I think we ruffled @thebird's feathers.
Man, I kill me.
Changeling always seemed rather underpowered to me compared to other splats. But then again I never had a Lost character for long, so maybe I'm missing something here.
@thebird said:
Also, wtf FitBit, why are you dying.
I contacted Fitbit through their web site over mine they got back to me in less than 24 hours asking for my account name so they can look into it. They have data about its health fed upstream so maybe you can do the same? They might offer some non-generic advice or replace yours if it's faulty.
@surreality said:
@Arkandel, be careful, this is so on point with things I want to do with half a dozen projects you may find yourself begged to join staff somewhere, some day!
Hah! No. My times of insanity and managing egos are behind me; I toil from a mortal coil these days.
@crusader said:
@Arkandel
Honestly, what you have described sounds less like a Consent-based game (which I find boring) and more like an ICA=ICC game, which I approve of.
I think that's by design. See, I don't believe consent-based games are so far from the model of player collaboration we (the hive-mind of MSB) often refer to as the gaming nirvana. In its heart that's what such a system represents, the ability to play and communicate with other players so that everyone walks away from scenes satisfied in some form even if their characters are not.
My assertion here (in its very rough form) is simply that the system itself could, and should, reinforce that notion - I suspect I'm being influenced, some might say corrupted, by @Coin and @tragedyjones' notions of nWoD's Conditions and Beats, which are meant to reward adversity, although I don't want to limit the discussion to nWoD.
So, I'd like to not simply expect players to be mature but to offer active incentives for them to occasionally lose, as a game of "bang! I shot you!" "no you didn't!" won't be fun for long. So perhaps if we condition the playerbase to take the occasional hit we could (always theoretically ) end up with a culture shaped to accept mishaps to their characters as part of simply playing, and more so in the absence of paranoia of losing a beloved PC whose story isn't yet told.
@Glitch said:
It all sounded good until I read your PvP example. I read your basic consent policy as "don't do anything too stupid, and you're not likely to lose your character." I don't read it as being able to deny simple shit like being intimidated. There's nothing permanently scarring about a social interaction you lost, or the permanent loss of a character in a quick ass-beating that leaves you hospitalized for a couple of days
No, I can see that. It's possible I put the barrier on loss arbitrarily too low there, and that PCs experiencing non-permanent setbacks isn't something they should be coddled about. The proposed plan looks roughly like this: (volunteer to lose from dice) -> (get a bit of XP), (volunteer to lose outright) -> (get more XP), but there's no real reason to shield players from what amounts to minor inconveniences otherwise either.
What I'm thinking is that ultimately a consent-based game, at least in this context, isn't that far from a... what's the opposite of it? Free-for-all? Bareback? It's not that far from it though when done right. What sane game isn't built around the concept of players figuring outcomes out for themselves and, if not, use dice to arbitrate for them?
Now, ideally what I'm looking for is a way to have the system itself gradually condition its participants into a cultural shift - and cultural shifts, bar nothing at all, is the hardest thing to achieve in MU*. Well, intentional shifts that is, with a somewhat specific goal in mind.
But I think this debate here is in the right direction even if specifics can and should be tweaked.
@Ghost Wtf.
All I can say is... okay, the first time someone pulls this off is fine, they didn't know. The second time... whatever, they maybe thought it was an isolated scenario.
At some point though they aren't going there for the hunting, are they.
As for that teenager, didn't she have parents or someone with custody who could intervene? That's pretty disturbing because at least the others were adults and could make their own choices.
@crusader I don't like the idea of considering anything sacrosanct in gaming since whatever works for you and your players is great, but you brought this to an open forum for comments, right? So it's your choice whether to take input at face value or stick to your line in the sand and defend it, but I think that might be counter-productive.
What people are saying is that the things you find disagreeable with nWoD Werewolf are pretty much... the game. You could gut them out, sure, but at that point why start with that particular game at all and not base it on something else instead? What you are proposing is like saying "I like Geist except for all this ghost stuff" - more power to you, but what you'd have in the end is something else entirely.
If you want input, ask for input. But be prepared to take it, else why go through the trouble in the first place?
Ruby, one of my dogs, is the most submissive, mild-mannered and non-aggressive creatures imaginable. On the contrary Izzie, my cat, is the kind of bully who takes advantage of such weaknesses so for years now every time she gets pissed off for any reason (say, if I kick her off my lap because I need to get up and go to the bathroom) she's been known to run over to Ruby and beat her up out of the blue to vent.
Over the years Ruby has been getting braver. Yesterday though it was hilarious and horrifying at the same time when the cat, freshly rejected from sitting in front of me while I was watching TV, went over to smack the poor dog while she was actually asleep, got snarled at and chased off the couch by a suddenly enraged dog whose primal instincts of fuck-off-dammit were finally activated after years of abuse-tolerant inertia.
It didn't last long, she got scared of her own rage and stopped within seconds then just looked confused (... 'what just happened?') but to see her actually baring her teeth like that was a revelation. I didn't know that bitch had it in her.
@tragedyjones said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):
- Grid Design - Part of me feels that a pre-made, pre-described grid is... a waste. Many players eschew the room descriptions, and many prefer to use +temprooms, RP rooms or private builds. How much is a minimum necessary grid design for a city? The sprawling layouts of DM or even HM are, imo, dead.
I quite agree. But then again I don't really think grids in general are necessary - hangouts are. As long as a few prexisting rooms are in place (parks, bars, hospitals, etc of different styles) and the ability to create temprooms or whatever, that's more than enough.
- An End to Bar-P - I have long ranted against random social banter RP, slice of life stuff, when that is all I can find. It is something I personally feel should be used as a downtime thing between active story
+1. Personally I hate bar RP PrPs even more, but some do like it so... mileage, I guess. The idea of a 'birthday party PrP' makes me wince though!
- Homework - Some games thrive on this, some entirely balk at the idea. But in general, how much effort is fair to ask of your players? Is background too much? Scene tracking? How can we streamline this process as well. Clearly automatic logging is not something most people, or anyone, wants.
I prefer attracting players to forcing them to do things. So while a very simple background could be required (I don't think even that should be), letting players fill out short/long term aspirations for example leads to XPs, so they have a reason to do it. Or... you could match STs to them if they fill out some 'wanted' sections on what kinds of things they want ran for them - completely voluntary but there's a payoff for it. Or they can file a weekly report - like KD did, which was a good idea - instead of automatic XP... which lets staff know what's going on on their own grid.
Such things have a payoff without being chores. If a player doesn't want them, if it's too much, so be it.
- Making things matter - How do you make what happens logical, consistent, and important without dedicating a small team to it? How do you ensure that the firefight that happens in one neighborhood actually impact the lives of the characters who live there but were not logged in at the time? How can we establish continuity of Non-Player characters between stories, characters, players, and scenes?
I think this requires the expenditure of a resource staff hasn't traditionally spent on players - trust. But for example allowing any character to change the description to any room temporarily - with an easy way to restore them to the default - could help.
Yielding some control over staff resources like sphere NPCs to players can also help; so many characters are born on a staffer's mind, get put on a wiki page and then stay there because there's never enough time to flesh them out or give the leverage they ought to have in the actual game so they can enrich PCs' RP. Allowing players to control them in a limited fashion as a hybrid between roster characters and NPCs for example might be fun.
Finally, making sure plot reaches your players in different ways and through a variety of venues is important. You know what I see a lot of? Either gigantic staff-ran scenes where a lot is on rails, or small pockets of activity centered around pocket STs where most of the MUSH has no such access to PrPs - or worse, they're limited to the aforementioned "PrP" bar scenes. To do this there has to be part of the game's design - matching STs to characters, lettering the latter give hooks to the former so they can concoct plots where they can thrive.
For instance it's really hard start an openly accessible public +event where I may know X, Y, Z are coming but hardly anything about what X Y or Z actually want; what motivates their characters, what their players would like, something. Anything. So it's common to end up with a necessarily more generic plot hoping to hit the right notes enough to engage people - but if those players are encouraged to provide this information upfront, and keep it up to date, it's a much more efficient process.
I hope that helped some.
@lordbelh I really liked The Magicians. SOME PEOPLE did not, but they are wrong.
@tragedyjones said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):
Re, PC Rivalries:
Perhaps a board or wiki or something announcing people, uh, looking for rivals? Maybe even make it a semi-official thing, where as someone is designated as your OOC nemesis, and you get reward X for thwarting them, and that reward is milkable (including more RP) but if you just, idk, KILL them, the flow is cut off.
Especially for a Vampire game, having a nemesis is fun.
@Thenomain, requesting one (1) +ST command that does what Ark suggested!
Although a forum or something can absolutely work, what I was talking with @Gingerlily about a few days ago was trying to automate this stuff so that it seems organic and seemless.
For example:
Ark and TJ meet at a bar. TJ rolls manipulation on Ark; if it succeeds they both get a tiny bit of XPs on the spot, along with a cooldown for a few RL hours so they can't just spam it. It also increments the rivalry counter between them.
Next time Ark and TJ roll between them the same thing happens but the amount of XP ramps up slightly based on that counter. And then the same thing happens, again and again - until the rivalry between us is a constant, primary source of XPs (obviously there should be diminishing returns at some point, but you know where I'm going with it).
What does this shit do?
It means we actually like the rivalry. Sure, IC one of us probably wins or loses or whatever, but it's advancing us both dammit. It's not just fun for the winner - hell, you can give slightly more XPs to the loser as a sweetener.
It makes social skills relevant and wanted. You know how we rarely roll stuff on each other because it's such a sigmatised practice? Well, this makes it actually part of the game on an everyday basis.
And the best part? Other than the coders having to code this crap in, it takes 0 work from staff and 0 work from players. No +jobs need to be filed, no justifications, nada. It just works based on stuff you'd want to be doing anyway - using your sheet abilities to do what they're made to do.
At episode 6, season 1 of 100. Wtf is it called 100? They're dying like goddamn flies, more like 87 or so by now!
@Bobotron said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):
@Arkandel
Re: Player STs
Yeah, but how do you break the cycle of trust that @surreality and I were talking about briefly? The players need to have some sort of buy in, and not just some tangible reward benefit.
Concessions have to be made from both sides. If you're staff and I'm a player and we both go in thinking he's out to get me then of course it won't work!
So for example I don't like the idea of PCs holding high ranks in game-wide factions; it generates drama and often unthematically high turnover ('the Prince has changed for the sixth time this year'). So what if we opened up NPC positions like that in a roster-like fashion as unchangable, static playable NPCs instead? So for example I'd be playing my Crone PC as normal but I also get 'custody' of the Invictus Primogen under certain conditions - can't use him for PvP or to favor my alt, etc.
My understanding is at least... Fear and Loathing is already doing something similar and it hasn't blown up on their faces, and it lets such characters be used for PrPs both as antagonists and quest givers. Do you know how many times I wanted to use a random Vampire NPC just to kick off a storyline by having them task PCs with something, and staff said they alone have to play such characters, so I had to basically create a new NPC out of nowhere from scratch who has no ties to the game outside of my specific arc? Why? How is the game served? Give your players a bit of leeway and let them play with your toys.
Re: PC Rivalries
What do you do to incentivize a PC rivalry so that it doesn't turn into killytime? Having rivals is great and awesome, but it seems like people have no conception of escalation and process other than 'you insulted me, I'm going to blow you up now!' This also becomes harder in a non-factionalized game, where your rivals/enemies may be within the same group as you, and doubly hard in a game where PK is fairly trivial.
Escalation is an issue. My hope is that if your PC, as my rival, is personally responsible for 60% of my XP and it's taken us six months to ramp it up there, then I really won't want to kill him in some meaningless spat - there goes my meal ticket! Coincidentally it also gives us an incentive to actually play more often - tying status to it makes sense, too. We're defined by our enemies in many ways so why not socially as well?
But of course this has to be thematic, which isn't too hard. Vampires aren't supposed to just destroy each other, there's a Tradition about this; Uratha, the same. Outside the WoD... say, Arx offers duels as a way to settle dispites, or a MU* based on something like @surreality's beloved Black Sails, a show which had a high turnover at times, could still take advantage of the realization every pirate they killed was one less abled person around to fight the Brits.
Whatever it is, I think unless your game is meant to have dead PCs as a core trope then you need to make sure it's not the go-to for conflict resolution. But there are many ways to do this.
@Luna said:
A lot of your $20/month accounting SaaS is by businesses themselves. It's the promised land to owners who think Xero is going to be a sweet and easy DIY solution. Then they end up having to hire someone to fix what they fucked up.
When someone pays $20 then they get $20's worth. So yes, when things are working it's all good and you are getting a great deal. For regular users where you don't care about 24/7 availability with data redundancies built in (such as say, when I use Google Drive for my RP logs) it's all good.
However when shit hits the fan they're also going to get $20's worth of service though. If the hosting company's data center has issues that accounting firm's needs will be pretty damn near the end of the queue while some poor sysadmin runs around to bring up more critical systems (which are paid for quite a bit more handsomely).
Arx. Their @randomscene take is very good; instead of giving a handout to new players' XP, they make them more desirable by basically enabling all newbies to give extra XP to those around them. Essentially every newbie is a walking nexus of RP as people flock to cash in.
It could use some tweaks - you can 'waste' your two weeks if you happen to not be very active right from the start, and people often went to newbies' scenes but didn't really do anything with them, for example - but it's still a stellar idea.
@Three-Eyed-Crow said:
This is why I love my e-reader but have zero need for a tablet. I need to get away from my laptop/work PC glare at the end of the day. E-ink is specifically designed not to cause eye strain. It does feel, to me at least, comparable to reading printed text. I still like the tactile nature of a printed book, but an e-ink reader works fine as a substitute and keeps my home library from swelling beyond the one wall-length shelf. The idea of reading on an Ipad or similar device for long periods of time, I cannot fathom, but it's a very different experience.
Yeah, reading on a tablet sucks. The battery life alone makes it not worth it.
I can't get comfortable with paper-books any more, I think it's as much a matter of habit as anything else. With the exception of material designed in a format that makes ebook readers a bad fit (say, technical manuals with diagrams, non-free flowing text with set columns, large page layouts like RPG books etc) I wouldn't go back even without the other advantages you mention.
The only time I remember hating my Kobo was during a commute back from work (i.e. in the train and about to get really bored). The bloody thing froze, something which happens very rarely but which actually requires a hardware reset - and that needs you to push a needle into a tiny hole to press the button. I of course had no such thing handy - normal books don't tend to stop working on you.
Oh, another thing.
Anything that keeps a PC from the grid - be it CGen or unthawing (obviously excluding restricted concepts or banned characters) - might as well be removed if it's not 100% necessary.
Soft approval, if you need it, is a better alternative than making someone wait for 1-2 days before they can show up on the grid - and even if you catch some problem after the fact so what? Fix it, but let people RP in the mean time.
@Three-Eyed-Crow said:
If a color e-ink equivalent existed that was big enough to read a comic or RPG book on, I would be the first in line to buy it. I suspect the market for it is even smaller than the market for e-readers, though, so I'm not holding out much hope for something like that.
The 10 inch Galaxy Tab S my wife got me for Christmas is a comic-book reading dream.
@faraday That sounds pretty interesting actually. No 'eeeh' from me, it sounds like you already put a lot of work in it, and if it was ever working (including live chat - Discord is a good idea but if everything else functions it'd be great to be able to communicate in-tab as it were) I'd be definitely interested.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/30/stepping-out-3
As a blog post about being inspired by a Fitbit to get better it's actually ... well, inspirational, but goddammit that person ended up walking nine hours a day ?
Now I feel like a filthy casual.
@faraday I started a web MU-from-scratch project back in the day for my own amusement but I got distracted. It was based on a php websockets server and I had it working with a grid stored in MySQL with rudimentary 'pages' for chat ... but then I realized how much work it'd be to write a forum and ticket system from scratch, too.
Plus, as you noticed, there's not that much interest at those stages. I figure someone will eventually bite the bullet and produce a base platform others can build on, but until then it's hard to recruit help.