I have yet to hear actors actively speak out about pictures from their movies being used to represent a RP character in a tiny game.
I often wonder how much of that has to do with news coverage. Is any reliable news source regularly covering our hobby?
@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.
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.
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:
Are there any other options that might represent a truly ethical source of PB art?
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:
Find a stock photo and use that.
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.
@Jennkryst @bear_necessities
I recognize that game. It’s Lightyear Frontier, the cozy farm building mech game.
@Faraday said in Player Ratios:
Now if someone’s waiting 6 weeks and never gets their scene with the NPC, that might be excessive. But so what? Staffers are human, they’re volunteers, and they’re entitled to have fun too. If they’re not doing a satisfactory job by your estimation, that’s a good reason to find another game. But if all the staff burn themselves out because the demand exceeds their spoons? Then nobody’s jobs get done because there isn’t a game.
This is why having a constantly updating conversation about staff availability is important to the life of a game. Nobody wants to submit a job and have it go untouched because staff is taking a much needed break, and I believe that most staffers don’t really intend to abandon portions of the player base just because Player A’s one request will require more thought and work than the 7 simple ones that Player B submitted in the same 6 week period.
I think giving players mechanical agency over their potential bad stuff happening is a good thing. One of the GMs I have tabletop groups with has cribbed a Fate Point system out of… I think it was Zweihander, into every game he runs. Each player gets a pool of Fate points that replenish 1 point per session, up to a maximum of 3. You can spend one at any time to reroll a failure, or negate some minor negative thing, for example from our last session, our elemental summoning wizard suddenly found he had lost control of his fire elemental, and he spent a fate point to immediately retake control. On the other hand, if something majorly bad happens, such as a loss of a limb, or outright death, you have to burn a fate point to ignore those effects, and effectively remove yourself from the scene or combat in question. If you burn one, you effectively reduce your maximum by 1 for the life of the character, and if something majorly bad happens after you’ve run down to 0, then you just take whatever fate hands you.
In our tabletop group, having that mechanical agency over it has emboldened some of our usually more risk-adverse players into doing things that make the story more exciting and actually threaten their PCs well being.
@bear_necessities I promise I am that one finger. I enjoy stories where my character loses just as much as I enjoy wins.
@bear_necessities said in World Tone / Feeling:
I’ve always felt that while people say they want consequences in their RP, a vast majority of people don’t really want it. At least not permanent consequences.
I always get weird reactions when I tell people that I’m totally okay with my characters losing limbs, being disfigured, having their livelihood ruined, or straight up dying as long as it’s entertaining.
I want so many hyper-specific games that I won’t actually get them barring starting games myself, and I can’t honestly be sure that they would even get enough players to be runnable.
Like my idea for a post-apocalyptic game where the remaining people on the world live in and around a huge metal tower. The people who have all the power live above the smog clouds choking the world below, and have access to the remaining places above the clouds, including the last bits of fertile land and potable water. The rest of the people live below, in claustrophobic spaces where their survival is only guaranteed by toiling to get access to resupply of the filters that keep the smog out of their cramped quarters. The lower class use power armor suits to try and clean the world, much like the Chernobyl liquidators, while the upper class vie for control of the remaining clean resources and do what they can to keep the lower class from climbing the tower and destroying everything.
@Roz That’s very very cool. It’s always impressive when a game really comes together on that level and produces that kind of story structure between PRP improvisation and the “metaplot” produced by staff.
@Roadspike said in Player Ratios:
One incentive that I think can help get people interested in running PrPs is to have Staff weave references to the actions in their PrPs into larger metaplot scenes.
Another idea that Staff could do in this regard is build frameworks for PrPs for common events that PCs would likely try to intervene in. For a generic D&D style fantasy game, maybe the area the game takes place in is known for regular bands of bandits preying on the towns because of the machinations of some evil arcanist, so the staff builds a framework for how bandit incursions look in the fiction of the world, and provide some ideas on how to put spins on them.
For me, I think it comes down to the intention of the staff from the start. If the staff intend to ensure that every PC has a moment or two in the spotlight and want to run big specific plots, then I would hope the radio of plot-running people to players skews a bit more toward the plot-runners. On the other hand, if the staff are really only building a set for people to play in, and not worried about having an arching plot throughout the life of the game, then the ratio can skew toward the players.