Posts made by Arkandel

@Thenomain

In this context 'meaningful' meant simply 'not clearly intending to circumvent other rules'.

Obviously it depends on the game in question, but a lot of drama happen as it is as a result of threats to PCs. I don't see a reason to add another factor on the wrong side of the scale by removing the player as well as the character from their sphere.

Someone trying to remove players they don't like by killing their PC, the targets trying to hold onto their OOC friends by not getting effectively booted, those in the queue encouraging conflict just to get the doors opened...there's little upside in comparison.

@Thenomain said:

On HM, when my character died I was permitted to recreate without having to go back into the wait queue, thereby skipping the quota requirements for the game. That was really the kind of reward I appreciated.

But shouldn't that be a given? I mean, unless a player is causing issues in their sphere, I'd consider it a pretty douche move to not allow them to skip quota requirements for the sphere if their character dies, not to mention it'd be yet another reason people would resist facing the IC consequences of their PCs' actions.

IC death following meaningful RP should be rewarded, not penalized.

@lordbelh said:

@Arkandel At Christmas I gorge myself. Screw it all, it's Christmas.

It's a Christmas miracle that calories of all you eat around the 25th are reduced to zero. Everyone knows that.

Something I neglected to mention - I think most people give up because they either expect results too fast, or vastly underestimate the calories they burn with exercise compared to the calories they eat.

So for example going to the gym to work out for most of us, even if we go at it hard, is say... 600 calories in an hour. Relatively few people can pull off more than that even if they think they are without injuring themselves, and the majority will burn less. However eating a cookie or two will replenish those calories within minutes - you know those 'rewards' we give ourselves for a job well done? With the excuse of 'if I don't treat myself now and then I'll never pull this off anyway'?

So a few weeks later after busting our ass we weigh ourselves and it's the same as before or more. So we give up thinking it just 'didn't work' for us 'because of our metabolism'.

Abs are made in the kitchen.

@Coin In the long run delays, temporary restrictions of Gnosis spends etc still take everyone to the exact same point. In a few months SHH's power curve will resemble TR's.

The difference is in new characters. They can (and should) offer an XP catchup or the dinosaurs will run the show, but the delays will keep them from doing so too soon, which is generally not a good idea.

@Coin

Yeah, I remember waits of almost half a year on high power trait spends. But that's a good thing, it encouraged you to make some hard choices; do you wait for so long to improve on just that one thing, or do you spend the XP far sooner than that on stuff you need pronto?

And it'd have solved TR's issue of overnight triple Masters handily.

It just can't work as-is with GMC since of course costs don't scale up with dots.

@Ganymede said:

This presumes that one is "fit," and that maintenance is the goal. For many, it's not.

I'm in no way an expert and on top of it I'm not a doctor, so this will be likely different for people dealing with different health issues.

However a few years ago I found myself in my early 30s, overweight and completely out of shape. I wasn't used to that, it sort of snuck up on me since I always used to play basketball, I walked everywhere, loved hiking, etc. But my lower back was suddenly giving up on me and even half-court ball with 25-year olds was killing me.

I found relatively non-critical adjustments to my diet and exercise helped a ton. I mean I went cold turkey on Coke, stopped eating obvious bad things like cookies, and replaced fries/rice with salads. Basically my diet was pretty much described as "meat with salad", and I'm not talking small helpings either. Lots of it. I went to the gym three times a week and lifted, 30-40 minutes a session tops.

I lost 50ish pounds in half a year. It does work. It doesn't even take huge sacrifices, it takes small ones on a daily basis. So I wasn't on maintenance - that's empirical though, it's what worked for me, and it might be different for other people.

Either way those small sacrifices, compounded by life and other obligations are still hard. Christmas? Try eating right around Christmas when there are sweets everywhere, right? Willpower is a muscle and like every muscle if you overwork it, it'll get tired and fail. Plus as mentioned above those 30-40 minutes hurt when you're on a rather limited time budget to begin with. But it's doable, for sure.

I think the best trick is to figure out some motivation even if you have to invent it. Be competitive with someone if you've got a competitive nature, or be part of a group to get peer pressure to work in your favor or... something. It's a personal thing obviously.

@Coin

My favorite is still HM's policy. You spend <X> XP? You wait <X> IC weeks (and on HM time was running at an accelerated rate of 2/3 if I remember correctly). Nice, simple, universal and it scaled with the complexity of what you were buying.

@Coin said:

I love wait times. I just don't think they should be that long.

Sometimes people crunch numbers very conservatively at first and I can sort of see the point in that. It's far easier to adjust waiting times for instance if they are too slow and you decide a few months down the road that they ought to be adjusted, than if you determine then they are going too fast when everyone has a bunch of stats at 5.

So for example I think on SHH they're too long. But it's fixable.

Generally speaking staying fit isn't hard. You watch what you eat a little bit (sweets are bad, cut down on bread/fries, eat more protein and fibers) and you exercise in whatever way makes sense to you (the best workout is the one you can do). It baffles the mind there are so many special programs and diets out there because fundamentally it's not that complicated a matter.

But that doesn't make it easy. It's all about consistency and we all got things going on in our lives to distract us.

My workout isn't that long and the gym isn't too far from my house - 30-40 minutes of freeweights than a 10 minute walk back, done. But when I stay late at work and then I'm tired, I'm hungry, I want to watch something on TV and on top of these things I know I need to be in bed by midnight. Well, that gives me a 5 hour window tops and part of it is eaten by the commute. So that one hour or so the gym-slot occupies on my calendar is literally 25% of all the free time that I have in a day.

Consistency is the hellish part.

Oh, all too well. My PCs routinely end up being left out from what their cabals/coteries are doing in my PrPs, then I need to make up IC reasons why they weren't there for them. Bah!

@Coin said:

@mietze
Honestly, I dislike XP transfers in general.

I am willing to make some leeway for people who lose their character contrary to their wishes (PK, death by plot, etc.), but if you get bored with your PC, I don't particularly think you should be able to just flip all that XP onto another character.

I like transfers if only because they allow a process of continued, ongoing renewal. For example if you're in Mage but you're dreadfully bored of your character you're probably going to be little good for anyone; especially if there are sphere caps and you might be hogging a spot, in which case idlying (but remaining just 'active' enough to not be frozen) is actually harming the sphere.

So what's the downside in allowing you to jump ship? You leave Mage to roll a Werewolf instead, the latter sphere gains some activity since people are more likely to be involved when the PC is still shiny and fresh out of CG, the former sphere loses next to nothing, it's a win/win.

As for the issue of min/maxing that might have been true on TR - where you can spend it overnight - but it wouldn't have been with other policies like say SHH has for delayed spending. There's no vastly different process then since, whether you have 5 or 50+ XP to spend it's still going to be expended quite gradually.

I've heard (and sorta agree with) both sides of this. The "we should get people involved" and the "people should take responsibility for themselves" mindsets are both right.

What it comes down to IMHO is that some people are just good at creating stories (by which I don't only mean 'running PrPs', although I've found one is a subset of the other). Others are good at joining stories.

It peeves me sometimes when people do neither though and simply play cardboard characters to embody some mechanical or thematic Mary Sue concept.

Facilitate or join, dammit.

@Coin

I think even more so than people not understanding games like MU* are by definition social since they involve group activities the problem is players don't want to understand not everyone plays the same game the same way.

I don't think that can be underestimated as a factor. Sometimes we're stuck in groupthink mode and it's a tough as hell issue to distance yourself from. I try to keep things in perspective - when HR for instance protested that my peeve about that 'Life Two' thing was unreasonable I did my best to take a step back. Was I just being an asshole? (I decided otherwise but who knows, I'm biased).

The same way... look at threads right here on MSB. Someone makes the implicit assumption that if you care about your stats you're not there to play a character. You yourself like social dice in certain situations where others frown on the practice. Some people play mostly relationships and TS scenes while for others TS itself is wrong.

We still find a way to detest each other's playstyle, consciously or otherwise, and look at our own preferences as what ought to the universal standard.

And that's over the same game. The same rules and mechanics taken from the same source material. Now take into account all those other MU* with different goals, themes, rules...

@darksabrz said:

@Miss-Demeanor the Consulate was -- at least in large part -- the brainchild of the Carthians (I think Laibah was the one who really pushed for the Consulate in the wake of Moritz's abdication, but EmmahSue can correct me if I'm wrong on that). In essence, the Praxis would potentially be considered Carthian domain. However, it wound up not working out that way.

The Carthians' intentions not workout out in practice the way they should on paper is arguably the Covenant's whole point. But yes, the Consulate at the time was the product of trying to apply Carthian ideals to a larger scope following Moritz' fall.

On the OOC front at the time everyone was rolling Carthians. We had started out relatively small (Laibah, VAS/Shaft, Loewe, etc) but after a certain point the Covenant's population exploded since of course that's where much the RP was, plus it was the safest place to be since anyone attacking one Carthian would be zerged by the rest. In retrospect staff should have intervened before it got to that point but I'd say our OOC population affected or even shaped IC events.

I still miss those days though. It often left so some very fun RP.

There are also ways to regulate the power curve even in the presence of a theoretically (in practice: time-limited) bottomless XP well.

For instance in non-GMC nWoD you can use ROI as your glass ceiling: remove limits on attribute/skills so players can raise their Strength or whatever dots indefinitely, but keep it scaling.

Sure, there's always going to be 1-2 XP at the end of each week, but if your next spend costs 50 then it takes you half a year to get there. So you have to decide (and making tough decisions is the foundation of any great system) if you're better off spending half a year to marginally improve your Strength versus considerably expanding your contacts' network.

I'm of two minds on this.

On one hand I hate the idea of rolling in social scenes in general. I feel it interrupts their flow and takes part of the fun of allowing the poses' quality determine their impact. On top of it requiring you to play with people you know, who are decent players and with whom there's some mutual respect seems to go against the point; if those conditions are true why do you need dice in the first place?

But on the other hand there's always That Guy with Manipulation/Intelligence 2, Dexterity 4, Firearms 5 and Manipulation 1 who's playing the professional sniper-slash-political mastermind. So if they get to dominate combat scenes it's unfair they are allowed to strong-arm people in social settings as well.

It's not GMC's system I don't like, though. From what I understand without having used it, it's well designed.

@ThatOneDude said:

I don't know, sometimes its fun to play the combat monster, and, more so when the events/PRPs ect that you go to or attend are all about combat.

The more freedoms your mechanics allow (and classless systems with plentiful XP tend to be pretty accommodative in terms of such liberties) the blurrier the line is between a combat monster and other kinds of characters. For instance my Vampire on TR had no dots in brawl, melee or firearms but he could kick some pretty major ass in a fight - and did during the EotW monstrous fight scenes.

What I'm wary of, and I'll continue to be until it's demonstrated otherwise in practice rather than just by pasting mechanics, is that systemising social interactions (by implementing GMC's 'doors' system or anything like it, for example) does less damage than good, or for that matter that it gets used more often than not.

As long as two things are true I generally don't mind any XP system:

1. Everyone has roughly the same access to XP. No tiered superpowers, no dinosaurs others will simply never catch up to, etc.

2. The system is implemented in a way to protect people from themselves.

Classic nWoD often failed at (2) because of CG. Spending freebie points to raise your power stat, for example, saved you a bunch of XP compared to buying it with XP later on; likewise spreading your starting dots around rather than mix/maxing them in CG was a pretty bad idea. And let's not go into the practice of playing any sort of combat character without a multi-attack fighting style.

Of course simply because a system protects you from making mistakes when buying things doesn't mean you don't get an enormous benefit from knowing how to use the +sheet you end up with.

You can RP being sober?

@tragedyjones said:

I think the idea of a territory system is awesome, but it IS a pain and many people are not going to want to deal with it. If it is a part of the game, it needs to be, IMO, built in from the ground up, You need to decide, and I hate myself for saying this, if it impacts everyone separately but equally. By that, I mean that it should influence Mortals/Vampires/Werewolves/etc, though they should not inherently block one another out or occupy the same slot on a turf.

You are correct in both accounts.

• A system would need to be integrated with other mechanics across the board. If it's entirely an island it'll feel like the add-on that it is.

• It would need to impact everyone but in different ways. Obviously a vampire doesn't need to control territory for the same reason a werewolf does. But then again they can share (at least in the nWoD) because generally speaking they don't need it for the same reason, either.

Otherwise the same clause applies to it as for any other game design choice: It has advantages and it has drawbacks. Not everyone will like it (but some will), so choose your poison.