@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!

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’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.

@Faraday I think these war stories are profoundly important to relay, because it’s pretty easy to discuss approaches in abstract, but when you’re down there in the trenches, you see how things unfold in ways that are difficult to predict, and you’re there in the crossfire feeling the heat of just how bad things can get.

That heat fades after a while and people may forget the details. We don’t need to wonder too much when there are actual cases. Players can have good experiences, but staff might be sitting there shell-shocked about it, and that should be a factor considering we generally need staff to run games.

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.

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.

@Livia Lol yes, please. Modern Chronicles of Darkness, and some extra nudging where people get some kind of in-the-know token so not every scene outside your sphere involves tedious tiptoeing around secrets in a collaborative storytelling environment.

@Pavel I guess at least I can be happy that I’m self aware.

@Pavel Eh I’m all talk. I make sad eyes at fellow staffers to do the dirty work, and if they don’t I just scowl about the injustices of everything. This is my attempt to vent to the forum instead of a friend discord where I thrash my pals mercilessly.

@Faraday You earnestly think it’s okay for people to address others this way? To be snarky? To be dickish? To accuse someone of maliciously ignoring jobs? It’s okay for them to expect some kind of service, and when they don’t get it, deride someone’s hard work, something a game runner poured their heart into? Do you think these people can be coached into acting like a model MUSHer with a gentle warning? A second chance? A strike system? Do you think they won’t cause problems down the line?

I know you, personally, have a very long fuse. I’ve seen you tolerate a lot of bullshit. I’ve seen people be real assholes towards you and your work. It sucks. I probably lack an objective view of this, as all I have are battle scars from people that were given second, third, fourth chances.

Game runners! You don’t have to tolerate this crap. It’s 2025. It is exceptionally easy to be respectful of other people, not some insurmountable task. We’re a dwindling community. There aren’t a ton of games left where this attitude will fly anymore. These tough calls suck to make, but you either curate your playerbase, or you end up with a very specific type of game.

Do we ever learn anything? Ever?

@catzilla Possibly. I have vague memories of folk coming out of the woodwork.

@Faraday Do you recall ol’ OnceWas?

Minus one Michelin star for “unclear help file” work.

If a system is supposed to work a specific way, say it is supposed to work that way. If it isn’t, update a file or something, maybe?

This was basically enough to get OnceWas banned. This person was freshly new. This is the most hair trigger case I can think of. He was immediately shown the door, although he was sure to kinda’ buckle down on his stance. Mild, probably, but no one wanted to deal with it.

I’m unclear of what your threshold is, as I recall you were not very approving of this behavior.

We do actually have data on how people say that want to be directly told things but then no one actually wants to do that apparently.

I have no idea what to make of it.

@Meg That’s valid. I don’t think anyone is actually all that hair trigger. Someone mentioned that there’s a lot the playerbase doesn’t actually see, as staff gets clues from the first login of the potential player, the application, the response to the application, etc. They build up a profile.

I’m not sure anyone is like… immediately banning people for brusquely asking questions. I can think of one player that began with a VERY bad impression on a game I helped run and I wanted them to be shown the door immediately. My fellow staffers told me to chill. This person stuck around for a bit and were more or less fine. Not a huge problem, not a huge asset. Just there. I don’t really think I would’ve missed them if they were nudged off. <<;

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.

People offer public games because sometimes you get some really cool randos that turn out to be awesome. The tradeoff is that you may have to be firm with some of the bad randos.

I’ve seen folk get kindly shown the door during the CG process, so that is indeed a thing that can work, if the process is long enough for them to display their overall… vibes in public, I guess.