How can we incentivize IC failure?

hobos

As someone who plays MUDs more, I can say that the lack-of-opportunity is a more MUSH-specific problem. If there are mechanized systems in place and everything occurs organically, then you're basically just running around playing the character you wrote all the time, and there isn't that same thirst for situations to shine. The thirst can't be avoided in a low-code environment, because you require a GM to run a scene specifically, and this is serious human labor that can't just be a backdrop to a persistent world.

Misadventure

@hobos Sorta not really related but -- in a low code environment, you can lay out a variety of tasks with the necessary skill levels/rolls needed. You can get pretty detailed with that (it's the game play structure of the coded systems so you are halfway to it).

Older survival TTRPGs had charts etc for finding parts and materials and jury rigging, creating, maintaining, repairing various vital technologies.

One could do the same for things like "find allies, create a coalition" etc.

It still could use some record keeping and story adjudication but the pieces can be created. Super clever folks can even make those bits into RP, as opposed to just mechanically satisfying a thirst for success/validation.

kk

Kinds of failure that suck.

Failure that actually is or is perceived to be fully or partly because of unfair advantage given by staff. Such as failing to someone who was being large amounts of cakey xp by staff, had secret special powers, were boosted up by npcs and etc.
Failure at the one thing someone's characters does mainly because of unlucky dice to a degree that it makes seem storyline wise that one's character is not expert healer, chef, whatever.
Failure that was evitable because of impossibly hard dice rolls. Although if that task was really almost impossible than this is fine imo. But if if the dice roll asked for was basically impossible to make, but the task trying to do was basic/easy that sucks. I have seen this before.
Huge risk, almost no reward failures. Such as having huge terrible consequences for failing, but if one succeeded it wouldn't have been much of a reward. Getting maimed fighting a super powerful demon is epic and a good hero moment worth the risk to many. Getting perm wounds/maimed tripping over a log in the forest sucks. I have seen this huge risk/basically no rewards from storytellers before.
Failure that leads to lost rp opportunities, such as not being taken on plotline, meetings and etc. These happen, but it they understandably can be super disappointing.

On the other hand...It is also annoying when failure rp is dealt with badly or even sometimes when there is huge reward/no risk

people who fail at something small or unimportant, but act like their world is ending - I admit I might have done this before myself!
People who make up excuses for all the reasons their character failed which wasn't just that they failed! It was everything but my character's doing that they failed!
People who are bitchy to the gm/storyteller when they fail.
Cakey plotlines for friends which have massive rewards/but zero risk, especially if metaplot staring scenes and etc. I don't mind cakey small scope prps for friends though as these generally don't have huge rewards and are generally not competitive with the rest of the game.

And the best way to fail!

Rp it well. Make it fun for others. Don't make a big deal about it and carry on. Pose and rp that one's character did fail and roll with the punches.

il-volpe

@kk

Also suck:

The sixth failure in a row.
The failure that makes an ordinarily indifferent-appearing GM suddenly seem all eager. e.g. You've been waiting weeks for a response on your attempts to investigate the ocelot, which is what you want to play, but y'know, staff time is limited. In the meantime you botch a +urinate roll and the GM pounces on you to give you a scene where you get bladder stones, which is not what you want to play.

(7 can be easy to do accidentally as a GM, if you automate or run on auto when you sort/triage your docket.)

Arkandel

One of the common pitfalls in many of the games I've played is that risk is up to the GM running a PrP, but rewards are heavily restricted or simply not systematized in any way whatsoever.

So for example, I want to run a PrP where the characters are going after some gnolls. I arbitrarily decide to make this pretty hard (or don't know how to scale the challenge) so I max the NPC stats, add a higher level chieftain, etc... so the PCs barely make it out alive. Perhaps some don't. However since there's no staff oversight not much can come of it. I don't have the authority to throw some actually tangible rewards at the end - perhaps not even more XP than if this was a birthday party PrP. Certainly nothing like a title, recognition by important NPC leadership (who're only played by staff who may never even hear about the PrP), some kind of magic item, etc.

So essentially PCs were risked for, well, nothing more than what the exact same adventure would have been at a fraction of its difficulty.

This happened regularly in WoD games where combat was pretty bursty. It was possible even a solid character could get one- or two-shot by a solid roll. But on the other hand PrPs' rewards were often flat regardless of the challenge rating, or simply scaled terribly; if going to your IC cousin's engagement party is worth half the XP of a potentially deadly combat, the latter objectively isn't worth the risk. Sooner or later the dice would go the other way and you would be rerolling.

il-volpe

@arkandel Yep.

I'm more-or-less against XP as a plot-reward on MUs, since getting to participate in a plot/event (especially one that's risky and meaningful and not a birthday party) is itself a reward more desirable than XP. The extra XP seems like, here, you did such a good job eating cake that you deserve an ice cream too. Some most intense 'no fair fucking favouritism' feels came from hearing somebody talk about how many "luck"/"karma" rescue-me-with-a-reroll-or-a-deus-ex-or-I'll-die points they'd spent when other (equally active with older or same-age PCs) players never had call to even consider using them.

McGuffins are under-used, and your point (very firmly) stands in that case, and also in the case of IC respect rewards.

HorrorHound

I'm working on something to assist in this mechanically but -- would you guys mind telling all of us what systems you use for the games you want to see failure in?

Example: World of Darkness is typically Attribute+Skill+Bonuses vs Difficulty due to X or vs. opponents Att+Skills.

WoDs XP-System is (roughly): I trade A-amount of XP for Dots in Skills, or Specialty. XP is rewarded as 123. NWoD is rewarded as 123-BEATS to = 1 XP.

I promise, this'll make sense later.

il-volpe

@horrorhound Now I'm all curious.

I can see a deal where you get a fifth of an extra die, or a tenth of a reroll for every fail/botch, so you can save 'em up and do spectacular stuff if you screw up enough. That could be fun.

(But alas, is still subject opportunity shortage issues.)

faraday

@il-volpe said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

I can see a deal where you get a fifth of an extra die, or a tenth of a reroll for every fail/botch, so you can save 'em up and do spectacular stuff if you screw up enough. That could be fun.

So I remember TTRPG and early MUSH systems that incentivized XP through skill use. The only thing it incentivized was rolling for the stupidest stuff as often as humanly possible so you'd bank up the XP.

Then of course there are the merit/flaw systems, which basically just incentivize players to take silly or toothless flaws in order to "balance" their merits.

Or the systems where someone takes a -2 in some little-used attribute in order to get a bonus to one that's going to come up all the time.

These ideas almost never work out the way the designers intended.

il-volpe

@faraday Yep. It'd have to be only for GM-called rolls or people will roll for loopy stuff and not just for the fun of it.

Mwaha, yeah, re: merits and flaws. I tend to forget them when making characters 'cause I don't let players use them when I run table-top.

HorrorHound

@il-volpe @faraday

Well, if we list all the ways these games actually handle XP I think we'll come across a mercantile pattern.

What I have run into in the past, specifically with TorilMUD, is that the use of a skill = raising that skill. More difficult tasks are far more difficult, but success is usually rewarded with a whole skill dot.

Using the skeleton of Physical/Mental/Social from WoD, you can provide a base of a character. A base of which skills will be naturally favored and thus easier to raise, and starting already hefty.

From there, the choice of TSK is much the same.

Moving on, you don't reward XP for scenes or from +votes, but rather, through CodeMagic, make it so skills are raised by the number AND quality of rolls made. Failure is going to occur organically, and I've seen this work via Age of Alliances' janky system.

You roll through CGen, pick PSM then TSK, merits, flaws, etc. Get starting XP to allocate wherever for flavor and customization...then it's all based on your game afterwards. XP can be rewarded safely in small intervals (as intended by the original system) without creating insanity vacuums.

Arkandel

@il-volpe said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

@arkandel Yep.

I'm more-or-less against XP as a plot-reward on MUs, since getting to participate in a plot/event (especially one that's risky and meaningful and not a birthday party) is itself a reward more desirable than XP. The extra XP seems like, here, you did such a good job eating cake that you deserve an ice cream too. Some most intense 'no fair fucking favouritism' feels came from hearing somebody talk about how many "luck"/"karma" rescue-me-with-a-reroll-or-a-deus-ex-or-I'll-die points they'd spent when other (equally active with older or same-age PCs) players never had call to even consider using them.

Some good questions quickly arise; what you reward XP for, how one receives them (is it a 'pull' where you file a +job or a 'push' where somehow XP is granted to you proactively), and the most important one of all - what are you trying to promote through XP rewards in general?

The first question is perhaps the easiest. Is it participation? Achievement? Effort? Activity? But - as staff - you need to consciously be aware of what you're throwing XPs at.

With the second question gets trickier. For example a 'pull' system is by definition biased towards those who will file such +jobs; some players do, some really don't (or not nearly as often). Not everyone likes to type justifications or face scrutiny from staff, no matter whether staff will scrutinize or not; the expectation is often enough of a barrier. And yet 'push' systems are prone to their own issues - automatic systems don't understand nuance (how could they). But staff isn't always there at every scene either. +vote systems are notorious for promoting cliques. So how do XP reach your players? What is the poison you're willing to pick for your game?

Finally... rewards (including XP) are there for a reason. Which kinds of players - which sorts of behaviors - are you, as staff, directly promoting through its distribution? For instance noted above, if the main way to earn it is PrPs then those who run scenes (and those who befriend them ) are the main beneficiaries. If you only incentivize success then those who win get ahead; is it any wonder, then, that some folks metagame, get upset when they lose, etc? You could always reward things on a flat scale, too ("everyone gets <X> experience a week if they log on") which promotes... logins. Is that enough of a bar for you and your game?

I feel until questions such as these are part of a MU*'s design then working on how to mitigate the negative side-effects of IC failure itself is more challenging than it needs to be.

Lotherio

I've been stewing on this for a couple days (and enjoy the extra day off by not doing much).

@horrorhound said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

CodeMagic, make it so skills are raised by the number AND quality of rolls made.

I think this gets to the crux of what everyone is saying. If rolling the skill a lot, success or failure, nets some gain ... then folks will game the system by sitting together in a room and spamming rolls throughout the day.

On MUDs this works, my favorite type back in the day was Nightmare LPMUDs, where I didn't get XP for killing mobs, I got it by using my skills. The higher the skill the harder the tasks I could do to raise those skills more. I couldn't kill the noob squirrels in noob woods 500 times to raise stealth by burning XP at my rogue class trainer, I had to go pick pocket the merchants a lot then when stealth was ready to train I asked the rogue trainer to raise my stealth.

On MUSH, the assumption is folks RP together, incentivizing rolling skills moves the needle away from RP'ing and more towards rolling skills, more like a MUD.

I know I'm being dicey there are fine RPI/RPE MUDs that blur the lines. But, for me at least, this is the distinction, on a MUD I could theoretically spend all day doing things solo to raise skills and such while on a MUSH, if I'm solo in a room nothing at all is happening.

This gets to the issue @Arkandel made, a GM scene has weight where as a PRP does not. There is no incentive to winning or failing in the PRP. My usual caveat, I've played for 30 years no without being in GM scenes/plots/events.

The places better for me have been the ones that do periodic XP regardless of activity. This has been the more universal system games. FS3 has given a small but even amount of XP to players on a weekly basis. The old D6 games (Dahan's included) would give so much CP per week.

The non-XP incentives and rewards can be distributed evenly between GM events and PrP, the issue then comes in accountability. Three players can sit in a room together for 8 hours and say they ran a plot to defeat the lich king to become Thespian Guildmaster of the Bardic College. But how do we know they did that with some risk/reward type rolls aside from trust? The answer has been logs but then there is a really high push back about some folks not wanting to provide logs, or not liking to log their RP or some such.

So what I'm seeing overall, is a system to reward RP and incentivize IC failure would be good but a system to reward RP and incentivize IC failure is a lot of effort?

I think adventure ideas for PCs in which they post the logs after and get some rewards is fine, but I know most folks won't do this even if you code it all the way through (+adventure/next to go to next scenario when all criteria are met, such as +roll/lute vs lich king/8 three times and the system tracks wins/losses on those three rolls). A system could easily be smart enough in old/new MUSH codes to do this. A +adventure system that initiates a scene when two or more folks agree to start it, then the first scene is so many of X rolls, it captures the first three they can't roll 12 until they get three successes. The +next part can see if they've done the rolls and to what degree and advance to the next scenario. This can be done on a MUSH (just like the Ares CG of being anywhere can be done in old MU softcode, rooms are not needed). I've literally done things to try and incentivize RP by saying do one of the following (argue with a stranger, get pick pocketed, stop a criminal, etc.) and post a scene to get some XP and no one posts scenes.

I'm falling in line with if the culture doesn't incentivize on its own for failure, then its more like what everyone has been saying. Folks just want to roll their good skill and win. I've played all walks of Mu genre, and comics are my favorite because those are the ones where more folks tend towards the sparkle rotation. They spotlight this week but spend a few weeks letting others rotate through the spotlight. @Ghost had something of this concept to transfer to other genres in his wrestling talks when saying the loser takes the fall to help make the winner look better. Or the Loser poses the results but not in a manner of, the sun was in my eyes cause I would have won on a thousand other days. Not everyone on Comic mu*s takes the fall like that, but more often than not that's where I see failure being more accepted as part of the rotation to get back to your spotlight time.

The thing that makes comics different is everyone is a snowflake, they just have their unique thing. Batman, Superman, Zatanna and Wonderwoman can rotate being badass because they each have a unique thing they tend to do. Some blurred lines with Superman and Wonderwoman sure, but they can juggle enough between backstories that they can take turns being masters of kick assery. Most comics places aren't always stat based and more folks look to the descriptions (can lift X amount of pounds, or master of fist-jitsu, or withstand heat of sun).

I don't know if this is going anywhere, but I think a game that focuses less on the rolls and more on the story may be better towards incentivizing IC failure system-wise; and good players, regardless of system, are going to make failing into a story no matter what I think.

HorrorHound

@Lotherio

At the end of the day it's about trust, as well as common sense. One of things that Modern Nights does is the code creates 'scenes'. Then you can trace roll activity to the scene. But, I get it.

faraday

@horrorhound said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

but rather, through CodeMagic, make it so skills are raised by the number AND quality of rolls made

How do you measure quality though? On MUDs or RPIs you have coded difficulty levels that have actual meaning - a level 20 mob, or crafting an item with difficulty 7.

These structures simply do not exist on MUSHes.

Even the concept of "only GM rolls" is inherently flawed - many valuable scenes occur between players, not involving GMs at all. Even in GM scenes, rolls can be few and far between. (I defer to narration more than rolls in the vast majority of my GMed scenes.)

Any such system would necessitate shifting to either judged RP logs (which has certainly been done, but is problematic for all the reasons @Lotherio mentioned) or a more RPI-like framework (which runs counter to the reason most of us MUSH vs. MUD in the first place).

So in short, I don't think this that mechanically rewarding rolls with XP will ever be a viable solution in a MUSH environment.

HorrorHound

@faraday

Using the difficulty system provided by WoD.

faraday

@horrorhound said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

Using the difficulty system provided by WoD.

Right, so me and my buddy just sit around typing roll Melee vs Hard for an hour.

Arkandel

@faraday I think one of the least recognized issues with rolls in general is that staff who implement systems based on that system expect them to be used.

They are not being used. Most players don't roll in social encounters unless there's some kind of pivotal moment, usually around conflict. That's pretty rare. They do get used in PrPs when prompted by a GM but of course that, too, is biased toward those with access to such scenes.

However the Venn diagram of game-runners and roll-users is sometimes close to a full circle.

faraday

@arkandel said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

They are not being used. Most players don't roll in social encounters unless there's some kind of pivotal moment, usually around conflict. That's pretty rare. They do get used in PrPs when prompted by a GM but of course that, too, is biased toward those with access to such scenes.

Totally agree, but I don't see that as a problem. My games always contain this guidance:

Players are always free to skip rolls and negotiate a resolution as befits the story, as long as everyone agrees. You should consider using an ability roll if the character is under significant stress, facing challenging circumstances or in conflict with another character.

You can use your character sheet as a guide for what your PC can accomplish without ever picking up dice. I rarely call for rolls in GMed scenes, and when I do it's mostly for "who notices this thing first" not "roll to see if you fall and die".

It all comes down to your philosophy.

HorrorHound

@faraday

Don't fail too often.

Also, the Down and Dirty Combat is A+