Posts made by Arkandel

@Ghost said in Eliminating social stats:

I also dislike the argument that these systems arent often used out of fear of players being rolled into unwanted TS.

I didn't intend the TS portion of my reasoning to take over the thread. It's a minor (if still a) factor for discussing the elimination of social stats.

The game I have in mind wouldn't be using any existing system anyway, for the record. I don't want to reuse something meant for a different medium as I believe that's the root of many issues we've had over the years by adopting mechanics developed for table-top into MU*.

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

@Ominous I agree. It's outdated. So let's make a MU that breaks these kinds rules, man.

That's the spirit. +1.

@Misadventure said in Eliminating social stats:

For politics how will you measure political astuteness, procedural knowledge, and the ability to gauge the public and the leaderships attitudes and moods?

If that's the course the game takes, I won't. The game won't. Its players will be the ones to determine how their characters are perceiving these things.

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

@Ganymede said in Eliminating social stats:
I think part of the point of social stats is to deprive targets of the exact kind of agency you describe, though. Let's say I want to use Intimidate in a WoD game. My character is annoyed with someone, so they decide to rob them. He pulls out his knife, waves it in the guy's face, and says, "Gimme all yer money!" with the intention of compelling him to do just that.

We do our roll of dice, and my guy wins; the target is intimidated. Now, obviously, the point of intimidation is to compel someone to do something -- or refrain from doing something -- they otherwise wouldn't because they're scared of you. In this case, the point would be to make him fork over his cash and then act scared and maybe piss his pants or something. It would be to make him bend the knee, so to speak, and act like he's scared of getting stabbed.

That's one of the major reasons I'm considering eliminating social stats.

Sure, you roll, the other guy rolls, you win... and then what? Did you scare the target shitless? Is the way they're responding adequately scared? What if you think they're kinda meh about it but their player thinks that's just how the PC shows fear? What if they recover in the next pose, is that too early? Are you supposed to scare the Elder by glaring at him, you neonate? What about in the next scene, should there be a lingering effect?

Sure, various systems and mechanics attempt to address the scope of social stats but I've just...never been satisfied with them. The primary issue is that they're typically pretty complicated - but unlike punching (which happens rarely since violent confrontations aren't an everyday thing), social interactions take place constantly, so if it's not easy to use such a system then it won't be... which may be worse than not having one at all.

@Misadventure said in Eliminating social stats:

So desice, is this a game where you people try to support one another being something they aren't, or a measurement of their ability? Cuz I am giving all of you a fat 0 in "being a vampire". Except Ganymede. Ganymede gets an 8.

This is a political game. I expect and want to generate both friction and the means to resolve it in non-lethal ways.

On the other hand as mentioned before I don't want to have undervalued attributes or powers. The reason I put this question out is to see if it's worth the tradeoff of doing away with the headaches of using social stats versus potentially depriving the game of 'officially' supporting certain concepts through code.

However:

@Meg said in Eliminating social stats:

I think, if you are only selling physical stats and skills, you are giving a big, big advantage to players who are just good roleplayers.

I can't think of a better endorsement than that, even if @Meg didn't mean it that way.

@faraday said in Eliminating social stats:

@Arkandel said in Eliminating social stats:
But wouldn't that be true for a lot of skills? I mean, charging skills based on utility is a perfectly fine system, but I would think you'd want to use it across the board and not just for social skills. Punch is way more useful than Computers in most MU*s, for instance.

Oh it would be. That's why in my system I don't want to have filler skills; if I need to bundle a bunch of them together to make it work then so be it.

But I don't want to have Punch and Mapmaking, then charge the same for them. In that respect Gany's "Guile" idea works better for my purposes.

@Salty-Secrets I thought about that. The problem then is I would need to sell the traits at a steep discount, which seems to undervalue them, since they would be less bang for your buck than other skills.

If you can buy Punch with 5 XP and can then punch PCs in the face then I can't sell you Lie for 5 XP if you can't use it the same way.

Give me a gut check (hopefully with your thoughts to go with it) here, people.

During game design, one of the potential ideas for its systems is to eliminate all social mechanics from it. That means no 'charisma' or 'manipulation' mundane attributes and no powers that sway emotions or decision-making.

The intent behind this is to cut down on incidents where social attributes like that are ignored either way ('no, I get you rolled six successes on lying, but...'), not have to deal with 'how much sway' a given attempt produced given I've never been satisfied with how social damage has been implemented before in the games I've played, but also to eliminate concepts that try to browbeat others into TS.

In that schema commander/bard type traits which buff allies (PCs and NPCs) in different ways would still be present.

The question for you; is this worth the tradeoff? Is the loss of systematized Littlefinger-like archtypes reasonable for what the game would gain in return? I put that in bold because obviously characters could still be able to roleplay lying and being as manipulative as they can get away with, but not with code backing it up.

Thoughts?

Barring specific and isolated circumstances, anything that means players who are online at the time and willing to roleplay with each other can't do so is a bad idea.

@Tyche They did the math on reddit (as they do) and it apparently checks out.

But really, George Martin himself in the context of the books said the exact reason he's not giving time frames in the novels is so people won't worry about the logistics, and just enjoy the story.

Are there plot holes? Sure. Is it entertaining? Damn right.

@surreality WILL.

@Jaded I liked it, just finished binge-watching it.

It was a bit short, just 8 episodes, but otherwise it was fun. The banter is on point.

The most metal deaths in Middle Earth.

@surreality said in MU Pacing:

@Lisse24 I refuse to speed up for fears of that happening, though. If I see an opening that makes sense, sure. If not, no, no thanks, I'll wait for it.

I've been in games where characters have found their lifemate within a couple of weeks of the MU* opening. In one such occasion I asked as cautiously as I could if they had rolled together... nope, they met in-game.

Now... there's nothing wrong with that of course. What is wrong is if they're looking to find such a mate NOW NOW NOW and they try to browbeat their intended into going along with it. Y'know, paging as soon as they enter the game to scene, and every scene has to be about Their Relationship, and every page is about how cool Their Relationship would be.

Read the (bed)room, folks!

@kitteh said in Indicating Discomfort in a Scene (online):

Obviously there's room for villainy. Let's say you're playing the racist/sexist/whatever char. What are you getting out of this? If it's mostly enjoyment out of being a foil for other people, cool. But isn't that mostly an NPC at that point? As a player, by default, you're some sort of protagonist, at least of your own story. Most players play to succeed, and while the better ones might accept failures along the way, generally they still want an overall arc of progress and achievement.

For starters I don't enjoy this; I enjoy lots of things. My characters are flawed in many ways - some of them are losers, others are manipulative jerks. I don't want to just play one kind of character.

But to answer your question what I get out of this is the ability to step out of my shoes a little bit. If I play a homicidal violent Werewolf it's not because I am inclined toward violence in real life - I am not, and I don't condone murder either. Likewise my last Sanctified character had very little tolerance for other religious beliefs than his own which would quite likely make him a bigot, and I enjoyed the way he felt he had to put on an act around those who drew his ire because it challenged me to stretch my portrayal to fit that - he was seething inside but the facade of civility was too important for him to sacrifice.

I've also been known to play much more traditionally heroic characters. They are still flawed but just in different ways.

Do you set that aside when you play one of these characters? If not, well, OK, now you're rooting for the racist/sexist. Now you're invested in their success, now you're pushing their goals and agendas over those of other players. We all know how much IC/OOC bleedover there is.

My character's success in no way shape or form reflects how much fun I have playing him. I don't root for my characters and if I do then it doesn't matter if they are nice people or not... at that point I've already lost the game by any metric that matters. The only way I can see justifying being sad or upset is if I lost the character before his story was told - that is, if the concept was just ruined, either due to death or something major such as exile, disinheritance, etc - which made him unplayable... but that's not what we are discussing here.

So these players often do make me wonder. I don't assume all of them are really what they play, but at a point you do have to consider what they're getting out of it.

It's just such a risky thing trying to classify and judge people ('these players') based on a a character type that they happen to be playing.

Let's speak in riddles here for a minute.

If a theoretical game offered automated stuff to do - NPC missions, resource management, perhaps loot hunting through automatically generated mobs based on the PCs' power level (which a ST would still need to be present for, the combat and plot itself wouldn't be automated)... stuff like that.

What is the line between what you would consider acceptable for a roleplaying game and the environment becoming a MUD? What would be acceptable to you and what wouldn't?

How much of such game-provided content would constitute a positive step into changing MUing as the thread's title puts it?

@Thenomain I'll look at it over the weekend. This is all out of the blue for me, as I think ES first spoke to me about it on... I want to say Tuesday? Therefore there's no real plan for the technical side of this transition.

I'll see if my existing Linode hosting would work for MSB first, possibly with a RAM upgrade, and figure it out accordingly. Barring unexpected technical issues though I don't see why Muxify wouldn't make the transfer.

I just don't know what it all entails yet since I've got zero experience with nodebb and/or redis. I figure that's about to change.

@Roz Neither did I.

But I think the counter-question I asked still holds merit; how do we best differentiate between a player playing an asshole from a player who is an asshole?

If we can answer that convincingly then we can also do away with the ol' "oh, it's just IC/ICA=ICC/this is a non-consent game" excuses actual assholes use to justify themselves.

@Rook said in Indicating Discomfort in a Scene (online):

In any sampling of MU*ers, I think that 1 out of 20 is a dirtbag for any of the following reasons:

• racist beliefs, subtle or overt
• sexist beliefs, subtle or overt
• hidden need to dominate/ruin others in the name of 'fun'
• someone simply looking for sex/rape/BDSM RP, no matter the theme of the game, or even discussion leading up to.

Devil's advocate though... we are playing charcters, too. So for example I would like (well, in general, I'm not saying I want to ) to be able to play a racist character without being racist myself.

So how is that done? How do you play out villainous values without being branded a villain? What's the mechanism of introducing discomfort in a way that serves the plot without it taking over that plot?

I very much want you to hate my character but I'm not keen on being hated.

@Lisse24 said in MU Pacing:

However, it seems lots of people want fast moving plots and lots of action. So I'm curious, what do you consider good pacing in MUs and storytelling?

The pacing for those two things has to be different. To explain:

In Storytelling there is usually a goal in mind, a resolution of some sort. As the runner you are providing the narrative but there is also an overall agenda - any elements you present are means to an end. The pacing needs to reflect that.

Scenes are different in that they are their own goal. To tap into Ganymede's reasoning, they are probably more like improv (which isn't to say plot has to be scripted either, but you can see where I'm going with this), and characters need to feed off of each other, and in some cases that's tricky to do in an interesting way unless they can hook into engaging plot points of some sort. In other words if a Vampire and a Werewolf meet in a bar without knowing what each other is, pacing can kill their potential to generate an interesting dynamic between them if it's too slow - because they need to have something to grab onto.

However in both cases the point you made is still very valid.

Specifically, I've come up against issues, where players want to go from meeting my char to Sharing All the Things within a scene or two.

Game of Thrones would be a piss-poor story if there was no build-up before dragons showed up to burn Lannister armies. That's what we sometimes neglect to do in the hobby, we just rush to the good parts without constructing the narrative first; sure, it's the big flashy moments that stick with us, but they only have any meaning if the entire story led to their ultimate cultivation. You can't just bypass those parts without them feeling empty... because if you do, they are.