Where's your RP at?

surreality

I'm. Just. Saying. There's. Dice. For. That.

Actually... not exactly, which is the point I keep trying to raise here: there are systems for that.

Systems include dice, but they are not limited to dice.

Plenty of games have respawns, non-lethal settings as a combat option, and so on, alongside permanent death. To insist that a game is not a game if it includes these options is utterly ridiculous on its face, because they're as viable as game systems and mechanics as dice are. The game plenty of us play the shit out of, WoD, straight up has shit in it about 'don't even let somebody roll for shit that fucking stupid because it's impossible'.

I love you to death, man, but jesus.

Sparks

Well... to be honest, @Arkandel, I didn't have to deal with that problem much, since Lost Stars was an invite only game; anyone who got invited was able to have things hand-tweaked. (I had two staffers, myself and a friend; I was not looking to have a game with a huge population, because then I would cry and hide under my desk at the workload.)

I think, if I had a larger game that was using a second-generation DICE now, I'd probably have made it part of the chargen system; once you'd set up your career, you'd get asked for a percentage split between skill, profit, and story. Based on that split and your character's age, you'd get a certain amount of additional skill mojo to put on your sheet. Then when your character was approved, you'd get a certain amount of money in the bank (calculated off age and the skills). And the remainder of your time would be sent to staff to use as a hook into things. "Oh, hey, this person's app has them spending 60% of their time up to now doing story-related things, and they're a stellar cartographer. Let's say they were exploring uncharted space, and hook them into this plotline, as well as throwing them a couple cool metaplot hints and an NPC contact."

Ghost

@surreality All my love, too.

I'm just going by this: game: a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck.

I think you're misunderstanding the holistic point I'm trying to make, so let me recalibrate.

If we are opening playspaces to support players in writing novels, stories, etc about characters of their own design, where they get to decide what does and doesn't affect their characters (to maintain their enjoyment of the space), then we should come out and say so.
If a playspace is using WoD or another game system as a system, and the game system is holistically important to task/risk resolution, then it needs to be stated up front that the entirety of PC story direction will not be decided by the player, but at times, by the dice.

There are thousands of ways to resolve a task, ranging from humiliating failure to heroic critical success. I'm NOT saying that death is always on the list. Using TurboTax doesn't include death as a failure option, and I'm not saying that it's not a game unless you can die using TurboTax.

What I'm saying is that if it IS a role playing game, the one that uses the dice and the books, then task resolution may not always go the way the player wants it to.

Philosophically, if all of the characters, per the genre or setting, are expected to be at risk (let's use zombies as an example), and you have twelve players using the system with the dice (because that's what they had to do to make a character sheet, use the dice, system, etc and when they fight zombies they have accepted a certain grade of risk to whether or not they get to finish that character's story how they want OR the character's story ends in being eaten alive) and then another eight players not using dice, but roleplaying fighting through hordes of zombies, having already predetermined the outcome...You're going to end up with a disgruntled Playerbase.

I don't care if death is a super constant option.

I'm just

Just

JUST saying that in terms of risk and how much is game vs how much is telling your story, that the entire player base should be playing the same game and that it's best to be very clear about this up front.

I have a preference. My preference, I feel, keeps things fair and I enjoy the titillation of not knowing whether or not my character will succeed. That's me. That's me. That doesn't have to be everyone, not everyone has to be me.

My earlier examples about zombie games and survival, I feel, require the game aspect or else the setting doesn't read right.

Catsmeow

I wonder if we should take all the survivalist and other discussions to another thread.

Serious question @Ghost. So don't roast me, bro.

Isn't this whole debate really one between those who like to play MUDs and those that like to play MUSH/X? I have never played on a MUD so I might be wrong.

Misadventure

Wow, things got extreme and caricature-like fast.

I will say that there are definitely players who are excited about setting and its feel as a prompt for acting/writing out scenes. Being in 100% control of the results isn't an issue for those players, it does not diminish their enjoyment. I would say they are enjoying riffing off each others creativity and prompts, perhaps enjoying the actual craft of writing, and reveling in pulling off fiction like whatever the genre source is, or what potential they saw in the setting description.

There are also players don't enjoy 100% control of what happens, where crossing their sharp or vague boundaries of what the settings potentials are also limits or ends their enjoyment.

Its probably a question of how in synch you want the players to be on what the boundaries are.

For a player who does not really need dice or "consequences" etc, does it affect your enjoyment to see players living in a bubble significantly different from what you expected? From what staff expected? If so, how would you communicate more strongly what is expected? How would you make the core "what you do in this setting" more engaging, producing more variety of player actions and stories?"

Another Thread: Yeah sure. Though oddly the title "where is your RP at?" makes sense in terms of what play space are you aiming for?

Ghost

@Catsmeow Agreed on sending this to another thread.

Constructive answer: No. MUDs are highly automated and focused near entirely on dice rolls. They were the text based predecessor to MMORPGs where the main point to MUDs is running onto a grid, killing automated mobs of monsters, rushing back to your dead body after being resurrected, and roleplaying MUDs incorporate some RP space to roleplay alongside the grinding environment.

MUSH/MUX are more flexible and have incorporated more tabletop RPG systems into their environments. These can be used by the book (-10 hitpoints equals dead because book says so) or more fluidly (let's focus more on the story, less on the system), and the culmination of what I've been discussing is on the philosophy between those two play styles on MUX/MUSH, how to keep it fair for everyone, and how to make sure the rules used for the setting match the setting.

faraday

Yeah this totally belongs on a different thread. Sorry OP. But since we're on the derailed train...

I totally agree with @ghost about setting expectations. Consent/control is not binary; it's a scale. On one extreme you have a fully consent game with no GMs. If players can't sort things out, the only resolution is for someone to take their ball and leave. On the other extreme you have a fully-coded system with no GMs. If the system says you die, you die. No negotiation.

Most games fall somewhere between these two extremes. And since everyone has their individual preferences, it's important to set an expectation of where on the scale you fall.

My standard policy regarding consent is this: "This is fundamentally a non-consent game, but we encourage cooperation among players and staff. We use the FS3 skills and combat system to resolve conflicts when players cannot agree. Although bad things can happen to your character without your consent, we try to avoid character death unless you really paint yourself into a corner. The coded combat system cannot kill you outright."

I have been running games with policies like this one since the early 2000's and during that time have killed maybe 2 PCs without their consent (both very extreme situations). Are these games for everyone? Certainly not. Are they perfect? Certainly not. But I think the assertion that such games are massively unfair and result in disgruntled playerbases is simply demonstrably false.

Alamias

@Arkandel said in Where's your RP at?:

Telenuke. Especially the dreaded +job version; I despise it - especially when it happens between characters who've never interacted. It just takes the whole fun of playing out a nice, dramatic, gritty or whatever else kind of death.

This. So much this.

I have been on the receiving end of this. While it was all perfectly on the up and up in terms of mechanics and also why I was targeted, it just sucks to log in and see a @mail that says "Rock fall, you die.". It doesn't really allow for any closure.

Character death is nothing new to me, and doesn't phase me much, but at least give me a death scene.

Seraphim73

@faraday Interestingly enough... A Song of Ice and Fire has done nicely with several "Main Character" deaths. It may not be your cup of tea (I honestly don't know), and it's definitely gotten "softer" on permadeath (silly Red God), but I think it's a very interesting example of a novel where the (arguably) main characters die with some regularity.

@Arkandel and @Alamias I think the only possible excuse for a telenuke is if the target player is actively (OOCly) avoiding conflict RP. Otherwise, I think that the attacker's player should contact Staff, have a GM contact the target player (if Staff decides that there's valid reasons for the attack, not like the BS "never met before" telenuke you mentioned), and arrange a scene.

Also, I agree with you on "Big Enemies =/= Hardcore." While I sometimes do enjoy a little competition with the PCs while I'm GMing, I don't consider it a win if I kill (any of) them--I consider it a win if I force them to use every IC trick and tactic they know, and force them to make hard IC choices (which may include retreating, surrendering, using one of their own as bait, or whatever).

On the case of an economic system, @Ganymede and @WTFE (I quite agree with your list, by the way), it sounds like the idea economic system would:

Require no more than 1-2 inputs every 24 hours at most.
Be based more on character stats than player actions/time.
Have some element of risk/reward, some element of character/player choice, and some element of randomness.
Only be a way to get extra money, not the primary way to get money.

I would suggest something like: choose which type of "job" you want to do that day from a menu list (con job, card games, day trading, smuggling, teaching, etc), choose how risky you want it to be (con job: shell game for pennies, 3-card-monte for dollars, reselling a "diamond" ring for a couple hundred), roll some virtual dice based on the appropriate skill (Deception in this case), see if you gain money or lose a little (based on how well you rolled, your skill, and how much risk you took), your "job" goes on cooldown for 24 hours.

So, you absolutely could just have a timer set up so that at 9PM every day, you went in and took the easiest, least risky job for your best skill and did it... and you've got the boring option for minimal payout every day, but at least you're getting some money--heck the system could give you that option every 24 hours if you didn't want the player to have to type in the commands/forget, then everyone would get a default amount of money if they didn't want to risk anything else.

Or, you could go in every day, decide how much you wanted to risk based on what you needed and when, and gamble a bit. There probably wouldn't be any consequences beyond losing a bit of cash, but maybe if you rolled really poorly (or well), a GM could be notified and could bring it up in your future RP (or post about it on an appropriate board, if it was exceptionally spectacular).

Arkandel

@Misadventure said in Where's your RP at?:

For a player who does not really need dice or "consequences" etc, does it affect your enjoyment to see players living in a bubble significantly different from what you expected? From what staff expected? If so, how would you communicate more strongly what is expected? How would you make the core "what you do in this setting" more engaging, producing more variety of player actions and stories?"

Absolutely.

For starters not needing dice is not the same thing as not needing consequences; the idea of consent-based games is that you trust your fellow players to convey their characters' actions as well as their consequences.

But glorified sandbox games don't work well. At least not in an autopilot, which we've seen by several WoD MU* which launched in the past few years and quickly became inert wastelands with bubbles of activity behind closed doors here and there. They promote (perhaps even require) cliques and isolate newcomers; worse, they place the burden (again, perhaps even the blame) on players for it; what do you mean you can't find any roleplay? Why, I and my four friends are having a blast!

Games which reward being extroverted and are made from scratch to be inclusive work much better.

Roz

@Seraphim73 said in Where's your RP at?:

On the case of an economic system, @Ganymede and @WTFE (I quite agree with your list, by the way), it sounds like the idea economic system would:

Require no more than 1-2 inputs every 24 hours at most.

Every 24 hours seems way too much. What about weekly?

lordbelh

I like the risk of death. I want it to be an option, because if it isn't an option, then that greatly influences decisions. But PC death shouldn't be capricious and come out of nowhere. In my mind they should either come from:

A) Other PCs, in which case its a case of two player agencies clashing together. These kinds of deaths rarely happen on games I play, because most people don't actually want to kill off your character.

B) Those special big moment scenes in which everything is on the line, and you're choosing (and there should always be an option not to choose, but with a cost to that as well) to risk everything. And more, if you fail in your endeavor and you lose your character's life, Staff still ensures it had impact and meaning. I'll give an example:

I played on a Vampire: the Masquerade game on irc a while ago. The Sabbat were invading. The Sheriff wanted to use mortals to hit them during the day, then surgical strikes to hit them right after dusk, while the Seneschal wanted to pull out of half the city and hunker down for help. We went with the Sheriff's plan while the Seneschal and her allies burrowed down and sent out the bat signal to the Camarilla leaders.

It went well for a while, then it didn't go so well, and in one scene half the strike team got wiped, the rest fleeing a burning inferno.

Now it was technically a failure, and our PCs stayed dead, but the way the STs wrote that story going forward was that the Sabbat, finding the resistance so damn tough, decided to move on to the next target instead of continuing to expend resources on our city. Those who had died thus didn't feel their character deaths had no ultimate meaning, weren't just there to impress upon us the danger of actually getting into the thick of it yourself, or for the ST to feel ultra hardcore. Those who survived got consummate rewards.

As for the Seneschal and her allies, they weren't dismissed either. The Camarilla leaders did answer with extra resources and a couple of nasty agents while everybody licked their wounds, and those safe places they'd created to bunker down in became useful down the line.

PCs shouldn't be the ones who get sucked out the air vent by a bad dice roll. The NPC next to them should. Random sparring sessions shouldn't cause character death from exploding dice. They shouldn't randomly die in childbirth (again, the NPC next door can do that if you really want that realism in your game.) If you're making characters roll to see if they'll live or die as an Storyteller, it should always be in those big moments when they're doing things that matter. Really matter, and if they die its on the Storyteller to make sure that amounts to a Main Character death has impact and meaning for the story.

Arkandel

@lordbelh said in Where's your RP at?:

B) Those special big moment scenes in which everything is on the line, and you're choosing (and there should always be an option not to choose, but with a cost to that as well) to risk everything. And more, if you fail in your endeavor and you lose your character's life, Staff still ensures it had impact and meaning. I'll give an example:

A sidenote, but death should be shorthand for "major negative changes to a character". It can be that the PC croaks but things like amputation, exile, basically anything that's permanent enough and dramatically alters how the PC can be played for the worse. A spellcaster who can't cast spells any more probably counts for instance.

Ghost

Or incarceration.

Plenty of people enjoy playing criminal characters, but in any given setting, the realistic risk of playing a criminal character is arrest, capture, and incarceration that may render the character unplayable. Criminal characters are typically constantly on the watch for the law, investigation, and other criminals. The risks in a life of crime are many. The risks include incarceration, death, having to go on the run, rival gangs/cartels, etc.

If the player can mandate that they do not accept the risks of any of these for their criminal character, especially when there's a law sphere on the game whose sole IC purpose is to investigate criminals, then you're basically allowing the criminal player to mandate that THEIR STORY requires that the law players don't get to decide what to do with THEIR stories.

Molly the waffle house employee mandating that she would prefer to not roleplay a sudden ISIS ~~attack~~ AK-47, pipe bomb jamboree in her waffle house is fairly reasonable. She wants to serve waffles and meet people. That's awesome.

A PC drug cartel leader mandating that police officer characters do not harass them ICly with investigations that could lead to the character rendered unplayable due to Folsom Prison Blues is far less reasonable.

Misadventure

Unplayable.
Reasonably unplayable.

surreality

@Ghost said in Where's your RP at?:

@surreality All my love, too.

I'm just going by this: game: a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck.

I think you're misunderstanding the holistic point I'm trying to make, so let me recalibrate.

If we are opening playspaces to support players in writing novels, stories, etc about characters of their own design, where they get to decide what does and doesn't affect their characters (to maintain their enjoyment of the space), then we should come out and say so.

If a playspace is using WoD or another game system as a system, and the game system is holistically important to task/risk resolution, then it needs to be stated up front that the entirety of PC story direction will not be decided by the player, but at times, by the dice.

See, here, we have no argument.

The previous points came across as 'all things are to be decided exclusively by the dice', and we all know that just isn't reality.

Games can also be structured as @faraday describes: under normal circumstances, use the dice; if no resolution can be agreed upon, use the dice; if there's no 'reward' you're trying to get out of it but some wholly in-theme and reasonable story development, don't stress it unless you want to.

And most of the time the latter is how it goes. Whenever my character makes a smartass remark, for instance, I generally leave that up to the writing to see if people around her think it's funny or not. If it was somehow important? Sure, I'd roll to see how charming it comes out to someone she's trying to influence, why not? Lies? Sure, I'll roll it, why not?

Bear in mind, I have zero qualms with risk floors being an option along with risk ceilings, and yes, I think it's reasonable for people to agree on such things when starting a scene. Stating: everyone participating in X event will end up infected with Y, this will be part of a long term story arc and there is no way participants will not be afflicted is as reasonable to me as this is a non-lethal sparring/training session; while your character is likely get get banged up some, regardless of any extreme rolls, severe injury will be the maximum damage cap that can be done to the character, they won't die.

Neither of these is 'just killing off a character to prove shit just got real' or 'players being unwilling to ever let anything bad happen to their character'. That's the point. And these scenarios are much more likely to occur in a game than the guy getting his head blown off for sitting on the favorite barstool, or someone screaming up a blue streak because they refuse to not be the prettiest princess in the room.

Reality lies in the middle, here. The reality is what people need to prepare for when running/planning a game.

Warma Sheen

Character death by bad die roll. I've never seen that happen.

Mostly because I'm not purposefully narrowing my focus to create sympathy and avoid responsibility for personal choices.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen. But it probably happens far less than people make it out to be. A character's death usually has far more involved than one single bad die roll, but because that's where things end, they blame it on that.

Its like when someone misses a field goal in the final seconds of a football game and the loss gets blamed on him, regardless of how easy it should have been. There were still 60 minutes of football in which plays and decisions were made which all led up to that point. Same with characters. Did you min max your sheet and spend all your XPs making a glass cannon, then fail some defense or resistance roll badly? That's not dying from a crappy roll. Everything you did from CG until then is what led to your character's death, which ended with a crappy roll. Your character, most of the time, puts themselves into situations or makes decisions which leads to being in a situation where they die due in part to a crappy roll. But not only is crappy rolls part of the system you're using, your choices and decisions and actions got you to that point. That's your character's story, whether you want to ignore it and only focus on the parts you like or not.

Sure, everyone has their own idea and preferences for story, but I don't understand how anyone can come onto a medium with this many other contributors and still expect to have full control over everything that happens to their character. I know that mindset exists. I'm not putting it down. All I'm saying is that I can't understand it.

Sunny

Not wanting stupid character death does not in any way indicate a desire to control everything.

Arkandel

@Warma-Sheen said in Where's your RP at?:

Character death by bad die roll. I've never seen that happen.

I remember on Eldritch when @Coin rolled some ridiculous amount of successes on a roll and killed a PC. She wasn't upset by it, it was just a bit impressive - a classic case of ST-dice. It doesn't always catch headlines because someone wants drama, it can be something like... you just rolled 12 successes in 9 dice, and you just want to tell people.

Sure, everyone has their own idea and preferences for story, but I don't understand how anyone can come onto a medium with this many other contributors and still expect to have full control over everything that happens to their character. I know that mindset exists. I'm not putting it down. All I'm saying is that I can't understand it.

To give you a smaller scale example here. In nWoD 1.0 when two vampires meet for the first time they need to roll for composure, and if that fails you go into frenzy. I hated that fucking roll; it just derailed scenes, especially with newcomers (who by definition were the most defenseless - "hey, welcome to the spheARGHDIEMOTHERFUCKER") but it was also repetitive to boot. The first time you had to constrain someone until they calmed their shit down was okay, but over months and even years it got really tiresome. So I, and others, handwaved the hell out of it.

Control doesn't need to be absolute, it's not all or nothing. But sometimes I want to play a certain type of scene and I'd rather it didn't turn into something completely different because one roll went the wrong way if that diversion doesn't generate interesting roleplay.

Auspice

I had a character die due to a bad roll.

D&D game, years ago. The exit from the dungeon went under a lake. My character, being from the desert, couldn't swim. Another PC had to make rolls to basically lifeguard-haul her to the surface & shore. They botched the roll.

Survived an entire dungeon only to die in the final stretch.

It was sad, but it turned out for good RP for other folks and I moved on. Because I go into fully-statted games (like D&D, WoD, etc.) fully expecting that the dice could go that way.