My general guide for Not Being Creepy On Games, which is by no means inclusive, but will catch…at least 80 percent of basic creepiness:

1. Be honest and straightforward about what sort of play you are looking for. There’s nothing wrong with being there primarily for the TS OR primarily for the combat OR whatever, but:

2. Accept without complaint or attempt to ‘win someone over’ when someone is not interested in the RP that you want.

3. Do not solicit real life details from other players. If they want you to know, they’ll volunteer it.

4. Do not share more than basic RL details to anyone who has not specifically asked. Freely shareable details may include the general line of work you’re in, what region of what country you live in, or the sort of hobbies you would tell your grandmother about. Details that no one needs to know unless they’ve specifically asked and you feel truly comfortable sharing with them may include but not be limited to: your address, your real name, pictures of any part of your body, your kinks, your salary, and any hobbies that you would not be comfortable explaining to a ten year old in front of their loving parents who are also holding shotguns.

5. No is a complete sentence. If someone says that they DO NOT want to do a thing, no matter what that thing is, then they do not have explain themselves and you should not try to persuade them to do the thing. That includes ‘talking to you’ or ‘playing with you’.

6. If someone says “Stop”, OOC, then stop. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. If someone says “Stop”, IC, then stop, and make sure OOC that they are enthusiastic (not just ‘will tolerate’) about the direction a scene is going in, and let them know that if the scene is not fun for them at any time, you can absolutely do something different or end it without any sort of argument or retribution. Then follow through with that.

7. If an IC event is going to involve harming, humiliating, dominating, punishing, or otherwise doing something painful to another character, check in proactively with the player, and work out boundaries for the scene OOC. This doesn’t have to mean planning out every moment, but you want to establish early and often that communication is good, and that just because someone’s PC is on the bottom of the IC event, it doesn’t mean you’re trying to harm or punish the player. It’s a game. Everyone should have fun.

8. Remember: Nobody on a game owes you anything. Not other players. Not staff. They don’t owe you scenes, or benefits, or specific relationships. No, even if it is written into character backgrounds - it’s a game, and people change. If someone doesn’t scene with you for a while, don’t assume that it’s because they’re avoiding you, or they hate you, or because they’ve been stolen away by that TS hog over there. Usually, it has nothing to do with you, but if you throw a tantrum over it, it WILL. And also, you will be creepy.

9. Helping a new player is not an exchange. Do not do it if you think you’re going to “get something” out of it, or that the new player’s character is going to owe something to yours. Especially do not page new players to see if their character is available for relationships for your desires - and if it is not, do not advise them on how they ‘should’ change their character so it is.

10. Comments on PBs or descs should be family friendly. Again, imagine the ten year old and the parents with shotguns. Do not volunteer the various sexual things you desperately want to do to the actor whose face a character has - or anything you’ve done to your self while looking at a gallery picture or desc. Ten year old. Shotguns. Don’t.

Hey all,

Putting my mod hat on for a moment. After talking with the rest of the mod team, we’d like to ask that you not include screenshots or links from MSB in this thread, or use this thread as a method to encourage, cheer, or organize action towards the other board. We know that people are sore about what happened, and this remains a place to vent about those events, but not to create or continue an atmosphere of cross-board drama. Thank you all!

As always, please feel free to discuss this decision in the discussion thread.

I wish I could get into something. There are several games that are, theoretically, up my alley, run by people I like who do things I enjoy.

But just can’t muster the energy. I feel bad, because I want to play with people and I have fun. But just nothing sticks to me right now. Hoping that if I don’t force it, I’ll rediscover my mojo at some point.

Another random thought:

PCs should not be at the highest levels of power. There are a few reasons for this, mostly related to the nature of players.

1. The people who most want to be “in charge” of other PCs are generally not the people you actually want to have that power. And often, they want it as an achievement…and once they get it, they disappear.
2. If your game relies on themes (like, say, conflict between factions or internal societal tensions) then you should not rely on PCs to enforce those as leaders. Most players won’t enforce theme, and the ones who do often end up burning out and miserable because they’re thrust in a position of “fun police” that isn’t actually very fun (ask me how I know).
3. “Good” leadership is actually not great for the game part of the game. Leaders who try to make friends, decrease tensions, and set up long-term successes push things towards stagnation. PC leaders who lean into creating thematically-appropriate conflict often catch whole loads of shit from other players. NPC leaders only have to make decisions that are aimed at making the game fun/exciting/tense for everyone - PC leaders often make decisions based on what they feel will make other players like them, or just get off their back.
4. Likewise, absent or rapidly rotating leadership makes it hard for players to have continuity of play, and PC leadership positions usually exist in a state of either functionally absent or flipping through PC leaders like a rolodex as new people show up, burn out, leave.

foksthery said in MU Peeves Thread:

@bear_necessities your friend is a fucking gaslighter who was really weird to me elseMU to the point where being on the same game as them made me super anxious and I was doing my best to respect their boundaries and drove myself batty. I should have left on my own. That was on me. You were right to boot me. No quarrel there.

I’ve removed the ‘at’ for foksthery because she’s said she’s not reading the forum anymore, and it doesn’t seem fair to ping her.

However, by context, it’s pretty clear that she’s referring to me, here. Because the previous incident of me being “really weird” and “gaslighting” her is on MSB, I’m going to summarize it here, in case those things go away from MSB at some point. You can find the details - including quotes of logs - on MSB if you care to.

The previous game was The Network. I was playing a character with wings, her character indicated that she was going to take his feathers without permission to put in her pillows. I OOCly mentioned that I found that a bit creepy, she said she didn’t care, her character was doing it, and I just decided not to argue about it. Later, a couple of people were making jokes about stealing my character’s feathers, and I asked people to stop - I freely admit it’s a stupid thing to get weirded out about, but it just hit me wrong and I didn’t want it to be a running joke. She said something about not realizing it upset me, I pointed out that I’d mentioned that in the scene.

She paged me with this big, anxious apology, and followed up with something like, by the way, don’t ever call my character ‘exotic’ again. Then vagueposted on MSB about it. Problem was, I’d never done that - and it being an Ares game, I had the logs to prove it. She tried to backpedal about how it wasn’t about me, so I pointed out that there’s no logs backing up the idea that anyone had done so. At which point she broke down, apologized (almost exactly like her apology earlier in this thread) and I figured it was over.

Later game, Santa Rosalia, I realized she was on the game. I had advertised for a play group I was putting together, and she signed up. I reached out to her, let her know who I was (I don’t have an Ares handle), and that I really prefer not to run anything for her or play with her. She was very understanding, and we avoided each other from then on. I gave a head’s up to staff so that they wouldn’t put us in any GMed scenes together if it could be avoided. I genuinely thought that was the end of it, and didn’t much think about her after that.

So, that’s the story, as far as I know and understand it. Whether I’m manipulative or a gaslighter, I guess I leave to everyone else to decide.

I’ll also say that you really do have to separate out two concepts:

In-character conflict, which may be between player characters

and

Player vs player conflict, where the PCs are mainly proxies for beating ‘the other guy’ on an ooc level.

I’ve had far more rich, rewarding, and intense conflict and competition between characters when there is no OOC masque, when players OOCly communicate about stakes, outcomes, desires, than when that conflict is treated as a competition between players. Like, I’ve had intrigue and espionage plots/scenes that could only happen BECAUSE we were talking OOC and cool with things happening. Also, being able to chat with people OOC about how we see this conflict helps me identify at a much earlier stage if this is a player who can handle conflict, or who it’s just not going to be fun trying to have these sorts of scenes with.

A secondary issue is something I learned as a newbie GM and which has never steered me wrong in the days since: “You can’t solve an OOC problem with an IC solution.” If the problem is “this player is playing their character in a way that makes the game unfun for other people”, then punishing/beating up/demoting/killing their character is never the solution. Having an adult conversation with them OOC about the effect their play is having on others’ fun is, and if that conversation doesn’t go well, then removing them from the game is.

Killing someone’s character because you’re OOCly annoyed with the player is one of the ways PvP gets real toxic, real fast. It’s not ‘policing the community’, it’s just taking your frustration out on someone who you usually know that you can beat and have often taken every measure to make sure that fight is as one-sided and humiliating as possible, because you’re there to ‘teach the player a lesson’, not to have fun with them.

I won a writing contest and will be paid for my fiction for the First Time Ever.

I think this thread is valuable as a venting thread, but I also think we should be careful that we’re not encouraging or organizing trolling on the other board from it.

It would honestly be better for everyone if we just left them to…whatever thing they’ve got going on there. With only themselves for company. That’s probably consequences enough.

There’s nothing quite like running a session where every player is engaged in the scene and having fun, even when things don’t go perfectly. Tense IC, chill OOC, and just a whole lot of fun from start to finish. It reminds me why I love to GM.

@Sam-Hyde said in Bannings:

I’ve been a pretty long-time lurker on MSB, logging in occasionally just to see if a new game got advertised (increasingly rare), and I must say that it’s a good thing you had a split. Also the people who make new games tend to get run off for various reasons. Not sure how much of a fan I am of that.

This is something that has concerned me, as well. If I have any ‘hopes’ for this board, it involves the Helping Hands subforum, and that there will be room for people to talk about interesting ideas without having those ideas instantly shot down by people who have very specific ideas of how MU*s ‘should’ work and are all too gleeful to talk about how trying anything else is doomed, DOOMED and will never survive.

It’s something that I’ve heard game designers and potential game designers talk about for years and when people are already considering putting hours and hours of work into something, having a bunch of people all too ready to pour buckets of cold water on any idea that isn’t exactly like five hundred games that have gone before is very discouraging.

@Pavel She was a good horse! I’m glad she had a nice retirement.

Love some cheese and crackers. Slice it up, get some good quality, rosemary and/or olive oil crackers, go to town. If I happen to have an apple or something, slice that up super thin to give a little sweet crunch layer.

But usually I’m lazy, so just cheese and crackers.

@Pavel said in AI In Poses:

Can LLMs be of benefit to people with disabilities? Fuckin’ probably, I dunno, I’m not an accessibility expert.

Honestly, I doubt it? If something existed that was what people who want to use LLMs THINK LLMs can do, then it would.

But an LLM is not that. They have no sense of accuracy, of understanding of the data they’re receiving or outputting. They’re often (like, sometimes higher than 50%) confidently wrong, which is the last thing you need to assist you with a processing or sensory disorder. They create a sense of deceptive empathy but don’t have the ability to consistently and accurately recognize distress or self-harm, so I sure wouldn’t use them for cognitive or emotional disorders.

Do some people probably use LLMs as disability assistance tools? Yes, and some people take horse deworming pills to cure COVID. In both cases, they should be stopped from doing that, because it very well may injure or kill them. “People do this” does not, in any way, equal “this is a good or effective thing to do”.

And I’m not even trying to be funny, or talking about MU*s anymore. An LLM cannot and should not be trusted with ANY situation where there’s a negative or harmful consequence to error, because they are fucking black boxes filled with errors.

@MisterBoring said in AI In Poses:

@Pyrephox said in AI In Poses:

Ooh! Ooh! I’ve seen this movie! Would you kill a member of your family because the crazed cult that’s taken you hostage says it’s the only way to save the world? What if actual airplanes started crashing? What if, what if, what if a vision from a god said you had to plunge that knife into someone or the world would end?

Ooh Ooh! I totally dismiss other people’s perspectives on things because I haven’t lived them and don’t believe they could exist.

Have you lived it?

Has anyone lived it? Can you cite a single actual case of someone needing, specifically, an LLM and not any of the other tools that have been outlined in this thread and that people with disabilities have been using with success for decades, using an LLM to “pose on time” and being removed from the hobby or shunned for it when people find out?

Or, instead, is this simply your building a torturous “what if” scenario to justify why it is Right and Good Ackshully for you to do what you plan to do anyway and just don’t want to experience any negative consequences from.

Just use your AI, man. If anyone gives a shit, it’s because what the LLM gave you to put out in the world is dreck, and people don’t like dreck. They won’t play with you, and that’s okay. No one owes you RP. Just find someone else who also uses LLMs, introduce your chatbots to one another, and discover that you can now use BOTH hands to fab to your TS.

There’s no witch hunt. Just people deciding what, and who, they do or do not want to play with. Find your fun, recognize it won’t match with others, and stop trying to make it a righteous crusade.

@MisterBoring said in AI In Poses:

@Muscle-Car said in AI In Poses:

I will never feel compelled morally or socially to treat software with humanity. Especially when it’s so environmentally and socially repugnant.

So if someone comes to you and explains that their particular economic and health situation force them to use ChatGPT to even come close to your level of expression and pose at a speed that isn’t offputting, you’d immediately tell them to get bent?

Ooh! Ooh! I’ve seen this movie! Would you kill a member of your family because the crazed cult that’s taken you hostage says it’s the only way to save the world? What if actual airplanes started crashing? What if, what if, what if a vision from a god said you had to plunge that knife into someone or the world would end?

Guess we all just hate the world and want it to die. It’s downright disrespectful to people who have reasons to murder their family members, but it is what it is.

@RightMeow said in MU Peeves Thread:

Not really what the conversation is about, but to find out if it’s AI, you post it to AI and basically say: Did you do this?

I don’t know why, but I find that both sad and completely hilarious.

And then the LLM gets it wrong, because it doesn’t actually know how to analyze anything.

I don’t spend too much thought worrying about if someone used an LLM to write their poses, their desc, or anything. I just ask myself ‘was this person fun to scene with’ and ‘do I want to scene with this person again’.

I suspect, if I’ve had LLM RP, my answers to the latter two questions are ‘no’ more often than they’re yes. And I don’t need to know that it’s because it’s an LLM: people have been boring and incoherent posers for decades without help. LLMs just, honestly, make the pablum spelled correctly and with better grammar.

(And, if anyone’s worried about being seen as posing-by-LLM, just focus on being reactive and attentive to other people’s characters and really present in the vibe of the scene, and you should be fine, more often than not. No one has ever said, “OMG, I had so much fun RPing with this person…what if they were using AI??”)

@tsar THANK YOU.

I have been using it since ChatGPT wasn’t even a twinkle in Eliza’s eye. It’s MINE. You can’t HAVE IT.

@MisterBoring If someone chooses to break a game’s rules, they are uninvited from the game. It’s not hard.

@Pavel Augh! That’s terrible; heal up soon!