@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.

@InkGolem said in AI Megathread:

I never share a scene in progress, and I only share ones that are publicly viewable on the internet.

Publicly viewable doesn’t mean “use for whatever you want” though. By feeding scenes into the GenAI databanks, you’re allowing the written work of your fellow RPers to be leveraged to generate other AI slop and put other writers out of business. It’s feeding the machine. That’s the harm of which I speak.

This came up in a different thread, but I didn’t think the response belonged there. So, just to clarify a few things about how characters are linked to Ares handles:

When you unlink a character or the game closes, it still shows up under the “Past Characters” section of your handle page. For example, on my page:

Game privacy factors in, so you can’t see current or past characters for a private game unless you also have a character there.

@Roz said:

I think you can request fully removing stuff from your handle, and Faraday may or may not oblige. I know at least one instance for sure where stuff was removed.

I removed a character link once for exceptional circumstances. It is not something routinely done.

I do occasionally get requests to rename a handle, and have struggled with the best way to deal with that.

My current policy is to have them make a new handle and then unlink/relink any current characters. This maintains a character connection between the handles. I have also moved over past characters to the new handle. It seemed preferable to have the history associated with the handle the player is actually using rather than the dead one. And frankly, someone trying to escape their past with a new name is unlikely to want to carry their past chars along.

That said, I can see the value in having a record when something like that happens. I may add some kind of ‘admin note’ to cover that.

@Third-Eye said in MU Peeves Thread:

I feel like games have to do more expectation management about this with players and I’m not sure what the best way to do that is. Beyond clearly stating whether real-time or async play is the norm/what’s done by GMs in staff scenes, but it takes a while to internalize that even if people read it.

I don’t really see why this is on the games or game-runners.

Players just need to communicate. If you like live, quick scenes - say so. Find like-minded players on the game. If there aren’t any, that’s probably not the right game for you.

It’s no different than people liking different kinds of RP. If the majority of players on a particular game like big bar scenes and I prefer one-on-one, that’s not a problem with the game - let alone the game server.

Async RP on MUSHes has existed for as long as MUSHes have; it just wasn’t as visible because it was happening in Google docs, across livejournal posts, emails, etc.

@bear_necessities said in Concordia Thread:

in fact, it would have negated some of the things staff was trying to do (get people to work together) because there’s no way to really do that with the FS3 combat code. It would have just been a bunch of people individually throwing coded weapons at different NPCs

I agree with your “can’t please everyone” points in general, but this comment is just not accurate. The FS3 combat code offers various commands for characters to aid each other, and – more importantly – there’s a pause in-between each round where people can collaborate while posing. I’ve seen countless instances of players bouncing off each other and doing clever, creative, collaborative things in scenes with coded combat support.

Now it’s true that many players just do their own thing, but you’ll also find that in big NON-coded combat scenes. It’s hard to keep track of everything going on in a big crowd, and many players are reluctant to bog things down.

Setting that aside, the coded combat is nothing more than a tool. It’s not right for every game or every scene, just like a hammer isn’t the right tool for every repair.

Ares was designed with privacy and safety in mind. The full privacy policy is at https://aresmush.com/game_privacy.html but I’ll summarize here.

It’s important to draw a distinction between logged and stored data.

Logs are plain-text files, accessible by any admin to track and troubleshoot what happens on the game. Certain commands are not logged for privacy reasons: connect/create (due to passwords), mails, pages/pms, poses, oocs, channel chat, and others.

2023-01-30 17:31:36 INFO - Character Connected: Faraday 127.0.0.1 localhost 
2023-01-30 17:31:37 DEBUG - AresMUSH::Jobs::JobsFilterCmd: ID=1 Enactor=Faraday Cmd=job/filter mine 
2023-01-30 17:31:38 DEBUG - AresMUSH::Who::WhoCmd: ID=1 Enactor=Faraday Cmd=who 

Stored data (in the database) is for the purpose of game features. This enables things like the web portal play screen, channel recall, sharing scenes on the wiki, etc. All built-in commands limit stored data to people who should have access to it. Game admin do not have ready access to everything. Not even headwiz.

• Pages/PMs can only be viewed by the people chatting.
• Private scene poses/ooc chat can only be viewed by the participants.
• Mail messages can only be viewed by the recipients.
• etc.

Pages, scenes, channels and mail all have built-in commands/buttons for a participating player to report offensive behavior with a verified, unalterable record attached.

Now it’s worth noting that even though Ares doesn’t give admins snooping commands–with ANY online service, ANY data transmitted to the server and/or stored in the database is ultimately accessible to the game owner and anyone they choose to share it with. Game owners/coders could install custom loggers or custom commands, or crack open the database manually. Sensitive information is best kept off-game, Ares or otherwise.

@lordbelh said in D&D Licensing Agreement:

The 50K and 750K tresholds are also pretty generous as far as I can tell. The part that’s actually bullshit and a real concern is the perpetual licence they’re giving themselves.

But 25% of proceeds is not generous - it’s highway robbery IMHO, even if it does only target the biggest game companies.

The perpetual license is a big deal for business decision-making though, you’re right. The biggest craziness for me was the content rights giving them “nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, sub-licensable, royalty-free license to use that content for any purpose.” You make a cool D20 game? Congrats, they can now make it and sell it out from under you. No sane business would agree to those terms, but businesses that have operated for years under the prior terms now have a gun to their head forcing them to agree or go out of business.

@Testament said in New Concept:

Why is the fact that it’s an alternate Earth make it a hangup?

You know how people talk about the “uncanny valley” effect in CGI? There’s an uncomfortable middle ground between real humans and obviously-fake cartoons? In the uncanny valley, things are close but just kind of off in some subconsciously-triggering way. Alt-history settings are like that for me.

Also, one of the reasons I like historical games is because of the setting, good and bad. I grew up inspired by stories about people like Mary Edwards Walker, who became a doctor in an era where not many women could, volunteered (rather forcibly) as a Civil War surgeon, and was awarded the Medal of Honor. Or Kate Marne, who used the fact that nobody would expect a woman to be a detective to nab criminals and spy for the Union. One of my favorite historical-MU storylines was about a woman who grew past her historically-typical bigotry after a trio of LGBTQ chars became like family to her.

Bigotry is bad, but I believe these kinds of stories have value. I want to believe there’s a way to have a space where people can tell those kinds of stories in a historical setting, while also being a safe space where people don’t have to confront that crap if they don’t want to. Some combination of consent and content warnings or something, like what @L-B-Heuschkel described.

Or just go alt-history. That’s fine. It’s not my jam, but I can understand if people just want to avoid the issues altogether.

@Warma-Sheen said in AI Megathread:

What school teaches stuff that isn’t based on other peoples’ works? Haven’t artists looked at other people’s works and been influenced?

GenAI isn’t influenced by other peoples’ works. It doesn’t learn in the same way humans do. It’s a statistical model referencing the works it has ingested. It would not exist without those works it has copied. Not referenced, not learned from, not experienced as humans do, copied.

It’s like we teach every schoolkid writing an essay - it’s totally fine to read from various sources, synthesize the info, cite your sources, and add your own thoughts. If all you do is copy from other people and shuffle the words around, that’s plagiarism. GenAI doesn’t have its own thoughts to contribute, and can’t cite its sources properly.

For example, GenAI can never write about a new technology, new celebrity, news event, etc. until some other human has written about it first. Then all it can do is make a virtual collage from their words.

People complain that AI “steals” jobs. But it doesn’t. People do that.

That’s a technicality. The use of GenAI takes jobs away from human creatives, who are already having a hard time making a living.

Cars are not great for the environment, but they are not intrinsically evil. We can regulate their pollution and make better cars that harm the environment less. Car drivers can take steps to mitigate their carbon footprint. We can invest in better public transportation. Cars can be used for the public good, like emergency vehicles.

In contrast, GenAI is an arrow aimed right at the heart of every creative industry, and that is a huge thing to me.

@Jumpscare

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

But a LLM itself is still ill-suited for such a task. And when we understand why, we can start to understand why it’s also ill-suited for giving other accurate information.

Sorry for double post, but wanted to add:

When we understand why it’s bad at giving accurate information, then we have to ask: So what IS it good for? And apart from a few niche word-parsing and pattern-matching tasks, the only answer I’ve seen is: replace the humans who generate content (artists, authors, customer support agents, narrators, etc.) with a machine that generates worse content. And that core idea is fundamentally the problem I have with GenAI.