nWoD 2.0 inter-sphere balance and mechanics
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@Arkandel said:
Other than for the recognition factor, how is that different from simply automating gains, however? I.e. what's the difference between this approach and say, TR's when it comes to advancing through XP?
Actually, The Reach isn't a flat-XP system. It's a "reward so much that no one gives a shit at the end of the day" system. The proposed system is, to invent a phrase, an "objective-based reward" system.
To compare it to Dark Water's system, an objective-based-XP system limits growth to the achievement of goals set by staff. With that system, if you do nothing, you get nothing. On Dark Water, you got your XP for puttering around doing nothing. Activity therefore is mandated.
On your traditional, multisphere WoD game, this probably won't work well. A D&D game would have better success.
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A MU*'s lifeblood is in its casual players who log on a few times a week to have a scene, not those few who practically live there.
You keep saying this. I don't really agree or disagree, I'm just curious why you keep asserting it as if it's obviously true. It certainly seems like something you'd like to be true, but I'm not sure what you're basing the statement on.
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@HelloRaptor said:
A MU*'s lifeblood is in its casual players who log on a few times a week to have a scene, not those few who practically live there.
You keep saying this. I don't really agree or disagree, I'm just curious why you keep asserting it as if it's obviously true. It certainly seems like something you'd like to be true, but I'm not sure what you're basing the statement on.
Sure thing. Consider the following:
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By definition there are fewer hardcore players around than casual ones. Most people either don't get to spend eight+ hours day playing a game or they don't want to. So the majority of your playerbase will be the other kind.
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Players with that kind of time don't tend to stick around for long. I think that's a fair generalization - either the circumstances in their lives change to no longer allow it (i.e. they get a job, go back to school, etc) or they burn out. I've seen plenty of people who were pulling all-nighters one month vanish the next - but the person with a regular work schedule and income might 'only' get to play 6-7 hours a week, but they do it consistently and for longer - hence the 'lifeblood' remark.
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I've learned to mistrust people who can invest too much time in a game, and not just from MU'ing. The reason for this is human nature, we are naturally inclined to expect a return on our investments; if I sink most of my waking hours into something whether consciously or not I'm likely to believe myself entitled to receive something back from it. Such entitlements tend to go terribly awry, be it on WoW or a MUSH.
The hobby doesn't require a gigantic time investment. Mind you, to non-gamers even folks I'd refer to as casuals represent a nearly unthinkable commitment. But yes, I believe the latter are who games depend on to thrive, more so because the guy who gets to be online thirteen hours a day isn't adding that much more value to them than one who has say, three.
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@Arkandel
Of your three statements there I'd agree with the first, disagree with the second, and don't really feel the third weighs in on the idea one way or another. You might as well say that since human nature so often reflects the idea that power corrupts, people willing to staff aren't an important part of keeping things going.Maybe I'm just put off by your terminology. Generally referring to something as the life's blood of a thing refers to what it needs to survive, and it seems like the people who do spend hours a day on a game are far more frequently what facilitates that survival. They, more often than not, are the ones who get involved with the most people and as a result even aside from whatever intentions they might have, they connect disparate groups and make organic connections between them that frequently don't form up on their own.
People on the same schedule, whether due to time zone or work shifts or combinations of the same, often have to play with people on at the same time with a frequency that makes connecting with someone in a wildly different subset difficult at best, and groups of disconnected players without threads to connect them tends to make for dissatisfaction over time. A player and their characters whose login times bridge those gaps is, to my observations, a pretty vital part of things even if your third point is true (as it often is).
More than just roleplaying though, those are also the people who tend to do much of the organizational work, keeping factions not only connected (within and without) but doing the legwork to help flesh out the stage where everyone else is playing. People who can only spend an hour or two a night aren't generally the ones getting all the work done that facilitates other people finding everything in its place when it comes time to play.
Like I said earlier, though, I think this is just me being pedantic about the turn of phrase. To my mind, whatever their faults, the people who can and do spend hours and hours a day online are very often the life's blood of a game in that they are what makes it possible for the game to survive. I disagree pretty strongly with your second point above, I think I mentioned, because my experience is wildly the opposite. People with that kind of time not only do stick around, they frequently get more invested in one or more characters than most others (which again leads to your third point, which is fair even if not relevant).
More to the point, most of the people I know who fit the 'live on the game' description will continue to keep a game alive well past the point when others think it should have died. They are literally the survival of the game, and I tend to see the short-term folks as the ones who burn out more often than not, or who rotate through characters like it's nothing, or wander off into RL for months without warning. They're also the people who, when things slow down or a game's population starts to thin, jump ship first to find a new game rather than sticking with it to give it a chance.
That said, I'd agree that the majority of folks who roleplay an hour or two here or there when they can, are entirely necessary for a game to prosper. A MU* would be a pretty bare and scraggly tree without its leaves, but it wouldn't necessarily be dead. I've yet to see a game where the hours-a-day crowd bailed that didn't shrivel up and die shortly afterwards.
It may not be healthy to be that invested, it may cause a number of issues between entitlement and just issues, and it's entirely easy to point to numerous problems created by people who are that invested, but in terms of a persistent world MU* made up entirely of interconnected parts, they are also absolutely vital to a MU*'s survival.
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Unrelated to the life's blood thing, I don't really like Conditions. I find them more or less a huge hodge podge of often unrelated rules that can't decide if they're fluff or system, which vary wildly in severity, involve often contradictory ideas of what constitutes resolution, and too many of them play into one of the worst relics of the older system which is the XP abyss that is Integrity.
I can see the seed of a good idea, but every time I find myself wanting to play with them I just sort of balk at how shit they collectively are in implementation.
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@HelloRaptor said:
I can see the seed of a good idea, but every time I find myself wanting to play with them I just sort of balk at how shit they collectively are in implementation.
I think they can do a good job bridging the gap between "automatic XP" (where you do nothing and XP grows on trees) and assorted methods of harvesting XP through generic activity (where posing/socializing grants you XP without much oversight on just what you're doing).
What I really question and remain unconvinced on is how successfully they can be implemented on a MU*. I can see many ways it can fail if, say, it is...
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too inconvenient/time consuming to go through the process of gaining Beats (it doesn't have to be very hard, if it's hard almost at all it'll be a pain in the ass since it's something players will be doing constantly)
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too much work for staff, who'll be faced with constant barrages by players on top of traditional +job workload
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too much for the average player to use sufficiently for their PCs to advance, resulting in all those casual players being XP starved
A game like Eldritch relying heavily on Condition resolution faces two bottlenecks: Plot availability and staff availability. They can scale the first through STs but they'll need consistent +job monkeys for the latter. And if RL hits, that could become an issue.
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@HelloRaptor said:
Unrelated to the life's blood thing, I don't really like Conditions. I find them more or less a huge hodge podge of often unrelated rules that can't decide if they're fluff or system, which vary wildly in severity, involve often contradictory ideas of what constitutes resolution, and too many of them play into one of the worst relics of the older system which is the XP abyss that is Integrity.
I can see the seed of a good idea, but every time I find myself wanting to play with them I just sort of balk at how shit they collectively are in implementation.
From this perspective, while I don't share it personally, it's at least 'contained'. Crappy ones can be revised or removed, other effects can be applied, etc.
I'd rather have these things in a contained list I can edit and adjust as needed than, say, deal with overly complicated combat rules that have all the tilts worked into their core material in a way you need to memorize beyond the current 'if x, apply an applicable tilt'. There's a good versatility there to tailor something to the scene without an excess of potentially overkill trivia to memorize.
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I just wish Integrity gain and loss were tied into Conditions and Breaking Points somehow, rather than XP. Same with Willpower, to a lesser extent. At least if you're missing WP dots it's probably because you traded them to get something else, so the xp you're spending still represents something concrete.
@Arkandel
To clarify, I'm not talking about how their implementation with XP, just their implementation in general. You're obsessed until... you're not? Some conditions are resolved when you're faced with the reality of that condition being bad for you, others are resolved when you just... do more of that same thing? Some can only be resolved by gain or loss of Integrity (see above) or an exceptional success on a breaking point (doable with MU* xp levels, but in general lolz), etc. -
I'm with @HelloRaptor on this one. Conditions look nifty on first glance, but as soon as you delve deeper it just becomes a confusing jumble of too much to keep track of.
@surreality The issue that always arises with something like this is that what you consider crappy, someone else likely won't. So you might end up getting rid of a Condition that others like, while keeping one that they hate. Also, edit and adjust too much, and you fall into the TR trap of people ending up playing a very different game from the one they expected and wanted to play. But then, I don't particularly care for GMC overall. I feel they added a lot of unnecessary and unnecessarily complicated components.
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Rewrite the condition guidelines then? Meaning okay make 1 or 2 consistent ways of handling them, resolving them, assigning penalties etc.
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Write up a cheatsheet. Every condition and the dice penalty or effect beside it.
That makes it a lot easier.
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Below is straight out of the Vampire 2e book, doesn't that make it fairly simple?
Conditions
Storytellers shouldn’t feel limited by the list of Conditions
in the Appendix (p. 301). As a rough guideline, a Condition
typically consists of a modifier between +2 and –2 dice to a
certain type of action, or to any action taken with a certain
motivation. A Condition is removed when the character’s done
something significant to act on it, or when she addresses the
original source. The sample Conditions later in this book have
examples of how to resolve them, but you can also resolve them
after other events if it makes sense in the story.
If play would bog down as you search for the right Condition,
just improvise one and keep things going. -
Which Conditions apply which modifiers to which rolls? Oh right, go to the appendix. Then keep that page open for EVERY time a Condition comes into play. Want to remove your Condition? Act on the Condition or address the source of it. Nice and vague, WW, keep up the good work. Oh, but there's examples of how to resolve them. No, wait, those are just suggestions, you can solve them in other ways that aren't explained. And look! There's improvised Conditions, too! Lets run down this list...
- Get a Condition (or make one up on the spot).
- Track its effects through the appendix (or have it all written down somewhere because yours was 'improvised').
- Play out effects of Condition as appropriate (don't forget to explain the improvised Condition when nobody is able to figure out which one you have!).
- Decide to rid yourself of Condition.
- Use one of the example resolutions in the book (or make up your own!) and hope that whoever decides these things is in a good mood/likes you/etc.
Then comes the inevitable cries of 'but he/she was able to drop theirs this way, why can't I' and 'hey, they got to make up a Condition for this, I want to have a made up one too'. If you want to allow that sort of freedom to make stuff up... good luck keeping track of it all. If you want to hardline and stick to the book, invest in earplugs for the whining shall be fierce.
And this isn't even touching on the Doors being opened or closed to make way for the Conditions. Yep. So simple. Man, remember the days of if your dice beat my dice in a contested Social roll, you won and we could get to the arguing over the results that much sooner? That was so hard. I'm so glad they simplified it into this.
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@Miss-Demeanor Sounds like shitty players... In a hobby and game that is suppose to be fun or enjoyable shouldn't be such a burden. I have a feeling that's what the improvised conditions are about. Beyond that it sucks to constrain players to "just this list", so, I think its cool. And furthermore...
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It's also supposed to be played with Condition cards that have things written out nice and clear and that you can check easily. The fact that we choose to play these games in a medium that makes it tougher isn't really the fault of the developers. We're just stubborn.
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Yeah. Conditions are designed to be handed to the player on a card. Or, if you play on Reno or Eldritch, the handy-dandy
notebook+cond system. Also available in +tilt! -
It's also really not that hard to keep a list of the Conditions and their effects on your wiki/talk page. We've transcribed them all to the system, so you can just +cond <name> and then copy/paste to your wiki so you can easily check it whenever you're playing. You shouldn't have a ton of Conditions on yourself at any given time anyway, unless someone is super messing with you, or you're lazy about resolving them, which, really, is no one's fault but your own.
All uses of 'your' being royal, a'course.
"Excuse the hell out of you. He's a bag of dicks. I'm a carefully curated box of cocks." -- to @GirlCalledBlu upon being misrepresented.
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Yeah, I don't really find them difficult to track. Just kind of nonsensical at times. Condition X is resolved when you do X*-1, but Condition Y is resolved when you double down for Y*2, while traumatic Condition Z is bzzzt sorry only throwing away XP or...suffering further trauma which might just give you another Condition will resolve it? Meh.
Though 'having them listed on your wiki' does sort of enshrine the idea that making up your own, which from what I read is actually the actual intent of conditions with the book just listing some examples, is something to avoid.
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What concerns me though is that, as simple as it can be made to use Conditions (which is debatable, as some people deep that complexity to be more than others), it's still an overhead. It's still a thing you have to do.
So I can completely see how, to an average player, it might be too much to invest for the returns. Or in other words, I don't know everyone sees the returns or considers them substantial enough to go through the pain of familiarizing themselves with this level of maintenance which will take place constantly afterwards. It's not something you do once and it's done; you have to keep it up.
Eldritch is an interesting experiment because it's the first game I've seen where you're pretty heavily encouraged to use the system to advance. Even in other 2.0/GMC MU* the standard XP were sufficient to make it optional but there, especially after the first six months, it's pretty mandatory or your PC will lag behind.
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There are plenty of ways to gain beats without conditions, but that IS a major source of them. Dramafails, taking damage, some breaking point situations, Aspirations...
