@Cygnus it’s not weird to dislike em, I’m just rolling my eyes at how you went into it. I’ll leave it there cause it’s off topic for this thread and you’ve made your opinion clear elsewhere that you can’t imagine having fun in a non pvp game and you can continue arguing it as much as you like there.

@Cygnus okay? It’s weird you went down a list of games and went “I have a long and detailed list of frustrations with this game and it’s runner,” “this game enables a transphobe and sex pest”, “no pvp :(”

It’s a silly criticism compared to the other ones. I get you’re looking for a game but cmon

@Cygnus you just shrug and move on like the rest of us do when a game makes a perfectly reasonable decision that isn’t to our tastes, maybe

@Cygnus you don’t need to performatively go into the thread to comment on it, though. It’s not like they’re going to change that just for you.

Image generation isn’t the only thing generative tech like this is being used for. It’s being used for animation, for voices, etc. Actors are fighting for their faces and voices to not be used as an AI simulacrum of themselves to put them out of work on a broad commercial scale. The creation of deepfakes and simulated representations of real people is another reason why I personally find generative learning algorithms deeply ethically concerning. That’s not necessarily a problem with Midjourney itself, and I can see why people might draw the line between a deepfake and a generated artistic rendering of an elf, or whatever. But there’s a reason I categorically dislike it.

Having played in a game in the past that probably could have been reskinned into a star trek game with a very small amount of effort, it worked best when it was a relatively small group, rank wasn’t several degrees of stratification (basically a few department heads and everyone else was about the same level, where most of the department heads traded off being STs) and players basically had free rein to propose a plot planet and put characters through hell on it.

We did some degree of bureaucratic rp, but there were enough interpersonal tensions due to factions present on the crew that there were reasons for conflict and consequences to that tension. The game runners occasionally threatened the ship itself, but some of my favorite plots there could start from a supply run gone wrong, or a investigation of a derelict station that was full of horrible monsters, surprise.

If a game is set in a tense environment where every PC is expected to have a competency or two that they bring to the table, then everyone has a good reason to go on away missions that put their life at risk. In fact, if part of the job of PCs is to go on those away missions, that solves half of the problem.

@Juniper

I’m sorry to say that this is just human behavior and can happen anywhere. There might be features of oWoD games that can make it easier for the perpetrators to get plausible deniability or excuse their hostility with IC factionalism, but creating an in group and an enemy happens because some people simply do not know how to operate without one.

@Gashlycrumb

This is part of why I prefer no dice for my personal rp, because I fine the conversational interplay fun! But if I have to use social dice for RP, my personal preferred order of operations is

1. OOC note of a social roll being needed and some discussion of what they’re attempting
2. Base roll
3. Socially savvy characters can use a buff to bump up their number
4. RP out the results. If it’s a failure, the player gets to decide how they fail. Maybe they offhandedly mention ties to someone the other character/npc hates, maybe they talked a bit too long when the other character prefers brevity, maybe they leaned a bit too hard on Intimidation and figured they could back it up when they couldn’t. That way you avoid the thing of “player makes speech but dice say no” thing, or the failure becoming out of character.

Then again I’m one of those people who enjoys playing out failure because I think how and why a character fails and how they react to it is absolutely fascinating

I think staff should be fine to have characters in any game, even a plotting one. I think on a practical level it’s not a good idea for the staff character to be taking the lead in a story plot they’re running, if only because in my experience it’s really hard to both GM and actually meaningfully pilot a PC! I’m sure it can be done, but I think it’s hard to do well. ime it’s much more likely for it to be ‘and staffpc was also there in the background’ than ‘this was actually the staffpc show’ but I am not surprised by the existence of the second.

In the hands of a conscientious gamerunner, i think a staff PC is another tool to help build game wide engagement. I think there’s a lot of little things those characters could do to encourage plot involvement that are hard to do with NPCs. A staff PC can “just run into” someone to organically bring them into a plot in a way that more formal NPC involvement could make favoritism, for example. “Passing along” IC gossip from other PCs is honestly a really important function in games so having a character on the ground to do that now and then is probably nice. Though I’m thinking of smaller games where it makes sense for everyone in it to be able to talk to each other.

Every few years there’s an absolute panic over a social media or art site’s ToS using legal wording to describe letting users host and reshare their content using the site’s built in reblog/retweet/whatever mechanics. The legalese is almost always being misinterpreted to be scarier than it is

@Jennkryst said in MU Peeves Thread:

Untrue! I disprove the very concept by usually playing them with conventionally adorkable women with fairly un-boob’d bodies.

She’s not like other girls!

@Snackness

This is a double edged sword when your plot runner starts taking your joke NPC name suggestions seriously and you end up with a villain whose name is ‘Stephyn with a y because the y makes it fantasy’

@RightMeow

My usual strategy at that point is to look at whatever info is available on their character, brainstorm 2-3 locations our characters could conceivably overlap, and offer all of them as suggestions.

Then once we’ve picked a spot and the scene starts, it’s just a matter of picking something that brings the characters into contact ASAP. Either that’s posting a starter the other person can directly respond to, or responding to their starter in a way that gives them something to work on. A scene can still be shaped a couple poses in - you’ve almost always got more time to figure out what you’re doing than the 30 seconds before you have to answer that question in your scenario. You’ve just got to break it down into smaller steps.

I don’t mind the dance of setting up RP, because in the same way I like to tailor my suggestions for location and event to the person who’s responding, mostly because I prefer smaller scenes to setting up an open thing in a location. The thing that does bother me is when people respond to an ask for rp in a way that doesn’t make clear whether they’re actually volunteering for RP in the moment or not. I have mixed feelings about a response that’s “I’m busy now but maybe some other day,” but it’s at least a clear response.

I’m not the target audience for episodic games because when I get into an RP and a character properly, I tend to want to keep going with them for a couple years, and while I might take breaks, I don’t tend to get turned off by game or character plots continuing around me.

I think full stop breaks might work best when you know you’ve got a dedicated group who will be able to consistently follow the scheduled active and hiatus periods. For a broader population, being able to continue the momentum if they’re feeling it is probably pretty valuable, and might make the transition into a new setting easier if they’re building hype through the shared social activity, even if they won’t be carrying over the character or setting.

@Meg

Agreeing with this - considering the point that was being made earlier about this being unique as a way of handling this kind of ooc story, it doesn’t follow that such a particular solution wasn’t going to need any retcons. Maybe they don’t need to write a baby out of existence- fine. But it changes pretty strongly how I as a player would think of and interact with the setting. It’s pretty niche fantasy territory to go with this as your ooc population control mechanism, and not everyone who’s cool with playing in a fantasy lords and ladies with magic scenario may want to play in a ‘hey humanity is Different in this one unspecified way that could or could not have major effects that would shape this world’s culture.’

Like I said if this is the kind of story they want to explore, more power to them, but the rippling effects of this kind of decision on theme and culture feel like something it’d be good to have baked in to the initial idea.

I think Concordia mods have talked about not expecting to get as much hype as they did (wrt using chatgpt to make some of their theme files) so I’m guessing this decision is related to that - they’re figuring out something that accounts for it in retrospect. Which isn’t a bad idea in itself, it’s just one of the odder choices they could have gone with to justify oocly asking people to hold off on family building.

@real_mirage

If it’s the kind of story the players and the mods want to focus on more power to them, but it definitely is one of the more out there ways to handle a ruling of, ultimately, ooc practicality. Sterility is a sensitive topic to rp about, and an entire species’ sterility is a really big piece of world building to have an explanation this late, which can really change a pre-established vibe, if the assumption has been something less… actively controlled before. It might be that this was just buried elsewhere in the theme and is moved to its own page now, but if that’s the case it might have been really buried because I don’t know that there’s been much talk of it before.

@spes

You’re here now so please. We have burning questions about jam

I first started RPing in a forum/journal RP environment before making a switch to MU and MMO environments, and making the switch really helped me to work on things that had been a problem during my more async days - I had a bad habit of letting RP trail off into an endless loop of pleasantries and fluff, without addressing the thing that the scene had been started for. I also had a bad habit of overcommitting myself to a number of ongoing scenes and then basically dropping all of them when I got overwhelmed trying to respond to a bunch of posts every evening. Now I probably could go back to more async with a heightened consciousness of those things that made it harder for me, but I find it puts more pressure on me to do so, so I lean in on the format that helps curb those bad habits naturally.

Getting past inertia/nerves and just reaching out to ask people if they want to RP