Posts made by Ghost

@reimesu said in The Case Against Real PBs:

Frankly, the entire argument against PBs isn't an argument against PBs, it's an argument against unethical players who are being manipulative. Which really means that you have to be vigilant about who you play with and what you're willing to get into with people you don't know.

While I don't disagree with you on this point in any way, I just wanted to say that my argument against PBs is a bit of column A and B. I still never truly liked PBs. My argument was also against using PBs.

I remember one time I used a famous rock musician as a PB. A few years later I was at one of their concerts, looking out at the actual dude I used as a likeness for rp, including some TS, and I felt so weird about it that I never wanted to go back. I technically have a distant RL connection to Emma Stone by like 5 degrees (her friend's sister married a former coworker and I guess occasionally comes by for barbecues, etc lol) and I gather that even mentioning that she's been used as a PB in conversation (should a chance run-in occur) would be super uncomfortable.

I have a long history of being around celebrities (some are friends, some are friends of friends) and I've always been the type to try to see and treat them like regular-ass people, and knowing the amount of harassment and unrequested sexualization of the female celebrities I've known (to the point of them having to worry about people waiting for them in lobbies, etc) the idea of it all just grew sour for me over the years. Many of them are well aware that if they google themselves they're gonna see things that make them feel unsafe or uncomfortable, and I imagine PBs might do that.

PBs just made me feel like a weird, creepy dork. (Edit) So I guess you could say that my angle is that out of consideration to treat those people like regular people, it became somewhat of a conscientious stance for me. This explains why (at least for me, paired with the desire to see good writing) I feel so strongly about it.

Edit: Also, jeez @reimesu the shout-out to PHBs took me back a decade or more.

@faraday said in The Case Against Real PBs:

If somebody's going to refuse to roleplay with me because they don't like my PB, good riddance.

Hah. I should have followed this advice a couple of times. After a while I began to recognize people page-investigating me to see if I was "so and so using that PB on a game a few years ago" as a red flag.

It can be hard, though. The energy of someone wanting to RP with you was attracting and sometimes I bypassed a few red flags in favor of not being bored, but the end result in those cases was always pretty bad

@Macha I honestly think Ai should be the future for stuff like ttrpg/mu character images. Spitting this positively?

1. No one can recreate it for another char
2. Even at its most realistic it's still art instead of an actual person's likeness, which avoids other issues
3. If you're good with Ai art engines, the picture itself tells a story of the creativity of the creator, which in a way is advertising rp with you
4. It completely eliminates the "...I refuse to roleplay with Charlie Sheen PBs because of this one experience in 2003" drama, and also protects unwitting players who choose that PB from being related in any way to the 2003 weirdo
5. It blends user creativity and allows for visual thinkers to see what is being presented as a char.

All positive points IMO

@Ganymede Apology accepted. I also came in super hot and my tone was snide.

@Ganymede I'm gonna leave this alone, but next time I'd respect you attacked the idea. I'll keep the rest to myself.

@reimesu okay but do people with admin tags also have to follow forum rules? I'm asking for admin support to keep an eye out for people (me, in this case) in terms of direct attacks and public medical assumptions.

Absolutely toning it down and want to move on, but I feel it is potentially damaging and not okay.

@Misadventure said in The Case Against Real PBs:

PS: @faraday just being reminded that there are people who can't visualize characters from text is enough for me to say if I were the head of a text based RP game I would be okay with PBs.
You'd think I would remember this since I have family and friends who have the same experience.
I'd still put images behind a spoiler tag or similar.

Yeah this actually came up in convo I had lately with someone and I absolutely agree with this point.

There are ND people or others who have hard times turning text to mental imagery, and I think that's 1000% valid. Great points. And given the potentially high population of people this would help, it makes PBs seem much more relevant alltogether.

Does it change my stance about wanting to see good writing and seeing descriptions in prose? No. But the idea has given me something else to consider for sure.

@Ganymede don't mince fuckin words with long paragraphs trying to act like making an insult about your opinion of my ego and stating that I seem unable to accept an addiction as some worldly statement about everyone but it just happens to include me. You're playing around with attacks on a specific person's emotional center as well as playing armchair addiction advice to a specific stranger. You really think that's appropriate and/or responsible?

Now, gross analysis of other people's mental diagnoses may be the tits on that other forum (aka the same place that talked shit about you for months for not following their mutual bargaining directives when ownership changed), but here... it's against the rules. Probably because it could be truly damaging to complete strangers; perhaps even to the point of being dangerous.

For all you know your "necessary" and "probably felt good saying" words could have sent me into a RL spiral! Pedestals are pretty risky things to hang out on.

It doesn't bother me, I just have an allergy to fake shit. Own it. At least when I talk generalities about my feelings on the hobby and community I own my intentions and language. I suspect you felt free enough to break your own forum's rules because you leveraged that you could do it to someone you felt was unpopular enough that no one would call it out.

Regardless, this is incident #25,000 on this forum of someone saying some non-directed, unpopular stuff and it resulted in direct, potentially RL harmful attacks by the so-called "moral high ground" who felt reassured that they could say something mean at a nuisance without having to be responsible for it.

So how bout you leave your critical analysis of me out of these discussions, because trust me I wouldn't dare do the same thing to you. I see no benefit in taking the time to try to make "situational cruelty" look like a Jerry Springer Final Thought.

@Ganymede said in The Case Against Real PBs:

You may feel that tall and above things, but I think that's due to your pedestal of self-righteousness. We've both participated actively in the hobby. And if we liken it to a vice like an addiction, the first step to actual recovery is to admit that you will always be an addict. I think you're just as much of a creepy weirdo as the rest of us, no matter how long you've spent outside of the hobby. The difference between us is that I accept this, but you apparently do not.

Wanna walk back that attack or write a paragraph about how it isn't? I thought better of you than this.

You may think I'm an asshole, but you're also the one who helped pen the policies about direct personal attacks soooooo

@faraday Yeah. I'm on the fence about AiArt/Midjourney. Granted, I don't think people who generate art via Ai qualify as an "artist" (for some reason people have started to think the Earth is flat, so let's not go crazy equating people with search engine skills as Frida Kahlo), and I think it's generally okay for RPGs and character art for RPG games, but the impact it's having on paying artists is wrong. I don't like where it is going.

Yeah...I dunno. I think at the end of the day the worst of the hobby comes down to sex, jealousy, bullying, and complications with mental illness. Obviously, due to sexual harassment I've had to endure on numerous occasions, my hot button has been considering ways to affect the negative behaviors associated with sexual harassment...which everyone benefits from. I believe the "Shang" roleplayer mixing with players like you has created an environment where some players can't help but try to bring Shang with them mingle with people that aren't about graphic sexual roleplay or OOC flirtation.

100% agree that the topic of anything relating to sex or IC relationships is the cause of endless amounts of drama in the community. Snide me says "must be that whole 'it's just roleplay!' mantra". Realistic me says that while I enjoy kicking at that box of "denial spiders" (because let's be fair, it affects outsiders, too and we wish some of these people would just evolve and stop), it's worthless waiting for this behavior to stop (or even asking) because it seems ingrained in a lot of personal RL needs/deficiencies/issues/etc. I've been there. I get it.

So my dislike of how some people utilize PBs as a sexual lure/object slips into that. Unfortunately, with this community, there's no way to resolve this stuff, because the hobby presents itself as an open-to-the-public environment. It's easy to let people in the door on these games, but hard to keep unwanted players out.

<insert BlahBlahGhostsRepeatingFunctionOnGamesSupportingSexualAbuseRoleplayCorrellatedToTheNumberOfPeopleBehavingBadlyAroundSexRoleplay argument>

@Derp said in The Case Against Real PBs:

@Ghost

My dude. You’re a bit out over your skis here. Take a breath, find your chill. Reasonable people can disagree in reasonable ways. Your examples and language do not currently fall within the bounds of “reasonable”, nor in fact “mildly constructive.”

Take it down a few notches.

Cool cool. I read.

@Misadventure said in The Case Against Real PBs:

Glad that was worked out.

Glad what worked out?

@faraday said in The Case Against Real PBs:

ETA - Believe it or not, there are players who don't RP TS. What if a whole game banned it (and hypothetically had a way to enforce it, like no private scenes)? Would that somehow make PBs okay? Not advocating for that, mind you, just a thought experiment.

I don't have an issue with TS, but constructively I think some people pass on players who don't TS; I've actually had players suddenly get electrical storms when I turned down TS. So there could be a pocket of people in there that others who didn't partake in TS weren't exposed to. What I can't understand is how many people I know who have also had similar stories (some 20+ people) and the number of people who claim not to have had incidents like these at all. I guess it might just be sampling

Alas, no, I don't recommend any MU to ban private scenes or TS, because we've seen time and time again that no one plays those games. So scratch that. All I'm saying is that for X reasons my preference is to read or view art of original characters than to see the same 45 actors used in every MU (I want to see creativity)...but also for the reasons (snide or not) in my OP. If I were omnipotent and ran a game my rule would be "No actor/actress/model PBs" and I believe the byproduct would be an environment (not that it would thrive at all even if I did so under an alias) with less of the issues I described, or at the very least a more interesting and original environment.

Subsequently, as a TTRPG GM I've been promoting use of original or Ai art, and it's pretty regular that I don't allow PCs from other games or templated characters (at least in games that don't have novice players). I think the overall experience is better for everyone when new things are created. Ownership of something organically grown so-to-speak, I feel, benefits everyone.

@Devrex said in The Case Against Real PBs:

include making everyone who has ever used a PB feel like garbage

Let's be honest, here.

None of the same boring people with the same boring, predictive cycles "felt like garbage" about this. None of the same boring people giving each other high fives about cleverly worded insults really give a fuck. Why are you shocked at this point? Is it fun trying to find new ways to say directly disrespectful things to me while I don't?

Commit to discussing the topic without making it about me and fuck off. I started the topic. I got biases. I'm not gonna attack people who aren't attacking me. It's how conversation works and I'm open to it.

@ZombieGenesis said in The Case Against Real PBs:

Did you tell them you were doing it? No? Did it affect their lives in any way that you were doing it?

Question.

Would it affect your life at all if someone you didn't know admitted to masturbating to pictures of you? What if they told you not only did they do kink-stuff using your likeness, but simulated a "relationship" with another person who was also gratified by your image?

An old player I used to MU with once told me (after being apart for years) that they made our FireflyMush characters into a sims game that had been running for years using sex mods, and went into detail about how many kids they had, etc. I can tell you honestly that someone emulating ME emulating a celebrity for years with all kinds of sex shit on their ooc end was really uncomfortable. I also clammed up all the time when I did TS and got a page about how they fapped to it.

In fact, I'd say over 70% of the interpersonal bullshit I ever got into in this hobby was always related to either me trying to flee for my life from a creepy player or other gross OOC boundary violations, so...I'm inclined to believe my own experiences, trust me.

I feel we are all logical and reasonable enough to agree that it's generally not okay to simulate that level of intense stuff using another person's likeness as a puppet, and that "if the victim didnt know it's okay" is rarely a valid argument involving sexual anything.

Maybe it's just me and I've been away from this shit long enough to step back from a 10,000 foot level and analyze how fucking weird this community can be. I think there are delusions and addictions at play and a lot of work goes into defending the outlet, especially when RL isn't cutting it. I've been there. I get it. There are just these pockets of weirdness and whenever myself or anyone else points them out there's a lot of "playing defense" around those topics. Very bizarre, and I'm grateful I don't draw from the hobby for a social outlet, anymore outside of occasional forum stuff.

@ZombieGenesis said in The Case Against Real PBs:

@Ghost said in The Case Against Real PBs:

"ridiculous argument about Sporty Spice"

This was posted as I was writing my post. I'll counter a ridiculous argument with another one, did you ask for consent from all the people you jerked off to in high school? Did you tell them you were doing it? No? Did it affect their lives in any way that you were doing it?

In fact, I did.

But the Sporty Spice argument stands. In fact, your straw man about whether or not I got consent forms from some bikini model applies! No, I wouldn't tell said model or whatever I tugged to when I was a kid that I did so because it's creepy, somewhat violating, and uncomfortable.

Whether or not I did X when I was a kid has no bearing on whether or not the argument I have presented makes it okay now.

@ZombieGenesis said in The Case Against Real PBs:

"Ghost thinks people who use PBs are creepy weirdos, and if you disagree with that, then you must be one."

To be fair, Ghost thinks a lot of people he's met in the hobby are creepy weirdos, as referenced by a lot of creepy behavior. My argument here is that there is something creepy actually happening that I don't think people point out enough.

Take it or leave it or block me if you require, I'm just sharing my viewpoint and if people don't agree that's fine, too.

As for the "if you don't agree..." thing, I swear I've heard and seen this kind of talk so much that really I think "defending the hobby" and "dodging talking about it" can be one in the same, but I would be fucking amazed if someone could prove to me they'd never seen this behavior; it's that common.

@Ganymede said in The Case Against Real PBs:

There's no harm in using a picture in public domain

Alright, let's test this.

Let's say you use Sporty Spice (the best spice btw) as a PB and roleplay out an artful ts scene that just happens to include both your RL kinks and the kinks of the partner. This may or may not involve "chair gratification" by yourself or the other, which may or may not be admitted to.

Now, you're at dinner and someone brings a friend. It's Sporty Spice herself.

DO YOU TELL SPORTY SPICE THAT YOU HAVE USED HER LIKENESS AND IMAGE IN LINE WITH A SEXUALIZED SLASH-FIC SCENE WITH ANOTHER PLAYER WHO HAS A RL KINK FOR HER?

"Oh hey so you'll get a laugh out of this. I roleplay in an online text based game where my character uses an image of you as their likeness. The sex scenes are super hot and she's currently in an in-character relationship with someone pictured as James Franco."

it's a simply yes/no question and if the answer is no, I'm pretty sure that line of thinking will end in "...because it would embarrass me and come across as creepy."

And it would come across as creepy because it's apparently not favorable in the public eye to use someone else as a gratification tool without their consent.

@ZombieGenesis said in The Case Against Real PBs:

Here's the thing about someone's chosen PB, it really only matters to them.

Respectfully, I think I will have to disagree with you, here.

I would say the # of times someone sent me 2 pictures linked in a page and asked who I'd rather fuck is pretty high, as is the number of times someone's told me "I had a bad experience with a Chris Pratt so won't RP with someone with that PB (or "only crazy girls and dudes pick Milla" has been said to me more than once). I've also had instances where people specifically thought to "collect" my PC by picking PBs they think might be in my wheelhouse. I've been asked on numerous occasions to make characters with very specific PBs based on their kinks (Gerard Butler, Cilian Murphy, etc)

Just being honest, here. The hobby has a lot of platitudes about "say this but don't say that" (Storytelling not writing despite people being judged on their ability to write, ts vs ooc cybersex, etc), and I think that "the only people who care about the PB is the player" is one of them. There is absolutely an element of trying to use PBs as lures for TS and romantic roleplay, and anyone saying otherwise is either out of bias or protecting the argument.

There's a whole iceberg of stuff that is weird, and I just happen to think PBs are one of them.

@Ganymede said in The Case Against Real PBs:

so this really reads to me like an attempt to shame.

Nah, I mean I obviously have my own biases and opinions. I don't think anyone should be shamed for TSing. I just think the people who call it "writing" and then repeat that mantra despite the ooc attachments, jealousy, etc should be shamed. It's not writing for them.

But those kinds of people using PBs as cybersex sock puppets ARE technically facilitating a sexualized experience with said person's likeness.