Where's your RP at?

Ganymede

Have you played XCom2? I really hate fucking dying in that game. You spend, like, a dozen missions trying to build up a squadmate, and then bang one stupid step forward and you get mudstomped by a fucking Archon or Andromedan.

It's the worst feeling in the world. I have no doubt everyone here would feel the same.

Here's the thing that makes it feel worse, in my opinion: if your squadmate were taken out and could not be revived during the mission, your chances of finishing the mission diminish substantially. If you lose the mission, your entire campaign is put in jeopardy. Fail too many missions and you lose. End game.

So, what's the point of the death? Probably realism, probably to add further danger, probably to make people give more of a shit of making a wrong step. It's part of the game, sure. But if you removed it, the grand game is no worse off. Maybe your squadmate is taken out for a few months, but the rest of your team could feasibly pull through. Kind of.

That's my mentality when I consider the issue: is death necessary to add risk to the game? On a WoD game, I'd say that the threat of death is essential because there is rarely another direct, punitive consequence for failure. On another game, losing a combat encounter may have substantial effects to the game as a whole, providing a different consequence for failure. On a game that relies on PrPs, I'd say that unqualified threat of death is more important. On a political game like Arx, I'd say that death is less of necessary device because there appears to be punitive consequences for failure.

@WTFE

Feel like working with me on an economy system?

Arkandel

@Ganymede said in Where's your RP at?:

That's my mentality when I consider the issue: is death necessary to add risk to the game?

What I think, and I don't mean it as a jab for people who prefer a different gamestyle than I do, is there are players who don't like playing a PC for long. They keep rolling alts, trying different things, that kind of thing - so to them the idea of a high turnout game isn't just something they wouldn't mind, they'd prefer it because it fits their preferences.

I prefer having the possibility of IC death around, especially to balance high-reward choices - if it enhances risk then yes, it's worth it. If my PC's choice is to go through those orc-infested catacombs for the shiny at the end because, hey, shiny... that's great, since otherwise if survival was assured why wouldn't he get in there? It'd make the choice less interesting. On the other hand though if the whole setting is basically built to make survival basically impossible - as I understand some Call of Cthulhu games are built - that interests me way less, since I like to invest in long-term character growth.

WTFE

@Ganymede said in Where's your RP at?:

@WTFE
Feel like working with me on an economy system?

If you can sell me on the value add, I'm down for anything. It's just ... a really tough sell given that I've never seen one that added anything I value.

Ganymede

@WTFE said in Where's your RP at?:

If you can sell me on the value add, I'm down for anything. It's just ... a really tough sell given that I've never seen one that added anything I value.

That's sort of the point of asking you to help me conceive of one. You say there's something lacking in every system you've encountered. So, define it, and help me figure out a way to meet that need you perceive.

If you can't define or describe what the "value add" is, it is difficult for any game designer to meet that perceived problem and figure out a solution.

@Arkandel said in Where's your RP at?:

What I think, and I don't mean it as a jab for people who prefer a different gamestyle than I do, is there are players who don't like playing a PC for long. They keep rolling alts, trying different things, that kind of thing - so to them the idea of a high turnout game isn't just something they wouldn't mind, they'd prefer it because it fits their preferences.

I don't particularly like any alts, but I do not shy away from death if it comes. Like @Sunny, it just matters how death comes. I don't mind if it is a consequence to an action, but I sort of get pissed off if it is solely the result of a poor roll or random.

Ghost

When character death isn't a viable option, then you're playing the rpg with cheat codes. It sets a potential expectation for NPCs, bad guys, sometimes other players, but not for your character. I mean, even from a point of artistic integrity, for the people who prefer their story>game, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Sunny

@Ghost

Apparently because you completely lack the ability to understand an opposite POV to your own.

Roz

@Ghost Sorry, are you trying to say that if a game doesn't have non-consent PC death, it's not a real game??

faraday

@Ghost said in Where's your RP at?:

When character death isn't a viable option, then you're playing the rpg with cheat codes. It sets a potential expectation for NPCs, bad guys, sometimes other players, but not for your character. I mean, even from a point of artistic integrity, for the people who prefer their story>game, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Look, we're obviously not going to agree on playstyles, and that's fine. But is it too much to ask to stop bashing the players you disagree with as being nonsensical and/or whiny wusses who can't handle losing a character and are ruining the hobby? (Not all your words - summarizing the thread here.)

I don't want to read a novel where the main characters get knocked off halfway through the story. If you do - great. I'm not judging.

Ghost

@Sunny Oh don't get catty at me about the fact that I feel strongly about my viewpoint on this topic. I've said plenty of times (in this thread) that I get the story crowd vs the game crowd. I do see other people's points on this topic, but just that without dice to resolve, up to the point of deciding character death, it sets an uneven playspace.

If you can't express your viewpoints without getting personal about it, then fuck off?

Arkandel

@Ganymede said in Where's your RP at?:

I don't particularly like any alts, but I do not shy away from death if it comes. Like @Sunny, it just matters how death comes. I don't mind if it is a consequence to an action, but I sort of get pissed off if it is solely the result of a poor roll or random.

Two examples I dislike:

Telenuke. Especially the dreaded +job version; I despise it - especially when it happens between characters who've never interacted. It just takes the whole fun of playing out a nice, dramatic, gritty or whatever else kind of death.
The ST who thinks it's cool to kill PCs. I remember when I brought my 3-week old Gangrel on HM to this PrP someone ran (for which there was no setup beforehand, it was literally just a 'hey, I wanna run something, come play!') and he threw like 6 NPCs at the 3 us - like dude, that's not a 'hardcore plot'. Any GM can just toss hard mobs at characters, that doesn't make it cooler. It just means you're about to kill my character over nothing.

Sunny

@Ghost

Saying that you get it and then turning around and proving you don't does not understanding indicate. You quite clearly don't get it, don't care, and are just continuing to insult everyone that doesn't agree with you with blatant lack of an attempt to understand. You're speaking out both sides of your mouth, here.

And cute, you little hypocrite. Insult everyone else every post, and then object to someone else calling you on it? Classy.

Goyim

people who hold serious convictions or beliefs are fucking losers

WTFE

@Ganymede said in Where's your RP at?:

If you can sell me on the value add, I'm down for anything. It's just ... a really tough sell given that I've never seen one that added anything I value.

That's sort of the point of asking you to help me conceive of one. You say there's something lacking in every system you've encountered. So, define it, and help me figure out a way to meet that need you perceive.

Well, the first thing I need is an answer to this question:

What does an economic system bring to the table that enhances my fun?

Because that's what any system added to a game needs to do: enhance fun in some way. I've not yet heard a convincing answer to this question. I'm open to the idea that such an answer is possible, however.

Now for ways in which economic systems interfere with fun, here are a list of conflicting forces at work:

Economic systems have a tendency to turn into grind-fests that are an end unto themselves as you struggle with them at length trying to get ahead (or, in some cases, just stay afloat). They turn into a boring, repetitive mini-game that starts to take hours and time away from actually doing things that are actively fun.
Economic systems have a tendency to reward people with no lives at the expense of people with lives. I have a very few hours per week to actively play. Aside from the #1 problem already chewing into that time, I'm at a horrific disadvantage in most economic systems when faced with someone who has eight hours a day to farm whatever it is that the economic system farms.
Not all economic systems have this farming thing. Or they limit it in some way that makes it so that the eight-hour-per-day-no-life-loser doesn't dominate. What then appears to invariably happen is that the economic system becomes pointless. It's just an extra command or ten you issue upon connecting and then never use again. It's a dunsel, pure and simple. The game would be largely identical without it; you'd only just lose a few commands issued at connection time.
Not everybody actually gives a shit about being an economist. Not everybody wants to do crafting/hunting/trading/whatever for money. So just like, say, someone not interested in combat will avoid combat, someone not interested in economics will avoid the economic system. But most games that aren't pathologically combat-oriented give you things you can do that aren't combat. Most economic systems (that aren't #3 dunsels) are all-pervading.

For an example illustrating these, I was on a Star Wars game that had an economic system. Out of the gate you could barely own a weapon. Armour? A vehicle? An actual SPACE SHIP? Not. A. Fucking. Chance. The game had what amounted to vending machines all over to buy things. After three months of playing I still couldn't afford a basic defensive vest. Why? Because I didn't do the #1 grind. Those who did the grinding highlighted problem #2.

Finally I hitched up with a player who had a suspiciously large number of resources. Like so suspiciously large that I'm pretty sure there was no way it was obtained using the game systems as-was. At that point I was just having money thrown at me whenever I needed it. The economic system became a #3 dunsel. It was nothing; less than nothing to me. If I wanted to buy something and it was even vaguely appropriate for my character, my IC patron just threw cash at me. The economic system was just window dressing; a series of commands I had to occasionally use to put a new piece of equipment in my kit.

And ... I'm not sure it's possible to make an economics system that doesn't exhibit at least two of the above problems.

Ganymede

@Ghost said in Where's your RP at?:

When character death isn't a viable option, then you're playing the rpg with cheat codes.

This conclusion is easily contradicted.

Blood Bowl is a game based around the idea of football with fatalities; however, in the game, fatalities are ridiculously impossible to achieve, and injuries are difficult too. You could have the most badass Ogre give an opponent a Spinning Piledriver into the turf, and only have about a 50% chance of causing them to roll over and moan.

Is it an RPG? Well, you make the team, which consists of players, and you have a hand in crafting those players when they gain experience. You move them; you determine their actions; and then you roll to determine whether those actions are successful. Sounds like an RPG to me, but you could argue that it is a simulation or war game.

Still a game.

If you play the game to kill the other team, you are going to lose every single damn time. Because that's not the point to the game: the team that scores the most touchdowns wins, to paraphrase John Madden. So, causing character death isn't a viable option in the slightest. Not if you want to reach your objectives. And even if your objective is to KILL KILL KILL, you are unlikely to reach that objective.

So, for some RPGs, character death isn't a viable option, and people still engage in it, and invest ridiculous amounts of disposable income into it.

A character is only as well-written as the person being them. Whether a character has a sense of their own mortality depends on the maturity and wisdom of the person creating them.

Ghost

@Sunny saying that I get it, but don't entirely believe it makes for good playspace are two entirely different things. I get the motivation behind it, and think it works very well in some non-dice playspace like superhero MUs where people go in with the expectation of diceless task resolution. I just believe that going through the task of getting a book/PDF to use in generation of a character, or using a system where task failure up to including rules about health levels, hitpoints, and character mortality, are running a weird line when adding in the element of players feeling that the results of those tasks need to fit to their liking. Seriously. Stop it with the trying slow-burn forum tactic of trying to paint me as some rules Nazi.

@faraday Cool beans. I'll pull it back a bit. We've already derailed the ass off of this thread. I would also like to note that I'm not a PKer or that guy that would join a game and scream and bitch on channels about players who have their own viewpoint on how their character works or how they think a story should go. Each game has their own view on how this should work. I'm just trying to say that when you have two camps of players getting together with differing views on whether or not the danger-level of the setting applies actual, quantifiable danger to their characters, then there will be problems. I just needs to be defined up front. That's all. Sync it up.

@Roz Not...Exactly. I'm waxing philosophical about the concept of is it really a dangerous setting if every player decides on a personal level whether or not they choose to ignore that the setting is dangerous at all? In the sense of running or maintaining a fair play space where players are expected to have their characters interact, you inevitably end up with some characters written as if being entirely unafraid of things like laws, death, personal injury, etc because the player seems to understand that there's really only risk when they choose for it to apply to them. Immersion suffers as a result. Sometimes it ends up with different groups of players seemingly playing by two sets of rules. GMs have to judge each case as it comes along. I know some people are very staunch about "this is my character, my story", and the want to write that story is reasonable, but the game element of rpgs is where sheets, dice, task resolution, hitpoints, failure, and death and dying chapters comes in. So not non-consent death, no. I'm saying non-consent other stuff, too, including just how much the setting applies to their characters and whether or not everyone is playing by the same set of rules.

Roleplay is great. I love it. It's fun, but if we also design these games to have that game element, then we should be clear about how it's intended to be used, and how it applies to people's characters whether they consent to things going their way or not.

Not everybody can win. We go through sooooo muuuuch shiiiit on these games with people getting upset because they want it this way when someone wants it to go another way.

I'm. Just. Saying. There's. Dice. For. That.

Ghost

@Sunny said in Where's your RP at?:

And cute, you little hypocrite. Insult everyone else every post, and then object to someone else calling you on it? Classy.

You win. I'm an unintelligent hypocrite who doesn't understand things and gosh darn it, I'm just really stupid, too.

Now stop.

Arkandel

@WTFE said in Where's your RP at?:

Well, the first thing I need is an answer to this question:

What does an economic system bring to the table that enhances my fun?

Because that's what any system added to a game needs to do: enhance fun in some way. I've not yet heard a convincing answer to this question. I'm open to the idea that such an answer is possible, however.

So, assume a Vampire or Werewolf game. It doesn't matter which for the purposes of this.

Domain ("our turf") is incredibly important to the theme but on most MU* there isn't really a reason why; holding or protecting territory - or gaining more - doesn't convey any tangible benefits to your character, so the only reason you might do it is because the book says you should.

With an economy you can provide that reason to characters, encouraging politics, exchange of favors (in fact favors themselves can be a currency and thus part of the economy), etc.

Just as an example, as requested.

Ganymede

@WTFE said in Where's your RP at?:

What does an economic system bring to the table that enhances my fun?

What I got from your post is: I don't find any economic system, regardless of construction, to be fun, and I cannot identify what part of a system is flawed because, in general, I'm not that kind of player that would find such a system fun -- but go ahead and try to prove me wrong.

And I can understand that statement.

Sparks

@Auspice said in Where's your RP at?:

Economy systems are cool in theory, but finding the balance is hard. You have to be willing to throttle it hard... or else risk the people that have little to no RL demands dominating the entire game.

What I did on Lost Stars (a private invite-only PennMUSH-based science fiction game ages ago) was a system I called DICE, where you had 100 units of 'time' per week. The system was then made of blocks, that would take an input, operate on it with a function, and then output something.

You could literally set up a block that said, "I have Skill X / Career Y, I will spend 40 units of my time this week making money at that." The input was time, the function was your skill/career, the output was money.

But if you wanted to train a skill up, that also cost time. (As opposed to XP; there was no XP to buy up skills, you just had to spend the time training them. It was level * 150 time, so level 1 of a skill took 150 time units, level 2 took 300, etc.) That was another block you could place in the system. The input was time, the output was progression towards a skill. (Basically, learning a skill had a 'meter' that had to fill.)

And other things could cost time, too; want to decipher that alien language? It'll take a roll (to determine how well you do) and then X amount of time working on it (where X is based off the roll). That was a custom block added to people involved in a plotline; you could even share those blocks around (to involve other people and get through a plot faster, provided they had appropriate skills).

Of course, I had other blocks as well to act as drains. Want to keep that nice apartment? That was a block that said 'this apartment will cost you X credits per week'. Want to have a ship to fly around? There was a maintenance block to pay upkeep and docking fees.

In effect, you had a breakdown that might say "Each week, I am spending 40 units of time on my 'job' running this fuel depot (which at my level means I'll get 1000 credits), 30 units of time on improving my engineering skill (until that's done), and 30 units of time on trying to reconstruct this weird alien device someone brought me (until that completes and staff moves that plotline forward). Also, 150 credits on my apartment, and 300 credits on my ship's docking and maintenance fees." And so each week it would run all of those.

The practical upshot of the system was, being 'super active' didn't give you any significant benefit economically, and everyone still had to balance their time. You could not learn all the things and get all the money and do all the cool plot things. Even if you were on every day, you had no inherent advantages (economically, at least) over a player who only logged in once or twice a week. And it had the added benefit that your income/costs weren't dependent on other player action (as can often be the case with PC crafters in coded economies).

It didn't work out perfectly; there are a whole honking stack of things I'd do differently in a modernized version of DICE. I would have the unused time carry over one week or so, because that way you would have a little leeway and not 'waste time' when training a skill or doing a plot (i.e., a block that would complete and expire) vanished, but you were away that week and didn't notice. I would automate a hell of a lot more of the block setup. I would have done away with the 'employee' block (where I could 'employ' someone to get X amount of their time per week for Y amount of my money), because it just contributed to system imbalance in ways that gave me headaches.

But I think the concept, as a whole, still has a lot of value, and gets closer to a 'balanced' economy than a lot of things I've seen.

Arkandel

@Sparks said in Where's your RP at?:

What I did on Lost Stars (a private invite-only PennMUSH-based science fiction game ages ago) was a system I called DICE, where you had 100 units of 'time' per week. The system was then made of blocks, that would take an input, operate on it with a function, and then output something.

You could literally set up a block that said, "I have Skill X / Career Y, I will spend 40 units of my time this week making money at that." The input was time, the function was your skill/career, the output was money.

But if you wanted to train a skill up, that also cost time. (As opposed to XP; there was no XP to buy up skills, you just had to spend the time training them. It was level * 150 time, so level 1 of a skill took 150 time units, level 2 took 300, etc.) That was another block you could place in the system. The input was time, the output was progression towards a skill. (Basically, learning a skill had a 'meter' that had to fill.)

I like this. It's straight-forward and gives the player agency to make interesting choices.

How do you treat dinos? What happens to the newcomer six months after the game opens compared to them?