How Do I Headwiz?
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@Arkandel My problem has frequently been that I've literally been unable to really find alternatives to XP. Like, I guess I'm just not searching correctly, but I really have not really been coming up with anything. It's been difficult to make an informed decision, because I can't, like, just find a straight up list of systems to check out and stuff.
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@HelloProject said in How Do I Headwiz?:
@Ganymede said in How Do I Headwiz?:
@HelloProject said in How Do I Headwiz?:
I basically went into this project with zero intention of using XP at all. My intent was always to entirely replace XP with something else. I highly recommend reading the DICE system and seeing how what you want to do would apply to that.
The DICE System doesn't really eliminate XP at all, from what I read. It simply eliminates the idea of advancement without doing anything. Instead, the DICE System seems to permit improvement when you spend Time to do so, which is sort of how I envision handling XP in my system. (To wit: spend X Time, get 1 XP.) And I like how the DICE System makes you choose between character advancement and developing character assets.
Then that does kind of bring up a good question.
Is there a way to eliminate XP? Should I even try? People have seen my game thread and my concept, is the elimination of XP an endeavour worth pursuing, or should I just try to refine XP to work in a way that's not shitty?
Anime-based stuff is always going to be a headache. Because on the one hand, you have power levels, which is conducive to XP. But then on the other hand, you have (as famously ubermemed by DBZ) the fact that when push comes to shove, power levels don't mean jack or shit.
I would rather divide the player base into tiers: Protagonist, Support, Sidekick, Antagonist, Henchman, Disposable, etc., and then instead of XP, give them something akin to the Unisystem's Drama Points, which are basically points you can spend "in the moment" to do things that you normally couldn't (or that are special in some way or another). Have a system that allows a character to spend enough "power points", or "hero points", or whatever, to "jump up" a category for a moment.
Maybe if you spend 5 points as a Sidekick, you can do something at the Protagonist level--suddenly Krillin busts out a badass Destructo Disc that cuts Vegeta's tail off, or Piccolo kills Raditz (and Goku, SPOILER) with his Special Beam Cannon. They're not on the main Protagonist/Antagonist level, but they can be momentarily. Otherwise, their abilities all function at the lower tier and any inter-tier interaction is a. nominal, and b. always going to end up in favor of the higher tier.
You can probably make it more nuanced by making there be more than three basic tiers--make it 5, make it 7, whatever you need. But this basically provides a way for a consent-based game that has a mechanic for back up the different power levels intermingling and affecting each other while respecting the "does he have the heart/balls/spirit/soul/resolve to do the thing" trope that so much Anime runs on.
(extra e.g.: that moment where a character normally thought of as weaker than the protagonist loses their shit and wails on someone much, much more powerful than them for a prolonged period of time can be the outcome of a player blowing ALL their special points. Of course, once the scene's over, they're out of points and probably exhausted and useless for a while...)
P.S. This would also be a good system for comic book MUs, especially if you separated the categories of levels. Like, Superman has Strength 10. Metallo has Strength 8. Sure, Superman is far stronger, but Metallo's close enough to go a few rounds anyway, and he can spend special points to do "Strength 10 stuff". Same can be applied to pretty much anything.
"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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@HelloProject Try this 20-page thread about an XP-less system instead then.
But all I meant is whatever you do has consequences, good and bad. For example you can also consider 'open' systems to be XP-less - they can be stat-less, or everyone gets a certain amount of points and they distribute them, or anything else. It's easier, it involves less work from staff, you're probably reducing CGen to nearly nothing so people can get on the grid faster... but you eliminate the carrot of progression. Is that better ? For some games, maybe? For others not so much? You're the judge, headwiz person!
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Coin I admit that my original vision was people training up and it being kind of RPG-like in some ways (which I know is counterintuitive to getting rid of XP). I really wanted there to be a way for people to be on relatively equal footing and then like, you can end up with a situation where Krillin, in this universe, ends up training and becoming even more powerful than Goku or something. In general, I was trying to avoid characters just being more powerful than other characters by default.
The thing is, the more I think about and deconstruct this, the more this starts to seem overly complicated, and I'm not totally sure how to achieve what I want in a simple way. So I start thinking, alright, maybe I should just do power more traditionally, give people their canon tiers, and not worry too much about evenness. It overall just seems simpler and funner, because it just seems more and more like doing it RPG style doesn't add much to the game other than complication.
That said, it brings up the new complication of: How the fuck do I determine when people are ready to get new techniques, new transformations, etc, in a way that is fair. Is there a fair way without XP, or is XP just sort of the ultimate bullet that one has to bite for making it fair?
@Arkandel That's for that thread! I'll give that a good, thorough read.
I do like the idea of progression. And this thread is really helping me a lot in making some decisions that have been bothering me. XPless progression seems so goddamned esoteric that it's why I was stuck for a while. So I'm gonna check this thread out too.
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@HelloProject said in How Do I Headwiz?:
Is there a way to eliminate XP? Should I even try?
No. Conceptually, gamers easily recognize XP as an abstract method of character advancement. If you plan to have advancement, you should plan on having some sort of XP system.
Is the elimination of XP an endeavour worth pursuing, or should I just try to refine XP to work in a way that's not shitty?
Choose the latter, for the reasons above.
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@Arkandel said in How Do I Headwiz?:
@HelloProject Try this 20-page thread about an XP-less system instead then.
But all I meant is whatever you do has consequences, good and bad. For example you can also consider 'open' systems to be XP-less - they can be stat-less, or everyone gets a certain amount of points and they distribute them, or anything else. It's easier, it involves less work from staff, you're probably reducing CGen to nearly nothing so people can get on the grid faster... but you eliminate the carrot of progression. Is that better ? For some games, maybe? For others not so much? You're the judge, headwiz person!
Wait I'm stupid I didn't know you linked to the DICE system thread, derp.
But I was told that it's not supposed to be an alternative to XP.
Wait, nevermind, I get it. It's an XP-less system, it's just not supposed to be an alternative to progression in the way that I'm thinking.
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@HelloProject There are so many ways you can do this it's not even funny.
For example consider horizontal rather than vertical progression paths. This is pretty common on many MMORPGs for example; on WoW the maximum level you can attain is 110, and XP get you there, but every 110-level character isn't at the same power level - they can get gear through doing dungeons, they can improve their artifact weapon through questing, and you should absolutely consider cosmetic improvements as separate progression paths as well because they are, ranging from achievements, titles, skins, mounts... players spend hundreds of hours on those things.
In a MU* you can do the same thing. XP could be absent or be tiered, allowing the fastest/most active players to get to the cap each time and then while they wait for everyone else to catch up you can give them different carrots to gain; reputation, ranks, in-game items, resources, land... then once the game begins to stagnate up the odds again and let the chase start anew. Or don't.
Game design is one of the most exciting parts of making a game, allowing you to pour a ton of creativity and cool new stuff into it. The only catch is once you commit to it you're sort of stuck, since converting to a new one after the MU* has launched and people are using it is a huge pain in the ass, so you want to hopefully figure this shit out before you implement it.
It baffles me some MU* runners redo what the last game did almost verbatim. It seems like such a waste of perfectly good fun on their behalf.
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@HelloProject
With regards to trying to determine how to make power levels / experience work, you've got quite a few choices available to you and every single one of them is going to get complained about at length. But I would actually like to take a moment to speak out for your original vision of relative evenness. This community here on MUSoapbox is extremely separate from our own, and much more welcoming of wild power level disparities because the more popular games in this community are World of Darkness games.
The late 90s and early to mid 00's was a period of time where this sort of thinking was far more prevalent in OUR community, and it produced some pretty internally toxic tendencies. Characters with special tags -- EFC, SFC -- would be wildly powerful relative to what the average PC could get, and even stock FCs would tend to be more powerful than any given original character was allowed, and character advancement tended to just not be a thing. For a good stretch the only way to actually reasonably compete with these disparities in place was to get exploitative with these game's combat systems. Our community is mostly over that.
The MUSH that you are building is a shounen manga MUSH, a genre that is notoriously bad about rendering everything but the main character of any given title Beyond Pointless. This is not, I think, a practice that you actually want codified into your game, especially since the focus of the genre is going to be Grand Old Fight Times, and fewer people by far are going to want to play Krillin if being Krillin means you're as much of a whipping boy as Krillin canonically ends up.
It's especially not a practice you want codified into your game if you acknowledge the power level disparities between things like Dragon Ball, Naruto, Yu Yu Hakusho, and whatever else you might choose to include, because even in those three the amount of escalation that occurs from one to the next is heavily tilted. (Mostly in favor of Dragon Ball, honestly.)
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Oh yeah, I definitely am making sure that I figure this shit out first. That's why I'm writing a design document and not in a MU* digging out rooms and writing files. It's also why I'm having discussions.
I like these ideas. With my four themes, there's equipment, techniques, transformations, and other things to gain.
Maybe the trick is to do a more advanced form of what MCM does, with having a baseline pool of stats that makes sense for a particular character.
Meanwhile, maybe power level can be a pool of points that aren't necessarily used like XP, but having more determines what attacks and transformations and stuff you can learn, and I guess can serve as some sort of e-peen, as is a thing that people enjoy. Power level could be this sort of thing where you can get it like a drop, like gold or something, or from doing other things. Then you start to qualify to learn things, and unlock secret transformations at certain levels, etc. The transformations and techniques could be what sets you apart as tougher, but not like, to some unstoppable degree like an EFC (I definitely remember EFCs) where you can plow through a bunch of other PCs at once.
Overall, I want to stick to villain NPCs being the toughest thing, but I don't want any one PC to be able to beat the shit out of an entire room of other PCs.
Actually, my vision of how power level could work is similar to how Super Robot Taisen used their version of cookies (I forgot what they called them). Every 100 cookies you'd unlock less common mass production units for a given faction. I would love to expand on that concept.
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I can certainly vouch that @Z-01 is right that evening the playing field means more interesting or secondary concepts end up played more often. While there will always be those players who go for what's interesting over what's powerful, most people prefer and in fact desire to be at the very least competitive. Very few people go for basic mortals on the games where the average is either a Vampire, a Werewolf or a Mage. Hunters tend to be popular but aren't what I'd qualify as basic mortals anymore.
In the interest of having your secondary roles filled, consider a perfectly even playing field. You already mentioned villain status being a thing, and that will make up for every hero being even. If you have advancement, then make sure that every predetermined period of time, every character who is below the played average gets bumped up to that number. Set a cap, too, and raise the cap only when you normalize the population using the played, again very important, played, average.
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I should also stop saying villain NPCs. Villains are more of a category that anyone can app into, but again will in general be the strongest things in the game.
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To extend Gany's "this"...
@Ganymede said in How Do I Headwiz?:
Trust your players, but verify their claims.
Trust your staff, but verify their claims.
You can get away on a game not trusting your players (and players can get away not trusting their staff), but you cannot run a successful game if you don't trust your own staff, because every staffer is an extension of your game, and therefore a reflection of you.
Even the shittiest game runs better, even successfully, if all staff are on the same page, with the same goal, or enough trust to believe and back up the goals of their fellow staff. "Ashes to Ashes" lasted far longer than it should have because of this. "Dark Metal" worked because of this. Some of the shittiest, player-unfriendly staffers came from these games, but they were passionate about the game and worked together.
Strive to be better than this, but this is how low the bar really is. People will put up with a lot of crap, even appear to smile and nod to the staff to keep them happy and off their backs, if they get to play. But, yeah, be better than this.
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Brus (wherever he is) made this post long ago on WORA. It's one of the only things I bothered to dredge up from the old, messy flat-file. Not everyone agrees with it, but it's the most forward, most succinct, and most organized document of its kind I've ever seen: Brus' Five Pillars of Good Staffing.
Enjoy.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
I would concur with that extension, mostly because I see any non-game-owner as a player, regardless of their assigned duties or lack thereof.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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@Ganymede said in How Do I Headwiz?:
I would concur with that extension, mostly because I see any non-game-owner as a player, regardless of their assigned duties or lack thereof.
Do you remember long ago our argument of whether or not a staffer is a player? I know the discussion was more nuanced than this, but I too have adjusted my take on this. I still believe a staffer is "just a player with extra responsibilities", but what I consider a player as being has refined. I think we've met in the middle on this one, old lawyerbot.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@Salty-Secrets said in How Do I Headwiz?:
I can certainly vouch that @Z-01 is right that evening the playing field means more interesting or secondary concepts end up played more often. While there will always be those players who go for what's interesting over what's powerful, most people prefer and in fact desire to be at the very least competitive. Very few people go for basic mortals on the games where the average is either a Vampire, a Werewolf or a Mage. Hunters tend to be popular but aren't what I'd qualify as basic mortals anymore.
In the interest of having your secondary roles filled, consider a perfectly even playing field. You already mentioned villain status being a thing, and that will make up for every hero being even. If you have advancement, then make sure that every predetermined period of time, every character who is below the played average gets bumped up to that number. Set a cap, too, and raise the cap only when you normalize the population using the played, again very important, played, average.
This is actually super easy to do in the genres that he's writing to as well, since it's pretty normal in shounen and surrounding genres for the New Hotness to set the new standard and then plateau into just being normal. Sailor Senshi get a new basic transformation and attack that utterly wrecks last season's villain but is only ok against the new youma, Martial Artists learn some new crazy technique, etc.
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You've gotten a lot of really good advice, so instead of repeating that, I'll mention something I don't think has been really discussed yet:
If someone takes on OOC responsibilities and can't or won't perform them, don't hesitate to either remove them from that position or route around them. This can mean staffing, but it can also mean playing an IC leader, or a feature character, or other positions where someone is expected to contribute more to the game than the average player.
This also includes you. If you know you have to go away for a good while, make sure you have someone else in charge (even if they aren't allowed to make, say, sweeping policy changes). I once staffed a game where the headwiz was gone for months and didn't delegate powers in her absence, and trust me, there have been few things in my time MU*ing that were more frustrating than having to run a game without the power to, you know, actually run the game.
I think people understand this if someone's just slacking, but they hesitate if there's a good reason for the absence, or at least a sob story. It's just a pretendy fun time game, RL comes first, people don't want to be mean, etc. The thing is, though, the jobs still aren't being done. (The aforementioned headwiz had a thoroughly legitimate reason to not be around. This did not prevent the game from suffering.) Relieving someone of responsibilities isn't a punishment, just a recognition that, right now, they can't fulfill them.
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@Rusalka I actually have experienced similar situations, so I definitely will avoid this.
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Hrm. My advice is super-anecdotal and comes from the Transformers/etc. circuit, but...
- Don't be afraid to steal your players' ideas and run with them, especially if you can get the player to collaborate on helping out.
- Don't be afraid to let people, and even arrange for, people to have the spotlight. Just spread the love.
- Don't be afraid to have fun. We make games to have fun. People forget this. Play your characters. DO THE THING. This whole 'ZOMG YOU CAN'T DO ANYTHING COOL YOU'RE STAFF IT'S SO UNFAIR' is only unfair if the love is not spread around.
- Be willing to put your foot down. People may whine and scream and bitch, but it's your game and they need to abide by your rules.
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@Thenomain said in How Do I Headwiz?:
Do you remember long ago our argument of whether or not a staffer is a player? I know the discussion was more nuanced than this, but I too have adjusted my take on this. I still believe a staffer is "just a player with extra responsibilities", but what I consider a player as being has refined. I think we've met in the middle on this one, old lawyerbot.
I sort of remember, but I guess my point is that, if you are headwiz, everyone is subordinate to you. If you own and run the game, it is your word that holds.
I've worked in "council-run" games, and it doesn't work as well as people may believe. If you have another owner, that's a different story, but if you're the only one paying to keep the lights on, it's your call, it's your responsibility, and everyone else will follow your lead.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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@Ganymede I feel like I've witnessed the frustration of no one being in a position to make executive decisions, which I feel is important for the long-term health of a game.
