@silentsophia Weird. I live in Canada where everything is bilingual and I don't speak french but can't they... y'know, turn the product around to look at the english label instead?
I guess if you want to bitch about those people you don't need a lot of excuse, but come on.
@Runescryer said:
not because there's a lack of players that like playing the bad guys, but because playing a villain means that you have to accept that all your planning ans scheming will pretty much mean nothing in the end. It's not an easy thing for role-players to accept.
We're probably getting ridiculously off topic for the thread at this point but it's a fun debate so... if MSB's admins want it moved elsewhere I'd be fine with it... only I don't know what our topic is. 
In ANY CASE! Personally while I'd love to play a megalomaniac villain my problem with it wouldn't be the lack of a chance to ultimately win at the end. I wouldn't want that, since by definition such a character's plan would involve some manner of absurd paradigm shift for the world, so it'd be more of a roleplaying hook than something I'd actually want to see happen.
No, the problem is that playing such a character on a day to day basis would cheapen the concept. You can't - and shouldn't - have Doctor Doom or the Joker walking around regularly for people to meet and have chats with. They should be reserved for large scale events or specific stories built around them to move things in a certain direction, not bar roleplay.
At this point my assumption is shifting towards the difference being a cultural one rather than systemic in nature.
I.e. it's not that superhero games due to their mechanics, sheets, etc cause less issues with people needing to win, it's just (?) that the WoD crowd many of us are used to takes IC defeat more personally.
Hm, what occured to me is we're providing no way for someone to spy on a place rather than a person.
I.e. "I'll be obfuscated in Joe's Bar tomorrow night between 6-10 pm". How is that to be fairly facilitated?
@surreality said:
Personally, I'd be a lot more comfortable with a command that creates a job or similar along with that. The oversight factor of staff handling the matter with eyes-on is one that's worth keeping, even if automation may simplify other aspects of it.
I thought about a +job but then - unless the +job system itself is modified - we'd lose the anonymity, which @Coin correctly pointed out some people like for immersion purposes.
Code once, have forever. It saves time in the long run under same principle as automating say, spends.
As to how useful it is? Spying is probably something not done too often unless the game's theme places value on information.
@Coin said:
Staffers can also ask Arkandel if he wants to know who is spying on him OOC. He might not want to know for fun's sake. Staff as a middleman can be more than just how to resolve a conflict; it can be a way to uphold immersion or whatever; a barrier between knowing enough and knowing too much (a barrier that is, of course, set in different places for different people).
Now that is a problem code can solve. The interface may be tricky in getting it done so it's easy to use, but staff shouldn't be needed for something like this (which reduces the burden on them).
For instance I want to spy on Gany. I type something like "+spy Ganymede" and get asked a few questions:
Gany gets a notification when she logs on that someone is attempting to spy on her using the means above. She does something like "+spy list" to see all the spying attempts on her (she's a popular target) and picks my attempt from an anonymous list. She's asked what roll she'll use to resist ('wits+composure+Auspex') (*) and then depending on whether she got more successes or not is either informed IC someone attempted to spy on her, who that person is, or she's asked to provide the information if she loses the contested roll.
There should also be a feedback command so she can communicate with her anonymous spy to ask clarification questions.
It seems like a neater way to do it and can spare staff the headache of doing it manually.
(*) this is probably wrong.
@Ganymede said:
I don't see any timing issue, unless players are limited to spying via an Obfuscate Code.
I don't see how you don't see the timing issue. I explained it above, how did it fail to meet your criteria?
To give an actual example, back on HM I had a couple of players spying on me. I don't know - to this day - just what means they were using but staff asked me a couple of times to detail what my character was doing "between 4 am and 5 am last night". I had no honest idea, so I erred on the side of caution and assumed a scene I actually had two days earlier happened in that time frame so that my answer wouldn't sound like a cop out ('Theo was watching cartoons on the TV').
Spying on a character in real time - i.e. while scenes are actually taking place - doesn't have that issue. I'm not saying it's hands down the best way to go at it, since for instance you should be able to spy on me even if our RL timezones don't match, but it's still a thing.
We want to be able to trust staff to handle conflicts, but if we cannot trust fellow players to be trustworthy and cooperative then we have other, deeper issues to contend with.
We do other, deeper issues to contend with. Neither Obfuscate code nor staff +jobs can fix those, unfortunately.
@Coin said:
Edited to add: actually, I suspect it's because when playing superhero MUs, people are much more concerned about the actual narrative. This is by far a generalization as there are both attitudes in all genres, but I see it more in superhero games, especially those sans dice, where the story and consensus are, by far, the ruling factors.
I wonder if on XP games (like WoD) it would make a difference if letting someone live after a beat down got them XP (as some of the new rules in the actual books suggest) and killing another PC *cost * them XP. In a game where XP doesn't rain from the skype, PKing might just not be cost effective--but you can still beat the living shit out of someone.
I can't address the first point because I've no clue.
The second one... well, I doubt it, but that's because actual PKs are freakin' rare. People worry a ton about them but - no small part because it's such a shitstorm when they do occur - incentivizing players to keep other PCs alive might not change much, since it's the paranoia that does more damage here than the action itself. But maybe giving them thematic reasons to avoid it, in the way Uratha have about killing each other could help alleviate some of it. Maybe.
@Entropy said:
I get all of that. And I'm not expecting any sort of problem free environment. Again, I'm not naive. I don't expect to do the impossible. I'm literally just looking to give a group of players that I see with a lot of good people a place to play that is not run by a batshit tyrant. If I could, I'd happily just open BNW2, for example, and keep everything the same, but without the dictator. That's not possible, so I'm just wanting to do the next best thing.... provide an alternative/haven for those players who are less than satisfied but stick around for the other players.
Your goals are noble but you're focusing on them rather than on the means to achieve them. In doing so you're making assumptions such as having access to an inexhaustible pool of staff players who are emotionally stable, active, competent and get along with each other.
These factors can be present, yes, but rarely all at the same time. The nature of the job is that it wears you down; it's not lofty aspirations and good intentions we run out of, it's patience.
Think of a MUSH as an instance of Ship of Theseus - you know, you keep changing parts when they wear out until none of the original ones remain, so in the end is it the same ship? In our games the grind staff faces is tough and endless, so once attrition sets in so and everyone who started out is gone is that still the same game? A Dictator, for better or worse, provides a sense of continuity, of an original promise still kept. Nearly any given M* which has survived more than a year has done so because a person - or very small group of them - stayed at the top in charge of a rotating cast of administrators, and that's for a reason.
Which isn't to say having a Dictator is a panacea. Boy, hah, no. But it's easier to find certain qualities in 1-3 people than to expect them in a whole lot more than that, and over time to boot.
@Coin said:
And yet superhero games are universally where I have seen the greatest amount of people being okay with losing as part of a narrative, compared to other games.
This could be (and it's conjecture on my part, I've very little experience playing in superhero games) because in the source material heroes and villains lose all the time. It's part of the narrative that consequences for defeat aren't that dire; you are knocked unconscious and the villain goes away cackling, or you're caught and put in a super-secure prison you'll break out of next week. No biggie.
In many games either defeat is followed by a fatality or at least people feel it will be and respond accordingly - which amounts to the same thing, drama. I don't know how many times I've seen some guy in a WoD game pick a fight at a bar and follow it up with spending willpower, all out damage. And while PKs are usually rare in actuality, the communal impression remains.
I dunno. Maybe that's partly the cause?
@Thenomain said:
@AmishRakeFight said:
One more innocuous reason is that player behavior does tend to change in front of staff members, in and out of character.
But why?
I think it's closer to how we behave in front of a camera. Even things we do very naturally on our own are done differently when we are being observed.
@Ganymede said:
As staff, I should be able to ask a player what their PC is doing during the period on which another is spying on them, and expect to be given a truthful answer. As another player, if I choose to spy on someone, I would like to think they would do the same. Maybe we go through some rolls to see if I'm successful or not, or not if we can agree on it.
One of the issues there is timing. When we're on the grid (theoretically) we're doing Important Things. It's when we play having those hush-hush plots to overthrow the Prince, make under the table political deals or whatever the hell. So if you're Obfuscated, following me around while I'm involved in such shennanigans that's what you'll get to spy upon.
If staff-you asks me "what were you doing between 1 am and 2 am yesterday?" I'm not ... honestly sure what I could say. Was my character plotting? Or was he in a taxi going downtown to catch a movie? Or just sitting in a room reading Twilight?
It's not necessarily cut and dried about being truthful. Now if we wanted to discuss players actually trusting their own staff to make their IC lives more interesting by actually giving them the tools to do so then I'd quite agree with you.
@Cobaltasaurus raises a good point. How do we feel about IC spying? Literally, a character sneaking into places while unseen OOC to witness what happens in them?
For the sake of argument let's assume that while using Obfuscate you can't see OOC comments, only poses and say's, and of course that if you are caught at it you can't say you were only present OOC.
@Ganymede said:
I concur that this is not spying, but for what reason was such code popular? I cannot wrap my head around why anyone would use it.
I had coded something similar on a MUD ages ago when we had what we called emote-fighting tournaments. Basically they were posed duels between two characters and then the audience voted on how well they thought the fight was posed by either party - the actual outcome was irrelevant. It was used to slowly increase your PC's ability at fighting, and in my opinion, was one of the best ways I've seen to handle such a thing.
Anyway. Since we didn't want 20 people to be in a room, possibly spamming, when only two would pose anything this allowed them to spectate without being present. They could have their own scenes, and 'watch' a second one from afar.
So that's a reason for it, no?
A Dark Bump In The Night Waters just didn't have that ring to it.