@Nobody-0 Receipt or no receipt, showing up on a game just to fuck with a place is not cool. If someone has an issue with a game, then stay far far away. Logging onto a game maliciously is a cancer to the community.

People taking their grievances to extremes is never okay.

@Polk said in Ruiz Thread:

she’s not in the past been afraid to take action.

Yes, she absolutely has. That’s an outright lie. And he knows that personally.

When @Polk pissed all over the game rules while she was away busy with heavy RL stuff and took advantage of her absence to abuse players he got a complete pass. She traded in her integrity on a silver platter for his help running the game when she couldn’t be there, because in comparison, a few players weren’t worth it to her to do the right thing.

She tried to offer solutions and undo the mess that he made, but the damage was done and @Polk got zero consequences.

So it depends on who you’re complaining about. If Addison is more useful to her game than you are, you will probably be shit out of luck.

Adjust your expectations about complaints there accordingly.

@GF said in Good things in Mushing:

Staff who take action when action is called for.

Especially when it benefits them to overlook at it.

Having a back bone should not be underestimated.

@Roz said in Liberation MUSH:

• Up to now, he had chiefly been someone who could save me a little time (which adds up considerably) by managing the wiki and website updates. Polk’s social IQ problems were not unknown. It’s why he only became Mage Director when Tris stepped down and there was no one else. And it’s why he was removed as Mage Director a year ago, and was relieved of any player-facing responsibilities as sub-director a while after that. He never did anything unethical (as a Director anyways) - but he could not deal effectively with people.

Well, that’s just not true. He very much did unethical things as Director.

Sundance(sun) pages: There’s two elements to this. The first element is 1) Polk should absolutely not have disapproved you on his own initiative. He knew that the moment he did it, and he already apologized to me in page about it, before I sat down. I had him immediately re-approve you, since I’m the only one who can carry out OOC discipline here.

I won’t say she’s just flat out lying. Maybe she just forgot, but he was definitely unethical as Director. Maybe she didn’t consider that situation because, in her view, she fixed it? (She didn’t actually fix it, she just reversed his decision, which still left a host of problems. Not the same thing as fixing it.)

But…

If she did just forget, I gotta tell ya, it sucks to have been so severely fucked over by Polk in the exact same temper tantrum, table flipping way and then forgotten about by Sundance like you never existed and didn’t spend months of your life researching, writing, and on a few occasions driving through LA in order to desc half of her ginormous, unnecessarily large grid to give her 200+ grid spaces and builds so that as many spaces and builds as possible were as accurate to the actual RL locations as they could be, all the way down to neighborhood blocks that had no notable features except for how much graffiti and trash were visible or how many and what types of cars were parked on the street. Granted, I did all of that willing and no one asked me to do the extras, but it is too much to expect that you and the reason you left the game not be forgotten about? Apparently, that might be.

So… hopefully it wasn’t the latter. That would blow.

Every neighborhood in a city to desc the grid, down to Google street view in VR. Done most recently for LA, but previously Chicago, and Manhattan.

Definitely don’t take the player option of of RPS, otherwise there’s no reason to use RPS. That would turn people away.

My biggest issue with character progression is that the only way most characters progress on a game is through xp and stats.

XP and stats should not be the only way a character progresses. There should be other achievables like rank or resources or territory or a combination of all of them that allows a character to progress without simply racking up xp and spending it.

If people had more objectives to achieve besides MOAR XP, then a game wouldn’t need to give out so much xp per week to keep people interested and uber stats become much less of a problem.

But handing out scads of xp is the easy, traditional solution. It takes very little monitoring and is often completely automated. So that’s what most games do.

Not saying that is bad or wrong, just that it really puts the burden of character progression on xp if that’s all the game has.

@junipersky said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:

I feel like one of her most defining traits is the way she talks about her OOC life. She could very legit have all the issues she talks about, but the way she phrases it is very much in a way that digs for sympathy and pity from others. She emphasizes her disabilities as reasons why people, especially those in authority, are out to get her.

I haven’t had much contact with her directly, but her constant RL overshares are one of the most awkward and uncomfortable and unavoidable things about being in the same play space as her.

Before I respond, just remember that this is a Star Wars game with kaiju that eats planets and the Death Star was being built to stop them, but the Rebels blew it up so now the whole galaxy is at risk of being nom nom nommed because of them. The top Jedi is an openly force-lightning wielding darksider (who leads with Luke Skywalker’s blessing) who also leads the New Republic’s military, even though they’re totally separate entities, who is prone to snap and yell at his subordinates for little reason because of the dark side and the brain pains he gets because the entirety of the Jedi Archives was placed inside his head before Order 66 - and everyone knows and is cool with all of it. No one leading things in this SW universe sees anything wrong with any of this. All perfectly fine.

SO. When you ask, ‘Why would they make X decision?’ Just know, that might not even rank of the list of jacked up decisions made at this place.

@Wizz said in Requring Character Connections at Chargen:

Works great at a table, but does not translate at all to MU*s IMHO.

How it translates on this game is new players show up and get to that section of chargen and say ‘I don’t know anyone!’ and the staff says, ‘Well you can use my player bit as a connection’ and then all the players have all their connections to the staff’s PC bits who are at the center of everything and everything revolves around them.

@Faraday said in Requring Character Connections at Chargen:

That’s interesting, because I wondered how using NPCs would actually accomplish anything. Are staff going to run these NPCs regularly?

Nope. Not for other players, anyway. For other staff characters yes. Everyone else, you’ll probably never see them again. If you do, do you think staff there will remember your character’s connection to them? Good luck.

@Faraday said in Requring Character Connections at Chargen:

If not, what’s the difference between saying I trained with the one special NPC jedi master, or some other one I invented in my BG?

Absolutely nothing. Well… except that with established NPCs they can tell you how wrong you are about what you wrote and how they wouldn’t do X, Y, and Z and make you go back to change your background to how they view that NPC.

@imstillhere said in Social/Bar RP:

I feel like “bar rp” picks up a lot of smoke as a bad thing though.

Why’s it got such a terrible reputation?

“Bar RP” is a colloquialism that many people use in the community. It means boring, trite RP without purpose or consequence.

It isn’t meant to be literal. It doesn’t mean that all RP that takes place in a bar is bad. But many scenes where people reach out to random players for RP has taken place in bars, likely because that’s were players thought was the most likely place for their characters, who did not previously know each other, well or at all, to have met. That was usually followed by random small talk that neither party was actually interested in because one or both was hoping the other would bring something interesting to the table and that doesn’t happen. What follows is usually forced or painful or unfulfilling or some combination of all three until the scene finally ends.

That is “bar RP”. And that’s why the phrase has such a terrible reputation.

As many have pointed out, the location of a bar is not the problem. Neither is social RP. It is the content of the RP that is the issue, which some people can make happily interesting, even with characters who do not know each other, and others cannot.

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

@InkGolem said in AI Megathread:

I don’t think there is any harm.

Generative AI is harmful to artists. It’s harmful to the environment. It’s harmful to students. It’s harmful to teachers. It’s harmful to critical thinking.

I understand that most people don’t realize this, so I try not to hold a grudge against the people who use it “for fun”, but it’s really hard when it’s destroying so many good things.

ETA: I’m speaking specifically about the mainstream GenAI implementations. The underlying technology itself could (theoretically) be used for good. It just currently isn’t.

I don’t necessarily disagree…

I just think the same thing can be said for so many other things that exist in the modern world and are used constantly. Cars. Planes. Pharmaceuticals. Food. The list kind of goes on and on. We all still use them (if we can afford them). It just seems very -insert appropriate word here so no one is too offended, but you get my meaning- to drill down on this one thing. (Add drilling and oil to the list if you haven’t already…)

Admittedly, I haven’t looked too far down the rabbit hole but…

I get that one of the big objections it is trained on other people’s work… but isn’t everyone? What school teaches stuff that isn’t based on other peoples’ works? Haven’t artists looked at other people’s works and been influenced? It seems like the actual problem is just that it does it better, wider, and faster than a normal person can.

I’m certainly open to changing my opinion with more info, but the issue that it is just better at learning and reproducing than people… well I’m very ‘meh’ about it. I’m not a big fan of people to begin with and that’s where the problem is. People. Hunger could be easily erased. Diseases could be far more eradicated than they are. Look at COVID and how fast that was addressed when it was deemed necessary. If we did use what we have as a planet for good, things would be so much better in the world. But we don’t. Not to go too much into politics, but people in the US voted and look what is happening and remember that people voted for that - everything happening was campaign promised.

People complain that AI “steals” jobs. But it doesn’t. People do that. They use this tech the way they want, then they keep the profits for themselves. Until AI starts doing things itself without a person directing it to do so, I’m not going to blame it for what’s happening in the world, no more than I blame a car or a plane. The epi pen didn’t jack up its own price a bajillion percent. A person did that. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop using an epi-pen (unless I just can’t afford it). Its just an example, but you get my meaning, I’m sure.

Using AI to make my funtimes more fun, I don’t have a problem with that. I also know its just my opinion and I respect everyone else’s for what they want and believe.

@Pavel Sorry, I didn’t mean that part about you, specifically, though I should have been more clear about that cause I can see how it came off that way. You have your preferences, that’s fine. But I’ve definitely seen people on games be very shame-y towards OTHER people about it saying things like “people that use AI are…” “if you’re using AI, then you are…” and those kinds of phrases and phrasings.

Just saying, “I don’t want AI anywhere near me.” is, to me perfectly acceptable, because everyone is entitled to their opinion about what they want in their own RP, even if it is kinda harsh because that affects your fun, but it doesn’t make judgements on anyone else.

There definitely should be a section in the +finger categories about whether people want to RP with others who use it so no one gets triggered.

I’ve actually had a great time with AI and I’ve never been able to run so many PRPs and plots for so many people in such quick succession at such a high level thanks to AI and in an age of plot runners becoming an endangered species, I think this is a pretty useful lifeline - if used well.

Prompt engineering is a very necessary thing with LLMs if you are going to try to use them with RP to get ideas, develop dynamic NPCs, or branch out story or even character ideas. If you don’t know what prompt engineering is or how to do it well, your results may not be well received. If you just hop on a free LLM and tell it to write you a pose or write a background, it will scream “written by AI” and people may look at you sideways - which would be understandable.

@InkGolem I agree with that in principle. The problem, as Pavel illustrated, is that some people dislike AI on principle so they’re violently opposed to better writing because it was created with technology, so you can’t always tell if it will enhance it for your scene partner without asking. And with the way some people react to it, there’s this elitist/shaming quality people are espousing about using it that makes it risky to even ask.

Personally, I prefer better writing over shittier writing, but when it comes to RP, the writing isn’t nearly as important to me as the story. If the AI can help create better, more interesting story, bring it on. If its going off on weird tangents that aren’t in the flow of the story, which inexperienced AI users often do, then its horrid. I could care less if the AI is writing the poses or playing the whole damn character, I have 0 problem with fun, interesting character interactions regardless of the source. Its one of the reasons I don’t mind play -insert any fun video game here-.

But that’s just me. I show up to RP for the fun of playing my character without may restrictions on that. Other people show up for different reasons and everyone has fun in their own way. Some people want a connection to another person. Some people just want to know their effort and creativity are being respected, if not matched, by the person on the other end of the character bit. I get that. Everyone has their own thing.

Overall, though, I don’t view it much differently than I view most artificial things. I see it like plastic surgery. It can enhance things naturally and beautifully, but it can also be grotesque and wildly unnatural, depending on the artistry with which people use it. For me, I don’t mind it at all, but I proportionally dislike it the more I can tell it is artificial. If you are using AI, but I don’t know (or even if I’m just not sure), then you’re probably doing it right and we’re having a blast. But being able to use it that way is a skill, like anything else. Some people do it well and its awesome. Others do not and its awkward and uncomfortable.

@SqeakyClean said in MU Peeves Thread:

Internet friends are fake. Don’t ever trust them. (A lesson I keep having to learn.)

As it turns out, MOST internet friends are people. And people are the worst…

@Pavel said in Re: Dies Irae:

@Jynxbox Okay, I at least somewhat agree with the majority of what you’re saying, except that last part.

The game’s been open in beta for a handful of months, and the primary setting is San Diego. So that’s where the work should be done. Staff have previously indicated that they’d like to expand Tijuana at some point, but it’s not the primary focus of their efforts.

I think its more of an issue of what is considered “San Diego”. If you’re building out a city of just over 50k people 25 miles north of the city of San Diego, but ignoring the city of 2 million people 17 miles south… that can make some people feel some kind of way, especially with some of the cross-border themes and culturally-minded beliefs baked into the game. I do get that.

I’d prefer to believe, academically, that political borders and such can be the anchoring point for the decision, for sure. Focusing on San Diego County rather than the City of San Diego. Everyone seems to agree that there’s no malicious intent by the staff, so its no harm.

But I do agree that the proximity and size and political status does make for a big missed opportunity for a more interesting and dynamic game theme, especially in terms of sources of conflict and antagonists. It is tailor made for a MU. Not a BAD thing. Just a disappointing one.

BUT it isn’t one that’s completely wasted yet. I’d encourage them to really take a look at the opportunities there and in the future open it up like a DLC expansion pack with a full complement of themes and integration, not just some grid spaces. Dies Irae: TJ!

@Faraday said in The 3-Month Players:

People MU for all kinds of reasons.

This. There’s no one magic bullet to MU success, 3 month or otherwise. It takes a number of things. There are a lot of things to be handled to address all the many reasons people join a game, some of them mutually exclusive. It is a delicate balancing act. Not everyone can do it. Not everyone wants to do it. Some people want to and can do it, but not forever.

A lot of the games that get trashed often handled all this better than others. People tend to focus on their complaints about a game without acknowledging all the things done right and the reasons games keep going strong for years, despite the problems. I’ve been guilty of this as well, especially when it has affected me personally, negatively, or unfairly.

But it doesn’t take away from the fact that running a successful game is a daunting feat, however one defines success.

@spiriferida I prefer no dice when I play with people I know well. Otherwise, I prefer the dice because generally I don’t trust other people I don’t know to play in a way that keeps it fun for everyone.

@Jumpscare TL;DR

Still love it!

@Artemis It could be that no one is going to try to live up to Arx. Everything else might just be a lackluster comparison. I never played there but I heard people talk about it for years.

@Gashlycrumb said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:

@MisterBoring

Yep. I dislike the sphere system because (among other things) it makes it super easy to let this happen. Frankly, it regularly happens within spheres anyway – the magical tank vs phone call thing really happened, though my character was actually taking a forty-five minute bus ride, not making a phone call. The tank-builder was in the same sphere as I, same GM, it was just, eh, indifference to the issue, or favouritism. It was not actually as frustrating as spending five RL weeks waiting for twenty IC minutes to pass while the staffer I needed to tell me what happened in those twenty minutes was having weekly adventure and daily sphere-baRP with their PC.

It kinda blows me away that gamerunners don’t all acknowledge the timeliness problem and have a stated course of action to deal with it. In my long experience, if you want to lose friends over an RPG the easiest way is to SKIP SOMEBODY’S TURN A LOT. That’s pretty much the simplest way to be a shitty GM. (If you want to really guarantee that friendships’ death, skip their turn a lot and then have a hissy fit when they point out how unfair and shitty it is.)

An aside, I wish we’d all get over the idea that MU staffing is volunteerism. Yeah, sure, it’s voluntary. But volunteerism implies community service. And okay, yeah, sort of, technically, but also, no. GMs are players playing a different role in the game. Yeah, we need them or we can’t play, but. Weellllll. You need a pitcher to play baseball, but you can play without a left fielder if you must. This does not make the pitcher a volunteer whose services you must constantly applaud and the left fielder a mere player who owes the pitcher. (For the same reason, gamerunners and players should all remember that GMs are players too, and they, too, should be having fun.)

It sounds like your bad experiences with MU staffing have soured you on staffers and their value. But don’t let your bad experiences with bad staffers blind distract from the importance staffing has on the hobby or the value in the service they’re offering the community. If anything, your bad experiences should show you just how valuable staffing is and how damaging it can be to have someone stepping into that role who won’t/can’t do it well. They should show you why good staffers should be applauded whenever they can be. Because good staffing is invaluable, even though many people take it for granted and are happy to sour on all of it because of the bad apples.