It really feels like Ganymede has just decided to let Derp drive it into the ground out of some need to avoid losing face from reversing a decision.

Well, I’m reducing my MSB activity to lurking now. Gany just basically said that the only person who needed to be apologized to on MSB for what happened was Derp.

I get two things from reading stuff from this thread.

1. That I definitely am not the target audience for Lords & Ladies roleplay.

2. That Arx, even with all of it’s trouble throughout its history, is a pretty good example of ‘doing it right’ in our hobby.

Congrats to all you Arx players and staff for doing cool stuff.

Starting a new thread, for a new year.

First up, and this one hit me hard, David Lynch, legendary director of such weirdness as Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, and the original 1980s version of Dune.

@hobos

Please stop. If you actually care, stop, step away, and come back in a few days or even a week or two. You’re making yourself look bad with each new post.

Bring back Victorian era drug problems!

I want a post apocalyptic game surrounding the events at one of the last settlements in the world struggling to survive against all manner of obstacles and threats.

@Jennkryst

I’m gonna have to run a one shot of the MMPR RPG in his honor.

Well, after that interaction with Ghost and some other odd shit I’ve seen today, I added MSB to my firewall block list. I don’t need that shit in my life anymore.

@Roz Totally. I’m all for people trying to repair relationships, but deception is not the way to make that happen.

Now, if someone came to me and was like, I want to rebuild the bridge and move on from this and in the process offered to make a new character to help push some plot I was trying to push, I’d probably see that as an olive branch.

@Faraday said in Star Trek Games:

Stuff has to happen. There have to be stakes. The drive needs to be fixed in time to get the ship away from some threat. The anomaly has to put the crew in peril somehow.

I think this might actually lead to more problems for a MU.

Assuming a game focuses on a single ship or station, and the majority of players are playing that ship or station’s crew, any problem that puts the crew in peril puts most of the playerbase in peril. And it’s been my experience that if a PC is in peril, that PC’s player would like their character to have some hand in thwarting that peril. And if only 5-6 PCs in the whole game get to thwart that peril, it leaves an untold number of PCs just standing in the wings waiting for their chance. I think lack of spotlight would build up way quicker on a Star Trek MU than any other for that reason.

I have no clue why there aren’t any Star Trek MUSHes out there. I know it’s really popular in the PBP / PBEM world, and there are dozens of Star Trek Bridge Crew / Artemis Bridge Simulator groups out there.

I wouldn’t play on one though, and it wouldn’t surprise me if my reason why is the reason there aren’t any of them already. I believe that Star Trek tells a really solid story about the primary crew of a starship (or station in DS9’s case) and trying to expand that story to a wider group of characters loses a lot of the Star Trek charm for me.

@Muscle-Car said in AI PBs:

The people stressed are the ones trying to maintain their ethics.

That’s what I was getting at, that attempting to consume ethically largely fails to have any impact on the continuing economic system, inevitably causing people doing the ethical consumption more stress as they watch the system continue to grow and exploit itself.

@Pavel said in AI PBs:

There’s no ethical consumption under (late stage) capitalism

I feel like there’s plenty of attempts at ethical consumption under our current stage of capitalism, it’s just ineffective, and largely just causing unnecessary stress to a lot of the people attempting it.

@Faraday said in AI PBs:

The problem with that theory is that most of the current generation of LLMs only work at scale. Unless you had a gazillion of your own photos, or had written an entire series of novels, it’s unlikely that you could train an AI model just on your own work and have it work effectively.

I don’t think it’s possible even then. Even if you it was solely trained to replicate a single artists style, I believe we’d only end up with something that worked within the limited variety of the artist’s work, and attempting it to produce something outside of that would produce non-useful, though perhaps morbidly entertaining results. There would still exist a need to train it on a library of stock images to allow it a wider breadth of subject matter.

For example, if we fed an LLM only the entire catalog of Van Gogh’s art, and asked it to produce an image of an sports car, it would probably either fail to produce anything, or just produce something random and call it a ‘sports car’.

After reading more of this thread (minus the brief interruption for troll time), I’m starting to realize that there is very little in the way of completely ethical sources for PBs, and it’s just a matter of finding something that is acceptable but doesn’t just flat disgust most people (as AI generated art does). I’m probably missing something, but it feels like that the closest you could get to ethical sources would be:

• Creating your own PB art from scratch, making sure to have proper consent from models in case of photography and avoiding the use of AI tools in your art / photo editing software. (Which is getting ridiculously hard in a lot of commercial art / photo tools these days).
• Commissioning an artist to do a PB art for you, under the specific understanding that it’s for your use as a character avatar in an online RPG.
• Use stock photos or other art published online for free under a Creative-Commons (or similar) license.
• And the before mentioned training an AI that you built yourself using your own art.

Are there any other options that might represent a truly ethical source of PB art?

@sao said in AI PBs:

Pretending that commercial generative AI models aren’t walking databases of art theft is just disingenuous at this point.

I agree with this, but do you think that non-commercial generative AI isn’t also art theft?

@Jennkryst said in System for Mech Game:

Cthulhutech

I completely forgot about Cthulhutech. That is another RPG with mechs and spaceships, though in the second edition, they aren’t starting with mechs in the book, rather waiting for the introduction of the mechs until later.

Not sure about the integrating with Ares part, as I’m a noob to Ares.

As far as mech / ship games, there are a lot of options (these are just the ones I’m aware of):

• Battletech + Strategic Operations - The OG in the Mech combat scene, Battletech actually has coded stuff for other codebases you might be able to modify to add into Ares. Strategic Operations adds rules for space ships and aerospace fighters.

• Lancer + Lancer: Battlegroup - In my opinion, this is the new hot mech game. Where the tech in Battletech is a product of its time (the 1980s), Lancer updates that tech stuff to make more sense given current tech (Mechs are 3d printed, people can be backed up onto a hard drive type thing and restored to life if they die) along with a more anime art style.

• Mekton Zeta - Old school R. Talsorian game inspired by Gundam and Robotech. Lots of flashy anime space / mech battles. Uses Interlock System, which is a precursor to the Fuzion system used in Cyberpunk 2020 / Red.

• Armored Trooper VOTOMS: The Roleplaying Game - Also published by R. Talsorian, this is based on the anime of the same name, which was a more hard scifi look at mecha. As I recall the PC death count is mechanically high because the science that makes the mecha work also makes them highly flammable.

• Heavy Gear - Dream Pod 9’s first game. It has roleplaying rules in older editions, but the current version of the system is basically just a wargame.

• Jovian Chronicles - Another Dream Pod 9 game, this is a full RPG with many supplements expanding the available mechs and spaceships. Based heavily on Robotech / Gundam / Macross.

• Battle Century G Remastered - Another anime based mecha game. Uses a simple d10 roll for its mechanics. Can’t comment too much on this one, as while I own it, I haven’t actually read through it completely.

• Beam Saber - Anime inspired, Forged in the Dark rules set. Has rules that can be adapted to space combat, but I wouldn’t suggest it for a MU, as Forged in the Dark games have mechanical issues when you try to upscale them to even a small MU in player count.

These days when I bother to use a PB, I usually do one of two things:

1. Find a stock photo and use that.

2. Find an actor or actress that isn’t super well known, and definitely isn’t known for their looks and use that.

Honestly though, the PB pictures I use are never anything near what I see in my head when I think about the character, so I usually leave that blank on wikis and stuff until I get tired of people poking me about it. And, in transparency, I have used AI generators before, but I have since stopped because well, they have terrible ethics (even, from what I understand, the ones trained on licensed portfolios where the artist (or artists) get money out of it.