For whatever reason, Charlotte decided she doesn’t like James. That’s fine, these things happen more often than we’d like in this hobby. Just don’t RP with that person and have fun with the people you can have fun with.

But no. Charlotte can’t just leave James alone. She continuously pursues storylines that place her in conflict with James and then cries when conflict occurs. She feels the need to constantly rant and rave about how much she hates James. Everything James does or didn’t do is new evidence for how awful he is, no matter how insignificant the issue. In fact, everything awful going on right now must be because of James.

Today, my peeve is people who simply can’t take a chill pill and stay away from people who bother them.

This scenario is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

My least favourite encounter in stories/plots is the Main Character Syndrome player. The one who rushes ahead without bothering to wait for anyone’s emote and grabs the MacGuffin to take home and try to interact with the plot to the exclusion of all others. The one who gets up in front of everyone and “volunteers” to be the most important person who shall charge forth alone to solve all the problems and actually expects a pat on the back for this behavior. Basically constantly looking for a way to elevate themselves above the rest of us peons who showed up to participate.

I’m dealing with one in the current game I’m playing and I’m so fucking done with it. A decent amount of plot licking means they’re somehow constantly in the center of everything and there’s very little to do that doesn’t require going through them in some way. And they have a history of OOC aggression towards people trying to get involved in plots they’ve already licked.

Like, have friends if you want, put them first if you want, I consider this all fairly normal behaviour. But if you can’t stop acting like a monster to everyone else that’s where I draw the line. Fuck off with that shit.

You know, I kinda don’t care if anyone leaves a PvP game without giving it a chance. At least they know what they want out of their RP experience and are mature enough to recognise it. A PvP game absolutely won’t benefit from a population of players who don’t like PvP and hope desperately it’ll never become a factor.

I like competitive gameplay and all, but I wanna be playing with people who also want that. Let’s allow people to curate their own experience and move on if it isn’t their thing.

If it feels like someone is constantly on a hair trigger waiting to flip out about the smallest thing, I wish them well and get the fuck out of there. Life is too short to walk on eggshells. And as already stated, the goalposts always seem to change.

I think if people are gonna use gen AI to write their poses they should instead drive into a lake.

IMO the ballsiest and best thing a game can do for community health is to ban alts. I’ll die on that hill.

The game has been running for a while now and while new games tend to fizzle out and die I’d just like to give kudos to Silent Heaven for going strong and continuing to mature.

In particular I think the gamerunner has done a lot of work addressing and removing negative influences, and the community has never been such a welcoming and chill place to be.

My unsolicited verdict-

@Cygnus, you really should learn how to communicate your grievances in a way that doesn’t make an enemy out of literally everyone, and also figure out which of them are valid and which need to be let go.

Others should be a little less mean towards people with characters that are too special, unique, edgy, whatever. Because those encompass a lot of people. Most people want to be special in some way, sometimes tactfully and sometimes… not. I think we all get to have more fun when we’re not veering aggressively away from being “cringe”.

@Gashlycrumb said in Numetal/Retromux:

@Juniper Do you think that helps compared to just alt transparency? (I really mean it alt-transparency, the name of every PC you play or have played on that MU is in your +finger, no exceptions.)

Yea.

1. People are busy and can’t be online 24/7. Splitting time between characters means that they are online even less 24/7. Gameplay slows to a crawl because the people you are waiting on have plots on 4 other characters to get through or simply aren’t willing to admit they’ve lost interest in half their characters. Leaders don’t lead because they are on their alts.

2. Making judgements on whether something is metagaming or a conflict of interest between alts is complicated. It takes up gamerunner time. You don’t have to spend time and energy on this if there are no alts.

3. Even if you determine no abuse occurred, the perception that abuse occurred is almost as bad. It stresses the fuck out of players. Good luck convincing them that thing you cleared wasn’t favouritism.

4. I have seen people plant an alt in every organisation just to keep tabs on what is happening and it gives an advantage even if they are careful not to blatantly act on it. I have seen people plant multiple alts in the SAME organisation to sway opinions in the direction they want. IMO no matter where the alts are distributed, it gives an unfair advantage.

5. If a player wants to avoid another player, it’s way easier if everyone only has one character and isn’t spread across the whole game.

6. Limiting to one character results in a more equitable distribution of roles in plots & leadership positions.

Also I fully admit I am lazy and don’t want to process and familiarise myself with 3x the quantity of half-baked characters. I feel more willing to give people my full attention when I know they are giving me theirs.

I found out where everyone went basically today. I wouldn’t be surprised if posting an advertisement got you banned though.

Also feeling super awkward rn because I didn’t know the name Juniper was already taken, I just used my name from MSB. This isn’t some kind of mindgame, sorry @junipersky

Ok, let’s start some fights.

In some places there’s a level of weird showboating that goes on around “solo RP”, putting a lot of effort into writing that just goes into the void and nobody ever sees. The more pointless, the more noble.

That’s weird. Like at that point, at least write a vignette and post it on the forum so someone can read it. Or write a book offline?

@Rucket said in Strike Systems:

At this point if I ran a game and someone spoke some right wing shit id ban them.

Amen to that.

“A-bloo-boo-hoo, freedom of speech, blah blah”
Nah. Go away. I’m tired of playing how far they can boil the frog before there’s a problem.

What is a Generic RP room?

I’ve staffed in places (outside of RP) that had strike systems and I think it was more because that was the done thing in gaming culture, rather than any deliberate and conscientious design.

It didn’t work. People get really mad if they’re given a strike they feel they didn’t deserve, it becomes a technicality and a debate-magnet. Also, we were a bunch of immature teenagers.

Growing up is realising you can just talk to people instead of issuing ultimatums from your ivory tower.

In theory, I’d like to RP at least once with everyone unless there’s some obvious red flag about them.

In practice… a good intro scene long enough to feel like I have a grasp on what that character is about can run 2-3 hours. A healthy RP community can have up to 30 regular writers. I also have to work to live, get 8 hours of sleep a night, cook, eat, wash dishes, tend to my real-life relationships, and I also have hobbies outside of writing.

Also, some people are only online for 45 minutes at 3am on Thursdays.

I can barely find time for the people who are specifically trying to follow up RP with me. So I have to be realistic. Whenever someone makes a fuss that I didn’t have time for them it really bums me out. Most of the time it wasn’t a conscious choice, that’s just how it shakes out.

If someone tells me with a straight face that they need ChatGPT because they have a disability that makes them unable to write, I view that with the exact same incredulity if they’d announced that they need Stockfish on the side because they have a disability that makes them bad at chess. It’s absurd. If I wanted to play against a computer, I’d just … do that.

I have to wonder why such a hypothetical person insists on playing a game around creative writing in a time sensitive environment if they struggle so much with creative writing in a time sensitive environment. Asynchronous RP would do a lot more for them, and we’d actually get to read their writing rather than the output of “Dave eats his porridge. ChatGPT pad this to 4 paragraphs of waffle”.

AI generated text typically looks at home in a game of Mad Libs which is why it loves words like “exudes”, “exhibits”, “emphasizes”, “highlights” etc. It’s an easy way for AI to get some vaguely related but illustrative nouns in there without actually constructing a pointed sentence. This is how I recognise it most if the time.

I don’t feed things into an LLM and ask it if it thinks something is AI written because that would be stupid.

@bear_necessities said in MU Peeves Thread:

Also I ran a bunch of my poses through ChatGPT and asked if AI wrote it and it said it was debatable and so maybe I’m just secretly a robot.

Yeah, I don’t think anyone is asking the idiot machine if it wrote people’s poses. You’d get better results from a magic 8-ball.

I think if people are gonna use gen AI to write their poses they should instead drive into a lake.