Client: Well, I’m gay.
Me: Mhm…
Client: And… that’s okay?
Me: slow swivel in chair to look at giant Progress Pride Flag on my wall
Me: slow swivel in chair to look back at client
Client: happy tears
Being a client’s safe space to come out is a gift that keeps on giving.
@Faraday One could certainly make all those arguments about the internet itself. It’s just all happening all at once like a rolling boil rather than turning the heat up slowly.
Which isn’t an excuse or a “so don’t worry about it.” We have to direct our energies outwards towards forcing our representatives into heavy regulation, etc. For everything else I’m just fatigued in my concern.
@Jumpscare said in AI PBs:
the AI gives him more abs
If an AI could improve my fitness and physique without me having to put in any labour my ethics and morality would go out the window as fast as I could type “make me fit and sexy please” into FitGPT.
There’s no ethical consumption under (late stage) capitalism, we all vaguely know this. Nobody in this thread is anyone else’s moral superior, and anyone trying to be should be roundly mocked.
The use of AI feels worse for a lot of us because we’re creatives, or move in creative circles, and that’s what generative AI is directly impacting right now. And that’s a perfectly valid feeling, especially if it mitigates one’s own consumption.
ETA: That isn’t to discount the feelings of everyone involved, simply an explanation for those who don’t understand the seeming hypocrisy and/or double standards.
Oh, I forgot to mention that there is a second stage to my process: I have to check whether or not the bastard I want to use has been accused of anything heinous. Then have a mild reflective moment about whether killing someone ‘counts’ as something bad enough to discount a potential PB… It’s a process.
@MisterBoring said in AI PBs:
Pretending that commercial generative AI models aren’t walking databases of art theft is just disingenuous at this point.
I agree with this, but do you think that non-commercial generative AI isn’t also art theft?
I think that it is theoretically possible for it not to be. If I trained my own model on photos I took, or art I did, then that could probably be reasonable (from an art use standpoint, at least). Whereas all commercial generative models, at least so far as I am aware, are prolific in their art theft.
Depends. Often a rough outline of a character comes from seeing someone specific in something. Though I don’t rip the character wholesale, there’s often something ineffably “that actor” about the character that I want to capture: Hiroyuki Sanada as Toranaga for instance.
Other times I describe a character to someone (a friend, or increasingly my children) and they make suggestions. Though often these days I don’t even bother with PBs as much.
@Faraday said in World Tone / Feeling:
The important thing is to set expectations.
Agreed. Even the most well-thought-out story-based consequence can feel like a capricious punishment rather than an interesting story moment if there’s no communication and the player is blind-sided.
@Ominous said in World Tone / Feeling:
For MU*s, pretty much every action is not standardized, so the GM should always be informing the player what failure looks like
To be honest, most of the consequences I’ve experienced in games haven’t involved dice rolls at all. They’ve been the result of stupid decision making, some of which was because of stupid players trying to win stupid prizes, but plenty of others could be chalked up to a misunderstanding between players, or player and storyteller. So there’s often no ‘I am going to attack him with my longsword’ pre-action discussion time. Someone calls the Prince of Vancouver an American and suddenly there’s a blood hunt, all because of a lack of communication or clarity.
@Ominous said in World Tone / Feeling:
if the consequence of failure isn’t already clear
I think this point here is often a point of contention. What’s obvious to the person running the story isn’t always obvious to those of us playing the story, especially if it hasn’t been communicated accurately. Sure, some of the responsibility is on the players to ask follow up questions, but I’d really advocate for those telling the story to go that extra half a mile in making hazards and risks more explicit.
Sometimes it can be exciting to be surprised by a risk you hadn’t anticipated. Sometimes being reckless does need to get a rap across the knuckles. But you really do have to work at framing the consequences as story beats and not the punishments they can so easily seem like.
@Faraday said in World Tone / Feeling:
longer if we imagine realistic physical therapy / recovery periods!
Any character over 30 now has to have “mild back/joint pain” as a mandatory part of their RP. And if you ever sustain an injury to a joint you get occasional stiffness, but as a bonus you get to tell when it’s about to rain and/or when your favourite sports team is going to win.
I think both of these issues, wanting a game to be run with some level of reasonable job completion level while also wanting to ensure staff don’t burn out harder than a lawyer studying for the bar, really exemplify the need for the original point of this discussion – some level of population control.
It’s sort of inevitable given the apparent lack of communication going on between staff, along with the sheer amount of making things up on the fly that I had seen during my brief sojourn there.
@Tez said in World Tone / Feeling:
Not me. I’m not working on this. I’m not being coy about me working on this. IT’S NOT ME.
The they-dy doth protest too much.
@real_mirage said in World Tone / Feeling:
laying taxes
Taking the “fuck the state” idea in a whole new direction.
@Faraday said in World Tone / Feeling:
It’s certainly possible to do so. TGG had a high PC fatality rate and zippy fast chargen (I don’t think there was even an approval step).
Oh I definitely agree, I played there exceptionally briefly (Russian front, obviously).
I think it’s one of those things that must be considered if one wants omnipresent danger while also having players feeling free to take risks. If one invests a lot of time into making a character, one is less predisposed to disposing of said character on a whim, generally speaking.
@DrQuinn said in Player Ratios:
I am that person that loves to pull people into things, though.
So long as you ask, of course. I have too many not-so-fond memories of staff foisting random “events” onto people who were quite happy doing their own RP thankyouverymuch.
If there’s danger around every corner that’ll get you if you slip up for even a moment, your CG needs to take ten minutes and approval even less.
@bear_necessities I phrased it poorly, but I meant time as in “you staffers only think about American timezones” and social energy as “I don’t know anyone and I don’t like asking for scenes out of the blue…”
