The grim/noble dark/bright alignment system might be helpful: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/s/bB0gvqrwjL

I am firmly on the Noble side of settings. I am down for anything on the Bright-Dark setting with slight leaning towards Bright, but I don’t have Grim in me anymore. As @DrQuinn said, if I want Grim I’ll look at the damned window, and I’ve been in that state for about a decade now.

EDIT: After thinking about it more, I’m going to take it back. I’m down for anything but Grimdark. I’ll take Grimbright. Arx felt Grimbright to me.

@KarmaBum Eh. I know how it is. You can run an event every hour, 24 hours a day, and some people will still only do BarP for all their interactions while complaining that there is nothing to do.

@catzilla That’s clever and a good use of AI for MU* purposes.

Honestly, I am coming more and more around to the idea that all PBs should be custom created art and/or AI generated images. The use of images of real people who didn’t agree to be used for such purposes has been making me more and more uncomfortable over the years.

I have hesitated to post anything in this thread, because I very much do not appreciate being drafted into the role of OP for this particular topic. Anyways…

@ProperPenguin said in AI PBs:

Hi, tech writer here.

I am job hunting (as I left a toxic work environment right before the AI obsession began in corporations). I have been job hunting.

The work disappeared for a good while. And reports from people who weren’t laid off basically came down to them being piled on so high with work they couldn’t manage. One person even reported that her coworkers had nicknamed her AI. ‘Send it to AI.’
Which was hugely demoralizing (understandably) to her.

I know a developer who runs a team: he was made to lay off his tech writer and told ‘just use AI.’ Except he’s in the financial sector. They cannot use it (for security, accuracy, etc.) and when he pointed it out, was told ‘it’s just writing, do it yourself.’

And this is the core issue, the lack of appreciation and respect to a profession from other professionals and industries. “Anyone can write. Anyone can draw. Anyone can take a photograph. Anyone can shoot film. Anyone can work an assembly line.” No, anyone can’t, and no a robot cannot give you as good a quality, yet. If you need specialized, expert, professional work done, you need to pay for a specialist, expert, and professional.

I like AI for hobbyists, people who don’t have the cash or the level of personal investment into whatever hobby it is to pay for a professional. “I want a PB that isn’t a photograph of a real person, I don’t have any artistic talent at all, and I don’t want to pay $150 for an image I am going to slap on a wiki and never really think about again.” “I need a desc, but I hate writing them. I’ll just have an AI write one over and over until I get one I like.”

And I am now going to exit the thread again. Have fun, y’all.

@catzilla Who gave you permission to access my MU* TS logs?

Belated reply. Put me in the “prefer the grid” group. I very much dislike off-grid RP rooms. Why even log into a server? You might as well just be RPing on Discord or by email at that point. I am fine with small or large grids, but I prefer location based.

I think that there are a lot of MU* players out there that have very specific unmet interests. Most MU* players have been playing the game for a while now and know exactly what they want. A new game comes along that sounds close grabs their interest, they give it a shot, it doesn’t check all their boxes, and they move on.

@MisterBoring I have also been wondering about this recently. This thread and my partner watching a lot of reality TV series like the Bachelor(ette), the Mole, Million Dollar Secret, and also a bit of Bridgerton have combined with me recently playing Fire Emblem and Unicorn Overlord with their harem anime elements and my constant desire to run a lord and ladies game, resulting in the crazy idea of doing a parody lord and ladies MU*.

At first I was going to call it Pretty Princess Simulator, but maybe The Courtship of the Crown Prince might be better. Basically every season will start with that generation’s crown prince having his debut and all the eligible noblewomen of the land coming to try to woo him into marriage, using their wits, wiles, political connections, etc. to do so. At the end of the season, the best noblewoman (or nobleman, maybe we will have a gay crown prince or a crown princess every so many seasons to mix things up) will win. All of the kingdom’s politics, wars, natural disasters, regime changes, economic swings, etc. will take place in the background during the intervening years. Every season will have a crown prince with a different personality, tastes, hobbies, etc and the noblewomen will need to figure them out and try to use them to their advantage to snag the future queenship. Hopefully the time skips between seasons changing the world would be enough of a change to bring the bubble players back to try again with a new season.

@KarmaBum said in The 3-Month Players:

@Ominous this idea sounds neat but what will people RP?

Blatantly ripping off @Roadspike 's template:

Woo the crown prince of the kingdom with wits, wiles, or wyrdings in this fantasy setting. Characters will be trying to find out what they can about the prince, use that to their advantage, and try to thwart the efforts of others in getting closer to the prince. They will attend balls, gossip amongst themselves, participate in duels, attend events to showcase their brilliance to the royal family, and plot against one another.

Pretty Princess Simulator is a game of romantic intrigue and politicking in a fantasy renaissance setting. Players might be eligible noblewomen trying to win the future queenship, the family members of those noblewomen working to help them, servants of those noblewomen or of the royal palace, or a small cadre of the prince’s friends, tutors, and personal staff who hold the secrets to the prince’s heart.

All characters will belong to one of the many noble families of the kingdom or their servants. You will be endeavoring to get your one of the eligible noblewomen in your house selected as the bride to the crown prince or you will be one of the prince’s inner circle working to achieve a personal secret agenda. The first month will be the arrival of the eligible noblewomen to the royal palace leading up to the crown prince’s debut. The next few months will be filled with varying events to attend and make oneself known, leading up to the crown prince’s final selection and marriage.

But yeah probably a lot of BarP. Unless the royal family goes full reality show and has the eligible noblewomen participating in ridiculous contests. And, since this idea started as a parody of L&L, that might actually be the route to go in.

@RedRocket This speaks to my OSR D&D gaming heart.

@Tapewyrm You’ve got to have some crunch somewhere for the social RP fluff to be based on. How can we bemoan the ongoing war with the orcs, if there is no battles in the background? How can we gossip about the King divorcing the past Queen and marrying some nobody from a backwater house if that doesn’t happen? Meringue topped with marshmallow fluff topped with whipped cream is sweet but not very filling. You can’t make a good dessert with just that. You’ve got to have some substance under it all.

@RedRocket said in The 3-Month Players:

The same thing is true of people who hang out in bars just to hook up for TS. Why are you on a roleplay game with a complicated combat and stat system when you could just go to one of many games where you can literally be anything and bang anything you can imagine.

Some people like plot with their porn or porn with their plot. Romance novels sell better than Hustlers. DeepThroat, the highest grossing pornographic film, made $22.6 million inflation adjusted at the box office; Fifty Shades of Gray grossed $569 million. Sure, you could log onto Shang, find a willing partner, and hammer out your best IKEA instructions for Peg A going into Slot B with gusto, but where’s the flirting, the foreplay, the slow simmer, the romance?

@real_mirage said in World Tone / Feeling:

I think the issue is so often when the consequences come around those consequences are out of the player’s control. Which can be completely reasonable/logical! But they feel helpless and more easily feel slighted/pissed/unaccepting of the outcome. Especially if there is a hand behind the outcome such as a GM/Staff telling them what happened.

When bad results happen, I think you have to push it back on the player and let them make a choice. I was recently watching Critical Role’s new campaign and their use of their new system Daggerheart and I thought it was perfect for handling the scenario of a bad outcome/consequences in a MU*.

As an OSR GM, when my players tell me what action they want to take, if the consequence of failure isn’t already clear, I try to make it clear and confirm that they still want to take the action.

"Player: My character is going to jump the chasm to get to the other side.

Me: That’s going to be a d20 roll under strength with a -2 for they length of the jump. If you succeed, your character will be on the other side of the chasm. If you fail, your character will fall into the chasm and, while your character can’t determine the exact depth, it’s enough that there is a strong potential for their death. Do you wish to continue?"

GMs should treat action declarations more like hovering over the options in a Paradox Interactive strategy game story event. Tell the player what the odds of success and failure or what die their going roll, the difficulty number or whatever, and whatever bonuses or penalties they have. Tell them what success looks like (because what they’re attempting may not get them what they’re actually after), and tell them what failure looks like.

@Juniper said in AI Megathread:

People call this “hallucination”. I think we should stop letting them assign a new name to an existing phenomenon. The LLM is malfunctioning.

No, it is not. What the AI spits out is meaningless to the AI. It just spits out what the most likely next set of words are based on the input it received and what it has already given. For it to malfunction, it needs to start writing sentences devoid of grammar. As long as what it writes is grammatically correct and a somewhat rational statement, it has succeeded

It is saying things that are wrong.

Yes, but factually accurate answers are not the purpose. Grammatically correct sentences are.

It is failing to do what it was designed to do.

No. It is doing exactly what it is designed to do. It’s failing at doing what entrepreneurs, marketers, and other PT Barnum snake oil salespeople want the public to think it can do.

EDIT: To actually contribute something to the thread, about the only thing I am willing to use AI on for MU purposes is played-bys and maybe creating images on the wiki for the various venues on the grid. I have grown tired of seeing Jason Momoa as the image for Seksylonewulf McRiptabs #247.

EDIT 2: Typoes.

@bear_necessities Well, it’s not all about wooing the CP. These are more decisions made by the Imperial Family. The CP just gets a say. So there are other individuals to be making your case to. Also the fighting over who gets to sit next to the CP at dinner, who gets to dance with them at the ball, etc. is part of the competition. Perhaps there might be leaderboards for the differing events to show who currently has what spot at what event. Want to move up the ranks at the banquet? Better start schmoozing up the staff member in charge of the seating arrangements for that event or maybe try the Empress or the Chamberlain. Have you ever played the card game Love Letter? That, only more detailed and with more roleplaying.

EDIT: I forgot that that review of the card game does a poor job of explaining the fluff of the game. The idea is that whatever character you have in your hand is the member of the court you have convinced to take your letter to the Princess. When you draw a card you can either choose for the character who currently has your letter to pass it off to the new character, enacted by playing the character you had in your hand and holding onto the new character, or use your influence with the new character to have them do something to help you, enacted by playing that character. It an abstract game about using your influence at court to win the heart of the Princess.

EDIT 2: Also one person won’t play the CP. It’s going to rotate amongst staff, so hopefully no one gets too exhausted being the focus at any event they attend.

@Raistlin said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

1: Players who are willing to have characters that “lose” in these political games and who’ll accept consequences. It should still lead to engaging and imaginative RP but, in my experience, most people just want to “win” and don’t like being on the other side.

I have a solution to that, but it always gets waved away - any character can be played by any player. When you log on, there’s a list of characters available, and you select who you want to play that day. Then there’s less connection between one player to one character, and any given character “losing” isn’t going to be devastating to that player.

@sao You’re a doctor! Not a MU* player.

@Faraday Getting a computer as close to passing the Turing Test than any other computer has managed before. That’s about it.

I am curious how people define Lord’s & Ladies games.

For me, a critical aspect of a L&L game is the pageantry and the scale, which ties into the pageantry. You could have intrigue and politics in a game about a few tribes living on an island or something, but the conflicts will be small scale (we don’t have enough food for our dozens of tribe members for the coming winter season, so we must go raid the tribe next door). The same can be said of a game that focuses on gangs in a city. Sure you have the conflict, politicking, and intrigue, but you don’t have the balls, the dresses, and the, dare I say, romance, both in the passion meaning and the nostalgic romanticism meaning.

I just want there to be actual politicking and intrigue. The set dressing, while enjoyable, becomes just meaningless decoration otherwise and the game stops holding my interest. Then again, I would also be down to play a bunch of tribes on an island fighting each other over the best hunting grounds. I just don’t think many others would be.

@Pavel Soooo, I haven’t been on any MU*s for like half a decade. Are…are people doing that? That seems…pointless. “Hey, let’s play basketball. But instead of us, let’s have robots play against each other while we do something else.” Writing is the whole point

@Raistlin @Warma-Sheen
I also think it’s a trust issue, and a trust issue that is almost entirely in the “you just have to trust me” category. Just like trusting the person on the other side of the screen isn’t a stalker who keeps changing their identity so they can chargen a new character to interact with you or trusting that people you are having a private scene with or worse TSing aren’t sharing those logs with their friends to laugh at your writing, there isn’t a way to outright protect yourself and verify that it isn’t happening. It’s too easy for the other person to obfuscate. So instead of allowing for grey area, people have to make it a firm black or white issue, because if there is grey area, when you catch someone, it becomes a whole ordeal figuring out if what they did was wrong. When it’s black and white, there doesn’t have to be any time spent on nuance.