@Ashkuri

I’m glum about a circumstance that I can’t really talk about with anyone and it’s just one of those things where I wish I had some no-judgment RP therapist to vent at. I feel dumb about it, but then also angry and hurt and offended and sad and scared/anxious. The answer is to walk away, but I don’t want to walk away. Meh. I’ll get over it.

Please enjoy my boy Casper!

@Ashkuri People love talking about their character, even if their character might only respond with mysterious grunts. So if the opportunity arises, I generally guide the RP in that direction. MORE QUESTIONS. It’s fun to learn about interesting characters!

Also comedy. I try to hold the idiot ball often, it’s usually pretty fun.

ALSO, setting OTHER characters up to kick some ass and shine.

DID SOMEONE SAY WHALES

When I lived in Florida I’d have to cross a bridge across a bay to work and occasionally I would see dolphins. I couldn’t take pictures because I was driving very fast with traffic HOWEVER I have recreated the experience to fully immerse you.

A while ago I was in an event scene with someone that could not string sentences together to save his life. No real regard for capitalization or punctuation, but he was able to communicate what he was going for. Sure I’d prefer something more polished, but his character was amusing, and he rolled with the punches. He wasn’t boring. He was real. He was genuine. It was clear to me because every word he managed to type at us, no matter how mangled, was something from his own mind. I’m not really sure what my point is. I don’t really know how to explain that it’s important, at least to me, to know that the word you’ve included in your pose was something you chose, you settled on.

I know of another player that was pretty fast and loose with punctuation, and happened to be… pretty boring. They came to an event I was running and we had a minor little poetry contest. A poet character came up with a sweet and snappy haiku. Then, noticing positive reactions, fast-and-loose belted out an 8 stanza rhyming poem in 3 minutes, perfectly formatted, entirely different from that player’s writing style. I was baffled at first. It did not cross my mind that someone would’ve gone out of their way to generate something like that for a silly poetry contest. The stakes could not be lower.

I guess I want to know what people mean by improving their poses. Making them longer. Filling in the gaps? Do you simply give the LLM a prompt like “respond posing my character takes off his coat and goes into the kitchen to make something”? Is it more detailed than that? Simpler?

I know this is gonna’ be hard to believe for some folk, but you can actually have a game of relatively decent people that, even on their off days, won’t be particularly rude or pushy directly to the game runners. It might not be a BIG game, but from what I gather, it doesn’t look like most staffers want to staff big games anyway.

@Faraday There is a human that’s in charge of disinviting people to games. If the human uses their human brain to use a tool to confirm if someone is using AI, based on the results AND their intuition, I don’t know, I think that’s fairly solid. If a human decides to just scan everyone and everything and determine to boot them off their game based on those results…

Like. Okay? If I get banned that way, I don’t want to be on that game anyway? If I go to BMD to whine about it I’d blame staffing decisions. The issue is false negatives, not false positives. At least, that has been our experience running games within the last 5 years.

This thread is about AI in poses. I think detectors are appropriate in this particular environment where human writing really, really matters.

I TOTALLY understand the impulse to have clear, hard lines about this kind of thing. I don’t like arbitrary rules AT ALL. I worry about slippery slopes. But we’re here to write human written lines at each other. This is what it’s all about! This is the CORE of our hobby. If we don’t push back against this with EVERY weapon we have, we might end up RPing with robots. Which people have! It doesn’t feel great!

I’m confused. Is genAI a fun, harmless tool to be more efficient at creating art, or is it the catalyst for the race to the bottom, a “painful and violent” future for humanity? I feel like the original argument deviated a bit.

I do kinda’ feel like… as a hobby, we need a masterclass on how to take a hint through text.

For me, I look for enthusiasm and actual action. I give someone time to reach out to me. All it takes is a few instances of someone reaching out for me to understand that this person does indeed want to hang.

If I reach out and get a response, but it’s very lukewarm and they don’t actually follow up, or offer very little assistance in the way of actually planning a scene, I take the hint. Saves us both the trouble. I’ll ask twice, generally, and see if there’s any connection there, but no more.

If NO ONE engages with me after I put in some moderate effort to be fun and friendly on channels and offer to run scenes or Do A Thing, then I tend to write off the crowd as not a good fit for me and move on.

@Gashlycrumb Idk how to ask this… does this happen to you frequently? Are you a bit of a chore? I mean I’ve absolutely been a bit of a chore.

I joined Otherspace long after everyone else did and I recall vaguely some attempt to monetize it in some way. The director was compiling everyone’s scenes into a book and selling it… I THINK?

I understand that there are paid MUDs out there but as a theoretical exercise, what would happen if MUSHing ever became monetized in some way? Would you personally PAY for a STed experience? They do apparently do this with DnD!

Would this concrete exchange make things easier for you, or would it be antithetical to the concept of collaborative writing?

I’m vaguely reminded of some L&L that drew ire for taking a break for Christmas. I do kinda’ think it’s just… the nature of a free medium. People are ultimately, eventually, going to do whatever they want, even if it might result in bad things later. It’s like being mad at the rain for personally raining on your picnic. I see solutions here like “just fix it just do the thing :)” and if it were that easy we probably wouldn’t be having this convo. Ask any staffer who was DEDICATED to prompt, “fast”, consistent responses how long they stuck around. How long the game existed.

I try to tell this to folk all the time, you will be a far happier person if you do not put all your eggs in one basket. Do not put all your happiness in one game, because then you will internalize everything as a personal slight. It may mean that you pull back on your engagement, but I’m sure we’ve all seen a particular player that goes SUPER hard into something, creates a TON of activity, and eventually either peters out or crashes out.

My MU peeve is that I write a big post then remember it’s the peeve thread where you’re allowed to have unproductive, non-constructive complaints about the system that innately discourage all would-be game creators who may now believe that someone is always going to be watching them on the +where to decide whether or not they are stretched thin enough.

@somasatori I get what you’re saying, but it always makes me a bit nervous relying on the court of public opinion/free market of the playerbase to handle an… arguably unthematic app.

The playerbase might’ve known they’d be encountering all kinds of people, but they probably don’t love the weight of social enforcement. Turning people away sucks no matter how steely you are, and if players are openly avoidant, unwilling to use public channels to search for RP, this is a problem. Watch how your very active, very social dynamo player handles a character like this. Watch the energy get drained from their bones as they try and fail to work with this character that probably shouldn’t have seen the light of day.

This tends to happen ANYWAY in situations where the staff is unaware of how someone is RPing their powergamey werewolf, or a little more hands-off in general. I’d strive to work against it, not encourage it, since in my experience someone really dedicated to their twinky character will stubbornly linger on a game far longer than short order. IDEALLY they get bored and leave on their own. It happens! Not always.

Although we might be getting off topic here.

@helvetica People do be wanting to write a lot sometimes. I guess there’s a captive audience there, technically. On CoG we had a few folk complaining about the limit and then trying to find ways around it by putting it somewhere else on their profile. As a youth never in my wildest dreams would I have predicted that people actually want to write full novellas for their backgrounds. My goal was generally to get in there and exchange poses with other people.

@Pavel I DO prefer when there’s a little questionnaire provided.

There’s another thing. The CONTENT of the CharGen/Application. For 2k5 it was a big fat written app that was e-mailed. The length of it was determined by the specialness of the roster character you were picking up.

In contrast Arx was like “you want THAT weird old man that’s in the freezer? ok yam sure” which was oddly refreshing.

I’ve often wondered how much applications actually filter anything.

Oh strap in I can make this thread controversial!

This extremely social hobby requires you to understand nuance in text, requires you to be able to read the room, requires you to take cues gracefully, requires you to be able to put yourself in another person’s shoes, and generally requires you to be GOOD at other human beings, which is actually kind of hard and involves actual work! COMMENCE FIGHT.

But it does appear that most folk prefer web. Telnet hanging on by a thread.

Which do you prefer and why? Have either of these fallen short in what you’d really prefer? Am I missing a secret third option?