@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.

I also think the multisphere pull is MOAR alts, not just for themselves, but for others.

I can only ever play one character at a time, but I know many players who loved to just load up on alts. And in most cases it is mostly about odds of finding RP. The more spheres, the more alts. The more alts, the more chances at finding RP. I suspect… that some of them are looking for a “specific” type of RP. And the more alts you can get, the more chances you have of playing with and/or finding that specific type of RP.

Against that, all other concerns become less important.

In this community, people acting against their own self-interest is exceptionally common, unfortunately. Sure, they’d have a better chance with a game that’s healthy and thriving and not spread threadbare. But. You know. Logic.

I avoid this consistently. Because no matter how many guardrails you put in place someone, somewhere, at sometime is always going to cross someone’s line. Because everyone has different tolerances for different things, it is impossible to know what’s okay for everyone. And someone will end up feeling a way they shouldn’t have to feel.

At least, in my experience.

@Solstice said in Missed Settings:

I’ve spent the better part of the last year utterly gobbling up everything in Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere (Stormlight Archives, Mistborn, Warbreaker, etc.) catalog, and I am so freaking sad that there don’t seem to be any Cosmere-based games.

Having an already-established world with a well-thought-out magic system that you can do tons of interesting things with?

It would so be my jam, right about now.

There’s an actual RPG for this. I haven’t looked into it cause I’m in the middle of the series and I don’t want spoilers, but this was also on the top of my list for settings/games I’d love to play.

@Hobbie This sounds a lot like what my friend’s ex said about him…

@somasatori said in Nwod 2e vs owod:

The lack of metanarrative requires STs and leads to frontload their world-building in order to get the plot started.

I think this is a feature, not a bug. It gives you a vague structure and requires you to run your own game, with your own world and your own story with strong mechanics. If you can’t do that, the game might not be up to par anyway and running something from previous editions will only work well if your players stay on the rails you give them. Once they try something outside of the box, a lackluster ST will lose control of the game quickly.

nWoD gave out so much specific detail that canon became this amalgamation of 542542 different parts of 4924 different books, not all of which agreed with each other, leading to many an argument over which character can be what type of monster and how this player or that player doesn’t know how to play splat x at ALL because they don’t even know about obscure passage X and quoted some obscure passage Y which I don’t know about so they must be making it up or at least really misinterpreting the writers’ intent, which is SO very obvious, so I don’t even want to play with this person who is making a mockery of the game and ruining my own fun if they are around me. Because that’s how differences of opinion work. TLDR:

@somasatori said in Nwod 2e vs owod:

nWoD generally had something for everyone, eventually to its own detriment as time went on.

Separately…

@Pyrephox said in Nwod 2e vs owod:

A couple of places where CoD 2E stumbles:

I think all your examples, even by your own explanations, are of good systems that players and STs use poorly. I don’t think that’s CoD stumbling. I think that is players that are used to playing a certain way refusing to evolve with the game system and continuing to play like they always have in previous versions/editions out of laziness or because that’s what they’re used to, then criticizing the game system for not conforming to their preferences. The explanations of how those things work are great for a storytelling environment, as you say. People’s lack of understanding/willingness to use them properly is their own fault because it is a textbook example of willful ignorance.

@Ashkuri said in Re: Dies Irae:

The code was so broken on Dies Irae that people could not RP because it just fundamentally didn’t work. People couldn’t see each others’ poses, couldn’t see when someone else came into the room sometimes, couldn’t see OOC messages in the room sometimes, it was very difficult to get even simple scenes done.

Yes, I forgot about that part. I didn’t really have much issue with that. I ran into a few times and it was a simple fix (at least for me). But other people really struggled with it, supposedly.

I did feel like some used it as a convenient excuse to bail, but it is what it is and as excuses go, it was a solid one. Not being able to see people’s communication is a pretty big deal on a MU*.

@catzilla said in Re: Dies Irae:

I think the first big death knell or sharp decline of the game was when @somasatori left.

I thought that at the time… but I had desperate hope that something else decent would step in and fill the void. That didn’t happen.

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

Scylla set up two pseudo-headstaff through which she could launder her reputation.

I will say that in my time there, I never had much an issue with Scylla, personally, but I know others did. I think people have long memories in this hobby and reputations aren’t easily repaired, regardless of how you go about it. If anything, people just wait for a chance to use reputations and prior bad acts against you years/decades down the road. So sometimes, despite doing decent stuff in the present, you’re doomed to fail for your past mistakes and then… whatever you’re working on in the present goes down with it.

@catzilla said in Re: Dies Irae:

It was fun while it lasted but seemed to suffer from revolving door of staff and then piling multiple spheres on the replacement staff.

From my experience there was a lot of power grabbing and control issues with nothing to show for it. A whole lot of NOs from the sphere lead, then not a single scene ran or plot introduced for the sphere.

The game had sky high potential and almost all of it was ultimately wasted. Vamp sphere seemed to have the best go of it towards the end, but it faded out pretty quickly.

Personally it was crushing to see this game fade out so quickly. It could have been really fun.

2/10 - Would NOT recommend running a game without a head staff. The idea of that is nice but in practice, without the right people there (as opposed to: anyone who is who is willing to do the job), it blows chunks a lot - and instead of one strong lead (which is rare enough) you need one for every sphere. Pipe dream.

@catzilla said in Re: Dies Irae:

@MisterBoring I heard along the grapevine that there was some behind the scenes troubles too. What exactly it was, I do not know. But, at least a small handful of staff left because of it.

I don’t think there was anything too major - at least from what I observed. I just think it was normal stuff and people weren’t invested in the game enough to want to deal with it. It never really got off the ground. So they either quit or quiet quit. On staff and player side. And the game just died.

Of course, there could also have been major drama that wasn’t made public to players or other staff.

@somasatori said in AI In Poses:

I have a question. What do you get out of MUSHing, a hobby wherein you write paragraphs at people in a turn-based format, when you’re not actually doing the writing? What’s the end goal there?

I’ve had this conversation with more than a few people and one of the most common themes that came up: an experience as close to tabletop gaming as possible, but without being crapped on because of not being able to put out AP English writing or wait 20 minutes per exchange for all the editing.

MU*ers can be catty, judgemental, petty, elitist, etc… to a higher degree than any I’ve ever known, probably to do with internet anonymity, which is one of the reasons the hobby continues to grow smaller and smaller. I’ve never known a community so highly motivated/invested in killing itself off as intensely as this one, and I’ve known some pretty shitty communities in my life (I’m old… er now.)

People show up to MU*s for very different reasons and it sometimes seems like a large number of people assume that everyone else around them is there for the exact same reason as them then get frustrated/confused when they don’t play the way they would.

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.

But to each, their own. People will feel how they feel about it and that’s okay, I guess. Its just sad for me cause I loved this hobby and I really thought this might actually put some life back into it, like CPR. So it was disappointing/sad/whatever when all the villagers pointed at the thing that could bring someone back to life thereby improving the outlook/prosperity of the entire community, called it a witch, and want it burned at the stake.

ETA: Not for nothing, but to go along with the analogy, some non-small portion of the thread is basically a witch hunt - with dubious degrees of accuracy.

@Pavel said in AI In Poses:

I can understand people using it as a translator.

I know you mean that it takes Spanish and makes it English. But it seems like that also could apply to taking Shitty English and translating that to English.

@Roz said in Numetal/Retromux:

@MisterBoring Absolutely don’t do a three strike system for blatant, overt, and purposeful flouting of rules like that. Like, at most give the player one single warning.

But the real answer is the first option: ban them. There’s absolutely no need to entertain that sort of OOC sneakery.

Doing anything else will encourage some people to do it until they get caught, knowing they had a freebie.

@Trashcan said in AI PBs:

@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

Is it “mealy-mouthed”? You seem to have a habit of leaving off the parts that are relevant to the point you’re trying to counter, as though the posts aren’t all above to be referenced.

Your obvious omission of it shows that even you know it was wrong.

But again, you can be insulting if you need to. That’s how these conversations go on this forum. I just don’t know why you do, instead of just having a conversation with an exchange of ideas with someone who might have different thoughts than you. But you do what you need to do.

I don’t have all the answers. I never claimed to. But I can see when 2 + 2 does not equal 5 and I don’t have a problem speaking when I see people trying to make that math work. If the answer was that simple, somebody else would have figured it out by now.

Rather than looking for a solution that actually has a chance in hell of working, if you want to take a 200 year old solution that takes 50-70 years and apply it to a modern problem that will be irreversible in no more than 10 years absolute max (as if it isn’t basically already there now) and ignore all the very obvious issues between the two so you can pat yourself on the back and get all the upvotes, go for it.

Problem solved. “You got it, dude.”

See you in 70 years when we will all most definitely be AI free of the problem that became ubiquitous 65 years prior.

@Faraday said in AI PBs:

You are vastly underestimating the quantity of creative people who currently make a living with their creative skills.

Possibly. But I also think you are overestimating how many jobs GenAI is currently affecting - the key word being currently. Those jobs still exist. Some are affected. But others are not. My mother is a voiceover narrator. She doesn’t make a living off of it but she does make side income. She hasn’t seen much drop off of work YET, because, based on the conversations she’s had with the people she works with, the companies that pay for voiceover narration don’t find that AI quality is sufficient to stop hiring real people. AI can’t get the right amount of emotional range and proper inflections when it needs to. But what AI has done is allow people/companies who were not paying for it before to add GenAI robotic voicerovers to their service or business model for free. But these were people who wouldn’t have paid for real voicever anyway. The worry is that in the future as AI improve, it will get better and be good enough to stop hiring real people. The companies have told her when she’s asked, that more than likely that will be the case. It just isn’t at that point yet.

I think there could/would/should be some kind of graph with a line representing the quality of “creative” work (some creatives produce a more quality product than others, they just do) and the ability of AI to replicate that creative work to a specific degree. And as AI gets better, the more it will eclipse people and the more people will be put out of work as companies cut payroll to make more profits. That’s what companies do.

And I’m not arguing that its not bad and its not wrong. AI was trained on the cesspool that is the internet. The good stuff and the bad and everything in between. But ignoring the realities of it won’t make it go away. Railing about how bad it is for people won’t make it go away. Moar defeatism, I know…

At this point, I think there’s value in being able to use GenAI to enhance what you do for as long as you can do it. If you’re a technical writer, use AI to make you a better technical writer so that you can stay working longer than other technical writers who ignore it and do not increase in quality or production.

People have to adapt to changes in order to survive. Get on board the train or get run over by it. As I said above, I don’t have all the answers. But I think it is obvious that this thing is gonna be here to stay. So at this point, it is a matter of using it to your advantage and staying ahead of others who cannot/will not evolve along with it.

It has been said ad nauseam, but GenAI is tool. And the better you can use that tool, the better off you will be. But you can’t get better if you don’t practice with it. There is an art and a talent to using AI and some people don’t understand that. And in the current climate and the foreseeable future, being able to use AI skillfully is quickly becoming a survival skill in the job market. Early adapters will benefit.

Do I think that’s a solution to the problem? No, its just an adaptation to it. And a lackluster one at that. But that’s as much as I have right now.