Saw this article and thought of this thread.

https://kotaku.com/ai-driven-driving-simulator-developers-go-into-debt-just-to-maintain-steam-demo-2000743791

Which made me think: If rising token costs eventually push the average person off of using AI, how much would we actually have to worry about AI being involved in this hobby?

@Pavel There’s also a legal argument that the act would cover MUSHes as a form of social media, which means we could lose a lot of the EU folks in the hobby unless they band together to build their own servers that go through all those meters of red tape.

Does anybody think the KIDS Act being reviewed by the EU Parliament might affect our hobby?

@somasatori Only games that will never make it as a MU. Like Unknown Armies and pretty much any PBTA game.

@Faraday said:

On a good game with a decent staff, you can trust staffers to remain fair even for their own characters.

Funnily enough, I don’t suggest this based on fairness, though that’s an additional benefit of it. I suggest this because playing a PC in a scene at the same time as one is staffing a scene can add to burnout at a faster pace. While fairness is one part of it, I have noticed that staff who run scenes they’re PCing in seem to, in my experience, burn out faster than those that keep a separation between the two activities.

My thought is sure, staff should be able to play on their own game with some caveats:

1. I agree with @gashlycrumb that all alts should be identified OOCly so that a lot of unethical behavior can be stopped at the pass, especially where staff is involved.
2. Further to that, I believe that no staff member should act as staff for a scene involving their own PCs. So if Staffer A is playing their PC in a staff run scene, Staffer B is responsible for running the scene and making any rulings on the scene.

If a staff member doesn’t want to have a PC on the game, that’s okay too.

Dennis Haskins, actor, famous for playing Mr. Belding on Saved by the Bell and Good Morning, Miss Bliss.

@Gashlycrumb I’m curious. This whole situation where the staff give you the cold shoulder seems to be something you have encountered before. How many games by your estimation have you been on where the staff eventually just stop responding?

Let’s hope that none of the bears get violent with each other. Chunk vs Grazer + her cub in 2024 was super sad.

@Kestrel said:

Some people hate bar RP, some people hate big scenes, some people hate conflict, some people hate politics. And when you put SA on the same list as social or conflict RP, it’s less like a kink list and more just general preferneces.

Totally tangential to this topic, but I’ve met people who hate anything that requires them to leave a single specific grid square.

I think this is one of those cases where a person’s inability to communicate in a healthy fashion has shot them in the foot.

So… Chunk has returned; Grazer has not. However, reading through all of the Fat Bears for this year, several of Grazer’s kids are in the running (one as part of 806 Family, and the other two, 428 Studious and 903 Gully, as solo bears).

Are we pushing Chunk to the top?

I’ll second what @pavel said. Giving people a glimpse of how you’re writing the setting and the rules of the game before they log in will definitely go a long way to letting people make educated choices about whether to give it a deeper investigation.

@voiceinthevoid Why can’t we have non-creeper vampire players who non consensually force people into diner RP? “My Tremere with the Eat Food merit dominates you into coming into Flo’s Diner and having a slice of pecan pie and casual conversation with me.”

@Pavel That’s last years list. The reveal of this years bears is in like… 20 minutes? 2 PM CST I believe.

Edit: And just noticed Tez already said that.

@Kassien Stop making me try to shoehorn more stuff into my already psychotically overwhelming schedule.

@Pavel Are Chunk and Grazer in the running again?

@voiceinthevoid said:

If people are doing SA role play ethically imo nobody will even know who doesn’t want to know.

That’s not always the case though. Even if the participants in the RP are consensual, the participants in the aftermath of that may not be.

@Evilgrayson said:

AddisonPlayer could be annoying. We butted heads on a few things, a few times. But he did a lot for the game, and a lot for other people.

Would you say your experience with AddisonPlayer is uniform to everyone that interacted with AddisonPlayer?