Posts made by faraday

The whole concept of "NPC" is kind of inherently broken when it comes to MUs.

Most know the original definition from TTRPGs, where it referred to characters controlled by the GM. This encompassed everyone who was a part of the world who was not played by one of the other players. Some were important to the plot; some weren't.

You can extend this definition to computer RPGs by substituting AI/computer instead of the GM. Anyone not controlled by a player is a NPC.

The term gets real murky real fast when it comes to MUSHes, because a) there is no single GM, b) regular players can control NPCs in equal measure to staff in many cases, and c) those who GM can also play with their own characters.

We're not going to find a consistent expectation of "what is a NPC" because the term just doesn't quite fit our environment.

@icanbeyourmuse said in GMs and Players:

@faraday Isn't a character, PC or NPC, suppose to have depth when it is 'named'? Why shouldn't they have IC bias and do something extra for a character they have some sort of relationship? Even if the character is an NPC King.

Which is why I said it wasn't inherently unethical. Nevertheless, I think that a majority of players would infer a degree of OOC connection from a romantic NPC-PC relationship that they would not from your usual political gamesmanship.

Some games attempt to avoid this in a number of ways, from maintaining top-tier staff-run NPCs as aloof guest stars to having them run collectively by staff for greater impartiality. Others don't, and just lean into the idea that staff NPCs are really more like quasi PCs. As long as you're transparent about what you're doing, players can vote with their feet about what's intolerable to them.

@kanye-qwest said in GMs and Players:

I think there's a few things being discussed here? Having a sexual or romantic rp relationship with a character doesn't necessarily mean frequent or hours of TS.

Yeah it also seems like we're not making any distinction between types of NPCs or motivation of the parties involved.

A staffer pressuring a player for TS? Abusive no matter whether they're doing it with a PC or NPC.

A staffer making up a NPC at a player's behest to portray their IC significant other? Who cares?

A staffer romancing another PC with the Staff-Run NPC King? That's a little unusual, and certainly has potential for bias (i.e. if the king does special favors for the PC, it gets a bit sus), but I don't think it's inherently unethical. Just tread carefully.

@silverfox The problem with that is that the social end is historically and rationally supposed to come AFTER the medical end. A disease doesn't cease to meet the scientific criteria for being a pandemic via wishful thinking. And when people try to pretend it does, it just leads to more unnecessary death (currently still topping 1k people PER DAY in the US alone - affecting certain groups disproportionately) AND prolongs the actual pandemic (by generating new and potentially deadlier variants).

It does feel, as @JinShei said, like living in the twilight zone.

@devrex Honestly there may be some other issues since the page chat doesn't paginate or archive or anything. So if you have somebody you've been chatting with for 2 years it might just choke. I can look into that at some point, but it really wasn't designed to be stored indefinitely since most players initially freaked about the idea of it being stored at all

@devrex said in GMs and Players:

Verified that the page log history spans interactions back to the first pages exchanged on game.

I applaud all your efforts. Just FYI though that unrestricted page and scene storing can lead to performance issues, which may necessitate upgrading your droplet with more RAM. Deleting unshared scenes defaults to off because on most ares games it seems that most scenes get shared anyway and it won't matter, but that's going to depend on your game culture.

In the decades in this hobby, I have personally known people who:

• Were falsely accused of being somebody they demonstrably were not.
• Were accused of heinous acts that, upon inspection, turned out to be the accuser completely blowing things out of proportion.
• Behaved badly at some point in their MU lives but genuinely turned things around.

And that's not even counting the general grudges and drama that abound.

So yes, I'm going to require a little bit more than just your say-so that Bob is a creeper, or Spider in disguise, or whatever. Does that mean "iron-clad evidence"? Of course not. These are living room rules, not "beyond a reasonable doubt".

This is neither victim-blaming nor abuser-enabling. It's just acknowledging the simple fact that people can and sometimes do make false or mistaken accusations for a variety of reasons.

@bear_necessities said in GMs and Players:

Come on now, you know and I know that this isn't at all what we're saying here.

I'm really confused because that is exactly what I see people saying?

I have repeatedly seen people saying they would ban even if they weren't sure it was a stalker, that it's better to accidentally ban an innocent person than to leave a stalker on the game, that "issue a DNC and if they bother you I'll ban them" is an unacceptable and callous response, and so on.

I'm not saying that's what everyone is saying (or you specifically), but it sure seems like a pretty clear message.

Stalkers are awful. Obviously nobody wants them on their game. The fact that so many shenanigans go unreported is tragic.

Nonetheless there is a wide gulf between "ban immediately with no evidence" and "oh well not my problem". If someone came to me saying they think Bob is their stalker, I would go to great lengths to see what I could do to make them feel more comfortable. DNC, making sure they understand the reporting tools, promising to keep an eye out for IC shenanigans, etc.

What I won't do, though, is just blindly ban based on accusation alone. Short of instances where a legit restraining order or conviction is involved, I can think of no other venue - online or in RL - where "I think Bob is a creeper because he did xyz on some other platform" would be likely to result in them getting kicked out. Unless, as @Roz says, you know and trust the accuser.

@roz said in GMs and Players:

any bad actor can easily avoid putting their efforts into places that can been directly reported on the games that are on Ares. If these are the only methods of evidence that are acceptable, you will be leaving countless openings for bad actors to exploit.

Channels, mails, pages, and scenes can all be reported in Ares, so I think you're pretty covered? If someone is aware of a gap in the reporting defense I'd love to know about it.

@roz said in GMs and Players:

If someone is stalking you, you are absolutely not supposed to make contact with them.

But you can say that, right? "Hey I'm not comfortable contacting them, can you please just tell them to leave me alone?" I wouldn't have a problem doing that on a player's behalf, even though I'm otherwise with @Derp that I'm not likely to ban someone based solely on an unsubstantiated report. I think there's a middle ground where you can express sympathy and concern and take a report like this seriously without jumping automatically to the banhammer over an off-game dispute between two people you don't know.

Violating a DNC request IS a bannable offense on my games, regardless of what else they may or may not have done (on game or off).

@derp said in GMs and Players:

But should that be the baseline? Should we expect that every GM on every game is going to be the personal friend of every player? Or should we establish as a baseline idea that this is just another service, and you all are strangers that have accepted certain terms related to services rendered?

As others have said, I don't think "living room" implies "become besties with everyone". Plenty of people run book clubs, etc. where they invite people to their homes that aren't necessarily personal friends. For me it's about the respect due the staff --because you're in their home -- and the overall atmosphere of community.

You can get a similar vibe from some public gathering venues. My friends run a comic shop. Players can come in to play at their tables, and some are pick-up games where strangers can join too. It may not be their living room, but it's definitely a level of connection and investment that you wouldn't find from the hosts in a convention center.

@derp said in GMs and Players:

Personally, I hate the "living room" theory of GMing. I don't know how it became somehow the standard we reach for.

I'm certainly not saying that your philosophy is wrong, but mine is different.

A MUSH is a community that will exist (with people coming and going of course) for months if not years. It is a creative endeavor that game-runners often pour their heart into--or at the very least a crap-ton of work into There is a ton of collaboration involved, and the players also end up with a lot more effort/investment.

So yeah, it may not be exactly like inviting your besties over for a TTRPG session in your dining room. But for me it feels closer to that than to the convention of stove coil enthusiasts.

@derp said in GMs and Players:

What then? Because I tacitly gave a nod of approval to 'yeah I am not going to explicitly ban you from doing a thing I cannot prevent you from doing anyway' I am now supposed to play the judge of the thing I couldn't stop you from doing had I wanted to?

I mean... you just say no? I don't see the big deal here.

It doesn't matter if Bob was mean to me on Facebook, Discord, MSB, ABC MU*, or whatever. If it's not your game, you have no obligation to discipline Bob for it.

It also doesn't matter WHY Bob was being mean to you off-game. Maybe it was RP about your game; maybe it was a conversation about your game; maybe it had nothing whatsoever to do with your game. It's still not your problem.

Unless of course you WANT it to be. If you feel Bob's off-game behavior crosses some intolerable line for you (hate speech, doxxing, stalking, whatever) and you want to ban him for it, that's your prerogative. But by no means is there any reasonable expectation for you to do so. Any player who demands that of you is just being unreasonable and you can tell them so.

@tinuviel OK so I'm legit trying to understand your different view on canon.

How would you know if it happened on the game itself?

I mean, if Bob and I post a log of space monkeys attacking the town square, it's probably equally stupid whether the RP took place in discord, on the game via pages or TP room, or on the game in the actual town square at 3am when nobody else happened to be online.

You shouldn't be beholden to nonsense regardless of where it originated.

And if it's not nonsense and is actual good story development... why do you care where it originated?

(for example, Bob and I working towards a legit game-related storyline, but we're in different timezones so literally can only RP piecemeal through google docs)

@tinuviel said in GMs and Players:

No it isn't, you simply disagree with it.

So I share a log to the game wiki. Where did it come from? Was it RPed in a grid room? A private room pretending to be the town square? Discord? Google doc? What about vignettes and backscenes?

There is objectively, measurably, no difference in the output AND and no way to verify that it did not originate off-game in part or whole. (I mean, short of spying on all RP and cross-checking against wiki logs, I guess, but that seems insane.)

And that's saying nothing about the game canon established when two players just agree what happened without playing it out, which people do every day.

So yeah... ridiculous.

@tinuviel said in GMs and Players:

But I'm of the view that if it's happening on discord or a forum, or via email, carrier pigeon, smoke signal, or anything that is not on the game then it's not 'canon' and not 'my problem.'

Not your problem (as a game runner), sure. As everyone has said, you're on your own if something happens, just as you would be if you were just chit-chatting with someone off-game.

Not canon though? That's ridiculous. Async and off-grid RP happens. It's happened for as long as there have been MUSHes. If the game doesn't provide a convenient WAY for it to happen in-game, like Ares' scene system does, then it's going to happen off the game.

And so? What difference does it make to canon if Joe and I are exchanging paragraphs at each other via +emit, pages, discord, Google doc, a private wikidot that we both edit, a private MU server we're both on, or carrier pigeon? On BSP we used to draft scenes on livejournal then post them to the wiki when we were done. Whatever tool you're using to throw the words at each other, you're still RPing and it should be given the same weight as any other scene.

Huh. I don't discount your experiences, but I can't help but wonder if they're emblematic of a particular type of game or set of games rather than MUSHing as a whole. Where I play, almost nobody cares in the slightest if you want your character to be pretty. Most of them do too. The characters (both male and female) are almost universally represented by "hot" PBs. So much so that it's almost a cliche in the other direction (the Battlestar full of famous hotties).

@derp said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

And the people who are likely to smash the button on the above as being offensive already have an advantage in that they've been thorougly programmed by Facebook to do just that.

Sure, and that's when sensible content moderation comes in.

Someone smashing "report offensive" on hate speech? That's good.

Someone smashing "report offensive" on covid-19 vaccine info? Ignore them.

Someone smashing "report offensive" on a cute puppy video? Clearly they need to be banned. (j/k)

ETA: I realize this is oversimplified, but at the same time? The people running the platform are responsible for building the kind of platform they want. If someone smashes "report offensive" on LGBTQ+ content or covid-19 information or anything else FB considers legit/valuable? FB has a choice of how to react to that. They could ignore it, they could ban the person for abusing the report feature, they could silence that type of content for that user only, or - radical idea - they could show them MORE of that type of content in the interests of educating them. You get the kind of community you foster.

@derp said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Sounds good right?
Well. Maybe not.

For society, it absolutely is good. Micro-targeting ads and news articles is a horrific practice.

For individuals? Sure it's annoying, but that's what the "report as offensive" button is for.

@derp said in Forum wonk:

I thought the migration was to move from Redis to MongoDB or whatever and stay on NodeBB?

Yes, I was just contrasting it with the effort ("cost") of a potential discourse migration.

Staying on nodebb costs time and/or money to fix the database configuration and anything else that might be wrong.

Migrating to discourse costs time and/or money to move the data over.

The only low-effort, low-cost option is to start fresh, and I don't think anybody really wants that.

@arkandel said in Forum wonk:

redis is the very likely but not 100% root cause.

The current redis configuration is almost certainly a problem, even if it's not the only problem. I think fixing it is a pre-requisite for doing anything else if you're going to stay on nodebb.

From what I saw on the discourse forums, it's easily $500 worth of work to try to migrate the existing database to discourse, if you could even manage it. (There were lots of reports of issues when I looked into it months ago because the forum data paradigms just don't line up completely. Also it's not formally supported.) Maybe you could get someone to do it pro bono, but the order of magnitude of effort is comparable.