Request: Downtime System + Hunting/BP System

Groth

Double post, to nerd over data storage:

@Groth said:

I advice using SQL for logging purposes.

I advise only using SQL for logging purposes if your coder can easily handle it. As the information is only important for that character bit, then keeping it on the character is fine, especially if you only need to keep information about the most recent event. If you want to keep a deeper log, then believe it or not MUX has a way to log to and read from an arbitrary text file. Use this as a NoSQL setup, or as a way to collect information until you can create a proper SQL schema.

There's a lot of things you can store in MU* fields or text files, but once you start caring about things like timestamps your life just becomes so much easier if you store the information in some sort of table imo*. Once you've stored the logging in a relational table it also becomes really easy to ask queries like "Which are the last X pools that Y fed from? Which people fed from X pool in November? Which month did X and Y feed from the same pool?" etc if you ever care to do so.

*Yes I know you can store those tables in text files if you care to do so.

Lithium

How can blood be in limited supply? People are blood banks, there's lots of people. Or is this a setting where for some reason thirty vampires have set up shop in a place that cannot support that many vampires?

ShelBeast

@Lithium Yes there are a lot of people. Living in a world of security and constant surveillance, with an addiction to Vines, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and Youtube. Even before this, feeding was never exactly the most easy task. It requires isolating a prey that is accustomed to sticking with the herd, and then being sure that privacy is in tact throughout the process. There's a lot of reasons why blood is limited, despite the fact that it is a resource that is in abundance, physically. The same could be said for diamonds in the real world.

Lithium

@ShelBeast I... cannot recall it being that difficult to find ahem companionship during my clubbing days irl to really figure out why it would be remotely difficult to find a victim in a game. Not including the unwashed masses of homeless people, runaways, prostitutes, criminals, and everything else.

Oh well. Good to know. Not a game for me then.

Hope you get your code worked out and good luck with the game.

ShelBeast

@Lithium Yeah, finding companionship and finding someone to bite can be similar, but not exactly the same. But moreover, in an MU* environment, especially, blood being a limited resource is the only real, proven means to lend impetus for political play the drives the game forward. If you're looking only to sandbox/social, then yeah, things are different. But in sandbox games where Blood isn't a resource, it seems that the political game falls to the wayside because there is no benefit to advancing, other than bragging rights. This has led to stagnation and inactivity in literally every single case that I've witnessed firsthand.

Edit: Also, not my game, nor my code. I have nothing to do with it, at all!

Misadventure

Do some math.
Using the OWoD number of 1 vampire per 100,000 people.
1 Pint of blood a night, you can skip a few nights, but you always make it up. You can't go hungry like a human. That's 365 pints a year.

Assume you can take 2 pints and not hurt someone badly. Thats 180 feedings a year.

Let's say you feed of the same people often, so only 100 a year are anyone new.

Now that can be 20 corpses. Sure.

However, if not, its 1 per 1000 people a year. In a decade 1% has been fed from. By the time you are a 30 year old 3% of the people you know have been fed from.

That gets noticed.

Rainbow Unicorn

So much of unlife revolves around the acquisition of blood that the kind of handwavium applied seems, to me, to be a mistake in general. While I'm not sure that coding it as such is the best response, I do feel that it should be more important than it often is.

Misadventure

It is a game, and so it should focus on what the designer (and players) want it to focus on. While the idea of hunting a human being is interesting, and you could certainly play up that whole aspect for vampire, serial killer, or criminal profiler, or recruiter RPGs, players don't seem that interested in it any more.

So some take it to be a good driver for competition and conflict, and place it off to the side as a feeding and downtime choices minigame.

Lithium

@Misadventure In any given year there are around 90,000 missing people just in the US alone. There are also means and methods to disguise your feeding and your nature.

The World of Darkness is I would assume, even worse when it comes to missing people.

Then you have the willing blood dolls, the slaves, mental powers, blood bonds, etc.

I'm still of the opinion that it's not /that/ hard to hide feedings, if you're in a large enough population center.

Coin

@Lithium said:

I'm still of the opinion that it's not /that/ hard to hide feedings, if you're in a large enough population center.

It's as difficult as the game requires it to be to achieve whatever atmosphere the game is going for. Games, like books and TV shows and any other form of story-based entertainment, have conceits that the players or audience have to buy into. If you can't buy into it, it's not the game for you, basically.

Groth

The two most distinguishing features of vampires are the sunlight allergy and the fact they feed on human blood. So if you're playing Vampire instead of Mage, Werewolf, Hunter or D&D, it's expected that you're somewhat interested in the idea of playing an undead monster that preys on people at night.

From a game design perspective you then want the player to care as much about preying on humans as the vampire does, the player should be thinking about how to get their next fix of blood. The way most games choose to do this is by making all the vampires special powers fueled by blood, requiring the player to regularly find a source to renew themselves. In VTR/VTM the vampire also loses blood daily requiring them to find blood sources even if they're not actively using their powers.

Since being a predator is such a big thing about vampire, you ideally want feeding to be something that's done on screen, in video games you'll usually have a feeding attack you're expected to use regularly. However in TTRPG's or MU* it's not practical to have every feeding event on-screen however since it's still a big thematic point, you'll want some mechanic that makes the player pay attention to when/where they feed. In TT that usually means making a roll with some sort of modifiers and if you fail, then your feeding went awry in some fashion. In MU* however you can take the opportunity to play up another part that's a big part of being a predator, territoriality.

By making blood limited on a grid-square basis (Abstractly representing the difficulty of getting away with several feedings in the same area in a short amount of time) you make the players care very much about who feeds where and when. It's in their interest to control some part of the grid and determine who feeds their in order to guarantee their own supply of blood as well as being able to offer blood supply to others in return for favours.

Talking about the chances of getting away with feedings based on population numbers is missing the point. Handwaving feeding in Vampire is like handwaving breaking&entering in Shadowrun or exploring the dungeon in D&D. Regardless of your chances to get away with it, it's something you're expected to care about and you want complications to happen somewhat regularly so you have the opportunity to use your fancy vampire powers to make them go away.

Misadventure

Actually, feeding from humans and hard to get rid of.

Sunlight didn't originally affect them in most myths. As a disease metaphor, anything that defeats them other than Divine Power would be hard to match up with the experience.

I read several pre-Dracula western vampire serials and stories to see what they were like.

There is no reason to go with those stories in particular when dealing with a modern audience, but they can provide different visions from the Victorian one.

For instance the somewhat cheesy movie Lifeforce takes on vampire swarms, sexiness, millenial fear, bat shape shifting. Renfields, stakes through the heart AND reincarnated romance. All in a different way.

Coin

@Misadventure said:

Sunlight didn't originally affect them in most myths. As a disease metaphor, anything that defeats them other than Divine Power would be hard to match up with the experience.

I read several pre-Dracula western vampire serials and stories to see what they were like.

Sunlight doesn't actually bother Dracula all that much, either. I think at most it limits his powers a little bit, but he's quite active during the day in the novel.

Arkandel

@Coin said:

Sunlight doesn't actually bother Dracula all that much, either. I think at most it limits his powers a little bit, but he's quite active during the day in the novel.

Wikipedia to the rescue!

"Dracula is much less powerful in daylight and is only able to shift his form at dawn, noon, and dusk (he can shift his form freely at night or if he is at his grave). The sun is not fatal to him, though, as sunlight does not burn and destroy him upon contact, most of his abilities cease."

Coin

@Arkandel said:

@Coin said:

Sunlight doesn't actually bother Dracula all that much, either. I think at most it limits his powers a little bit, but he's quite active during the day in the novel.

Wikipedia to the rescue!

"Dracula is much less powerful in daylight and is only able to shift his form at dawn, noon, and dusk (he can shift his form freely at night or if he is at his grave). The sun is not fatal to him, though, as sunlight does not burn and destroy him upon contact, most of his abilities cease."

Great reason to hang out in mist-covered London. There was a series of books by Fred Saberhagen that had Dracul as the good guy (he went by "Matthew Maul") and he lived in Chicago, favoring its supposedly consistently overcast skies.

Misadventure

Almost every trait of creatures are up for redefining. EG not all vampires or "zombies" have actually died at all. It's just a reminder that you can go many directions when you have an idea.

Arkandel

@Coin said:

Great reason to hang out in mist-covered London. There was a series of books by Fred Saberhagen that had Dracul as the good guy (he went by "Matthew Maul") and he lived in Chicago, favoring its supposedly consistently overcast skies.

Many works in pop culture though - and I'm mainly talking movies/TV series here - employ lethal sunlight as a limitation for vampires.

I guess it depends on how they're used as well. As antagonists (say, in Fright Night) they are obscenely overpowered compared to the mortal heroes, so a way is needed to ensure they survive long enough to win. As protagonists it's too limiting to never show your stars in the day if you're running a multi-year series.

And there is always 30 Days Of Night; set north enough so the sun literally doesn't go up for a month, it's the plot device that drives the entire thing.

Coin

@Arkandel said:

@Coin said:

Great reason to hang out in mist-covered London. There was a series of books by Fred Saberhagen that had Dracul as the good guy (he went by "Matthew Maul") and he lived in Chicago, favoring its supposedly consistently overcast skies.

Many works in pop culture though - and I'm mainly talking movies/TV series here - employ lethal sunlight as a limitation for vampires.

Yes? My original comment was meant to clarify that vampires functioning in sunlight isn't something that comes around thanks to Dracula, which is why i quoted @misadventure's post.

Misadventure

And I wasn't trying to link lethal sunlight to the advent of the Dracula novel, though many movie versions feature sunlight as the final destroyer of Dracula. I was just trying to see what had been written about before Dracula made such a big splash.

Is there a term for when you say two things near one another, but they aren't meant to be directly related, though they may be taken as such?

Lithium

@Coin Absolutely. I said as much earlier Just you know, trying to discuss stuff and have discourse but... I will refrain.