Fading Suns 2017

[SparklesTheClown]

@deadculture Jesus Christ.

I'm out. If we hit WORA vibes any harder, Cirno's gonna come back, more stoned than ever.

[deadculture]

@HelloProject Bye bye.

[bored]

@deadculture I don't even know what's happening here.

Apparently I'm evil, I guess for pointing that 'the Firan players who ruined SC' were 1) mostly just normal players, the same as you find anywhere (I know for a fact many of them played WoD too) and 2) that the game had strengths aside from its weaknesses?

@surreality You're acting like the people you whine about harassing you everywhere. You really seem like a mental health case, and that this hobby is something you shouldn't be involved in.

[mietze]

A new Fading Suns game would bring me out of retirement.

Though....kinda like certain spheres in WoD you'd probably get the same people who are still grudge holding over the last 3 FS games (I remember people complaining about each other in pages to me about what so and so had done on the FS game that ended like 10 years before Star Crusade!! And I thought vampire and changeling players were bad!)

So probably a very clear, sane, consistent way to deal with tantrums would be best. I think by and large people could get along, with that in place.

[Ataru]

@mietze Would a Dune game bring you out of retirement?

[surreality]

@bored said in Fading Suns 2017:

@deadculture I don't even know what's happening here.

Apparently I'm evil, I guess for pointing that 'the Firan players who ruined SC' were 1) mostly just normal players, the same as you find anywhere (I know for a fact many of them played WoD too) and 2) that the game had strengths aside from its weaknesses?

@surreality You're acting like the people you whine about harassing you everywhere. You really seem like a mental health case, and that this hobby is something you shouldn't be involved in.

(So let's just quote this before it all gets edited yet again.)

You're not evil for that claim. You're an idiot for being so dedicated to bashing @HelloProject that you didn't bother to read what he actually wrote, and it's just a bonus irony that it agreed with that sentiment in full.

I'm a petty, vindictive cunt when people earn it, and that is precisely what's happening right now -- I cheerfully own that shit. Call it my inner Sicilian waking up.

If you consider reading a thread and laughing at your fuckup when it was spotted harassment, what would you call what you did in mine? Oh, yeah... huh. Double standards and behavior blindness are typical of the toxic crap described.

And more of the same: divert from admitting and owning a fuckup or employing even the most marginal measure of self-awareness by increasingly escalating accusations and ad hominem absurdity. You win the internets! (Shame the prize is a dunce cap.)

Edit: P.S. Back to ignore now.

[bored]

@mietze said in Fading Suns 2017:

Though....kinda like certain spheres in WoD you'd probably get the same people who are still grudge holding over the last 3 FS games (I remember people complaining about each other in pages to me about what so and so had done on the FS game that ended like 10 years before Star Crusade!! And I thought vampire and changeling players were bad!)

So probably a very clear, sane, consistent way to deal with tantrums would be best. I think by and large people could get along, with that in place.

This is the one reason I definitely think you should avoid having a very hierarchical setup to start and lean toward more strict-cgen, because this is a big part of what happened on SC. Old grudges are one thing. Old grudges turn into 'You let THAT guy have a position?!?!?!' when the setup is inherently uneven.

Custodius, in the grand scheme, didn't do much that was... super harmful or obviously cheating. But his existence was a mark of favoritism and it polarized everything into a lot of us-vs-them. 'Oh, so in so is so and so's friend and they have a position now so.... OMG THE WORLD IS ENDING.' Etc.

@surreality Bitch, we done. Follow me around with your stalkery nonsense if you want, but I stopped having any interest in interacting you when I stopped posting in your thread a month ago. Take a hint and move on.

[mietze]

@Ataru Possibly! I am not super familiar with Dune except for the 80s movie and game wikis. But I do very much enjoy what I have seen!

[Packrat]

@bored said in Fading Suns 2017:

And since @packrat is around and was involved, maybe he has some ideas for recapturing some of the magic without the suck.

This is actually something I have put extensive thought into, both whilst I was on the game (trying to persuade other staff to change things) and afterwards.

• First of all, do more work before opening the game, from code to systems, actually finish stuff and document it. There just will not be time to do that work once the game is open and it will lead to an ever expanding backlog of administrative crap. Star Crusade literally never had an equipment system, it never had a way to actually track people's cash reserves. Even when the rough economy/military system was introduced it was impossible for anyone (even staff frequently) to get any idea of what say, two companies of soldiers, actually meant practically.

• As mentioned before make people actually pay points or similar if they want to be a baron, or a bishop, or a count, also do not automagically couple this with wealth. That said do not use the book system that equates being a knight with being a church novitiate because that is blatantly ridiculous, though the ranks do even out some at the higher levels. The count does not need to be as good at sword dueling or chandelier swinging as the landless black sheep knight, they are going to get spotlight time anyway. Do actually have a character generation system or metric instead of it being randomly subject to the whims of overworked staff.

• On which note, choose a system that actually gives the results you want in character generation. Paulus in particular really wanted players to go and indulge in swashbuckling heroism... But basically no characters were equipped to do that, they were say as good in a sword fight as a regular fairly experienced knight or something, of whom there were hundreds. It made no sense.

• Do structure your setting so that it takes into account guilds and the church from the start as major power players instead of awkwardly slotting them in then wondering why nobody wants to play a guilder, maybe crib from medieval history more and have the cities, etc, basically guild run with charters and also at least as rich as the countryside. There were attempts at this on Star Crusade but it never really felt convincing.

• Also follow through on what were allegedly the design ideas being the game to start with, let player characters actually be meaningful and important, do not burn out to where you view the players with contempt and burn them for every decision they make because 'it is stupid', utterly forgetting that they are operating in a hideous information vacuum. Especially do not do this whilst having nonsensical ideas about say, warfare (of course cavalry can charge tanks on even terms! So silly of you to think your tank battalion would have an advantage vs 500 medieval cavalry charging across an open field.)

• Definitely avoid having stupidly badass NPCs who are enlightened and better than the PCs whilst having the benefit of staff knowing more and thus having them make 'sensible' decisions denied to players.

• Do not have people making time sensitive decisions on strategic warfare when it takes 2 months for a player to even be told how many and what troops they have, let alone move them or make any decisions involving them.

That said some of the more common refrains about Star Crusade were more due to the aforementioned information vacuum and lack of feedback or control than favoritism or (further) insanity. For example the Kurgan were not in fact a monolith or uniformly engaged in the war, Antonio was not getting preferentially attacked arbitrarily, it was because he was attacking everyone without regard to which faction they belonged to then having his murderous fanatic horde slaughter the populace. (On the other hand, he had an entirely expendable fanatic horde and was overall by far the more militarily powerful count, especially as he was the best commander out of them).

Other people were sending letters to Kurgan leaders and/or bribing them, Amber was I think outright paying tribute to one of the big Kurgans to leave her alone

[bored]

@Packrat said in Fading Suns 2017:

@bored said in Fading Suns 2017:

And since @packrat is around and was involved, maybe he has some ideas for recapturing some of the magic without the suck.

This is actually something I have put extensive thought into, both whilst I was on the game (trying to persuade other staff to change things) and afterwards.

It's a pretty good list. I think code/documentation wise, it's probably also a good idea to be more realistic about what you can do. Paulus wanted CK2 on a Mush, where even the most advanced custom coded system (that you probably won't have) can't handle something half that complex.

That said some of the more common refrains about Star Crusade were more due to the aforementioned information vacuum and lack of feedback or control than favoritism or (further) insanity. For example the Kurgan were not in fact a monolith or uniformly engaged in the war, Antonio was not getting preferentially attacked arbitrarily, it was because he was attacking everyone without regard to which faction they belonged to then having his murderous fanatic horde slaughter the populace. (On the other hand, he had an entirely expendable fanatic horde and was overall by far the more militarily powerful count, especially as he was the best commander out of them).

Other people were sending letters to Kurgan leaders and/or bribing them, Amber was I think outright paying tribute to one of the big Kurgans to leave her alone

Ehn. This is a little patronizing. There was an info vacuum, but that had more to do with what the Kurgans actually had or could do, or where our troops were or silly things like that. No one was confused/missing any of this stuff you just mentioned (the Kurgan factions were brought up constantly and we all knew about the bribes).

Being able to pay the bribes without facing poverty or massive backlash from the offworlders is why it was favoritism. I had an alt on the main crusade front and every battle was a cakewalk. So apparently the Kurgan factions were so disorganized they couldn't mount the slightest defense for the main objective, but could simultaneously come together to muster armies in the thousands or tens of thousands to fight other fronts. You can wrap it up in theme, but when half the players are on Easy difficulty and the others are on Nightmare, that stops being theme and becomes favoritism of a sort.

[deadculture]

Whenever Amber would get the stick she'd throw a huge bitchfit and then it'd get automagically fixed for her. There was never a more unbearable player in the game than Amber. While Custodius' antics didn't amount to much, they certainly enabled the shit behavior one would often expect from Amber herself.

Also, her child was by one of the big wig Kurgans himself, so she'd naturally set herself up with them, and threw another fit when Crow's Nest's Kurgan taifa was wiped out by someone with sinister purposes.

[ThatGuyThere]

@Packrat
In the interest of being constructive, if you have a game where the war is important make it feel important to the players. Not exactly sure how to do this, but on Star Crusade seeing the updates on how the war was going always felt a but like I was reading reports generated by Big Brother, i.e. The war against Eurasia continues....
I know the places being fought over belonged to PCs in a lot of cases but the updates never seemed to matter it was a list of we won these places the otherside won these places go about your business.

[Packrat]

I think the key thing there is that, from the perspective of a not 100% inner circle but on staff and connected to what was going on person, everyone was being fucked by Paulus and Lextius. I mean literally everyone, every single strategically involved player complained about how they were being shafted but other people were getting an easy ride.

I am pretty confident that this is true because at a certain point I got fed up, quit staff, then a month or two later tried making a new character without rejoining staff. I pitched said character to perfectly fit what staff wanted, played to all of Paulus' preferences, spent significant effort merging actual middle eastern history and some other stuff he digs with in depth Fading Suns lore, etc. I still ended up feeling totally fucked over and biased against despite probably having more favoritism than anyone else in the history of ever.

Edit: To expand on that, after quitting staff I came back and made Fadila (sp?), who was a combination of Fading Suns Joan of Arc combined with a really in depth and complex fusion of the 7th century Sunni/Shia Islam split and the write up of Pyre, the Avesti homeworld, in the Church supplement. She was probably the best researched and well realized MU* character I have ever made with an exact fusion of RL history and in theme stuff that worked best for most of the remaining people who were running the game, she was even being fucked with the Javkovians behind the scenes to better appeal to Paulus. She got handed frankly bad ass as hell stats, a significant army, etc. I know that plenty of people complained about how much she did get.

I still ended up feeling totally screwed with and biased against thanks to just how tremendously terrible the whole strategic/warfare management was.

Further Edit:

A big issue with the warfare was a fixation on decisive battles combined with not actually making them decisive. Given that the idea was to model things on medieval conflict it would have worked far better to make such battles rare (why would the enemy face you if they feel they are outnumbered?), instead concentrating on raids, skirmishes, etc. Couple that with making fortifications actually something that holds out and requires a siege for both NPCs and PCs, instead of the bad guys being able to instantly seize or raid them whilst PCs require horrified mass slaughter assaults that break armies.

Then run that stuff, let PCs be decisive in engagements of 30 vs 50 people which are happening every other day, when somebody brings 2000 people vs 3000 people, that should be a big deal! (assuming those are whole armies). Whomever wins should make dramatic gains, but why was the person with only 2000 soldiers actually fighting?

[bored]

@Packrat

So, I don't disagree that probably everyone felt or to some degree was being fucked over by Paulus. 100%, he was the #1 problem, as I've been saying. The only point I'm trying to make re: Custodius is that even if everyone felt whatever, the situation was not in any way balanced. 'No one is ever happy' is a universal symptom of MU players in general, and can be somewhat safely ignored as long there's some underlying fairness. But the game did not have underlying fairness. Not everyone was playing the same game. Custodius wasn't the plague that killed the game, but Paulus enabling him was an example of his general bad staffing.

Amusingly, so was your later PC. That's just a continuation of their typical moronic policy of handing out character quality by how OMG AWESOME they thought the concept was and how much coffee they had. BG coolness (beyond a degree of ascertaining basic thematic comprehension) determining power level was one of the big problems, so were random MASSIVE ARMIES appearing out of the blue for some players while others got 100 dudes. This is why games need real cg systems where people spend points for their shit.

Anyway, you're mostly right about everything else, especially how the scale of conflict and big battles should have been handled. It was far too easy for PCs to lose everything and almost impossible for them to gain anything... unless it was the main force under Custodius and the Li Halan guy who just steamrolled the 'main' battles

[deadculture]

If I ever have time to play a MU again, and it happens to be FS, I'd play a Li Halan dude just for the unexplored Portuguese angle.

[golgoth]

@Packrat I was definitely on that game. It was 100% amazing.

Another mention for all of this. Musoapbox is just one place to post up information about a game. There are tons of resources out there where you can promote and recruit for a game.

It amazes me that I don't see more promoting of games in other venues (many of which are free! (or low dollar amount)).

[Packrat]

@bored said in Fading Suns 2017:

@Packrat
Amusingly, so was your later PC. That's just a continuation of their typical moronic policy of handing out character quality by how OMG AWESOME they thought the concept was and how much coffee they had. BG coolness (beyond a degree of ascertaining basic thematic comprehension) determining power level was one of the big problems, so were random MASSIVE ARMIES appearing out of the blue for some players while others got 100 dudes. This is why games need real cg systems where people spend points for their shit.

Anyway, you're mostly right about everything else, especially how the scale of conflict and big battles should have been handled. It was far too easy for PCs to lose everything and almost impossible for them to gain anything... unless it was the main force under Custodius and the Li Halan guy who just steamrolled the 'main' battles

That PC was absolutely part of the problem, I went out of my way to make a character Paulus would insist on making so awesome stat/stuff wise and... Yep, it worked.

Though to be fair the 'people arriving with big armies' thing was entirely in theme and from what I remember there was actually a wish for more people to apply for crusading nobles, or bishops with armies, or whatever. The problem was that there was no rhythm or reason behind who got what sized army beyond perhaps 'You need to ask for it' and some ill defined guidelines that nobody actually knew.

People tended to get bigger armies if they had them in an unsustainable fashion, somebody who was an offworld noble with an army they could afford easily tended to get a lot fewer troops, maybe 1/4 of the number an on world noble would get. Somebody who had specifically mortgaged all of their lands etc to pay for an expedition would get about as many as say, a baron (The Li Halan general for example, actually a lot of barons had more troops than him, though his soldiers were all mobile).

The thing is that for whatever reason Paulus wanted basically all troop formations to be identical in function so while people though that Caelwyn's army was super awesome because it was tanks and infantry in APCs, in fact it was no more effective than 500 guys with spears would have been.

[bored]

@Packrat

Again, making something "from theme" doesn't really mean shit in terms of what PCs get to play. This is such an easy trap to fall into, but it's not hard to demonstrate how silly it is. It's "in theme" in Vampire to have ridiculous ancients rise from slumber and totally outclass every PC, but we usually gave staffers the stink eye when they let their friends get a 5th Gen ubermonster. So you just need actual rules for this stuff. It's not hard, really!

And I'm pretty sure the 'all troops being equal' thing wasn't remotely true. I mean, I helped Paulus with testing for his mass combat system (I wrote a little app to simulate them out, even) and there were absolutely troops with different stats. Maybe he threw that out later? And the Li Halan guy had a lot of stuff. Again maybe things changed later when they got bitched at enough, or whatever.

[Packrat]

I am not defending it, the fact people were getting statted/approved like that was ridiculous.

Also yes, it was all thrown out, basically later on everything was just 'A company of X', the only real difference was that some companies were more mobile than others, plus super elites where a smaller unit counted as a company (thus could fit into transports more easily, Dervishes for example). Caelwyn had I think four companies, fewer than a lot of barons.

[bored]

@Packrat Pragmatically, that's a much better way to handle it, for most scenarios, esp things like the Dervishes. Probably should have treated some things in separate categories, ie armor, high-speed cav stuff (whether literal cav or using the modern meaning), but just making stronger things worth more is decent overall. The degree of min-maxing the original system allowed and encouraged was nuts (including things like mixing unit types to shore up weak stats at lower cost) and totally untenable. I think I recall proving that system wise 1 BB could kill infinity of various troop types due to some weird special they had, etc.

If you ever do something and actually have troops, I offer system design help on setting up that side of it because there are some major pitfalls and do/don'ts in that whole arena