@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?

@bear_necessities I mean obviously some metapose is a normal part of RP, right. But in other types of fiction writing the reader often observes from a perspective of omniscience that is not part of MU-style RP. AI poses will often give you that omniscience where you don’t expect it, and it can be jarring/a red flag.

Few of the items in the list above, all by themselves, would indicate AI use. In my opinion, there’s a degree of severity + combination with the other ones that makes it ring as AI.

Here’s the thing for me about the AI writing.

It’s never em dashes, semi colons, and oxford commas that make me think something is AI. Here are the traits I’ve seen that indicate AI:

• The sudden arrival of stylistically different content that is unlike anything this person has ever been able to produce before (like a poem sent in 2 minutes from a player who doesn’t usually write poems)
• A lack of that person’s usual writing quirks (or any writing quirks), smoothed out into something that sounds very generic and is devoid of typos and human mistakes
• A weird regurgitation of theme content in an “in this essay I will” sort of manner, often using sentences directly lifted from the game website
• Bizarrely positive/cheerful content that doesn’t particularly fit the character/situation and is somehow boring at the same time
• Use of the second person, especially in descs: ‘you see this, you feel such a way about this person’ or other types of vaguely power-posing comments that are out of vogue in MUSHing, like ‘he intimidates everyone who sees him’
• More thought-posing and metapose than is common in mushing. People do of course metapose in RP, but the AI will churn out poses that sound like a novel or fanfic, as though the reader can and should be expected to extensively know what’s happening in a character’s mind by listening in on their unspoken thoughts and motivations. We don’t do that in MU. AI doesn’t know that.

Check enough boxes here and then put it through multiple AI detectors and they all say 99-100% AI likely? Not 40-50%, but 100%? It’s AI.

@somasatori Validation, probably. A certain number of MU*ers don’t do this because they love the craft of writing RP, they do it because they want people to notice them and like them.

@Jumpscare lololol this is true

re: special snowflake characters

There are two north stars for Mushing

1. Don’t be boring
2. Don’t be a dick

If you can’t figure out how to do 1 without doing 2 then you’re going to get mocked.

@RedRocket bro once again, some of us have played and GM’d plenty of PVP, and we love PVP, and we don’t run it anymore because it’s so onerous and toxic that it’s not worth it.

Just go play Star Wars AOA. I guarantee that it will check much of your list, lol

I feel like this sums up several many MUSH interactions I’ve had with people over the years

@Pavel Can we not call her a weirdo, man?

I have run a lot of PVP as a villain faction head! Some thoughts:

Death was not involved. We did what was called “cinematic defeat”, where you can lose a limb if you want to or fall down a reactor shaft or topple over a cliff. Whatever thing happens and just removes you from the action. “Full loot,” or losing all the items you had on you to the opposing party WAS possible, but rarely happened.

So even in this not-losing-your-char PVP environment, some observations:

• PVP is more exciting than PvNPC. It always is, full stop.
• PVP espionage is an unmitigated disaster. Even if you do everything perfectly in your secret covert actions, someone OOCly assumes you’ve cheated and raises hell about it, and it’s hard to speak to the accusations without blowing the successful spy’s cover. If you’re transparent about who the spy is from the start, no one will allow themselves to be spied upon.
• PVP “outside the box” actions that aren’t “direct attacks” are an unmitigated disaster. Trying to pin down exactly how much advantage a sneaky plan or trap gives and how to weight it is a losing game. People get mad when you don’t let them do their Super Genius Plan exactly the way they saw it, they get mad when it doesn’t obliterate the enemy, and the enemy gets mad when it has any effect on them whatsoever.
• Even when you plan specific events so that your own villain self will take an L, so that people can beat you up and capture you, people find something to be mad about and find a million things you did wrongly and badly. Even when you lose to them completely.

My PVPs were really successful, exciting, and fun. People did love beating me up and some loved the threat my group and I posed. Some gentle players participated in the PVP, and told me they were never brave enough to do PVP before mine. Some of them are still memorable to this day in a way PvNPC generally isn’t.

However

I recently cleaned out my discord and it was full of crazy abuse about how I suck, I’m a cheater, I’m a dick, I’m unfair, I interpreted the mechanics or rules wrong, I played favorites. That’s just the discord, never mind the smoke I got on-game, like people freaking out when I walked in a room or abusing me on channels and in pages for existing.

I would never, ever run a PVP game/faction again. The excitement is fun but the toll it takes on me just isn’t worth it.

In this the year of our lord 2025, why are people still allowing bad actors in their game community? Why is there a concern with “we have to be fair” to people who are toxic to staff and other players, totally obnoxious, or otherwise a bad fit? It’s a mush, not a constitutional right, if they’re no good for the community then EVICT THEM.

I hate AI PBs. I hate them so much. All the reasons @Roz said, plus the fact that I am somewhat face-blind and AI created PBs are so generic that it’s nearly impossible for me to grasp the likeness in a meaningful way. They’re just face soup to me.

Again because face-blind, my PBs are actors I can recognize and who stand out to me either by unusual appearance or by “this person is a lunatic” vibe or both.

IMO dealing with points, levels, ranks, tokens, achievements, etc are just levels of bureaucracy that take ST time from actually doing the things that points, levels, ranks, tokens, and achievements are meant to unlock.

The intersection of sad and funny is where I thrive.

@Jax I mean, there WERE some very fine JexCo Products to be had.

@SockMonkey RL do be RL’in, always and forever. I hope life is treating you kindly and that things are going well for you!