Posts made by Arkandel

@admiral said in Good TV:

I thought Achilles was gay? Or did I read the Illiad wrong? Making him bisexual seems kind of pointless.

The term didn't exist at the time Homer was alive (and for centuries later) so there's no way to answer that question. Someone's sexual preference wasn't a defining characteristic for them at all.

There were basically two taboos. The first makes sense - as a married male it was part of your civic duty to be willing and able to father children, since cities needed people. So you still had to perform with your wife no matter your preferences, at least to that extent.

The other taboo ranges from pretty iffy to really creepy because it was frowned upon to be the passive half of a homosexual relationship as an adult man since it was considered a submissive trait, which in turn was seen as a feminine quality. But hey, that's okay because that was okay if there was a large enough age gap! That's what mentoring those boys entailed... so... yeah.

But yeah, anyway. Achilles wasn't bi or gay or anything since the term made no sense for the time.

@faraday said in Heroic Sacrifice:

This is not a subtle loss, though. This is the main loss for an awful lot of players, myself included.

Yeah, I meant subtle as in... it's easy to miss. But it's definitely a major factor, as big as the XP loss.

I couldn't give a crap about the XP/rank lost -- on the games I play, mechanical advancement is downplayed or non-existent.

Fair enough, but many do. More so on MU* where XP is majorly a factor of time invested, so when Joe died and your 800 XP went away, to rack them back up it would take another RL year. When you are reeling from every other part of that loss as well, this can easily push you well over the edge - and it's completely understandable. You're not a bad player if you leave a game over something like this (although you are if you respond in other, less sociable ways ).

I care because my investment is in the character. Their relationships, their personality, their goals -- their story in other words.

That's a really tough problem to fix from a systemic point of view. The way I'd put it is that your RP partners are gone as part of those relationships vanishing into the ether; your character's boy/girlfriend, their hard earned alliance with that tough S.O.B. Gangrel with a heart of gold... gone.

Hell, sometimes (and this is another 'subtle' thing) players are discouraged from rolling their next PC into the same faction let alone group out of concern it would be a clone of their last PC, or a 'revenge character' or... whatever. So basically what this translates to is that if you are removed from play you can't rejoin your friends, which is also a major blow.

So of course most people don't want that to happen to them. Barring truly exceptional, mature players you know who doesn't mind? Someone who has nothing to lose. No shit I'm okay with my character dying when I'm barely playing him, he has no allies and next to no past.

@coin said in Heroic Sacrifice:

I can't tell you how many times "but all my XP, I had like 3000 XP on this character and now they're dead! What a waste!" Guess what, now it weas all YOUR XP and what you spent on the character has been funneled back to you and you cans pend it however you want. Make a new character, buff some of your other ones, I don't care.

Although I want to downplay the importance of losing a character in the context of this thread (involuntary PC death happens pretty rarely, all things considered), I agree with that solution.

When your character is lost for any reason there are two things you mainly lose:

1. Your mechanical progress (usually XP, but also rank, connections, etc); obviously a number is easier to carry over than the rest.

2. Your identity. You are Joe, and once Joe dies and you become Bob. This is a subtle loss but not one to be underestimated since it does matter, and there's no way around that one (since it'd be really confusing to explain this Joe isn't the old Joe but it's just the same name for a different character).

@faraday said in Heroic Sacrifice:

It's good to say that we want to make people more amenable to failure, to cater to the people who are, but how is the million dollar question.

A while ago I had proposed a 'nemesis' system. It was basically part of a social mechanics thread but it could be converted to fit this objective.

So basically the idea is to entice players into valuing their opponents. Each time you do a contested roll against someone you get a small reward (XP, status, whatever) whether you succeed or not as an IC demonstration of being challenged. It also begins increasing a counter showing how often you've been challenged by that person, and over time the higher this counter the better the reward; after all opposing a Fett in a negotiation, as long as you walk away from it, is more significant than being roughed up by some random thug. The fact the two of you are opposing each other makes you peers, and as one rises so does the other.

I think by systematizing this opposition and ensuring friction is always a positive would result in people treasuring their long term enemies on an OOC level. Every time you clash with that Primogen, each time the Elder spits vitriol your way, your status increases alongside their own; you are antagonists, but now it's a symbiotic relationship instead of a zero-sum one.

So that's my pitch. Remove the zero-sum part out of encounters, social or otherwise.

@kestrel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

@arkandel said in Heroic Sacrifice:
I don't see why it has to be this way. If you fail and your character ends up in jail, they could still have a very cool scene where they're brought before the high council and interrogated about their crimes, who they know, etc. They could be bribed to betray their friends, thus being turned into a double agent who has regular meetings with important NPCs trying to blackmail them or extract information.

Because if you fail your character doesn't typically end up in jail (fatal or truly bad endings don't happen very frequently) but there's a worse hell than that for PCs to end up in; irrelevance. You can't get as much leverage to negotiate, you aren't invited to as many of those decision-making scenes, and this loss of agency means you are reliant on other players coming up with ways you can stay relevant.

Successful PCs have more agency. It's just how it is. To give you an example on HM I played Theodore. The number of scenes I had as a lowly Sheriff's Deputy, as fun as they were, didn't compare to the access I had for RP after he rose to Dictator; suddenly I had people coming to me, asking to set up audiences, I had the luxury of sending others into side quests... my character's leverage increased my level of involvement to "at will" rather than "what I can get today", which makes an enormous difference.

His legions of fans prove that a suave, successful sexpot isn't necessary to portray a great and deeply beloved story, which is the ultimate aim in designing this kind of system.

He was a successful character on a TV series. You won't see him played on a MUSH nearly as much, and what's even more important, the way games are set up he wouldn't get as many opportunities to shine as other characters, built for 'success' would.

I'm not saying you are wrong in what you want, just that there's a reason there's a mismatch between what people like to watch and/or read about, and what they then play. People want to win because one way or the other, they always get something out of it and nearly nothing when they don't.

@kestrel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

The former is a little harder. I agree that taking away gamist incentivisation is a good start, but I worry that @seraphim73's idea of having only 'karma' as a stat would also risk people running too wild with their character builds. I like @arkandel's idea of rewarding failure but I feel like this too is a band-aid, as it would still, ultimately, be about a system of rewards and progression. However a band-aid might be the best that can be hoped for.

It isn't a bandaid, and it's easy to see why if you look at stat-less sheet-less games; there are no hard carrots there - no XP, no gear, nothing - yet people still chase victory for basically the same reasons @faraday mention. Their characters are their proxies, and the game still rewards winning over losing.

What do you get for being successful on such a game? Oh, everything. You have access to exclusive scenes, for starters; there are plenty of "high council meetings" in MU* to the point it's almost a separate trope for them, where the Duchess and the Count meet their peers to share secrets and make decisions. You are among those who get the spotlight in public scenes, who are invited to social events and are bestowed the cool ranks.

You don't get those - as a rule - for failing. It's not a matter of attributes and dice pools (or at least not exclusively) but rather the fact that it reflects how real life works; politicians, business people and generals don't advance in their perspective careers because they are challenged but because they beat those challenges.

Books are just different because they present readers with different perspectives. In the Robin Hobb's Farseer series Fitz isn't a powerhouse although he gets his chance to kick ass, he's a character repeatedly brought down hard, and we as readers are given the chance to empathize with the measure of his sacrifices.

Something like this is not going to work on a MUSH the way we design them because for characters like Fitz, the sacrifice itself would simply take agency away from them. They would get access to fewer scenes, less name recognition, and their ability to be the catalyst of great things would be lessened since what drives roleplay is perception, and the ultimate focus of too many people is getting a stranglehold on the spotlight.

This effect isn't intentional but it's not accidental either; most games explicitly reward the latter and they punish the former.

To change it you are fighting an uphill battle. If you want a literary experience then you need to build a game meant to emulate and incentivize that, which means breaking free of traditional MU* tropes since they are doing the exact opposite of what you want, and a MU*'s culture is based on actions and not words. You can't say what you want on a post or wiki page, you need to design then implement it in your entire game, from CGen to the grid.

@kestrel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

So the question becomes, as a game creator, how do you tackle this? How do you encourage your playerbase to step back a little from their need to play heroes? From their need to avoid obstacles, reject risks/stakes, and inhibit progression or complexity in a story?

Start with rewarding failure. Not many games do this; in fact nearly none do.

Almost all games reward success; you get XP, recognition, ranks, status, resources, all for winning... but then you are also told you shouldn't care whether you win or not. That's a very steep hill to climb afterwards as a player, especially since every other non-MU* game does the same thing. WoW doesn't give you loot for not killing the boss!

And yet books do exactly that, very often. Heroes don't sit there basking in one victory after the other, they suffer setbacks and then if they win in the end it's brief - they need to face the next adversity, then the one after that. How boring would it be if you read about the adventures of Harry Dresden, the guy who never lost a fight in his life? Yet that's exactly what most MU* players think they want.

So reverse that. Make having adversaries the way everything is earned; you are judged by your political enemies, you grow by losing social encounters as much as you do by winning them. The more powerful your major opponents grow the more you do in a symbiotic way.

... Or something along these lines. Mechanically the choice would be yours, but we need - as a hobby - to ensure what we reward in a game is what we actually want. That is not the default. By default we blindly reward what the last game did, going all the way back to various table-top RPGs most are ultimately derived from, but which were never developed to be used in MU*.

It goes without saying that anyone who spoils Infinity War here... let's just say we'll unleash @Ganymede completely on them.

God have mercy on your soul after that because no one else will.

@wildbaboons said in Good TV:

but did they make Troy or just buy the rights to it?

I'm pretty sure the Illiad's in the public domain by now.

@coin said in Canon/feature characters:

• Power balance - can OCs be as powerful as FCs?

Absolutely a decision that needs to be made by the game developers as soon as possible (and I would say before even beginning to work on this stuff). It will heavily decide who will be interested in your game and who will be absolutely turned off. Neither answer is wrong.

See, in most original works this doesn't matter at all, because newly appearing characters' power levels can flactuate tremendously but it's done with the intention of being used in a specific way - usually sporadically or in mostly their own book - or with an end goal in mind. So for instance you could create someone like Sentry who's more powerful than Thor or the Hulk or Lobo who could exchange punches with Superman and it's not a bad thing; it just depends on how they are used.

The thing is though is that on a MU* it does matter.

At a glance sure, a lot of OCs are going to be Mary Sue kinds of characters, but so could FCs; you could play up Superboy or Wolverine as whatever idealized perfect avatar for your personal empowerment fantasies as you like.

It's really the frequency of their appearances that can throw things off. Lobo isn't normally showing up everywhere, and the fact he'll steal the spotlight like oh-my-gawd is sort of baked into the character so if you're reading a book he's staring in that's probably because you explicitly bought the book knowing what you were getting into.

On a MUSH we know how messy things get - and the power level itself is only one of the issues, but I'm not sure they're due to the FC/OC disparity either. I mean sure, Thor could solve every problem Daredevil has ever had - he could stomp on the Hand pretty handily (hah-hah), but so could a cosmically powered OC.

If there are issues there should be one of three reasons:

1. The high-end characters, FCs or OCs, are restricted to the lucky few. Call me cynical but that's probably the most common reason.

2. The FCs are just played badly - and I mean 'badly' by whatever yardstick you choose to judge that from. Maybe Iron Man is played by someone crappy, maybe he's always shagging up with Black Widow, maybe he's a villain. Dunno.

3. The setting feels off because OCs are way more important than FCs. I can kind of see that if Batman and Superman are constantly outshined by DeathsquadRIP and Fragolas it could rub some people off the wrong way.

TL;DR: I think the power gap itself should absolutely be determined and made clear very early on, but also it probably doesn't matter too much on a day to day basis unless other things are malfunctioning.

@bobotron Now we just gotta get @Thenomain into cooking this shit up into a codebase.

@bobotron Of course just because the preorder will be available soon it doesn't mean the final product will be. But that's exciting, as I do love the oWoD theme.

What provisions in policy or mechanics should be in place for some of the following things to work:

• Successfully mixing canonical characters (Batman, Luke) and original ones in the same game.

• Power balance - can OCs be as powerful as FCs?

• Thematic integrity - can the Avengers be led by or consisted mostly of OCs?

• Character development - how much freedom should FCs have? Can Rand al'Thor find true love in the arms of Jane Sedai?

• How does history revisionism work best? Is it okay to soft/hard reset FCs when they get a new player?

Add your own to the mix!

@aria Well, xenophobic wasn't even a concern.

I mean a very common phrase in antiquity was "πας μη Έλλην βάρβαρος" which literally means "whoever is not Greek is a barbarian".

@wretched The first thing you'd need is a buy-in. A lot of of the things you seem to be after would be really difficult to code or put in mechanics (such as the chance of being in legal trouble, for example) so you'd be relying on the factions themselves to bring that to life. That's a tough sell, not because it's unreasonable but because it takes a while for the game's culture to get where you want it to be, and in the mean time you need to feed them something else to keep them around long enough for that to develop.

It's a good general concept, but I think you'll need to flesh it out more. As it stands it still needs that 'ah HAH!' moment of inspiration.

@insomnia I just don't know if tic-tac-toe counts as a video game!

@derp I had the misfortune of reading through the comments section on a Troy review when I was curious about the show. A lot of posts were about 'Hollywood rewriting characters for affirmative action, lol, they made Achilles bisexual'.

Motherfuckers, have you read the Illiad?

Every Friday evening we run basketball runs at a court near work paid by the company, where coworkers and friends participate. Although we're all nerds some of those guys are pretty fit, and several are 10+ years younger than me, around the same height - some taller, some shorter... all good there.

Over the last few weeks I've been finding the game was getting easier. I can switch and defend any of these guys, get to my spots on offense to shoot or post people up more or less at will, to the point where I'm passing out of double teams so I don't feel I'm monopolizing the ball. Sometimes matchups are harder but it'd gotten to the point where I was wondering why they are letting me get away with so much since they don't take it easy with anyone else.

This week we were hanging out after the game, and during the conversation it occurred to me... these guys aren't letting me do anything. I'm doing it. And since I'd never been in that situation before, it really hadn't occurred to me.

feelsgoodman.gif

@ashen-shugar said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

Don't know if it may help, but maybe an option that requires a poster wait a full hour before posting in the same thread after their last post?

I would curse the moderator who did that to me.

I get where you're coming from, but I think this would penalize the whole for the actions of very few. Not every MSB poster is aggressive to a fault.

@thatguythere I'm talking about @Auspice's new section, dude.