@Thenomain said in What do RPGs *never* handle in mu*'s? What *should* they handle?:

@Ide

It comes down to how I play the character. I wasn't thinking too much about it, but what @Duntada said about an 18th level mage nuking a street game made my entire history of posting on Wora (both of them) and Swofa and here swim into a particular focus: Tabletop games put the character in the role of the most important thing, while a Mush cannot easily be played this way.

On a tabletop, throwing a fireball at a street gang may put your character in jeopardy with the local law, it's not going to end your character. The storyteller and your fellows at the table are going to roll with it and keep things interesting.

On a Mush, it's likely that most people don't have that level of interest of you as a player. They're not going to cater to your play style.

Extending this line of thought: MU*, of necessity, involves telling a different kind of story. It's no longer about the PCs directly, it's about the community, or the place. A common pattern for sphere metaplots in oWoD (which is basically all I've enjoyed playing in this format) involves eventually facing some kind of ultimate big bad. This is, fundamentally, a tabletop plot. It has a clear ending, a clear beginning, and you know when you've won.

When you run that as a sphere plot on MU*, you end up eventually getting there and then.... what? Season 2, bigger and badder than before? That's a diminishing returns curve, and eventually every TV show that relies upon it either shuts down or jumps the shark, eventually.

Arcs like that aren't metaplot, they're now subplots, and a lot of the meta is going to be player-generated, emergent content that happens as social circles, conflicts, and tensions are forged through general RP. I try to make my sphere metas be situations or conditions of the place. They're not things you fix (at least not without tremendous work, and generally all you end up doing is changing the status quo to some new thing that you now need to contend with), they're things you adapt to and they color all the smaller scale stories you're telling.

Your character's story is braided together with plenty of others. You can still have your beat-the-badguy story arcs, it's just A story instead of THE story.

@Pyrephox said in What do RPGs *never* handle in mu*'s? What *should* they handle?:

However, just capping or eliminating experience/improvement isn't a solution, either, because a lot of players are primarily incentivized by seeing their character become more power and get more Stuff. Remove the opportunity to mechanically grow and change, and you lose a lot of people's interest.

Retirement is an alternative to capping. Congratulations, you won. Time to start over with something new, maybe we'll keep this bit around for use as a powerful NPC and we'll ask you to cameo, etc. Still rubs people the wrongway sometimes but I think it's a nice enduring reward that doesn't necessarily unbalance the stock of active PCs as hard.

@Derp said:

As much as I would want to play this... I wouldn't. I would find my eye twitching at every third pose and going on 'oh my god that is not how that works' monologues, probably much to the annoyance of other players.

So while I encourage this, I'm also big enough to realize I'd be one of Those Players, and leave the rest of you to have your funtimes in peace.

I would also be one of Those Players, but I suspect my will to not at least give it a try would utterly fail about three months in. On the other hand, if it hadn't degenerated into a massive OOC shitstorm by then...

But yeah, pilots shouldn't attend movies about airplanes, etc.

@EmmahSue's and @Ninjakitten's checklists are very close to my own method. If/when those fail me, I will also go troll the site's wiki, checking out people's 'hooks' field and looking for ways that my character can ping those hooks, reaching out to such people with pages. Yes, it's the MUSH equivalent of cold-calling, but it works surprisingly often, people like it when you read the things they wrote and approach them on the terms they laid out.

As RP Staff, I also appreciate people who create jobs. Jobs give me an automatic list of: here's a bunch of people who have specific RP needs. If anyone's online who created a job, I start poking them in order of oldest, actionable job.

@faraday said in Finding roleplay:

Tangential note: I understand why sometimes staff wants to require approvals on PrPs - I used to be that way myself. Trust is hard when you're worried about players doing crazy things. But in time I've realized that strict PrP policies will discourage even the most enthusiastic players from running anything. Or they'll just ignore them and run it anyway. These days my policy is just "run what you want, just don't wreck the theme."

I require approvals for PrPs on my site, but it's not so much about players doing crazy things as it is two other concerns, collisions with established canon, and what I call New Puppy Syndrome(tm).

Player wants to run a PrP. Great. I love it. Before they do it, I ask for a basic synopsis up front and give it a quick scan to make sure they're not running into problems. E.g. if their PrP needs the city's vampire prince to do X, but another PrP or TP has explicitly established that he's magically prohibited, or incapable of doing X, we need to amend because otherwise the game's canon winds up self-contradicting. I've seen years-long meta-arcs go completely off the rails over this. Collisions aren't a reason to reject a PrP, and historically when PrP STs needed to borrow established NPCs they were perfectly happy to take advice or requests about substitutions.

New Puppy Syndrome, however, is a big drain on staff time and resources. An ST may have a finite interest in their own PrP. They want to run the scenes, they want the things to happen, and then they're done. But their players, and folks who hear about these events second and third hand may want to poke at these goings-on or the aftermaths. The PrP ST, however, is done with it and no longer has interest. This is fine, but that means the aftermath RP (usually investigation type stuff) lands in staff's laps. I need to keep tabs on what PrPs are running, have been run, etc, so that when I get weird +requests from players that make absolutely no sense to me otherwise, I know who's new puppy this is that they got bored with and sent back to the shelter. Unlike with the real puppy, there's no ethical failing here, but taking a first look at a PrP before it goes live lets me be ready for the secondary and tertiary effects it might have.

I certainly don't think the approval process needs to be anything more than a look-over. The only PrPs I'd actually reject are on the order of "I want to run the PrP where the world ends and everyone on grid dies."

@Pyrephox said in Finding roleplay:

I have no objections to random plot dropped out of the sky, but if you REALLY wanted to rev the engines and storytellers had time, it'd be even better to page the people involved and say, "Hey, I've got a few hours to run something for you guys - what would you like to have your characters do that could happen where you are?"

When I run out of jobs I can take action on (Hah!) that's a thing I've been known to do.

@Seraphim73 said in Finding roleplay:

As for +requests sitting forever... I know that Staffers are busy running things, reading apps, and with their RL, but I don't generally think there's any excuse for a +request sitting in the queue for more than a couple of days. After that amount of time, you should at least get a response back of "We're discussing this, we should have a resolution by X time."

Anything less... is uncivilized.

Staff really need to heed due dates. RL shit happens, whatever, but at least be checking in, yeah.

The city of Detroit has gone through a major economic and demographic decline in recent decades. The population of the city has fallen from a high of 1,850,000 to 701,000. The automobile industry has suffered from global competition and has moved much of the remaining production out of Detroit. Some of the highest crime rates in the United States are now occurring here, and huge areas of the city are in a state of severe urban decay. Upon these real-world stresses, we lay the Classic World of Darkness skin: The city, in 2003 opted to carry out a shrinking of its municipal boundaries, forcibly relocating anyone who lived in the newly disincorporated territories (with race and class disparities rampant in the outcomes of this policy) and essentially surrendering huge swaths of the former city back to nature. The move was called 'Measure 2' and it saved the city a mountain of money woes at still uncertain costs and a stigma of capitulation.

From The Ashes is a Classic World of Darkness game running with 20th Anniversary rules (or as close thereto as we can approximate, absent M20 and C20), and set, as you probably worked out, in Detroit, Michigan. Our game is themed on reclaiming lost things and as such all spheres face an uphill battle and (as of this writing) no 'home base' or organized community. Garou have no caern or sept, Kithain have no freeholds, Mages have no chantries - each for different but (at least tangentially) related reasons. We're telling the stories of how these communities get by in the absence of their usual social apparatus, and likely how they go about re-organizing and staging a comeback. Player characters will be expected to self-govern and self-organize, as well as earning their happy endings.

We are open for Mortal, Mortal+, Changeling, Shifter, and - with caveats and heavy screening - Mage spheres. (Sorry, no Vampire. Maybe someday we'll open it, but as of right now we have no staff competent to run Vampire, and no we're not looking for cold-call applications for staff.)

If you're interested, come check us out at darcness.net:2860 or give our wiki a gander at: http://fta.darcness.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Best person to contact there is The Supremes, (the guy who wrote all this), his schedule is Tuesdays/Wednesdays all day, Thursday mornings, Fridays after 10AM, and Saturdays until 5PM (all times Eastern US). All else is catch-as-catch-can.

tl;dr - EVE is described as "a so-so spaceship game with the world's best Meta."

The Mittani is the Something Awful (Goonswarm) faction's dictator. He doesn't have a current account, he just plays the metagame and makes a solid income on the side running a set of fansites including one that used #gamergate as a springboard to launch into broader games 'journalism.'

His history's really a fascinating read if you like space politics. But he's winning an MMO: he doesn't pay to play, and he makes money off of other people who do, without working for the publisher.

@Admiral said:

I've never seen a case of eminent domain used to force people from disincorporated areas to move -into- the city.
I've seen it used exactly the opposite, to force people to move out of the city.

To date you are correct, EmDom hasn't been used in this fashion. RL Detroit, ultimately concluded that voters wouldn't accept it (they were right) because it would feel like a major invasion of personal property rights (and it would've been, not that this stopped people from doing it in Kelo.')

Maybe my experiences in major cities differs from yours. I'll give you the strange 'We love our people and want to take care of them so we move them into the city where we can do so' Detroit.

Again, you're reading stuff that isn't there. There's nothing about 'we love our people' in this move, by the city. It's a budget-saving measure. They write-off huge (read: poor, mostly abandoned, high-crime) neighborhoods as total losses, legally divest the land from what is 'City of Detroit' and cease water, power, policing, fire coverage, and all other city and emergency services. In order to avoid people who live in these places having the right to sue the city for not providing mandated services, they move the few hangers on who still live there to other neighborhoods that they're not writing off. There's no love here, and the process is spectacularly horrible for all parties.

What about the 'Werewolf has to be cuddly and safe and no stereotypes allowed!' business?

First of all, once again, you're reading things that aren't there. There's nothing about our Werewolf sphere that's cuddly or safe. What we are doing is making the game a safe place for players. Since we have players who are POC and all manner of minorities besides, we're not interested in character concepts that rely on (e.g.) racist stereotypes. They are a form of aggression against the stereotyped minorities and - frankly - they show zero effort on the part of the apping player.

If you can't imagine a Bone Gnawer except as an alcoholic black guy who's behind on his child support payments? You've got some work to do as a writer. If you can't imagine a Black Fury except as a vengeful misandrist, you've got a damagingly incorrect understanding of what feminism is about, and again, we're not interested - our Black Furies have more depth than that. That shit wasn't actually okay in the 90's either, but it's become a staple of WoD gaming in large part because WoD was written by and for people who didn't know any better - I sure didn't get it.

That's what the 'no stereotypes' thing is about though: protecting players from well-meaning folks who don't even realize that playing a character who perpetuates damaging stereotypes is part of the problem. Hell, usually they don't even realize that the character they're playing is a damaging stereotype. This shit's hard.

Example of Stereotype we do allow: Ahrouns are violent and full of rage. Why? because no actual real-life people are being harmed by the perpetuation of that stereotype.

Or the 'white people aren't welcome in the ghetto' business? I don't recall if that was your game or just discussion we were having about opinions of the ghetto in general though.

I was not party to, nor witness to, any such conversation - I suspect you're bringing this in from somewhere else.

@wizz said:

but it's not like the game creator was implying anyone who played oWoD was racist or misogynist. (Presumably.)

Confirmed. I don't even believe the folks who wrote this are, necessarily, racist or misogynist, either. But what White Wolf wrote down, and what a lot of us play with is damaging stuff, and we don't even realize it... which is one thing when you're playing around a table of white guys and while it perpetuates the invisible damage, it's the kind of drop-in-the-bucket stuff that's not worth worrying about. When you've got actual people of color, actual gay people, actual trans people, etc, playing on your game though? You need to be more aware. It's really fucking hard work, too.

@Admiral said:

I apologize if I came off strong. Racism is one of my twitchy points. I absolutely hate it and part of that hatred is hating when people try to turn pretendy-funtimes into a battleground for their particular viewpoint even if it coincides with mine.

It's totally understandable that this is twitchy-making stuff. We put the notices of the problematic stuff on the wiki so that the pretendy-funtimes don't end up the battlefield. We write, on our sleeve, where we stand on this stuff so that there are no surprises three months in because I hate that shit too.

@Arkandel said in Finding roleplay:

See, what you view as perfectly reasonable and benevolent approval process ("just talk to me, we'll figure it out") is very often seen as an obstacle, a reason for staff to look down at a creative task that's often fuzzy in the early stages. Having someone trying to poke holes into a plot before it even gets off the ground isn't fun, after all, and few people can take rejection or even constructive criticism well.

This is true, as with everything I look at this as a balancing act between maximum functional freedom and a minimum of me spending my time running down the details of a PrP on IC hearsay alone when I could be running scenes.

The phrasing in our PrP policy is different than the frank discussion I gave here for exactly the reasons you state. Most people never even realize that I've actually thought about the implications their intended PrP might have. (In all but one case the implications were nonexistent, the scope of the story was so localized that all I did was say 'have fun, send me logs when you're done.' In that one case it directly overlapped with a player-requested TP I was running, and I basically offered the PrP ST a full hand-off of my stuff for them to shape as they pleased. They accepted and took off with it, it was great.)

How you frame a policy is at least as important as how you execute the policy, though. And any policy at all is going to offer some kind of resistance, you're right.

I'll never get tired of saying this: Storytellers and coders are by far your scarcest resource as a game-runner, so the more staff can do to stay out of their way until something goes wrong or if they ask for help - as opposed to putting obstacles up - the better it is.

So very, very true. Also, staff can be reaching out to their players. With only three staff, we have a number of players who are on during times that staff aren't on-hand. I've had a couple of players comment on this and let drop a story idea or two without even realizing it. Those are opportunities to suggest to the player that they step up and PrP ST. The usual concerns of "what if I do it wrong, etc." come up, but that's an opportunity to coach a new ST, share a few tricks, and help someone get over those first-timer cold feet. Most people who do it enjoy it, even if they never do it again. Some folks catch the bug.

@Thenomain said in What do RPGs *never* handle in mu*'s? What *should* they handle?:

@Ide

It comes down to how I play the character. I wasn't thinking too much about it, but what @Duntada said about an 18th level mage nuking a street game made my entire history of posting on Wora (both of them) and Swofa and here swim into a particular focus: Tabletop games put the character in the role of the most important thing, while a Mush cannot easily be played this way.

On a tabletop, throwing a fireball at a street gang may put your character in jeopardy with the local law, it's not going to end your character. The storyteller and your fellows at the table are going to roll with it and keep things interesting.

On a Mush, it's likely that most people don't have that level of interest of you as a player. They're not going to cater to your play style.

Extending this line of thought: MU*, of necessity, involves telling a different kind of story. It's no longer about the PCs directly, it's about the community, or the place. A common pattern for sphere metaplots in oWoD (which is basically all I've enjoyed playing in this format) involves eventually facing some kind of ultimate big bad. This is, fundamentally, a tabletop plot. It has a clear ending, a clear beginning, and you know when you've won.

When you run that as a sphere plot on MU*, you end up eventually getting there and then.... what? Season 2, bigger and badder than before? That's a diminishing returns curve, and eventually every TV show that relies upon it either shuts down or jumps the shark, eventually.

Arcs like that aren't metaplot, they're now subplots, and a lot of the meta is going to be player-generated, emergent content that happens as social circles, conflicts, and tensions are forged through general RP. I try to make my sphere metas be situations or conditions of the place. They're not things you fix (at least not without tremendous work, and generally all you end up doing is changing the status quo to some new thing that you now need to contend with), they're things you adapt to and they color all the smaller scale stories you're telling.

Your character's story is braided together with plenty of others. You can still have your beat-the-badguy story arcs, it's just A story instead of THE story.

@Pyrephox said in What do RPGs *never* handle in mu*'s? What *should* they handle?:

However, just capping or eliminating experience/improvement isn't a solution, either, because a lot of players are primarily incentivized by seeing their character become more power and get more Stuff. Remove the opportunity to mechanically grow and change, and you lose a lot of people's interest.

Retirement is an alternative to capping. Congratulations, you won. Time to start over with something new, maybe we'll keep this bit around for use as a powerful NPC and we'll ask you to cameo, etc. Still rubs people the wrongway sometimes but I think it's a nice enduring reward that doesn't necessarily unbalance the stock of active PCs as hard.

@Coin said in Finding roleplay:

I think one of the things I hate the most about +jobs is that they have to be accessed on my client.

If I could go on a website and look up the entire job on a webpage and scroll up and down and whatnot, etc., without having to interface with my client save but for inputting into the job? That would make it infinitely more tolerable, IMO.

But that's probably just a personal quirk.

I'm with you on this, but I ain't gonna write that API. I suppose you could just push all job-like objects out to a web-based ticket system, though. Again, I don't have time to write it.

@Thenomain said in XP systems:

Roughly around 60-80 players for pulling 10, 40+ for pulling 5. This really only works if the people who help are fairly random; if the same five or ten people are seeing the nominations then half of the system isn't working; the half where people get to see how awesome their peers think this other person is.

Do you not anonymize the recipient of the +recc as well as the author?

@Seraphim73 said in Finding roleplay:

As for +requests sitting forever... I know that Staffers are busy running things, reading apps, and with their RL, but I don't generally think there's any excuse for a +request sitting in the queue for more than a couple of days. After that amount of time, you should at least get a response back of "We're discussing this, we should have a resolution by X time."

Anything less... is uncivilized.

Staff really need to heed due dates. RL shit happens, whatever, but at least be checking in, yeah.

@Pyrephox said in Finding roleplay:

@The_Supremes said in Finding roleplay:

@Pyrephox said in Finding roleplay:

@The_Supremes That makes you Good People in my book! I always love more character-focused plots...not in the sense of internal navalgazing, but in the sense of actually furthering character goals, or giving them exciting things to do that are tailored to them.

The real challenge I have is in getting people to create jobs for that sort of thing. Impromptu stuff is harder for me than things I can think about and Plan(tm). A lot of people seem allergic to giving me "this is what my character is up to" jobs that I can be like... "Oh really... well then... -PLOT-"

Oh, well, yeah. +Jobs are where fun goes to die, lost in a hell of nitpicking, boring rolls, and being forgotten.

Yeah but... how else can I make things happen without quitting my job, punting on my PhD, and winding up homeless because I refused to logout ever? XP

@Pyrephox said in Finding roleplay:

@The_Supremes That makes you Good People in my book! I always love more character-focused plots...not in the sense of internal navalgazing, but in the sense of actually furthering character goals, or giving them exciting things to do that are tailored to them.

The real challenge I have is in getting people to create jobs for that sort of thing. Impromptu stuff is harder for me than things I can think about and Plan(tm). A lot of people seem allergic to giving me "this is what my character is up to" jobs that I can be like... "Oh really... well then... -PLOT-"

@Thenomain said in XP systems:

@Ide said in XP systems:

I liked the vote review system with a panel of players on Aether as well. I don't remember the specifics -- I think votes were anonymous but with no explanation? @Thenomain I summon thee.

Reccs were a small paragraph of text that were anonymous to players so a blind group of 10 players would vote if the reccs for that character that month were worth 0-3, with 3 meant to be pretty rare.

Getting a rotating group of 10 players together once a month (so about 20 players, different sets each month if possible) became stressful. It was reduced to 5 later on, which would be my bare minimum to make this system work.

After the process, the players got to see the nominations for themselves, including the name of the person who submitted the good vibes.

Nowadays it's the occasional bonus kudos, one at a time.

I kinda like the peer-review process there, but it seems like you'd need a fairly large player base to consistently get the panel. Any estimate of how large a group of regulars you feel like you'd need to implement such a thing?

@Pyrephox said in Finding roleplay:

I have no objections to random plot dropped out of the sky, but if you REALLY wanted to rev the engines and storytellers had time, it'd be even better to page the people involved and say, "Hey, I've got a few hours to run something for you guys - what would you like to have your characters do that could happen where you are?"

When I run out of jobs I can take action on (Hah!) that's a thing I've been known to do.

@Ninjakitten said in Finding roleplay:

@The_Supremes
The difference in my head between +vote and +recc is that +recc requires an explanation, and in my experience that seems to have been enough to prevent most of the rewards-for-one-brief pose, since most people aren't willing to do more work to reward someone than that person did to earn it. I think people tend to feel it requires more than "X showed up."

On the other hand, I also find +reccs weirdly hard to write, and where they exist I've always ended up feeling like I was failing the people I play with because of how rarely I actually manage them even when they're highly deserved.

Word. I've seen +reccs break down before, mind you, but it's always because staff are just rubber stamping whatever comes through the system (it becomes +vote with an extra text field).

@Coin said in Finding roleplay:

More and more I start to think that the best way to give out XP on a game is by providing every avenue possible and limiting it to an amount during a specific time frame.

If we're talking, say, CofD:

Automatic XP
+vote
+recc
PRP (running)
PRP (participating)
Conditions
Aspirations
Dramatic Failures
Breaking Points

Just provide all the ways and then limit the amount you can get from each per, say, week--and then limit the amount you can get per week, period. That way, the people who like to play in large groups can vote for each other, the people who like to use Conditions and Aspirations can do that, and to really max out you have to participate in a little bit of every kind. It also stops people from feeling like one style or RP is running roughshod over another.

It requires more thought, obviously, but I am really starting to think this is better than some other stuff we have so far.

When I've thought about systems like that, my knee-jerk reaction is that they offer the worst of everything for little material benefit, but I recognize that's an emotional reaction that has no real evidence or theorycraft behind it. Setting a cap on XP gained per period of time seems to result in folks defaulting to OOC idling the moment they hit the cap. Some of that is player attitude for sure, and I've made it a personal policy that I generally don't want to cultivate a player base who pursue XP as their only motivation... but I've been guilty of it myself after being on a game with such a system for long enough. There's definitely some propagation of those attitudes built into having that system in play.

Nearly every RPG system out there uses some form of 'do the thing, get the points, buy more stats.' Some way that your character gains in ability and grows through a story. For a LOT of people, character stat progression is a vital part of what makes roleplaying enjoyable. In a tabletop format, where everyone's at least within an order of magnitude of each other's XP totals, little more than GM/DM/ST discretion is needed to keep the ship from listing one way or the other. In a massively multiplayer context, with a persistent world and so on, there's a fair bit more variance which can make STing and running a site an issue even before we get into the ways in which a lot of people lose sight of the roleplaying in favor of the pursuit of stats for their own sake.

There's three basic categories of XP Policy (and then combinations of these) I've observed over the years and each has their weaknesses:

1. Players Give Out XP To Each Other (+vote/+recc) - The most common by far involves players using commands to nominate each other for XP gains, ostensibly in reward for providing content. The ideal is that good RP is what the site is about and players should be rewarded for creating and participating in it. In practice there's all sorts of shenanigans to the effect of collusion, vote trading, and a social expectation and sense of entitlement to +votes even from people for whom you've provided no value in the scene, etc. There's PvP motives written all over these failure modes, too, which is why I consider them an issue worthy of addressing rather than hand-waving it off as 'some people suck, that will always be true.' A lot of the +vote circles are about ensuring that they 'keep up with the Joneses' in some kind of imagined 'they will try to kill us with their X so we need to have maximum stats to keep playing' defensiveness, at best... and 'we need to kill so-and-so, so let's get some stat bloat on' at worst.

2. Automatic XP - Just by having an approved character or by being logged in, or by passing commands to the server while in a room with other people passing commands to the server or whatever, the XP just happens. Usually this is small amounts per hour or per day or whatever... it adds up though. MU* stuff happens on timescales of months, sometimes years. XP here is definitely an entitlement, not a reward. The stat bloat happens in order of the date you were approved, essentially. There's something fundamentally anti-meritocratic about such systems: the most powerful character is the one that's been around since the game started (usually a friend of the founders) and that will never change, essentially. Insofar as stats matter, the pecking order becomes a bit of a pyramid scheme. Stories often involve disruptions of the status quo, however, so there's also something fundamentally corrosive to good story in such systems.

3. Staff assign XP awards - Going back to these games' roots, the ST determines appropriate XP awards based upon player/character deeds. This is the system my staff and I chose for FTA, but we're not thrilled with it. It seems to have meant that there's a LOT less coffeeshop/bar RP (which isn't necessarily a bad thing given how universally 'bleh' people seem to feel about that being the main source of RP in a lot of places), and to my eyes as an ST a lot more TP/PrP stuff. Stat bloat occurs to content creators, prime movers, and people who are interested in Doing Meaningful Things(tm), which is good (or at least better). On the other hand, when staff aren't around to run TPs and PrP STs are saturated or need breaks, there's just no XP, no character progression, no matter what else you do. This makes good staff even more critical, and they're already damned hard to find. XP is no longer visibly coming in, it shows up in comparative large windfalls (it comes in points?!), which is cognitive dissonance for people used to the steady trickle.

FTA is reviewing it's XP policies, so I'm open to being persuaded as to the merits of particular systems over others. No system is perfect, all have their failure modes, and in the end it's a question of which failure modes are (more) tolerable or justified by the direct benefits the system offers.