NotSanni

i like this thread mostly because it’s a great reminder that sometimes a story doesn’t have any heroes in it

I haven’t really had a stake in all of this, and mostly I’ve been following along for the hot goss, but this is the thing that’s so wild to me. This specific behavior of “you aren’t allowed to call Ghost a bully, but Ghost can call you a bully” truly boggles the mind.

In any case, if people just stop posting about this on MSB, it’ll probably slowly die off. Ghost and Derp will just quietly seethe and read this forum until someone tries to spark some kind of discussion they think is really, actually quite clever, or until Ghost can’t stand screaming into the void by themselves and rehashes this with some disingenuous post about toxicity or positivity.

@RedRocket said in AI Megathread:

So the next time you are thinking about trying out a new game, ask ChatGPT about it. You might find something interesting.

no

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

@Pax

Lame is not a slur when it is used to describe a thing, only when it is used to describe a person.

It’s a synonym for disappointing, weak or unsatisfying that has been used for most of human history dating back to the early Germanic tribes that first used it to describe an animal with a non-functional of overly weak leg. You would put down your horse because it had a lame leg and couldn’t plow a field anymore.

It’s only considered a slur if you say a person is lame because you are advocating for them to be killed.

I’m very clearly not advocating for the murder of the people who run boring games.

Absolutely wild and inappropriate when someone says “please don’t use a slur” to go on a weird tirade.

All the red flags (no surprise, given your “GAMES ARE DYING BC THEY DON’T PLAY THE WAY I WANT THEM TO” attitude tho).

@icanbeyourmuse said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:

I’ve already said my thoughts on the others. Except ghost. He just gives me the vibe he likes creating drama while pretending he isn’t out to do just that.

That’s almost certainly what he’s doing. He shows up on r/mud to do the same thing once in a while. He’s a dillweed.

@Pavel said:

@Nelly said:

Another difficult topic are the characters who have quippy one-liners or otherwise unserious comments in serious scenes.

It would be one thing if it were occasional, but it’s very much the MUing equivalent of having something scan as the wrong price at the check-out line and saying “Must be free!” Like, it’s great for you in that moment but that’s just one moment in five hundred thousand that cashier has had to deal with.

I partially blame the MCU, though I can’t really say whether their quip-per-scene quota is an originator or a symptom.

I blame Joss Whedon specifically.

I think that there’s a place for games that have conflict between the PCs, but there’s a few things to be mindful of.

Rephrasing PvP as “CvC” and allowing for CvC - Character vs Character - conflict while not tolerating PvP (player vs player) content is a good first step (which is something that Silent Heaven does, to my understanding). But with that, you also need to make sure that the community is well maintained and managed - games with hard coded conflict/competition (especially in the RPI space) tend to draw a toxic crowd, and making sure to get ahead of that with a cultivated community goes a long way towards making sure CvC doesn’t become PvP.

Something else to be mindful of is a “talk shit, get hit” kind of system of CvC can exacerbate problems, as well. Typically, troublemakers do what they do for attention, whether it’s positive or negative attention, so when someone rolls up to a space that has codified conflict, it’s very easy to generate attention by just acting out. This tends to get solved in the “community cultivation” step of things, but it’s one of the things that can crop up with having open conflict between PCs.

@Juniper said in Numetal/Retromux:

My unsolicited verdict-

Others should be a little less mean towards people with characters that are too special, unique, edgy, whatever. Because those encompass a lot of people. Most people want to be special in some way, sometimes tactfully and sometimes… not. I think we all get to have more fun when we’re not veering aggressively away from being “cringe”.

Honestly. The “mean girls” attitude that’s creeped into a few different nerd/geek and adjacent spaces is exhausting.

@Juniper said in Non-toxic PvP:

You can design a near perfect character-conflict system and it will be ruined by an influx of extremely sensitive slice-of-life RPers who devolve into sobbing fits whenever they witness so much as an invitation to participate in conflict.

So lately I’m thinking I’d just kick out those people. Not everyone is capable of the kind of introspection required to choose a game that suits their playstyle, sometimes you have to do it for them.

As I often say whenever the topic of “how do we do character conflict good and fun?” comes up within the MU discussions, the answer is literally this. Community management.

That’s not a skillset that every (maybe even most?) folks who want to run a MU have or want to develop, which is understandable. But willingness to have to be “the bad guy” and take a rep hit, and deal with reports, and investigate claims, and all that sort of thing.

IMO player-driven conflict as a focal point to a game doesn’t really ease the cognitive burden on the staff running the game. It just shifts it from “THE METAPLOT” to “watching out for jerkwards”, which inevitably leads people to complain about the lack of Metaplot anyways.

Not even just slice-of-lifers who want to stake up a part of the niche game that clearly isn’t for them. But tryhards that focus entirely on winning conflicts over creating cool stories. “But that’s what my character would dooooo” types who justify crummy behavior via “IC logic”. Escalators that go from 0 to 100 (both in reacting to conflict, and in initiating conflict).

There’s many pain points that arise when it comes to running a game w/ PvP (tho I prefer Jumpscare’s rebranding of it to CvC personally) as the main drive, and after years in this hobby I just don’t know that I believe it’s worth all of the effort, given the variety of dillweeds and trashbag people you have to sift through to get The Cool People Who Just Want A Lil Bit of Spice In Their RP to stick around.

The common thread I see with people who support and use LLMs casually makes a whole lot of sense - they consistently aren’t willing to put in the work.