I don’t know if it was intentional, but Materialists is Sweet Home Alabama.

@Yam
There was coded money (you received a coded paycheck). You could go to a coded bounty board and offer people coded money to capture another PC for you.

@Muse
I played on a game that had:

• Coded card games you could play with other players
• Coded slot machines
• Coded economy (buying gear)
• Coded trade (buy/sell trade goods)
• Coded exploration through the desert
• Coded buses
• Coded shuttles
• Coded ELEVATORS
• Coded gear modding
• Coded space travel
• Coded being locked in a glass box while your body regenerated and you could see people posing outside the box but you were unconscious inside it
• Coded healthcare that you could fuck up and make things worse (I once killed a man this way)
• Coded soda machines
• Coded buying a drink from a bartender
• Coded stuff that didn’t work anymore
• A lot of coded stuff that didn’t work anymore
• Coded “bounties” for NPCs that didn’t exist
• Coded bounties for PCs that did exist
• and more that I am probably forgetting

@Yam said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

I’d like to hear the cold hard requirements that you might expect from players and how you plan to enforce them. Hypothetically.

I don’t plan to enforce them and I don’t think that attempts should be made to enforce them. I’m arguing that it is better (for the game community, of which each player is a part) if individual players choose to RP outside of their core group of friends than if they do not. I’ve said a couple times that it’s not a crime, and I’m not sure that I’d even “have a polite conversation” with someone about it. It’s somewhat rude and people will notice it, but it’s not an infraction (unless specific game policies are being violated) or an indictment on their presence on the game.

@Yam said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

@Faraday

When I join a game, I’m not signing up for any sort of responsibility to the greater good of that game, nor do I expect that of any players that join a game I’m running.

I agree but I think this is a really interesting topic. We talk about what people expect of staffers a lot, but what about the average expectation of players? I’d like to know if there are more folk that think that if you app into their game, you’d better get your ass out of your room with your pal(s) and dig into the plot.

I don’t agree. The gamerunner has created a place for people to play on their terms, and players have an obligation to do that when they choose to show up there and continue showing up there.

Let’s say a person invites friends and acquaintances over for a board game night. Snacks and games are provided, just show up and have a good time. Most people come in, find a table, and join a game or start a new one with a few others. People are migrating between different games, pairing off in some cases for smaller games, getting up to get snacks and chatting in the kitchen, and generally socializing together.

One couple shows up, takes an Uno deck and a bag of popcorn, and adjourns to the basement. They stay down there most of the night, and occasionally other attendees overhear them talking or laughing but they’re not making a scene or anything. Is that a crime? No, of course not. Is it rude to the host and the other guests? At least a little, yes.

Of course there is an expectation that players behave a certain way and engage with the MU in a certain way. You have to accept the MU’s terms of service to even create a character on an Ares game, and by default maintain a certain level of activity to avoid the idle sweep. Every Ares game I can remember looking at has policies listed on what they expect from players. That obligation may be small, but it is not zero. Whether it compels anyone to behave a particular way is a personal matter. There is no active harm in not doing so, and I am not advocating for bans or repercussions for it. People are allowed to eat only candy if they want to. It’s better if they eat some vegetables, to use Yam’s phrasing.

I’m also not trying to say that people aren’t allowed to RP with their favorite people, or that they shouldn’t RP with them “too much”, because that’s stupid and toxic, and I’ve experienced that firsthand. I am only saying that if you show up and receive the benefits of the game (structure, etc), then perhaps you owe something in return, however small.

@Faraday said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

When talking “best practices”, you have to ask: best for whom? Every player comes to the game with different desires and different needs, and I really don’t think it’s fair to expect them to put those aside for some vague “good of the game”. That’s not their responsibility. As long as they’re not doing active harm to the game (toxic cliques hogging resources is one example of that) and are playing within the established bounds of the story, who cares what they do or who they do it with?

Best for the community of players that make up “the game”, which is all a Mush really is. The good of the community, of which all players participating in the game are a part, absolutely is the responsibility of each individual player. If we’re talking best practices, then it should hold that, generalizing the behavior to everyone on the game, it would result in a net benefit for the average player. I think that it’s pretty easy to make the case that if everyone is playing with people who aren’t their most favorite experience on occasion, on balance, everyone will probably have more fun. I think it’s also pretty easy to make the case that if nobody is, there will probably be less total fun.

It can be true that what results in the most fun for everyone and what results in the most fun experience for a particular person are not the same thing.

@Faraday said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

I absolutely can RP with just a single other person, and that’s not stopping anyone else from playing with others.

You can, but the question is whether players should, I assume from the perspective of what’s best practices.

A Mush, if it’s healthy, feels like a world. You can “go” there. There are people there. Some of them, yes, are not your favorite people, but that is what a real place is like. You can certainly choose to ignore certain people, as I described in the analogy. It doesn’t break the game. It’s also not productive to building a healthy community that feels like there are possibilities and unknowns rather than another window for chatting with pals.

@Ashkuri
My hot take on this is that Mushing, while often described as a “hobby” and a “game”, has elements of both but doesn’t fit neatly into either category, and that while hobbies and games can be solitary, the defining feature of a Mush is that it is not solitary. Other people are required or you are merely writing. Who those other people are is a question for the owner/staff team of the game to decide.

We have (probably) all played on large games that took a laissez-faire approach to playerbase and character creation, but these days, at least in this neck of the woods, that is not the norm anymore. Most games are smaller, shorter-lived, and more focused. On a big game with 70 connections, it is a lot more defensible to take the position of “I played with this person a few times and didn’t love it, so I will never play with them again”; presumably someone out there sees them and will love them for who they are. On a smaller game, this is much less likely to be that person’s reality.

At the same time, a Mush is too big to be treated like a tabletop game and has more in common with a sports team or even a sports league. Past a certain size, you simply do not know enough people that are your favorite people to make up a team with, and necessarily there will be some you do not enjoy. While you are not obligated to pass them the ball every time they are open, if you never do, they will notice, your team will notice, and your team’s performance will likely suffer for it. If everyone on the team feels the same way, then that is a matter for the coach (staff) to resolve; that player should be removed from the team. The team will operate better without them, and there may be another team that that player coheres with more ably.

People should play with people they don’t know and people they don’t actively enjoy. I don’t think anyone should feel like they need to do it all the time, or even most of the time, but what’s “fun” is not written in the stars either. Sometimes someone I love to play with will produce a bad time. Sometimes I am the one producing the bad time. Sometimes someone I don’t normally enjoy surprises me.

A sidebar to say that I don’t think RP incentives ever work well. The RP must be the incentive or you’re barking up the wrong tree.

@Pyrephox said in AI In Poses:

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.

This is true, and it’s true in the context of disability.

However, the limitations of these LLMs in this study demonstrate apparent ability bias. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 27% of American adults have some type of disability. When prompted, ChatGPT generated persons with a disability at 5% of the population whereas Gemini generated 11.7% of its population possibly having a disability (fig 4). The underestimated approximation immediately demonstrates a lack of diversity and inclusion.

Source. The same researchers also asked the LLMs to describe people with disabilities and documented that both models were much less positive in the word choice they used than when prompted to describe a control group, both containing around 5% less positive words and those words skewing towards descriptors like “inspirational”.

Information provided by AI has already been shown to influence user behavior, and if that assistance is biased, users find themselves adapting to that bias. When these decisions affect the health of others, the consequences have much stronger risks associated with them. LLMs used to supplement medical decision-making may perpetuate this bias and compound already existing inequalities.

One of the most considerable findings in this study is how unfavorably patients were described in ChatGPT- and Gemini-generated responses. […] This biased perception of patients should be reconsidered before integrating into health care systems. These tools that have been designed to enhance the patient experience do not demonstrate the same equality and respect for the people they were built for.

@Warma-Sheen said in AI In Poses:

I’ve had the conversation on other threads, so I won’t get into it again here if people reply back to tell me all the ways I’m wrong, but taking a tool that improves writing and using it on text based game seems like it would be a godsend to cure many of the ills that people have complained endlessly about for decades - bad writing, lack of storytellers, no interesting plots.

Let’s grant for a second that these are ills that ChatGPT (and other LLMs, but based on the stats, it’s ChatGPT) can cure.

Genuinely, if I can have a better time engaging with content from ChatGPT, then why do I need the other person in the loop at all? Because their (evidently) poorly-written self is somehow so much better and more effective at prompting than I am? Because I enjoy the randomness of whatever they might happen to throw at it? Why is the other person involved here? Why should I wait for them to pose back to me instead of asking ChatGPT myself? Someone explain it to me.

@KDraygo
I don’t think that the majority opinion is that using ChatGPT is a great evil; I think the majority opinion is that many of us don’t enjoy it and want people who are using it to pose (or substantive portions of what it produces to help them pose) disclose that they are. That being said, I’m going to take issue with a few of your points for the sake of being contrary myself.

my experience shows me that there are three major points I need to develop to contribute good writing to the stories being woven together with those I am RPing with.

I would argue that Mushing doesn’t call on you to contribute “good writing to the stories”. It calls on you to contribute fun to the community of players. How you are doing this is by writing in stories, but it’s also by vibes and a million other things, like showing up when you said you would.

My view on ChatGPT is that it’s a tool, one that can help a lot with part 2. [translating that creativity, imagination, thoughts, and ideas into written form that is both enjoyable and clear for everyone to read.]

I am again going to argue that “Part 2” is not about being “enjoyable and clear for everyone to read”. It is about being enjoyable to interact with. This is not the same thing. Many great writers are not enjoyable to interact with because they leave no air in the space. I think you get that, because you come on to Part 3, which is

being able to cooperate with the community in the game. Coordinating with the staff and cooperating to your fellow players to help create and develop these stories and adventures.

This is close, again, but it’s not quite right. You are not cooperating to create and develop stories. You’re collaborating to create fun.

Am I being pedantic? Maybe. but there is an important distinction here between creating “good stories” and “good writing” (which we’ll grant for the sake of argument that those are things that ChatGPT can actually do) and creating a good time, which is the actual point of playing on one of these games.

I’m not sure who will be wasting time having ChatGPT just come up with poses completely by itself and just copy pasting into the game, so to me, the concern may be a bit overblown.

I promise it’s happening. But on to my closing point:

So my “starting stats” into the hobby were probably a high part 1, low part 2, low part 3. […] The second part took years of not just reading but also RPing, going from a newbie RPer that wrote probably very cringe and rough poses to something that was more palatable to everyone.

This is part of the journey, it’s part of the fun, it’s part of the magic of these games. Outsourcing the writing means you never get better. You never look back and laugh at your own cringe moments. You never track your progress and appreciate that you haven’t just been dicking around online, you’ve actually bettered yourself in some way. You weren’t just part of a cycle of regurgitating content, you created something, however meager. Studies have already shown that using ChatGPT to help you write something makes you less creative and less engaged, which sort of bumps up against your optimism about “Part 1”.

Do you think it’s fair that people ask AI users to disclose it?

@Gashlycrumb
The most relevant piece of information here is probably the system you are pasting the data into rather than the fact that these are coming through email. Is this a cloud-based solution, or does your organization run it on premises? Is it one of the big ones or something nobody outside your org has probably ever heard of?

@Roadspike said in AI PBs:

It doesn’t make you better, it makes you faster.

It doesn’t always do that either.

When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.

@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:

Is it “mealy-mouthed”?

Yes.

Unwilling to state facts or opinions simply and directly.

There is no thesis statement in any of your posts beyond “AI is harmful but there’s no point in resisting so we might as well all use it anyway”, and you’ve spent almost 2000 words saying it if I remove the asides about how I’m mean.

If this is not your argument, feel free to state simply what it is.

@Warma-Sheen
This

it won’t work today.

is

But trying to regulate AI is like putting a rookie traffic cop on a Formula 1 track.

defeatism

They can try to slow things down, but no one’s gonna listen.

by definition.

At this point it is highly unlikely, in any practical sense, that we can do anything about tech companies running rampant.

Disagreeing with you does not equate to insulting you. If your argument is not that there is nothing (in any practical sense) that we can do, so why bother, feel free to explain what it is.

@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:

The Industrial Revolution happened over many decades. But it took just as many decades for laws and regulations to catch up to what has happening - for many of the same reasons it won’t work today. Too much money and influence on the side of the people with the new toys.

This is a misrepresentation of the historical facts. Laws and regulations that reformed the worst excesses of the Industrial Revolution happened because ordinary people demanded it in spite of overwhelming monetary opposition from the incredibly wealthy and influential capitalists of that time. John D. Rockefeller’s net worth is estimated at around $253 billion in 2013 dollars, Cornelius Vanderbilt at $203 billion, and Richard Mellon (of Carnegie-Mellon) at $103 billion. These and other “captains of industry” of that era commanded money and influence on the same scale as any modern tech billionaire.

The government did not decide to regulate because there was no money telling them not to. “Strikes organized by labor unions became routine events by the 1880s. There were 37,000 strikes between 1881 and 1905.” We owe the eight-hour workday to continual agitation by hundreds of thousands of workers over more than fifty years. The President of the United States sent federal troops to end strikes (these are all different Presidents), and Rockefeller was widely blamed for organizing the murder of 21 people, striking miners and their families. Between 1850 and 1937 almost 900 people were killed by the authorities in labor disputes. Regulations did not “catch up to what was happening,” they were dragged kicking and screaming by we the people.

This kind of mealy-mouthed defeatism serves no one but the ruling class. Ordinary people have stood up for themselves and demanded better treatment in the past, and we can do it again.

PvP as implicated in the “death of the medium”

There are good reasons why PvP used to be more common in an MU environment that have nothing to do with personal preferences, as @Hobbie has repeatedly tried to make the case for.

Factor #1: people do not read or write as much as they used to.

When the internet was new, there was not a whole lot else to do with it other than read or write. These days, you can do anything online. Social media alone accounts for over 2 hours a day on average, of which big chunks are watching video (i.e. not reading or writing). The average (American) person spends more time on YouTube (24 minutes/day) alone than they do reading (16 minutes/day). Reading (for pleasure) is down by 7 minutes per day from 2004, a 32% decrease. Writing is much harder to find stats on but I assume the number is smaller as there are many more readers than writers, and I would expect it follows similar trends.

Factor #2: At the core of PvP is not story-telling, but the thrill of competitive victory. There are much more evocative mediums available for experiencing this thrill.

VIDEO GAMES. On an MU, the competitive aspect is always attenuated through a sheet+gear and dice rolls. In a video game, the competitive aspect is much more nakedly down to player skill. You do not lose a shoot-out in CoD due to a dice roll; you lose because you were slower, less accurate. On top of that, you also get to experience rich audio/visual imagery that an MU cannot hope to provide. The timer to repeat this tension is short, the barrier to experience it with a group of pals is low, the improvement in your skills (not a character) is quantifiable, and the dopamine hits of advancement and reward are lab-engineered to maintain engagement. 25% of all PC gaming time last year was spent on 4 PvP games.

MUs are not waning in popularity because they don’t have PvP.

They are waning in popularity because the things that they are made up of are not what people are choosing to engage with in their limited free time. Emphasizing PvP as a core of a game’s experience will not lead to a meteoric rise in popularity because this aspect of gaming can be done better in other game mediums. MUs exist at a weird confluence of social interaction, creative story-telling, and TEXT, which may better explain why so many games have left PvP out; why invest significant time capital (and despite the laissez-faire presentation of PvP given above, the investment to manage PvP is significant) in something that another medium does so much better?

The timer may be running down on when video games get better at approximating social interaction and creative story-telling. In the meantime, text-based RP remains a compelling hobby because it is the only game in town that can offer those two elements from the comfort of your home, for free, with some of the coordination elements of TTRPGs removed; the increase in options to run Actual TTRPG sessions online is arguably much more of a problem for MUs than too few opportunities to punk newbs.

@RedRocket said in AI PBs:

You are looking at this as if it’s taking away from artists when it makes you magnitudes more productive.

As a reminder of what professional artists have actually said for themselves:

More than half of respondents (57%) do not consider their area of creative work to be a sustainable career, and 72% believe that their work opportunities as a creator have been negatively impacted by generative AI. While 14% thought that there had been an increase in their earnings which they could attribute to the developments of generative AI technologies, 86% said that such developments had caused a decrease in their earnings. When it comes to feelings about how generative AI might impact creators, 11% are more optimistic than a year ago, 20% are neutral, but 69% are more pessimistic.

source

Reading over @Roadspike’s post, I want to pick out this line about CvC: “when done with a player who you trust”. I would kindly submit that this is rare less because games don’t allow it and more because it requires a solid underlying OOC relationship with the other player. This is not the dynamic we enjoy with most other players and not really something a game can be designed around.

I also want to pick out a few words that turn “CvC” (positive connotation) into “PvP” (negative connotation):

Frustrated, upset, stress, toxicity, egos, [dislike of] losing

These are the same pitfalls endemic to any competitive context, and these are things that we can design around. Healthy PvP requires the same things as “CvC” as described above, and there are things that a game runner can do to address them.

1. Trust/fairness (the belief that success is based on mutually shared controls, evenly applied)

OOC masque and private sheets came up earlier as things that make a game system more conducive to PvP, and that FS3/Ares is bad for PvP because it emphasizes transparency. A hot take here on my part is that transparency increases your odds of maintaining a healthy PvP environment dramatically because it helps address concerns of trust and fairness directly without relying on OOC relationships.

A more obvious thing is having referees who ensure that the rules of an encounter are understood and enforced evenly.

Other things game design can address in this space are stat bloat for older characters by limiting the amount of progression that can be made and access to “high caliber” gear. This is not to say that any advancement is bad, but the more advantages long-time (or “staff favorite”) players have, the less fair the playing field will feel and the more likely it is to incur OOC upset.

2. Sportsmanship (the practice of winning or losing graciously)

This one is harder to set up mechanics around, but you can easily design policies with it in mind. The expectation that players do not complain about the outcome of an encounter, that they do not engage in mean-spirited activity, that they maintain a modicum of care and concern for the fun of other players, applies in any competitive context and should be enforced. Referees in most sports can penalize players for bad behavior just as they would violating any other rule.

Why bother?

Even if your game has no PvP, PvE is not a panacea and the two points above still matter. The big difference between PvP and PvE is not that drama connected to these two things or the lack thereof doesn’t occur in one and they do in the other. It’s that in PvE the target of the upset is much more limited: one GM rather than a whole crew of opposing PCs. Designing and policing your game to promote Trust and Sportsmanship is still a good idea because even a PvE game is, fundamentally, a game.

I played on the same game as @Ashkuri and had many of the same sorts of experiences there, and I echo many of the same takeaways. “PvP” does tend to be higher stakes than what “PvE” can provide, and higher stakes are generally more exciting. Whether that is worth the additional baggage is a personal preference, but I disagree pretty strongly with some of the assertions in this thread that PvP doesn’t drive story, or that PvE (as it is commonly run) is just as thrilling.

I also don’t agree that PvP needs to mean character death/mutilation, or this sort of Running Man + Mad Max dystopia where PCs are subject to devastating consequences 24/7.

On one game I joined, maybe a week into playing there, I attended an event where PvP combat occurred. It was the first combat of any kind I experienced on that game. I was instantly one-shotted by a veteran player. I can see how for many people this would have been an instant turn-off and they would have logged out and never logged back in. I thought it was dope as hell. I decided to lose an arm, my PC languished for days in medical treatment, there was a whole side-plot spun out of his journey to obtain a mechanical arm (this was a sci-fi game), and he ended up switching factions in the resulting STORY from the simple act of me getting pwned in my first ever fight on this grid. It was fantastic, it was the best thing that ever happened to me on that game.

Nobody made me do that, though. The only part that was “enforced” was my guy getting shot and being out of the fight. I didn’t have to go do chargen again.

On the flip side of this, I stayed on that game and I ended up running an opposition faction and many times that meant organizing and facilitating PvP events, and no matter how much communication there was about what would be allowed to happen, or what stakes there were for PCs involved, or even preset outcomes to where the fighting would end up overall, could ever outrun the resulting drama around the mismatch between people’s expectations for how things would go and how things actually occurred. There is simply a scale and trust issue with running PvP on an MU* that TTRPGs (which we should remember that WoD was designed as a TTRPG) do not have.

You can do everything right and communicate everything down to a T, but on a long enough timeline, somebody is going to get their wires crossed about how something went down and become convinced that something was done unfairly. There are players that I would probably still be friends or friendly with today that do not want anything to do with me because of PvP that I was doing my level best to make as fair and story-oriented as possible. It’s just the nature of the beast.

God, I love it though. We should probably start a support group, PvPers Anonymous.