For the record I don’t think any kids were raised wrong. I don’t really take that attitude. I find it concerning that they default to… handling actual IDs for pretendy funtime, but I don’t really see it as their fault.

Regarding fresh blood, people actually do like this format. I did a recruitment sweep, reaching out to RPers in the fandom of a game we were running. 99% of the time because they were INVITED they eagerly jumped into things. One of our close friends is from a tumblr crowd that never heard of the platform.

I have the pleasure of being in a game that has players that have never heard of mushing! It’s such a delight!

I guarantee that if folk actually advertised their shit on discord, not just individual games but as platforms, like… Ares and Evennia being showcased in the big ol’ discord hubs, people would pick them up! Slowly, and perhaps quietly, but surely!

But for some reason we don’t advertise at all, really. If we do, we only do it in our circles.

@KarmaBum said in Age Verification & Games:

there’s shit-all for fun new games right now.

This was a kind of thoughtless comment.

Gosh, are there any NON 18+ games out there? I figure maybe some MUDs?

@Pavel This makes me want to run a poll to see how many folk are actively RPing on Ares games right now vs anything else.

@Third-Eye said in Staff Bits Linking Handles:

People are gonna find out 90% of the time.

Yeah, they will eventually, it’s hard to really “hide” here. But the discussion has brought up examples of players unknowingly interacting with staff characters and feeling a certain way about it. They’re talking about that sliver of time when people don’t know.

Eventually people will pair person to character. We have a personality fingerprint that’s hard to smudge, at least long term.

But clearly some folk didn’t sign up for hidden staff characters, where it might take a little while to actually pair staff to character. It got paired, clearly! They know now. But they didn’t. And that was the issue.

I figure the handle being prominent, right after the name on all channels with every message has probably shifted the expectations a bit, as opposed to an alt list tucked into a finger.

HOW ARE YOU NOT INSANELY EMBARRASSED ABOUT POSING VIA LLM, WRITING IS LITERALLY THE ENTIRE POINT OF RP WHAT IS GOING ON

I think people lean towards the concept of interacting with someone that has been… kind of vetted in some sense, at least within communities. For better or worse.

It’s true that you can make a new handle though. I think there might be intrinsic value in handles that people recognize.

Out of curiosity I’m wondering if folk have ever had the opposite reaction of ‘ah him that motherfucker what a tool’, like maybe ‘ah him i love his themes/style/atmosphere i will check it out’.

These Age of Heroes people are never going to own up to lying, failing to credit where credit is due, or using AI to steal other people’s work. However it’s pretty uncool behavior in this small community, it is obvious behavior in this small community, it is rude, and it is shady.

Reminder to all of this very poor etiquette in our small community, lest it get buried under someone defending this poor, poor Chaucer fellow.

Peeve, the (bad) public chat comedian. Everything is a fumbled attempt at a joke and a convo killer. We are nothing but a captive audience to them, and they refuse to engage with players in any way that doesn’t center around them.

If you’re gonna’ go up there with a mic at least be funny, aaaaa.

MANNERS, PPL! ETIQUETTE! AAAAA

There are various perspectives and experiences here and I think it’s swinging from big ol’ lawless crunchy traditional games where poor sportsmanship may be rampant, to ares games where by default you’re under 3 layers of thicc limits.

I got all spun up and ready to fite against bank limits and cooldowns but it looks like almost everyone agrees that it’s a silly system. Welp.

A few years ago I was so desperate to run an ares CoD game for my pals that I went the google sheets route. I think I had it so they’d be locked or versioned or something.

Then coder pal went ahead and coded an entire CoD plugin so I ended up pivoting away from this idea. It would’ve been a lot of work managing everything like this, but hey, it’s possible! The sheets were styled from some free resources, then altered so that they handled the formulas.

@helvetica said in When is the last time you played?:

performance critiques

WHAT

Has anyone seen a system that effectively incentivizes players to run things for other players?

I ask because my pals have mused on these kinds of systems but my only perspective is like… I run scenes because I want to run them. Extra XP or perks don’t really factor in for me.

Maybe a better question… have incentives encouraged you to run scenes when you normally wouldn’t?

@bear_necessities said in When is the last time you played?:

everyone just keeps waiting on someone else to Do Something, and when everyone is waiting around, no one does anything, and the staff can’t keep up with constant demands to Do Stuff so they get burned out and yeah.

This is why I really admire both the tabletop GMs and mush GMs that are able to carry a story to completion. Like, goddamn, you guys are so powerful.

I think smaller, punchier games benefit from having a set lifespan. Think of the lifespan of all those Discord RP groups out there. So many unfinished threads…

Twice now I’ve seen someone ragequit on ares via… attempting to blank their profile. Like delete all photos and then try to leave the fields empty. Then individually leave channels.

I guess on a web-based platform you can’t really slam the door as easily.

ETA: I’ve also heard stories of folk going in to edit other peoples’ wiki pages to scrub their character OUT. Which reminds me of another story about a banned person Old Transformers Game threatening to send some kind of DMCA over their own uploads.