My first text game was hellMOO.

I will be taking no further questions.

@tsar said in MU Peeves Thread:

If you’ve been turned away from a game, or know that you’re probably not welcome on a game-- DON’T SNEAK ONTO THEM.

This is especially funny on games with bans that aren’t permanent, but become permanent if you try to sneak on.

@Jumpscare said in Factions:

Once, in a medium-combat faction, I had the boss NPC of the faction desire a spar with one of the PCs as a way of making up for the PC’s transgression against the faction. The idea being that they fight and all is made right in the end, regardless of who wins the fight. The PC decided to be a pacifist, passed all his combat turns, and said things like, “This won’t solve anything.” (It literally would have solved everything.)

And that’s just a spar, not even a real attack! Such a bummer.

I really like Faction conflict play. In my opinion it’s better to fight with somebody based on being in opposite factions, than it is to fight with somebody based on your character hating theirs. Players really struggle to stomach being targeted with conflict, and knowing they’re consistently going to be targeted by Faction A for reasons that are completely impersonal is reassuring.

In practice, there’s always some kind of snafu and I haven’t seen it work right. Often a bunch of players sign up for faction play and end up being totally disinterested in it, or worse, get really upset when they get affected by faction conflict they explicitly signed up for. Don’t do that. There are so many games that don’t feature competitive play that you could be playing.

Software development practices are crucial, but the kind of people who find AI the most useful probably haven’t been introduced to those practices so in addition to potentially being let down by the bot, they’re not doing OTHER project activities that would really help them and the bot isn’t going to introduce them to. Version control, unit tests, checking logs, using a debugger?

I have found AI code extremely unhelpful compared to jumping into a debugger, but those things are also learned skills that you can’t assume everyone has.

A peeve I have is sometimes staff -try- to disperse plot hooks, but like… end up giving three plot hooks all to people in the same insular group, failing to solve the bottleneck problem at all when they proceed to treat a gamewide plot like it’s their own personal treat.

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.