Feb 27, 2015, 7:05 PM
New Prospect MUSH
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@Coin said:
I do like the way you structure learning stuff. At least, the basic "no XP, just learning times" approach.
As a note I tried something similar to this on Darkwater: the Magening, and it seemed to work out alright -- but we got a very limited draw of people. I think folks are somewhat hesitant when they get told "no XP".
I'd be interested in seeing a multisphere nWoD game try it. The no XP thing I encountered for the first time on Peverel's oWoD game, but it wasn't learning time based it was just justification based. On Darkwater: the Magening your rolls in ST'd scenes counted as a tick to improve the stat, and you could justify as well.
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@Cobaltasaurus said:
I'd be interested in seeing a multisphere nWoD game try it. The no XP thing I encountered for the first time on Peverel's oWoD game, but it wasn't learning time based it was just justification based.
SHH is doing this in all but name. With a slight bit of activity XP is near infinite (I'm consistently over the XP I had when I started playing, and I spend pretty liberally). Between +vote/all, irregular PrP participation and if heavens forbid you file for Beats and the such, you'll never be XP starved. You'll almost always be waiting on learning something so you can start on something else, though.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Arkandel said:
SHH is doing this in all but name. With a slight bit of activity XP is near infinite (I'm consistently over the XP I had when I started playing, and I spend pretty liberally). Between +vote/all, irregular PrP participation and if heavens forbid you file for Beats and the such, you'll never be XP starved. You'll almost always be waiting on learning something so you can start on something else, though.
Unless you're like me and tend to RP at the end of the month, and no one has +Votes to give. It isn't actually the same, Arkandel.
You can say that in Elbonia they've done away with currency, and everything is going great for the few people content to live only there. And that in neighboring countries they've all but given up currency in name; so long as you work 80hours a week, had seed money to start with, and occasionally file paperwork with the bank to get more money you'll never have to worry about currency either!
It isn't the same.
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@Cobaltasaurus said:
Unless you're like me and tend to RP at the end of the month, and no one has +Votes to give. It isn't actually the same, Arkandel.
You can say that in Elbonia they've done away with currency, and everything is going great for the few people content to live only there. And that in neighboring countries they've all but given up currency in name; so long as you work 80hours a week, had seed money to start with, and occasionally file paperwork with the bank to get more money you'll never have to worry about currency either!
It isn't the same.
Obviously your milage may vary, I can only go over my own experiences here, but I really don't play very often (I'd say 2-3 times a week tops, with 2 being about average). Now granted, I ST so I'm sure I end up being in more public scenes than some people and I've gotten some +reccs, but I also spend XP like there's no tomorrow. I bet people who're on more consistently and play more regularly than I do are accummulating XP at a higher rate.
I could be wrong, of course.
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@Coin said:
I would probably limit it to "slots" and have certain stats occupy more slots than others. So maybe taking an Attribute from 3-4 occupies 3 slots (old rating, since this is oWoD Revised) for a time span calculated on 4 (the oWoD Revised multiplier for Attributes). If the "default time span" is "1 week", it would take 3 weeks.
Using this system means that people have to strategize what to raise, when to raise it, etc. It's actually pretty cool.
When we were originally building CoH, I had a system like this for learning times. The number of slots you had was based on one of your stats. You could use multiple slots to learn one thing faster but with diminishing returns. Ultimately we decided to not use learning times so it went out entirely. Still, it had the nice feature that you could be "preapproved" for a bunch of XP spends which I thought would make it more efficient from an administrative perspective. On New Prospect, we're not doing multiple slots for a single power for the sake of simplicity.
As an aside: your presentation regarding your views on RP Staff is pretty condescending. "RP Staff Are Bad"? Really? We get it, you don't like it, but you come off super bitter and resentful. Maybe consider revising the way you present your core reasoning to something positive, instead of "Boo on RP Staff! Shunnnn!"
This is a good point. We understand that specific people can be be good RP staffers. My personal belief is that things are stacked against the well-intentioned ethical RP staffers. When we walked away from City of Hope in 2013 I wrote a post mortem about the game and RP staff as a role in general. (http://www.cityofhopemush.com/cohdb/post-mortem.txt) A rough summary of what I said there is that plenty of staffers are unethical, the ethical ones are severely disadvantaged, and that unethical behavior is significantly more incentivized than ethical behavior. I'll make no claim that my premises or rationale were air-tight.
That's not well-conveyed in the page you cite though. I can see it coming off as a claim that RP staffers are inherently unethical. I can see ethical (and unethical) RP staffers feeling personally insulted and that's not something I want. It should instead present our issues with RP staff as a common occurrence and explain that we think avoiding those issues is so important that we've gotten rid of RP staff to prevent it. Something like that anyway. I'll get some editing on it over the next couple of days.
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@Coin said:
What I really don't get is why they're still going with dice when it's Consent. Either go full consent or don't, IMO.
Some people like an element of chance. Players decide for themselves how a scene plays out. If they want to negotiate things, that's cool. If they want to roll dice, also cool. I think the best is to negotiate in advance which possible outcomes are acceptable and then let the game rules determine which outcome is realized. I'm not going to tell people what to do though.
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@ThatOneDude said:
Full consent always makes me think about the little shits that don't like ICA=ICC. So Player A comes up and plays keep away with the werewolf's hat ( Player B ) in a scene Player B is in with some other people. If the werewolf says, "Cool, since you are being an idiot I'll punch you in the mouth." Player A can say, "Nope..." and then continue to ruin any semblance of fun that could have been going on.
I recently saw this characterized as "Cowboys and Indians". "BANG BANG I SHOT YOU" vs "NUH UH". The game as whole will succeed or fail based on our ability to foster and support a culture that encourages and rewards cooperation and disincentivizes obstructionism. Maybe the game will become dominated by disruptive players and tank. We'll work against it, we hope we can stay on top.
The only recourse then is to what? Break up the scene, go to a private room where other "good" RPers can't join easily. Where does that lead us? Cliques?
The first recourse is to deal with them directly. When we speak to people politely and respectfully, it sometimes gets results without the need for some authority to come in and slap people around.
If it doesn't, the next step would be to leave the person behind. It's inconvenient, but if done consistently the offender won't find RP. If they continually try to insert themselves into RP where they're disruptive it becomes an issue of OOC conduct, not of RP consent. Then I get involved and discuss that player's role on the game and set up some guidelines.
Cliques don't form because one person chases everyone away. Cliques form because a group of people feel more comfortable RPing with each other than with the player base at large. Cliques are a part of human behavior.
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Have people not yet learned that a Storyteller System game with NO STORYTELLERS is no game at all?
“Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.”
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@The-Tree-of-Woe said:
Have people not yet learned that a Storyteller System game with NO STORYTELLERS is no game at all?
Just because there are no Storytellers on staff it doesn't mean there are no Storytellers.
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It sounds more like the plan is to put the story back in the players hands over staff running the show. At least that is my take.
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@Arkandel said:
Just because there are no Storytellers on staff it doesn't mean there are no Storytellers.
Having played on City of Hope, it means exactly that. And that whatever supernatural critter the staffers play (at CoH, mages) will get tons of candy. The others will be whacked with the nerf-bat.
“Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn -
As for the rest... of course corrupt, self-serving administrators are an impediment to a game. I don't think that's a good reason on its own to not have Storytellers on staff though, it presents a fair bit of an overreaction to something that can just as easily impact other aspects of the MU*. After all you'll need staff for other things.
The absence of metaplot consistency alone is probably something to be concerned about. Not that a global sandbox doesn't go well with consent-only rules because it does, but I still don't think it's worth the loss of thematic oversight and the possibility of at least occasional introduction of new elements to enrich the game.
Still, I'd be curious to see how the experiment goes.It could be fun, especially if you get enough player interest around launch to get some momentum going.
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@The-Tree-of-Woe said:
@Arkandel said:
Just because there are no Storytellers on staff it doesn't mean there are no Storytellers.
Having played on City of Hope, it means exactly that. And that whatever supernatural critter the staffers play (at CoH, mages) will get tons of candy. The others will be whacked with the nerf-bat.
I will second that there will be no Storytellers if they behave at all like they did back before they handed the game off, in which a staffer got involved with a player storyteller's plot with their character, took the scenes completely over and tried to edge people out, and threw an absolute fit when the player storyteller wasn't interested in just changing their plot to an outcome that suited the staffer.
They talk a good talk about ethical behavior, and are lying through their fucking teeth.
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Was it one of the current staffers that did this, Sunny, or was it one of the two originals? I'm vaguely playing there, and think I even met your PC there when I first started (I've only been there six months or so). You were Lark, weren't you?
That said, how has the game been forked off? Is the grid and PC DB the same? Are there going to be 10-15 alts per staffer like CoH has now? Is everyone going to be starting stats, or are we going to continue to see some animals being more equal than others (either I'm just rubbish at min-maxing, or people have been coming into CoH with crazy fucking sheets. Eh, probably both...)?
When I've been inspired to play, I've had a decent time with the Hermetics. They were the only people interested in picking my PC up - the changelings couldn't give a shit, and the Arcanum's heavy hitters wound up crapping out before really getting going. And, I admit, the lack of direction from staff is frustrating sometimes. It's nice to have some sort of top-down plot going on, even as a simple framework for PrPs. I don't like the complete reliance upon PrPs for everything, though. I have had no issue with the Hermetic stuff I've been getting (any lack of activity with that is my own fault), but it would also be nice to have some meatier things to investigate that aren't also being invented by ourselves.
And I can't stress enough how pleasant it would be to have events and things that weren't simply staffalt-and-crony circlejerks. That's pretty goddamn boring for the rest of us.
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As far as CoH goes, what the shit is up with all the hip, urbane, charming Wyrm PCs who just want to hang out and... I don't know, beat their girlfriends with tentacle-dicks or something. Cripes.
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@hedgehog said:
Was it one of the current staffers that did this, Sunny, or was it one of the two originals? I'm vaguely playing there, and think I even met your PC there when I first started (I've only been there six months or so). You were Lark, weren't you?
One of the two originals. I have had Lark there from very early on in the game; I walked away for a good long while after the incident in question (there were and are other issues with the game, but I am only going to speak to things that specifically happened to me). When things got passed off I went back and tried again a few different times, since some old friends played there, and there were some fun new people to play with. I'm a sucker for getting drug places I know better than to play on just because amg I haven't played with that person in forever.
I have plenty of stories about the current staff on the game, but neither group even manages to smell like scotch broom, let alone roses.
As well, keep in mind that under their full consent rules, they are very much anti-consequence. Common sense has not in the past been applied with them, and these two are very gung-ho on staff not getting involved unless it's something like harassment.
For example, someone refusing to follow in-the-book sphere rules complained about not wanting to have to do so, and in response the IC reality was changed, adding a different political group to the grid that was NPC based and did not enforce consequences that the PC in question could belong to, rather than making the character face any sort of consequences. It was quite ridiculous.
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ANY adversarial game + Full Consent = Yeah, no.
Not saying this game will fail, or anything like that -- but Full Consent, as mentioned before, has been used by too many assholes for assholish reasons for me to want to be anywhere near there.
Shit happens in RPGs. You don't always win. You kinda consent to those two things happening by signing up for a mu*, MMO, or tabletop RPG, IMO shrug
Good luck, tho.
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