Eldritch - A World of Darkness MUX

[Coin]

@tragedyjones
Dude, your sheet does not translate well. Maybe put it between code lines?

@RDC Yeah, I'm not too worried about that, anyway. Aspirations in general are just something people need to get used to.

[Glitch]

I'm not trying to make people show their sheets. Or even saying there's anything wrong with efficient point expenditures or that @RDC has done anything wrong by being very active.

I don't even care if everyone is walking around with a 100+ XP at the end of a year. The only thing I was doing was pointing out that, if power-level and XP gain are areas of concern for where you see your game in a year, or two, or even three, then these are things to think about. The only reason I used Corbin is because Reno was the only place I played any GMC, he's been there since forever, is really active and I know he knows how to build a sheet.

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[Coin]

@Glitch, I understand. It's cool, and appreciated.

Explaining my rationale a little, there are a few reasons why I chose this method: 1) the one @Arkandel mentioned above; 2) I prefer people gain experience actively, even if it's a lot, to passive; 3) and the limit is mostly to have an idea of where the ceiling is, you know? I need to know, as the game runner, just how high people can be at any given time.

[Glitch]

@RDC I played the Daeva Invictus, Jonathan.

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[Ganymede]

@Coin said:

Explaining my rationale a little, there are a few reasons why I chose this method: 1) the one @Arkandel mentioned above; 2) I prefer people gain experience actively, even if it's a lot, to passive; 3) and the limit is mostly to have an idea of where the ceiling is, you know? I need to know, as the game runner, just how high people can be at any given time.

Your rationale reflects a bias towards players with a lot of time to actively RP without consideration of what the player brings to the game. In kind words, I find this rationale narrow-minded and short-sighted.

You really need to re-think how you treat XP, and not adopt policies which essentially cripple players for reasonably handling RL obligations.

[Coin]

@Ganymede, I'm running a game that needs activity to thrive. If a player doesn't do anything because they have RL obligations, I'm not going to shun them or punish them, but I'm not going to continue to reward them beyond whatever passive experience sthey'd be gaining. That creates a whole lot of resentment among those that are active.

I don't consider it narrow-minded or short-sighted; rather just taking a stance in the sort of policy I want to adapt for the game I'm running.

There are elements of my game that support people who want to run their own stories in their own slice of the setting without having to deal much at all with those outside of it. I did this specifically so that people could enjoy the game at their own pace as much as possible.

I have played on The Reach for a long time, I played on HM, and before that I played on a game with a much more "miserly" XP awards, and I've played on games without XP at all. Based on my experiences, this is the system that I feel will best represent a compromise between these styles of experience systems.

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[Coin]

@RDC said:

It's remarkably easy to get 'activity' XP in a GMC system, so long as you're willing to learn how it works, set goals that you want to pursue with each and every scene, and allow "bad" things to happen to your character, then react to those bad things in ways encouraged by the system. Get out there, fail. Dramatically fail. Take conditions. Resolve those conditions. Pursue your Aspirations. You can earn quite a few Beats in a scene or two. Will you have exactly as much XP as someone who actively runs plots for people twice a week every week and also has the time to RP and pursue their own goals/conditions et cetera? No. You might only get 75-80% of what that person gets.

That doesn't really bother me, and I don't really see it as "crippled".

Pretty much this. If a person "brings something to the game" with their limited activity, it is insanely easy to make that limited activity pay off big.

[Ganymede]

@Coin said:

I'm running a game that needs activity to thrive.

You don't need to offer a carrot to get people to generate the activity that you want to see. No one ever has. You merely need to enable the people that want to tell stories. Worse, you don't want to encourage people to tell shitty dramas just to earn carrots.

That creates a whole lot of resentment among those that are active.

There's that word again. "Active." What the hell does that even mean? And is that really want you want?

I will posit: no. What you really want is quality players that will generate their own stories and plots, and participate in what's offered. You want players that have the requisite social skills to get along and work with others. Those folks, by and large, are also the same folks that have full-time jobs, families, and other responsibilities.

The Reach keeps a lot of these players because those players know that they will eventually end up with the characters they want to play, regardless of the activity they put in. I believe this to be why The Reach retains a lot of quality players, despite the open-and-obvious shittiness going on there.

I have played on all sorts of games, and have for a long time. Your system will attract players, yes, and you will have activity. I fear, however, you will not attract the players you actually want, and that, in the long run, will become a problem for you.

[Coin]

@Ganymede

Active means active. It means engaging the game. It means being present and interacting with the environment provided. It means, in general, not sitting in the OOC Lounge all day talking about how much your job sucks and never going IC. It means having goals and doing things when you can to achieve them. You don't have to play every day, you just have to give the game you're playing some time. And if you can't, that's a shame, but hardly crippling.

You're assuming so much with absolutely zero knowledge of how I operate, which is basically your biggest mistake in this instance. Especially when you start trying to explain to me what I want by qualifying and classifying it based on your opinions. What I want is a good game where everyone gets along and can tell the stories they like within the theme and setting my fellow staffers and I have worked so hard to create. And if some of those plots are of great quality and if some others are of low quality will be determined by the players, when they play them, and in how much they enjoy them.

Furthermore, since I am offering about 100 experiences (GMC-style, over the course of a year and a half) with no real activity required, anyone who can't make "the character [they] want to play" with that kind of experience (which is, by common translation practices, about 500 first edition XP, without diminishing returns), is, "in kind words", short-sighted and narrow-minded, in my opinion.

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[lordbelh]

I think 4XP a week is a bit much in GMC, but I also think that a flat but diminishing rate combined with activity based XP is pretty spot. I like it. Most Dinos will fade in activity over time, even if the exceptional monster wont (and I'm OK with that), and this allows newer but more active players can catch up.

@Ganymede: You need people who are out and interact with the world and the other characters. Who does things, who has things happen to them (which is how most XP is gained on GMC). The more of this, the better, because talking about it and reacting to these things builds RP for everybody. Catering to people with limited time on their hands is good, but you can't just cater to them.

Edit: Text cleanup. Apparently I was rushing.

[Ganymede]

@Coin

I am assuming much, but my assumptions are based on personal knowledge and repeated observations over time. Pedantically, this isn't a mistake; this is how people think. But I am assuming a lot, which should have been clear from the start.

You seem to have confused my examples with my polemic: that's your mistake. My message is simple: your XP policy favors one group over another. And like any policy that does so, the disfavored are going to feel disenfranchised. I know of few people who enjoy feeling that way, so your policy may drive them elsewhere.

If you're not concerned about that, that's fine.

@lordbelh

I'm not a dullard; I know you need people to do that. I do it all the time. But I will admit that I get disenfranchised when I see others outpace my PC who do little but mill about socially getting XP.

When it comes down to it, I see no good reason to reward people who simply have more RP time or live in a timezone where there is bound to be more activity going on. Everyone connected to the game ought to have some desire to go out and play -- so why offer a reward to do so? Just fucking do it. Darkwater is fine example of a game that offered a flat reward of XP, yet had plenty of activity going on.

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[Glitch]

It's your game and policy, and there are different ideas of how to handle XP, but a couple things you said majorly peeve me.

@Coin said:

but I'm not going to continue to reward them

XP doesn't need to be a reward, merely a reflection of character growth. People get attached to their characters because of the RP and less-so because of their sheets. I'm not trivializing the importance in sheets as a reflection of a character, but there's no reason XP gain can't be a background consideration, rather than a prominent form of player "rewards".

That creates a whole lot of resentment among those that are active.

This annoys me more, though. XP is not some finite resource or zero-sum game. They resent that others are given XP for existing while they are out there earning their XP through some meaningful scene that is in no way a reward in and of itself. It's okay for people to get flat-rate XP as long as it's not as much, because that wouldn't be fair to all their hard work RP'ing.

In the end, I think XP is a poor form of reward, but it's common enough that I am probably in the minority for that opinion. The attitude that someone else getting XP at the same rate as you and not participating in the kind of way that you (generic you) participates is somehow worthy of resentment is shit. I take exception to it.

[Coin]

@Glitch, I never said I resented it; I said it could create resentment. I am perfectly capable of seeing a repercussion of a thing without actually being part of said repercussion.

I agree that perhaps "reward" was the wrong word; but if roleplay is its own reward (which I agree it is, not mentioning it explicitly doesn't mean I don't), that still leaves me with experience being the only thing I can, as the game-runnner, gauge.

Furthermore, these games in particular work on experience; the game itself--the system it is built with--reward you doing things with experience, as exemplified by @RDC above. These are the games we chose to create a MU for, so we follow that criteria.

[Arkandel]

There's no such thing as a 'better' or 'worse' system in a vacuum. It all depends on what kind of game you want to run.

If @Coin says this is the goal for his game then that's the best system possible for it. Compromises are being made at different parts for any given possible implementation, with different advantages and disadvantages. So he intends to get a game where oldbies are ahead but newbies can catch up with a bit of effort and time; that is the goal. If someone presented him with an alternative that works better with that in mind I get the impression he'd consider it.

Conversely, TR gets to keep its people despite its shittiness because no game has been created yet intending to be as popular. Reno has only one sphere, SHH is invitation-only, @Coin or @Glitch+@ES' games are still not available, etc. It's not (just) the XP system - I can't imagine anyone who's played on SHH would feel short on XPs, for example, as they flow pretty liberally.

[Glitch]

@Coin I used the generic you, when talking about it. I was not assuming you would be part of the group that resented it, I was merely addressing what you brought up.

And I did say I recognized that XP as a reward is common. These are tabletop games, so a MU translation obviously requires reworking some things. Taking it a step further than "2xp flat-rate, 4xp max, etc, etc" is just another part in the process, so I don't really find that argument as compelling. Like I said though, I know I'm in the minority there.