Twinking in RP MU*

[Three-Eyed Crow]

@Bennie said:

So maybe the point is that the way in which Plots are advertised is too lazy. inviting the All Game to the rodeo instead of saying Characters 100-200 with Social primary is an option we should be exploring.

Tailoring plot to power levels would solve a lot of the issues I have with uber-statted PCs. It's hard as a plot-runner, though. The nature of MUSHes mean that your PrP group is more often than not cobbled together from people with compatible schedules and whoever the fuck wants to engage with it at a given moment. This isn't necessarily bad, but it makes it difficult to expand your tailored plot beyond 2 or 3 people.

[Wizz]

@Olsson said:

If I just charge ahead, I ruin their fun.

If I have to sit through their planning and scheming? They ruin my fun.

So beyond the obvious point of alternating, sometimes letting them have fun, and sometimes letting me have fun. And me taking the backseat and pulling back on the loud and bright shit. Any suggestions for how to handle that?

Mix it up a little. If you're the hammer, let them help you decide where the nails are. That sounds like peanut butter and chocolate to me!

[HelloRaptor]

If my fun is RPing and you walk into scenes where I am and instead of RPing just slaughter all the things, then you're a dick

Does this work both ways? If you arrive at a scene where slaughtering all the things is about to commence, and figure out a way to resolve it all just through RPing where nothing has to die, are you a dick for pushing your preference and ruining someone else's fun?

Towards the main topic, I'd generally prefer that peoples sheets are maximized to describe the character they want to play, wherever on the scale of ability that falls. I can handle folks who want to be the best at everything, or the best at what they do, etc. What infuriates me are folks who can't be bothered to play with the system enough to be as good at the things their character does as they think they should be, and then complain, because they don't feel like they should 'have to min-max', when in truth they just don't feel like they should have to learn the system at all, just put dots where they fit their imagination and POOF it should all work out.

"Medicine 3 implies a 'Professional level of skill' but my character isn't a preofessional, so I'll only take 1 or 2, but WAH why am I reliably rolling for shit on Medicine rolls, it's so unfair!"

Shoot yourself in the foot if you want, but shut the fuck up about it for fucks sake. Yes, it's annoying that White Wolf (and other games) like to tie mundane skills to supernatural powers, such that your magical healing power that has no bearing on actual medicine at all is keyed off of your technical knowledge of actual medicine. Suck it up and buy the dots you need, or shut the fuck up.

Truthfully, I think my real contribution to this is - "twink all you want, but don't let the depths of your +sheet stop my ability to RP or you'll find we RP in very small doses." Even if your sheet is awesome, if you walk into a murder mystery, roll dice once to reverse time to see what happened, say who did it, and walk out - well, good job asshole.

...wait, isn't looking back in time like a level 2 power? How does that even require twinking? And this example is a huge peeve of mine. Murder mysteries are not generally a good idea when involving people with supernatural powers, because so, so, so many of them will sidestep the point of a murder mystery. Shit, peeking back in time isn't even restricted to Mages. Hell, there more than one M+ type that can do it. A relic can do it. If you want to run a murder mystery, only invite strictly mortal PCs.

[Darinelle]

@HelloRaptor said:

If my fun is RPing and you walk into scenes where I am and instead of RPing just slaughter all the things, then you're a dick

Does this work both ways? If you arrive at a scene where slaughtering all the things is about to commence, and figure out a way to resolve it all just through RPing where nothing has to die, are you a dick for pushing your preference and ruining someone else's fun?

It absolutely does.

...wait, isn't looking back in time like a level 2 power? How does that even require twinking? And this example is a huge peeve of mine. Murder mysteries are not generally a good idea when involving people with supernatural powers, because so, so, so many of them will sidestep the point of a murder mystery. Shit, peeking back in time isn't even restricted to Mages. Hell, there more than one M+ type that can do it. A relic can do it. If you want to run a murder mystery, only invite strictly mortal PCs.

Probably, and I agree with this and I'll say it was a poor example of twinking, and more an example of what can happen if you cross-sphere ST and don't really understand all the powers. Though in some cases, getting a couple of ranks of Time Arcana isn't necessarily appropriate depending on your character and then it IS twinking. I have a character who is hopeless at politics. HOPELESS. This is her character. She is terribad. Her politics are 0. I don't think even 1 in politics is right for her right now. Eventually maybe she'll get better - or maybe I'll just always leave her bad at politics and never spend a point in it. Twinking isn't just in how much you spend, it's in why you spend what you do.

3xp is nothing. Spending 3xp to get 1 point in politics could represent the changes she's gone through in working with the people she does. Alternately, 3xp in politics could be representative of my desire to be able to boost stats that roll with politics and never suffer the untrained hit for doing political things and roll like a shiny golden god. One way is twinky, one isn't.

In the end though, I'm not interested in judging people for the size of their sheet - it's all in how you use it. (obligatory: that's what she said)

[Please Delete]

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[Catsmeow]

@RDC

I totally agree, but I also know that it is hard for the ST. They have to try and incorporate everyone. When there is a huge power gap, it's hard to do. It's also on the other hand not fun to always be excluded because you are a high power level. I have run things and been like hey this is power level low, mid or high. Please do not come if you are high to a low level one (haha high). Please understand you may die if you come to a high level one and you are a low level. Proceed.

As to being the STAR. I don't actually care if I'm the star of the show. I play mortals because I like the support role. I like my influence to be in the shadows. You know if you are the star, you have to take the fall when it goes bad. Just saying. However, I don't like to sit around and use my skills just to be told: Oh you are at a -12 for all these things because they are so strong. Sorry, I had to account for the twinked out Immortal in the group. -- It's like why did you personally invite me then? To be the audience for them? Two thumbs up, okay, they weren't really thumbs.

[Bennie]

@Catsmeow You know what I hate, is the "ST" - and I use those quotes loosely - who start the combat by saying, "We won't be rolling any dice today. Just have fun and pose what you think your character can do!"

[iceshinagami]

I am an unabashed Twink. I could throw 35+ dice at a target with automatic damage on my pre GMC TR character. My current TR Character can stealth with the best of them and can throw a ton of dice to hit something too. One of the reasons I do like TR's XP though is that I can fluff out a bit. at 800+ xp, I can afford to have some non combat fluff. And I do, have a lot of it. And I buy things up that I never thought I would, because it makes sense. Nuit started with Presence 1 and it showed - she hid, she was shy, she didn't talk, she was afraid of everyone. But time has gone on. She's gotten social skills. And even though she was a combat twink from the start, and most certainly is even worse than she was before (GMC actually made her a tadbit /stronger/) presence is up to 3 now, because it fits, and a whole host of social skills have been bought.

But I am also very fond of building weaknesses into my characters. Nuit has a ton (not that I share them :P) and Karasu, beatstick that he was, was so oblivious to social situations and understandings that he could be (and was) led about by the nose and his strict sense of honor used against him multiple times. He could kill anything that he turned his sword too, but that was all he could do. He couldn't investigate. He couldn't lie convincingly (really, at all), and he was so oblivious to social manipulation that it made my head hurt sometimes what he would get into.

But i love the challenge of being a twink (ie, finding the most efficient way to do something) I love the RP flavor of weakness and balance. And, unlike Arc said, I don't shy away from 'Quarterstaff Fighting Style' (or whatever) cause it sucks. I just plan my way around it carefully to make it work out better for me, cause I like the Theme of things.

[Wretched]

My level of peevetasticness with the twinking usually depends on more the player than the stats. I will freely admit if I see a new player pop up, peek at their wiki and see that they have a column with stats listed and there are 6 stats maxxed out at 5, I get a little eyerolly. It's so very batman, I am the best at all these things! In the world! With TR you get 100% Xp for new chars, and I just plain don't get the appeal of dropping a char on the grid with no room to grow in what he/she does. This is of course personal opinion. There are some, Olsson's pc was mentioned, that work hard not to steal the spotlight, that can be badasses of doom that don't have their own head up their ass, while there are others that I just sigh heavily to myself when they enter a room, preparing to grit my teeth.

Then there are the folks that have the stats but don't actually play them. I'm talking to you every Str 5 waif out there. Under 5 Foot with Maxxed physicals and the scrawniest PB in the world, really?

Personally I prefer more rounded characters in my MU's, but when I MMO I minmax the fuck out. Different mediums.

[surreality]

@HelloRaptor said:

Towards the main topic, I'd generally prefer that peoples sheets are maximized to describe the character they want to play, wherever on the scale of ability that falls. I can handle folks who want to be the best at everything, or the best at what they do, etc. What infuriates me are folks who can't be bothered to play with the system enough to be as good at the things their character does as they think they should be, and then complain, because they don't feel like they should 'have to min-max', when in truth they just don't feel like they should have to learn the system at all, just put dots where they fit their imagination and POOF it should all work out.

"Medicine 3 implies a 'Professional level of skill' but my character isn't a preofessional, so I'll only take 1 or 2, but WAH why am I reliably rolling for shit on Medicine rolls, it's so unfair!"

Pretty much this.

I end up useless in a whole lot of events and PrPs because the characters I make tend to reflect what they actually do -- which means a lot of dancers and artists and sometimes a medic or occultist of some sort. The medics and occultists are almost useful and naturally I seem to play them them least often, because I'm a derp like that. The rest? Yeeeeeeeah, not so good in a fight. But at least it's honestly what I planned to make at the time, even if that character isn't the most useful character in combat, and if I'm playing them as what they actually are, I'm having the fun I want to have and all's well.

Why do I get the impression the price of malpractice insurance in WoD with their 'professional level of skill' is even scarier than it is in the real world? Because... yeah.

[Thenomain]

I think, @surreality (& others), my question in response to those is: Whose responsibility is it that your character be useful in a scene? A lot of people take it upon themselves to make sure that their character is useful for the game, though they still want to role-play a character with different traits.

In today's PrP-Driven scenarios, where is there a place for a dwarf who works at Baskin Robbins and takes care of his invalid mother? Where in WoD does it tell you that it's okay for your Eternal Spring 2 (Heal Everyone) to be powered by a mere Medicine 2? Would your average Mu*er go to you, or go to Tammy Twinkery who tho her character concept is "flower girl" has Medicine 5?

These are rough hypotheticals.

People are probably going rage against one side of this spectrum or another. Hell, I've seen @HelloRaptor argue the case for both sides.

I have no answer, but the waters are very muddy, and the games we play tend to force us to have the maximum stat for our power stat possible. Maybe if WoD wasn't designed to do that, or if we didn't have XP coming out of the ground in fountains.

[Bennie]

@Thenomain a lot of players seem to come from some strange (to me) dice less continuum of gaming that involves raising baby dragon eggs, dancing in Disney ballroom scenes, putting on musicals, and shit like that, without dice, and getting titles from something called feature characters where the title came with the char they asked for off a list.

So I think it is just the clash of various cultures meeting in the same river crossing. With 300 wagons abreast you're bound to have folks who don't get that the game line involves a measure of success and failure through rolling, or who find that boring because of the time consuming effort behind trying to control success in your favor. Just as you're bound to get folks who have only ever dealt with that and who spend far too much time working on figuring it out, even eschewing a lot of RP to do it.

In essence, the Pure RPer thinks the Rules Lawyer has lost sight of the point of the game, and the Rules Lawyer thinks the Pure RPer never got the point of the game in the first place.

So my answer to the question of Whose Responsibility Is It Anyway? is that it is the responsibility of the participant to not stick their dick in anyone's ear. Which is to say, play the game, and if you spy out someone who doesn't play how you like, or a ST who is resistant to the same, take a step back and ask yourself if if is worth alienating everyone involved by pushing for no poses/tons of rolling (or tons of poses/no rolling).

Where we seem to make our mistake is in foisting our preferences all over the game screen and screaming at anyone with a different vested interest. There's usually so many people around, if you just can't stand that dice just rolled by, be pro-active and get thee to a room where people don't like them dice. Or if there's no dice to speak of, and you're bored, get thee to a room with dice.

There's no need to perform a real time exorcism with the people present, trying to banish the dice, or summon them, as your gamer-religious preference might be.

[Thenomain]

@Bennie, I don't think so. You're right that we're a mesh of cultures, which is a good thing, but I come from a culture of pure dice and even I am pressed to put that 5 in that Medicine or hang on to 600 xp unspent (which I currently have on Reach).

Likewise, I don't think that there are "Pure RPers" or "Pure Rules Lawyer" in the WoD settings, and that you've given too little credit to the fact that games like WoD expect you to push toward a few stats at very high levels. There are few game systems that work this way, and none that we have explored the rules enough to exploit at this level.

I will agree with this, tho:

Where we seem to make our mistake is in foisting our preferences all over the game screen and screaming at anyone with a different vested interest.

That's certainly one mistake. Patience and understanding, people. Patience and understanding.

[Sunny]

As an ST/GM that regularly runs things for groups of PCs at variable power levels, it is so much of a pain in the ass to balance a scenario and herd the ferrets so that everybody has something to engage with. So, so much of a pain.

It is entirely possible though, and requires a mixture of planning and being able to completely throw away the plans on a dime if needed to ensure your players' engagement. You just dump more and more on the monster-characters in the front until they're well and truly occupied, and then throw something less of a threat at the lower powered characters. This functions in combat scenes the easiest; it's harder to do in long-term plots, but it is again possible. Give the big cats the big/tough mystery to solve, then once they're off chasing shadows, give the kittens something that matters (and is within their ability) to also deal with.

This requires that your players are generally aware of what you're trying to do, and are being cooperative about it by NOT wrapping up their shit and then turning around and stomping all over the lowbies' shit, too. The vast majority of the time, people are completely and happily willing to go along with me on this, even if they have never played with me running something before. I have only ever run into a problem with it once, with someone who threw a complete tantrum OOC when I made it obvious she was not going to be allowed to solve all the things including what the other PCs were working on. I've been doing this for a while though, and there having been only one major problem (in other words, only one that I'm really remembering -- that one stuck with me)...is rather the exception that proves the rule.

[Bennie]

@Sunny I keep picturing this scene where the dancer is doing high leg kicks in a saloon girl dress at the gate to occupy the guards who are scratching their heads wondering wtf just happened, while the 3 werewolves abscond with the truck on their backs, will powering through death rage so they don't break anything as they tip toe out of the industrial parking lot.

[Sunny]

@Bennie : Hahaha. Yes. That is exactly the sort of thing I'm suggesting.

This is, for the record, why I have such a difficult time running PRPs that require staff approval before they're run, rather than simple record-keeping afterwards. If I want to ensure that everybody has fun, I absolutely must have the leeway to make shit up as I go. If I am not intimately familiar with the PCs I'll be running for, I have to guess. Guessing is harder than I like STing to be and I am rarely right, so I need to have room to improvise. Period.

Many games do not allow for this wiggle room; sometimes I will get a staffer that says: 'I get how you run things, it's cool, do what you need to do' (@Glitch). That leads to some pretty epic storytelling. I had the same benefit on TR from @EmmahSue during the EOTW thing; I was able to provide general outlines and then just do it. Prior to my withdrawal from playing on traditional games, I was at the point where I just wasn't going to run anything any more.

[Bennie]

@Sunny has a point. We know by now with a pretty empirical record that the community thrives off people being allowed to tell stories with very little oversight. While it will never be 100% possible to trust 100% of the people to run 100% of the things in a way that does not some % of the time turn out to be a spectacle the staff were never expecting. The general rule of thumb is, if the people invested in storytelling aren't telling any stories because your game system has so many hurdles in the way of their running something that it's a job to run anything... you only hurt your game. You're discouraging people from participating, and yet, you want them to go through this inordinate volume of hurdles to participate. It goes both ways. They want their contribution to be uncomplicated and fun, and you want them to participate.

This means a game's first line in defense of inactivity is to look at just what their PRP rules are, and to think about quickly rewriting them and relaxing them to the point that activity starts again.

I find much of PVP stems from the lack of PRPs. People have no Pure to rip apart, so they turn on one another. All the loud mouthed people you love to hate stop sitting around spewing vitriol at everybody and go out and eat something when there is something to be had. Take away the something, they only have other people to turn on.

[Thenomain]

Rampant PVP has nothing to do with PrPs. It has to do with having poor impulse control.

[Wizz]

@Bennie said:

@Sunny I keep picturing this scene where the dancer is doing high leg kicks in a saloon girl dress at the gate to occupy the guards who are scratching their heads wondering wtf just happened, while the 3 werewolves abscond with the truck on their backs, will powering through death rage so they don't break anything as they tip toe out of the industrial parking lot.

As an aside, this sort of scene is why I think a game based on Buffy/Todd and the Book of Pure Evil (kiiiiiind of NSFW, haha) would just be so much goddamn fun.

[Bennie]

@Thenomain agree to disagree. When people have things to do, I watch a PVP shouting match that spills over to Channels like once every year. When people have nothing to do, they're always screaming at one another and complaining about being blocked somehow from destroying one another and who's a staff pet and who's a whack job and who's a jerk for having too many dice and who's entrenched and who's not flexible and who's unenlightened.