I agree with @bear_necessities. not to get all foucault and shit but the application process is a sort of prison, and the prisoner is both the staffer and the player. The main rationale for apps is generally twofold:

1. preventing people from metagaming or powergaming or playing something that’s too powerful
2. keeping characters in a fairly regimented theme

To some extent I feel like the community has largely moved on from the necessity of point #1. General powergaming and being the best combat monster is an extremely unsatisfying thing to play long term and it seems like most of the folks who went that route (at least in WoD) have disappeared.

On the second point, metaplot and strict staff-run plots have been on the outs for something like 10 years now. If you’re introducing PRPs into your setting at all, you’re relinquishing control over your setting to other players. Hell, if you allow other staff to run plots on your game you’re relinquishing control. My argument is that there is, therefore, no need to strictly monitor stats to maintain a theme, especially if you’re running a MUSH that emulates a TTRPG system. The system will inform the fiction and you will get characters that fit your theme because of the point allotment they have. Highly unbalanced social sexpot psychic? they absolutely exist in both WoD and other modern fantasy settings. Combat-focused werewolf who ignores any other skill aside from Hit The Guy? 100% part of any urban, medieval, or other fantasy setting. If someone apps in with these concepts in mind and does an overall bad job because they didn’t understand what they were making, they’ll probably be avoided by the rest of their fellow players because they are genuinely not thematically enjoyable RP, or they’ll find themselves on the short end of a plot that they could never have prepared for.

Put another way: if someone apps into a Mage the Ascension game and has no understanding of how paradigms, practices, and instruments work, nor how to implement them into practical use within the storyline, that will work itself out eventually (and possibly in short order)

@Gashlycrumb I came here to post that. RIP to a real one, gonna watch the yellow video again

For all my fellow goths, founding member of Siouxsie and the Banshees, Kenny Morris

@MisterBoring said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:

@somasatori said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:

Trophy tends towards the gritty fantasy

You forgot golf

I haven’t tried it, but that looks great

Perry Bamonte, the lead guitarist of the post-Disintegration-era of the Cure

@Ominous said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:

I think exploring other story game designs, such as Everyone is John, Dread, Microscope, Band of Blades, The Quiet Year, The Fall of Magic, Swords Without Master etc.

hell yeah weird little story game recommendations!

Also check out Lovecraftesque, either Trophy Dark or Trophy Gold, any number of PBTA games but especially Apocalypse World itself, Pasión de Las Pasiones, Worldwide Wrestling, Brindlewood Bay, and Urban Shadows.

Each of those really takes a stab at an existing genre of RPG and shifts it into a different mechanism of storytelling. Urban Shadows is probably one of the closest analogues to World of Darkness, but really does something unique with regards to how organizations and play settings are created. Both Pasión de Las Pasiones and World Wide Wrestling seem silly on their face, but are surprisingly impactful to play (one is a game about telenovelas and the other about the lives of professional and semi-professional wrestlers). Trophy (any iteration) is great for examining our relationships to fantasy roleplaying games. You can make it as high or low fantasy as you want, but Trophy tends towards the gritty fantasy – it was described once as “if A24 made a D&D movie.” I also may or may not be suggesting Trophy Gold because I have a credit in it. Brindlewood Bay has probably the best mystery-creation-and-solving system I’ve encountered, but it also takes a “the game is a conversation” stance towards it. If you find that you like Brindlewood Bay, also check out the game Public Access,

Lovecraftesque is very similar to Everyone is John, but everyone plays a facet of a Lovecraftian protagonist, which is fun when bits of the psyche start getting warped by the mythos.

@junipersky I have no idea who these people are but these sound like very cool plots. That Norwood one is very neat and more consequences like that need to happen on games.

It always seems like there’s an overemphasis on wounding a character physically, where combat is going to be the thing that has the big negative consequences (speaking for WoD games mostly here), but it would be great to have more of those plots where the consequence is some kind of moral injury.

@Pyrephox Oh, fair enough, yeah! I was mostly using that as an example where people might be good at handling the big stuff but might have issues with more minor inconveniences. Definitely not to excuse the behavior or attempt to convince anyone to engage in it, for sure. My point was that levels of reactivity might vary or be surprising based on what the stimulus is. I think I’m also perceiving this from the older school staffer perspective of “everyone gets to play” even if the person isn’t a good fit for the game (and also not from a player perspective).

I’ve met a handful of people who get really aggravated when small rolls in social scenes don’t go their way, but who can handle poor rolls in larger scenes. I feel like this maybe falls into the “mushers don’t like to be humiliated” point mentioned elsewhere in the thread.

@Pyrephox said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:

The only real way, I’ve found, to know is to see how people handle small failures in play, before trying to work through the big setbacks with them.

So, there’s this really interesting inverse effect that I have noticed clinically in many of my patients with large capital-T trauma: People who have experienced particularly traumatic events tend to react really negatively to very small events*, or what might be might be considered pretty minor-to-moderate annoyances by a lot of people, but on the flip-side they tend to be very blasé or even good when something major happens.

Not saying that every MUSHer who endorses this attitude has this going on (though surprisingly more than one would think), but I feel like my approach to someone saying this would be more to introduce a negative element and then slowly increase the tension. Alternatively, I would have them be witness to people who I know would react well to their characters’ lives getting ruined and seeing what their opinions and perspectives are on those events. I also tend to temper my approach to evaluate someone’s reaction to certain things, which is partially because my perspective as a trauma-informed clinician is that I must be aware that we all got something that’s a no-go.

*this is obviously an “it depends” thing and isn’t intended to be diagnostically relevant in this instance, where I speak about MUSHing; while it has some research on it under the term “trauma reactivity” it’s also very anecdotal in this case

@hellfrog said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:

And I do! I do not like the ooc assumptions that most often come with playing something other than 100% friendly

Exactly this, and I feel like due to this I often will take on a more affable demeanor because my characters can be assholes and I don’t want to be labeled OOCly in the same vein as my IC.

I put the top response because I do want it to happen regardless, but I think with the same caveat as everyone else. I also would prefer bad things to be done to my character by someone whose writing ability I respect, and who I think might have a plot or overarching theme in mind rather than just an arbitrary sniping situation.

No one wants your death pose to be delivered by someone who can’t put together a decent goddamn sentence

@Faraday said in AI In Poses:

Good to be skeptical, but I don’t think it’s quite that bad. More like “5 out of 6 doctors agree!” advertising. It is a meta-analysis of studies that (as far as I can tell) were done by other people. There are still a host of potential biases in play. My general point was that even with all those potential biases, they’re still admitting that sometimes they’re only getting a “B”.

Good call-out here! I am apparently in Reviewer #2 brain these days whenever I look at any research work. It’s great that they discussed their limitations and identified that there will still be some cases where they’ll miss the mark. I completely overlooked that part of your previous post!

@Trashcan said in AI In Poses:

This white paper, published by Originality.ai, which concluded that Originality.ai is the best checker,

while I’m not disputing that Originality.ai is good as I’ve never used it, this is the same vibe as “we have investigated ourselves and found that we’re the best”

@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.