Best posts made by bored

@Ghost

It's unfortunately almost a rule of MU design that if you split your playerbase your game will die or at least suffer horribly until you integrate them. It's not that the idea doesn't sound cool, but it's just one of those things with the size of the hobby etc. Really the only way to combat it is doing the thing you said not to (alts), and even then it tends not to work.

To talk a little more about the meta stuff, @saosmash and otherwise:

I definitely do it for humor a lot too. And not just humor. When I talked about the evolution in my writing from MU infancy to now, I think the big difference is that when I started, it was strictly an interactive medium through which I was playing a game. I wasn't writing, I was communicating in-game actions. Now I think of it a lot more as an exercise in shared writing, and so I write for people to enjoy what I'm writing, not just to deliver information. So if I can make a pose more interesting, funny, sad, or what have you by injecting a subjective authorial aside, I'm really happy to do that.

I think there's also something to be said for getting at a character's emotional or mental state in the text of a pose beyond 'Name frowns' or so on, to facilitate accurate interaction (this gets at the classic characters are better than their players trope). Players are generally good at neither typing out the specific nuances of facial expression nor at interpreting them from others' texts, while characters might be good at these things. Characters develop bonds and rapports that might be much stronger than the familiarity of the two players may be OOCly for one another's RP. So I often find it's useful to be descriptive and let others decide what they pick up on and react to ICly.

The people who are willing to make metaposed swipes at people are generally nasty little weasels impersonating human beings, and getting them to stop this won't stop them from being douchebags in other ways.

@ThatGuyThere said:

I have seen multiple games that attempted to be both Lords and Ladies as well has having other options available , every time the L+L part has been dominant the other side withered one the vine usually fairly quickly. Star Crusade for all it's faults had more adventuring actually taking place then most , so my question for those that are championing having the perspective game be both is how do you succeed where the other s have failed?

I think a big part of this is that the L+L games are usually so fetishistic about how awesome the Ls are that they make the other types so neutered as to be pointless. IE, you can look at http://eternalcrusade.wikidot.com/economy and see it in action, even the best merchants don't really come close in money to the top nobles, and the top nobles get all sorts of other snazzy titles and lands and armies on top of that. People just want to masturbate to how awesome their noble is.

One of the reasons it comes close to working in Fading Suns is that the books, at least, do treat the Guilds as roughly equivalent entities to the noble houses. They have fleets, they have massive assets, and even hold some planets, if not as many as the nobles, but then they also outright control various spaceports on most worlds.

People have already made suggestions along this line, but it can't really be said enough. You need an interlocking web of power players, not a hierarchy, or people will just gravitate to the top.

@Ghost said:

I don't care what the game is or what setting it is, and I'm doing my best to not sound like some bitter Grampa type when I say this, but I've come to realize that a grand majority of the MU habit is roleplaying relationship simulation. My main advice for anyone starting a game idea is to understand this. Most of your players will focus on some form of relationship arc storyline as their personal baseline, and unless they want to roleplay a character death, will choose IC actions based on their OOC RP desires to avoid having to rekindle or reset their relationship roleplay. A large number of your players will be making IC relationship plans via pages, come into chargen with an already established plan to have relationship RP with another player's character, or will put the game onto the back burner if they fail to find relationship roleplay and are getting it on another game. Because of this, most players will avoid consenting to death, assassination plots, or risk of character loss unless it is predetermined that the outcome will allow them to keep their characters. These players do NOT want to lose their RP with their IC/OOC paramours, because if their character dies and their new character hooks up with the widow, players will call foul.

I can't say I really agree/accept this like others have. I still think the staff sets the tone and the players follow.

And casual observation of the MSB-adjacent MUverse bears this out. If the overall desire for most people was to simply have their relationship RP and avoid at all costs anything that might threaten it, you wouldn't see the non-consent dominated WoD-playing population. Firan would not have been a popular game. SC, which gets (I think mostly erroneously/as a result of misinformation from Cirno) portrayed as a 'marriage simulator' was a game mostly about violence with a lot of PC risk.

So I'm kind of confused how all of these things can be popular or successful if all players desperately want to avoid them. Even on our recent example of Realms Adventurous, which definitely suffered from the problem, there were plenty of people willing to go out and fight and die (and people did!). The new staffers who took over the game wanted to make it more cuddly and friendly... and they lost some non-insignificant portion of the playerbase.

So the idea that everyone wants a safe, consensual cuddlespace seems dubious.

What I'll grant, is that there certainly are a subset of players who act exactly as your post describes. The new G&G regime in RA are those sorts of players. There are also plenty of games that are created quickly with nothing more than a thin veneer of theme to satisfy staffers who are the sorts you describe, which invite other people to join in and end up only having that kind of RP.

But I absolutely do not see this as a universal norm. There are plenty of people in this very thread saying they want more bite to their game, and asking @Packrat to provide it. If you build it (and support it thematically), they will come, and all that.

@ThatGuyThere said:

RfK worked and got people involved mainly through the work of Shava not just the systems and staff work but also in paging people to bring plots that would fit their character to their attention. She would introduce people on channel and by page whose characters would play well off each other things like that. I am not saying it cannot be done but it takes a shit ton of work from dedicated people. Who do you propose would be the Shava of this game? You volunteering for that role?

Didn't play on RfK, no idea who Shava is. That said, you're basically suggesting what I've been saying repeatedly: that you need staffers who do things. True!

Who am I suggesting do it? Uh, whatever staff @Packrat hires. That's why he'd hire them, right? Would I do it? I dunno. I might offer help on an FS game, dunno about unique theme. But the point is you don't need one magic wizard, you need a staff in general that is willing to put in the work.

That may well be rarer these days due to the demographic issues of the MUing population (which is far more likely a factor in any grand changes you think you've seen). But it doesn't change that basic requirement. You want anything other than a sandbox, regardless of the genre, you need a vision and active staff to push it.

You turned around and said 'but haha it's a crap game and you have low expectations if you think it's amazing lololol' in a pretty troll way, ignoring the obvious facts we're all critics of that game anyway. For, you know, actual things it can be criticized about. But the reality is most games are like SC; ie, they have some plot, people come and make characters to do that plot, they eventually find out the staffers are shitty douchebags, get bored, TS for a while, and then quit.

If you want a game that's also fucking perfect? Yeah, good luck, when you figure that out please come by and tell all of MSB about your discovery of this unicorn of a game. But the 'omg marriages and babies' shit is wearing real thin, especially when you have exactly dick to back any of it up.

@Thenomain said in 7th Sea 2nd Edition:

@bored said in 7th Sea 2nd Edition:

PvP is basically not on the menu

You say this like it's a bad thing.

I'll entirely agree on everything else.

I think, by and large, the people in our hobby (or the subset that are active here) like PvP, possibly more than they'll admit to. Maybe not the most extreme versions, but when you move beyond the 4-6 people all doing one thing that is assumed in table top, its sort of hard to imagine everyone doing their things and no one ever coming into conflict over it, especially when the setting itself sets up major rivalries.

I'd much prefer that the rules could handle it and then staff could figure out how much to encourage/discourage, rather than just leaving me with bad tools from the get go.

@SG I used them a great deal when I ran a 4E game, and have actually carried that on to 5E.

That said, I never used them in the way they're presented in the book, which is terribly flat and useless (roll this or a couple skills a bunch of times, hope you get X succ before Y fails).

I used them in a much more involved way, probably similarly to some of the ones on the link you give (I definitely took inspiration liberally from blogs at the time), or even more complicated than that. Generally I'd write up a whole slew of specific actions with different skills at different DCs (sometimes scaling on margin of success as well, etc). Some would gain successes toward 'winning' the challenge, others would grant bonuses to subsequent rolls, address secondary RP objectives, modify combats that would get triggered along the way, etc. Often characters could spend combat resources (surges, power uses, spell slots going on to 5E, etc) to get bonuses or could pick up statuses (like Exhaustion in 5E) that would transfer over. I experimented with a whole lot of different formats, and some worked really well, but it was also a huge amount of prep each time and they weren't very re-usable.

Basically they were a goto when the players wanted to do something really large-scale and sweeping in the campaign, or for setpiece battles or a few other things impossible to model in a fun way in the normal rules. But they were replacements for whole sessions or large parts of them, not ways of handling smaller things like chases etc unless they were really spectacular.

@HelloProject said in Fading Suns 2017:

@bored I've been on 100+ games and I can assure you that this behavior is the minority, being decent and not a literal monster is not some unique special snowflake thing.

There's always at least one or two shitty players, but for most of a game being that way? Yeah, no.

So... 'most of the game' were 'literal monsters'? Yeah, OK. You're definitely not in crazy hyperbole territory, or anything. Please show us the way, sensei! Since apparently we're all fucking moron barbarians here while you're playing thousands of wonderful games with no problems?

...

Getting away from the crazy here, I feel like this is the kind of discussion that makes getting anywhere useful in the hobby impossible. I'm probably guilty of it, and I'm sure I've been more critical of both Custodius and even Paulus in prior threads on this topic. But it's silly to talk about games like they're full of monstrous evil people and kind of an abdication of personal responsibility.

Weirdly, I think that SC was a better game than the average. It was far more interesting and had way more activity and crap going than a contemporary analogue like 5th World. A hell of a lot happened in a short period of time, and the 'literally monstrous' toxicity included a lot of active politics, war stories, etc. If anything, I think it sort of demonstrates how thin the line between greatness and garbage is. Paulus could probably have been ... even 20% less of a jerk, not invited (or asked to leave) a single problem player, and it could have gone on a year more easily. And I'd probably take a year or two of solid plots and fairly active politics over 5 years of 'PrP sandbox WoD game/Generic FS3 L&L #152'.

And since @packrat is around and was involved, maybe he has some ideas for recapturing some of the magic without the suck.

@Packrat

So, I don't disagree that probably everyone felt or to some degree was being fucked over by Paulus. 100%, he was the #1 problem, as I've been saying. The only point I'm trying to make re: Custodius is that even if everyone felt whatever, the situation was not in any way balanced. 'No one is ever happy' is a universal symptom of MU players in general, and can be somewhat safely ignored as long there's some underlying fairness. But the game did not have underlying fairness. Not everyone was playing the same game. Custodius wasn't the plague that killed the game, but Paulus enabling him was an example of his general bad staffing.

Amusingly, so was your later PC. That's just a continuation of their typical moronic policy of handing out character quality by how OMG AWESOME they thought the concept was and how much coffee they had. BG coolness (beyond a degree of ascertaining basic thematic comprehension) determining power level was one of the big problems, so were random MASSIVE ARMIES appearing out of the blue for some players while others got 100 dudes. This is why games need real cg systems where people spend points for their shit.

Anyway, you're mostly right about everything else, especially how the scale of conflict and big battles should have been handled. It was far too easy for PCs to lose everything and almost impossible for them to gain anything... unless it was the main force under Custodius and the Li Halan guy who just steamrolled the 'main' battles

@Apos This is a pretty solid approach to it. The 'is this skill actually worth the points I paid for it?' question is always the most essential, I think, and as long as you give the skills value in game then people can't make that complaint anymore. They might not be as good for making the other dude lose forever because hah hah ur ded, but that's the tradeoff.

Anything else, I think, is pretty much icing. Throwing in status effects/tilts or whatever is a fun system to ponder, but I'd never want to see something as black and white and mind control-like as Firan's social imperatives. Those things were a nightmare because they were so abusable and depended entirely on (obviously potentially biased) staff intervention in almost every case, making the fact that there was code in the first place a joke.

@Lisse24 said in Good Political Game Design:

Second, the power structure needs to be dynamic and changeable. In too many games that spout being political, including most L&L games, it's really, really hard to change who is in power. Firan was horrible at this, especially in later years. The clan leaders held all the cards and more minor nobles didn't really have much to bring to the table. Politicking was limited to between clans, meaning that 95% of the game population was excluded from that game play. Was it possible to take over a clan? Sure. It happened a few times, but not nearly often enough to make an interesting political game.

I keep wanting to make a permanent version of this I can link to, but I've brought it up in a couple places: L&L games tend to hit the trap of doing a very structured, CK2-like concept of feudalism, where dukes rule counts and counts rule barons or lords etc. Or Clan Leaders rule irrelevant noble families that no one cared about at all (Firan). Almost inevitably, the power of these figures is exponential moving up the hierarchy.

This is both wrong from even the slightest look at history, and stupid from a play design perspective. You want your primary actors to be at parity. Now, maybe it's fine to have only your Dukes etc sitting at the main council (and, see above, I'm in favor of a primary council-like entity that probably maxes out at around 10 people), but all the lesser lords should have pretty much comparable resources, so that their loyalty and assistance is something you rely on, not something you demand.

And to date, basically every L&L game ever gets a big fat F on this one.

@Pandora said in Good Political Game Design:

@Ganymede said in Good Political Game Design:

@Pandora said in Good Political Game Design:

I loathe the idea of a family stockpiling military assets in order to frienemy their ruling house. Sure it's realistic, but do we really want controlling levels of power in the hands of whoever decides to ignore political maneuvering, social warfare, diplomacy & playing the game in favor of stockpiling the military stat?

It depends on how the game manages the military stat.

The argument is about a single family being able to flex on their ruling lord solely through military might. If this is able to come to pass, it doesn't matter how the game manages the military stat, it's being managed poorly.

I fail to see how this is a problem, so long as the assumption is that these +command systems underlying the RP are intended to be a large part of the game, are functional and not broken to the point of RP-ignoring abuse, etc. If you have some vassal with strong resources and they start building a military... maybe take action before they get too far. Maybe ask your other vassal who lives next to them if they're cool with it. If you do none of those things, and you get facepunched out of your crown, it's on you.

If this thing EVER happened on these games, they'd be far, far more interesting places to play.

@Pandora said in Good Political Game Design:

Maybe it's a perspective thing. I play code-heavy games, so I'm very used to seeing 'Might makes right' & the idea of a game with an emphasis on politics and relationships going the way of 'Idiot with a big militaristic force and no political support, leadership platform, or allies steamrolling to the top via brute strength' would just be disappointing to me, personally. Everyone has their own vision for these games, I'm just stating my opinion that I am against that particular vision and can only hope it doesn't come to pass.

I could take all of this and flip it around, though. Why does the 'Idiot with a big militaristic force and no political support, leadership platform, or allies steamrolling to get to stay at the top via brute strength massive benefits they had from day 1 because they took Duke Fancypants'?

The issue is the assumption that people at the top should be more powerful and stay more powerful, not whether social is more powerful than military, or RP more powerful than +code. The details of how well individual players use the +commands and/or RP to stay in power or gain it is... the game? That's the game you're playing. It might trend code or RP heavy but it's still the game. So it's a problem when the game is ludicrously rigged so that the higher ranking cannot possibly be overcome, for reasons of laziness, favoritism, and poor grasp of the history they're trying to replicate.

@Three-Eyed-Crow I guess? You could pretty easily make Lighstabers just cheesy, broken weapons and restrict who gets to equip them, give them a special stance for blaster deflecting (if you want?), and weapon profiles for things like TK/Force Lightning and... that's it?

Everything else would be narrative, I imagine, and I don't see why it's difficult to give characters a 'Force' skill (or Sense/Alter/Control or w/e) and have them roll those in TPs otherwise. I agree it wouldn't be good at simulating the 'library of detailed force powers' style play, but that's something (pertinent to this discussion) that WEG SW more or less invented not something really inherent to SW canon, right? 'Video game' force powers are very much a result of the EU rpg expansions and, well, videogames.

@arkandel Finally having gotten around to vote, I gave a neutral.The flavor text to that one isn't actually correct for my choice, but numerically I think it's right (ie, I do 'care' but I'd give you a 3/5).

I still haven't seen many instances of positive moderation, but then again it also kind of seems like you've reigned back actively moderating after the first few attempts (mostly, but not exclusively, by @auspice) went so poorly.

You've been responsive to banning the 4channers and Cirno, which is good.

I'm still not sure about the board subdivisions and rules, we discussed a lot about restructuring those but instead we've basically just slowly floated back toward same-old (where we can fight in ad threads a little bit until it gets too mean and then, to the Pit!).

So, meh? I don't have any problems with things now, but its mostly because it seems like you stopped doing much. I'm 100% happy with that, but its also hard to rate that as 'you guys are doing great.'

@lotherio said in Valorous Dominion:

@cupcake said in Valorous Dominion:

@lotherio One of my struggles is that things are pretty insular; at the recent party it felt like people were sticking by the folks they already RP'd with and I arrived late and felt completely at a loss. It's probably also in some part my own anxiety. But we've got at least two social events in the planning works which may help. Willing to take suggestions if you have advice, though?

If you feel anxious, I'd be glad to help meet others and do smaller groups for people to start getting out of their houses. Its in this sort of early stage where houses seem to be sort of figuring themselves out, but really the political minded should be considering relation to the other houses. We were hoping monthly pairings for Valor would help some folks meet others, but we have a few that are having a hard time connecting with their partners.

This is completely in the air, but as staff, I'll run bigger things like today's Siege of Viergues every few weeks at most. But maybe we can add smaller type events to get folks to mingle outside of their families and circles? Like host small feasts/hunting/something where houses only send one Rep to RP with houses and others they haven't RP'ed with. A mingler or so something to get people to meet others?

I think that the game's setup kind of encourages people to build a house out of their RL friends and whatever randos they can lure in, min-max it to cover various skill requirements (because the HoHs are forced to be turnips) and then play a lot inside that group. For instance, if you fail an econ roll (like my family did right away) it encourages you to do an in-house PrP to fix it (we are). What it doesn't really encourage is much outside RP, because 'go to another family for resources to fill the stopgap' isn't actually a good option - no one is going to give up a resource for free, and if you trade for it you've still effectively sucked the loss, just shifted it from one commodity to another. Maybe if resources were on the whole more available and a little more fluid, but as it is the trading is going to be very limited (everyone waiting 2-3 more months to get enough to trade for an addition... and then everyone will be at zero again etc).

By comparison, as you mention it, the scene going today definitely seems good for getting people to mix and mingle as it tosses us together in one place. So we may need more events like this, at the small and large scale (big events unfortunately mostly kill RP, it's just 'line up and make your one pose at the NPC'). You may also want an evening-centric GM to do some of it (this is advice that might be good for ALL your games :P). Not everything needs to be a grand siege or tournament or major to-do, and it might help to create multiple smaller things that limit participation - that way a few people can each get a part of the plot and then have to interact. Right now, it's all solo +requests in the background with very little actual RP or interaction. You might even hand a part to each house and then kind of let them all work together to piece together the puzzle.

Anyway, this is meant purely in the positive, constructive sense. I always enjoy your games, just brainstorming on what can be done to jolt people out a bit.

Semi automated is still a lot more than nothing. Arguably @faraday's stuff achieves a lot of what is mentioned at least on the combat end despite her saying it doesn't interest her, in that it allows players to handle combats of pretty much any scale or seriousness without ST aid.