Posts made by Arkandel

@Three-Eyed-Crow Sure, although I can't quite say why it'd be the case. Giving the ST some idea of the circumstances that might lead or enable your character to join the story seems pretty reasonable to me.

The kick-off of a new story arc from scratch is often the hardest part. After the PCs have bought in IC it's much easier, but bringing the band together in the first place is often a pain in the ass, and can involve some liberal amounts of handwaving to get it done. I don't think "well, I'll be at the harbor because my character likes the sound of the water and long solitary walks in the dark" or "well, she's stalking rich guys to rob at knife-point" is too much to ask just to help that poor ST out.

@faraday said in Identifying Major Issues:

There are also a lot of players who are gunshy about participating in PrPs. My last few games have all but begged players to run PrPs and empowered them to do a lot, but the number of people actually doing so is tiny.

What I've found is that this greatly depends on the distribution channel.

For instance let's take Arx, a very well populated game, just to exclude the factor of whether the game itself is active or not. I ran open public PrPs ("if you walk into the bar at 20:00 there'll be something happening"), invite-only PrPs (@mail Joe,Bob,Jane="hey, if you come to the House study at 20:00 there'll be something happening") and also 'gated' PrPs ("there will be something happening at the city harbor at midnight if you have an IC reason to be there, @mail me so I know how to include you").

The first type was packed. People came in and RPed anything, from engaging what I was giving them to playing with others already engaged, to just doing their own thing completely.

The second type had okay results only when I also 'advertised' it over channels and communicated with people directly else participation was unreliable. I had considerably more interest, too, when I was running stuff tied to staff metaplot as well as players preferred the extra value for their time.

The third type is basically a no-go. Unless I'm dealing with specific people I know, if a scene requires any kind of buy-in it's really hard to find people willing to invest a few minutes to figure out why their characters would be eligible for it, offer requests or additional details or... anything, really.

TL;DR - the least effort it takes for people the more likely it is they'll join your stories. Plan accordingly.

@ThugHeaven I loved the book. I didn't love episode 1, but #2-3 won me over big time.

@faraday said in FS3:

I don't know if that's something you can ever really fix with the system, though.

I don't even think that's a problem let alone something you can 'fix'. It's just a different approach - as long you document your particular game's expectations clearly it's not a big deal.

@faraday said in FS3:

So where's the disconnect? Is it documentation? Expectation? I'm just being too nitpicky?

The disconnect is in player expectations. When 9/10 games encourage min-maxing then 9/10 people who roll for your own will probably try to do it as well.

Such is the price of doing things differently. But as you said, when you explain and reason it out, most folks will understand and adjust without incident. The ones who don't are probably those you don't want sticking around anyhow.

Just make sure your approach is uniform and consistent over time. For example if you'd nitpick over $stat being high but the other staff member a month from now handwaves it there's going to be a problem.

@Ganymede said in Identifying Major Issues:

Ideas are a dime a dozen. That's the easy part.

You think so?

I do! Especially when the issue itself means more ground-breaking ideas are less easy to catch on (and get help) than tried-and-true ones. I'd have a lot more trouble recruiting for a futuristic AI-robot-uprising-versus-magic-wielding-humans game than I would for a more generic L&L fantasy kingdom under attack by a reawakened ancient evil - the latter is just an easier sell.

But yes, ideas are easy (but don't take my word for it - take Neil Gaiman's maybe?) especially when compared to the actual effort it takes to realize them. Conceiving the scope of your game versus writing it down in enough detail that others can pick it up, narrowing it down to recruit others, figuring out where players will fit, breaking down the system you'll want for what it's supposed to do, getting it coded of course... it's a considerable endeavor - as you know very well.

Coming up with the original inspiration pales in comparison.

But seeing a good idea through properly is not easy at all. @Faraday has spent years with her code and system. @Thenomain has spent years developing his code. @SunnyJ has been very meticulous with Fallen World. Fate's Harvest took 2 years to pull together. I can't even imagine how long it took for whoever to code SW:DoD or SW:FoH.

Yeah, it sounds like we're agreeing fully. In fact I don't know how anyone could debate this matter - making games is hard, man!

If I had an issue with games these days, it is that they are rushed. A Beta open is to detect bugs, not to open a game and add content, ideas, rules, history, etc. to it. My main project has been in development for 4 years, but that has been accelerated recently.

My issue isn't with the kinds of games that try and fail, it's with ones which are clearly uninspired, and only exist because their creator(s) 'wanted to run a MU*'. Or - worse - wanted to do a specific MUSH 'better', so basically they cloned everything and just changed the parts they didn't like. I just really hate sandbox games in general, but when they are combined with a lack of inspiration I feel they can collectively lower the bar for everyone.

@ThatGuyThere said in FS3:

@Misadventure
Never been a fan of allowing respecs myself. And this is coming from someone who made a Werewolf once without the skills that two of the three gifts i got in c-gen used.

Any system that uses hard XP caps should also offer respecs. Else it's really easy to screw yourself over and you might not even realize it for a while.

Also Mage falls under that umbrella. Gnosis limits what Arcana you can buy high enough, and you can find you've already 'bought wrong' and now you can't get that one spell you based your entire character concept around.

I'll avoid going my usual route of saying the hobby's in a slow, steady decline due to the telnet-based protocol it's been burdened with, and deal with "the hobby" exactly as it stands today.

So!

What do you consider to be a major issue in the hobby as it exists today?

I'd say the biggest problem, and I include myself as part of it, is we're reluctant to try something new.

Sometimes that just means we have a plethora of MU* which aren't any good; that's not a bad thing on its own since they're offered freely, but it lowers the bar. With every new sandbox game basically cloned from the last one - down to the policies and procedures but with some cosmetic HRs which are basically pet peeves of its runners - the standards are just a little bit down, players' expectations of what we can do with the medium are just a bit less.

But they get players anyway because they are familiar and offer the same shit we already know how to do; I'm definitely a culprit here. I don't wanna learn new systems, I don't like it, so at times I've settled for things I knew were subpar, whose staff had no enthusiasm for the material or creativity to invest in their work, and there was no pride about the result. There was no passion in it; it was just some code running over a code with a grid - there you go kids, we're done here.

Why do you think it's an issue?

Because new projects, ambitious ones, fail way more often than not. Obviously that was always going to be the case - novelty comes hand in hand with risk after all - but I've known developers who couldn't even find enough collaborators to begin working on something. Many interesting ideas are failures to launch, usually for the lack of a pocket coder to do some customization although that's not the only reason... and going through all this, investing tons of hours and sweat into the gruelling process making a new MU* is only to see 10 players on at launch can be heartbreaking.

So some pretty cool things might be aborted in favor of yet another $city of Darkness. I don't think this is an issue, I think it is the issue. We're at the point we have almost nothing to lose by innovating and perhaps a lot to gain as a hobby, yet we aren't doing it.

Do you have any ideas that you think would help resolve it?

I think it'd need to start with coders. Most of the time that's the main roadblock; there are damn few available, but unless you have some guys to at least mentor new ones games die on the conceptional stage. Either a potential game-runner is already networked or they are not, and in the latter case things are very tricky.

There is also no structure about it. If you don't already have a crew how do you start a game? Make a thread here (and be told by twenty people why it won't possibly work but hey, you go ahead and try and waste your time), which gets derailed three posts into it with stories about that one MU* five years ago and that guy, what was his name? How do you recruit help? How do you actually have a proper brainstorming conversation which stays on topic and which yields some interesting ideas that can maturate into actual systems? There's no roadmap - no successful game-runner has actually put this shit together to document the path to actually making their own MUSH a reality back in the day so new ones could learn from their mistakes.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. That's the easy part. Turning them into games is fucking hard work and there's almost nothing out there - other than on a purely technical level (that does exist, courtesy of many hard-working folk) - that can help make cool new games a reality.

I realized a few weeks ago I have no idea which projects some of my all-time favorite comic book writers are doing any more. Mark Weid, sure, but also Kurt Busiek? Garth Ennis? At least Mark Millar is doing all the things.

Although unfortunately Jeph Loeb is also involved in everything, and I hate that guy's writing with a mild passion. What he did in Ultimates 3 was unforgivable.

@faraday said in FS3:

@Thenomain Yeah I don't think it was a personal distrust, just skepticism about the system math. I mean , say you're that sniper who botched the 96% chance of success?

On Tuesday the NBA draft took place. In it the Los Angeles Lakers' chances of landing a top-3 pick were 46.9%.

The way this works is literally through gold balls being put in a container which then spins. Representatives of all teams are physically present in the room, observing everything, and as this is a multi-billion dollar business you better believe they are watching closely.

When the Lakers got their pick the allegations of rigging were strong.

It's not just the system, it's humans too. We can't accept things we don't like, sometimes.

@Ghost said in CofD and Professional Training:

Social combat is important because nearly every player is interested in their social game succeeding, but very few players are willing to organically choose to lose in social situations.

Maybe I've been lucky but I've been around plenty of people who chose to 'lose' socially in scenes without any dice being involved.

Then again none of those involved ruining someone's character as a result. But if that's the desired outcome then that's also the problem there, not the system used to determine the result.

@surreality said in CofD and Professional Training:

I also think seduction/mind control/abuse is a paper tiger in our community. Yes it has happened but it's rare, and there can be plenty of safeguards against these cases.

Not anywhere near as rare as they should be.

Remember, a lot of the type that pulls this is the same type that only approaches female names with the 'so you must be a submissive' bullshit -- which means as a male player, you're going to experience it directly much less unless you're playing female characters relatively often and the other player thinks you're female OOC.

Although you're of course correct in that perception dictates a certain bias in rarity, and I'm sure women have it much harder than men in that regard, I still insist it's 'rare' - in the way that assholery is a clear minority of the total number of IC social interactions taking place on a grid.

What do you think about the following reasoning I just pulled out of my ass? The reason jerks seem to tend to use social rolls and mechanics to abuse others is because they're less likely to care about the general social stigma involved in making such rolls in the first place.

I suppose "OOC forcing her to do it" through a roll tickles their fancy more than "her OOC agreeing consensually to do it" though. Hrm.

@Lithium said in CofD and Professional Training:

It hasn't worked, because it was never enforced. I've yet to see a single game since 1992 that was based on WoD where social rules were actively enforced. Oh sure, Dominate got enforced, certain Gift's got enforced, but not actual social dice.

Maybe we're just disagreeing (and that's fine) or I'm not explaining it correctly. In the latter case:

If the goal is to make unsupervised rolls an everyday reality on a game's grid then enforcement, by definition, can't work; if you're calling staff in to judge then the scene is no longer unsupervised. On top of that there is a stigma to using social rolls in RP which is a cultural barrier; to overcome it players need to have a reason to do it. Knowing they can get someone into trouble for not adhering to a roll in the way they think that person should (which might be open to interpretation - did you get 'intimidated enough' by my roll?) doesn't mitigate the fact the act itself of calling staff in just about ensures bad OOC blood, and they might have just lost themselves a RP partner.

That's a trade most people don't want to make. I don't blame them.

Admittedly I've not played on every WoD game there was, but if you know of a game where social rules were actually enforced, I'd like to hear why that didn't work. If it was a problem with people not liking the rules, or /other/ problems that usually end up with a mu* dying, like bad staff etc.

That's because the definition I'm using for why these systems don't work is this: social rolls are not being used, or they rarely are, and that's not because if they try to force the outcome they wouldn't get their way. It's because enforcement itself is disruptive to the scene's flow and it would often make the initiator a less desirable roleplaying partner ("this guy came into our scene, forced a lying roll, and now we're stuck for twenty minutes while staff's getting our stories, dissects the poses and tries to figure this out. Yeah, I'll be playing with them again - not").

Hence the need for positive reinforcement.

@Ganymede said in CofD and Professional Training:

One way is to remove these sorts of rolls altogether. FS3 sort of does that: there's really no Action roll for "Seduce" or "Convince Someone of Something." The focus of BSG:U is mew mew mew PEW!PEW!PEW!.

Sure, that's absolutely a valid solution. I'm typically not in favor of taking away progress paths from a character since it reduces diversification of builds but... if that's the best we can do then removing social stats is fine.

@Lithium said in CofD and Professional Training:

The solution is enforcement of theme and rules. Everyone by playing the game knows (or should) know what the rules are for the game and it's systems. They should know what happens when social skills are used.

I just explained why that approach hasn't worked - in my opinion. Can you explain why you think that interpretation is incorrect?

The only 'problem' is that not every scene is judged by an ST, and this game is /built/ around ST involvement.

Well, it's a problem, but I agree. That's why earlier I said we needed a paradigm shift, as our approaches so far are either using systems meant for table-top mostly verbatim or are based on/very similar to those.

Funny fact, too: on consent-only games, like Shang, the problem is far smaller for both physical and social interactions. People just seem to figure it out somehow a great deal more often than elsewhere.

@Lithium said in CofD and Professional Training:

@Arkandel How's this for justification: Your character isn't dead?

IMHO to many people think it's justifiable to just punch someone trying to socialize with them. I think there needs to be consequences for the violence. Most of the time violence isn't a good thing, especially in public.

I think the only thing that needs to be done is enforcement, not benefits, just play the game by the fucking rules. Otherwise? You're cheating.

Enforcement has been tried. It doesn't work - if people don't want to do it they won't do it. You need to lure them to it and make the use of social skills something positive that consistently adds to their experience. There's a stigma to using social dice, whether anyone likes it or not, and that's that - I've been playing for quite a while and the only ones I see somewhat consistently used are voluntary self-composure checks.

It can't be done through pressure from above. Even if you have the most gung-ho vigilant staff ever the moment they are called into a scene not only is the whole point of unsupervised rolls negated but also bridges are burned; if I call staff on someone because I felt they didn't reveal enough information after a 'conviction' roll I doubt I'll be seeing them in my scenes again.

The solution must involve positive reinforcement, not slaps on the wrist. It has to be something players are happy to use because it makes things more fun for them.

@Lithium Sure, but you can't justify your way into happening. It needs to be attractive for players to use on a day to day basis - or they won't.

Punching doesn't happen in every encounter but lying or trying to convince someone of something does. It's a more complex problem to solve than getting around the loss of agency which, agreed, is an opportunity.

@Ganymede I feel we just haven't shifted the paradigm enough. There will be a breakthrough but we just haven't made it.

I mean... yes, assuming jerk players there'd be need for outside supervision, sure... but as it stands you can have two reasonable people playing characters in a fistycuffs situation who can figure out perfectly well what happened and who won. And yet the unquantifiable nature of social interaction makes it harder to determine the outcome for interpersonal encounters, which I suspect might be because the RPG systems we're using are adopted or based on table-top ones made to figure out the outcome of PC<->NPC conflict.

We need... something else. One day a developer will figure this out and become a MUSHionnaire!

I also think seduction/mind control/abuse is a paper tiger in our community. Yes it has happened but it's rare, and there can be plenty of safeguards against these cases. No one is suggesting we don't honor grapple rolls because they can be used to justify rape, after all. The vast majority of cases wouldn't have anything to do with teh sexz0rz.

But all this is a very long-standing debate on MSB and for good reason; figuring out how to use social stats, especially in cases of PC vs PC, is very tricky. Even the best implementations I've seen on MU* so far were basically utilizing them in +jobs (or the equivalent, i.e. not in real time and going through staff) but I've never seen one that satisfied me for in-scene conflict resolution.

How about this new Star Trek show?

@Ganymede said in CofD and Professional Training:

Social combat often deprives a player of agency over their character, and there are a substantial number of people uncomfortable with this for a variety of reasons.

That is quite true. However then either social stats shouldn't exist (or be undervalued compared to their physical/mental counterparts) or they need to be enforceable like everything else.

Ignoring stats mustn't happen.