@GF said in New Concept:

if you can’t suspend your disbelief for less prejudice but can for God being a space squid who hates you, then maybe sit with that and really think about it.

If it’s a fictional setting? I absolutely can suspend my disbelief for that. But history is established. Someone (sorry can’t find the quote) mentioned “it’s just the 1920s but without discrimination.”

I don’t know what that means.

I’m not being snarky. I hate discrimination with a burning passion in RL, and I fully respect someone not wanting to deal with that in their pretendy funtimes.

The problem is that discrimination is so deeply baked into societal systems that it’s just not as simple to me as snapping your fingers and saying it doesn’t exist.

Everyone always points to Wild West settings and says: “If you can imagine a world where the PCs don’t die of dysentery, why can’t you imagine a world without discrimination?”

Easy. You’re not pretending dysentery doesn’t exist, you’re just saying the PCs are lucky enough to not contract it, or to contract it and survive – both of which actually happened.

“A world without discrimination” is just not the same thing. How did it get that way? Let’s start from that Wild West setting…if racism isn’t a thing, then logically slavery wouldn’t have been. There wouldn’t have been a Civil War (or it would have gone very differently). Heck, the entire economic basis of the south would probably be dramatically different. Oh and would America even exist at all if not for the genocide against the native peoples? How far back do we go with this?

If you want to do alt-history, that’s cool. That’s what Savage Skies did. They picked a divergence point (something about “when dragons appeared” IIRC) and then wrote the history from that point forward to explain why their imaginary world is different from our real world. It’s a bunch more work, but it addresses the issue cleanly.

Less clean is “racism exists but we don’t want stories about it here” because of systemic discrimination. What about the laws of the land? What about PCs who have discrimination in their backstories? It gets thorny.

I’m not telling people how they should RP. I just wish people would stop ascribing evil motivations to those of us who just have a hard time imagining a historical setting as an egalitarian utopia.

@helvetica said in Wyrdhold Discusion:

@Serafine Logs are publicly available, their placement on the site just isn’t in a very obvious location.

I think their custom portal has a bug actually, because the “Recent” view on scene logs was initially blank for me. Once I switched it to “all” and back to “recent” it behaved itself. That might lead one to honestly believe there were no public logs.

But it’s oh-so-pretty. Seriously. Kudos for the aesthetics.

@Roz said in Wyrdhold Discusion:

@Serafine said in Wyrdhold Discusion:

True to its name, I’ve seen nothing but war and strife from ARES.

I mean, Ares is just a codebase, it doesn’t really have any influence on whether or not there’s drama on a MU*.

Whatever do you mean? I’m quite certain it’s the first and only MU codebase to ever see drama. I designed it special that way.

@tsar said in Los Angeles 2043: A Blade Runner MUSH - Discussion:

Man, thank you. Because this vague insinuation that Director bailed and crushed all these people’s hopes and dreams of stories really started to get my blood pressure up. He’s a really cool dude, who is engaging, funny, and a great time.

I don’t know Director from Adam, but even if they did completely bail, so what?

Staff are volunteers, and players are not entitled to anything from them that they are unwilling to give.

If they open a game and close it the very next day because some horrible experience caused them to reconsider the whole thing? That’s their prerogative. If they open a game and close it the very next week because RL got too hard? That’s their business.

Yes, it’s disappointing when games close. But guess what - even running YOUR OWN GAME doesn’t mean you’ll get a chance to finish the stories you imagined telling. Enjoy it while it lasts.

@De-Villefort said in But Why:

I’ve been thinking about it and maybe I’m just mad because the Lords and Ladies type games are glorifying some of the worst kinds of people to have ever existed on the face of the earth.

There have been Star Wars MUs where people play members/supporters of the literal fascist Empire; Wild West games where people play racists, outlaws, and robber barons; supernatural games where people play vampires and werewolves; and modern-day games where, indeed, people play super-rich elites.

This fixation that fantasy settings are bad and other genres are good seems weirdly out of step with what people actually do in those other settings.

People point to the staff tools and FS3 design in Ares as like: “This enables folks to run games with fewer staff,” and while that’s true, it’s backwards. Ares and FS3 were designed the way they are because games, including my own, were having trouble finding and keeping staff.

I personally experienced too many cases of staff blowups or abandonment through the years, some of which harmed relationships with friends. So for the last decade or so, I run games myself. That means not only do I need tools to support that (see: Ares and FS3), I need game design to support that. So generally I stick to single-sphere, PVE, narrowly-focused games. ETA: Also with de-centralized storytelling like @L-B-Heuschkel described.

@doodletilidie Be aware that if you allow players under 18 you’re subjecting yourself to the COPAA laws. Additionally, you may be opening yourself up to liability if you allow R-rated content on a wiki that is geared towards 13-year-olds (per your NSFW policy) or by allowing mature RP at all without the players involved having any means to verify the age of the people they’re playing with. Big can of worms. Don’t recommend.

ETA: COPAA is specifically for under-13 but other regional laws may still apply for under-18s, especially European players. Still don’t recommend.

@Kestrel That’s very interesting. I only skimmed the thread, so maybe I missed something, but I wouldn’t consider their attitude “disdain” so much as a different emphasis.

We want people to be able to emote with each other while focusing on one thing at a time, not doing that awkward thing that plagues MUSHes where you end up addressing five people in a single emote and having five conversations at the same time.
…
What we’re trying to do here is provide an immersive atmosphere for a playstyle that resembles improv acting more than collaborative writing. It’s difficult and jarring to immersion when these two styles clash.

Much as I enjoy MU RP, they’ve got a valid point, don’t they? I’ve literally had 1-on-1 MU scenes where there are three different conversation threads going simultaneously between the same two characters. Traditional MU paragraph style resembles neither organic character interaction nor normal creative writing.

TGG, for instance, had shorter poses during action scenes by the necessity of the code. Storytelling still occurred within those constraints.

Like they said, these are styles. Neither intrinsically better or worse than the other, but each having pros and cons. At least they’re up front about it and setting expectations about what they’re going for.

@RedRocket said in AI PBs:

Everything the a.i. makes is entirely original.

GenAI makes nothing original. Every single thing it does is algorithmically based on the work it’s been trained on. Without that trained work, they’ve got no product.

That trained work was used without the permission of the creators. That is the crux of the lawsuits, and while the results have been mixed so far, I believe ultimately the creators will prevail in some form or another (probably a watered-down global licensing pool, but it’s at least something). I believe this because one of the cornerstones of the fair use doctrine is that the transformative work does not replace or compete with the original. That is demonstrably not the case here. This has been theft and plagiarism on a scale that would make Napster blush.

ETA: The Getty and Disney lawsuits are probably the strongest, as they show pretty compelling evidence that their artwork/photos are baked into these GenAI tools to such a degree that it can faithfully reproduce them when prompted. It’s not just stylistic inspiration.

@RedRocket said in AI PBs:

The training process teaches it to draw in the same way humans learn to do art…

GenAI does not learn in the same way a human does. It’s a false equivalence. People keep wanting to anthropomorphize these things like they’re actually intelligent, but they’re not. They’re fancy word- and image-predicting algorithms. Autocomplete on steroids. They do not fundamentally understand the world the way a human does. They have no actual creativity, insight, or originality. They match patterns and generate similar ones. They do it really well, which is why the tools work, but that is not the way humans think or learn.

@Pyrephox said in D&D Licensing Agreement:

I don’t begrudge Hasbro making money off of D&D. There’s a lot of the merchandising and expansion of the IP that I love. I know it’s only there because it’s profitable, but as long as it’s fun, it’s good. However, I don’t like the way this thing has been played…

That’s where I land. D&D is their product and they’re entitled to stop letting other people make money off it without getting a cut. But their terms are utterly ridiculous.

It would be like me saying that not only was AresMUSH no longer free, but if you use it you have to send me all your game’s wiki/css/etc. that I can use for whatever I want without paying you a cent. That’s just absurd.

Some players will roll with things - I love that. But I’ve had some players quit over what I considered natural (non character-ending) consequences of their PCs’ actions, and others throw gigantic fits over the smallest of setbacks.

PC death is my personal hot-button because it ends the story and makes you start over from scratch. That’s not fun for me, so I don’t play (or run) games like that.

@SpaceKhomeini said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

I usually operate under the assumption that the character I’m helming is largely an idiot and does idiot things that will result in idiotic self-owns.

Sometimes I forget that I haven’t communicated this loudly enough with everyone around me and they get kind of cagey when I do stupid shit IC.

The fact that this needs to be communicated at all is kind of emblematic of the core issue. Most players in my experience don’t want their character to come off looking bad (in their opinion) because they think it makes them look bad. There’s such an over-investment in IC success, glory, and coolness that if someone is actively trying to embrace natural consequences or have their character do something stupid, it’s looked upon with suspicion or disdain.

@Roz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

i think for me and some others, social RP is largely the vast majority of RP that isn’t super directly plot RP. and if that’s not the case for others, then this is an argument about semantics.

Yes, I think that this is absolutely a semantic difference in definitions. Since there is no one true universal definition of “social RP”, everyone’s going to come at it with their own personal definition. So it is entirely plausible that some people will say “all social RP is boring” based on their definition of social RP.

Personally, I don’t think RP fits neatly into boxes like “social”, “plot”, etc. for reasons that folks have described already. It’s a more nuanced dial. But if I were forced to define “social RP” it would be smalltalk / slice of life where it’s only about the social aspect and nothing else interesting and/or plot-related happens. I generally don’t like that. I’m not here for Life Simulator. I want a little drama or adventure.

I’m not saying I’ll never do social RP, but it’s not something I particularly enjoy.

@Wizz 100% agree.

Some things may be made easier or more difficult in different pacing styles.

In rapid-fire pacing, it’s harder to polish/edit (due to time pressure), but it’s easier to do back-and-forth interactions. In async it’s the opposite. Neither is intrinsically better or worse, but one might align more closely to your preferences.

@Wizz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

before async was even a twinkle in Faraday’s eye

I certainly didn’t invent async RP on MUs. I’ve been doing async MUSH scenes by email almost as long as I’ve been MUSHing. It’s always been there. Now, with Ares, it can just be done on the game.

@Clarion said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

you can have rich room descriptions that give you something to RP off of.

Yeah for example see the locations directory on Keys. Each of those locations, like Abandoned Animatronic Pizza Place, is equivalent to a grid room. Many games also provide either ASCII or graphical maps like Keys’ here to show how the locations relate to each other.

Now if you desire the “immersive feel” of literally typing N/E/N/In or whatever to reach the pizza place, then sure - that’s personal preference and off-grid/web RP is not going to be your thing. No shade. (Though I stress again that Ares games also have grids you can play on.)

But the arguments that off-grid/web play means RPing in some void where you have nothing to go on and nobody can ever run into you are simply not how this works.

@Ominous said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

Those set up scenes never seem to be “our characters come across one another and strike up a conversation before becoming fast friends a few scenes later.” They always seem to start in media res

I’m not disputing your personal experience, but it’s been very different than mine. You don’t have to randomly encounter someone on the grid to have an impromptu scene with them. I can’t count the number of times I’ve set up a 1-on-1 scene with somebody my character didn’t already know and then just had them randomly meeting for the first time ICly. The only difference is the amount of OOC coordination involved.

@Ominous said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

The second problem I have is that it doesn’t leave room for happenstance.

Again, Ares’ scene system just gives you the choice. If you want happenstance, you leave the scene open. Others are free to join. If you don’t, you make the scene private.

Here are just a few of the many different ways you can RP in Ares:

• Grid RP: Faraday hangs out in the Gym hoping for someone to come by. When Ominous enters the grid room, Faraday poses doing something. Ominous responds. Yam joins from the web portal. Roadspike wanders into the grid room and joins too.
• Off-Grid Client Open RP: Faraday PMs Ominous: “Hey, want to do a scene? Our characters seem to both like basketball, maybe they could meet in the Gym?” We use scene/start to start an off-grid client RP set in the Gym and our characters meet for the first time. Since we left the scene open, Yam can use scene/join to join it. Roadspike can also join from the web portal.
• Pickup Web RP: Faraday creates a web scene set in the Gym, leaving it open. Ominous, Roadspike, and Yam all join from either web or client.
• Private RP: Faraday and Ominous have a basketball showdown off-grid, set in the Gym, and since it’s private, nobody else can join.

You can still do pickup RP. You can still do random grid RP. You can just ALSO do private RP more easily. Philosophically I just don’t think it’s good to force people to play in ways that they don’t want to for some imagined “good of the game”.

@Ominous said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

If I am doing novella stuff, which I call collaborative writing and I haven’t done in decades because I’m picky and it has an even smaller population than MUs do, it HAS to be async. Someone (I’m not scrolling up to see who) was poo-poo-ing on this style, suggesting that such a framework focuses on the writing aspect at the expense of collaboration. That is incorrect. I would actually argue that MU*ing is much less collaborative as everyone in a scene tends to be looking out for number one with number one being their character. It’s a different mindset.

I think we’re maybe talking about different things. The long-form async style I’ve seen in venues like Storium and forum play still has the one-character-per-player hallmarks of MUs, only the poses are way way longer. Due to the length of time between everyone’s poses, it’s basically impossible to have a meaningful conversation or to coordinate actions with one another. Mostly folks either just do their own things separately (resulting in less collaboration) or are forced to go off-game to collaborate more directly in discord/google docs/whatever.

@Yam No - in Storium you mostly just control your own character. They’re a little more tolerant of power-posing someone else in the interests of expediency, but most of the moves I’ve seen are just one character.

@Trashcan said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

Even knowing that you could start a scene from the grid, again, I never saw anyone do it and I never did it even though I’d just come from a game where that was the only way of RPing. Why? Because it is just so much easier to click ‘Create a Scene’ and fill out the fields, which you will need to do anyway to share it and it’s clunky to do them all from the client. You don’t have to wander the grid like a fool peering in shop windows for the right room. You can just select from the list.

It should be covered in the basic help files/tutorial, but even setting that aside - There’s almost no functional difference between starting a scene from the grid and starting the scene from the web portal. If you mark it open to the public, both provide a way for any random person to join the scene and RP according to the scene’s pacing from either the MU client or the web portal.

So yes, it’s different, but it’s not different in a way that (IMHO) makes it harder to play live.

To your other point though - yes, there’s a default private setting for web/off-grid scenes, but it used to default to Open. Lots of people complained, because the majority wanted the default to be private. So I changed the default. You’re saying that game design is influencing behavior, but it’s actually the other way around.

Harkening back to the “old days” - you could start a scene in a TP room or on grid. It’s a choice. Even before Ares there were people complaining about “too many” people doing private TP room scenes, which always felt like WrongFun to me. YMMV of course.

MOVED TO THE OTHER THREAD

@Third-Eye said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

’ve wondered recently how much of this is changing player expectations from the people who were always on the platform 5+ years ago, when the first Ares games like Spirit Lake and Gray Harbor were around, and how much is players from more time-shifted mediums like Discord coming into Ares because it has more QOL features.

Are we getting more players from other mediums though? I’ve only heard of a handful here and there, but I admittedly don’t have hard numbers.

I really wonder how much of it is just shifting player preferences. Other folks in other threads have talked about the MU population getting older, having more responsibilities, less time, etc. And in a world where Netflix designs TV shows around distracted-viewing, is it really that surprising that fewer people want to devote an uninterrupted 4-hour block of time out of their evening to pose every 5 minutes?

I don’t want live RP to go away. I still far prefer it. But even I don’t have time for it any more.

@Pacha said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

The deliciousness of Ares is (for me) that I don’t have to put up with that any more.

Ares lets you choose.

You can plunk yourself down on the grid and scene/start a random pickup scene --OR-- you can selectively start private scenes with only the people you want to play with.

You can RP with live/traditional pacing --OR-- you can play async across disparate schedules and timezones.

If more people are choosing the alternatives, maybe it’s just showing that the old ways were never that popular to begin with.

While that may be paltry consolation to those of us with different preferences, the good news is that server doesn’t care how you play. It just may take more effort to find your people. Make a game where pickup RP is encouraged, or where staff runs only live events. And even if it’s not your game, you can still lead by example, organize, and try to find folks who want to play that way too.

@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

I’m actually sorry for saying that because I was definitely putting bias on it, I was really only looking at games with 4 or 5 stars.

Heh okay, fair. Three stars is still good activity though, by my reckoning - that would make 10 public/active games, which is still almost as many as in the entire Evennia list (including all the pre-alphas). Grapevine lists 150, but that seems to be mostly MUDs.

Entirely earnest question - where are these bastions of non-Ares live MUSH RP? How does one find them?

@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

There are very few public games on Ares, and none of them appear to have a “live scene” culture.

I’m not sure how you define “few” but there are 16 currently open public ones and that’s actually the majority of the open Ares games in total.

@Pavel said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

async culture because… it’s Ares, that’s what it’s for.

Except that is expressly NOT what Ares is for. I know, because I designed it to do live scenes (since that is also my preference). The vast majority of scenes on my Ares games were live, because I made them that way.

Like I can’t control how people play with it, but on a technical level Ares supports live scenes just as well as it does async scenes. The only difference between it and PennMUSH is that you can also play async more easily.

So yes, there will be more async scenes visible on Ares games because people who were RPing with alts in TP rooms, or in Google docs, or on private sandboxes, or (way back when) on LiveJournal can now play in the game. They were always there, it’s just more visible on Ares games.

But having more async scenes doesn’t prevent anyone else from doing live scenes, any more than me eating chocolate prevents you from eating vanilla. So that’s why I’m trying to dig deeper into it.

Are people trying and failing to run live scenes? If so, why? Perhaps there are tools to help.

Or are they just annoyed that they want to join live scenes (i.e. they expect someone else to run them) and are annoyed that nobody is catering to their preference. That is a very different issue.

ETA: I’m not meaning to wrongfun anybody in that last paragraph btw. It’s totally fine to be frustrated that no game is providing what you prefer to play. I’ve been there myself. But I wouldn’t blame the game-runners for that, and I certainly wouldn’t blame the server.