@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.

@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.

@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.

@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.

@RedRocket said in The 3-Month Players:

You had to struggle to become enough of a bad-ass not to have to live in fear all the time. I can not emphasize enough how important that feeling of progression is to the health of a game.

Many players enjoyed DarkMetal.

Many other players wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole because that style of gameplay holds no appeal to them.

TGG was a game with permadeath, trivially easy chargen, XP-based progression, stakes, drama, rotating “seasons” to keep things fresh, and the some of the most impressive immersive code systems I’ve ever seen. It still had a lot of player turnover. (and about 10 very passionate core players)

People want their actions and choices to matter. … It’s the same reason people add stakes and drama to TV shows. If nothing changes, there is no point.

This I agree with, but routinely killing your PCs off is not the only way to accomplish this. There are plenty of successful TV shows that avoid the Game of Thrones style of knocking off main characters left and right.

There is no one-size-fits-all game.

@Hobbie What’s the point of the prefix though if the goofy autogenerated name already conveys the fact that they’re a temp name? Unless your game has a habit of new players naming themselves things like JadeWanderer.

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

@KarmaBum Yes, it will automatically log them in.

@Hobbie There won’t be any guest prefixes or suffixes, because that presumes that they provided a name. The whole point of this feature is that people don’t want to think of a name, or feel the perceived permanence of creating an account. The only difference between a temp character and a real character is that one has an autogenerated placeholder name (like ScarletVisitor or whatever) and the other has a name that you chose. There’s already a command/screen to rename an unapproved character.

@Tez said in Ares Tour Feature Feebdack:

Personally, I like the random combination of adjectives and nouns. I couldn’t tell you why, but I don’t love the numbering. This is 100% vibe and not logic-based.

Some games have requested specific names, and the config for combos turned out to be a bit ugly. So I’m currently leaning towards just a single list of guest names with some preset list of AdjNoun combos as the default.

@dvoraen These will be full-fledged characters, so there won’t be any separate data table/permissions/changing names/etc.

The only reason this feature even exists is that I’ve gotten feedback that expecting people to use the create command (or web equivalent) with a name/password is too much burden for a quick tour.

So this feature basically just does that part for them with an easier command/button. Otherwise these characters will be functionally equivalent to any other new character.

It is also worth noting that Ares allows players to change their own character names up to the point where they’re approved, so there’s no admin burden if they decide to stay.

Since I know not everyone who plays Ares games is on the Ares forums, I figured I’d cross post this here.

Ever since retiring the web client screen, I’ve been contemplating ways for someone to check out a game more easily from the web portal. Here is what I’ve come up with, and I’m interested in what y’all think.

Historically, guests have been pre-designated shared characters. connect guest (or tour in Ares) will connect you to the first available guest, so you can chat as Guest-1 or whatever. As soon as Guest-1 logs out, the next person who logs in as a guest can re-use Guest-1.

Having shared characters has always presented issues. For example, you don’t want the next Guest-1 to see what the prior Guest-1 had said in PMs. This also makes it impossible for guests to submit requests, receive mails, etc. since they can’t necessarily get back to the same character. Also there are security issues with this, because the first Guest-1 could cause mischief, but their IP would be overwritten by the second Guest-1. Finally, shared characters are unsuitable to a web app for many reasons.

But what if it was easy to make a temp character that wasn’t shared?

Here’s the pitch:

• connect guest/tour will now just auto-generate a character for you with a temporary name and password.
• A new ‘tour’ button on the web portal does the same thing.
• This is a regular character, same as if you’d created them yourself from the login screen.
• If you decide to stay, you can just rename them and keep on playing. Otherwise, that char will go into the idle queue for recycling.

I’m open to suggestions on how these temporary chars should be named. They’ll get recycled eventually by the idle system, but not necessarily right away. So any naming system needs to account for potentially a lot of different temp names. A few possible ideas:

• An easy system mirroring tradition would just be to let you configure a base temp name (“Guest”, “Visitor”, “Wanderer”, etc.) with a number onto the end. So the first guest ever would just be Guest-1 and eventually you’d work your way up to Guest-999 or whatnot.
• Common practice these days is having a big list of adjectives and nouns. Combine them to get a silly temp name like “TriumphantPanda” or “HappyWombat”.
• You could specify a list of guest names, like [ “RedGuest”, “BlueGuest”, “GreenGuest”…] but if all them had been taken and not yet recycled, it could tack a number on the end.

@Juniper The existing ad model sucks, but there are other ways to solve that problem. If someone is doing work to put out professional content, they shouldn’t be expected to give it away for free, and it certainly shouldn’t be stolen from them by a plagiarism machine. They deserve compensation, whether that’s through a subscription or ads. I have no problem with, for instance, YouTube’s model where you get to choose between the two.

But regardless of philosophy, what I’m talking about is simple cause and effect. ChatGPT has to get its information from human content creators. If OpenAI drives them all out of business, they’re just shooting themselves in the foot too. But by the time that happens, the damage to all the other creators will already have been done.

@Juniper said in AI Megathread:

If LLM chatbots weren’t so chronically wrong, using them to dodge adverts and engagement bombardment might actually be a decent use case.

Until there’s no more content for them to gobble up because all the websites they stole from have shut down.

Major newspapers post a summer section of AI slop that includes, among other things, a summer reading list for kids with imaginary books (complete with imagined summaries).

We’re Focused on the Wrong A.I. Problem in Journalism
It’s not bots writing the news. It’s the bots reading it

Apart from the obvious debacle, I think that article has a good take on the second-order effects of GenAI that many don’t consider.

• Most “free” internet sites are free because they have ads.
• As more people get their content from AI-generated slop like ChatGPT, the only people coming to sites are AI bots.
• Nobody’s going to pay to advertise to bots.
• Ad money dries up.
• Site goes behind a paywall, or (if it can’t sustain itself with subscriptions) no longer exists.

We’re already seeing more paywalls, and the problem will only get worse.

@Roz Seems like that would be a good standalone ares plugin if someone ever were so inclined.

@bear_necessities Even on their Pro plan, ChatGPT is losing money off every prompt their users send it. And a large chunk of their users are just using the free plan. Could they raise prices? Sure. The question is how much cost the market will bear for polishing up LinkedIn posts.

@bear_necessities said in AI Megathread:

Not to get super nerdy here but it’s not that unusual for a company of that magnitude in early start-up phases to see significant losses, nor is looking at net loss vs gross revenue a great judge of financial performance for start-up companies. I could go into a lot of detail here but this is definitely not the place.

That’s true, but usually companies like that have a clear plan. Uber can operate at a loss because eventually it’ll drive all the taxis out of business. Then it jacks up the prices and has a profitable monopoly. Amazon operated at a loss for a long time to cement itself as a hub so that it can make a profit on razor-thin margins at tremendous scale.

The concern that has been raised in many economic circles is that these GenAI companies don’t have a coherent plan for how to become profitable. Now sure it’s possible they’ll stumble into some amazing thing that unlocks a huge profit center. It’s just unlikely to come from replacing wikipedia with a plagiarized information source or providing second-rate chat support. Time will tell.