I'd like to try to articulate something that has been on my mind for a while regarding how we treat female characters in RP games.

When we meet a new RP partner, we are lowkey looking for ways to judge that RPer and work out if they are worth hanging around. Are they an OK writer? Are they interested in the same kind of RP that you are? What about their character's design? Does their character have some kind of motivation that makes sense? Does their personality make them interesting? And if their character is female... are they too pretty?

I can't be the only person who has noticed that having a pretty character counts for negative points. We as a hobby... kind of hate women who want to be pretty. I can't count the number of times that a new character has walked into the scene and one of my friends has OOCly referred to that character as a whore because she is described as being willowy and slender with cerulean eyes and perfect lips or whatever. I can't deny that I've felt this same sort of knee-jerk reaction.

People take you a lot less seriously when you are playing a beautiful character. You're assumed (in a very derogatory manner) to be a vapid sex character. A larger proportion of people just don't bother to interact with you, I suspect because they aren't interested in cybersex and assume that's the only kind of RP that you have to offer.

I've played with some pretty fucked up communities. I once played a game where the admins overnight decided to retcon the majority of female roles to be obese and/or elderly. The attitude was very much that if you then didn't want to play them anymore, that just proves how shallow and vapid you are. It couldn't be because you were irked by the obvious targeted mocking. My characters were murdered a lot on this game. I left as soon as I figured out that I wasn't doing something wrong to deserve this. I was just playing attractive or young female characters in an openly misogynistic community.

Here's the thing though.

From birth, women are brutally indoctrinated to tie in our own self-worth with our physical attractiveness. We are given dolls as childhood toys. Our cartoons feature physically perfect role models who are mainly preoccupied with their own appearance. Our parents, grandparents, uncles and aunties tell us to alter our behaviour, appearance and weight based purely on whether it's what "boys like". Because if you're not beautiful, you're worthless. Some of us manage to decouple attractiveness from our self-worth and find fulfilment in other things. Others will struggle with it for a lifetime.

With all this in mind, is it really surprising to anyone that many women have RP power fantasies that involve being pretty? Why do we have so much disrespect for the stereotypically feminine desire to be pretty, while respecting more stereotypically masculine power fantasies, such as being capable combatants or owning ridiculous and cool weaponry? I don't think that's fair at all.

I think it's time to recognise that playing Igorette the hunchback doesn't make you automatically more serious and intelligent than playing Isabella the princess. I'm here to defend people's right to play pretty characters without having nasty and misogynistic assumptions made about them.

To decriminalise pretty.

Had a new starter at the office today and I've been excited because we need someone else around who actually knows how to code.

New starter arrives at 9 and my boss has done NO prep. She has no desk, no PC, and no login details so I can't even give her a loaner.

And of course it falls to the women of the office to get this shit arranged and cover for his laziness. Preparing ahead of time is not that fucking hard, but he doesn't apply an iota of effort into doing organisational work (i.e. HIS JOB).

I am tired of picking up the slack and having my time getting eaten up by busywork. I'm a qualified professional, not your goddamn maid / receptionist. Setting up the conference room and buying the milk isn't exactly something I can put in my portfolio to angle for promotion, but my male co-workers are free to hog all the glamor work that will progress their career. And that's if they're not blatantly taking credit for my shit.

Fuck the boys club.

/Rant

I was bitching about The Boys Club about twenty pages back so I feel I owe an update for all the people who listened to me whine

I ended up quitting and got a better job. Turns out I was being underpaid for my skillset! And I'm not gonna be buying anyone's milk, because I'm working remotely!

Having only vaguely skimmed this thread (sorry) here's my worthless 2 cents.

Good antagonism both requires a high-quality roleplayer and a high level of personal commitment to making it work. The more I play MUDs the more convinced I am that players are like water, they usually take the path of least resistance. If you want them to act in specific ways you need the mechanically incentivise that behavior and dam up shortcuts that you don't want them to use. If you can't design a system that incentivise cooperative antagonistic play, high-quality antagonists will go somewhere else.

I recall a game where players holding high positions of authority were thematically obligated to crush antags into a fine red paste ASAP. Anyone who went easy on an antag to promote story faced backlash and potential removal. So people stopped being bad. GMs now wonder why everyone sits around hugging each other and nobody wants to start conflict. But, I mean, what did you expect?

I'm not saying it's easy or simple, but facilitating antagonism is definitely the responsibility of the game implementor (unless the game has like 3 people in which case none of this applies).

For me, whether big scenes are too much depends on the game I'm playing. I used to think they were horrible, but when I hopped into another game I realised they're great. It came down to game design and culture.

Game #1 was a game where everyone typed slower and adhered strictly to turn order. Every single emote had a response to everyone else in the scene, it was chaotic and nonsensical. Nothing ever got done.

Game #2 automatically forced players to split into groups when the scene got too large. There was no cultural pressure to follow turn order, people just cut in with quips whenever it felt appropriate. Emotes usually focus on one thing instead of trying to address every little thing going on. Scenes moved fast, stuff happened, actual stuff other than hi/bye.

It took some watching and learning, but adjusting my playstyle to not be so rigid helped immensely.

I know when I lose a character, what I want is to feel seen. To know that others noticed my character there and noticed stories that they went through. So it can help to get together with friends and acquaintances and just reminisce about shit your characters did together.

I have had a dead character have a wake/funeral organised, and while I didn't attend or even really know about it at the time, it was nice to know that somebody noticed enough to do that. Of course it's awkward to ask anyone else to mourn your character so maybe not the best of advice in this situation. But if one of your friends is reading, consider doing it!

We live in a personal privacy hellscape. Nothing is above being scraped and sold. Very depressing.

Brilliant jerks are the fucking worst. It's like they're completely unaware that their personal set of skills isn't the yardstick of competence for every human being alive. Or that everyone has a different lived experience and set of skills that the Jerk doesn't have - we just don't rub it in their face.

Also 9 times out of 10 when the Jerk is jerking about something, I actually already knew it and the source of confusion was his lacklustre communication skills.

I was once witness to a particularly gnarly incident where an RPer created an entirely separate character and Discord identity to catfish this one guy, marry, and ERP him. And later manipulate him into forgiving her original identity because by the way he fucking -hated- her.

So yeah. I respect stranger danger, especially identities that seem unestablished/dropped in. Because when people have complete anonymity at their fingertips, the only thing holding them back is not being a fucking psycho.

It goes against our desire to connect with each other, but really, don't share anything if you can avoid it. You never know who your new friend really is.

@arkandel said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

The reason I dislike it is because it taints future interactions. How is Bob supposed to build up to the next small tidbit of apocrypha he pries out of Joe and feel legitimate excitement about it when Jane has read the fucking handbook IC and knows everything there is to know complete with its canonical terminology?

Now imagine that instead of doing that, Jane continues to treat it like a secret and admits to keeping things from Bob. Or pretends to be surprised so she doesn't have to admit she was keeping things from Bob. There are a million interesting ways you could have taken this, Jane, God damn it.

bless faraday for having the patience for this

I think the killing blow for text generation apologists is that RP with AIs is already accessible. If it's so good, or better than human RP, or indistinguishable, why not go RP with AI? Why bother using AI as a crutch to interact with human RPers? It's like saying AI is good enough to serve up to other people but not good enough for you. Which is just kinda dishonest. People know the shortfalls of AI, they just want to use it as a shortcut to access the juice they really want (the other player's response).

@Ghost said in A.I. in the Community:

Is there anyone anonymous who uses it under the radar who wants to chime in?

Not exactly but I experimented with RPing with AI dungeon, put quite a bit of work into prompt design and still got bored out of my mind because AI writes like AI. Passive, repetitive, and using a lot of words to say almost nothing at all.

I've also mocked players (and even storytellers) for using it because you can 100% tell, especially with dialogue.

As players in a writing hobby, it's looked down upon to outsource writing to AI because the writing is kind of the point.

AI images are just visual aids produced by people who are primarily writers, not artists.

If we were a community of artists, the use of AI art would be less appropriate.

We live in a personal privacy hellscape. Nothing is above being scraped and sold. Very depressing.

@Ghost said in MU Sads and Glads:

@Juniper The shit part about when people do that, is that it clearly wasn't about quitting.

It's not. In this case, it's clearly about some sort of childish protest in an attempt to punish the gamerunner for decisions. And from the outside it looks so petty and so ridiculous. We can all see right through this behaviour, and it's frankly embarrassing on their behalf. Especially when it becomes apparent how many people are in support of said decision, and are having tons of fun without them.

It is a little uncomfortable when somebody chooses to make a big show about quitting a game but then have trouble following through. They hang around, announce to their friends, give away their stuff, make a few more announcements, then stand outside looking in the windows hoping someone will miss them when everybody has already gone back to playing.

Like, please. I wish they would stop making this so uncomfortable for everybody involved. Just go. We'll be fine. I promise.

What are your tips for generating artificial played-by's for your characters? What kind of tools are you using? And more importantly, has anyone figured out how to get it to listen to the eye colour you want???

I've used Midjourney in the past but the cost is a barrier and it will generate more of an overall "vibe" while ignoring any individual details you include. Also everybody has these luscious supermodel faces with huge lips that is somewhat off-putting.

@Macha AI is a tease. I always feel like I'm 1 edit away from generating the perfect image but never quite get there.

Admitting I didn't read most of the discussion between here and the initial post.

PBs of real people's faces has always come off as a little strange to me and I have always preferred digital art because it doesn't feel like I'm using someone's likeness without consent. AI image generation has been a huge benefit although it still has a lot of kinks to iron out regarding ignoring instructions in favour of stereotypes. And there's ethical considerations with generative content, although it's not like I was ever paying digital artists for their work or making money off RPing so I don't think it matters much.