People who grade books yet to be published - usually quite highly - on sites like Goodreads.
Yes, I'm looking forward to Doors of Stone too. But it has a 4.45/4 stars rating with 1500+ votes and not one of those people has read it. It just makes the entire rating system unreliable.
@ThatGuyThere said:
How would you deal with this hypothetical.
You refuse Player A's request for something that needed to be refused. You have the stated yes first policy. So Player A then starts a campaign of Staff is unfair. Said player points out how staff said yes to Thing B C D who were all near the line you have but not quite over it. Up until this point Player A has not shown to be a problem.
Someone in this thread made a point for clarity which was agreeable. To it I'd also add transparency is important.
"Guys, we made the ruling to refuse <X> in this case because $reasons, and when B C and D had a similar-looking we allowed it because $otherreasons. It is our believe $reasons and $otherreasons are sufficiently different to warrant a different approach." Then try to work with Player A to see if you can reach a compromise.
Look, eventually you'll run into players who are unreasonable. Just be sure you're not the kind of staff players run into who is rude and authoritative. So be polite and patient but firm and clear, then if it doesn't work even to the best of your ability and they refuse to take 'no' for an answer it's on them, not you.
@ThatGuyThere said:
the more you post on this topic the more I wonder if you actually deal with humanity.
As anyone can tell you I live in the vat I was originally grown in, carefully kept separated from mankind. I still somehow managed to spend several years of that time staffing on games and running plot as player. I was lucky enough though in that time to not have to interact with human players, only pose-bots powered by thousands of monkeys pounding on their keyboards to produce random sequences of words at me (which in retrospect explains a lot).
Yes staff should be concerned with winning, not the game really but the continued trust of the player base.
I have found the best way to earn someone's trust is to make it into a mutual investment. Perhaps our mileage differs, but that's the reason this debate exists.
@ThatGuyThere said:
This exactly. Yes as Ark stated people will find things to complain about if they want to but it still makes zero sense to give them extra ammunition
Ammunition is only important if you're in a fight, and you'd only care about it if your intention is to win.
Staff shouldn't be worried about 'winning'. It's not about that.
@faraday said:
@Arkandel I think your goals have too much methodology built in, and that's what people are objecting to.
That's a fair point. And there is overlap in there.
- "Audit don't approve" is a big turn-off for me. All games have an unspoken rule that totally crazy things will be retconned, but saying it like this makes it sound like "we have limits but we're not going to tell you what they are until after you exceed them." That's going to make me very leery of running plots for fear of retcon.
The idea there is simple. The vast majority plots are fine, staff should only intervene if someone fucked up big time. So unless we compromise the principle of removing bottlenecks by letting players do their thing and only stepping in if absolutely needed, how would you ensure things which are quite out-there or unwanted don't become part of canon?
For example yes, your concern would be perhaps valid if staff has been known to be trigger happy about their audits, but it doesn't strike me as likely that trigger-happy staff would pick this philosophy to run their game under. And while there can be a more or less comprehensive list of Things To Not Do on the wiki ('don't burn down the entire city in your plot',) it's unlikely every single really out-there idea could be preemptively mentioned.
I don't think it's fair to say I'm being closed minded about this (which doesn't mean I'm not, naturally I wouldn't think that's the case 
), but I like the idea of having control mechanisms in place meant to be used rarely to prevent extreme cases. As noted in the initial pitch, trust should go both ways; players are trusted, but so are staff. In a way that's the only way any game can truly function well. So if staff has to step in once in a blue moon to find a compromise the players involved should give them the benefit of a doubt and communicate to figure it out.
- Having "yes first" as a staff mantra to encourage staff to be open-minded and allow players to steer the game is not so bad. Advertising a game a "yes first" opens yourself up to all kinds of bizarro player expectations and entitlement issues, as others have already said.
It does. But nothing is free in design. You pay something here to buy something there. What has to be decided is if the tradeoff is positive.
I'm not saying my ways are perfect. Every system has pros and cons. I'm just saying that clarifying your actual goals may allow you to consider alternative methods.
See above - I'm agreeing with you on much of this. I certainly don't think the proposed system is anywhere near ready - that's why I brought it to a peer review. I don't mind things being shot down as long as we try to build them back up afterwards.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/look-behind-morality-horror-judge-214035854.html
“I have to ask them if they have teeth,” Houston has said. Most of the litigants, she explains, don’t have a full set of teeth, so the show buys them a pair for their appearance—or paints their teeth if they’re rotten and discolored from drug use. They might also take them to a hairdresser or barber, and they provide clothes that look nice but not too nice.
“If you saw what America actually looks like, you’d be horrified,” Houston says. “You wouldn’t turn on the TV.”
@Ganymede said:
@Arkandel said:
Midway into the 4th session the trainer takes me to his office and gives me the spiel: Do I care about my health? Am I dedicated enough to be great? Am I willing to invest in my well-being? If so I should pay $7k for a year's worth of sessions!
If Dailyburn has taught me anything, it is that I can pay $10 a month and get killer, daily workouts online. You can get the equipment too, and it will still be a fraction of the cost of getting a trainer in.
That won't work well with free weights - but only because the equipment in question includes a squat rack, and I don't have the space to install one. If I did then yes, a few hundred bucks or so paid once would cover me for basically a lifetime since barbells last forever.
It's not a big deal either way, the gym itself is excellent - well lit, maintained, clean - but it bugs me that they're essentially using it as a marketing hook to pitch their uber-expensive personal training sessions. The implied guilt trip (fuck you, if working out four times a week I'm dedicated enough dude) is what actually annoyed me.
Great gym-chain corporate discount leads to super cheap membership for a year! Yay!
Awesome 7-session personal training package to kick it all off sounds fun-tastic, whee!
Midway into the 4th session the trainer takes me to his office and gives me the spiel: Do I care about my health? Am I dedicated enough to be great? Am I willing to invest in my well-being? If so I should pay $7k for a year's worth of sessions!
@(%*$#
@ThatGuyThere said:
If you market yourself as a yes first game then the first no will cause people to bitch regardless of how reasonable that no might be.
Game design is not magical. It won't make everyone quite reasonable all of a sudden. Any game runner who doesn't know in advance people will bitch shouldn't be getting started.
The question is, are they right? Do they have a point?
In this case they wouldn't. It's 'yes-first', not 'yes to everything'. The advertising is quite honest, and if someone reads what they want into it that's on them. Having said that, it's a fair point that things should be clear on the wiki about matters such as house rules, forbidden concepts, etc so they don't merely apply to everyone (which they must) but are also easy to review from day one.
Here's a question though for y'all; what do you do about grandfathered concepts in a game like this? Two examples:
The game launches and doesn't allow "minor nWoD templates such as ghouls or Sleepwalkers to become major ones in a different sphere (a mage former Ghoul, Embraced Sleepwalker)". During its course staff changes their minds - hey, maybe some good stories can come of this. Does it create the impression - or reality - of wrong-doing since people might have been unable to play it in the past, even when they are able to now?
When the game launched it allowed the becoming described above. It's creating more trouble than stories so staff decide it should no longer be permitted. Do they take existing characters away from their players (with a full compensation of course toward a reroll) or grandfather them in for fairness?
Discuss.
@Apu said:
@Arkandel said:
I don't know why "yes-first" means "never-say-no".
I think for a lot of people, there's an assumption that if you put saying yes ahead of everything else then how can you possibly say no?
But that's a bad implementation.
To offer a counter-example, if a traditionally ran MU* with a mandatory CGen didn't allow almost anyone through without nitpicking through every little detail in the background and forcing everyone to conform to a very narrow, arbitrary standard set by staff it'd be an equally bad way to run their game. That's not on the overall philosophy of filtering new character creations, it's on the particular staff members being anal about it.
@Coin said:
Having used this style in the past, this isn't really the case, at least, not in my experience. There are basic set pieces of a pose that can be handled pose-to-pose without too much worry--especially during conversational scenes in which I pose my character saying something, but he's not done saying something--I just gave the other person a chance to interject.
True, and on top of that it works much better in larger scenes - which is where pace is disadvantaged the most, I've found. So if I'm playing with A, B and C I have seen A and B's poses, so I'm typing what my character is doing to respond to whatever happened there while C's being typed out. When once that's out I make the necessary adjustments.
Obviously if C does something really unexpected I'd need to throw out a large portion or even the entire pose but as @Coin said that's not worse - as far as anyone else is concerned - than starting from scratch anyway. It only 'wastes' a bit of extra typing on my end, no biggie.
The problem I've seen from time is with Storytelling. I swear some people ST by having pre-written their stuff before the scene even starts which makes it really awkward to be in it since it's like you're not really there.
@Roz said:
I'm a little worried about it. The first season had such a robust, focused script with the Purple Man as the big bad, I hope they can keep it up.
@Apu said:
- Players decide to make a game of their own, a game where they'll never say no and always say yes, wanting to cater to the needs and wants of the players.
I don't know why "yes-first" means "never-say-no".
If a character makes a Jedi for your nWoD game it'd be your job to have The Talk with them and figure out an alternative where they can play something roughly similar to the concept of a mystical warrior - maybe in Mage or Changeling? If they want to do something you don't want in the game across the board (and it should be on the wiki since it'd be applied to everyone unconditionally) similarly, don't let them - that's what the audits are for. So as an example if you rule for the game that characters can't change from one supernatural type to another then someone who wants to play an Embraced Mage will not be able to; again, talk to them, maybe they could play a Theban sorcerer instead.
Of course the game will have a theme - it can be as strong a theme as needed - and reinforced, too, without sacrificing the basic principle. If there's interest we could even sit down and figure out how a harder concept for a game than a generic north american metropolis could be implemented well using a framework like this just to see what gives.
@Sovereign said:
What do you believe the benefits to this style of game to be?
The idea for the entire game is to allow synergy between its methods to achieve two things:
Hey, maybe it'd work, maybe it wouldn't. I'm pretty sure some of the means would have less synergy between them than I'd like and as a whole - as usual it'd probably come down to the implementation, not the theory. Such is the way of things.
I'd just like to think though if such experiments fail it wouldn't be because we are all just horrible people who can't get along with each other except under the constant supervision of adults. That shouldn't be something we take axiomatically for any design because then... well, that's pretty sad.
The 'trolling' part referred to on that page wasn't that someone was amassing NPCs (or any other type of in-game resource), it was the idea of someone who would specifically do that simply to try and rape everyone in the game. Even that though I followed that up with some examples of why and how I expected characters to deal with unless OOC pressure or means entered the equation in which case it would certainly be up to staff to intervene.
Ignoring social merits is an old problem especially in the WoD, abused on all sides. The more I think about it the better a well defined weighed consent system would work for a game like this. My initial reservation in including it was worry it might dominate the debate but we've crossed that bridge by now.
What I had in mind was something chosen at CGen. Maybe something close to this (ignore the exact numbers for now):
Rape would certainly be included under 'torture', but I'm open to suggestions for better word to use. The idea is your character could still be roughed up in normal plots (punched, stabbed, etc) but not permanent things like loss of limbs, personality changes due to mind powers, etc.
Finally I'm not certain - and I'm open to suggestions - about if and how to allow changing the setting afterwards but I'm not sure it should be possible unless the XP system is flexible enough to allow retroactive changes like that and the one described in this thread isn't.
@surreality said:
Would the intention here be 'anything in the books is fair game and available to play', or 'we'll go through the books and determine what is and isn't available to players, but what we decide is available is available to all players equally and there will be no quotas, caps, justifications, or hoops to jump through for any character of the proper splat who has the book pre-reqs for the thing'?
Well, either way. All that is available for purchase at all is equally available to all players. All merits, skills, powers and so on can be purchased in the same way by everyone in the same way, subjected to XP availability, timers, etc. There are no justification requirements or restricted concepts.
Whether it's 'everything in the books' or '<this stuff>' would depend on the material in question and would presumably be designated clearly on the wiki.
@Alzie Can you please explain how or why this wasn't a satisfactory answer to your question from that time?
To clarify though:
Staff wouldn't be involved at all in how a player amasses any IC resources. They don't 'justify' (and thus, can't deny) spends, merits, NPC acquisition within the rules, contacts.
Any OOC means of harassing a player are within staff's purview. If you are paging a player pushing for what you want, making alts to keep track of them, not accepting the right to fade to black... staff can and should step in immediately to shut that down.
Any conflict on the IC grid remains under the control of players. If your PC picks a fight with another you can either resolve it through mutual agreement or let it be decided by dice. If asked staff can monitor a fight to answer questions about mechanics and ensure the result is respected if needed.
Maybe that's your issue. Or it's that you somehow seemed to be rubbed completely the wrong way by the mere existence of a thread where people were discussing a different kind of gaming philosophy to build a game around than yours that you decided to disrupt it.
If you don't have anything constructive to offer please stay out of it.
@Alzie said:
@Arkandel is it because you're going to blame the people involved? I bet your'e going to blame the other people involved. That's always the solution.
Do you actually have any reason to be here other than to be dismissive and patronizing?
If you don't care for the content of the thread there are other ones around. If you are here to contribute then it's as good a time to start as any.
It's not consent which allows the worst of these offenders to create horror stories the rest of us repeat here afterwards and go 'whyyy was this allowed?'.
I can tell you why it was allowed if you want, @Ghost. And what the most major reason it doesn't get reported is. I didn't really want to because it might derail the thread - but it's got nothing to do with what administrative system the game is using or what its goals are.