@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.

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.

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

@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.

@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.

@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

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

@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.

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.

@Pyrephox said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

In fact, one of my never-gonna-happen “would love” MU* games is a political game centered around a free city with power split between elected citizens, powerful merchants often from outside the city, crafting guilds, and the mercenary forces the city needs to keep from getting eaten by outside powers.

This is actually one of the things I would like to see, a sort of ancient Roman Republic, Renaissance Florence/Venice game. Have the server focused on the city and the patrician families that run it. Have an Assembly that passes laws and appoints the magistrates and the governors of their conquered lands. The Republic of Rome board game is kind of what I am thinking of as a basis. Maybe a little bit of the Dune setting and the Arcane series.

Appointed bureaucrats (magistrates, governors, ministers, generals, etc.) rather than inheritable bureacrats also gets around the problems of bad players that do nothing having a lot of IC power. They won’t have it for long when the Assembly demands answers for why they aren’t doing anything and appoint a replacement. It also fixes the problem of important characters sitting on a roster for months at a time. Again, the Assembly will just appoint a replacement.

The question is whether the Assembly is elected by the citizenry as a whole or whether it’s more closed off. In ancient Rome, membership in the Senate was given to anyone who had been a magistrate and that was the only way to get a seat. As the Senate was the body that appointed magistrates, it was a closed system. Then again, even with the entire citizenry able to vote, oligarchs will exist, as history and current events demonstrate, so the people that get voted are still likely to be of the patrician class.

@Jumpscare I get a Coup (the card game) vibe from this.

I see PCs at the highest levels of power working under certain circumstances:

1. The power is temporary.
2. The power comes with constraints.

For the first, I point again to Republic of Rome and John Company board games and the themes that they have. Rather than having position be mostly inherited, it is mostly appointed. You want to be one of the two proconsuls over the entire Republic? Sure! But the term is only for two years, you can’t have consecutive terms, and you can always be brought to trial by the Censors for fucking around. You want to be the general of the armies in Bengal? Sure! Better bring in spoils and not lose too many men, or we’re kicking your ass to the curb. No one gets to just be a position because their mommy or daddy had the position, and there are expectations of performance.

For the second, I had thought of game centered around the politics of the fey/divine beings. One attains more power and Prestige by the titles that they posses, such as The Red Count, Lord of the Dead, The Frosted One, The Dweller at the Threshold, etc. When one bests the current possessor of the title, they get it. While each title gives powers and more Prestige, it also comes with taboos. The Red Count can’t touch iron. The Frosted One can’t be in the sun. So on and so forth. Break a taboo and you are greatly weakened, making it easier for someone to steal the title from you.

EDIT: But I will agree that, in general, the top echelons of power should be NPCs who give tasks to the PC underlings.

@Rucket Could you elaborate on what you mean by “basic House development”?

@Gashlycrumb said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

When plot-stuff flows both ways, PC power is constrained by the powerful PC’s need for IC support from the less powerful. If it always flows top-down, well, not so much. Not at all if you let the mighty get away with taking no action/ineffective action/action only involving off-camera NPC minions.

My post was not meant to imply that plot stuff can’t flow both ways. I was arguing that factionheads should be NPCs so that the overall direction and policy-making of that faction can kept on a leash by administration, rather than risking a PC factionhead completely derailing or sinking an entire faction because their player decided the character needed to hold the idiot ball.

Alice, Bob, and Carol, a trio of town guards, could be the ones to come across the zombie horde and report it to their sergeant, the commander of the town guard, or the mayor. However the mayor, assuming they are the head of the faction in the particular scenario where the factions in the setting are the various towns in a kingdom, would then issue a command to the commander of the town guard, a PC, who could handle it themself or delegate it down the chain. But somebody better do it or the mayor is going to be pissed. It may not even need to get to the mayor. Once it reaches the commander of the town guard’s ears, again a PC, they could make a decision and act how they feel would be appropriate. Bit, again, they better be right about the course of action, because, if they kill the zombies when the mayor has a pro-brain eating policy in place the mayor is going to be pissed.

Players get to play US cabinet positions but the President is an NPC. A PC isn’t going to be able to order that we nuke Russia because their player got fired from their real world job and they want to watch the world burn. The players can be representatives in the National Assembly, but the heads of their parties are NPCs. If the players deviate too far from the tenets and positions held by their party, the head of the party can kick them to the curb and they likely won’t be re-elected in the next election cycle without party support. So on and so forth.

@bear_necessities said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

But what happens when Alice, Bob & Carol, a trio of town guards, come across a zombie horde and horde that information to themselves because they want the plot? IDK there’s no real perfect way to ensure everyone gets a bite of the plot cake except to just put the information out there for everyone.

If they fail and die, then the town guards, David, Emily, and Frank will come across a zombie horde that’s three zombies larger and their friends and family curse their names. If they fail and don’t die, the mayor and the captain of the guard are going to be pissed and their friends and family may shun them. If they succeed, good for them. Celebrations and cheers to their names will be had. And the mayor and the captain of thr guard might still be pissed for them acting on their own. That’s the risk you take when you take on such responsibility.

@Pavel Well, it was kind of the point of the idea. Run a seasonal server so those who aren’t feeling the current season can get a new experience a few months later and maybe have it be more their vibe. I would much rather run and/or play a L&L server that is long running with deep politics, intrigue, economics, etc. They only other reason that I can think of off of the top of my head to go “seasonal/anthology” is if you’re doing a generational theme and want to timeskip rather than wait a few years for the next generation to age up.

This has all been a fun tangent to the topic of the thread, but steering things back, is there any reason to believe that a server with “seasons” will in any way draw back the 3 month players at the start of every season? I would think that more substantial changes would be needed between each season, rather than just changing who the characters are and time skipping, to attract back people who left after the first season’s bubble.