Roster Characters & WoD?

[Solstice]

@roz

Not sure what your point is with this one. It's like continuing to discuss jazz music in a thread where someone asked 'Are there any games about jazz music?'

[Tinuviel]

@solstice It happens every time a conversation drifts. Without fail.

[chibichibi]

I'd be down with rosters on a WoD in a mortal sense. I think your average joe/jane mortal could be easily rostered. It's just a simple concept that someone can pick up, join the game, see how they like it and go from there. The roster could certainly have the option of becoming something supernatural (through an awakening/embrace/chrysalis whathave you depending on the splat) but since there are millions of mortals per supernatural it makes sense.

Rosters that start off already supernatural... Do NOT make sense to me. Considering there are themes in place for the splats, it'd be hard to just give someone who doesn't know the game or book something that can be an in for a potentially complex society.

But that's just me.

[Pacha]

@chibichibi

I think Rosters would be good because it lets the game runners set the tone of the game. If you don't want that really weird concept, or the comedy concept, or that concept that is your pet peeve, you don't put it on the roster, and it will never show up. In particular, I think of the recent problems at Liberation and how easily those could have been avoided if they had simply offered a roster of characters they wanted to see and said "Here...pick one!"

[chibichibi]

@pacha How would you screen for someone taking a roster, never having read Mage/Vampire/Werewolf/etc and just going ham with it, ignoring theme even if the char concept is in theme? That'd be my worry.

[Tinuviel]

@chibichibi said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

@pacha How would you screen for someone taking a roster, never having read Mage/Vampire/Werewolf/etc and just going ham with it, ignoring theme even if the char concept is in theme? That'd be my worry.

Have an application process, the same as any other character.

@pacha said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

I think Rosters would be good because it lets the game runners set the tone of the game. If you don't want that really weird concept, or the comedy concept, or that concept that is your pet peeve, you don't put it on the roster, and it will never show up. In particular, I think of the recent problems at Liberation and how easily those could have been avoided if they had simply offered a roster of characters they wanted to see and said "Here...pick one!"

Ew, no. If you only want stories about your characters write a book. Have some rosters, but let us actually creative people make our own, please.

[Derp]

@mietze said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

I think we need to get away from the idea that a game in a beloved genre must cater to all people, past and present.

Literally nobody said this though.

What we've said is 'it did not work in the past and comes with an attendant host of problems that create issues for the players involved, so it is likely not worth the headache'.

This has absolutely nothing to do with who a game caters to, and everything to do with a generalized logistical issue that has absolutely nothing to do with taste.

For the most part, though, I agree with the statement. Not every game can, or should, try to cater to all people. But there is a certain core of gamerunning logistics that are going to be fairly universal for whatever genre you want to play in, and there's no escaping that.

[mietze]

@derp There are plenty of people who would totally freak out and refuse to darken the door of a WoD game with rosters. Or any number of things. I think that making a roster WoD game would probably have different problems than the usual, because it would be a very different group of people than is per the usual Shittington By Night game in the old school/usual vein

I don't think WoD players are unique in this at all. After all, most of the "I want to make a X game, here's my idea, would anyone be interested" tend to have lots of people jump in to criticize that idea and how they would never play there or why can't you do something the polar opposite instead.

It is almost endearing.

However, honestly I think that there's no harm in trying something new, if the person who's going to run it wants to. Hopefully the people who Would Never Play This would stay away (but as we all know there are also many exhausting people who also will log in on guest or pre-CG bits to loudly complain that a game doesn't have their desired features/sphere/mechanics/theme/allowances/ect and need to flail about it for awhile too.

I see a conversation where people have pretty different takes on what the purpose and structure of a 'roster character' is. Anything from if they are fully fleshed out or not, whether or not they are a one player or serial player type of thing, whether or not they should be given powerful or special unique only this PC can have this roles, ect. I've seen more and more games have a hybrid of roster and non-roster PCs (usually rosters in the minority) and even those handful of games seem to be using rosters/interpreting them pretty differently from each other.

[il-volpe]

@tinuviel said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

@il-volpe Or like... just make your own character and not bother with the faff of a roster?

Because, as has been said, some people would rather not cg. For a variety of reasons.

I have some distaste for the character who keeps showing up with different players.

But I don't hold it against players if they'd rather play than generate a character and are (OMFG) willing and able to play a character they did not create.

And it just ain't so that making people invest time and effort in cg before they can play makes them invested in the game. Somebody might spend five hours making a PC, but will stop logging in before it's approved if you take more than a week or so. Or if they do keep showing up and checking, they might end up feeling 'stuck' in the OOC room with their enthusiasm all spent. If you want people to log in, you must reinforce logging in. Logging in and encountering friendly, responsive and amusing people is fun and makes you want to log in again. Logging in and finding your app approved is exciting in itself. Logging in and getting into a scene that's fun, even more so. If you can get all three of those events to happen to Penelope Player on her first login, you've given her a little jackpot reinforcer for logging in, and she's probably gonna be back /and/ have more staying power in terms of returning even after boring login sessions.

[Kanye Qwest]

@ominous said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

I shall continue to stand on my soapbox and shout that all characters should always be on the roster and anyone can pull any of them off for the night to play them. When the log off, the character goes back on the roster for someone else to play. Also I would have a time limit that auto forces a person out of the character after 24 hours to keep people form idling in a character so no one else can play them. This would take MUSHes in more of a collaborative novel direction rather than the MUD-y standard it tries to stick to now.

And most people will continue to tell you this doesn't sound fun. At all!

Portraying a character takes time. You can pull something off a roll and play it on a surface level over a playsession, but most people like to develop characters.

[Tinuviel]

@kanye-qwest said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

@ominous said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

I shall continue to stand on my soapbox and shout that all characters should always be on the roster and anyone can pull any of them off for the night to play them. When the log off, the character goes back on the roster for someone else to play. Also I would have a time limit that auto forces a person out of the character after 24 hours to keep people form idling in a character so no one else can play them. This would take MUSHes in more of a collaborative novel direction rather than the MUD-y standard it tries to stick to now.

And most people will continue to tell you this doesn't sound fun. At all!

Portraying a character takes time. You can pull something off a roll and play it on a surface level over a playsession, but most people like to develop characters.

Aye. To steal from tabletop wording... we're after a campaign, not a series of one-shots.

It's all well and good to want collaborative novel... but it's not. It's a stage play or a film. We're all there to work together, but I'm here to play Wackford Squeers, not Nicholas Nickleby.

[Ghost]

@ganymede said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

@grayson

I r samuel haight cat.

+10,000 points for the Samuel Haight callout.

[mietze]

I would be interested in seeing how a game like ominous describes works over the long term tbh. I don't think I could get into it myself since a log in every 24 hours or yoink policy would be too hard for me personally to manage. And I can't flip flop into characters super easily, which is why it's hard for me to juggle alts.

But. I do know people who are major altaholics who almost never stayed longer than a week or two engaged with a character, or who could only do so if they could step out of that PC frequently (via rp rooms or using player-npc/retainers/ect) to engage in many stories. If they gave something like that a try, maybe they'd get a really good dynamic for them, and if it attracted similar players, I bet they'd have a lot of fun without worrying about annoying other people or getting into trouble as occurs on more traditional places.

I would think that would require a very dynamic staff who were also jumping in to provide scenes/plot/ect on a more frequent basis...but that is just my brain thinking, perhaps the type of person who would be attracted to jump and play and jump and play again actually would be just fine even without that.

[Tinuviel]

@mietze I'd be very interested to see it in the same way I'm very interested in sociology research. I don't actually want to do the work or experience the problems, but I want to read the paper afterwards.

ETA: And from what I can tell it's not log in every day or yoink, it's yoink every day and pick someone new.

[mietze]

@tinuviel Ah yes, I misread. Well in that case, still difficult for me personally. But I do kind of hope that someone puts something like that together, because I like seeing new stuff. I kind of wonder though how one would track creepers/abusive people (because although most of the ones we know about probably wouldn't be attracted to that environment I don't think, there's always people who will show up to do that), but i'm sure there would be some way to do it.

[Tinuviel]

@mietze said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

I like seeing new stuff

I'm an old grump, I roll my eyes at the idea of 'innovation' for the sake of novelty. I also hate gimmicks.

[Tinuviel]

Which, for the sake of clarity, isn't saying that things must be done my way or cater to me. If you bring an idea up in public, and I think it's pants-on-head bonkers, I will say so... usually with evidence. Doesn't mean you shouldn't do it anyway.

[Sunny]

@tinuviel

Yeah, it's not for me and I think it's a terrible idea for a variety of reasons (the thought of the logistics of just policing gives me a headache), but I'd still like to see it tried, because I think we'd learn a lot from the attempt and I DO think there's a (small) audience for it, and I think it would require thinking about a lot of things in a different way than the usual approach.

[Tinuviel]

What could be fun, though, is a form of... randomizer code in CG.
"I can't decide what stats I want"

• +random

Boom, full sheet done up with random stats to play with. Hit +random a bunch until you're happy.

That might be just me though.

[mietze]

@tinuviel I guess if you or I were to put this together we'd be doing it for the sake of novelty, since neither of us are into that kind of style, format, or structure. But I would think if someone who was really into the idea because it reflects a certain style that they wanted that really isn't available to them at present, they're experimenting in the hopes of improving the experience for people like them.

I think there are a lot of little and big tweaks that can/should/probably will eventually be done to expand the expected format and structure of games over the long haul. Some we will hear about here, others not so much. I know there's a lot of private or only semi-public games out there, some in traditional formats but others trying to mix it up to suit the vision of the runner (or the people playing).

I don't blame people for keeping the not-the-usual stuff under wraps, especially here, but I personally just really like seeing the new ideas when people run with them even if I don't have the same inclinations.