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.

@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.

I’m far, far more interested in PVE than anything else. I try to avoid political games. I guess I like a bit of what Tez described? Hopepunk? The world is shitty but we’re trying anyway. Trying to stick to mood here… desperation. That team stuff that Jenn mentioned is pretty appealing. FRENSHIP. Nuanced development in characters. I guess this really depends on your players.

@Tat In stretches between games run by friends, I search for RP servers in Discord via Disboard. I’m in a few major RP server advertisement hubs. I would say about 90% of the RP I find on Discord centers around async RP. To me it’s rare to find live/active RP, mostly because a lot of these are run by younger folk who believe the pose length indicates literacy and quality of RP, so people feel pressure to make massive posts padded with meaningless thought meta and fluff.

So much of the RP on Discord is async that threads die out contantly. Story seldom moves forward unless you find pockets of very active, very speedy RPers.

When I say async I’m talking about days between poses. Which either works for people or doesn’t, but I do think MUSHes gear towards quicker, 2-3 hour scenes as opposed to week/month-long scenes. I had to dip on a Discord RP recently because one person took a solid month to pose.

• Stability
• Stability
• Stability
• Responsive staff
• Access to metaplot is nice but not all that necessary so long as I’m permitted to run my own stuff
• Not a huge fan of secrecy/player occlusion or whatever it’s called, I prefer everyone being on the same page oocly (for important things, anyway)
• My friends also happen to be there which is not a thing that a MU can control of course, just a factor to keep me around longer
• Solid, interesting theme
• Did I mention stability? I lose motivation real quick when I notice staff starting to fade off

On a WoD game I played a dockhand (or harbormaster? I can’t remember) who was a changing breed oceanborn spinner dolphin. So I heavily researched the area surrounding the fictional town, and made a map of basins and banks.

@Tez Oh my GOD how dare you compliment me SO STEALTHILY by @ing me

AND THE PPL THAT UPDOOTED YOU

I LOVE YOU ALL im cry ;_;

I love comedy in RP. A lot of my friends are fucking great at it and I am 100% shamelessly biased. My favorite kind of RP comedy is the kind where it’s not just amusing, it’s side-splitting hilarious and it affects YOU as the PLAYER so now you get to channel that mirth AUTHENTICALLY through your character.

There have been multiple times where I’ve posed my character trying to resume the flow of the scene but then having to continue laughing in the middle of it because I was still cracking up. Shout out to @ham @sao and @Pyrephox

Naturally, @Tez is amazing at it too. I haven’t played too much with @tsar but I STILL remember how amused I was when Erik came to patch up Gil’s broken nose. scar has been absolutely killing me.

Yes I think it’s generally good for your RP health and the game health to eat your vegetables/RP with people outside of your circle. It’s just not something you can really enforce in other people, or guilt them into, or pressure them, or posit questions like why they’re even ON a game (if you’re trying to be effective in getting the result you want). All you can do is encourage it, lower barriers, make it easier, and that’s on you as a staffer, not a player. To me this is one of the important roles of a staffer. I think the platform plays into this as well. Easier to roll into a rando on a grid, for example.

@Rathenhope

@sao I GOT TO RP ABOUT THE STICK!! I think. Maybe. I might’ve just been examining every single object in your room and every object within an object. I feel like I ICly asked about that stick though.

Also how could I forget @Rathenhope who ALWAYS rolls with the punches for comedy. I am particularly fond of a fish-out-of-water character he played in a WoD game with me.

@Gashlycrumb

awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww wtf ;_; I’m so fkn flattered. (crunch milk is gr8 IM NOT ALONE IN THIS)

Get posturin’ tez.

@Tez Lmao NO I WAS A GOOD DOLPHIN!!! TEAM GOOD GUY

My notes say they were “major seamarks”.

@Yam said in MU Peeves Thread:

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.

This isn’t a new peeve, I’m just kinda reflecting how awful I felt a month ago about a very niche situation and how the feeling has completely faded from my mind. In the end the situation walked away from me (the game fell through) so I no longer had to deal with it, lol. I’m not sure what lesson I’ve learned here. I guess everything is fleeting.

I voted for (up to) 15. I ran a private game a few years ago for about about 8 players and it was SO MUCH WORK. Granted I was doing a lot of narrative story responses that were pretty personalized. Everyone had stuff going on. A bunch of creative people that you want to give plot attention to.