Creative Outlets

peasoupling

@peasoupling said in Creative Outlets:

@lithium said in Creative Outlets:

See I love posing /actions/ people can respond to, not stuff that is a barrier to entry to RP. They can easily look at my character and read what I look like, or if they know me, they have already done so and posing it over and over again can be... intrusive.

I feel like people respond to what people look like all the time, though. Moreso if it's something that's likely to stand out for some reason, whether because it just does, or because of context. Maybe you're in leopard print, hot pink, and wearing gold mirrored aviators indoors. Or maybe you're wearing a vintage Dior dress with pockets, which is always relevant.

Either way, I don't tend to have a description for every single outfit my characters might wear. The closest is on Arx, but even then people kinda skim and assume all kinds of things.

Yes people respond to what people look like, but there are /so many/ multi-descers out there that are /easy/ to use and manipulate on the fly. There's absolutely no reason to need to pose it every single time rather than set a multidescer up.

Well, generally my descriptions include the character's general sense of style and fashion, the kinds of clothes you'll likely see them in, not specifics. They don't wear the same clothes every day, but I'm probably not going to multidesc the entirety of their wardrobe in advance. I did once, but the character was a street rat, literally.

Auspice

I include clothing in my poses. Usually my first pose. And usually it's only about a sentence worth.

That's not worth my time to deal with a descer. And if you're fussing over spaaaaaaam, people would be even more spammed to look at my entire desc if I'm going "BY THE WAY GUIZ MY DESC IS VITAL YOU NEED TO LOOK AT IT" ... when I could just toss out a single sentence / half-sentence in a pose.

And yes, that includes everyone seeing it again, because we're talking a volume scale. One line vs. the (considering my average desc length) 8-10 and considering I RP on average with only about 4 people max except on rare occasions. So even if I begin with just 1 person and 3 others join, the spam quotient is ultimately less if I pose 1 sentence of desc per vs forcing each and every person to view my entire desc.

And let's be honest, expecting people view your desc every time you RP with them is absolutely attention-demanding behavior.

Auspice

@peasoupling said in Creative Outlets:

@lithium said in Creative Outlets:

@peasoupling said in Creative Outlets:

@lithium said in Creative Outlets:

See I love posing /actions/ people can respond to, not stuff that is a barrier to entry to RP. They can easily look at my character and read what I look like, or if they know me, they have already done so and posing it over and over again can be... intrusive.

I feel like people respond to what people look like all the time, though. Moreso if it's something that's likely to stand out for some reason, whether because it just does, or because of context. Maybe you're in leopard print, hot pink, and wearing gold mirrored aviators indoors. Or maybe you're wearing a vintage Dior dress with pockets, which is always relevant.

Either way, I don't tend to have a description for every single outfit my characters might wear. The closest is on Arx, but even then people kinda skim and assume all kinds of things.

Yes people respond to what people look like, but there are /so many/ multi-descers out there that are /easy/ to use and manipulate on the fly. There's absolutely no reason to need to pose it every single time rather than set a multidescer up.

Well, generally my descriptions include the character's general sense of style and fashion, the kinds of clothes you'll likely see them in, not specifics. They don't wear the same clothes every day, but I'm probably not going to multidesc the entirety of their wardrobe in advance. I did once, but the character was a street rat, literally.

Double-post since this came in while I was writing. This, yes. This is why I write the single-line in my entrance pose. Because my main desc includes the general sense of style, so my main pose can be like 'Today s/he is wearing...' and a simple <blah> of what it is.

Lithium

@auspice We all know that I'm not talking about the one line people.

I'm talking about the people who have to detail /every little thing/ in their pose about how special their outfit is.

As for spamming when people read a description? No. That's not spam. That is me choosing to read your description at a time that is convenient to me. It isn't being tossed out there on everyone's screen.

faraday

In my experience, the overwhelming majority of players never read character descs. Folks can lament about the “good old days” and moan about lazy people all they want, but it doesn’t change the reality. Descs should be considered supplementary info for those who care, and the essentials captured in glance and emits as appropriate.

Arkandel

@faraday said in Creative Outlets:

In my experience, the overwhelming majority of players never read character decs. Folks can lament about the “good old days” and moan about lazy people all they want, but it doesn’t change the reality. Descs should be considered supplementary info for those who care, and the essentials captured in glance and emits as appropriate.

I used to read descriptions more. Ever since PC wiki pages became a thing I do so more rarely - that's the only thing that's changed at least in my use case.

@Lithium, I won't debate that the posed description issue any more since sounds like a pet peeve. We all have them and you're entitled to yours.

Bobotron

@faraday
I try to read descs, but the last game I was on was more purple prose descs than not, which kinda killed my interest in two page mass scrolling descs.

On the flipside, I suck at describing cuts/etc. of clothing, so a general desc plus an image link to an outfit is about what I'm up for nowadays, barring a few things.

Lithium

@faraday said in Creative Outlets:

In my experience, the overwhelming majority of players never read character descs. Folks can lament about the “good old days” and moan about lazy people all they want, but it doesn’t change the reality. Descs should be considered supplementary info for those who care, and the essentials captured in glance and emits as appropriate.

That is because of the prevalence of PB's and wiki pictures. We've /lost/ a major chunk of what used to be an introduction to a person's writing style and persona.

The description.

Remember when Descriptions used to give us an indicator of how much crazy we were dealing with? Or how someone posed, typed, or otherwise?

This aim for the most common denominator just puts an emphases on mediocrity.

Zobi

I like to pose what my char is wearing. I adore characters with distinctive styles, but I try to reel myself in. It's hard sometimes.....

That said, I adore making things like play lists, clothing pinterest boards, etc. That'll get me into my character faster than writing a background.

I loathe backgrounds.

Arkandel

I just remembered another thing I figured out helps me a lot, and it came from an unexpected direction at the time... spend justifications.

So on Haunted Memories and then partially on The Reach you had to justify (some of) your +xp spends. It was of course typical red tape bullshit passed down from one generation of staff to the next without really thinking it through, but as I was going through the paces I found out both that I liked it, but also that it helped me; there are stuff - usually solitary activities - my characters were up to I never thought about since they never saw the light of day. Stuff that was just a bit too boring or irrelevant in an interactive fashion came out as did details about their downtime and passive interests... and that made them more real in my head.

Actually later on when I played on a Kushiel MUSH and on Arx I found journals worked mostly for the same reason. I didn't use them to summarize stuff I already knew as much as to try and come up with stuff my characters knew and I didn't... which was always more than I had figured, once I started typing them out.

Dunno. Maybe I just like writing about RP.

Lithium

@arkandel I like justifications for anything out of the ordinary. I also like the idea that all characters should not be experts at everything.

The current trend of give everyone tons of xp is to me, homogenizing. Nobody is special if everyone is.

If I have a character who is of a specific type, and they should be good at this one thing, it's ok to not be awesome at /everything/ else. It adds to character personality and strengthens the 'group' ideal.

If everyone fights as well as the Rahu/Ahroun, then they lose a lot of what makes them special.

The problem is we see these huge character sheets, and power creep gets involved, and then you need to have uber big bads to challenge the group because everyone is capable of taking on regular stuff.

3 /should/ be a perfectly acceptable skill level for a professional soldier with experience...

Limits are great for creative outlet because it helps characters find their niche and what makes them special.

Arkandel

@lithium said in Creative Outlets:

The current trend of give everyone tons of xp is to me, homogenizing. Nobody is special if everyone is.

Well sure and I agree, but I'm not sure how that applies to what I was saying unless you meant it to be something new?

Lithium

@arkandel I was branching off of your saying you liked justifications.

surreality

@lithium said in Creative Outlets:

3 /should/ be a perfectly acceptable skill level for a professional soldier with experience...

I actually agree with you about this completely. And per the way WoD is written, it should be like that.

With the way they made the mechanics, though? I played a con artist who never once got a single success on a roll to lie with a 4 subterfuge and 4 manipulation. (And I rolled it a few dozen times over the course of playing the character, so it's just just a case of 'never rolled it'.)

Either that's really, really, really spectacularly shitty luck with the dice roller -- which unfortunately has been consistent in other cases as well for me at least -- or they maybe didn't quite figure their mechanics and intent in a way that matches up as well as may have been intended. Like, failure's obviously a part of the game (and should be), but you'd think someone who is a professional X wouldn't fail at it 100% (or even 80%) of the time, and success should maybe be part of the game at least sometimes, too... -.-

Bobotron

@surreality
Yeah. This is my complaint about all dice pool systems, really. It can add to drama and tension but it tends to fall apart under true 'would be great at' scenarios.

ETA: This is part of why I like the MET variants. Laws of the <stuff> and MET VtM still have issues of 'you can fail 1/3 of the time' but there are many ways to mitigate things (and if you're good at a non-contested test, a lot of times you can just succeed and go on). And NWoD MET definitely pushed away the variances, though it traded stuff out for hypercomptency (I can't count how many times I"ve seen, and been able to build, characters who can get an exceptional success on an average draw, and don't fail unless they draw a 1 which is an autofail).

faraday

@surreality said in Creative Outlets:

I actually agree with you about this completely. And per the way WoD is written, it should be like that.

A professional rolling 5 dice (3 skill + 2 stat) gets at least one success about 83% of the time. So if you rolled a "few dozen times" and literally never got a single success then please never take that char to Vegas because your luck is astonishingly abnormally bad

Arguably though 83% is low for a competent professional doing "their thing" under routine circumstances. But that's an artifact of the nWoD dice in particular. SR4 and FS3 have different percentages.

Lithium

@faraday said in Creative Outlets:

@surreality said in Creative Outlets:

I actually agree with you about this completely. And per the way WoD is written, it should be like that.

A professional rolling 5 dice (3 skill + 2 stat) gets at least one success about 83% of the time. So if you rolled a "few dozen times" and literally never got a single success then please never take that char to Vegas because your luck is astonishingly abnormally bad

Arguably though 83% is low for a competent professional doing "their thing" under routine circumstances. But that's an artifact of the nWoD dice in particular. SR4 and FS3 have different percentages.

A competent professional should be able to get by without rolling dice to begin with, every 4 dice is 1 success in a non-stressful/high pressure situation. So 5 dice should get them through the average work day. Now take a professionally skilled person (3 skill) with good aptitude (3 attribute) and a specailization (1 more dice) and you're up to 7. 7 dice should get at least 1-2 successes on most rolls, above 90% of the time. In general.

When you factor in equipment bonuses it gets even better (Because a professional should have professional grade equipment) for +2 dice or so, which puts you at 8 or 9 dice which should be 2 successes for rote/mundane stuff.

This segue's into the creative outlet part to me, because what a character is, and isn't, good at should be part of the creative process, but there is a very real fear in a lot of games that we're going to make a character, and then be useless cuz of sheet optimization, or twinkery.

Arkandel

@surreality said in Creative Outlets:

With the way they made the mechanics, though? I played a con artist who never once got a single success on a roll to lie with a 4 subterfuge and 4 manipulation. (And I rolled it a few dozen times over the course of playing the character, so it's just just a case of 'never rolled it'.)

According to http://nwod.org/wiki/index.php/Probability_Math the chance of rolling at least one success with 8 dice is 94.23%.

It is obviously possible to roll no successes, even on multiple attempts, but that's not a failure with the mechanics since the math checks out.

ThatGuyThere

@goldfish said in Creative Outlets:

I play a character that is usually a jeans and t-shirt guy. But lo and behold, in THIS scene, he's wearing a suit. Maybe it's pressed and fresh. Maybe it's rumpled and the tie is undone. Why is this character wearing a suit all of a sudden?

I agree with the sentiment but not the execution, if my PC who is a jeans and t-shirt guy is wearing a suit then I will have his suit desc on. Someone waiting for me to pose on outfit in a scene would be waiting forever.
I don't really mind them being posed but I am much more likely to look at something if i want to refresh my memory on a desc rather than scroll up so what the desc says will be what I tend to be roleplaying with anyway.

Seraphim73

@thatguythere said in Creative Outlets:

...if my PC who is a jeans and t-shirt guy is wearing a suit then I will have his suit desc on.

I tend to be somewhere in between. If my PC is usually a jeans-and-t-shirt-guy is wearing a suit, I'll have a suit desc, but I'll also mention that he's wearing a suit in my intro-pose. Just one little mention, not any detail about the suit (unless it's bloody or rumpled or something very distinct). If they want detail, they can look at my desc, which will (usually) be a suit desc. Because I'm a desc nerd.