Just an aside, at least the Covenant write-ups in 2nd Ed give examples of how they tend to act when in charge and when NOT in charge.

@TNP said:

Dear @tragedyjones.

I'm a relatively young Ventrue who was Embraced during college. None of my friends know I died or that I'm now a creature of the night. They think I just disappeared for a few years due to a breakdown from stress (I was pre law). I still maintain contact with them for dinner and theatre dates and they don't have a clue.

My problem is that now we're in our thirties, they're starting to get married. I've already had to miss three weddings because they were scheduled for noon. My coterie says I should just break ties with them but I don't want to do that.

My question is this: a fourth friend just got engaged and they're setting the date. Should I dominate them into an evening ceremony or just resign myself to another missed wedding? Do I still need to buy a wedding gift for them if I'm not going?

Asleep During Daytime

Asleep During Daytime, you have a few ways to handle this. First, you're young and new to your Requiem. If you are durable enough, and as a Ventrue you may know some Resilience, you could try and be a badass and attend the wedding, at least the ceremony, and leave early claiming you aren't feeling well - the sunburn will help corroborate your story. If you're fully fed you can survive an hour or two in the daylight without taking any aggravated wounds, but be sure to have a snack planned.

If you are already considering Dominating them to alter the ceremony, perhaps you can do that, but this is a dangerous path. It only gets easier to break people after the first try. Are they your friends then, or just meat-puppets to bend to your will?

And yes, you should send a gift. Especially if they are well to do in the mortal world, you should continue to cultivate those allies!

@Thenomain said:

@Coin

Once you jump back to your own timeline, Hitler is no longer fucked up. You could just call it all a dream. This is one of the core problems with the New Universe theory of time travel.

Well, yes.

But there is a timeline in which Hitler is fucked up. And you created it.

There could be a dozen.

This leads to the same type of game you and I discussed before, a la The Strange (and would even be a good permutation to play with the Cypher system).

@mietze said:

It can be a bit of a balance though. My ideal is someone who has a PC with flaws, who RPs them, but who is /also/ capable of give and take and noticing/playing off others' flaws too. Because there are some people who are so in love with their broken PC that sometimes they become very self centered as far as needing that to be the focus of all scenes you have with them. (The If Only People Bothered to Unwrap My Awesome PC but Instead They're Bothering Me With Their Own Stuff people--I bet everyone has experienced that too.)

This is actually what I find the most enjoyable with MU* RP, the interactivity, having your characters learn about others, having others learn about your character, having relationships develop etc.

One of my most amazing experiences was when the person I RP'd with ICly commented on a minor thing from one of my poses more then a week previously. I felt completely floored by the fact someone had actually noticed and remembered such a minute detail.

I'm not particularly good at making deep and flawed characters, however I try to make characters that are interested in others and hopefully fun to interact with.

@Tat said:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Chat

That's actually pretty neat. Combined with a wiki page for room desc/notations/descriptions, that's kinda cool. It reminds me of a more location-focused version of some of the digichat setups.

@ThatGuyThere said:

When it interferes with rp rather then facilitates rp is my answer, granted i know that is horribly imprecise and will differ for each game but that is also the truest answer I can think of.

Yep. And it's easy to have a 'too much' situation where adding more helps: eg, you've got obfuscate code, but no code to allow people who ICly can see through it to see through it. Either don't code obfuscate and have everybody roll and ICly behave as if they really can't see it if they fail, or add code to give them as have the right powers an automagic chance of seeing through it.

I once had a character who was shot with a shotgun his first hour on the grid. The PC who shot him said that he wanted to hit him over the head with the gunstock, not shoot him, but was told that the code demanded that he shoot once he'd wielded. I think in that particular case the GM was just being silly, but that sort of thing does happen. It really mucks up the game for me if I'm told I cannot do something that's possible in the imaginary world because the code won't support it.

@Thenomain said:

This is really what we're talking about in this thread. Not so much how to portray darkness, but how to get players to stick to theme and treat their character as a living creation that is not themselves.

Once we can work that out, we can tell people that they volunteered to play a game where bad things happen and ask them where the disconnect is.

Yeah. There's this overlap, though. Or so I believe, because I figure that some difference between WoD horror/tragedy and WoD superhero-monsters arises from the fact that the superhero ones don't get their stuff taken away?

I know nothing, I haven't played a WoD MU in years.

Personal resonance with a game system does not necessarily make it good, or bad, it just makes it not to your taste and/or preference. Which is completely, and utterly, fine. There is nothing bad about disliking a game system. There may even be reasons you personally find a system lackluster, or failing in an area, but this does not in general make a system 'bad'.

All a system is, is a series of rules, to try and interpret our pretendy fun times in a way that doesn't devolve into infantile cowboys and indians/cops and robbers where someone got shot, and another person says they didn't, and the back and forth lasts for all eternity.

The system is supposed to be the impartial mediator. If everyone plays by the same rules, then everyone is in balance, in theory.

The reality is that no system is perfect, there are people who find the holes either accidentally or on purpose, and build to take advantage of the system being ran (Such as multiple action combat merits in nWoD 1.0 for example, or a mentalist in Champions). These can make a system appear to be imbalanced, but everyone is still playing by those very same rules.

Long story short: Different strokes, for different folks.

As to capped vs staggered? I dislike automagic xp. XP is supposed to signify important life altering events that spur a person to change and grow one way or another. It's a mechanic to give the illusion of increased experience.

One can simply do the same job, day in, and day out, and live without truly living, and thus gain no experience. Their skills are static because they aren't being challenged to improve them. They are couch potatoes who spend much of their free time watching the telly.

If you don't have those experiences, then you shouldn't get xp in my opinion.

Also: The only day we stop learning, is when we die (Theoretical soul notwithstanding) thus I am against xp caps.

I also don't believe that some fresh character should be the equal to one who has had all these experiences that have shaped them and made them grow beyond a starting character. It devalues all those experiences.

That's just me.

Coming as a newb to this board, but not to the anime/video game side of MUs, I'd say MU*es largely place RP first as their priority. Not going to go down the same points other people have made here, but I've seen some threads here talking about coded combat and the like, so here's my take on that instead.

I've been on some MUs where there's coded combat, but it's often with the idea that it's there as an optional tool/toy, specific to that MU*'s theme, to help with decisions, present ideas, and not overrule the flow of the scene. RP is a collaborative effort and consent-based.

One MU* I was on had status effects like Panic, which could be added to specific attacks. It was up to the player if they'd reflect this in their pose, and sometimes, it just wasn't a good idea to. Two other characters may be having a defining dramatic moment on that round, and drawing attention to my character would ruin that. Later on in another fight, however, if I'm hit with Panic again, I may use that as a prompt to show the effects on my character because it would sell some aspect of the other character who inflicted the Panic status. My character may even attack one of their friends, as long as I clear it through a page to other player of that character. The panic status is there in both cases, so the chances of my next attack hitting will suffer in the code, but I was in charge of how I expressed it.

That's there the difference is, for me. Code can be added and things can be automated, but if it gets in the way of telling a story, forces the theme to fit it (rather than the other way around), and/or doesn't help create opportunities for RP, it just doesn't work.

@Thenomain

Hehe I meant 'code up' as in 'create a game around' but, what little time I have is pretty much invested.

Saw this this morning, thought you might like it.

http://siliconangle.com/blog/2015/07/29/cd-projekt-announces-witcher-tabletop-rpg-game/

Edit aha derp, someone posted the same announcement up the page.

@Roz said:

@deadculture said:

What I would like to see is a MUSH based on the same world as Guy Gavriel Kay's Lions of Al-Rasan, A Song for Arbonne, etc. It's close enough to some themes in our world's medieval era to make it easy to play, extremely low-magic and very engaging, if you ever read either of those books.

HELLO I AM HERE TO UPVOTE YOU TWENTY TIMES

I was so emo when I finished that book. 😞 The duel between ... well, let's not spoil things, certain characters, was handled in basically the best way I've ever read a fight going in a novel.

I was all grrr and :(.

Don't worry. MUSHing is well on the way to being the greatest, most secure thing ever.

The world needs more single-sphere WoD games. Do the Forsaken 2e game.

@tragedyjones,

I recently went down nostalgia way and tripped over Aether's internet archive, which includes maybe the best written "for people who have never seen this nonsense before" set of instructions. Might want to look?

https://web.archive.org/web/20070910132810/http://aether.mux.net/oldsite/news.html

The provoking situation was that the staff PC would not automatically step aside for the player character in that spot. The argument is that since it was a Rank 5 influence spot, which only one person could hold, that was automatically a position of power-- and that was the crux of the disagreement. Some felt it was not a position of power, some did and that a staff-PC shouldn't hold it. But Shava has always been very clear about her preferences on boundaries between staff PCs and non-staff PCs. It was one of the things that drew me to the game, after being burned by questionable staff ethics and actions on so many other games.

It is true that coming in as a new staffer on an established game in which 70% of the game was in one person's head, and the new folks left with no training or minimal guidance, was difficult. There were some attitudes towards the new staffers coming in that were worrisome, both from the player and the established staff side. New staff put in an incredible number of hours trying to play catch up, field complaints and try to rectify a situation that had been simmering for awhile. We worked our asses off and while I'm sad, I'm also proud of what we did do.

But the reason for closing the game was not over the 1XP reward.

@permabern said:

This Forum doesn't allow posts over 32kb. In 2015.
How exactly do I post a 30 minute or less log of insansity from a MU?

For the love of Cthulhu, please don't post a 100k log here. 😞