Posts made by Arkandel

After a really 'meh' day full of nothing working the way it was supposed to and going to bed pretty bummed, I woke up and don't feel as bad.

That's something. Things might still not work the way they are supposed to work but hey.

@Cobaltasaurus If you need a Storyteller count me in. I don't staff any more but I will run PrPs.

@Apos said in Social Conflict via Stats:

But on the other hand, what about something mostly invisible? A game has a social system that two people in a private scene use, one things it gives authority over another character, the other person is super creeped out but still feels that they would be the bad guy if they don't play along, it leaves a bad taste in their mouth, they log off and never come back, and staff never knows what happens, and the person that even did it probably doesn't even know. Those are the very problematic systems.

But it's not the intent here that I'm disputing. Of course the reason people who want more draconian checks and greater oversight on social rolls are doing it to hinder bad guys. What I'm saying is it doesn't work, and the act of trying to limit these things simply penalizes the good guys.

Look at the worst offenders we've had in our community, the big names, what did they use? Exactly what you mentioned, the insinuation saying 'no' would mean they are doing something wrong. They accomplished that through pages, cherry-picking book passages ("look, Mind 4 means you gobble down that panther dick, it's the rules"), abusing staff connections ("can you prove 100% you were told to gobble down panther dick? No? Liar.") and so on.

In the mean time social attributes in general are barely being used in practice. Sometimes I see social powers, perhaps in certain +jobs for investigations, but their usefulness truly pales compared to their physical equivalents, and part of that is people - reasonable, well-meaning players - are already pretty self-conscious about 'forcing' others to do things, it's being seen as a form of PvP and not creative collaboration using dice to settle outcomes.

That's the real challenge here, I think; the real hurdle isn't to prevent assholes from being themselves because they already have every tool at their disposal to do so. The hard part is to somehow lift the collective cultural taboo we have in employing social rolls in even non-drastic ways (lying/detecting lies, trying to get someone to keep talking and reveal secrets, measure the impact of someone's stern admonishment) during everyday social scenes.

If we go too far in the former direction we'll harm the other too much, IMHO. A system people won't use might as well not exist.

@Apos said in Social Conflict via Stats:

@Arkandel I generally agree but I think everyone judges the relative merits versus what's possible from abuse cases. I don't think anyone would argue that giving everyone full admin privs on every game would be a great idea, even though it would definitely cut down on overhead. I think most players are honest, non-dicks. I also think most people get extremely involved in their stories, and the time they are least likely to be reasonable is when they get emotionally invested in a conflict against another player or feel slighted by something, and it's not that paranoid to try to avoid cases that get people worked up.

There is however a balance in which cases it's worth trying to avoid getting people worked up about without inconveniencing everyone else. Common sense and basic player etiquette can go a long way into mitigating risks from roleplaying systems.

Let me offer an example. When I made the switch from MUDs to MUSHes years ago I was scratching my head about how staffs everywhere were permitting @emit - it's such a broken command! You can literally do anything you want with it... only of course you can't because if you try others will squint in your general direction so hard your skin will melt.

In fact to give you an idea, I had coded something similar on the game I had been playing called pemote; it was functionally identical to @emit only it put "[$characterName]" at the end to avoid cases of abuse where people could badmouth other players anonymously or fake others' poses if it didn't have their name attached. Yes, those were concerns that had been brought to me about it at the time, that's why the pemotes were name-tagged.

These are all possibilities even now, right? I mean I could go to one of @Ganymede's scenes and "@emit Ganymede eats a bag of dicks" couldn't I? It's the perfect crime, no one can find out it was me! Mwahahah!

... Yeah - but when was the last time this was actually done? No one is trying to fix this broken command because who the fuck cares? It'd be way worse to prevent a tiny margin of abuse by one immature idiot (me, as usual) than to enable everyone else to pose anything they legitimately want.

I think the same applies to what we're discussing here. Yes, someone might abuse it. Maybe. In fact they have even without the need for fancy systems - panther semen and all. But the vast majority of players don't carry panther semen around, they just play the game as it's supposed to be. Those are IMHO the ones we should be aiming to accommodate primarily and then, as much as we can, do our due diligence for the assholes among us.

@faraday Yeah, and it's a bit annoying to construct them if there's OOC spam, etc in the mix.

Is there even a rough timeline for when this game is meant to open or are you guys still at the early stages so not thinking about that?

@Cupcake I think as long as an apology is given honestly and without an agenda, whatever form it may take, it certainly beats the alternative.

@Cupcake Pitch is great.

Bobby.

@Bobotron said in Social Conflict via Stats:

Besides, even 'instant modifiers' and 'chosen at chargen things you can never betray' are still part of the thing: trust. No matter WHAT you have to trust the other person and communicate and BE REASONABLE and NOT A FUCKING CHEATER who ignores the stats.
...
No system is going to be perfect without a buy in and, ultimately, a cooperation on the players' parts to be reasonable. Which is going to be a problem no MATTER what is done. I am simply choosing to start out by asking people to work with each other, let the system help guide things when you really need to, and communicate to make things work there.

I think that's the correct approach; there is so much paranoia in our community about all the cheaters, exploiters, terrible people out there who abuse everything to force others into panther-cock TS. So we end up shooting ourselves in the foot this way trying to come up with a ton of provisions ahead of time to eliminate any chance someone might step out of line using our precious systems.

That doesn't work. The type of unwanted person is undeterred; I mean they are completely unobstructed. All they need is the page command and the law of large numbers, hitting up everyone until someone bites. In the mean time legitimate players are faced with borderline hostile mechanics treating them like suspect cheaters and it's not unreasonable that they don't use them.

Taking a leap of faith is a genuinely good idea. Rely on players to not be dicks; most are not.

The most awkward fight ever.

Don't have policies you can't enforce.

Don't turn personal peeves into policy.

Don't institutionalize nepotism by making it into policy.

But also this: The OP didn't ask so feel free to disregard, but above all else I want good word of mouth: If staff is shitty it doesn't matter what the policies are, or what they say, since they'll do whatever they want anyway.

@Killer-Klown Challenge accepted.

@Seraphim73 said in Social Conflict via Stats:

something I'm calling "Hills to Die On." At Chargen, each character gets to pick three ideals (with the approval of Staff, of course) that their character can never be forced by the combat system to betray. If they choose to have their character betray them in RP, that's something else of course (and would probably remove the ideal from the list). These would have to be policed carefully, because something as broad as "Loyalty" or "Unseduceable" won't work (unless the character is a eunuch?), but something like "My Word is My Bond" (if my character promises something, they will never go back on it) or "Never a One Night Stand" (self-explanatory) would.

I think that's a poor idea. Consider the following:

1. At chargen many people (myself included) only have a general idea of who the character really is. I might not know his 'hills' yet, or be mistaken about them, until he clicks.

2. It sounds easy to abuse and, worse, easier to lead you into Mary Sue kind of concepts; he is unshakeably loyal, truthful and just! Also those same values can be probably applied against any social attempts to make him do anything unseemly.

3. Characters (should) change. Maybe he starts as a newly Changed Ghost Wolf but then he's exposed to enough Pure shenanigans to make him really despise them, and now he's all arggh about killing the motherfuckers. Or he meets a girl and really wants to settle down. That's not something you can predict, so there should be more flexibility than just what's in CGen.

@Thenomain said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

The exception being "meeting scenes", which are punishment on everyone already.

HM. Regular mandatory Mass scenes. 25+ characters in a room.

I still have nightmares.

@Cobaltasaurus said in Shadows Over Reno:

(which doesn't work very well since I work nights Sun-Wed, which means I don't sleep much during the week, and then sleep A LOT Thursday - Saturday). So I schedule events for mid-evening PST / night EST, and then it's time for the event and my brain is mush and I'm like "i can't be bothered with rules and rolling right now, no event tonight, sorry".

Been there. Yeah, the early evening zzz's are hard to reconcile with "oh, time to juggle 4-5 players paging me through paragraphs of poses and assorted game spam".

Having said that, yours was the only plot I got to join lately so... thanks for that.

@Auspice said in Shadows Over Reno:

You either start early enough for the EST folks and no PST can make it (since they're all still at work), or you start late enough for PST and the EST peeps have to leave early. I work from home and I've tried a broad spectrum. 5:30p PST / 8:30p EST seems to be the sweet spot, but you've gotta be able to jump right into the action in 1 or 2 rounds.

My take on that is very simple - I leave work at 5:30, get home at 6:30 and need to eat something. So I run them at 8 - all EST, all based on my availability. It's the best I can do.

I skip the 'You all gather here,' the 'figure out who is riding in what vehicle,' etc. We spend a few minutes OOC (or in advance of the scene time if possible) figuring out who has what and is doing which in advance... and then I start with the 'As you roll up to the abandoned Radio Shack, you see...'

Because I swear, for every person that's awesome in the 'setup' by including everything in one pose, there's a couple people who take 2-3 rounds of posing and that alone can add an hour or so.

I wanted to take a bit more time here because that one's important... the setup.

In the past I had at least one person complain to me because I launched a multi-part story in a formulaic way - there was basically a quest-giver who handed the PCs some initial task, and that was apparently not good enough. To such people I kindly say fuck you too; beginnings are hard, k? When no character knows each other so I can't even draw on existing alliances to hook things into, players need to give the ST a chance and suspend their disbelief just a little to leave room for the plot to roll. Else we'll spend the first hour (maybe the first session) just trying to figure out how everyone got involved and isn't that a lovely way to spend a Tuesday night?

Obviously if I railroad the whole plot and characters are just bit parts in a story without choices and agency then yes, that'd be a good reason to protest.

Anyway, these days I @mail interested participants in a new plot a day or two before it starts with some suggestions about how they might get onboard; ideally they get in touch with me and we work something more elaborate out as needed. Almost no one has ever actually done the latter but hey, I try.

What's much harder is hooking new people after the plot is ongoing, especially if it's not a Hollywood production with cars exploding and giant monsters coming out of the deep; if there's an overall veil of secrecy or discretion about the affair but I only have three players for my scene on Thursday and I need four, or someone asks "hey, I heard about the ninja thing, I want in on the ninjas" then it needs to be done. And I hate asking the plot's participants to suspend their disbelief again so Bob can show up out of nowhere for that thing they're trying hard to keep under wraps.

I haven't found a reliable, universal way to get that one done so far. It's just all case by case - but it's obviously much easier if the players themselves do the work for me ("Hey Bob, I need a favor man... we need extra muscle for a job"), but that's relying on them to do some of the legwork which... I admit, isn't always something I'm keen on counting on. The vast majority of players just sit on a plot until the next scheduled +event unless I'm specifically targeting an already well-knit OOC/IC group with the plot-fu.

@Tinuviel said in The Apology Thread:

I proved myself as nothing more than a monsterous individual that was willing to say or do whatever to gain the favour of those that are less than reputable.

Dude, it's just a text game. You weren't monstrous.

Just get better at not being manipulated from now on. You can prove it by giving me $20.

@Cobaltasaurus said in City of Angels MUX (CofD/nWoD 2E):

Find me someone to run it before you me!

I thought @Autumn just volunteered.

@Miss-Demeanor I hope you get an itch right between the shoulderblades where it's really hard to scratch it.

@Tinuviel said in RL Anger:

SPRING mothertrucker!

Far too much heat, all the hayfever, and goddamn snakes everywhere. Eeeech.

Today I had to put on a parka and snow boots for the first time and I got to find my heavy gloves. I hate you with the passion of a million burning stars.

Winter is coming.