PC antagonism done right
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@Gingerlily For what it's worth, I think it has meandered amongst various things.
Speaking personally, I prefer to not have 'designated' antagonist characters, be they PCs or NPCs on grid (barring the occasional monster of the week, but those are easy).
It isn't just the system and mechanics that need attention paid to their design in this regard: the factions in the game need planning as ally or opposition, and the resources available in the game need to not be big enough for everyone to have everything they want, creating the need for competition (beyond the usual 'I just want to have all the things so nobody else has any', which is a fair motivation in itself).
All of this stuff needs to work together, and you essentially have three 'core' systems on any given game: the IC realities of the game world, the game system mechanics, and the OOC policies/code/rules/support/staff mindset. This is one of those subtler truths that a lot of game creators/runners are slow to realize -- until it explodes to prominence when what seemed to be a harmless policy or house rule tweak suddenly screws a set of abilities or a character type, that then screws a faction vital to keeping things moving or balanced in some fashion, and suddenly there's an IC mess due to the ripple effect that just undoing or reworking the original tweak can't repair.
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@Arkandel said in PC antagonism done right:
For this to work it needs to be part of the initial design. Everything has to be tied together cohesively.
I'm... not really sure that I agree with this statement. I mean, sure, it's good if it's a part of the initial design, but I'm not sure that I'm ready to go for the 'Abandon All Hope' approach for games that didn't have it from the outset. It might take a philosophical shift, for sure, but I fully believe that any game could do this if they really wanted to. Just saying 'welp, it wasn't there to start with, so now it's all screwed' doesn't seem like a logical jumping off point.
@Tempest said in PC antagonism done right:
Games need XP caps. Seriously.
I'm... not even wholly against this. But really, I don't think they need caps. What I think that games need is a much slower rate of progression than we see on a lot of the current games. And maybe do away with the 'catchup' systems, because holy shit do those things get crazy quickly. Games need tiers of power between characters. If you know that you're within x-range of xp of whoever is supposed to be the top dog, it's much too easy to treat them as some yapping, eye-rolly pleb who you can just ignore. And it's also easy to sit around shopping for cute boots while you soak up godlike powers through the starbucks wifi.
It's very much a 'tragedy of the commons' sort of situation. If you know that you don't have to work that hard because all the guys at the very top are working hard, and you're not that far off from them because of game design, then ... why not?
This, too, creates problems with realistic conflict and antagonism. If you're pretty much a carbon copy, power-wise, of everyone else on the game, why do you even care? Especially on WoD games, once you hit around the 200xp mark, you're basically just adding party tricks. One more gift tree, a few more dots of arcana, a few low-level disciplines. They're drops in the bucket. You've already got your Focus Thing.
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@Tempest said in PC antagonism done right:
Games need XP caps. Seriously.
I'll be over here, waking up after others have been fucking woke to the shit that people like me and Ice Cream Emperor have been griping about for years.
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XP caps, sphere caps, an actual fuckin' plan...
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@Tinuviel said in PC antagonism done right:
@Bobotron The massive staff overhead suffered by RfK was due, in perhaps small but not inconsiderable part, to the behaviour of the headwiz. Without her it would have taken a fair slug of work, certainly, but at least they'd be able to get the work done without her going over everything to ensure it fit "her vision."
No, the staff overhead suffered by RfK was almost entirely caused by the fact it was originally conceived as a game run by the book as much as possible, including the LARP rules. However as the game grew more popular it became increasingly obvious that those rules scaled poorly and were not a great fit for a MU* environment meaning that a complete redesign was necessary designed for the MU* context from the ground up, however this is difficult to do when you're buried under the work of actually running the game.
What is obvious to you may not be obvious to me and vice versa.
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@Groth said in PC antagonism done right:
@Tinuviel said in PC antagonism done right:
@Bobotron The massive staff overhead suffered by RfK was due, in perhaps small but not inconsiderable part, to the behaviour of the headwiz. Without her it would have taken a fair slug of work, certainly, but at least they'd be able to get the work done without her going over everything to ensure it fit "her vision."
No, the staff overhead suffered by RfK was almost entirely caused by the fact it was originally conceived as a game run by the book as much as possible, including the LARP rules. However as the game grew more popular it became increasingly obvious that those rules scaled poorly and were not a great fit for a MU* environment meaning that a complete redesign was necessary designed for the MU* context from the ground up, however this is difficult to do when you're buried under the work of actually running the game.
This is one of those things I've written about and ranted about for ages. A system designed for probably 12 people tops around a table, which would be a really big tabletop game... does not work for a MUX. It won't. The overhead is far too high. A 12 character MUX would be tiny. Could still be great! But it's tiny for a MUX. Even smaller games tend to have at least 2-3 times that.
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Maybe do a setup where there has to be no less than 8 and no more than 12 characters to drive a mini-faction (I dunno, are they the support for a Slayer, are they the officers of a brigade, are they the lackies of musketeers, the aids of politicians) where all the end result in in terms of the mini-faction scale, but each person has their mini-faction to RP with, and of course dealing with other mini-factions, and whatever story elements etc.
