Posts made by Arkandel

George Martin himself said that he didn't like how in Lord of the Rings Tolkien tells us Aragorn is a great King but he doesn't tell us how. Like, for example, after Sauron's defeat there are still hundreds of thousands of orcs around in the mountains, does he put them to the sword? Go in and kill those orc babies? What about the humans who sided with the Enemy?

If nothing else the series is always about how getting the Iron Throne is easy (look at how many people have sat it already during the course of the series/books alone!) but staying on it is hard.

I don't even know if it belongs in this thread but.

(GoT Spoilers)

...

For those who've watched uhm, an uncertain number of episodes from the newest season of Game of Thrones, holy shit are they diverging from the books considerably now! I didn't see it coming, with a few exceptions they were mostly faithful... now major characters are starting to get waaay off course.

I think the biggest pivotal point was the decision to take Lady Stoneheart out of the equation. Once that happened Brienne 's quest had to be repurposed. Then shit got real.

For many players resource management is in no way an enjoyable part of the game.

For example most vampire players don't want to have to go out and roleplay hunting every time, for example, so I don't see Loci providing more Essence than expected as a problem.

Conversely, roleplaying such scenes has its place (as it should) but just because Storytellers aren't throwing plots based around it too often, preferring other venues to have fun, doesn't mean these elements aren't thematic or important to the game. Vampires still do go out to suck people's blood every night or two, after all, it just isn't a constant source of RP for all of them.

Down and dirty combat is a (very convenient) way of making those otherwise terribly long fights whose outcome is assured last a lot less without requiring the ST to handwave them altogether. In 1.0 even if you were faced with a few thugs with knives it'd have taken a while to cut through them.

Having said that, in 1.0 mooks like that were actually a threat. A lot less so in 2.0 due to the power boosts across the board.

@tragedyjones said:

I think the reason no MU had been planning to do Beast is most.people are generally completely.unfamiliar with it thus far.

Sure, of course. But my point wasn't that it wasn't going to eventually be out and picked up by MU*, only that it wasn't gonna happen any time soon.

@Miss-Demeanor said:

Dammit! I thought I was safe. I thought I'd escaped from GMC. Neither Vampire nor Werewolf interested me in the least... but then they made this. And this looks AMAZING.

SIGH I almost got away...

If it makes you feel any better (?) no MU* is even planning so far to include it that I am aware of, plus it might be a long time before it's even out.

What did you like about it?

@Bobotron I steal so much I don't even know where I originally found it any more.

Not that the thread had ridiculous amounts of potential to begin with, but at this point we're stretching the definition of 'mildly constructive' even for our non-lofty standards.

@surreality I quite agree with what you are saying, I am just not sure consent-based games fix the problem.

Unless consent is required at every level, including losing contested but non-lethal/permanently changing rolls, a player could still try to push those things through. Hell, look at Shang, it happens there routinely right? And likewise I have yet to see a popular non-consent game where characters would be forced (well, 'forced') to play things out instead of fading to black.

I'm a supporter of the former type of games but I really don't think they'd fix this issue. At best they might mask it a bit.

@surreality said:

Basically, on previous incarnations of the board, the problem of "I had a bad day RL, I want to make someone as miserable as I am by being a real jerk IC, and making sure nobody can do anything about it OOC because it's a non-consent game and they don't get a say and I get to make the other player uncomfortable/unhappy and I'm going to enjoy that/gleefully not give a damn about that other human being on the other end of this situation," came up more than a few times as a flaw in fully non-consent environments.

To be fair that's not a problem with non-consent games, and it can still happen in a consent-based MU* in the exact same way. People can be dicks without trying to kill a PC.

Staff can't really do anything to the 'asshole because I can be' because you essentially have to make special rules to punish them

That is the wrong approach though. You can't out-rule assholes, or they'll just try to twist around it, and it's the players who're doing nothing wrong who'll end up being inconvenienced (or worse) by their existence. A general guideline ("don't be an ass") should be enough, then staff can enforce it as needed - we always end up relying on staff judgment anyway, so it's perfectly okay to make policies loose rather than too specific.

@Coin Non-consent and consent, when done right - i.e. assuming all characters are played by mature individuals interested in collaborating with each other to tell a good story - are essentially identical. They only diverge when things go awry.

I'm a supporter of the proactive element in consent based games as I find the lack of paranoia fosters a culture of cooperation. But the two approaches aren't that different as long as the sandbox we-don't-need-no-mechanics factor encountered in many of these games isn't present.

@Sunny +1. I couldn't have said it better. I'd have used more words though.

@crusader I don't think anyone here suggested your ideas are bad, or that a game based on them wouldn't/couldn't be fun.

Just that it's not nWoD, which I think is fair to say is accurate.

I might be off-topic and please let me pointedly put my constructive hat on before I ask this, but here it is:

Is weather code useful for something?

@Misadventure The other thing is... the more mechanics get in my way, changing the way I play, the less I usually like it.

Take the Beats/Conditions system in nWoD 2.0 for example. I'm totally sold on it but that's more due to the excitement I see from some people using it than that I think I'll actually be okay with incorporating filing Conditions in my everyday routine.

Basically what I would want from an XP system is to be somewhat seamless. If I need to farm votes from public scenes then it's the opposite - since I hate big gatherings. Don't make me choose between 'having fun' and 'character advancement', the two should be linked not at odds.

If I had to choose I'd take automatic activity-based XP. Sure, it's content-agnostic but it rewards being out there regularly (as opposed to TR's "advancement for existing" implementation) and you literally need do nothing else but roleplay to get it.

However that's just me. I can totally see why other people might want something else.

When it comes to PvP in particular I think the problem to manage is expectation rather than reality.

The reality is that PC deaths at the hands of other PCs is relatively rare, quite likely due to the drama that comes with it, but also because most people don't want to be dicks. However the threat of it, the potential the other player might in fact be a dick is a driving force in strife generation, so that the knowledge that consent would be required before really bad things happened can pre-emptively get rid of that potential.

The flip side which is consent being abused due to horrible players is a different thing altogether. That's why staff exists, it's their job to protect the game from such people, while the truth is they'd be there no matter what. No MU* is dick-free.

@Admiral said:

I think it's fine for some people to prefer consent-based games. I just sincerely hope that isn't the future of MU*ing because I have zero interest in it. If I don't have the risk of losing my character I just can't enjoy taking risks.

I don't want to sound like I'm arguing what you like (because that's silly) but what keeps you from playing and simply waiving your consent? Not just for one encounter but permanently by flagging yourself as non-consent-okay (which sounds so much like Shang ).

@il-volpe said:

@crusader said:

@Arkandel
Honestly, what you have described sounds less like a Consent-based game (which I find boring) and more like an ICA=ICC game, which I approve of.

Indeed. I would not describe GoB as consent-based. When I hear that, I think "diceless" and I don't want a diceless game. Dice are fun. Not knowing what will happen is fun. Having a non-human system of arbitration is fun. Having different skills and different levels in those skills is fun. Having things go unexpectedly well or unexpectedly badly is fun. The sense of tension and risk created by dice is fun.

That's what I was thinking, yes, if for different reasons (which is as intended since we it's natural to value other things even in the same systems).

For instance when I played on Shang there were several things that bugged me and it wasn't the lack of dice per se, it was the lack of a common framework; people had abilities and powers often made up on the spot, there was absolutely no way to compare two characters' skill levels at any task or, for that matter, even the same power - two telepaths would use entirely different approaches to how reading minds work. Furthermore there wasn't even a guideline to progression, which is one of the things I enjoy the most in any RPG, i.e. starting as a lowbie and becoming better at things.

So see, I don't like dice... per se. I roll them rarely unless I have to, but I do like having mechanics even if only to provide objective frames of reference. How does <X> work? Oh, that's how, okay. I guess I see sandbox (in this context) limiting the gameplay's potential rather than doing something for it, and I say that although I always liked the idea of just rolling whatever you well damn pleased through CG without having to wait for approval or go through bottlenecks and jump through hoops. The latter, to me, is a price worth paying for the former.

On the other hand...

The non-fun part is losing a character you don't want to lose, because of a series of bad rolls. So I did away with that.

Yes. I remember when I first started playing on HM (I hadn't had the character for more than a month, but being completely new I knew no one, and creating the PC took a while then I had invested a lot of time in meeting the few folks I did end up knowing, getting a ghoul, etc.

So there was this offer for a PrP thrown by Kohl which I took - my first pWoD PrP ever! So he took us through this 5-minute setup and threw something like five NPCs with fire-axes at the party, which was consisted of three PCs two of whom were extremely non-combaty. I didn't want to lose the character - it would have been for nothing.

So to me, the meaning of consent is to ensure emphasis is placed on simple sanity checks like that. Actions can - and should - have consequences but players should have a definite say in defining how far things go.

It's not meant to be a dramatic departure from traditional games since even then communication is supposed to be key and wasting the other guy's PC for little reason (be it as a Storyteller or otherwise) should be avoided - we're supposed to offer the courtesy of discussing it first, and perhaps making sure alternatives are on the table if they exist.

Well, that's what this is about the way I see it - systematizing the offer.

@crusader I don't like the idea of considering anything sacrosanct in gaming since whatever works for you and your players is great, but you brought this to an open forum for comments, right? So it's your choice whether to take input at face value or stick to your line in the sand and defend it, but I think that might be counter-productive.

What people are saying is that the things you find disagreeable with nWoD Werewolf are pretty much... the game. You could gut them out, sure, but at that point why start with that particular game at all and not base it on something else instead? What you are proposing is like saying "I like Geist except for all this ghost stuff" - more power to you, but what you'd have in the end is something else entirely.

If you want input, ask for input. But be prepared to take it, else why go through the trouble in the first place?

Lady on the commute two days in a row. I know I should feel more sympathetic that your toddler is throwing hissy fits for half an hour straight because it's more annoying to you than it is to us since you have to take it all day long but damn.

Half an hour and it's not even eight in the morning yet. And you are trying to bribe him into stopping? That's called rewarding him for it. Damn.