Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?
-
@Ganymede said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
@ixokai said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
For most cases with most players there's a review and an approve and that's it. This can't be argued as anything but more efficient then hand-statting to my mind. Maybe I'm missing something entirely.
I think the disconnect exists at a circumstantial level.
What you seem to be describing is a system that checks on a pure point-by-point basis; that is, the only function of staff in the process is to ensure that all the dots are put in the right place. On that level, I concur that CGen functions that allow players to set them are more efficient from a staff perspective. But maybe you and I worked on different WoD MU*s; that's just not how it goes or went. (It's entirely likely that we both worked on the same games, actually.)
The general WoD character approval process also involves, generally: (1) looking at a background; (2) checking Breaking Points to make sure they are sensible; (3) reviewing +notes for Merits to make sure they are sensible; and (4) hand-setting XP spends out of CGen. This presumes that the automated CGen checks for pre-requisites, otherwise that's another thing to check. And that could be another thing to check if there are problems with the pre-requisite checks. So, there's going to be staff-involvement -- generally -- above and beyond simply checking point totals.
See there we have one big flaw: any chargen that involves 'hand-setting XP' is a failure to my mind. Yes, I've played on these games, and found the process difficult and painful as a player.
I will not put out a chargen for any game system that involves anything but approval from staff. Notes, breaking points, all of that: at the best they are just approved in a single step. At worst if a player suggests something, you reject it to resubmit. But something like XP? If the game gives XP to all players and you don't have XP as part of chargen, your chargen has failed, IMHO.
The chargens I have always done has been focused on the concept: once you get out of it, you're done. Chargen stops ... 50% at absolutely worst case of things not allowed, and maybe an app here or there requires sending back to modify notes. But this is not usual. Not if chargen is clearly documented. It'll happen. Just less.
Then in the majority of cases... your job is simply to approve.
Plus, as I said before: I like having interaction with my players. Back when, I didn't just point them to the room and say GO FORTH AND MAKE THYSELF. Players interested in joining asked me what I was looking for or wanted or needed, and we actually had conversations to that end. Players wanted to discuss their concepts and how they'd fit in. Players wanted to talk about rule interpretations. Players wanted to talk, and I was happy to talk with them.
I like having interaction with players too, but I like taking out as much effort this interaction requires as possible. As a coder I believe my job is as I said: player convenience, player convenience, (duplication intended), staff convenience, my own annoyance.
I believe by taking this philosophy and model I can support greater interaction with players, as I see chargen not as removing interaction, but clearly specifying what the player intends and supporting them through -- and this is very important to me -- a system they do not understand fully.
I'm not perfect, my code isn't perfect, but I go listen to players and everytime one has difficulty with something I try to make it better.
To me chargen wins over hand-statting without any reasonable argument in that it is easier then the opposite. Is it possible for a player to be frustrated doing it? Learning the commands? Yes, its possible: and where possible I will make it better. But a player can ALSO be frustrated by having to do it manually without any support.
My goal: making applying easier, more robust, more clear. I want more people to succeed and have a good experience. I think bending my skills towards making chargen solves this and reduces frustration greatly.
I might be wrong but its what I believe and what I will commit to doing my best to achieve.
-
@Thenomain said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
@ixokai said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
Also, don't say 'trust me'.
Wow, you've gone from conversational to confrontational in short order. For someone who spent almost the entire post positing what I may have been thinking, I can imagine where these trust issues may be coming from, but maybe a little less of the defensiveness.
I disagree. Any statement that says "trust me" implies accepting the rightness as-is.
If you have an argument, make it. Don't ask me to trust your conclusions because you say 'trust me'.
Edit to add: Defensiveness? Ooookay.
-
@ixokai said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
See there we have one big flaw: any chargen that involves 'hand-setting XP' is a failure to my mind. Yes, I've played on these games, and found the process difficult and painful as a player.
Generally, WoD CGens involve the second step of submitting a list of XP spends to staff; that's what I meant by "hand-setting." I don't consider the process difficult or painful, given that most places also require submission of an XP spend via +jobs after CGen.
I might be wrong but its what I believe and what I will commit to doing my best to achieve.
You're not wrong in the slightest; you simply have a different perspective. You want to automate the process as much as possible, and I can't disagree with that; however, when I am staff, I appreciate the meager amount of interaction as a sort of fail-safe against demanding a re-submit.
Personally, I haven't had much in the way of problems with CGen either by submission or by automation in the 20+ years I've played. The only problem I bump into are wait-times for responses in the approval process.
-
@Ganymede said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
@ixokai said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
See there we have one big flaw: any chargen that involves 'hand-setting XP' is a failure to my mind. Yes, I've played on these games, and found the process difficult and painful as a player.
Generally, WoD CGens involve the second step of submitting a list of XP spends to staff; that's what I meant by "hand-setting." I don't consider the process difficult or painful, given that most places also require submission of an XP spend via +jobs after CGen.
This happens, yes, but considering many games-- TR included-- had automated XP spends. So, at that point, why not include automating those xp spends in chargen?
For me its not the issue of the spends exactly, its about the system. Systems are complex. Some people are experts or near-experts, they have no issue writing up a character in notepad. I like to think I fall into this group: so I usually don't have an issue. But a lot of people aren't experts, and do have difficulty with making characters and ensuring all the rules follow.
That said, I do hear a lot of issues players have with chargen. I think they are common: and I think most problems aren't 'learning commands' but instead 'knowing what to input'.
Most problems, IME, are related to understanding the system and not that the code is an issue. The player frustration is, IME, one of throwing them into the wild unknown and expecting them to do everything right. A chargen guides, leads, and this minimizes player frustration.
I might be wrong but its what I believe and what I will commit to doing my best to achieve.
You're not wrong in the slightest; you simply have a different perspective. You want to automate the process as much as possible, and I can't disagree with that; however, when I am staff, I appreciate the meager amount of interaction as a sort of fail-safe against demanding a re-submit.
I'm not against having more staff involvement: I just think the code should do everything reasonably possible for the code to automate. As I said, I don't do open chargen games: I have history that makes them bad to me. I want staff oversight of characters. I want connection between staff and players.
This connection just doesn't need to be specifics of numbers that can be automated. Instead it can be about interesting tidbits in backgrounds. Or notes.
Personally, I haven't had much in the way of problems with CGen either by submission or by automation in the 20+ years I've played. The only problem I bump into are wait-times for responses in the approval process.
Here we disagree, but second hand. I have not personally had much issues with CGen, by submission or automation, but I have heard huge amounts of issues with both from others. And I seek to rectify this.
That said: God Shadowrun sucks.
-
@ixokai said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
@Arkandel said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
I asked Theno once if character data was all in MySQL tables anyway so that we could just make a web interface for CGen. That'd be as ideal as I can think of it, because then we could have a character sheet taken straight out of a WoD book (or whatever) to let players fill out the dots, then magically they'd have the corresponding +sheet in-game. Unfortunately that's not possible with the codebase.
Me, I like wikis, I like the web, but IME there is a significant subset of our player population who do not want to so much as touch anything outside of the game.
So having a web chargen has been something I've thought about from time to time but ultimately a no-go for my priorities.
I'm philosophically on the other side of this. I believe the game should be mainly dedicated to direct in-character actions (ie poses and walking around) while whenever it's feasible to move OOC functionality outside the game that is a good thing since it leads to less spam in the main game window. By moving things like chargen, wikis, rules and forums to a website, you free the game up to be about actually roleplaying.
-
@ixokai said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
For me its not the issue of the spends exactly, its about the system. Systems are complex. Some people are experts or near-experts, they have no issue writing up a character in notepad. I like to think I fall into this group: so I usually don't have an issue. But a lot of people aren't experts, and do have difficulty with making characters and ensuring all the rules follow.
For the most part, CGens seem to presume expertise. I see where you are going, but I don't know if it is functionally possible to create a CGen that is both easy-to-use and complex enough to handle the uniqueness that some players aim for in their PCs. As such, I think having an expert (a staff member, presumably) to advise a new player going through CGen is a good idea. Maybe that's why I lean in the direction of more staff interaction in the process.
There are some good ideas. For instance, Arx sets up a template for you based on your choice of profession. So, for a WoD CGen, for example, you could have a "basic" CGen where someone picks a generic archetype that helps set up their attributes and skills for the most part, then allows them to tweak their +sheet after. That would cut down on the learning curve. It would work for plain mortals, but may get more complex when you add the various race templates. (Because why is Majesty based on Empathy and not Persuasion, right?)
-
The Reach never got full automated XP spending because the code staff was too busy putting out fires on a daily basis, but mostly because the setup had the system as largely inconceivable for fully automated spending, but MOSTLY because staff could and wanted to keep half an eye on spending patterns.
But mostly because it didn't seem critical to code beyond what was there. Even with what was there, there were non trivial moments when staff needed to take a more direct involvement in the spending.
There was no one answer, other than there being so many hours in the day and so much anyone can do before burning out and that "good enough" is a legitimate goal. (edit: Which itself isn't a single answer.)
-
@Thenomain said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
The Reach never got full automated XP spending because the code staff was too busy putting out fires on a daily basis,
Was TR's codebase really that unstable? I figured it ran forever and had so many players and since I didn't really ever see much in the way if issues, that there weren't really many.
but mostly because the setup had the system as largely inconceivable for fully automated spending, but MOSTLY because staff could and wanted to keep half an eye on spending patterns.
But mostly because it didn't seem critical to code beyond what was there. Even with what was there, there were non trivial moments when staff needed to take a more direct involvement in the spending.
You said mostly like three times, I feel like there's something on the order of 165% of reasons why the xpreq never went to full automation
That said, none of these reasons seem unreasonable. I don't begrudge TR not quite getting there: it was fast 'enough', really. And...
There was no one answer, other than there being so many hours in the day and so much anyone can do before burning out and that "good enough" is a legitimate goal. (edit: Which itself isn't a single answer.)
Perfect is the enemy of good.
-
@ixokai said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
Was TR's codebase really that unstable? I figured it ran forever and had so many players and since I didn't really ever see much in the way if issues, that there weren't really many.
Because four excellent coders (well, three and me) did some amazing things to make sure it looked that way. Key work that @Glitch did on the system was the only reason I could do anything remotely close to the xp spend calculations, but it involved more or less starting a second stat system on top of the first.
You said mostly like three times, I feel like there's something on the order of 165% of reasons why the xpreq never went to full automation
That's pretty close to correct.
I just thought of another one:
Mostly each nWoD game line ended up with a couple dozen exceptions to the XP spending (many of them based on social orders and magical groups) that would have needed coding around. My decision at the time was: If the XP cost system couldn't determine which of several tiers of XP costs a stat would be, it would calculate the most expensive option. Players could submit non-calculated costs but they would also have to explain why.
Things like "is this vampire power major or minor based on bloodline" were easy and probably already correct, but things like "my legacy means that the third specialty in any one skill is half cost" were not. It took a while to get people used to typing 'xp/cost' before submitting, but all in all it cut down on a metric ton of bureaucracy.
I generally trust people, but unsupervised I suspected people wouldn't speak up if they were being under-charged, but would make sure to self-check values if there was any chance of being over-charged. A healthy number of people complained about this, but I consider off-loading small issues bureaucracy to the initiator, where it can be minor, rather than a central processor, where the small bits add up, to be a fair design goal.
If I could have made the system more precise without losing what little sanity I had left, I probably would have.
(This counts as my writing design notes, right?)
-
@Thenomain said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
@ixokai said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
Was TR's codebase really that unstable? I figured it ran forever and had so many players and since I didn't really ever see much in the way if issues, that there weren't really many.
Because four excellent coders (well, three and me) did some amazing things to make sure it looked that way. Key work that @Glitch did on the system was the only reason I could do anything remotely close to the xp spend calculations, but it involved more or less starting a second stat system on top of the first.
Huh. Well good work! I had no idea.
You said mostly like three times, I feel like there's something on the order of 165% of reasons why the xpreq never went to full automation
That's pretty close to correct.
I just thought of another one:
Mostly each nWoD game line ended up with a couple dozen exceptions to the XP spending (many of them based on social orders and magical groups) that would have needed coding around. My decision at the time was: If the XP cost system couldn't determine which of several tiers of XP costs a stat would be, it would calculate the most expensive option. Players could submit non-calculated costs but they would also have to explain why.
Yeah, this is a difficulty. Its not insurmountable, but it is for sure an issue. With the move to a flat XP system (which TR never included, since it as the game of quadrillions of XP), I think NWOD won't have to worry about this as much.
I might be wrong, though. I'm kinda WOD'd out and so haven't looked closely at the post-GMC NWOD lines.
I generally trust people, but unsupervised I suspected people wouldn't speak up if they were being under-charged, but would make sure to self-check values if there was any chance of being over-charged. A healthy number of people complained about this, but I consider off-loading small issues bureaucracy to the initiator, where it can be minor, rather than a central processor, where the small bits add up, to be a fair design goal.
I prefer to approach situations as pro-trust: players are mostly not bad and are not going to cheat. That said, I also recognize they are prone to making honest mistakes. I think code can minimize these difficulties.
If I could have made the system more precise without losing what little sanity I had left, I probably would have.
TR wasn't my ideal, don't get me wrong. But it did good. And coders staying sane is a very serious requirement I'm not even joking about.
(This counts as my writing design notes, right?)
Of course it does
-
@ixokai said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
And coders staying sane is a very serious requirement I'm not even joking about.
By this you mean 'coders staying as sane as they were when they started' right?
-
@Thenomain By fires you mean +kinks right? Yeah, that was a great fire. Burned brightly, not too strong, not too weak. Lovely.
I remember the time that automated XP Spends were proposed. Essentially, it wasn't so much objection as it was the insane amount of exceptions. By the time the exceptions got added in the number of categories that you could do by yourself were so minimal that there was no point to it.
@ixokai The reach codebase was special. There were times when we (Thenomain and I) would look at code and then draw lots to decide who got to fix the issue. Then there were times when I pulled the short lot and rather than going through the trouble of fixing it, just rewrote the entire section. Consequently, that's how +roll v2 happened.
The Reach isn't the only codebase that suffers from this though. Any sufficiently large and complex Mu codebase is disgusting. Pennmush's built in lisp style code doesn't lend itself to beauty or organization. RFK's code, for instance, was spread out along 20+ objects and was quite frankly horrendous. Perhaps more horrendous than The Reach. It was huge, complicated and interfaced with a database.
Also, I'm not sure why the reach's codebase was your ideal? Could you elaborate?
@SG As to your original question.
If you want something more focused on a database interaction: https://github.com/ccubed/Mu2/blob/master/Database Stats/ArcIf you want more traditional:
https://github.com/ccubed/UGS -
@ixokai said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
@Thenomain said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
Mostly each nWoD game line ended up with a couple dozen exceptions to the XP spending (many of them based on social orders and magical groups) that would have needed coding around. My decision at the time was: If the XP cost system couldn't determine which of several tiers of XP costs a stat would be, it would calculate the most expensive option. Players could submit non-calculated costs but they would also have to explain why.
Yeah, this is a difficulty. Its not insurmountable, but it is for sure an issue. With the move to a flat XP system (which TR never included, since it as the game of quadrillions of XP), I think NWOD won't have to worry about this as much.
Nnn... no. CoD is too young to see what, e.g., the various Werewolf Lodge powers are going to do with xp spending (far worse than the Changeling Court xp mess!), but they still exist in a level that is worth banging your head against the wall.
For instance, in Mage, if you have a teacher for some of the Arcanum, you can spend some XP but not others. If your Gnosis (power level) is too low, you have to spend more XP to buy up the higher Arcanum levels. Demon has a few tricks like this one too.
Sure, none of this is insurmountable, but...yeah.
All of this is designed to answer @SG's question: Is there a chargen framework, or a simple Chargen out there?
Of course, people like you and I are more likely to look at chargen as a code challenge because we know how hellish it is to throw numbers at a sheet and leave human beings to double-check the math just in case. I still stress that this is the easiest and quickest way to build a CG, but far from a desirable one. When I was coder for AetherMUX, I went in and touched and tweaked something in their insanely simple chargen about once a week and it was finished before I started there.
@Alzie said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
I remember the time that automated XP Spends were proposed. Essentially, it wasn't so much objection as it was the insane amount of exceptions. By the time the exceptions got added in the number of categories that you could do by yourself were so minimal that there was no point to it.
The way I remember it was something like: It was the fifth time that week that some staffer had entered the wrong xp cost and I threw up my hands and yelled that I was going to fix it "if those staffers couldn't do simple math". (WoD's exceptions-based XP math isn't simple.)
Then about a week passed with me essentially bringing over what parts of my own system that would work with Reach's, staring for about two days at how I might do the exceptions, and declaring that even the increased function invocation limit and buffer would not be able to handle the number of lookups I'd have to do for some of this (maybe it could; I wasn't going to spend time right then finding out), and leaving the framework for future users.
I mean, look at Reach's/Fallcoast's job format when you submit an XP spend. It's a list of four or so commands for staff to run with a reminder that they really should double-check these things before doing it. If nothing else, that should click in people's minds that it took four separate inferfaces to process one XP spend, when most reasonable systems I can think of only require two. (Update the sheet & log the change.)
This has been a Thenomain's Old-Man Reminiscing special presentation.
-
@Thenomain Heh, Yes, I remember the 'could you fix this sheet for me, pretty please, the code can't do this minute change' requests. Boy those were awful. By the end of it, I was just adding bonus xp to people and pissing everyone off because making those totals equal was the biggest pain in my ass. But lord forbid those totals not be equal, because then you might get 42 xp at the end of the week instead of 43. Or 1 instead of 2.
RFK's system was pretty crazy actually. However, someone before me had already typed out literally every stat category/restriction ever on a single object. So it was a simple check to see if you qualified, a simple check to see if it was in the 'this automatically creates a job' category and then process. Later on, we found out I had actually been processing the xp costs wrong (in the player's favor), so that was an amusing revelation. I don't think I ever fixed it after that because I was working on the giant auto territory system and we had enough staff to handle every xp job.
@ixokai Also, I agree with @Thenomain that the move to flat XP has, if anything, made things more complicated. Especially since the 2e books are removing a lot of merits. Now games are having to find a way to represent those in a fair way when even Onyx Path itself says those things aren't the same cost as merits. See Werewolf 2e and Fetish.
-
@Alzie said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
RFK's system was pretty crazy actually. However, someone before me had already typed out literally every stat category/restriction ever on a single object. So it was a simple check to see if you qualified, a simple check to see if it was in the 'this automatically creates a job' category and then process. Later on, we found out I had actually been processing the xp costs wrong (in the player's favor), so that was an amusing revelation. I don't think I ever fixed it after that because I was working on the giant auto territory system and we had enough staff to handle every xp job.
I remember other staff members explicitly requesting the automated xp spends to not be put back in because doing the xp jobs made them feel productive while taking a break from staring into the dark abyss that is plot based jobs.
-
@Alzie said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
@ixokai Also, I agree with @Thenomain that the move to flat XP has, if anything, made things more complicated. Especially since the 2e books are removing a lot of merits. Now games are having to find a way to represent those in a fair way when even Onyx Path itself says those things aren't the same cost as merits. See Werewolf 2e and Fetish.
Eeeh, I don't see this as an issue myself. My basic assumption is a game is either entirely 1E, or entirely 2E. I never at all supported the hybrid monstrosity that TR did when it half adopted 2E's system.
I see the upgrade from 1E to 2E a breaking change: you can't convert to it. I would never want to code the transition between the systems.
And that's said for me because Geist was my favorite 1E property and it seems it won't get converted.
But it is what it is: if I'm coding a 2E game, I code a set of rules, and in that situation, I don't have to worry about merits that aren't there because they simply aren't there. I don't have to worry about a way to represent things removed: they simply don't exist.
Now, if ya'll are right and the XP rules in 2E flat are more complicated, and you're surely more expert then I, fair enough. I still have a hard time believing its not encodable as a series of functions and rules. I just don't find XP calculation daunting.
But I also wouldn't do things like TR did, where you get a 1XP reduction for 'justification'-- for me, automated XP means the cost is set in absolute stone, taking into account all stats and various rules of those stats (this is my burden), but then that's it. If there's some time delay or such, we can do that too.
But I found 'blah blah bullshit reason, save an XP' ... horrible on TR. I never did it on purpose but a few times did it without thinking and just found it kinda embarrassing. I'd rather XP be something you don't question, myself. It just is.
-
@ixokai ...Do whut? 2E removed merits that represented in game items but left the items in game leaving GM's and Wizard's having to find a way to represent said items mechanically knowing that these items don't compare to the merits in 2E because Onyx Path has explicitly said that they do not cost scale against the merits in 2E. The example given was fetishes. These are werewolf spirit relics which used to be represented by a merit in 1E. The merit is gone but they still exist in game. Onyx Path has explicitly stated they do not compare to the cost or breadth of merits in 2E and that there never will be a 'fetish' merit. So now you have to find a way to mechanically represent these things and 'price' them.
So...None of what you just said has any bearing on that. Especially not the part here since these things are most definitely still there.
I don't have to worry about merits that aren't there because they simply aren't there.
-
@Alzie said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
@ixokai ...Do whut? 2E removed merits that represented in game items but left the items in game leaving GM's and Wizard's having to find a way to represent said items mechanically knowing that these items don't compare to the merits in 2E because Onyx Path has explicitly said that they do not cost scale against the merits in 2E. The example given was fetishes. These are werewolf spirit relics which used to be represented by a merit in 1E. The merit is gone but they still exist in game. Onyx Path has explicitly stated they do not compare to the cost or breadth of merits in 2E and that there never will be a 'fetish' merit. So now you have to find a way to mechanically represent these things and 'price' them.
So...None of what you just said has any bearing on that. Especially not the part here since these things are most definitely still there.
I don't have to worry about merits that aren't there because they simply aren't there.
That's what notes are for. I don't see why a fetish has a cost at all: its like asking for a cost for a chair for someone who has crafting.
