Space Lords and Ladies

[Arkandel]

@Packrat said:

Amber was a character on Star Crusade who...

Well actually she was not given unfair advantages over the other County level nobles and was in many ways arguably the weakest. Certainly she was not particularly favoured or disfavoured by staff, non of whom knew who she was from prior games and none of whom were particularly friends after she did turn up.

Remember that nobody had more than a fractional overview of what was happening on that game, people fixated on their issues or opposition without realising their rivals were generally being funked over in eight different ways themselves but dealing (or not) with it without advertising everything.

Some people have alleged she was kind of a bitch but it was apparently a given for people to complain that everyone who was not them or their ally was unfairly favoured and/or evil on that game. I only RPed with her like four or five times but she seemed okay.

She was markedly less prone to histrionics than most players though and was a political rival of Apollonius' character.

I think a staff member did play one of her vassal barons but he was playing a decadent fop who was not exactly a key asset.

So she was a player who did nothing remarkable and was less prone to bad things than others?

Man, MSB's whistle blowing sure is failing us these days.

[Misadventure]

The whistle to blow here may be more about players thinking they have it worse than anyone else, as discussed above.

The folks who tend to post to MSB and WORA are a pessimistic lot.

[Packrat]

Well to be fair, trying to play a political/military leader on Star Crusade was ridiculously frustrating, I tried it after quitting staff and did not stick around more than maybe two months before just leaving out of the frustration of having to deal with it. If I had not had the 'benefit' of having seen behind the curtain then I could have easily seen myself assuming it was a deliberate thwarting.

[deadculture]

@Packrat She must have thrown a fit after a pretender baron went to Crow's Landing and started killing all the Kurgans inside. Her daughter was half-Kurgan, though, so that could've been passed along to the Curia quite easily. The fact she was half way to being a Kurgan vassal doesn't surprise me.

Out of curiosity, who was the Imperial Eye agent who found out about her? Was it Custodius' alt?

[Misadventure]

This may be a topic for another thread, but I will ask here anyway.

Players (sometimes) talk about wanting to have an effect. My own personal experience is that when this is said, they mean something theme or setting changing, often beyond the parameters of play. EG they want to complete destroy the government on a white house politics game. I probably have bad luck.

When you think about having an effect, how big an effect to you hope for?

[deadculture]

@Misadventure Enough to be memorable. After Firan I confess I tend to mentally downplay anything I do, since they made you feel pretty much like a shit player for affecting their setting, but then people who played with me 8 years ago tell me all about my exploits being a villain and I feel all fuzzy inside.

I find that because I'm willing to take risks, I tend to leave more of a mark on the game world when playing a particularly ambitious character.

[Seraphim73]

@Misadventure said:

When you think about having an effect, how big an effect to you hope for?

This probably says something about me as a person, but I want that effect to be big enough for other players to talk about it ICly and OOCly.

Perhaps the most entertaining example I've had recently was back on Generations of Darkness, where my clone trooper got the kill-shot on Grievous (fighting alongside a bunch of Force Users and a non-clone officer). It didn't change much theme/setting-wise: Grievous was still dead, the CIS threat was ended, but it gave people a reason to know this one lone clone trooper, and to talk about him (and boy howdy was it great propaganda for Palpatine when he went all Order 66... or rather it should have been, but that's another story).

I want to see PCs and NPCs react to my actions. It doesn't have to change theme or setting long term, but I want to see the setting accept my action and react to it.

[Misadventure]

Give an example or three of various grades of memorable?

(I am coming from a space where there was a mystery in a campaign, and when others wanted to ST, I laid that one mystery beyond their authority, and BOTH not only directly went after that secret, but tried to define it via their stories. So I lack trust in either human nature, my friends, or my ability to communicate "NO, do NOT do a plot about X. You don't know enough to do anything that deals with its complexities beyond what you have already seen. You can do more of what you've seen if you like.")

Anyhow, meanwhile I am hoping to look at how grand a thing players would like to create. And hopefully accept risks for.

[Ghost]

@Misadventure said:

When you think about having an effect, how big an effect to you hope for?

Honestly? I think about 1/3 of the time I've heard this, it has meant "I want the GM or the plot to be affected by changes of my own design, or I want to feel like my input is being accepted by the GM/staff. This tends to be a complaint I hear often, and whether said plot change idea is the best or worst ever, the player tends to feel as if the plot change is warranted and really wants it to be implemented.

However (I use HOWEVER at lot, don't I?), I find that MU and Tabletop(TT) tend to run the same trope when it comes to GM/ST railroading. You see, us story-writer types, when we envision a tabletop adventure, tend to think Beginning, Climax, Resolution, and when designing an adventure or a meta plot, we envision where we would like it to go, how we would like it to end, and some of the filler pieces that make the story and the plot exciting and make sense. So in MU and TT, I tend to see a lot of game plots and scenes where the general meaty bits of the story have already been authored; the players don't so much affect the outcome as they do help the GM deliver the end game she had in mind...

...and in that, I feel, many TT/MU players feel like they are supporting cast to the GMs story, where the static NPCs are the primary cast who initiate the major, over-arcing changes. From this point of storytelling, I feel a lot of players, definitely more than 1/3rd, are very perceptive to figuring out whether or not their characters are making any sort of dent into the GM/STs original vision.

[Seraphim73]

@Misadventure said:

Give an example or three of various grades of memorable?

I think that will wildly depend on your theme. To stick with Clone Wars-era Star Wars, because I already brought it up, how about (given that any of these could becoming TOTALLY AWESOME AND MEMORABLE with the right scene):

Barely Memorable:

• Killing Whorm Loathsome, CIS General in a semi-random skirmish.
• Being elected Senator from a minor planet.
• Being promoted from Captain to Major.
• Passing your Trials to become a Jedi Knight.
• Becoming the leader of a street gang on Nar Shaddaa.

Suitably Impressive:

• Surviving Operation Knightfall as a Jedi by escaping the Jedi Temple.
• Defeating Admiral Trench in a pitched naval combat.
• Taking the place of a canon Senator on-screen due to IC manipulation.
• Being promoted to General/Admiral.
• Being acknowledged as a Jedi Master.
• Becoming a Black Sun Vigo.
• Killing General Grievous as part of a larger group.

Pretty Dang Big:

• Surviving Operation Knightfall by dueling Darth Vader to a standstill and then escaping.
• Defeating Admiral Trench while outnumbered and outgunned.
• Becoming Vice Chancellor after out-maneuvering Mas Amedda.
• Joining Republic/Imperial High Command.
• Taking control of Black Sun.
• Killing General Grievous in a solo duel.
• Killing Count Dooku in a solo duel.
• As a Senator, publicly denouncing the Empire as it is created, escaping Imperial custody with the help of others, and helping to found the Resistance.

Ridiculous and Over the Top:

• Stopping Operation Knightfall by defeating Darth Vader in a duel and driving the 501st back.
• Defeating the entire CIS fleet with a single Star Destroyer.
• Going straight from Padawan to Master because you're JUST THAT GOOD.
• Taking control of Coruscant as the head of Black Sun.
• Killing Anakin Skywalker in a solo duel.
• Killing Count Dooku in a solo duel as a Padawan.
• As a Senator, publicly denouncing the Empire as it is created, evading capture by Imperial forces in the Senate Building, founding the Rebellion, and fighting fleet battles against the Empire within your first year of resistance.
• Becoming Emperor.

I think that most games can flourish with any number of Barely Memorable and Suitably Impressive instances, and can host a couple of Pretty Dang Big events per year. The game -might- be able to survive a single Ridiculous and Over the Top, but probably not more than one.

(Bonus, some of the above are actual IC examples from a couple of Clone Wars era MUSHes I've played on, either of things characters did, or things people tried to do.)

[Packrat]

@deadculture said:

@Packrat She must have thrown a fit after a pretender baron went to Crow's Landing and started killing all the Kurgans inside. Her daughter was half-Kurgan, though, so that could've been passed along to the Curia quite easily. The fact she was half way to being a Kurgan vassal doesn't surprise me.

Out of curiosity, who was the Imperial Eye agent who found out about her? Was it Custodius' alt?

It was Anselm I think? Who was definitely not Custodius, he was a Thana who played at being a useless dilettante but actually had truly terrifying mind reading powers that he completely failed to exploit, essentially making the facade the reality.

Crows Landing did cause her to have issues, as did that one baron with the gigantic cannon who held war crimes parties where he shelled random villages.

[Misadventure]

Those are excellent examples, thank you.

[deadculture]

@Packrat So the guy had amazingly high Psyche and never used it. Hahahaha. What a fucking waste.

[Packrat]

@deadculture said:

@Packrat So the guy had amazingly high Psyche and never used it. Hahahaha. What a fucking waste.

I just checked, he had Operant level Pyche with a score of 7, plus two careers in Thought Police for the +2 bonus, he had something like a 15 goal for emotion control and never used it.

On the other subject - the most memorable thing that I ever did on a MU* was doom the world, it was on Vargo, does anyone who played there remember the famine, the evil forests of thorns and the monsters/child eating ogres that started appearing? That was all the fault of my character after she murdered a saint. She tried to become a pacifist after he persuaded her to give up violence, then Antimonist (demon worshipper) bandits deliberately attacked the pacifist commune she had gone to live at, at which point she failed at pacifism and murdered them.

Then she rode (badly injured, fighting multiple people without armour in Fading Suns is terrifyingly dangerous!) to confront the saint about how he was wrong and pacifism did not work, the argument got heated, she stabbed him in the mouth and murdered him. This broke some kind of metaphysical seal that prevented the Dark/The Evil from manifesting fully and was basically the cause of everything that went wrong from that point on.

[Apollonius]

@Packrat A reason why Amber was considered to be favored over the other Counts was largely because of a few items:

1. While there may have been background raiding from the Kurgans against Renaud and Amber, most of the most brutal raiding and big scale Kurgan activity was pointed at Oultrejoyeaux (Antonio) and Auberry/Sidon (Lyov (me) and Karl (bored)). Auberry, for example, faced off with a super effective Kurgan leader with no real avenue for expansion, meaning we bore the most risk and the least possible reward. Karl might further complain Lyov did nothing to help but I was in the middle of making sure my operatives and regular troops were there to back Sidon should Sidon go into raids or on the front against the Kurgans... or bail out anyone who got into hot water (like Chiaka). This in turn limited my ability to do my own raiding for cash, but I shouldn't have apped for a Count-level PC if I wanted to raid instead of playing bureaucrat.

2. I actually had a pretty intense side conversation with P about Amber-as-Chancellor. This was both before her nomination, during the first round of voting when she got voted in by ONE vote, and then when a coalition of PCs tried to get that overruled by having that one vote change his mind, by which point P refused to reopen the vote and then packed the voting with a few more NPCs to make sure that we could not unseat her as Chancellor. Amber was going to be annointed Chancellor whether anyone liked her or not and it just happened that at one of the votes, the players, by one vote (who later changed his mind) accepted it. If that isn't structural, I don't know what is.

3. @Packrat I know you are trying to be fair minded but I do think the consensus was that Amber and Renaud got certain advantages that others did not. It may not necessarily be areas where you were privy or were aware of, and I do want to state that the advantages the rest of us got were totally thematic to native Fading Suns. While Lyov got a few interesting toys that other PCs may cry foul about, I believe Amber's biggest complaint about Lyov getting his toys was Decados Jakovian agents which hoisted twenty different issues including the fact that they really were not in Lyov's employ and could do whatever they wished (i.e. what P wanted them to do) in the name of the Decados. Antonio's major advantage were his Dervishes and later his fanatical Crusaders but again, the former was thematic, the latter he worked for. Amber was really complaining about theme and how her Van Gelder did not get the cool off-world toys that a hands-bound Decados and a crazy fanatical Crusader PC got.

4. At least in the beginning, Renaud and Amber both got to fill some of their host baronies with people that they brought in. Antonio and I got stuck with random people. Some were awesome like Lysandra (Antonio). Others like Chiaka (Lyov), were totally messed up and were being told to revolt against me while they were still in chargen.

The thing about Amber was that neither Lyov nor I, the player, ever considered her to be a rival. Amber was distant, we didn't share a border, and my interests lay in tearing out a few baronies from Renaud and keeping the super-Kurgans along my border at bay. Hell, my PC was half-Van Gelder and actually had sympathies about the house's plight under the thumb of the Decados. I never actually RPed a scene with her because she flat out refused to do so... so it's hard to call her a rival and therefore somehow call out any alleged bias.

I do echo @bored 's sentiment to just stand up a Fading Suns game. Just make the theme more gritty tech. Like Leagueheim.

[Packrat]

It was three years ago and an awful lot happened on that game which I disagreed with, I mean I did quit staff and have no intention of repeating much of what happened on Star Crusade, so I am just not going to go into a step by step rebuttal of that though I do not feel your account is entirely accurate.

On a more positive note (or negative?) I am definitely not going to make a Fading Suns game, whilst it is a great setting Fading Suns lead to a ton of impositions which I am not a fan of and frankly I want things to be more sci-fi and less medieval. I have the broad brushes of an original theme already sorted out, the framework for the economy and social system, and will be setting up a server/trying to remember if I can code in the last week of April (since necessary bits for my computer build got delayed and so I am stuck without a real machine).

For a start it is one hell of a lot easier to put together economics/military stuff when you do not need to take into account medieval slaves in salt mines compared to space robot stock exchanges and knife wielding conscripts vs anti grav laser gunships.

[Apollonius]

Your lack of commitment to slaves in salt mines is disappointing. But now I do expect anti grav laser gunships in your game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROX9V4bKqKs

[ThatGuyThere]

@lordbelh
I am not saying you cannot get them involved. I think with enough work you can, but ask anyone on staff from RfK they way they ran the game was a lot of work. A labor of love for the most part but still a lot of work.
The mindset I see exhibited most in this thread is that of if we provide something else they will drop what they are doing and do what we want. To the contrary I believe that most player are playing what they want or they would not be playing, now you can mold this through game culture but there has been little talk of molding OOC culture, which RfK definitely did to get people involved and much more talk about the IC situations.

Edit to Add: Also a big reason the impression of unfairness lingers on Star Crusade is that the rules constantly changed. I don't mean policies I mean the actual game systems used. Appollonius already mentioned the vote thing. the economic situation went through at least three different systems regarding how the economy worked, and the large scale battle system was overhauled when, according to the post about the change on the bboards, it did not produce the results staff wanted.
Now I have no idea weather Amber was favored or not but it would take a lot more the the word of a Staffer from the game to get me to believe either way when staff was known for and admitted to telling different people different stories.

[silentsophia]

Regardless, Amber kinda turned a scene into 'This is how SS and her PC kinda suck eggs'. I honestly have no problem handling some stuff OOC like my bog salt for your booze, or whatever if someone has limited RP time. I mean, it would be a pretty short scene.

I adored my PC a lot. She got some things did. But man, it felt like her Count and general area just got curbstomped.

[lordbelh]

@ThatGuyThere said:

am not saying you cannot get them involved. I think with enough work you can, but ask anyone on staff from RfK they way they ran the game was a lot of work. A labor of love for the most part but still a lot of work.

This is true, but they were also both incredibly inefficient about how they went about it, and had systems that were designed for a game of 30ish characters at a time when it ballooned to 100+. The takeaway from rfk was not that its too much work to bother with, but that it can be done, and if you do it you should probably keep in mind the consequences if the game does explode. And perhaps not leave all the work on one pair of shoulders (Shav was one of the better staffers I've come across, but she did not excel at building up a support network to share the burden of staffing).