Posts made by Arkandel

Utter asshole of the day!

Once again... no one in this thread is wrong (except for Gany of course, just out of principle).

We either have to debate the best way to do a thing or to debate why a thing is the best way to run a game. We can't do both at the same time, it's an exercise in futility.

A discussion has to begin with the goal, not with the method. That's basic engineering.

Yeah, I agree with @surreality that 'activity' measured in some way or other ought to be a major factor of XP distribution. Otherwise it's less useful as a carrot, since it promotes nothing but existence.

This is something I was told way back when I was first getting into WORA and I think it applies to MSB as well.

We're a pool of sharks. We'll bite anyone, including each other, especially if we smell blood. But there are no real favorites - everyone gets bruised around here at one time or other, so as long as people have a relatively thick skin they're fine.

The caveat: What this community dislikes above all things (and detects it at a pretty decent rate) is a fake. Just be upfront, don't ever lie and don't feed us jargon. When it comes to gaming (online but also otherwise) many people here have considerable experience, we don't need things beautified since it often comes out as patronizing instead. Just tell it like it is.

@il-volpe said:

I see no reason why newbies should 'catch up.'

You mean you don't agree with the reason, the same way I can see why newbies shouldn't catch up but I believe its drawbacks to be worse than the benefits.

This is one of the cases it's quite alright to disagree. People just want different things out of XP systems, it's natural.

Yeah, I haven't been following this much but there's some serious nerdrage here.

In a discussion like this it's (once again!) becoming obvious why there is no "one best" XP system; we all have different goals.

My goal is parity. Someone else's is IC plausibility. Another's is encouraging long-term activity.

So @Cobaltasaurus, what is your goal for a game using an XP system? What are you intending to do (assuming it's something in particular rather than encouraging conversation about systems in this context). Because unless we can answer that we'll all be tailoring systems toward whatever our personal preferences are.

@SG said:

Could you have some NPC mage somewhere do something like that? Like put a curse on a lineage or something?

Maybe, but would that Mage be doing this habitually? I mean it's a game, people go lax and play less all the time. Players will be failing to meet any set goals fairly regularly, and systematizing the consequences ought to be flexible enough to take that under account.

@Staked said:

Pretty decent tips, though I disagree with running SSH on a non-standard port. If somebody wants to try to get in, nmap is going to find it on that other port anyway.

True, but why make it easier on them? I mean they are basically scanning huge ranges of IPs for known ports (and then for known exploits), so every bit of a delay is to our collective advantage.

@Roz said:

@deadculture said:

What I would like to see is a MUSH based on the same world as Guy Gavriel Kay's Lions of Al-Rasan, A Song for Arbonne, etc. It's close enough to some themes in our world's medieval era to make it easy to play, extremely low-magic and very engaging, if you ever read either of those books.

HELLO I AM HERE TO UPVOTE YOU TWENTY TIMES

I was so emo when I finished that book. The duel between ... well, let's not spoil things, certain characters, was handled in basically the best way I've ever read a fight going in a novel.

I was all grrr and :(.

@mietze said:

Ultimately, if there is a list of expectations that staff have for a certain role, they're not "punishing" people who can't make those expectations. I advocate for specific lists of expectations, because it allows for more flexibility OOC, and for more diverse people being given a chance, if they can approach staff with a team proposal or other thing that still meets all of the requirements even though it's not Ye Old Typical person who can afford to be online 24/7.

The problem isn't coming up with lists. That's in fact the easy part.

The problem is monitoring all those people to make sure they're compliant with the objectives on that list over time, offering warnings and taking privileges away when they aren't met. Not only is that a constant burden on staff but also it's much harder to take something away than never giving it to begin with.

Even if you consider strong-willed, professional staff (which is in no way a given) the method of 'taking back' the privileges is far from easily implemented. How do you 'take away' someone's Discipline dots? His Primal Urge? The fact they are a freakin' Elder? Sure, some mobile things like Status and Resource dots could be clipped but none of the big things, since there are no great IC methods of trimming things (then giving them back once the player is once again compliant...).

While I agree with @Coin (that always makes me feel bad) about there not being an one XP system so they'll all need to be adjusted to the type of game you're running, that doesn't mean we can't still take a few lessons from online games which use various methods as a way to measure progress but also as incentive for desired behaviors.

For starters we need XP to trickle in capped. If it didn't then people with waaaay more time on their hands than others would dominate utterly. Even in games where the distribution method exists but is capped high some players will file endless streams of whatever-it-takes to reach that cap; taking dramatic failures and breaking points for everything, for instance, could swiftly lead to powerhouses in nWoD 2.0.

Now, let's take games like WoW. WoW started out with no way for newbies to catch up at all, but the cap was still very tangible; you could reach a state where you had your full item set and complimentary and that was it; until more items came in, the character was 'complete'. That led to players losing interest between content updates. A secondary issue arose which quickly became critical; new people coming in couldn't play with their friends, since everyone was doing 'end game' content (say, three patches with improved items past launch) which they'd need to gear up for but they couldn't, because no one was raiding the old content so they could get outdated items from previous content updates.

This applies well to MU* if we consider the abstraction here. Consider the following:

• Oldbie characters need to be challenged, or they will get bored, so increasingly high end plot has to be present for them.

• New characters come in who need content to match their own more limited abilities. Stick them in a high-end plot and they're useless, stick oldbies in theirs and they 'solve' everything.

• If there's a total cap of XP you can reach then players reaching it get bored. Roleplaying games are built toward advancement, it's no fun when you run out of shinies.

It's not as clear cut as that of course since roleplay isn't about winning encounters like WoW is, but the point still exists that some way of compromising different levels of players should exist, especially in the ever-existent lack of enough plot-runners.

To make matters trickier not everyone enjoys playing a proverbial sidekick - if the most you can earn in a week is X XP then new players will always be lagging behind older ones, assuming roughly equal amounts of activity.

I believe a catch-up method to be the most efficient way of dealing with these issues, but safeguards need to be in place. That is, allow XP to trickle in faster for those who are behind the progression leaders - but don't allow that TR silliness where new characters came in with triple Masteries despite Awakening the day before. For example:

• Allow twice the rate of XP for characters until they reach 90% of the leaders' total gains.
• Spending delays (more liberal than the normal ones but still existent for new players).
• Background checks. If a PC is an IC fledgling they get a smaller amount of catch-up XP.
• Promote activity. Too many games allow 'backup PCs' to be set up, who basically are gotten through CG and just accumulate XP without being played. XP should be a yummy carrot towards a goal.
• Allow XP transfers in character death/legitimate retirement. There is no reason to not do this other than people doing it constantly. Much of the OMG-I-DIED! drama can be avoided with just that.
• And above all make sure your cap is set high but not too high, or some players will abuse it. Constant. Breaking! Points!

You may want to allow some things to encourage plot running besides the above but those are the basics of what I'd consider a decent system. Good luck defining 'activity' though.

@BetterJudgment True! Unlike the rest of what we do and talk about here which is guaranteed to pass the test of time with flying colors.

@tragedyjones In theory it's a good idea (and it might help some STs) but if I'm running a scene with 5 people in it I'm not sure I'd ever go around poking into +sheets right then, spamming myself senseless to see what they got.

However you could offer universal access to +sheets, either to your Elders or to everyone. The OOC Masquerade is a ridiculous thing anyway, and then it could become part of prep-work instead for STs.

Alright, let's take a stab at it.

Casuals vs Actives

If you want to make it tiered do it all the way; actually offer incentives (the standards of which would then need to be enforced) between kinds of players willing to put 'more' into the game. So if there are Vampires some are Elders - real Elders, with the dots to match. But then they'd need to do things, not only in theory but in practice, making them mini-sphere leaders in their own special way. Adjust for whatever spheres you got.

These standards can be anything but you could tie them to Storytelling. More on that soon!

I fucking love the idea of what you can do with the God-Machine. I have a lot of ideas on how to integrate it into various spheres and the game in general.

Well, I got nothing to offer there. If you have the ideas make it so!

ST-Led scenes

You can tie this to the tiers - look, basically no matter what you do, want or offer some people will run plot because they like to do it and some won't because they don't like to do it. All you can do is encourage it more; so what you're talking about here (I think, correct me if I'm wrong) is changing the culture so there's less separation between what a "PrP" and a "regular scene" is.

So how about something like this... each of your Elders - let's call them that for now although the principle is the same for any sphere - comes in the game with a metaplot of their own. It's part of their requirements to have more than a background but a story, with protagonists and antagonists and things happening around their very existence. So each time they are out on the grid they are asked or even requested to pull from those and involve others in the madness that's their existence. Assassins try to get near, crazed rogue ghouls pop up to steal their precious super-drippy vitae, powerful agents from their Covenant try recruit PCs to cater to their insanity, Angels show up to propagate their weird schemes, whatever.

In other words make it so that being a Storyteller advances your character at the same time. It's narcicistic as hell but if it works, it could work really well.

One problem I have never been able to solve, is to make it so that what happens on grid happens in a meaningful way. Sure, you could log everything everywhere but that is intrusive and time consuming.

... I got nothing. I guess the grid isn't something I usually care about, specific hangouts are and I always felt anything more than public posts and changed room descriptions was overkill.

That's it for now.

@ThatGuyThere I'm flattered!

Not a link, but something I liked - from Slashdot, regarding adblock and the necessity of advertisements online in general:

I read an article a while ago about some scientist who decided that he wanted to go around investigating a certain species of leech that lives inside a hippo's butt, like attached directly to the colon. He suggested that, as big as the hippo is, it probably wasn't really all that aware that the leeches are even in its butt, but that's where the leech likes to be because there's a good source of blood there for the leech to feed on.

Now, the scientist is probably right, the hippo probably goes its whole life not really knowing that it has all these leeches in its butt. It might feel a little pain in the butt, but the hippo probably isn't concerned with why that pain is there, much less how or even if it can get rid of it, it's just something that the hippo has always lived with. The hippo accepts that one of the facts of daily life is that you just need to live with some pain in your butt.

Now, imagine (and believe me, this is a hypothetical), if the hippo let someone root around inside its butt and remove every one of the leeches, and even stop any others from attaching. It might take a day or two to get used to and get back to normal, but the hippo would wake up one day and realize that it no longer has a pain in its butt. It can still do everything it used to do, it can frolic in the water, it can roam around and find the tender little pieces of grass, it can do that thing where it poops and swishes its tail around to spread it all over its neighbors, and it realizes that it can do all of those things it likes without having that pain in its butt.

Now, maybe the leeches could talk. Maybe the leeches talk to the hippos and they say things like, listen, hippo, my life cycle depends on you letting me get into your butt when you're in the water. I need to drink your blood and drop out some eggs, so that other leeches can be born and start the cycle all over again. It's not really a big price you pay, I mean sure, there's a little pain in your butt, but I need you to do this. If you want to get in the water, it's just something you have to deal with. It's the price of admission. If you get in the water without letting me in your butt, it's like you're stealing the water.

I bet that the hippo would hear that, and would still want to continue going about its day without any pain in its butt. I don't think the hippo would feel very sorry for the butt leech. Sure, maybe the butt leech contributes to the aquatic ecosystem, maybe its eggs or the dead leeches get eaten by other things and fertilize the grass that the hippo likes to eat. But, if the leeches weren't there, the grass would just find other nutrients. Even though the leech is trying to argue that it's a necessary part of this ecosystem, it's actually just a pain in the butt. In reality, despite what it tells everyone else, the major beneficiary of anything that the butt leech does is the actual butt leech.

Anyway, I just had a thought that advertisers kind of sound like hippo butt leeches.

I will assume you didn't watch the video rather than that your sarcasm detector is broken on a Friday, when you need it the most.

Just to help you guys write, maybe use speech recognition software?

You're welcome.

I'm not too worried about ego anyway. The truth is that it takes enormous competitiveness and self-confidence to get to that level - there are very few humble people I can name who became real superstars (as in, in the conversation for 'greatest <X> of all time') without it.

Tim Duncan is pretty much the sole exception, the guy's a legend and he doesn't seem to give half a damn. I mean he plays D&D but we can forgive him that.

So if KD has a chip on his shoulder that's probably good. He'll need it. Plus I really wanna see him as a Laker.