Fading Suns

[Apollonius]

I got the impression that Paulus knew Amber or someone who was close to Paulus did but I don't really remember what gave that impression.

Yara was a spy for P against Custodius and myself because P wanted to give us a 'second chance.' This is somewhat ironic... or fitting... since she was basically advertised as the ombudsman/PR for the staff roster. It was also a strange way to give us a 'second chance' when it was pretty damn clear what they were doing.

Mind, I actually was applying to be a tiny little baron and P suggested I be the Count of Auberry. I said I wanted to play a Hawkwood and he said I should play a Decados and he'd give me toys like Jakovians to sweeten the deal. I specifically requested that I be the Viscount/Son of said Count because I felt that if I was an outright Count, knowing my history with the staff roster, people would automatically be suspicious of me as a player. Making a deal with P was my first mistake because all deals with P is Faustian. In hindsight, I should have never made any deals and should never have voluntarily crippled my PC like I did.

Okay. In hindsight, I should have never played in Star Crusade. Next.

[bored]

Yeah. 'Known activity generators' is a code word for 'my friends.' 'First come, first serve' is also code for 'my friends,' because when you're opening a new game the first people who know about it are usually your buddies. So in the end, it's back to people giving shit to their friends. If there was some legit exception that made it 3/4... oh well then.

How much you knew about this shit, @Packrat, I don't know. I do have a recollection of my 3-way interactions with you and Paulus being a nightmare, and the pair of you consistently telling me different things or changing your mind, going back on things you said etc, to the ultimate result of me being fucked no matter what I ever did. IIRC, you had the rep on game of being the guy who loved to tell brilliant, evocative stories... about PCs getting fucked over. That was actually what drove me off. The favoritism only factors in, in that there was a very obvious subset of people actually succeeding. Everyone else, it was 1 step forward, 2 back.

[deadculture]

@bored Do not forget @Packrat was incidentally the Joan d'Arc of the setting too, after he gave either Rosario or some other equally powerful char up.

But I did have some fairly good times in that game, especially with @mietze, Sofia et al. I just think Paulus/Principle should have striven for a cleaner execution of everything, pretty much. I understand why the contradiction but it was a very subjective fog of war. Amber and Renaud were VERY, VERY intimately attached to the setting as characters and had an unfair advantage over the other counts.

To an almost cartoonish amount.

Time will tell what kind of game you'll run Packrat.

[deadculture]

Oh and by the way, don't make the XP gain as sluggishly retarded. It made all the good sheets to be especially good and frontloaded.

[3543thrh67]

I actually liked how Star crusade did their XP spends and the likes.

[Packrat]

I have to admit being curious about what caused that, admittedly it was years ago but the worst thing I recall happening to anyone in a scene I ran was Sofia losing her hand? She won the naval battle and got plenty of loot to get a robot hand though.

There was one guy who was nearly incinerated by a gigantic laser but he dodged it then shot the gunner to death. I also remember some Brother Battle getting really indignant after a lucky roll let him get slightly injured in his powered armour by the Kurgan lord he then killed?

To be honest I did not run that many many scenes.

Why you were pressured into being a count definitely eludes me though, I mean you were not a "staff favourite"! It did seem to be a weird pattern that every count player thought that all of the others were staff special friends while at least half of staff denigrated each of them constantly on channel. Having been a player on a P run game thought I do know just how frustrating it was though - you are in this horrendous information vacuum and punished for every possible mistake while if you send in requests to try to do something they are normally actioned like a month after they were relevant.

It was not deliberate persay . . . But so much of the strategic level stuff was kept to Paulus and Lextius whilst being redicilously admin heavy, with no economy system and everything ultimately decided by entirely subjective fiat.

[deadculture]

@bored I think the guy with that reputation was Lextius.

[bored]

Yeah, I definitely mixed Emmanuel and Lextius up. Lextius was Paulus' right-hand bad news service. It's been a bit.

@Packrat: My bad!

[ThatGuyThere]

I must have gotten lucky with the approval lottery I was honestly surprised how well statted out they made my Phoenix knight.

[mietze]

My Amaleathean majorly fucked up a healing roll and almost killed another PC. Luck of the draw is that he was around me again when it triggered and I didn't fuck it up so bad the second time around. It still wasn't great but better than unintentional PK. I actually really felt bad (he was super sweet about it). Some of the battle scenes were high stakes in other ways, but I too remember tantrums and all out ignoring unfavorable rolls (IC and Ooc tantrums) with one person in particular but she was by no means the only. Sometimes I felt the scene runner did not handle that well, and so it kind of encouraged that behavior.

P and I and quite a few others have had some pretty in depth and honest discussions about stuff that went wrong (for a while I was contemplating opening a game too--but realistically I don't have the time or health to do so so I'm not).

There were so many things done wrong ( and right). I think a lot of it boils down to (if you take out the personality conflicts) overextension of a too small staff for the scope of the game they were running. I agree that it's better to focus in on one or two aspect rather than to try to do everything (politics! war! Guilds! Questing! Exploration! Ect!). And at the end only 1 or 2 people had plot info as staff, things were not updated and getting lost, there wasn't enough staff time to keep up with demands/expectations that had been set (some people may blame players--I don't. I think as staff you teach people how to treat you and others by what you permit oocly in particular and what you reward, and from my outsider perspective at the time there seemed to be a pretty shocking amount of discourteous behavior all around, from STed scenes being delayed or started hours early with minimal communication or flagrantly after people had been waiting, and people throwing screaming Ooc tantrums at staff and other players in public). That's really why most of the people I know wandered away. It wasn't moving along, and the signal to noise ratio of problem behaviors was starting to rise as people grew more frustrated and started taking it out on each other.

I'm hoping that my health situation will be on the mend soon (and with it probably the time situation as well). I would still love to get involved with a FS project if that stuff permits. Old contacts and friends, don't be strangers. Always happy to chat/catch up.

[Alzie]

I didn't mind staff making stats. I didn't know the system at the time so being able to say 'This is what I want, I don't know what stats to buy' and have staff say 'This is what you want' was useful. Granted I didn't know if what they offered was good.

[silentsophia]

@Packrat She had to take out a loan from the Battle Bros and sell the ship they captured to them. Hands ain't cheap. I played Sofia and I think her stats were pretty good for what she was (Hazat Naval Captain deliberately kept bad at politics to prevent quibbling with siblings). I also didn't/don't know the system very well, so it was nice for me.

I did love hauling people around and taking people places. Emmanuel and the Battle Brother whose name started with an M but was not Miles were pretty awesome. Miles wasn't a bad dude. Sofia taught him how to fish. Adventuring and battling were totally my jam.

I thought losing her hand was interesting, and I did have fun - even if I have a knack for rolling terribly and giving GMs good dice wherever I go. I did lose a lot of faith when one chick accused me of trying to ruin her fun (lol), saying in OOC I was being passive aggressive in order to ruin her fun (wtf) because my ship's captain wouldn't give up her passengers if she could help it. So I offered to leave rather than escalate. This apparently made it worse.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it felt like consequences weren't really a thing for Renaud as much as others. I did feel awkward about a lot of it, but I was grateful mostly to be beneath his notice. And I will confess I get grumpy at my bad dice but I think Sofia made out well enough. She liked most people she ran across, and balanced out the more hot headed, party type Hazat. I felt kind of crushed by how Amber treated me IC and OOC. A four hour scene for 'lol ur pc isn't competent' was - eh. She just took up a different position and being a baroness was totally awesome!

Also, having a grumpy old man Li Halan was pretty hilarious. She had a phobia of lampreys and lived in the Fens where they exported lampreys. I deliberately avoided politics because 1) I suck at it and 2) It rarely seems to end well.

[Apollonius]

Thol/Lextius intentionally reveled in the misery of others. If P was a lying sociopath, Lextius was an outright sadistic psychopath.

@silentsophia That same chick is one of the reasons why I had at least two major meltdowns. You're either referencing Amber and/or Chiaka. Either way, good riddance to both of them.

As much as I want a new FS game to pop up, it does go back to a MU* thesis of mine that the FS 'space' is too crowded with personalities that make it a bad fit for any long-standing MU* environment with any political/economic system. A vampire on the Reach can exist and idle out in a single breath with no one ever noticing. In FS, even if we are talking about the height of its popularity with 40-60 people signing on (some of those alts), pretty much everyone knows everyone else and most of those people despise each other in a weird interrelated manner.

[Alzie]

@silentsophia Moroko! Momoko and Moroko! How could you forget Moroko! Moroko was the best.

[deadculture]

@Apollonius It's a game. Yes, emotions and frustrations run high, but let's not use the words 'suffering' (how much suffering is it to stand in front of a screen?) and psychopath (no doubt Paulus has a problem in that he's a master of doublespeak, but that doesn't really make a psychopath, per se). Now, having put that aside, Lextius was the kind of dude who did want to screw you over in scenes, and I think he was extremely ... 'moderate' in how he statted you. With some exceptions.

As for Chiaka, she was histrionic and loved to be the victim; I think in that particular scene that @silentsophia mentioned she was offering herself UP to the Kurgan captors and was frustrated Sofia was nixing her attempts. Amber, on the other hand, was the kind of person I wouldn't trust with any sort of IC leadership. Everything was personal, everything had to be a major fucking issue if it didn't go her way. And because of that, she was extremely difficult to work with, in addition to having a LOT of neat advantages over pretty much everyone else (an air force, et cetera).

[Apollonius]

@deadculture There definitely is a level of suffering. It's not that I suffer from a bad roll or IC misfortune, but the fact that in a MU*, unlike, say, an evening with Skyrim and Farkas as my companion/husband/pack mule, there are real personalities at play and real people who socialize not just on an IC level but on an OOC level.

Paulus was a sociopath in the most classic of definitions:

"...a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience."

Paulus lacked any sense of conscience for the sort of shenanigans he pulled. He pretty much simultaneously befriended you while talking about you behind your back as he was sucking up to you. There was one time where Paulus was talking to me, while also talking to Custodius. Custodius and I were trading notes on what Paulus was saying and using that as a sort of feedback loop to talk with Paulus.

Lextius is more of a psychopath:

"...a person suffering from chronic mental disorder with abnormal or violent social behavior."

Lextius-run plots and anything that was touched by Lextius was a one-way ticket to a lot of headache for your PC and possibly the player based on the sort of actions and sadistic pleasure he took in playing PCs and players like pawns. I found Paulus to be tolerable because I suppose I understood his doublespeak. With Lextius, there was no doublespeak. It was a bull in a china shop and he took pleasure in screwing people over IC and OOC. That last bit was pretty well documented over the course of DBtS and FS: Vargo.

And again, I'm certainly no saint, but I like to think that I was on tolerable behavior for most of my tenure in Star Crusade til towards the end and I just stopped giving a shit. I dunno. Maybe I was worse than everyone else. Either way, I called bullshit pretty quickly and got out with a little online MU* dignity intact.

Apparently Paulus, from Day 1, was telling Chiaka OOCly to revolt against my PC. Nevermind that my PC came three days later onto the grid and I was still negotiating the terms of my PC.

I really resented Amber because she got to cherry pick her vassals (I got stuck with Chiaka because staff thought it would be a fun joke on me) and she still complained about shit (namely my shit) after she got more toys to play with in a safer County. Never mind that having a small cadre of Jakovian agents is thematic to a Decados Count and since the Jakovians were controlled by P, they were at best, people that dislike me but were fortuitously shooting in the same general direction.

[mietze]

If Chiaka player was telling you that, with respect, I might take it with at least a little grain of salt. I mean it could very well have happened, but given my experiences with her where she was saying she was told or had to do things that I knew for a fact ICly and OOCly the opposite was said (because I was there), I mean she is I'm sure a very nice lady but not exactly very reliable. At least in almost all of my experiences with her.

I don't think anyone on that game was a sick person. I do think that in some ways though players were encouraged to be at each other's throats. It lead to a lot of frustration. I got to hear all kinds of things on all sides, because while 2 of my PCs were at least minimally involved in politics, both were somewhat neutral as well, at least on the surface.

Everyone had the same complaints about favoritsm and staff set up. Given that that started to happen on RfK as well I am wondering if it isn't endemic to understaffing when hardly anyone is getting responses to anything, things crawl to a halt or there's unsatisfying pace or advancement, somewhat of a communication breakdown, and in the absence of a very unifying personality (as Shava tended to be) the people start turning on each other out of frustration and safe target.

[Packrat]

The problem with staff setting people's sheets was that it was a complete lottery, it all ultimately came down to a game of applying for somebody who was as big a badass as possible and specifically spelled this out in their background if you wanted to be actually good at things. If two people applied for a knight, one who specified they were a super badass and the other did not? Most of the people on staff would happily just set up the first as vaguely competent at some stuff and the second just as competent but also with the stats to be a badass, this happened even if the latter player was hated by staff and the former loved in a lot of cases. Some people would be inexplicably terrify however and others inexplicably good with no real reason behind it and there was a weird aversion to giving high levels in certain skills, I got a huge amount of flack on staff for giving Hugh (who was like, a general) a Warfare skill of 7 since he had not just put a few paragraphs in his background suggesting he was an amazing general (nobody else had applied for a general at all at this point!). Needless to say people would never be told that they could/should put that they were great at stuff in their applications.

That said I did notice a comment above about Rosario being a powerful character I played? Yes he was my character, but he was... Well, a knight who was particularly good at waving a sword around, but then terrible at almost everything else apart from riding horses and with no particular influence or importance. There were quite a few player characters who were better than him in a straight fight including Cephus who not only did beat up Rosario three times but was also say, a competent military commander who spoke Kurgan and other useful things. Off the top of my head I think two of the Brother Battle would have beaten Rosario in a fight, Antonio definitely would have, there was that Dervish who mauled him utterly at the tournament, the Baron of Helborg was great at shooting, plus at least one of the Muster, that Vorox. There were another couple of knights who would have definitely had the edge in a duel if they fought using energy shields and thus took advantage of their superior combat maneuvers. He was definitely below average when it came to total points on +sheet, though thanks to the random +sheet lottery there did exist some poor people who got characters who had no goals higher than say, 11, just randomly, including people who were weirdly favoured by staff.

Fadila was a character I applied for after quitting then coming back to the game not as staff, quite frankly I took advantage of knowing what type of character they liked to give high stats to then pitched to it, though if I remember correctly her 'Holy Visions' were actually due to a Decados mind control chip in her head. I ended up giving up on her after running into the brick wall of staff obfuscation that effected everyone else. Want to know what your army actually consists of so that you can actually political/military RP? Wait six plus weeks! Want to try to move said army away from the capital? Welcome to having to deal with Custodius' creepy as fuck self. (Though it was hilarious getting him to agree to feed her army as it marched through his land, her 'army' which was far larger than its military strength suggested due to consisting in a large part of fanatical beggars with huge knives and lunatic priests.)

Regarding Lextius I am honestly not sure what the fuck happened to him. He was just toxic when it came to running plots, dealing with jobs, whatever, he was always looking for the way to most screw over all of the players involved. Years ago (like ten years ago) he used to be huge fun to RP with and run really great plots where you got to do awesome baddass stuff but at some point he lost that, admittedly I have not spoken with him since before Star Crusade went down but it was in full force long before that. I mean I still have fond memories of on The Dark Between The Stars my Hazat Baron having a rivalry turned friendship turned enemy thing with his Decados Baron, sword fighting assassins on an airship, ultimately betraying his Decados Baron and having him murdered, etc.

[Apollonius]

@mietze said:

If Chiaka player was telling you that, with respect, I might take it with at least a little grain of salt. I mean it could very well have happened, but given my experiences with her where she was saying she was told or had to do things that I knew for a fact ICly and OOCly the opposite was said (because I was there), I mean she is I'm sure a very nice lady but not exactly very reliable. At least in almost all of my experiences with her.

I don't think anyone on that game was a sick person. I do think that in some ways though players were encouraged to be at each other's throats. It lead to a lot of frustration. I got to hear all kinds of things on all sides, because while 2 of my PCs were at least minimally involved in politics, both were somewhat neutral as well, at least on the surface.

Everyone had the same complaints about favoritsm and staff set up. Given that that started to happen on RfK as well I am wondering if it isn't endemic to understaffing when hardly anyone is getting responses to anything, things crawl to a halt or there's unsatisfying pace or advancement, somewhat of a communication breakdown, and in the absence of a very unifying personality (as Shava tended to be) the people start turning on each other out of frustration and safe target.

Chiaka and I had stopped being on speaking terms barely midway into my tenure and I tried my best to have my agents deal with her because she would go into histrionics midway into any scene with me OOC. With Amber, she flat out refused to talk to my PC (despite being a major Count) because her PC ICly hated the Decados and because she had some sort of gripe with my assets. Again, had to trade words via an emissary.

Star Crusade's staffing regime liked to talk and I managed to pull a lot of information from various players, some staffers, and often from the mouth of Paulus himself. Very little changed since Vargo.

[silentsophia]

@Alzie Moroko! That was it. He so was. Sofia adored him and so did I.

@deadculture Yes, it's the one. I was nixing it because it wasn't in character for my captain, nor was it fair to the other players. I thought a Hogan's Heroes-esque escape would've been more fun. But I was too busy CRUSHING FUN.

Don't get me wrong. I am hardly a saint. I did play a loyal Vassal to Antonio, and later Sans.