Where's your RP at?
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A fair economy for a game with a large number of players, in an online setting, without dice to determine winners and losers, is a fucking mess. I just don't think it's possible, either.
Sooner or later, on every MU, you're going to come across PlayerA thinking it should go one way and PlayerB thinking it should go another. If it's about story, then the resolution of the scene comes down to PlayerA vs PlayerB, not CharacterA vs CharacterB. It's ultimately an argument about who is right and who maintains creative control.
It takes a very tight, very team-based environment to survive that. This is, IMO, why so many of these games turn into throat-punch festivals. When it's down to deciding what the players want, no one wants a 50/50 coin toss or some staffer who is ultimately going to be called out for potentially playing favorites to be the tie-breaker.
Light systems are great for this, too. Light systems are harder to hack, like FS3, but still allow some measure of IC challenge/conflict resolution to keep things IC and not being hashed out OOCly.
But, then again, we've all seen plenty of examples of players refusing to accept the IC resolutions, even when dice have determined the results. For this hobby to work well, it requires a fair-play understanding that sometimes, CharacterB won the scene.
and we have derailed the fuck out of this thread
EDIT: I am also proud to announce that this is my 1000th post and I have EXACTLY 1000 upvotes.
I AM KILLING IT NOW THAT THEY TOOK AWAY THE DOWNVOTE BUTTON.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
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1001 and 1001 now.
Fuck you.
Edit: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T UPVOTE THIS. JESUS.
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It does feel like the hobby is really in a period of shrinkage, though, and it feels like a lot of players are retreating to where players are, regardless of how weird an idea that is. I know two people who took their non-sexual RP to F-List of all things, simply because there's thousands of people there. I've seen a few people in recent months basically shrugging and heading back to Shang, just because it's a big place. Law of averages and all that, and I can't say I blame them. Some of the places I've dabbled in over the past few months have involved a lot of talking about RP and not much actual RP.
edit: More shrinkage than the constant decline that's been going on for the past few years, of course.
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Am I going to regret asking about F-List?
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OH ARE YOU EVER
It's a collection of basically-IRC chat rooms based around ERP. That's all it is. However, there's a significant amount of players who are there to do non-sexual RP. I don't believe them, of course, but there's also a number of profiles that I've been shown as evidence that there are people trying to do high concept roleplaying.
So, y'know, like Shang but without even Shang's world to provide a shared tapestry and a context to ground characters in.
edit: Checking the site, there are 6000+ characters logged in.
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wincing
ERP?
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Text-sex.
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I just hit the web site. It's a furry site, isn't it?
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I've seen what's down there. And I'd give anything to unsee it. No amount of therapy will ever make it okay.
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I played on PC death expected games. I've had PCs killed within a week of cg. My PC has accidentally killed another (remember dousing that guy with soapy water on SR Detroit, @Shayd ?).
There was nothing more magical or intense about Shadowrun games in the 90s that stuff today. It was just a different culture. Oh by the way they didn't have xp rollover either!
Usually people who can only think of PC death to create tension and shit are pretty unimaginative and lazy in my experience, especially on games where it is not culturally the norm. You can create tension and stuff without it or by letting people have options.
I've chosen to kill off or go with a crappy dice roll death on wod PCs. Though then you run into the issue of because it is not so cultural, some people do it to attention whore too, or to make people feel bad before they reroll their xp into a new PC.
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On Topic: No where really right now. I log on to KD fairly regularly, but I'm pretty much only playing with one person at this point.
PC Death. I think if it's understood from the outset it could work. It worked very well on Greatest Generation and we had a pretty good sized player base. Of course, it was VERY clear that PCs were temporary- after all a campaign would end and everyone would have to re-roll. Perhaps that could work for a survival game- perhaps set a 'season' of six RL months or so before a new setting and everyone re-rolls.
Off-off-off topic. I really miss The Greatest Generation.
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How long were the character runs on The Greatest Generation?
I have a waggish sense of humor.
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@Ghost said in Where's your RP at?:
@surreality Well, yeah, a good GM doesn't go:
"You went to go break up the mugging outside of the bar and he was hiding a sawed-off shotgun in his pocket ROLL INITIATIVE, FUCK YOU YOU DIE."But we're not talking about tabletop here, we're talking about players interacting amongst themselves. Sure, they can be something a ST or GM flings at someone. I've encountered these in players running into things other players are doing more often than any of them being GM'd, however, by a pretty big margin.
You're right, there are equally valid styles of play.
It's just that when you have one population of people who believe that the game is about risk, character sheets, and dice rolls, and another population of people who believe that the game is about what they decide the outcomes to be, then stuff gets awkward.
One crowd won't agree with the "never rolls dice" crowd deserves the rewards.
The other crowd doesn't want their characters or story risked to dice rolls, and doesn't want to be forced to do so to move the story along.
The problem here is that you're still addressing only the extremes.
OK, fine; that solves like 5% of the times this crap comes up, well done, how about the other 95%?
How about the time players want to run a sparring session that they agree in advance is going to be non-lethal and for minor damage only, and roll that exploding dice moment that would otherwise put someone in the ground? Are these people unable to play a game properly when they ignore the final roll and cap it to a hospital stay instead for a serious but unexpected wound, in accordance with the mutually desired outcome for that scene? Most RPG systems don't account for combat style sparring, or do so very poorly and in hopelessly unrealistic ways. It's not a big deal at the table, since this is rare as hell, but it's a fairly common M• scene to have that absolutely involves dice and actual consequences.
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@Misadventure said in Where's your RP at?:
How long were the character runs on The Greatest Generation?
It varied. Some campaigns gave you more revives. (For those unfamiliar - it was like a limited number of "lives" that would undo a lethal wound.) Not many people got permakilled in WWII Stalingrad, but WWI Arras was more of a bloodbath. Looking back at my logs, the campaigns themselves lasted about 6 months on average.
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That might be another good solution- give each character a number of 'revives'. With TGG, if you took your revive, you survived, but there was a loss to your stats to represent the grievous injury. You were also given the option of just re-rolling right away and rolling over your XP to a new character. I can't remember if there was a bonus involved with that option or not but I feel like there was.
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@faraday @Trevler Those are cool options. They're also game/system mechanics -- just like implementing, say, a risk cap or floor on a scene can be a mechanic in a game.
All of the above is also much more viable as a means of managing multiple play styles on a single game than arguing only the furthest extremes.
Nuance is a thing, and tends to reflect reality best. Everybody in this thread is way too intelligent to pretend nuance is not a thing, so oh, on all ye gods and little fishes, I wish people would stop doing it.
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@Gilette said in Where's your RP at?:
It's a collection of basically-IRC chat rooms based around ERP. That's all it is. However, there's a significant amount of players who are there to do non-sexual RP.
I don't care about what people do there, but I do wonder if the codebase is up for grabs somewhere. Because that would be very interesting.
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@Trevler said in Where's your RP at?:
That might be another good solution- give each character a number of 'revives'. With TGG, if you took your revive, you survived, but there was a loss to your stats to represent the grievous injury. You were also given the option of just re-rolling right away and rolling over your XP to a new character. I can't remember if there was a bonus involved with that option or not but I feel like there was.
Even TGG toned that down in later campaigns though IIRC. Along with the increased number of revives, the revive didn't come with a permanent stat loss. It wasn't a grievous injury, more like a "bullet hit the flask in my pocket" sort of thing. I think it says a lot that even the hard-core people who were willing to play with permadeath on a deliberately-short campaign wanted to ease things up a bit.
