@eddie I was going to go off on a bunch of your earlier points, but several others already got there with very similar things to what I was going to say. Plus… Woah… I just got to this post:

@eddie said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

Truth of the matter is…

And I’m pretty sure that your own story tells us everything we need to know about you. You “invested” time, effort, and in-game currency into something and didn’t get the attention of a player you were interested in, the attention that you felt was your due.

You realize that putting in time, effort, and money into another person without a business deal involved is called “being a friend,” right? And that you aren’t owed anything for it? Particularly not anything of a sexual nature? There is no ROI on being a friend to someone, you do what you do because they’re your friend, not because you’re going to get something out of it.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

I just think that on a game where a core theme of the setting is conflict between factions, making that conflict between players meaningless or even impossible for no IC logical reason makes the game setting just as pointless and boring.

You can have conflict between characters without having PvP. Even if the rule is “you can’t directly harm another PC” there’s a whole lot you can still do to play out conflict. Your lack of imagination is your problem, not a problem of PvE games.

It’s like making a game set in the marvel cinematic universe but no one is allowed to play as the heroes or villains, they can only play normal people doing normal things.

Um… no it’s not. It’s like making a game set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but no one is allowed to play as villains, just heroes – oh wait, that’s pretty much most comic book MU*s out there.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

Putting everyone on the same team means staff takes on the burden of being everyone else in the world.

This is actually almost universally true, unlike most of what you’ve said. A PvE game does require more Staff effort to create all of the antagonists and their actions to frustrate the PCs – but it requires less Staff effort to deal with assholes who are just out to grief other players by killing their characters.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

When the games started being about protecting the feelings of bad actors who instigated trouble then ran to staff for protection it all went to shit.

You have this backwards. Yes, there are some people who do bad things and then complain when they get consequences for those bad things, but those players exist on PvE games too, and they still try to weasel out of consequences. But by closely monitoring or eliminated PvP, you stop allowing the bad actors who instigated trouble by killing characters for OOC reasons – or just to grief the other players. The people who “make it their life goal to ruin things for everyone” aren’t the people asking that their characters not be killed off for no reason, it’s the people killing off other characters for no reason.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

What is happening now isn’t working. What people did then was working. Back in the day there were hundreds of active players on at a time. Now you’re lucky to see five.

Huh… sounds like you’re not on the games that are successful right now. Sure, they may not have 100 players at a time, but they’re perfectly happy with 30. It’s almost like MU*ing is an outdated technological medium whose primary players grew up and are now adults with jobs and lives and families rather than being high school or collect students who time on their hands.

Your issues sound like a you problem.

@sao This isn’t a direct reply to you, but you were the last one on the thread talking about this subject. For me, it’s the difference between “I don’t distrust you” and “I don’t trust you.” I’ll play on a game with Staff that I don’t distrust. I may not fully trust them, but I’m willing to offer them the chance to earn that trust. I will not play on a game where I don’t trust Staff. That is for the people who have already burned me or someone who I do trust.

And I agree that life is too short for the stress of “do I trust this person I’ve put in a position of power over my fun or not,” and this has only gotten more true as my life has gotten more full.

@Apos Agreed. Any time that someone asks me to define a term that should be common knowledge, I assume that they are just looking for clearly delineated rules that they can push the envelope on and then claim that they’re not breaking the actual rules.

Everyone should know what “creepy” means, and if they can’t avoid it, then they can’t play on any game I run.

Like a few of the previous posters, I couldn’t finish reading the log. It was disgusting. The use of the Luck point to gaslight a character “because it’s funny” was particularly heinous.

Apart from and beyond the horrific content, I also found the future-imperfect tense (or whatever ‘will’ and ‘would’ and the like are) posing grating.

Sorry, @Cobalt, that you had to deal with that, but also thank you for dealing with it so that it didn’t continue (even if it led to you closing your game down).

The parent(s) of student(s) at my district were picked up by ICE and detained. The student(s) are with family, but it’s still shaking up this tiny-ass rural, progressive island community. And it’s shaking up me too even if I’m white as Wonder Bread.

When you’ve got your brain-weasels going full-bore, and then someone reaches out about RP, and those nasty scratchy bitey things quiet down for a little bit.

@Pavel I get that you’re trying to take the most generous interpretation, and I was too – until I got to the talk about ROI. I completely understand being disappointed that a storyline didn’t work out how I wanted it to, how I planned for it to. I get that, it’s happened to me, and it’s sucked.

But, unless there was some specific agreement, no one should be talking about return on investment in interpersonal relations unless it’s some version of Prue Leith’s “It’s not worth the calories” where you’re deciding that the other person isn’t worth your time and so you’re disengaging yourself.

To expect a particular return on your investment from the other person, particularly where romantic RP/TS is involved… that’s way too close to “I bought her dinner and drinks, I deserve sex” for my comfort.

As for the other situation that @eddie mentioned – I really feel for them about that one. That sounds like an uncomfortable situation, and a boundary that they set properly and which was then crossed by another player. That’s not cool at all.

To me, the core of a Lords & Ladies game is that characters are grouped by families or groups that are competing for influence and prestige within a larger feudal or semi-feudal structure – and that the characters are influential people within the setting.

Now, this could be:

• wayfinders who lead family canoes between Polynesian islands, competing for pride of place
• competing cyberpunk megacorps all under a Corporate Court – so long as the PCs were high-level executives at the corps, rather than disposable espionage operatives
• knights and barons and viscountesses living in fantasy castles
• mafia families under a capo di tutti capi
• technoknights and starship captains in a semi-feudal, multi-system space empire
• daimyo and geisha in the Shogunate (or a fantasy version thereof)
• minor landed gentry in Victorian England (or a fantasy version thereof)

I don’t think that pseudo-European matters, but I agree that combat is usually going to be a means to gather influence or prestige rather than the point in and of itself.

I would actually love to see a Lords & Ladies game using FS3 autocombat for attacks on reputation – leave any physical combat to just straight rolls, because it’s just not as important as the social maneuvering.

@Pyrephox said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:

There are patterns of abuse that can really on be seen AS A PATTERN, because each individual incident is small and easily dismissed.

This is why reporting even just “a creepy feeling” is so important. More than once, I have gotten reports from multiple players (and noticed myself) that a player was giving off a creepy vibe, testing those boundaries with people. When confronted, the creep revealed themselves via their responses and were removed – after they were removed, several additional people came forward to say that they had been targeted.

If you are being victimized by someone, chances are that you are not alone in this. If I (as Staff) get one report of someone being generally creepy, I’ll watch them more closely, but if I get four reports from people in three different playgroups? Yeah, that person’s probably gone, even if each of the reports is just “felt like they were pushing boundaries.” Unless it’s obvious, I’ll talk with the prospective creep, but it’s definitely going to be easier a) to be direct with them about the problem, and b) to obfuscate those reporting the problem, if I have multiple reports.

@MisterBoring Peanut Butter-filled Pretzels from Coscto.

Sometimes also one of the kid’s string cheeses. But mostly the PB Pretzels.

@Pavel First w in the English manner, second w in the German manner, at least for me, when I steal it shamelessly.

@sao I was trying to come up with a situation too, but I couldn’t. I did want to leave the door open, because there are very few things I want to be an absolutist about.

I could imagine something like the delirium situation @MisterBoring mentioned, or it being a month or two in between creating a character you never played and creating a new character because you forgot about the first one, or getting so excited about the concept that you forgot that there were no alts allowed and submitted a new character.

But the response to Staff going, “Um… hold on a sec” would be very telling, and would decide if I went scorched earth or just nuked all but one character and gave them a warning.

@Roz Agreed. If there is some particular reason that you think they accidentally made an alt (I can’t even think of a reason that might happen, but who knows…), wipe all but one character and tell them that they just got their one and only warning. Otherwise, it’s a flagrant violation of a clear-cut rule: ban, explain, and move on.

@Gashlycrumb I think that there’s a place for that, certainly, but I also don’t want to take away the ability of players to create something truly unique – so long as it fits well within the setting and themes of the game. If everyone on a Clone Wars game played Clone Troopers and no one played the Jedi or the Mandalorian trainers or the stuck-up-soon-to-be-Imperials, it would be a much less exciting game.

But I would love it if there was some way to teach people to use their unique ingredients to make something tasty, rather than inedible glop, as @labsunlimited put it.

@Gashlycrumb said in Numetal/Retromux:

It might be more clear to say don’t be a bore. It’s okay to be boring sometimes. Or even to play a character who is largely static and stock.

I feel like this is a very important point. I love to play “stock” characters like Stormtroopers, Clone Troopers, Children of the Light, Academy-fresh pilots, and other “boring” characters, and then not playing them as bores.

On the other hand, I’ve met players who can take an absolute special snowflake of a character, but the way that they play them is utterly boring and uninteresting.

@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:

At this point, I think there’s value in being able to use GenAI to enhance what you do for as long as you can do it. If you’re a technical writer, use AI to make you a better technical writer so that you can stay working longer than other technical writers who ignore it and do not increase in quality or production.

If you’re a good technical writer, GenAI isn’t going to help you become a better one, it’s only going to help you become a faster one. Of course, in doing so, it’s going to introduce errors into your work that you won’t notice if you’re going fast enough.

Same thing goes for those using GenAI to get the tone right in emails, or to fill in the background of an image, or prototype code, or summarize law briefs, or all of the other relatively reasonable uses of GenAI that I’ve heard of. It doesn’t make you better, it makes you faster.

And when GenAI makes a professional faster, it allows the company to reduce staffing, like you mentioned, but it also introduces errors that slipped through because the now-overstretched staff has to go fast with GenAI to keep up with demand.

So maybe we can’t put the GenAI genie back in the bottle, but we can, and I posit, we should still mock the crap out of companies that can afford it when they use it, and chastise them for taking shortcuts that hurt their workers and are unethical and environmentally unsustainable. At the same time, our higher education and businesses should be working to find out what GenAI is actually good at, and what it can be trained to do (relatively) ethical and environmentally-sustainable methods.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

I just think that on a game where a core theme of the setting is conflict between factions, making that conflict between players meaningless or even impossible for no IC logical reason makes the game setting just as pointless and boring.

You can have conflict between characters without having PvP. Even if the rule is “you can’t directly harm another PC” there’s a whole lot you can still do to play out conflict. Your lack of imagination is your problem, not a problem of PvE games.

It’s like making a game set in the marvel cinematic universe but no one is allowed to play as the heroes or villains, they can only play normal people doing normal things.

Um… no it’s not. It’s like making a game set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but no one is allowed to play as villains, just heroes – oh wait, that’s pretty much most comic book MU*s out there.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

Putting everyone on the same team means staff takes on the burden of being everyone else in the world.

This is actually almost universally true, unlike most of what you’ve said. A PvE game does require more Staff effort to create all of the antagonists and their actions to frustrate the PCs – but it requires less Staff effort to deal with assholes who are just out to grief other players by killing their characters.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

When the games started being about protecting the feelings of bad actors who instigated trouble then ran to staff for protection it all went to shit.

You have this backwards. Yes, there are some people who do bad things and then complain when they get consequences for those bad things, but those players exist on PvE games too, and they still try to weasel out of consequences. But by closely monitoring or eliminated PvP, you stop allowing the bad actors who instigated trouble by killing characters for OOC reasons – or just to grief the other players. The people who “make it their life goal to ruin things for everyone” aren’t the people asking that their characters not be killed off for no reason, it’s the people killing off other characters for no reason.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

What is happening now isn’t working. What people did then was working. Back in the day there were hundreds of active players on at a time. Now you’re lucky to see five.

Huh… sounds like you’re not on the games that are successful right now. Sure, they may not have 100 players at a time, but they’re perfectly happy with 30. It’s almost like MU*ing is an outdated technological medium whose primary players grew up and are now adults with jobs and lives and families rather than being high school or collect students who time on their hands.

Your issues sound like a you problem.

I’m a big fan of each room having an RP purpose. Maybe it says something particularly cogent about the setting (there’s a monument about a past incident or historical personage), maybe it’s a “critical” RP location (the mess hall on a military game), or maybe it’s a place I think could host RP even if it’s not typical (a dingy alley in a Steampunk game).

But I believe that each and every room should have 2-3 RP Hooks in it. So you’ve got a laundromat, because people like RPing talking to strangers while their undies tumble – why not note that one of the driers sometimes chews up clothing, or that there’s a phone number written inside the door of one of the washers in permanent marker, or there’s a camera in one corner with a screen showing that everyone in the laundromat is being recorded. Little things that people can integrate into their RP and use to spark IC discussion or action.

Whether you’re Grid-based (like most MU*s used to be) or Locations-based (like Ares), this style works, and can turn what could just be vague names that could be drawn out of a hat to run scenes in into something that can help inspire RP.

I feel like, as others have said above, there’s a difference between Player vs Player conflict and Character vs Character conflict. Yes, sometimes people get frustrated or upset and CvC becomes PvP, but most of the stress and toxicity I’ve seen from games on which competition of that sort was encouraged comes from PvP, where the egos of the players get involved and it’s less about losing the character (sometimes it is) and more about just losing.

I have no interest in high-stakes Player vs Player conflict. If I did, I would play PvP video games or play competitive chess or try to become a professional poker player. I love high-stakes Character vs Character conflict, when done with a player who you trust in search of a better story for all involved. I find it elevates the heart-rate almost as much as high-stakes PvP, and has a much better chance of a positive outcome.

I wish that there were more games that were open to CvC conflict (alongside PvE) but whose staff came down hard on any attempts to turn CvC into PvP. And if I had more time in my life, I would absolutely run the one I’ve designed.