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.

@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

@Gashlycrumb

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.

Lately I’ve been enjoying the element of chance when it comes to the narrative. Sure, narrative above all else. That’s given. But sometimes, sometimes, it’s nice to be a bit surprised by the system that was originally built with the fiddly bits in mind. And I think, judging by the responses, other folks have had decent experiences. Ideally they’re tools to kind of pad things out between RP. Hanging out in your room, everyone’s gone to bed, now I can work on descing my glorious wardrobe.

@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.

I’d basically like someone to explain to me why having a truly, TRULY neutral player who generally RPs with 1-2 people is a NET LOSS to a game. I’d argue that this is even better than a solo player who just lurks. For THAT, you could make the case that they’re just farming XP or something, but personally I wouldn’t care. From what I can understand, ya’ll want a No Dead Weight policy, which seems like it’s usually applied to staffers.

If they are doing anything that somehow reaches you and informs you that they hate the theme and the setting sucks and everyone else sucks, that’s a player problem, not an engagement problem. As ever, it always comes back to the player problem.

I think we can all agree that it is perfectly acceptable for staff to create their own rules. I’m just trying to figure out why games might think a player engaging in this specific manner is a net loss, like they’re somehow taking up a slot that someone else more engaging would be utilizing.

Settings where there are adversarial factions! Perhaps more than 2! Where have you seen this done elegantly? What made it work? Was it baked into the theme, or just a byproduct of having more character type selections?

Is it a fundamentally flawed approach in modern MUSHing? Can it be managed in a properly collaborative environment? Does it depend on a carefully curated playerbase?

I’m not quite talking about PVP, because in my mind, this is something that involves narrative clashing but no one generally gets KILLED. Plus I see PVP as kind of separate from adversarial factions.

Like in Transformers 2005 and TFU, it was kind of built into the theme to do punchy coded beat-em-ups very often that resulted in no death.

@somasatori At that point it should’ve been pulled out the IC realm and dealt with it like it was player problem. I think the… GTA RP server people call it failRP? << Sometimes people do such wacky shit that it cannot be resolved ICly. There’s a threshold of “oh, I see, this is not RP related at all”. You wouldn’t punish a player like this by killing their character. You’d punish a player like this by banning them.