Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning
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@Lisse24 said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@Pandora said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
There's a difference between 'The NPCs say my scandalous vomit-green dress is hotter than yours' and 'I rolled the dice now tell me about your ties to the demonic horde while we prep the executioner's blade, traitor'.
No one has argued for either of those things. The first is boring, the second robs a player of their autonomy. However, as @Sparks pointed out, there's a more indepth conversation about social combat in another thread.
Some people don't care about fashion and sparkly shit and gossip and that's 100% perfectly fine, but writing off a system that would benefit the fun of people who do enjoy it as 'boring' would be a disservice to those who appreciate the less-feudal warfare side of L&L games. All I want is to play a pretty political princess with lots of fucking diamonds. Somewhere, someday, someone is going to enable that.
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I am out of date with the game but one thing I did notice when I played was that 1) There is coded Prestige (which did not do anything at the time, this might have been changed). 2) This was mostly raised through paying money into abstracted lifestyle expenses and to a lesser extent through paying to host events.
The thing is that spending money on fancy clothes, jewelry, etc, had no effect. Now I am not sure how it be factored in, but it was very easy to spend more money on a single outfit, a particularly snazzy hat or gems stuck onto your sword than on an entire party. That is definitely the kind of thing that should influence prestige.
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@Apos said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
Same will hold true for any kind of social combat, where, 'tell me ur sekrits so u die' is pretty much the social equivalent of some dude standing outside of the newbie gardens spam killing people in a MUD.Except isn't this exactly how the interrogation social combat worked on Firan? Not that anyone is holding Firan up as some paragon of coded system excellence by any means, but you can't quite claim that any social combat system will punish people for that kind of fuckery, because it was pretty much the status quo on the last L&L game we all knew and loved(to bitch about).
Tinuviel about 9 hours ago
I hate you with the power of a thousand Pandoras. -
@Pandora said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@Apos said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
Same will hold true for any kind of social combat, where, 'tell me ur sekrits so u die' is pretty much the social equivalent of some dude standing outside of the newbie gardens spam killing people in a MUD.Except isn't this exactly how the interrogation social combat worked on Firan? Not that anyone is holding Firan up as some paragon of coded system excellence by any means, but you can't quite claim that any social combat system will punish people for that kind of fuckery, because it was pretty much the status quo on the last L&L game we all knew and loved(to bitch about).
There's two distinctly different kind of social systems that people are really talking about, that have very different goals. The macro ones we took very light nudges towards (reputation, renown, prestige) and those will all be massively revamped- basically anything dealing with any NPCs at all have to come through a social lens, and how well someone will rule will largely depend either on their social skills, or the political and social characters helping them with that. That kind of, 'I want to sell the nameless NPCs on something' is something not many people have problems with, since even if characters are both trying to convince NPCs to do different things so it's effectively PvP, it still is at one divide.
The really fucked up, 'tell me a secret that is suicidal' is the kind of social combat that a lot of people justifiably have huge gut rejections of, because they've seen the gigantic abuse cases there which just completely remove autonomy. Simply put, no social combat system should ever allow any kind of absurd situations that is wildly out of character and self-destructive for them- it just doesn't make sense. I vastly prefer buy in and carrot approaches to things like that, and though yeah I need to make sure social characters have teeth and have plenty of ideas about that, no charming stranger at a bar is going to talk a calm, rational person into cutting their own throat because it seemed like a good idea at the time. One reason so many people had such a problem with Custodius oocly is because he tended to try to sell other players oocly into a direction for their own characters that was wantonly self-destructive by taking advantage of ooc thematic ignorance combined with staff indifference or active collaboration in other games. That's actually a design flaw that isn't really addressed so much- characters should always be representative of actual people, they shouldn't really be permitted to take actions that are so self-destructive they make absolutely no sense in the context of the story, and are a result of ooc collusion or ignorance. And I carry that same philosophy on social combat or anything else in the game- if some rational, calm character has no good reason their happy guy wants to self-destruct, and it is purely ooc motivated, it can't be permitted.
Virtually every game will let player characters walk off that bridge, because they don't want to impede player agency over their characters, -even if- it makes no sense whatsoever. I say that's bullshit, and bad for collaborative games. It makes a shared story worse when you allow the absurd, even if it is purely self-destruction that can't be explained or rationalized.
some fucking idiot who people only like because he's good at taking credit for the work of everyone under him, just like every other fucking L&L headwiz.
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@Apos I have no qualms against anything presented here, I fully agree that social skills levied via NPCs are impactful and can give players of non-combatants some meaningful agency. I was simply balking at the idea that all social combat mediums operate/operated under that same pretext, because some seriously asinine things have gone down in the name of a dice roll.
@Apos said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
That's actually a design flaw that isn't really addressed so much- characters should always be representative of actual people, they shouldn't really be permitted to take actions that are so self-destructive they make absolutely no sense in the context of the story, and are a result of ooc collusion or ignorance.Mein Aldrette.
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@Apos This is a pretty solid approach to it. The 'is this skill actually worth the points I paid for it?' question is always the most essential, I think, and as long as you give the skills value in game then people can't make that complaint anymore. They might not be as good for making the other dude lose forever because hah hah ur ded, but that's the tradeoff.
Anything else, I think, is pretty much icing. Throwing in status effects/tilts or whatever is a fun system to ponder, but I'd never want to see something as black and white and mind control-like as Firan's social imperatives. Those things were a nightmare because they were so abusable and depended entirely on (obviously potentially biased) staff intervention in almost every case, making the fact that there was code in the first place a joke.
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There has been an influx into Thrax the last few days of players. A new Victus. A new Dagon. And the RP has been readily available. There have been periphery family members coming in too (half-siblings of Fatima and Abbas) and the mood seems to be positive.
I'm probably biased but it seems like a really positive turn and shift in mood. I think it is a good time if you have been wanting to join the game or try it to give it a shot. There is enough new players and people that have been coming on in the game that it is a good place to try the game out.
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@buttercup said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
There has been an influx into Thrax the last few days of players. A new Victus. A new Dagon. And the RP has been readily available. There have been periphery family members coming in too (half-siblings of Fatima and Abbas) and the mood seems to be positive.
I'm probably biased but it seems like a really positive turn and shift in mood. I think it is a good time if you have been wanting to join the game or try it to give it a shot. There is enough new players and people that have been coming on in the game that it is a good place to try the game out.
Yeah I like that Abbas seems more active and it was nice seeing Victus on the grid again. I am interested in meeting some of the new people in Thrax.
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Baltus also got a player.
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@icanbeyourmuse said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
Baltus also got a player.
Possibly briefly.
I seem to have picked him up in a time of intense OOC drama for Darkwater and may put him back on the roster.
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@krmbm said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
I seem to have picked him up in a time of intense OOC drama for Darkwater and may put him back on the roster.
The roster's at least deep enough that there's a decent variety to choose from, and seems to get refreshed regularly. One of the things that typically bothers me about roster games is feeling like all the 'good' characters get picked over and you're left with the dregs if you show up six months in, but I find the pre-gens at Arx pretty rich all around (I'm very happy with mine, and I'm a heavy roster skeptic in most respects).
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@krmbm Aww! I hope you don't but I entirely understand not wanting to being thrown in amidst a bunch of drama. I was not expecting the drama, honestly.
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We're going to smooth out the drama, no worries. Darkwater will be course corrected and Thrax/Gyre plots will continue to hum along.
If someone is bringing OOC drama to you, please do let us know. We've had some complaints already and have spoken with people to let them know that's not ok. If it keeps up, we'd like to know so we can address it. Please and thank you!
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I'm sometimes really taken off guard by how popular some small roleplaying tools can be. A couple weeks ago @Tehom coded in a small command called +firstimpressions, to let a characters make a one-time-only record of the first time they interacted with another character, with a small xp incentive to nudge it along to encourage meetings and creating new relationships between characters. Two weeks later, there have been nearly 3000 unique records created of characters meeting for the first time.
People really like to RP.
some fucking idiot who people only like because he's good at taking credit for the work of everyone under him, just like every other fucking L&L headwiz.
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@Apos Anything with XP incentives will be popular.
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What I like about firstimpressions is how cute and fun most of them have been. Although some people have been mashing firstimpression within thirty seconds of entry to a room, which is not really what it's for, and some of THOSE firstimpressions have been, er, hilariously inaccurate.
But yes, I do have awesome hair, thank you for noticing.
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@saosmash Isn't that always how first impressions are, though? You see someone, make a snap judgement, and it colors how you view a person. In accurate or not.. to me.. that seems more or less exactly how it should be.
Unless I've met the bit on multiple occasions previously I do tend to play off previous encounters.
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@icanbeyourmuse I don't write a firstimpression of someone until I've exchanged at least a round or two of poses with them. Because, you don't know who someone is enough to have an impression of them until you've interacted with them on some level.
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@saosmash I bet I could make a one-pose entrance ridiculous enough for a first impression. DON'T CHALLENGE ME.
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@Roz Yes, I am sure that the next time you backflip into a room, you will be firstimpression worthy at that time.
Also, I've already written your firstimpression!
