Topics created by Ghost

@Ghost I hope it's good. Mel Brook's humor is such that I think a lot of his old stuff couldn't be made today.

@Ghost said in Telnet Safety:

NEVER give your address, phone, banking, fullname, general location, business information, etc over pages/chat in MU even if you trust the person because THE DANGER ISNT YOUR FRIEND, BUT THE SERVICE/PROTOCOL YOU ARE USING.

Fixed that for you.

You nerd.

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

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

I don't think this practice is as widespread as you assert it is. (Though doubtless it does exist.)

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

Its really being discussed as though it is black and white. It isn't always. But I understand that there are certain people who are just fundamentally against AI and aren't going to want to give any quarter.

Just using AI to substitute for writing isn't a great way to go about things at all. But if you use it as a tool, it can be great. Not everyone's writing is good. Some people are awful and I imagine there has been far more mocking of people's crappy writing than there has been of their use of AI. So if someone's writing can be enhanced and improved by AI, I am all for that. I am not at all opposed to great writing, and I honestly don't care if it comes from an AI or a person.

I don't have the time or inclination to really think the thought through, but playing video games is a valid form of entertainment wherein you don't have to interact with a human. Someone programed the video game. Just like someone programmed the AI.

If someone uses AI to tell good stories on a text game, then to me, it doesn't matter much at all. But that generally involves having to write text themselves then have the AI improve it. If they are just copy pasting AI responses, then it probably won't be good writing. Parts of it might be. But other parts will either not make sense, not fit the story, or be super repetitive, which is common.

At the end of the day, if the writing in the story is good, I don't care what tools were used, wholly or otherwise. I am entertained.

I get that not everyone holds the same opinion, but I think its hilarious that people would turn away good RP regardless of where it comes from when people have been complaining both about not being able to get good RP for decades while also having to deal with fickle/irrational/psychotic/etc personalities in the hobby.

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

If it's so good, or better than human RP, or indistinguishable, why not go RP with AI?

If it were, people would. I know I would. If I could avoid some of the headaches of dealing with certain individuals and still have good RP, that would be absolutely lovely.

But it isn't.

Not on its own. Its still a tool that a person has to use to make it truly effective. And even doing that is still a skill that comes from a person.

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

@Ghost said in Stranger Danger?:

Do you have issues finding/maintaining RP with players once they find out you're not open to IC-relationship stuff? That was always kind of my issue: I was able to find a lot of available RP, but people would suddenly have "electrical storm" or "rl emergency" or "sorry gotta go" when it was established I wasn't into TS/relationship RP with the person.

I don't have this issue either. Frankly, I prefer RPing with folks who take a similar position. I'm not against romance or sexual RP, but I RP from work a lot, and that's not the sort of RP I'd like when I'm trying to negotiate a seven-figure deal by email.

Another idea I had or came across a while ago was to complilate a collage that encompasses the look and vibe of the character. So their face is ultimately less important to their vibe and presentation, right?

It's fun to do this anyway to get into the character design mindset.

@Devrex yeah you can filter by game system and by time, so I have to set my desired times and do the systems I want one by one to make sure I'm not getting a hundred dnd games. No offense to people who love dnd but I'm now in my early 40s and I don't know how many more "_________ cleric" or "_______ rogue" I have left in me.

I think 15-20 is fine. I rationalize this by saying "I would be willing to buy dinner for my GM" so I set the bar at how much I'd be willing to pay for dinner.

@reimesu

The Darth Jar-Jar theory is one of my personal favorites.

This one is from TTRPG; now that I've read the whole acronym and caught up with the rest of the class, you know.

Content warning: Drug Use.

***The Story***

click to show

The GM had placed us in a situation where our almost-epic D&D characters ended up Somewhere Else, where we all thought we were just college students. So suddenly, my fighter is just a kid on a sports scholarship. But there were a few secrets and things to find on campus that could give you special abilities.

Someone is summoning some Lovecraftian horror on campus. We find the summoning. This giant tentacle thing is now rising up in the woods behind campus. We have like. 5 hit points.

Enter the Druggie. She had found one of those secrets. It seemed super lame. She could jump. Really high.

And she'd been charged with finding a few "supplies" for the druggie party later.

So she turns to the GM and says, "Welp. I have ecstasy and Everclear here in my inventory."

GM blinks slowly. "Uh, yes, you do."

"Great. So I mix the ecstasy in the Everclear, shake up the bottle, jump up, and throw the resulting mess into the creature's mouth."

The look on the GM's face was priceless.

Once he'd recovered, the thing loses its mind, wrecks its own summoning circle in its drug-fueled haze, and returns to whatever reality it was trying to emerge from.

@ZombieGenesis Same. There's something very relaxing about the game while also having good puzzles and exploration. In the last few years I've really taken a shine to "lower stress" games like the Lego games or games with a "story" difficulty. I probably needed more relaxing games after being the "Soulsborne" gamer that I am.

Importing your WizardingWorld stuff was neat. Turns out I'm a Gryffindor. Huzzah

Forcing "purity" (interesting term for the topic, isn't it?) in an RPG is a slippery slope.

Sure, Genre-wise you don't want Luke Skywalker using 2022 tiktok meme examples in RP (he's supposed to be from a galaxy far away in a long time ago), but there's a pretty big line between "Creative preference" and "tyrannical GM nonsense". In the case of BofD and these two mentioned in the topic, their angle is that they view themselves to be an authority on the setting and they're literally inviting people to play content they view themselves to be owners of. So I don't get why people even bother to play that game, because ultimately it comes down to playing "house" with a couple of kids in their backyard and they'll make you leave if you're "not doing it right".

Why bother trying to be creative or create ANYTHING in an environment with someone who will tell everyone what their characters are, what they think, what they would or wouldn't do, etc?

These people are all "No" and not "Yes, and". They're not even "maybe, so" or "No, but". At the risk of sounding snide, they're literally using someone else's literary work and reputation to build themselves as an authority on the content and gatekeeping the shit out of it...and one of their preferred gates to keep is that BIPOC aren't in the ruling caste, make racist jokes, and consider black characters in the setting to be a matter of "woke cancel culture".

So, constructively, this should all be a lesson on do's and don'ts when it comes to understanding a few key things.

if you don't want people to try to create their own things and having a stake in it, you should be solo-writing it and not running it as an RPG where you falsely promote the concept of logging in to have agency over...well...anything. Yes, it's true that players/fans blur the concept behind a character's skin color as being indicative of support for ACTUAL people with that skin color. Is it a minefield? Yes. Is it 100% about the content? No. It's somewhat shades of politics, social issues, etc blurring it's way into content. Still, it's best to understand this and take at least a "maybe, but" approach.

You could create a setting where 1000 all-white families boarded a spaceship and colonized a planet, and after 200 years there are 10,000 people who have ONLY mated with people on that initial all-white spaceship, and people will STILL be like "...can I play a black character?" and your answer should always, ALWAYS be to question why the fuck you decided creatively that everyone in that ship was white to begin with. What's up with that?

@Ghost said in The Great PC Death Dilemma:

Without the "great equalizer" of PC death, player disenfranchisement grows as players will never be able to compete with older characters.

This isn't actually a problem unless plot-runners allow it to be.

A table-top GM may need to find ways to prevent the barbarian from bashing in every locked door before the rogue can have a go at it, and that same GM is doing a poor job of it if it's all straightforward combat all the time and the wizard has naught to do but run away.

And y'know, if it's difficult to come up with in-story complications to achieve this, you do have the option of putting 'This event/plotline is for PCs with n XP or less' on the announcement. I can't possibly count the number of times I've been told some plot that my PC would notice and care about and reasonably be involved in is simply not for me because of 'sphere' distinctions, leaving me to come up with the reason he didn't act. This is fine. I could do the same in keeping my nose out of stuff meant for lower or higher power-levels.

@Ghost I played that a few years ago. It was pretty good.

Changing the World Takes Time, Gentle Readers
by Judith Martin, Nicholas Ivor Martin and Jacobina Martin
Miss Manners | August 4th, 2022

GENTLE READERS: There is a disturbing trend in Miss Manners' correspondence that she wishes to address, lest Gentle Readers give up hope of a more polite future. It concerns letters that begin:

-- "When did it become OK to ...?"

-- "Am I just being hopelessly old-fashioned or ...?"

-- "Am I being too sensitive when ...?"

What follows is an example of something that was never OK. Miss Manners' field is external behavior, not internal squirming, but her concern is the implication that the victim has, or should have, given up hope of improving society.

A fourth type of letter underscores the point: It seeks a polite response to a slight, real or imagined, that the Gentle Reader already answered with a taunting rejoinder, a rude gesture or worse.

Miss Manners does, on occasion, supply responses which, though faultlessly polite, cause an offender to explode in a burst of mortification and apology. But she more often counsels more subtle responses, which, even had the reader known them when the event occurred, would not have required a fire extinguisher.

This is because the goal is not to strike someone who struck you first -- the goal is not to get hit in the first place.

This should be apparent, as even Miss Manners' most caustic advice is too late to touch a driver who has long since sped away, a line-cutter who is off offending new people out of reach of the Gentle Reader, or everyone else who has long forgotten what happened at that date, luncheon, meeting or class reunion.

It takes time to improve the world -- or even, truth be known, one's friends and relations. This is not because there are no solutions to rude behavior or because one must either accept rudeness or be rude oneself. Nor is it because the solutions proposed do not work.

True, Miss Manners' approach does not always provide the instant gratification of smacking our fellow citizens under the guise of good manners. She realizes this runs counter to a world that is impatient when the package just ordered is not already at the door. What she advises used to be known as solving the problem, an activity that Miss Manners accepts is old-fashioned, even if it is the only one that ever worked.

And just because we do not see the offenders shrivel up in front of us does not mean we have not succeeded. Who knows but that, having been shown a better way, they have not spent a sleepless night repenting?

I feel this.

Once upon a time on a game far, far, away... I had a RPing partner on a MU*. They were giving off all the indications of something being off about their patterns. They were partying harder, they were depressed, they were angry, etc. We would touch on it. I wasn't sure what to do for the longest time for many of the reasons already listed here. Then I just one day went -- Hey, are you really okay? Seriously? -- Then I went through and talked about medication and how I don't view it as something that had to be hidden. I shared a bit of my own personal story and that person ended up seeking help.

Now, it is not your JOB to do this. Please understand that. Not everyone is the same. -- My thought on it (which is personal) is that if someone is put upon my heart, then I should reach out. I would rather lose a friend with a show of concern then stay silent. HOWEVER that is just my thoughts and your choices are valid how you end up handling it.

I'm sorry that you are in the situation though.

From my perspective as a long-time lurker and very occasional poster...

This has all appeared extremely silly, ngl. That might seem dismissive to some of the people who were involved in the very heat of it, but I don't really intend it to be. Overall, the optics from a largely outside observer on all of this haven't really been great, but I feel like that starts to tread into water that's not terribly relevant for the original point of this thread, so I'll attempt to stay on topic.

First off, if you genuinely want to make MSB a positivity-focused environment, you have to understand that you're going to be fighting an uphill battle. The reputation that MSB inherited from WORA and further refined with the Hogpit isn't one that goes hand in hand with 'calm and measured discourse.' You're undoubtedly going to have a lot of people who will try to continue to foster the more hostile environment the place has been known to be for a while. It feels a bit like an Applebee's just bought out a biker bar, so expect the bikers to keep showing up for a while, either in protest or ignorance. Honestly, if I hadn't been watching what's been going on, if someone told me that MSB fractured and a new place opened called Brand MU Day, I definitely wouldn't be putting money on MSB being the one all about positive discourse from here on out.

Anyway, that's just one of the two main hurdles I see going forward. The other is that... like... You're humans, too. You are not immune to tribalism and cliques anymore than the Brand MU Day people are. Be wary of the urge to label any criticism or opinion that you dislike as being hateful or insulting. This is the internet, disagreements are going to happen and they will get heated. Think hard about where you want to draw the line and make sure you make it clear where that line is.

Mind, none of this is to say I've seen evidence of any of this so far. It's just a general warning as someone who has seen and sighed his way through repeated fractures and merges as a comic game fan. Generally speaking, I'm all for a positive environment for discourse. Once upon a time I would have thought it was impossible on the internet, but over the years I've seen a few examples of it (mostly) working so... I'm rooting for you guys, but I wouldn't say I'm totally convinced of the viability of this experiment yet.