Posts made by Bobotron

@Cupcake
I was really pleased with the episode overall. I am still not totally sold on this version of Mon'el but it's growing on me. And the J'onn and M'gann angle has been interesting.

I have a copy of Pose Order Tracker that saves to a room; it might work to be edited to save to an object? I think it's primarily written for PennMUSH as it requires @hooks. I can link it if needed.

@Seraphim73
You have no idea how much I've weighed options. At this point it's going to be a test anyway, and if it doesn't work, it's a simple 'okay, we turn off that bit of code'. But I think that, once I get all of the stuff based around it, it'll be workable. Besides, even 'instant modifiers' and 'chosen at chargen things you can never betray' are still part of the thing: trust. No matter WHAT you have to trust the other person and communicate and BE REASONABLE and NOT A FUCKING CHEATER who ignores the stats.

Part of why I'm aiming for the 'social health' type setup, and trying to come up with 'fail forward' and other types of 'fail with some reward' setup, which is my ideal (and not something like 'take a beat for a dramatic failure') is to at least mitigate some of the crazy modifiers and give the stuff (like, in all honesty, if someone was trying to seduce a happily married, the Disposition would immediately shoot from Indifferent to Hostile, which is also a factor in the system), and giving compromises and 'here's what can't be done with social Sway'..

No system is going to be perfect without a buy in and, ultimately, a cooperation on the players' parts to be reasonable. Which is going to be a problem no MATTER what is done. I am simply choosing to start out by asking people to work with each other, let the system help guide things when you really need to, and communicate to make things work there.

@surreality
Right, I am not making a WoD game. It's my own setup and history and world, so it's not using any of the WoD specifics, but being a modern supernatural game, WoD is the closest (and I won't deny it's being made to offer an alternative to the standard WoD MUSH out there).

@Lisse24
Yours is very similar to my idea. I haven't gotten it completely written up yet, but the ideal for mine follows a similar format to yours as far as declaration of intent and the 'end goal' of the exchange. My version ends up with two additional things:

• A representation of how you feel about someone called Disposition, which is essentially 'social armor' and modifiers. It ranges from Indifferent in the middle, to to Friendly on the top end and Hostile on the bottom end. This doesn't need recorded separately for everyone, as you set your Disposition at the start of an exchange, but certain things may make your Disposition different (and those should/would ideally be set on you as +notes)
• A 'social health' called Sway, determined by your Social and Willpower Attributes and modified by things such as the Blasé Quality; Sway starts at 0.

During the exchange, the social parley increases or reduces Sway on the defender. Generally you have five tactics: Deceive, Persuade, Intimidate, Bargain and Seduce based on your Social Attribute and an appropriate skill (Subterfuge, Leadership, Intimidation, Streetwise and Empathy, this will likely change around) and your defense is automatic based on the tactic that is used on you (another combination of Social + certain skills such as Empathy and Awareness). modified by certain powers such as Cult of Personality, a Basic Magnetism power, for example. Multiple 'aggressors' vs. one 'target' grant a bonus to the target's social defenses.

The commands are inbuilt and will take any modifiers from powers, or other things such as optional bonuses from pose quality. The 'aggressor' attempting to convince someone of something uses the command and the code takes care of everything, determining how much Sway is put upon the 'target'. Guidelines will be in place, but ultimately, Sway is meant to create a cooperative method of 'what can I get out of you?' This isn't meant to be used for every pose; guidelines will be in place, but roughly every 3 'pose rounds' or back-and-forth if it's just one person. I'll have in place some general 'here's what you should, on average, acquiesce to if you are Swayed by a successful argument,' and at any time a target or an aggressor can yield. If an aggressor yields, they do not get what they want. If the target yields, they are required to compromise on the outcome; the aggressor doesn't get their full goal, but the target doesn't go down in defeat and have to give up the full thing.

Without the application of powers such as the Ironclad Command, a Basic Compulsion power, social conflict can't force a character to:

• Physically harm himself
• Physically harm another
• Do something entirely counter to his character (“I want to sleep with her but she's happily married.”)
• Perform an impossible action (“I want her to disappear”)

Any of those things CAN be agreed upon as an outcome if the players feel it is appropriate; but if not, a character must give into at least something along those lines. A happily-married man might be flattered and let some information slip, or a character might contemplate jumping a rival that they were just talked up about, influencing their Disposition towards that person.

That being said, a wide range of intent can still take hold. Examples might include:

• “I want him to feel ashamed at his actions.”
• "I want him to believe that Bernard is coming after him, and he has to strike first,"
• “I want to turn his anger toward his sire and away from me;”
• “I want to turn her on, sexually.”

@Arkandel
I don't want to spoil and I don't think we have a spoiler tag here? It's something I've been looking forward to with it since Season 1.

RE: Supergirl

ID'S HABBENING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

@ThatGuyThere
Jury duty isn't fun. I've had it twice, and somehow been selected for grand jury both times.

So I wanna say, this has been a great discussion, and has been an interesting read with the fors, againsts, and 'things to take into account'. I am working on a few things tonight, the writeup for a 'baseline' of what my goals would be is one of those things, so I will probably post it here to be horribly ripped apart. But a lot of the 'it should guide, and give leads and setups, but not be 'lawl I rolled better we fuck now'' discussion is exactly where I was leaning with it. It all lines up with my concepts of cooperative non-consent that I've talked about before.

@Jennkryst
That'd be Volund's SceneSys system.

@Arkandel
Oh yeah. Hence why I'm aiming towards automating. No need to do the 'look up' or 'ask staff' potions, just use the commands and go and keep the guidelines/outcome/rule stuff in mind. As far as making a pose for each use of the +-command, that'd be up to the players; the guidelines I'm looking at are a few poses between any use of the commands to foster RP (plus social health will be significantly less than physical health in my theoretical setup).

@Thenomain
Maybe I'm not articulating what I mean by 'fair', though probably 'fair' isn't the word I'm looking for. Consistent, maybe. And yes, they use different styles of roll-combinations in NWoD, but it can ultimately boil down to a few specific setups for exactly what to roll for different situations (and I feel like the tactics listed in SIFRP cover the majority of bases with the methods listed like Charm, Coerce, Incite, etc. can be used for most any of those situations..

Ultimately I want to do something that pares down the need for a lot of fiddly bits and situational differences in what is rolled/handled.. And again, I didn't ask the question initially of WHAT people thought of it, I asked about experiences with said systems for the purposes of designing something based on other input. So perhaps I've made up my mind on how I feel the system should work, but that doesn't mean I'm not looking at the input here. After all, it's just in the theorizing stages right now.

@Thenomain
Yeah. I want to give people tools to support their roleplay, and to create fairness in situations, but also to prevent the whole veering left/veering right that comes from raw dice rolls.

Obviously it's not going to be perfect, as it can't enforce someone to be a good sport OOC, since it can't dictate the specific outcome as that requires player collaboration and the loser being a good sport, unlike a raw combat system that dictates you have been wounded/knocked out/whatever. I have faith that it'll work out (and I'll be adapting the commands from the combat code ANYWAY, so it's not going to be something super-difficult to add or tear out if necessary).

@Thenomain

Yeah, I'm very much a fan of the Intrigue system. I think, with some tweaks to ensure that it mechanically works like a +combat code would, and guidelines written for how to handle the outcomes, including switching from social to physical combat as necessary, would work well on a MU*.

@Thenomain
Well, the discussion is fine, but not inherently what I had been aiming for. I had specifically meant if people had been on games that used a social conflict mechanic (and by social conflict, I mean some method that uses stats to back up a goal/outcome, such as using your skills to cow a guy into giving you information, or wheedling a lesser to spy on your rival with promises of sweet bootay, and such like you see in GoT/ASoIaF) and their experiences with such, not specifically 'do you like it/what do you think of it' type of response.

Though, like I said, the discussion is fine.

My goal here is attempting to ponder out if it's worth the time to pare down the SIFRP intrigue mechanics to something slightly less complex for a MU*, not the inherent dislikes/likes/pitfalls of social conflict backed by stats.

A lot of the 'here's what social combat should NOT do' (IE Dominate-level junk) should really go without saying, but MU* is a world of constant need to have an advantage or people being unreasonable about things and being unwilling to work together or 'lose' in any manner, even when there are incentives to do so. In particular I have experienced a lot of what @SG had talked about with poses vs. stats (an issue I've encountered in LARPs hundreds of times), but I also disagree with @Seraphim73 about 'shit poses backed up by twenty successes' and find @Pyrephox 's talk about 'smooth operator' stuff in my way of thinking. I do find myself agreeing with @Seraphim73 though, about the goal being moving TOWARD and supporting an outcome, not forcing things like you might with Dominate.

And I know nothing will ever be perfect, but in trying to ensure fairness across the board for social conflict, on the same way that physical conflict can be cleanly adjudicated with rules (I hate to say 'if a guy can roll 12 dice to punch you with his Strength + Brawl, a guy should be able to roll 12 dice to put the fear of God in you of him with his Presence + Intimidation' but that's really how I feel about how this should function). I think that's why I like the SIFRP one, as it gives you outs and yields and such that have other consequences, especially things like yields where you give a compromised outcome (which is my ideal end goal for someone running out of 'social HP').

So I'm wondering what people's experiences are with social conflict on a MU*, resolved by a combination of roleplay and stats? I know a couple of the NWoD games used the Doors system (or I thought they did, but I could be completely wrong), and I know Firan had a social conflict system that used stats. I'm curious as to the viability of such. A friend of mine pointed me to the Song of Ice and Fire RPG and their Intrigue system and I have to say, it looks like it could be a nice addition to a MU*, if a little tracking-heavy. In SIFRP, you have:

• Social skills used as you would use physical skills for combat
• Social HP in the form of Composure
• Social 'armor' in the form of Dispositions towards other characters, with rankings in both favorable and unfavorable, with Indifferent in the dead middle, Affectionate at the high end of favorable and Malicious at the high end of unfavorable.
• You essentially have a functional combat system, reducing Composure to get your result, depending on the type of result you want (going through Bargain, Charm, Convince, etc.), but there are outs (including going to physical combat), and considerations for the outcomes of the tactics used.

Perhaps a pared-down version of the system might be interesting on a MU*. Anyone have any experiences (good or bad) with stat-backed social conflict on a MU*?

@Cobaltasaurus
YAY my bug report helped! Glad you got it!

@Insomnia
I suppose because RE has a lot of it's own inbuilt plothooks rather than generic zombies. What was mentioned to me was that they're using RE1 and RE2 as framework starting out, and integrating aspects of the Hive stuff from the movie into it. Like, we explicitly talked about stuff like doing the whole Raccoon City infestation/infection, with openness for players to affect the story. I don't think it'd break your brain as much as you think, unless you don't want them to deviate from canon in any way.

@Insomnia
I think it's their own canon from talking with the person who made it/posted the ad, they'll be using some events from both and integrating and creating their own timeline stuff, so it's not straight Resident Evil timeline of either.

Not my game, but I figured people might be interested.

Resident Evil: Redefined

Address: residentevilmush.com 2002
Website: TBA

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Welcome <GUEST>. Please review the following before proceeding.

Resident Evil: Redefined is a brand-new MUSH set within a 'redefined' version of the Resident Evil universe and is aimed at fans of the series as well as newcomers who may not have a clue about the series. Whether you're a fan of horror, action, biopunk, survival horror or even stuff like The Walking Dead; there is bound to be something for you.

Set in 2005, the world of RE:R is not much different than the regular world with the exception of the growing threat of bioweapons and by extension, bioterror. At the forefront of this biological research, is the enigmatic and omnipotent Umbrella Corporation. Set in the idyllic and prosperous Raccoon City, our game is set to open as the initial outbreak of a deadly pathogen known as the T-Virus begins.

We offer players the ability to create original characters or pickup characters from a roster of pre-generated characters. Whether original or roster, you are guaranteed to start with the same potential and nobody has a special version of Character Generation.

In addition, our game is designed around a larger story that is shaped by players through plots and interaction; helping them accomplish the goals they want to and take part in the kind of events they desire.

Presently, we are in Beta and are looking for players to come join us as well as potential staff helpers.

Will you survive the Horror?

@Jennkryst

... HRM. That's an intriguing way to handle status effects though.

@Jennkryst
Yeah, that's where I'm coming up flat. The concept of removing Aspects from it and using the raw mechanical bits.