Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning
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@fortydeuce SCORE! does victory dance
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@pyrephox I was using 'tree' losely. But, you just pointed out that clues combine together to create a revelation. So, it does not, to me, seem like it would be hard to connect some of the already gathered clues to just toss a little extra on a 'rehashed' path. I'd get excited over getting more than 1 clue about something, when they are related. It could be like 'You got this bonus clue!'
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Yeah, I know I have some clues about some things that fit together, but I don't have any @revelations about those things, even though maybe I should. But that's a guess.
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@fortydeuce said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
Yeah, I know I have some clues about some things that fit together, but I don't have any @revelations about those things, even though maybe I should. But that's a guess.
I don't think there's a revelation related to the clues you got. I literally gave you all the clues on that topic that exist, to give you a framework and hopefully give you enough hooks that you can talk about things with people, get a few more clues, and get a posse together to help you hunt even more things.
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OK, then that makes sense, because I was wondering why I didn't have a @revelation for it per this thread. But if it doesn't exist, that works for me. No worries!
(And the char's gathering the posse, slowly but surely!)
But also, some organizational structure to the clues would be nice -- maybe ANSI could be utilized there to categorize?
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@fortydeuce I'll be honest. I have about 200 clues and...five revelations. Mostly around the same subject, while the vast majority of my clues are a grab bag of things or results of @actions in clue form. So do not be concerned if you haven't had a revelation, yet!
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@fortydeuce There is organization to them, in that they are all grouped on our side by keywords? But I know that doesn't help you.
Part of the game is figuring out how all of this fits together, so I'd be leery of something that supplants the @theory system that is player-driven with something GMs do. We know how the lore of the game fits together, but the discovery is part of the game proper, so I don't know how much we'll be automating it and forcing players into one set knowledge path. You can stumble on all kinds of information in weird ways, and connecting things is always a many-to-many sort of thing.
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@Pyrephox -- thanks for the reassurance!
@Darinelle -- totally valid point. Just looking at it from someone who's been there for, uh, five days, and thinking "How would this be more practicable to me at this very moment?" Because it still feels like the tip of an iceberg in terms of systems (as opposed to theme), and I'm thinking how that could be rectified. -
@pyrephox said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@sunny I think that accuracy can vary across experiences. PCs like yours or mine are some of the most socially powerful ones in the game in a way that other characters can't easily match, in many cases. One of the most powerful Duchies in the game can have a very different experience as a social character, I think, than a random Iron Guardsman or a Baron in the hinterlands. At least in part because staff IS very good at letting us use the organizations that we're heads of, and use the non-combat resources we have to affect change.
In at least two of my PrPs, there was no combat whatsoever because the agitated mobs with pitchforks were defused thanks to social characters. The combat PCs ended up having relatively little to do other than accidentally almost rekindling the whole situation. Which would also be fun! But these were PrPs, designed as background local color for the world-spanning battles between good and evil. The scale was deliberately smaller. Maybe there should be more of that sort of thing?
I fully intend to, some day, roll charm+seduction at some wildly inappropriate life and death juncture, but I don't really expect my combat character to ever play a major role, even after I invest more into social stats. If she ended up trying to conduct diplomacy with a lost elven kingdom, it would be a sign something has gone seriously wrong somewhere IC. Which would also be fun.
In part, I think it's an issue of scale, and the very structure of +events. If you're expecting a thing of enormous importance to happen next Tuesday, you'll grab your heavyweights, whether that's combat or social or whatever.
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@kanye-qwest said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@arkandel said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@darinelle said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
Well. I mean - yes, I think what we're saying here is that we're putting in considerable effort to keep this from happening, because it's weird to have Combat Joe Who Has No Social Skills And Does Not Afraid Of Anything in charge of diplomatic efforts.
I think it's a great thing to focus on.
How do you deal with the (obviously exaggerated) example I gave above though? The House Voice who's a combat-character, and thus has the authority (but not the coded skill) to be part of or even lead diplomatic missions because of their rank?
The short answer is, we are trying to design a system where ignoring the social status of yourself (your rep) and your house will begin to impact what Combat Joe the Voice wants to do. If you ignore prestige and never do anything diplomatic or work social angles, when you go to call your banners for war....well...
When you go to manage your domain and see the productiveness of your NPCs is shit and it's affecting your bottom line, you might start to think about delegating to and involving the social characters in your house.
Erhm, does this mean that people (me) who are playing combat focused voices and who have tried to stay in our lane (e.g I have leadership but haven’t gone too far into other social skills because I’m. Not sheeted that way), will start hurting our houses by being voice without being social?
Noto bene: Sorry of types— phone.
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@Pyrephox +1. My character is just shy of 400 with 14 revelations, and so much of it is tangential stuff. If I cut out everything except what's attached to those revelations, I think I'd have 80~ish.
@fortydeuce One thing to keep in mind is just because you have a clue doesn't mean it's true. That took me way too long to wrap my head around. <.< Historical accounts can be inaccurate or get details wrong, there could be red herrings, stuff like that. But it's a good RP motivator to link up with other people and try to figure out how stuff fits together.
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@oldfrightful said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@fortydeuce One thing to keep in mind is just because you have a clue doesn't mean it's true. That took me way too long to wrap my head around. <.< Historical accounts can be inaccurate or get details wrong, there could be red herrings, stuff like that. But it's a good RP motivator to link up with other people and try to figure out how stuff fits together.
I think staff did say at one point that they stopped doing purposeful red herrings early on, because they saw the sorts of troubles they caused OOCly.
But yes, @fortydeuce there's a reason that the clues are written as narratives. They're snippets from journals in a world where history has been stolen from the characters, and not being sure how they all fit together is, in fact, purposeful. We're putting things together OOCly as much as our characters are ICly. And if some sort of connecting structure was made visible -- well, it would actually be kind of a spoiler in and of itself. There are clues that are narratively connected that PCs wouldn't be able to see the connection between without further context. To indicate the connection OOCly would basically be giving players answers before their PCs had the ability to really figure it out. And the game tries to build systems to avoid those sorts of OOC spoilers.
@cobaltasaurus said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@kanye-qwest said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
The short answer is, we are trying to design a system where ignoring the social status of yourself (your rep) and your house will begin to impact what Combat Joe the Voice wants to do. If you ignore prestige and never do anything diplomatic or work social angles, when you go to call your banners for war....well...
When you go to manage your domain and see the productiveness of your NPCs is shit and it's affecting your bottom line, you might start to think about delegating to and involving the social characters in your house.
Erhm, does this mean that people (me) who are playing combat focused voices and who have tried to stay in our lane (e.g I have leadership but haven’t gone too far into other social skills because I’m. Not sheeted that way), will start hurting our houses by being voice without being social?
I think it just means that your combat Voice couldn't do everything on his own. Like, if he doesn't have much social skill or prestige and tries to do big social stuff without help, he won't get too far. Certainly not that all leaders suddenly need to be socially-focused.
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@roz And it might mean that people would have to think carefully about appointing Voices who cover their own weaknesses. If you're a fighty lord or lady, then your voice maybe needs to be social. If you're social, you might want a fighty Voice for war-time commanding.
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As not to be mischaracterized as merely omg so negative...
@pyrephox said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
I will also say that I think that the new @action system helps, or can help, in regards to that feeling of flailing around in the dark. The ooc_intent switch is, or at least I have found it to be, /very/ helpful. Hopefully it is as helpful for staff as it is for me, but making me state 'out loud' what I hope this action is capable of accomplishing has helped clarify what I want out of what I'm doing. Before it went in, I know sometimes I would hear people mention that the response to a storyrequest was completely unexpected, and it could sometimes feel like a dialogue in Mass Effect, where the prompt says 'express skepticism' and the dialogue is like, "YOU LYING FUCK."
This this this a million times this.
I absolutely do love @action and think it's a great addition. The prior request system was very vague and my success rate with them turning back anything useful was terrible. And /ooc_intent is like the best MUing invention I've seen in... the entire time I've been MUing maybe? It means that no matter how much you flail around trying to ICly describe sometimes obscure and arcane actions, you can very clearly state: 'This is what I want out of this' in that section. And staff seems good about honoring it.
MORE GAMES NEED THIS OMG. Just culturally, actually asking what your players want rather than make them swing blindly at your plot-pinatas is amazing.
Conversely, the @revelations explanation makes me... uh, even more anxious, because you not only need up to date clues but a perfect combination of clues to get the useful info? Idk. Seems kind of moving backward. The only way I can see this being positive is if 'key' (to completing the revelation) clues get handed out to... the least clued in people (via visions, background ones to new players, etc) with a hint that they're part of a big picture, so that those people can then go and shop their key piece around to get the other stuff from the better-knowing people. Maybe that's the bottom-up structure @Apos is getting at, but I can't say I've quite seen anything like that in play so far.
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@kitteh You don't need a 'perfect set' of clues - people can actually have some different clues and get the same revelation, that I've seen. Including some clues that came from actions that I did, so it's not like it's preset in stone, I think.
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@pyrephox Well, I was going by your description of it which said combination. The helpfile indeed doesn't explain anything.
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@kitteh Yeah, what @Pyrephox said. The @revelations are much more like -- big picture? If that makes sense. They're not things that are generally changing. They're more like fundamental aspects of how the world works overall. So they don't go out of date, and you don't need one perfect combo or anything. There will be a whole pool of clues that are on the revelation, and they're all kind of weighted differently, so you can get any number of combinations to pop it. So while they're cool and fun, they're not necessarily about a single plotline going on at a single time that you have to worry about becoming superfluous.
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@kitteh Yes! You have to have a certain number of the right clues to trigger a revelation. But I was just clarifying that it seems like if you do something new that generates a clue that staff decides works for that revelation, then it works. It's not like chasing rares, and not everyone has to know the same exact thing to get the same revelation.
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@pyrephox said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@roz And it might mean that people would have to think carefully about appointing Voices who cover their own weaknesses. If you're a fighty lord or lady, then your voice maybe needs to be social. If you're social, you might want a fighty Voice for war-time commanding.
Voices are also meant to be there to handle things in your stead when you can't be, so there's nothing wrong with appointing a voice with the same strengths as you. (Neither is there anything wrong with appointing people who have complimentary skills to you!)
But if you are Prince Fighty McArmorpants and, as a voice or military leader, you want to convince the populace that, hey, blood sacrifice is really what's going to save us from the abyss, honest, you're probably going to need the charms of a Popular Pretty Princess or a skilled Whisper or someone diplomatic/social in order to sell that. It's meant to drive you to involve other people in things.
In that sense, it's not all that different than how if you want to go scouting in the woods for an elusive enemy, you probably want Lord Terry "Treehopper" Ashford of the Vista Glades who has perception 5, survival 5, and stealth 4 out there scouting the path for you, rather than having Prince Clarence "Clanky-Tank" Valardin in plate armor with perception 2 and zero stealth (but one heck of a set of combat skills) rattling along as the party lead.
