Best posts made by Arkandel

The Superbowl being at the same time as our weekly basketball league game meant most of the team wasn't there. There were six of us, playing 25-year olds, so we only had one sub.

I ended up playing slightly over 40 minutes. There was nothing left in the tank near the end, my legs were dead, the lungs on fire and during a timeout I could barely stomach water.

Now and then I really, really feel my age - those motherfuckers wouldn't stop running and slamming into us in the paint.

It was still glorious. But Monday morning is decisively not fun now.

@Ominous said in Social Conflict via Stats:

I addressed this in another thread. I posited that the solution may be using a "fortune in the middle" system instead of "fortune at the end" like most MUs use. Instead of person A poses, person A rolls social skill against person B, person B reacts, repeat for next set of poses, persons A discusses what their goal is at the start of the scene with person B, they roll and find out how successful or unsuccessful person A will be, then they play out the scene knowing which direction it's going to go.

That works fine if you go into a scene already knowing what it's about; however, at least for me, going into a meeting with an agenda accounts for a relatively small segment of my roleplay. Usually it's more like "I'm meeting people at Elysium, one of them mentions something I need to know more about and I've got to convince them to tell me everything", or going to a PrP and I want to get another character to follow my IC plan (which I don't have ahead of time, I don't even know what the PrP will be about beforehand). Stuff like that.

I think it's imperative we somehow find a good design around social stats on MU* but so far I haven't ran across a robust system that does the job. Usually either it's too complicated or too simplistic to cover the range of outcomes. Even games which come with this sort of thing out of the box like CoD don't seem to be seeing a lot of use - correct me folks if I'm wrong but I've never, ever seen Doors used in day-to-day roleplay in the GMC-based MU* I've been playing for what, almost two years now? Is that just my perception?

@SinCerely said in Dating in the 2020's:

on WoW, he was my GM and I traded soundbytes for enchant materials

<curiosity ensues>

@Kanye-Qwest said in Social Conflict via Stats:

I'm confused as to why social combat should not use social stats.

Physical combat uses physical stats. If you build your pc as a combat beast, the understood tradeoff is that things relying on the OTHER stats, the ones you shanked to become a combat beast, are going to go much less great for you.

The argument isn't why they shouldn't be used - I don't think anyone is saying that - but how. And some of the reasons that complicate the matter are these:

1. Even combat scenes are annoying; they take too long. In the nWoD a fight can easily take over an hour, often considerably more than that. There are all sorts of tables to look up, rules to argue, the roll-then-pose sequence is time-consuming, etc. Now consider how far more rare they are than social encounters, which account for most of the scenes in a game. If the system isn't super streamlined to use it'd be a huge pain in the ass.

2. It's not as easy to quantify social damage compared to physical damage. You have 10 hit points so if I inflict 11 hit points I knock you out... but what about your alliance to Bob? How much do I need to inflict to make you change your mind? How much changing does that accomplish? Do you hate Bob now that I scored a critical hit or just have doubts? It's far more of a gray area.

I agree on the premise that social stats need to matter as much as physical ones, the question now is how.

Well,

1. Someone has got to make a plot about the massive new finding which someone already dubbed "archaeology on steroids".

2. We're full and don't have room for more henges, archaeologists claim.

@Kanye-Qwest Yes, we all agree on this!

But how?

I am just so disappointed in people. It brings the worst in me. I was watching a video (one of many) from Greece where refugees on a boat were being 'welcomed' by the local racist brigade.

I get it. It's hard when you are already facing financial hardships to see illegal immigrants arrive by any and all means to put even more stress on the country it's easy to react badly. And on the other hand it's easy for me as a (legal...) immigrant to sympathize with one group while not having to face the music of that massive financial collapse taking place in southern Europe.

But god fucking dammit it's women and children on a fishing boat. Like twenty of them, that whole thing seemed about to topple over. They just crossed a pretty stormy sea (this was in February after all) to get there; they are wet, tired, and as vulnerable as someone can be - they have no legal status, don't speak the language of the country they're in, and have no certainty about their future in the long or short term and probably scared as hell.

So guy who's standing there glaring at them from the safety of the shore when they're just rocking away on that tiny boat, when someone points out there are children involved maybe your immediate reaction should not be to yell "well we didn't get those sluts pregnant, just get them the fuck away from here", if for no other reason than that I really don't like deeply hating anyone, yet I really fucking hate you.

@Ganymede said in Social Conflict via Stats:

Enforcing them?

I mean, nWoD 2E has a very robust system. People just choose to ignore it sometimes. Most players go along with it, but some do not. If staff would step in and mud-stomp the cheaters, that'd be great.

Read up, though!

The problem isn't enforcement - you can have players perfectly willing to use social conflict rules and it's still inconvenient to do so, unclear how it works (the last time I asked on the vampire channel with multiple staff there how a basic thing worked it took a while going through books to come up with 'it depends'), and slow.

These things need tweaking if we ever want it to be common place enough that it becomes part of gaming culture and a natural thing people do in their everyday scenes.

@GreenFlashlight said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

@Derp said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

I've been making the same argument over here, reminding folks that as a matter of international law they are different. Seems nobody cares.

It's not about the law. It never was. If it was, then people would care what the law actually says. It's about white supremacists wanting to be white supremacists while pretending they're not white supremacists, that's all.

Note that in Europe racism is (slightly) different. It's not about skin color per se, there is plenty of racism against people who look paler than the local populace but come from the 'wrong' country. All it takes is to sound different, follow another religion, even to speak a variation of your language - not even a different one!

The other factor there is poverty. The southern countries are not in good shape, and that's very fertile ground for racism to take hold because there can be legitimate arguments about how viable it is to host seemingly endless waves of refugees. International treaties (EU ones, in this case) are actually to blame.

For instance once someone hits Greece's shores they cannot be allowed to move onto northern Europe which, let's face it, is what they actually want. They need to go through legal procedures and be accepted by the wealthier countries, which takes lengthy procedures and oversight. Nor can they be sent back, for the most part, not because of humanitarian reasons (I wish...) but because in many cases they purposefully don't have any papers - those get destroyed before the journey back.

So while things are somehow figured out the refugee camps just swell in size and numbers, the host country can't afford to improve their conditions, and they can't leave. That's a pretty explosive combination in the long term.

@Pyrephox said in Social Conflict via Stats:

How exactly do we define "posing quality"?

It would need to be an individual definition. Because there can be no universal one.

The code doesn't know (and can't) how your character is predisposed toward anything. What I presented as atheism/religiousness can be anything - how easily a pretty girl can manipulate him, how she's particularly hostile toward authoritative individuals, how impressionable they are to being complimented, etc.

All of those things can change how you IC react to social manoeuvring. And since only you can know, it stands to reason you should be able to assign modifiers to the attempt - both positive and negative ones - because it absolutely should affect your character's defense - if the other person appealed to one of your weak spots that should count. If they rub your character the wrong way it, too, should matter.

That's what 'posing quality' means in this context.

@HelloRaptor By which you naturally mean knowing Jane from freakin' Breaking Bad is playing the part, right?

@Coin said in Social Conflict via Stats:

It's also a bad example within context because we're talking about social (and in a way, mental) stats. So either the PLAYER needs to have a compelling argument, or you can have the dice decide who has the better argument, otherwise, why both rolling? And if you're not gonna roll, why bother with the stat? Just dump it all in physicals...

And yet the exact same paradigm exists in many systems for violent encounters. Take the CofD for instance, you have a different negative modifier for brawl than you do against melee and then again than you do against bullets; some characters take more damage from some sources than they do for others.

Notice also that while physical attributes are far easier to quantify and generalise than social ones we still have to consult fairly extensive tables with different modifiers; a broadsword does more harm than a dagger. A rifle does more harm than a pistol but it's slower. Reinforced clothing is worse than body armor but penalises you less.

I don't think then that we're being inconsistent in applying modifiers to social encounters. The only difference is we can't generalise as easily or in advance because there are too many nuances to possibly stick in a table. My assertion is we let the defender do so; if your character is hitting all the right notes I give the attempt a bonus. If they are making a bad offer I assign a penalty.

It sounds reasonable.

@HelloRaptor said:

@Coin @Arkandel
I mean neither of those things, since I still haven't watched Breaking Bad and didn't really get into Veronica Mars.

You are a monster.

For starters I completely differentiate between social supernatural powers and what we're discussing here generally. Before we can have something like Majesty bypass conflict through stats we need to first design how that conflict normally goes.

In other words Majesty jumps ahead from Step #1 straight to Step #6, but we first need to know what each of those steps is normally and how it's crossed.

For another I disagree with @Groth in the way that I hate character control being taken from me; I mean I do, in the same way that I'd be mildly irritated by someone beating up my character if I had a different story/idea of his story progress, but that's fine - it comes with playing with other people. The unpredictability isn't a drawback as long as it's treated correctly by all participants starting with me; if my immediate mindset initially isn't that I just lost something then it's all good.

No, what I mind is if scenes can't flow properly because we keep having to interrupt their momentum to do dice stuff, chat OOC to debate mechanics and call staff in when we don't know/can't agree how something works. That shit kills my interest in a scene. A social system needs to be very, very fast-paced.

For example:

My character, Joe, is trying to fast-talk @Ganymede's Jane into letting him get through to the private back room.

I pose the social attempt, then do "+social/fasttalk Jane".

Ganymede sees the attempt ("Joe is trying to fasttalk you. Type '+social/defend Joe' followed by a modifier from -5 to +5. 0 is the default if you don't assign one").

Since Joe did something mildly clever by bringing up Jane's combat prowess as a backhanded compliment ("come on, if I misbehave you can kick my ass easily, we both know that") the attempt is given a defensive -2 modifier making it easier to succeed.

Ganymede runs "+social/defend Joe -2", sees the result (but I don't, I don't know the outcome) then poses accordingly.

The roleplay continues. There's near zero delay.

I am completely fine with this system.

@GreenFlashlight said in RL Sads:

Is it weird that the dying seems somehow less awful than the weeks spent undiscovered?

One of the things we lose in death is dignity. We can't ensure how we are seen by others or in what state we are found.

One of my friends can (now, years later) laugh about how his father passed away. It was in the spare bathroom where he had a stroke then fell forward, blocking the door, so their family couldn't get to him.

Death takes more than life.

@ThatOneDude said:

@Huzuruth Its good to have tons of options.

I don't know about that. At some point all the extra fluff isn't adding to the game, just to the game's complexity.

The nWoD doesn't need the identity crisis - it has to either be an easy, straight forward system that gets out of the way and lets RP happen or it has to be about a plethora of options to offer depth in number crunching for powergamers to theorycraft.

It shouldn't try be both or it will be neither.

After several months gyms opened again in the GTA which was frankly the best thing that's happened to me lately.

I didn't know how much I needed that me time. Part of it is just getting under a bar and browsing reddit between sets to take my mind off work, but it's also the way it affects what I eat and how I spend my personal time; without having something to strive towards I let good other habits slide.

@Miss-Demeanor said in Social Conflict via Stats:

@Arkandel I'll call bullshit on that. If you're only ever participating in scenes where everything goes how you want it to go... that's really no different than ignoring the things you don't like just because you don't like them.

There's no need to deal in absolutes. There's a considerable gap between "I only participate in scenes where everything goes my way" and "I will not ignore rolls and cheat if things don't go my way".

The system I proposed works perfectly well with the former. I am suggesting if someone is at the point (or the kind of person) they would go with the latter then there is no point in trying to enforce these rolls and no system would really fix the problem - I would rather just avoid the players.

Edit: Clarified the gap in question.

I'm pretty sure Clans are a feature of core D3 although I can't swear on it. But RoS is so good.

As an investment, D3 is an amazing one for its returns over time.

@Miss-Demeanor said in Social Conflict via Stats:

But if we can't trust our fellow players then none of this really works. I don't want my IC social attempts to succeed if the other person hates it but is forced to go along, what's the point of that? How much fun is the scene going to be?

Bolded for emphasis. Your response suggests that any course of action where someone 'hates' the outcome should be avoided.

Oh, you misread it or I didn't explain it sufficiently. That's not at all what I was saying. I was saying if the person I am playing with will either cheat if he can or need to be brute-forced into accepting an IC action if he can't, then I don't want to play with them.

That kind of person will sabotage the outcome anyway so continuing the scene is a poison pill for my fun.

Systems can't fix bad people. They can only facilitate and improve interactions between the rest.