Best posts made by Misadventure

Interesting correctos.

@Thenomain said in CofD and Professional Training:
Life is pain, Princess; anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something.

I don't want to have to police someone with a proven track record of trouble.

Goals of design are nice.

Previously demonstrated means to meet those goals, or ideas on how to do so, and examples are better.

:nods.

And the complete failure to deal with multiple opponents.

If you are planning on a cumulative cost to defenses, do note the typical have a bunch of less powerful attack use up defensive actions or inflict a cumulative penalty to defense of next rounds actions as a set up a big sucker punch.

Sounds okay until the day you realize your group of supposed to be mostly harmless kobolds or slow zombies just destroyed the defenses of the PC right before the big charged baddie attack arrives and vaporizes them.

My "best" answer to that so far works in some games but not others. I say that if your average defense would counter an attack, then it is reflexive. If you need more than that, then you can start using up actions or gaining a cumulative penalty while making a roll.

This was the issue in Buffy games. Buffy couldn't begin to stand up to the kinds of numbers she did in the show, and everyone else was in worse shape.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

... But it is unlikely to be Eurus ...

Aww maaaan. The dunes, the duuuunes.

Understandable though.

A minor epiphany of phrasing occured to me a few weeks ago.

Play is play. Role play is a type of play. TS is a type of role play. Done.

Note that Game Play is not Role Play. Therefore, Role Playing Games are designed as having crossed purposes. MU*s tend to treat role play as sacrosanct, so the game play cannot intrude on the role play. People won't play to social stats/dice rolls, nor to generalized mind control, but they allow complete mind dominance since you don't role play through that.

I plan on pages in a MU* wiki that lay out behavior expectations, and what is supported and what is not.. I have my own stuff for that, and would include several things from various threads here.

Demonstrate. Model the behavior for others. Accept that no one is a paragon.

I have been told that at one time (at least European) people identified more by Religion and culture than physical traits.

The Culture in Iain Banks books encompass many species and belief systems, but all under what their AI network guides think is effective or valuable. I believe they are presented as the "good culture".

#party goblin

@rightmeow I can take a stab at #1. This is just based on my experiences online with various communities etc, I have no inside track on info here.

TL;DR Forum threads are too chaotic and volatile to work with easily.

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Threads are an okay way to discuss something specific. They tend to fray into a lot of different directions, some focusing on minutia of some aspect, others on interpretations, relating other events, then arguing with each other, making quick comments or jokes, etc.

Then your original content creators intermittently reply where they can, both answering questions, and trying to stop or set aside certain tangents.

Timeliness, variable availability, etc all make for what you see here, really meandering conversations.

That's all fine when people are really just chatting, or brainstorming.

When you have something you are working on, or considering changing significantly, those threads aren't directly helpful. Imagine you are considering a character arc change in a series and fans are saying what they'd like the unchanged character to experience. It may be great ideas, but it's going to be scattered across pages and pages over a long time, and a lot of it may not be relevant if you DO make the change.

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DMs would hopefully be succinct, present an idea clearly, potentially use information that the sender didn't want public, and like posts also have a name attached so if needed you can ask for clarification, ask if a change meets their need specific etc. Like a +job thread on a game, if you're familiar with that format.

Ideally, after both internal (here being among admins) discussions, and those DM discussions, either a decision would be reached, posted and be done, or potential new content (here expectations, rules, whatever) would be posted for comment and either public discussion, or another round of DMs, or a mix.

TL;DR Forum threads are too chaotic and volatile to work with easily.

Would something like the +job system be a good/great/terrible tool for async RP?

The systems I have used have several benefits: invite based participation, on game resource, can (usually) send +dice rolls to it if desired, a player can see a list of their scenes, date and time of activity.

It lacks privacy from staff, although maybe it could be configured so that only one staffer has access. It also could take up a lot of room unless scenes were eventually removed, either logged or just deleted.

I'd suggest that having death in the stakes should require a social contract of make it interesting, or don't do it.

It may not be "realistic", but as these games are never a simulation, verisimilitude is the best you can aim for. As in, it feels right for the genre. Players characters are the cylinders that the story engine fires on, having someone taking those out is costly, and should be done in a way to mitigate that cost, or even transform it into a gain.

As a ST/GM/plot runner etc, if you had to choose, would you say you have some requirements for success in mind to progress the action of scene, or would you say the scene setting etc is more to give the players a chance to show their characters in the situation. This can be about what you thought or designed the scene direction to be, or wherever the players are going in an unstructured scene or because they are a herd of cats?

Do you see it as likely being the same as a player in a scene?

@devrex That falls under whatever direction the players are going in.

To use your example, I might ask you would set a difficulty or expertise level for success in a given direction, and if the players don't match it, the situation goes in another direction, perhaps a really bad one? In your mind, is it possible they aren't well-prepared, or just not up to a given route they choose?

Another way to look at the question is are you setting up tasks to resolve, whatever they are, or are you offering some prompts for them to enjoy RPing about?

@hobos I would say that Played Bys seem to refer to real people portraying the character, like a show or film credit.

Original artwork, and even artwork for characters who are mainly portrayed as art (comics, manga, anime, video games, animation, artwork in books) doesn't have a real person to portray the character.

Text based RP is certainly a long way away from deepfakes.

Depicting crimes in text is not illegal in the US as far as I know, unless it's a serious how to where specific information like actual models of security systems, software details etc are included. Even then - it's not illegal to point out a security weakness in known systems.

I'm mainly curious as to why one real world attribute matters, when another doesn't seem to. But again, nothing's going to change. If I were to run a MU* and decide I didn't want PBs, I would just make that policy and if asked why answer "because that's how I want it."

Just a rando occurrence - was reading an author's blog and they had links to their own MidJourney created character images. They seem familiar to me, but I am exposed to a lot of AI character art in passing.

https://rddsmith.com/character-images/

I have many vague reasons to share this: they sorta remind me of real life actors, the images still look like paintings to me, serendipity, etc.

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.

@Macha Probably.

I wonder what the world (would) think of mixing real life people via AI. Is it the same as mixing in real life artwork, which I personally see as theft (mathematical alterations of input), or are peoples ' actual appearance feel different for some reason?

Not something I'd care to discuss here though.

I will say it is too much to ask that players alone or even collectively pay a dollar a day to subscribe to MidJournney just to make an image for a MU*.