Posts made by Arkandel

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in PC antagonism done right:

Whatever a game does, they need to be upfront about it. It's like a consent/non-consent policy. This shit is important for players who're deciding whether or not they want to play somewhere. I strongly dislike PvP to the point where I'll generally avoid games that emphasize it, but I can tailor the design of my PC to minimize my need to engage in it (and generally prepare myself for something I'm eh on) if I'm aware it's a thing. If I'm not aware OOC, I can't do this.

Absolutely, consent settings (maybe with adjusted values on certain in-game benefits) could be a good idea. Then players can choose their own level of engagement in the adversarial race - or to simply not participate at all.

@faraday said in PC antagonism done right:

But I've seen that work successfully an awful lot more often than I've seen people play healthy IC antagonists (outside of short-term 'bad-guy' type plots).

Exactly. I've seen the same thing - probably all of us here have. Historically having a healthy OOC relationship with IC antagonists has been an exception and not a rule.

But the reason I made this thread is to ask... could it be because we've been doing it wrong? Can we make it right? Or better?

I mean your IC friends in games give you so much even just counting system benefits. You exchange +votes/+reccs way more often, they can buff you in games like Mage, exchange +task support on Arx, lend you their well-statted Haven and Herd on Vampire, share pack bonuses on Werewolf... that's before we even count scenes.

What have antagonists ever done for you other than stand in your way?

I mean this could be a fool's errand but I think there's a non-zero chance if we revisit this and come up with a system that sets the pieces up differently than how every-game-ever has been handling this kind of relationship, possibly inadvertently, we can get different results as well. Dunno. Maybe?

@Lisse24 said in PC antagonism done right:

1. An open and transparent OOC atmosphere, where character motivations are clear and clearly separated from players, and where players are nudged towards seeing disagreement as healthy.

How, though? I agree, that'd be great, but what do we do to make it happen?

For example have a system where players - in exchange for XP - post open journals revealing their characters' actions on a weekly basis? They don't have to do it, it'd be voluntary. Is that close to what you had in mind?

2. Make sure that conflict is driven by character motivations and setting and that character driven conflicts are reinforced.

Same question as above - how?

3. Providing disincentives to what is normally seen as winning. (ex. Your faction is in charge! Yay! But now, any time you try to do something shady, there's an increased chance the IC newspaper is going to find out about it and splash it all over the front page)

I think the key to this is providing systems where interesting choices are made. For example... you lead a barony. You also want a larger army but someone has to work the fields since that's where your money comes from - and armies cost money. It'd be great if you could afford a glowing sword for yourself, too but those farmers need physicians to look after them. So where do you draw the lines? Is your land an authoritarian one (so you're playing a 'bad guy' because it gets you things you want) or do you forego military power?

In my opinion one of the main hurdles in MU* is we can have our pie and eat it. It's more fun when we can't.

4. Providing incentives for disagreements, rivalries, and what is typically seen as loss.

I offered an idea in your thread about long-standing feuds granting XP over time. I think it's a good one, although the implementation might actually decide that.

5. Create a dynamic environment where characters can expect to go through both high and low points as a natural part of playing the game.
6. Proactive staffing that is regularly checking the pulse of the player base, and stepping in on potential OOC conflicts before they become issues and encouraging frustrated players.
7. Clearly defining actions you do not want to see and actions you do want to see and rewarding/clamping down on those actions as necessary.

Again... how? Those are worthwhile goals, but how do you make them happen?

7. Since players are going to talk OOC, encourage the talking and plotting to happen on game where players can be nudged in a healthy direction if possible.

I suspect this one will be really tricky. Look at MSB - even when we have no stakes at all (no characters affected by the topic at hand) things get... heated sometimes. Do you think having the game's direction and plot open for OOC conversation somewhere (on a wiki?) will be a net positive?

Is my understanding incorrect that many Star Trek games are afflicted by the same issue as Star Wars ones? I.e. the playerbase is split up between a zillion planets and space stations?

@faraday said in PC antagonism done right:

Antagonism makes for good stories, but in a MU* environment I think it's a lost cause. Mostly for the reasons you mentioned, but it's even more than that. Let's pretend that there's a totally mature player who won't start OOC drama, needs no encouragement to play antagonism, and is an awesome RPer. I don't want that person playing my character's antagonist, I want them playing my friend. Because 95% of MU scenes are social in nature, and who wants to hang out with their antagonist? Antagonists are best metered out in small doses, and that runs contrary to what you want to be doing with your awesome RPers.

I see your point. But if we reverse it, do you still think it's a good tradeoff, and why?

So let's say all of the great players are playing your friends. In fact everyone is friendly to each other. Now, obviously you can have as many scenes with these guys as you want - there's no reason not to - but what are you going to be playing about?

If all challenges come from the environment then the game is stagnant in the absence of someone playing its elements. I would argue it's why sandbox games haven't worked out, for instance; there simply weren't enough STs around to provide everyone with things to do, so while small pockets of activity (i.e. those with a pocket ST) could thrive, a critical mass of players couldn't be sustained - and MU* floundered.

On the other hand one can thematically arrange for reasons to play with your antagonists. Council meetings, uneasy truces in the face of even greater adversity, Elysium politics, etc. Yes, absolutely, you probably won't be seeing that great person as often as if you were buddies, but there'd be that much more meat to it when you do. ... IMHO, of course.

@Tinuviel said in PC antagonism done right:

I believe that having any kind of antagonist at all requires active, interested, and creative staff. That is a must. Sure, one can run NPCs in their PrPs, but for a truly game-mattering antagonist staff have to be involved.

Notice that in the context of this thread an 'antagonist' doesn't need to be a bad guy. For example if you're playing a Crone and I'm playing a Sanctified we should be able to have a very adversarial relationship without it devolving into OOC unpleasantness. The objective is to somehow make this happen. Or to at least make it more likely.

That said, the key to any antagonist is that they are capable of winning and losing in a way that doesn't result in things ending AND provides for more RP around that situation. For example: Taking prisoners, escaping at the last moment, considering those he fights beneath him and leaving when he has the upper hand, et cetera.

Alright, so a good first step is to ensure death is a truly final solution and not a first inclination. Other than thematically (a decree from the old-fashioned Prince threatening nasty retaliation to anyone who destroys another) how can this be systematized? How do we make players and characters want to keep their adversaries around instead of just putting a knife into their eye socket?

Hey folks! Please remember this is the constructive (<winkwink>) section so let's pretend to be mature, civilized people.

I've been sorta kinda hijacking threads about this for a while and maybe it's better if we have a thread for it. So this is my objective: How do we do IC conflict between characters right? I don't necessarily mean bad guys - although that's possible - but handling concepts which are thematically supposed to clash for ideological or practical reasons.

Here are my assertions regarding PC antagonists going into this:

• It's a good thing IC. It creates dynamic, shifting political environments where different factions can prevail. Everyone getting along perfectly all the time is boring.
• It's a good thing OOC. It lets people create RP by playing off against each other, be driven to recruit new players into the game to play their allies, compete for IC goals and support a wider variety of roles.
• It very often turns to drama. Common accusations (people collaborating OOC, cheating, etc) can be difficult to prove, and paranoia can lead to toxic environments. Staff need to dedicate resources handling complaints instead of running the fun parts of game.

Now, we get the kinds of games we reward. In most games there is nothing positive about having opposition to your IC actions in any conceivable way other than the joy of roleplaying. But that's not enough for everyone - clearly. At the same time games offer incentives for all sorts of other collaborative things which also fall under the 'joy of RP' umbrella (allies +vote each other more often, for example). So conflict is always a net negative and conformity is always a net positive - by inadvertent design.

In my mind the main problems here are:

1. Mitigating the negative impact having an antagonist has on an individual
2. Reducing the positive impact OOC factors - metagaming on Skype for example - can have on the game
3. Letting staff stay as fair and transparent as possible without impacting on their ability to keep certain things from players (metaplot secrets, for example)

So, what do you think? For starters do you agree with the general premise of having PCs antagonistic to yours being a good thing or do you believe it's a lost cause, and games should stay purely collaborative?

Either way, what can we come up with to do something about the problems I listed? Do you have other ones to add?

On a tangent, I would like to not need to depending on 'good, mature players' for things to work as what kinds of players we get either can't be systematized or falls outside the scope of this exercise. Ideally we can design systems where great players thrive, okay players improve, and bad players are marginalized.

Any takers?

I like to compare metaplot to what TV series do.

There's an overall seasonal arc, and then there are episodic mini-arcs. So the Flash might be preparing for his final showdown with Zoom, that's the big thing, but in the mean time he deals with breaches from different Earths, the occasional villain of the week, etc.

Then at the end of the season... a new season begins with a new overall arc.

I think it's a good model for MU*. There shouldn't be just one Big Thing everyone's working on forever or newbies will be eventually rendered irrelevant as they come in too late, and older players feel like they've been doing this same old and dance forever because they have been.

@Ghost said in What do you WANT to play most?:

HOW IN GODS NAME DO WE NOT HAVE A GAME IN THIS UNIVERSE YET?

The perhaps obvious but incorrect reason is the books may be excellent but only a niche part of the playerbase has read them. So you either have to loosen things up thematically to allow non-readers to have a nicer experience, but perhaps alienate the hardcore players, or you adhere closely and lose most of your potential players.

But really the reason is we all have books we love and would really want to see made into a MU* we play, but they are different books for each of us. So it's hard to find a set of staff to begin with whose top preference is the same. It's much easier to pick a genre than a novel series.

@Autumn said in What do you WANT to play most?:

Original themes often aren't well-presented, and that can make it difficult to get and retain players. Say what you like about George R. R. Martin, but he's a much more entertaining writer than the average person who decides they want to start a game and make up their own setting for it.

Yeah, and for me it's also a matter of not wanting to pollute my mindscape of beloved works of literature with the usual MU* idiocy. It's why I haven't and would never play a Lord of the Rings game. I don't need to deal with stupid homicidal sex-starved Elves fucking in Elrond Half-elven's bedroom on a drunken wager.

I think what we'll see a lot in this thread is how varied and niche our interests are, deep down, and how much we compromise so we can find some place to play we can at least tolerate.

https://www.yahoo.com/style/border-wall-costume-infuriating-192925905.html ....
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L&L. I like politics and it automatically gets RP going between players instead of relying on someone to run things.

@Lisse24 said in Make a Game with Me!:

I want XP to be tied to good RP, not just any RP, and loss. I would like to award a limited amount of XP for a) working towards player goals, b) acting in theme, c) acting according to characteristics and an unlimited amount of XP for 'loss.' Yes, @Pyrephox, I know loss isn't a great term for it yet. Should someone come on board and I can work on this project in earnest, that would be the type of thing that gets refined.
Anyway, I think a good way to handle this would be through player verification similar to how @randomscene works on Arx. You type in a command that says why you deserve XP, the other people in the room verify it. Use of the command gets stored so if there is XP cheating, we can go back and look at it.

I dunno. It might work - but usually such vote systems (which is basically what this is) are plagued by circlejerking as people's friends make vouching basically automatic. Remember cheating is really hard to show; was I bullshitting when days earlier I said I was 'cultivating a mutually beneficial political relationship with the Baroness' or was I just hitting on her and getting XP for it? Looking back you can catch the most blatant abuses but realistically... that's it.

I think here you know a lot more about what you want so far than how to make it happen - which isn't a bad starting point. Most games launched don't even ask these questions, they just copy whatever the last game they played at did.

A good idea might be to integrate as many of your systems as you can. In other words don't worry about the exact methods of XP distribution yet, but design all of your game's other portions - how politics will work, how resources will factor into it, what will tie organizations and goals together, etc. And once you have enough, hitch your XP wagon to those. Ideally progression happens organically, through things your character is already doing, rather than in reverse - knowing what will generate XP ('large public scenes give more +votes!') and playing your character accordingly.

I want the political environment to be fluid and changable, with different factions and players gaining power and then waning as time goes on. I would like factions to have various benefits to being in power and benefits to being out of power.
I'm thinking of 4 different types of factions, which right now, I'm referring to as:

• Heritage (How did you get to the island?): Western Continental (Spanish/British influenced), Eastern Continental (Russian/Asian influenced), Mainlander (American influenced), Foreign born/Tourists, Native Islanders, Mixed Native, Sea Farers (Traders/Pirates)

• Political Philosophy (What do you want to happen to the island? - these factions totes need cooler names): Colonial Rule, Mafia/Mob Control, Democratic, Socialist, Theocratic, Military Rule, Native Reversion

• Spheres of Influence: Political, Industry, Trading, etc.

• PC created families/allied groups

Sure, that sounds reasonable. My advice is to make some concepts very easily playable - in other words, allow unique concepts of course, but have some suggestions aside for new players who might not want to spend a lot of time upfront coming up with them. "Pirate", "nobleman", "merchant", "mercenary", "priest" for instance are pretty universal and a newcomer doesn't have to read a long wiki. Then CGen can help guide them through the types above anyway.

Do you plan to allow leadership of organizations/families/factions open to PCs?

@Pyrephox said in Make a Game with Me!:

@Arkandel said in Make a Game with Me!:

@Pyrephox Why not reward long-standing antagonistic relationships?

So for example when you first clash with the Baron in the local senate it gives you a small amount of XP. As the two of you become rivals the rewards begin to scale up; it's becomnig a long-standing feud which trickles in over time. At that point it becomes a periodic income, which adds up.

Then you don't want to kill him. You need the bastard! In IC terms someone else would have taken his place anyway, at least he's the devil you know... and it's giving you the chance to learn from the conflict.

Treasuring your IC enemies seems like an interesting recipe. Thoughts?

Oh, I /love/ that. That's an awesome idea. Now, you'll have to be careful that people don't just...designate a whole bunch of nemeses and then not push that relationship

The way I'd implement it is have code handle political decisions. So let's say a decision has to be made - do we impose tariffs on those southern barbarians' ships and risk war or placate them to continue the uneasy truce? If you and the Baron vote the same way nothing happens; if you vote against each other a counter is increased.

That counter goes up every time you clash - the code keeps track. And the higher it is, the more you get from the relationship. In that way you want people to stick around - everyone wins from having these clashes. Winning politically is nice, but you always get more from such long-standing friction regardless.

The system should ensure you can't just designate your TS-buddy as your 'foe'. It's handled automagically for you over time.

@Pyrephox Why not reward long-standing antagonistic relationships?

So for example when you first clash with the Baron in the local senate it gives you a small amount of XP. As the two of you become rivals the rewards begin to scale up; it's becomnig a long-standing feud which trickles in over time. At that point it becomes a periodic income, which adds up.

Then you don't want to kill him. You need the bastard! In IC terms someone else would have taken his place anyway, at least he's the devil you know... and it's giving you the chance to learn from the conflict.

Treasuring your IC enemies seems like an interesting recipe. Thoughts?

Alright, some input then (that's my preferred level of involvement in most projects, at least at first - let me know if it's unhelpful and I'll stop).

• Does magic/the supernatural exist?

Yeeeeeeesssss? The Antillia myth is tied to a boat of demonic priests that settled on the island. I like that. I also want to give space for priestly types and paganistic religions. However, I think the preferable scope on abilities is small. No gods appearing. No magic automatic healing. No supernatural abilities that allow you to overwhelm your enemies. etc.

Thematically that sounds reasonable. One of the problems on L&L games has been that faith-based characters either lacked depth, purpose, a niche or all of the above; on paper they had things to do but in practice they were often caught in a limbo where they lacked both political and military clout but were burdened by IC limitations (say, not being able to marry) compared to other PCs.

In terms of game effects balancing supernatural powers is tricky. A common issue for example is some of them are simply more useful than others, so you get the type that conveys the better powers. Another is that the cost to getting them needs to be calibrated as well - you'll know which ones pretty early on if your demographic gets really obviously skewed; players are typically great at figuring out where the best bang for your buck is.

Speaking of, what are your plans for the power curve? How will advancement (XP?) work?

• Is the game primarily PvE or PvP?

I think a good game is an equal mix of both. In Antillia, I would like to create an environment where characters are naturally at odds, but circumstances keep factions working together and keep any one group from ever winning.

Sure, but how? Do you have plans or only the goal for now?

d10 system. I have some game systems sketched out in varying degrees of completeness, but I since I plan on bringing more people on board, nothing is 100% settled.

Okay. I'm typically not that interested in systems, I just wanted to see if you were adopting an existing RPG or running an original one.

You also mention conflict How do you plan to systematize it staying healthy, and losing being a rewarding experience?

As mentioned, I have some systems in mind that would really benefit from having someone work with me on them. However, the TLDR; is that I think you reward what you want to see, and so XP is tied to healthy conflict to some extent and especially to 'losing.' I think the more a character 'loses,' the more XP they should get. Ideally, this should serve the dual purpose of keeping dinosaurs from ruling the game and encouraging loss as positive thing. Although, of course, game atmosphere and proactive staffing is equally important in this area.

Alright, some thoughts here:

For starters you are quite right, you reward what you want to see (or you get what you reward, whether it's intentional or not). There are many ways to skin that cat, but my very early advice is to design a system that's not going to require staff supervision over handing out every reward. It's going to drive up the workload very rapidly and it's really boring as a persistent task; consider going with a "trust, and verify" approach instead so there's a record of these things to catch abuse after the fact, but allowing players the leeway of monitoring their own advancement.

Beats in nWoD 2.0 are interesting. That system does exactly what you suggest - it incentivizes trying and failing. I would still put that firmly in the 'trust and verify' category as well, since it's a lot of work and scales up very poorly otherwise.

Don't be afraid to stealbe inspired by successful implementations in other games either. For instance Arx's making it a rewarding experience to play with newbies (through @rs) is an excellent idea. KD had a good one too where you filed a weekly report detailing what significant advancements you've attempted IC in that time; that allows staff to keep an eye on what's happening on the grid by delegating monitoring - and making it voluntary - to the players themselves, but also (theoretically) rewards attempts to make actual progress. If you reported "well, I had great sex with Jane" that wouldn't count, and if staff eventually noticed it you'd get a finger-wag.

What are character archetypes you have in mind for this game? Are there factions and what kind? What's the political environment like in very broad terms?

I don't know what my level of involvement can be but if you want some early questions:

• What level of technology do you have in mind for this?
• Does magic/the supernatural exist?
• Is the game primarily PvE or PvP?
• Do you have a system or mechanics in mind for it?

You also mention conflict How do you plan to systematize it staying healthy, and losing being a rewarding experience?

@Gilette said in What do you play most?:

No genre preference, even when I look back through my gaming history. But what I've always been looking for in recent memory is a good superhero game.

I'm convinced those don't exist.

Now and then I'm tempted, but then I realize they're a multi-universe abomination where everyone ever is playable at the same time and none of it makes any sense.

Then again looking for sense in comics was always a fool's errand, I suppose.

@Clarity said in Hobby Glossary:

Can you give me an example of code and IC reasoning that would be used or this? Like, are we talking a magic homing fireball from the other side of the game that can target someone? Arrows shooting from several rooms away?

A few years ago when I was staffing Geist there was a case of telenuking between two characters who had never met.

Vampire A had a beef with Vampire B. Vampire A was a Sin-Eater's girlfriend, who asked that S-E to kill Vampire B on her behalf. He was trying to arrange it over a telenuke.

Had it been allowed to go through it'd have been a PKill between two parties who had never once interacted in any fashion, including the kill itself.

Skeletor and He-Man dance-off commercial