who sighs meaningfully,”

But it can’t “bring more spice” than that, lol. That’s exactly what it’s trained on. It is not technically possible for ChatGPT to excel at creativity, the best it can do is a mediocre average of all the writing it’s been fed, because that is how it works.

But writing quality or lack thereof aside: There are already LLM/ChatGPT apps and services for role play out there. It will adore you. It will make you the star of the story. It will be on any time frame and theme that you want. It will make any changes you want.

If we as a hobby aren’t using those services, then it’s because we decided there is something valuable about human interaction and responses that ChatGPT can’t replicate.

Is it cool to enjoy human responses to your content while being unwilling to write human content for the other person?