@Juniper Some games have (usually around 5-6) rooms just off of the OOC area that aren’t desced and can be used to act as places that aren’t necessarily built into the grid. I have a personal dislike of RPing in those because they lack the feel of the game world the rest of the grid has.

@Jenn

You must have stopped reading when I mentioned “often times become hostile when asked to join RP / plot”. I have politely approached a duo like this and asked them if they’d like to come join a plot, as they were nominally part of the same faction as myself, and received a rather angry response. I’ve seen staffers on other games politely send a duo like this an invitation to a plot event and get told very plainly to get bent for trying to force them to play the game the staff intended to run. I’ve also witnessed these people throw tantrums when they were suddenly touched by plot they refused to be a part of.

@Jumpscare said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

If they’re not bothering anyone and they’re not taking up ST resources, let them play.

My personal game running / staffing philosophy is such that I would rather all of the players connecting to my game interact with either the plots my staff is running, or with PRPs (that ideally include a cross-section of the players on the game). I see it as a trade. My end of the bargain is the server, the game itself and the plots I and my staff devise, and the players end is their RP with the game at large and whatever PrPs they choose to run for the rest of the players. This is also part of why the next game I run won’t have Generic RP rooms. I’ve seen too many toxic groups form around RPing only in Generic RP Rooms to let that happen in any game I might try to run in the future.

@Faraday said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

You’re making a leap from “prefers to play with their friends” to “never responds to the goings-on of the game.”

You misread my example then. I was specifically referring to pairs of people who join a game only to play in a single grid room, never interact with plot, often times become hostile when asked to join RP / plot, and usually get upset if plot events ever effect them. I’ve run into it a few times in my 20+ years of hobby, and it’s possible that they are the same two people each time (as every time I’ve encountered this phenomenon, it’s gone down almost identically to the others).

@Cygnus said in Numetal/Retromux:

This doesn’t happen on RetroMUX because certain staffers are part of the clique itself; they dole out plots to people the popular kids club approve of, so they’re feeding into the non-community aspect of a game.

Do you think, based on your knowledge of the game, you could identify the members of the clique in question?

My preference is a single warning followed by a permanent ban, unless the harm is incredibly wrongbad (like most sex pests), then just straight to goodbye.

@Faraday said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

I cannot fathom how people having fun with each other telling stories and generating scenes would be considered “inactivity” by any sensible MU metric.

If they never respond to the goings-on of the game, and never leave a single grid square, are they really active? What structure are they using?

@Roadspike said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

I don’t see anything at all wrong with players only RPing with other players that they explicitly like – unless they’re hoarding plot in doing so.

That’s usually the point when cliques go bad, when they start hoarding plot and staff resources for their group and take toxic OOC action to prevent others from accessing them.

@Faraday said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

I absolutely can RP with just a single other person

I have sadly seen some incredibly toxic behavior come out of people joining a game to try and do this. It’s fine if they’re just chill and keep to themselves, but I’ve seen duos get incredibly antagonistic OOC just because people invite them to events or social RP. Even worse so if they get touched by the plots they didn’t bother to even read about, let alone interact with.

That said, if a person intends to RP with a single other person to the exclusion of both the rest of the players and staff run plots, I seriously have to question, especially in the age of Discord and Free VTTs, why people are choosing to pad a MU’s numbers with their secluded RP that might as well be inactivity as far as the census and statistics for the MU in question is concerned.

I think trying to RP outside one’s standard circles is always good for the game, and in the long run could lead to new people a person enjoys RPing with.

@Solstice said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

As for cliques, I think it’s something of a losing battle to try to dismantle the human desire to tribalize, and one we’re unlikely going to solve within the confines of a text-based RPG.

I agree with this. I think the sane response to cliques in this hobby is to just have staff on a given game keep an eye on it, and deal with the ones that are toxic. I’ve seen just as many non-toxic cliques as toxic ones over the years, but it’s rare that a staff team catches the toxic ones in time for it to be dealt with effectively.

@Pavel said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

That said I would personally avoid any formalised ‘welcome wagon’ team.

Wouldn’t that by nature include avoiding interaction with staff, because it’s part of their job as staff to act as a welcome wagon for the game?

@Ashkuri said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

No one thinks people should RP with players/characters they actively despise.

I totally agree with not RPing with Players a person does not like / get along with. It’s not going to do anyone any good to force that. HOWEVER, when it comes to characters a person doesn’t like / get along with, that’s not cut and dry to me. I can understand avoiding RP with characters that drive plots and themes a player is not trying to be a part of, but at the same time, I wouldn’t go so far as to assume that player despises that character. It’s when people start avoiding RP with characters they don’t like that are trying to be involved in themes / plots they want to be involved in. That seems like gatekeeping and conflict avoidance (and I’m not even talking exclusively about PVP, I’m talking about avoiding scenes where other characters are going to offer different viewpoints to the character in question). There’s a big difference between “I don’t want to RP with Captain Lightheart because he’s always trying to lead attacks against the pit demons, and my character Laurent The Ever-Sage isn’t about fighting demons.” and “I don’t want to RP with Captain Lightheart because he’s going disagree with Laurent the Ever-Sage about how to deal with the Cursed Tome of Seven-Skins.”

Also, while I’m thinking about it. Avoiding playing with players a person doesn’t like / can’t get along with is passive clique building if you really think about it. You’re just sort of building a reverse clique where there’s a “clique” of players you won’t play with, and everybody else is in your larger “will play with” clique, even if you’re not constantly positioning yourselves to only play in that player group.

@Pavel Totally. To rephrase my question:

Does @Cygnus feel it is a staff’s job to ensure that any single person is RPing with everyone?

@Cygnus So it’s your position that a person refusing to RP with people they don’t like is bad for the game? Are you saying that you’d rather force them to RP with people they don’t like?

@Pavel said in MUing Snacks:

Okay, Brennan.

I was literally eating almonds when that entire thing happened and giggled.

@Roadspike That’s a good one too, but as much as I like them, they’re sort of an impulse buy for me at the grocery store.

I’m curious about something and I figured I’d ask:

You’re deep in a long scene and it’s really good, so good you’re not really willing to devote attention to anything else at the time, but the pangs of hunger hit you. What snacks are your go to in this situation?

For myself, I keep a bag of almonds or trail mix at my desk and grab that. If I have just posed and have a bit before people expect me to pose again, I might run to the kitchen and get some string cheese.

What is everybody else doing when hunger strikes in the middle of a good scene?

@Pyrephox said in AI In Poses:

There’s no witch hunt

I never said there was. I was proposing the hypothetical case of someone who has to rely on an LLM for their own actual disabilities, which given the state of the health care system in the US and other countries, makes sense to me.

I even got my answer and that was generally: people who use AI, regardless of the reason, are contributing to a horrible industry that shouldn’t exist.

@Pyrephox said in AI In Poses:

Can you cite a single actual case of someone needing, specifically, an LLM and not any of the other tools that have been outlined in this thread and that people with disabilities have been using with success for decades, using an LLM to “pose on time” and being removed from the hobby or shunned for it when people find out?

Without someone coming forward to admit it here (and I doubt they would because of the stigma we’ve already witnessed in this thread), I can only provide cases where people with disabilities are turning to LLMs as assistive tech.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0262885624004529#sec4

@Ashkuri said in AI In Poses:

In this very thread people are saying they would just prefer your short pose. Short poses are fine.

I have no interest in ChatGPT for creative purposes, and my little use of it for non creative purposes is dwindling down to zero mostly because I’ve quit the few things I was using it to help me with altogether.

My poses however, some months definitely rub my imposter syndrome the very wrong way. I may play in 5-6 scenes in a month, and in those scenes hundreds of lines of prose are created. When I look back at the logs, and see that I’m only responsible for maybe 10 lines in 6 scenes, I question whether I’m actually participating in the hobby or just being a virtual wallflower.

@Muscle-Car said in AI In Poses:

the idea of wanting other writers to be like me is narcissistic and small-minded

I think this brings up another facet of this discussion. Where does mental health play into someone’s decision to rely on an LLM for assistance in communicating with others (be it an email, a discord message, or a pose in a MU)?

I could reasonably see imposter syndrome being just as much of a cause for jumping to ChatGPT for posing. I know I struggle with imposter syndrome regularly, and when I make a 2 line pose that describes my characters actions and dialogue in only the most basic terms, I honestly wonder if I shouldn’t just quit for being abjectly bad in comparison to some of the excellent prose I see my scene partners producing.

@Pyrephox said in AI In Poses:

Ooh! Ooh! I’ve seen this movie! Would you kill a member of your family because the crazed cult that’s taken you hostage says it’s the only way to save the world? What if actual airplanes started crashing? What if, what if, what if a vision from a god said you had to plunge that knife into someone or the world would end?

Ooh Ooh! I totally dismiss other people’s perspectives on things because I haven’t lived them and don’t believe they could exist.