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.

Yeah, uh, even before the other perspective came out I was sitting here thinking that screenshots of you complaining about someone doesn’t prove anything.

I complain about people with my friends. But if I’m going to accuse them of being a shitstain in public I’m bringing RECEIPTS.

Do you have anything more substantial for those of us in the peanut gallery?

I forgot 7.

It’s kind of lame thinking your organisation has 6 people able to contribute to a plot only to find out that 4 of them are sitting it out and doing nothing because they cannot interfere with stuff they are doing on their main.

@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.

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

@dvoraen said in Numetal/Retromux:

Um, ACKSHUALLY, this is Rough & Rowdy, so if anything I’d say it’s “Soft & Serious.”

Mostly because I couldn’t think of how to do an inverse to “Hog Pit.”

“Soft & Serious” sounds like the kind of romance novel I’d want to read, can someone get on that?

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”.

Is it normal to view unpleasant, controversial or “dumb” in-character behaviour this negatively? If a character causes trouble, is that considered subversive to the community or even rude? Is disruption and conflict not the bread and butter of telling stories together?

I’m seeing why this character might have been a problem to other characters, but I guess I don’t see why that means the OOC actor was a problem. Seems like a lot of bleed.

@Pavel said in AI PBs:

This is absolutely something I think (or at least hope) that many of these techthusiasts just don’t get. They’re up to their elbows in snizbangs per faloop and productivity metrics per powerpoint presentation that they don’t see reality.

See also: splitting the atom, letting every idiot have a handgun

As per usual, capitalism makes things 1000% worse.

I don’t mind that humanity has unlocked the ability to generate human-like text in response to a prompt, but I DO mind that LLMs are now hooked to millions of bot accounts designed to propagandise the social media landscape.

I don’t mind that we have the ability to sort samples of text into broad categories, but I do mind that it’s being used to screen for abusive content without a human in the loop I can appeal to when blatantly bigoted speech slips through the cracks.

I don’t mind that people have the ability to generate images for personal use, but I do mind the interminable pile of slop other people have generated filling up online spaces I used to visit for real, human-created content.

Sadly because We Live In A Society it’s pretty much impossible to separate the existence of technology from the way it is being used, and there is nothing to do about it but opt out as much as possible and complain loudly that Microsoft ever thought a new AI-lead operating system was a good idea.

I’m here trying to figure out how AI image generation is gonna reduce menial labour for me. What is it gonna do? Make an image of someone doing my laundry???