I also come from a WoD background and know that non-consent doesn’t invalidate fade to black, and especially doesn’t allow forcing someone to play through potentially traumatic stuff. So, with regards to “I come from WoD where you’re lucky to have staff even acknowledge you before doing what they want,” I feel like this was a pretty old perspective even 15 years ago. IMO, one thing most successful/decent staff took from places where staff acted with impunity about your character’s consent was to at least check in on certain things. Even just a heads up of, “hey this is likely a combat scene, are you cool with that?” was pretty standard on several games which were non-consent MU*s. Player side, most games had a +warn system. All you’re doing is taking the worst elements of past WoD staffing habits and bringing them into a new generation and setting.

Edit: Also this wasn’t intended to be a reply to helvetica, but the log output from inuki lol.

@Pacha said in MU Peeves Thread:

I always find it a bit creepy when it is clear someone has someone else on watch and they start gushing over them on the channel when they log in, but haven’t even ; waved or said ‘hi’ yet.

It also kind of bums me out if I end up logging in day after day and get tumbleweeds, but there is very clearly a group that are friends and treat each other logging on like the second coming of Jesus or something.

Obviously there is nothing objectively wrong with these behaviours and people can say hi to who they want. But, it is a peeves thread and I am allowed to find the behaviour personally irritating, also!

Seconding this. Sometimes I just need a minute to get my bearings, especially if I’m coming from work, dealing with the kids, trying to settle down myself. We’re no longer in the glomps era. The age of glomp is over, the time of “hey” has come.

I hate my first week of trying to engage people on a new character. It brings me straight back to that feeling like when you switch schools, and on top of that I’ve learned that it takes me more than a handful of poses to find my character’s voice, with the end result that my ancient reptile brain tells me how awful I am while I’m trying to roleplay a social scene.

Edit: Also, I am deeply anxious about asking for RP on a channel. Intellectually I know that if no one responds it’s not a big deal, but ancient reptile brain says that all of them secretly despise me and wish I would go away.

So truly they become HannahBANanna.

I just fully finished a really tough clinical rotation today. I’m not exactly sure why I expected I wouldn’t, but I had a pretty rough time of this whole exit process. For context I worked as a clinical psychology extern at a VA residential facility for homeless veterans who often had substance abuse issues loaded on top of PTSD, depression, anxiety (typically) and serious mental illness (more rarely). Since my emphasis is in trauma, I worked with people who were highly traumatized using primarily cognitive processing therapy, but occasionally prolonged exposure in addition to substance abuse treatment. During my final staff meeting, they did this thing called Thanks & Goodbyes (T’s & G’s) which is usually done with residents graduating from the program.

The thing that got me the most was that I kind of assumed I was a background player, largely unnoticed and just nose-to-the-grindstone working with my patients. I had a large-ish case load and only taught a couple classes (dialectical behavior therapy, and CBT for Substance Use Disorder). It hit me that I kind of internalized this idea that I was separate from the team, so when people started expressing gratitude or talking about how they appreciated this or that about me I had no idea how to hold it and felt extremely awkward in the moment. I also have a history of substance use, and was very grateful to be able to help people who were currently in a material position that was similar to how I’ve lived in the past. A couple of my patients this year relapsed upon release from the program, and at least one of them died as a result of overdose following relapse, so I won’t say I did a perfect A+++ job, but I always did the best I could and advocated hard for everyone. Having been in that world, I know what it’s like to go through the sobriety/relapse cycle, and fall into an old habit that might be beyond your old tolerance.

Anyway, due to a lot of other things in my life (child, spouse, research, work), I generally feel like I don’t have space to hold the kinds of emotions that I need to have about this experience, and I need to get it out somewhere else I fall into bad negative patterns (see above). So, here I am writing about it, I guess.

@thrax said in Numetal/Retromux:

To the playerbase of Newbetal/Retromux

An Apology to the fullest.
It is true The player behind Kahula overstepped a non contact request.

This is really all you have to say. It doesn’t really matter what you do or say to someone, if you’re explicitly hiding your identity to trick someone into interacting with you, it is (imo) bannable. There are some people out there who have completely destroyed their reputation in the hobby and often that infamy is not the kind of thing that people would just straight up forgive. I’m sure anyone reading this can come up with a handful of names of people that would immediately ruin the experience of a game if they were found to be there.

I have no idea who Kahula is or was so I’m not going to speculate on whatever their reputation might be, but befriending someone on a separate platform without mentioning that you know each other – especially when they’ve invited you to a game which usually prompts a “oh, what MUSHes have you been on? Have we played together?” conversation – is such a red flag that it’s a specter haunting Europe.

No one asked about this but one of the reasons why Luddites are so maligned as just anti-technology morons is because of pre-Marxist class struggle, which was won by the burgeoning industrialists and capitalists of the early Industrial Revolution period. Many of the luddites, as labsunlimited mentioned, were professionals who knew their craft well. Many of them had probably grown up being taught the craft by parents who had apprenticed them to other expert crafters, and had a great deal of generational knowledge about a specific handiwork. The Luddites weren’t protesting technology, they were protesting the development and financing of machines that created cheap, replaceable, and easily manufactured versions of handcrafted things. I think the main contingent were weavers, but I could be misremembering that. On one level, you could view it as bourgeoisie vs. petit bourgeoisie (industrialists/capitalists vs. small business owners), but many artisan crafters of the turn of the 19th century often lost their business due to cheaply manufactured goods and ended up working in those same factories. Or they wound up in poorhouses, I guess. In the US they probably just starved to death because we’ve always been who we are.

Engels talks a little bit about this in The Condition of the Working Class in England, which is a good historical reference regardless of one’s personal opinions on Marxism or socialism, as you can see elements of this same conflict between the advent of new machines to perform traditionally human labor in our current conversations about AI.

People who actually act like a welcome wagon when you’re new and don’t know anybody and ask “do you want to meet so-and-so? They match your concept in such-and-such way.” It makes me feel like I joined a more natural community.

@Aria said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

@Wizz said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

@Rinel said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

Very few people who did not grow up as girls are fully aware of this problem.

I am not going to go into a lot of detail as I find it honestly upsetting to remember, but I did want to say that both my own experiences with older players who knew sexually explicit discussion/roleplaying with me was not appropriate given my age – which I openly admitted to anyone I regularly RPed with – were with women, or at least players that presented as women.

I am not trying to dispute ratios or anything like that, but I did feel like I should represent the fact that men typically vastly underreport sexual abuse in RL and it’s likely the case in the hobby as well.

I shouldn’t need to say this, but…

Yes, I can vouch that this is 100% true. On more than one occassion, teenage me offered to play the role of “weirdly territorial girlfriend” for guys I knew. It wasn’t a good way to handle it, but teenagers. We didn’t exactly have much in the way of appropriate skillsets for addressing the real problem.

I was thinking about this yesterday, and I imagine that a lot of why my own experience was able to advance so dramatically (flying across state lines, and part of the ocean besides) was due to my being male. My dad did a decent job in protecting my sisters from abuse but there was that gender-enforced blind spot, I think. It makes sense, given that for a long time the prevailing attitude – which is thankfully on the decline – is that men/male-bodied people can’t be sexually assaulted, or it was often played for laughs in media. Gets a litle rough behind the tag.

Spoiler

I wanted to say: I’ve talked about these things in therapy before but for some reason I feel a stronger sense of catharsis from this group discussion/topic. I guess I always felt alone in my experience, even though I knew I wasn’t, so thanks to everyone for being as vulnerable as you’re comfortable with here.

@Faraday said in AI In Poses:

forgets that she has a fan in her hand from one pose to the next

yes, uh, damn that forgetful AI, ahem >.> <.<

I appreciate the pose examples because I wouldn’t have thought they would look like that. There’s still a vague sense of uncanny around a couple of the lines there, like

“the sort reserved for moments that amuse rather than unsettle”

and

“the plain cut of a coat and the steady set of shoulders register in her mind as particulars to be filed away”

but it may be hard to recognize among a series of other poses if you were in a larger group scene.

@Muscle-Car said in AI In Poses:

@Tez So you call yourself a role player? [smirk.jpg] Name all poses.

What’s your favorite pose? Oh, heh. Yeah, that was okay. I prefer the earlier @emits.

@Tez said in AI In Poses:

@somasatori This is inaccurate to how they would actually respond. I was actually just saying this elsewhere, but the technology changes RAPIDLY, and we are fooling ourselves to think that is what it looks like, or that what we recognize now we will recognize in six or even three months.

It’s too bad, since it would be easy enough to just separate it out. It’s hard to imagine what the endgame of using an LLM to RP would be, since the implication would be that if you’re using it, I could be using it, so … what, we’re just having our LLMs RP with each other? Even the staunchest “LLMs reduce the mental load/writing barrier on the player to dig into the story” advocates have to admit that would be a useless future for the hobby.

I know that AI models are slightly more sophisticated now, but whenever I picture attempting to RP with someone using an LLM for their poses, I imagine me writing out a big scene set, and then someone responding with the sort of stereotypical AI bowing and scraping it does.

Just pulling from a scene I ran back on Fallcoast in like 2015 because logs are forever (names removed):

The Forbidden Gate is one of the more frequented Gates in Fallcoast, and with good reason. It typically leads to one of the more stable and easier parts of the Underworld to access and travel through, rather than some of the others, which lead to winding caverns and mazes. Player1 and Player2 are able to push their way through the Gate and get into the Autocthonous Depths, pulling themselves through the initial tight squeeze of the caverns directly beyond the Gate until they reach the larger mass of empty rock interspersed with pillars, the place where most of the Rivers tend to wind up being.

Like usual lately, this part of the Underworld is a quiet place almost devoid entirely of ghosts and the Unfettered. It seems bizarrely empty; not even the sound of something moving in the dark beyond the Sin-Eaters’ line of sight can be heard. Only the rush of some Underworld River in the distance, and the scent of stale, fetid water that’s been standing for some time.

Player1 glances about and says, "It sounds like you were referring to how few ghosts are around these days. You’re absolutely right! Now I notice that there are no ghosts at all—it looks like they have fled deeper into the Autocthonous Depths. It isn’t just eerie. It’s terrifying.

Rob Reiner, director of such greats as Princess Bride, my dad’s favorite movie (Sleepless in Seattle), Wolf of Wall Street, and This Is Spinal Tap was apparently murdered in his home with his wife.

Edit: Evidently, they were murdered by their son.

Some poor med student attempting to use GPT to write a paper for their ophthalmology class:

“The patient’s orbs glistened with lacrimal fluid like morning dew…”

though this non-MUSH-related thing also annoys me about AI and the techbro insistence that it must be in absolutely every product:

I typo’d “b and”. No one calls a watch band a “watch B&”. This is a very Hello Fellow Kids reaction, because if I had to guess it’s assuming that I’m using some sort of slang.

Yeah, I would personally never call myself a coder, just an extreme hobbyist (also my knowledge of code starts at Evennia/python and ends at Evennia/python, with a very minor knowledge of TinyMUX/MUSH functions from 13 years ago thanks to Cobalt doing a code class back then). The setting and story is where a game really lives and breathes for me. I have admittedly a million ideas for games, but those ideas often have very specific stories, locations, characters, etc. which/who I will generally feel the need to write out, for better or worse. I personally don’t think this is an abnormal perspective for MUSH developers, especially the ones who are driving the setting, or story if something like a metaplot exists. Obviously we all can’t make an Arx or write a bunch of setting lore like Empire or some of the WoD projects. However, even if you’re just coming in with a new game that’s completely barebones, aren’t you at least interested in seeing what happens based on how the world is developed by your players? That probably requires some investment in the creation process.

I’m reminded of this comment that I read, or maybe was highlighted in one of the writing youtuber people that I watch, where someone was saying that LLMs allow writers to bypass having to work out the prose to get to the plot. This defeats the purpose of writing, in my opinion. I have like no physical artist bone in my body, so it could be that I’m reacting in the same way as my artist friends do when they see AI art.

I’m not trying to start anything, but a lot of this description is kind of why I shied away from Berem (aside from losing all time to do anything outside of work, family, sleep).

No shade for anyone using AI in code; to be clear, I don’t know if that’s the case here. Also, I’m not even sure if they actually used AI in the setting writing, but it just hits 100% of all of the hallmarks described above, including the use of emojis.

And the text itself:

The Town’s Growth

Berem was carved from wild woods and stubborn fields. The founders built it where river met forest, shielded by cliffs and watched over by a shimmering lake. They poured their remaining magic and wealth into it: a stout Town Hall to govern, a Marketplace to trade, an Inn for wanderers, and a Temple so Berem’s spirit would be forever honored.

Word soon spread across Mystara’s Known World — not of a bustling metropolis, but of a place where young heroes could find their first footing. Here, a novice could earn coin protecting caravans, clearing nearby ruins, or rooting out trouble in the thick woods. Berem’s Tavern became famous for its worn quest board, where calloused hands posted cries for help — and new legends were born.

The town’s location remains a curiosity. Some maps mark Berem near Darokin, others whisper it lies close to the edges of the Five Shires, or in the misty borderlands beyond Karameikos. Berem itself cares little for such speculations. It belongs to the world, and to those bold enough to find it.
️ A Beacon for Adventurers

Berem today remains what it has always been:

• A starting point for wanderers, outcasts, and dreamers.
• A resting place for those who need healing or hope.
• A memorial to courage — not grand, but real.

Its harbor welcomes merchant ships. Its smithy forges the blades that will one day sing in distant halls. Its temple bells toll for the fallen and the triumphant alike. And every so often, beneath the light of the high tower’s beacon, a new band of adventurers sets forth — hearts full of hope, blades newly sharpened — carrying the spirit of Berem into the wide, wild world.

They say if you stand quietly at the town’s entrance when the mist rolls in, you might just hear Berem’s laughter on the breeze — urging you onward.

I’m not sure why I had such a visceral reaction to it. Generally speaking I don’t care if people use AI in code, and I will usually have a kind of ‘meh’ reaction to seeing AI art (especially the piss-filter images on the NPC pages on the Berem site), but the writing just took me entirely out of it.

If I had to guess, it’s because I can see my own motivations for using AI code or something to help facilitate a location where I can tell a specific story. If you use AI for everything altogether, then I wonder what the point of having a writing-based game is, or why you would create a unique location in a world at all. Berem is not, to my knowledge, part of the Mystara canon, so if you have an idea for a cool little adventurer town, why not write it up yourself? Idk. This also is likely not completely on topic, since most of the discussion is on AI in the real world rather than in our corner of it.

No one asked about this but one of the reasons why Luddites are so maligned as just anti-technology morons is because of pre-Marxist class struggle, which was won by the burgeoning industrialists and capitalists of the early Industrial Revolution period. Many of the luddites, as labsunlimited mentioned, were professionals who knew their craft well. Many of them had probably grown up being taught the craft by parents who had apprenticed them to other expert crafters, and had a great deal of generational knowledge about a specific handiwork. The Luddites weren’t protesting technology, they were protesting the development and financing of machines that created cheap, replaceable, and easily manufactured versions of handcrafted things. I think the main contingent were weavers, but I could be misremembering that. On one level, you could view it as bourgeoisie vs. petit bourgeoisie (industrialists/capitalists vs. small business owners), but many artisan crafters of the turn of the 19th century often lost their business due to cheaply manufactured goods and ended up working in those same factories. Or they wound up in poorhouses, I guess. In the US they probably just starved to death because we’ve always been who we are.

Engels talks a little bit about this in The Condition of the Working Class in England, which is a good historical reference regardless of one’s personal opinions on Marxism or socialism, as you can see elements of this same conflict between the advent of new machines to perform traditionally human labor in our current conversations about AI.