Best posts made by bored

There wasn't pee code. There was a pregnancy related ambience emit that talked about wanting to pee.

Other things people haven't seemingly mentioned:

• priests (and Ojitar) being able to buff stats
• The map in general, with its large coordinate grid system including a z axis for griffons.
• Other environmental features like a river current (that could fucking drown you pretty easily), and coded damage rooms in some areas
• Searching for hidden exits in rooms
• a crop/farming system, that was pretty underused
• a land income system based on noble ownership of actual grid squares on the above coordinate system
• the @Clan system, which is the closest thing to a discussed 'Domain system', and which handled large scale agricultural and industrial (such as it was) production for your clan's NPC population, including those in cities outside the main one. It also allowed for trading, and created a mini game where once a year or two we'd all go mad looking at spreadsheets and meeting in bars to trade dead birds for baskets, or occasionally go out and personally genocide the entire moose population of a grid square to manually fill food needs (hi)
• Speaking of that, hunting, which was basically the only place you had 'aggro' mobs in the game under normal circumstances
• Fishing, with poles or nets. My little Zin-rat commoner child made some sweet cash selling lobsters to a princess (lobster bisque was a favorite high-quality energy meal)
• messengers/mail delivery, including of objects, including objects that are technically creatures, like sending people a swarm of bees in the mail (same character)

There doesn't seem much mention of it but obviously there were also the big trademark things like crafting and combat. As a subset of this, staff could custom code magic equipment, and there were various magical weapons, divine trinkets, and so on floating around the playerbase. They could impart stat bonuses or do other things. Famously, there were also case-by-case coded powers for the demigod/Lanesh folks. These included everything from invisbility to summoning objects, spy code of different sorts, and combat powers that did damage or changed stats.

@reason Better/worse is always going to be a matter of personal perspective, game goals, and so on.

The prior editions are all variations on a core design (ignoring the d20 version that came out temporally alongside 3e). They retain a distinctive system throughout, even as things have been balanced over the years. If you love it, you love it, and the FFG system may disappoint because it's not the same thing. You want to play it because technique names like Pincers and Tail or The Mountain Does not Move spark the imagination. I think 4e is the pinnacle version of that system, since it benefits from so many years of playtesting and design iteration. It's streamlined and slick, and as balanced as such a lethal game can be, shaving down some of the spikes while still giving superhero samurai as you rank up. I like it a lot and would always be happy to play it. It's why I was willing to code my own stuff to run a game in it.

But if you've played a lot of it you may run into the 'school clone' syndrome, where maybe you don't want to play another Hida Bushi because you've already played one and characters from the same school have a tendency of coming out the same (unless you heavily sacrifice mechanics to play against type). The mountain still isn't going anywhere.

So in that way, I do find something refreshing in the new system and that makes me want to play it also, especially for revisiting any of my 'old favorites' in terms of Clan and school. It lets you build characters that are a lot more varied, unique and personal. That said, because it's a new system, all those moving parts can lead to some poorly balanced outcomes. It's already got a lot of errata. There is also an outstanding question over how well the FFG approach works, as it blends modern narrative RPG design with hard crunch in ways that can be contradictory. This is going to be tough on a MU.

As a final small point: an interesting facet of L5R is that its consistency across editions, even between 1-4e and FFG, means that older sourcebooks and material are often still useful to newer games. I highly recommend 4e's version of the setting book, Emerald Empire (there is a 5e version too), or the two Imperial Histories as they offer great options on time periods and settings. Also City of Lies is basically my favorite RPG location/campaign setting boxed set ever.

@Packrat I got the first Red Rising book for free at comic con and it struck me a bit like 'I'm gonna combine every popular Young Adult series I can think of!' (Hunger Games + Harry Potter + whatever that one about the genetic super kids). Not a terrible book for all of that, but still kind of my impression of it.

THAT SAID, uh:

• Crunchy estate/fief management, resources should be limited, (social or economic), people should compete over them and gain tangible benefits. Resources should be expended and everyone should always want more.
  This should be fairly abstracted especially given the scale, a few moving parts, but people should be able to intuitively grasp what is going on. Also this should require fairly minimal administrative burden. Build in reasons to delegate power also!

Good luck with that.

Or, more constructively, you need to scale this ambition way back. Some of your ideas are contradictory (crunchy and abstract?) and some require more code than you likely have coders to slave away for ('minimal administrative burden'), etc. I shouldn't need to remind you how SC's spreadsheets of doom worked out.

Want to be the Space Duke who owns rich Space Estates in the core worlds and has an uninterrupted supply of infinite completely legitimate Space Gold? You might have to compromise on your Duelling skill.

I do approve of this, given by fairly stringent belief in having everyone use the same chargen. Fuck features, now and forever.

@Packrat

Whether she was a staff buddy or not, she was still a beneficiary of the really skewed general game setup. Maybe that was all done for Renaud's benefit (he was definitely buddy-buddy with Paulus; you don't take a player you admit has been a problem on prior games and make him a feature otherwise), but it benefited everyone in the south. So by putting Renaud and her together it really exacerbated things. Certainly I left because it was pretty galling to get the kinds of super-effective Kurgan attacks I did when Renaud was ignored and the only attack on Amber was led, and this is not hyperbole, by an incompetent child general.

Otherwise, she was just kind of a shitty person and dubiously someone who should have been given a feature slot since she seemed to dislike RPing with people and preferred settling things via OOC channels and discussions rather than ICly. @silentsophia's interactions are a good example of that.

Amber aside, though, I still think SC illustrates that the playerbase, even if you reduce it to 'L&L players' (as if they're totally different people), is perfectly willing to be involved in more than just TP-room fucking. So there's no reason for you not to go forward with a game focused on providing that conflict. The players will follow your lead, despite what some people are saying.

Also: Just make a Fading Suns game. Seriously. It will save you so much time on theme.

I think people are being confused by 'spreadsheets are bad'. It's not that me and @deadculture are against math or spreadsheets; I'm one of the bigger system nerd types, the guy who writes Monte Carlo simulators to analyze/break these kinds of games.

It's that, again, @Packrat started the thread saying he didn't want to follow SC's mistakes. He is now describing a game that literally mirrors all of SC's mistakes. The 'spreadsheet heavy' phrase is a shortcut here for describing the type of system that SC had, not just spreadsheets in general.

It's kind of bizarre, including the total lack of self awareness.

This thread has made me reflect on a few things:

Several people comment how they don't play, and just kind of participate here. To me this is a hint of how little there is to actually enjoy in the hobby any more. Most games have the same problems they always have, good RP is painfully scarce, and little of what you can scrape up is worth the effort. Of course, a lot of this is due to a change in personal standards of effort/reward compared to games getting worse, although there are factors on that side too (very sandboxy games, etc).

I obviously count in the above category, except that I don't even post here that much. And when I do, it's primarily to be negative. So I probably haven't moved on as much beyond the WORA mindset as I'd like to think, which is on me. Then again, I think there's a lot of people like me; it's just a matter of the degrees to which people go to veil their vitriol in politeness.

The hive mind has come out in force to defend the fact that the hive mind totally isn't a thing. Quelle shock.

MSB is probably more useful as an advertising forum than anything else. The discussions are painfully circular rehashes of the same discussions we've been having for decades, no one has changed their opinions much, and any of the scarcely few good ideas we've ever come up with are typically ignored by game makers in favor of same old, same old.

I'm old and bitter.

In my experience, you tend to see mostly those of the broad category and some of the general. You almost never see any of the others. I'm curious if that's because people just have no interest in such games or because someone has just not come out and made on(or at least not made on in some time).

First, there's a current X-men+ game that's been around at least a year, as well as a new alt-universe game, so 'almost never' seems extreme.

Otherwise, there's a couple things being discussed here. Some of it is very general. 'Big and sandboxy' vs 'small and focused' is not comic specific, but rather one of our oldest topics. Insert the usual debates on total RP vs. getting lost in the crowd, or on whether logins are actually a measure of game quality or success. And 'include every IP' vs 'just X-Men' is definitely a subset of this.

But FCs do add some particular dynamics.

The slope on FC popularity is pretty damn steep, with a quick fall-off from the top characters. So, unlike with other big game vs. small game stuff, there's essentially an absolute cap based on how much IP you provide. You really can't make the choice to have a 'big' X-Men game. And the harsh cut-off really impacts style preference, too. Being a Gotham fan may be kind of pointless when there's so few key characters and your chance of ever landing your favorite might well be zero unless you help build the game.

This doesn't only apply to people wanting to take the characters, but also to people wanting to play with the characters. Vibe is simply not going to attract RP the same way as Wonder Woman.

And there's a tendency of staff not to be realistic about any of this stuff: no one wants to admit 'yeah, all the good characters are taken, no reason for you to really play here.' nor admit that a given character is just not very popular (or heck, kind of a joke) and probably won't get any RP unless the player is in the top 1% of proactivity and charisma. I feel like there's even a bit of that vibe in this thread already, in the 'why should power level matter?' refrain. It seems to make unrealistic assumptions about every player being cooperative, giving, self-aware, willing to write to others and generally share the spotlight. This are great ideals but... yeah. My experience is that a lot of the players of high powered characters are typically absolutely awful at this. Some outright are in it for the power trip, others are just blithely unaware (ie, I've seen people give the Superman 'World of Cardboard' speech/quote as an OOC context on multiple occasions on these games, offered as proof they were a 'good' Superman player and knew what was up. Except the context of the speech is literally the ultimate 'Lol I was just holding back, I am a living I Win Button', given before Superman solos Darkseid. It's 100% inappropriate in a MUSH context.).

So, IDK. My preference is not to play on a style of game. My preference is to play a character I want to play, and get recognizable comic-y RP. Any game that serves that goal is acceptable, but many games will fail at it.

@Rinel

I spammed @Cirno (and uh... that one weird actual internet predator guy?) and it was worth it.

@Arkandel said in How to Change MUing:

Let's speak in riddles here for a minute.

If a theoretical game offered automated stuff to do - NPC missions, resource management, perhaps loot hunting through automatically generated mobs based on the PCs' power level (which a ST would still need to be present for, the combat and plot itself wouldn't be automated)... stuff like that.

What is the line between what you would consider acceptable for a roleplaying game and the environment becoming a MUD? What would be acceptable to you and what wouldn't?

How much of such game-provided content would constitute a positive step into changing MUing as the thread's title puts it?

This was the key to Firan's success, because the downtime busywork keeps people logged in and invested when RP isn't happening, which keeps people around for RP to happen. So to the degree you can do it (which is a very high bar, given the next-level coding), you probably should! Proven success formula.

I think the only lines people really have for that stuff is they don't like the code subverting RP. So they don't like social code (insert 6 page derail about roleplay vs rollplay and social skills vs combat here, phew, glad we got through that) and they get ancy around things where say, you might be able to just take away their land/titles/whatever through a couple commands. The latter category some people would absolutely still want, but it's divisive. I think just about any amount of beating up NPC others would be enjoyed/positive.

Uh still spoilering I guess? yabba dabba doo.

***=***

I'll add that I thought this was going to be a game I'd go nuts for, but it never really succeeded in grabbing my interest. Variety of reasons, really.

I think the fact that the 'crazy supernatural stuff' came in so front loaded really killed the mystery, while also kind of hamstringing a lot of the typical pirate-y tropes people. It took focus off 'arr, we be pirates' and turned it into 'we are the scooby doo gang' very quickly. Also into a standard FS3 BSG combat of the week reskin as far as the cycle of do-nothing filler and combat-only 'plots.'

I'll add/echo the lack of grid RP even being an option being a thing that turned me (and my tag-along) off. I get the newschool +scene code kinda stuff, but for some people the idea that you can't really just 'go on the grid' for RP is a disconnect, even if it's only psychological.

This is probably the thing that kills my MUing interest, these days. Basically any larger game either waters down their concepts to the point where buy-in is minimally required, or have big themes but no buy-in and fail to address it. Everything is sandboxy with the occasional side of 'Big Fuss metaplot' that usually railroads pretty predictably to success or failure.

It's kind of why I find HorrorMU interesting, since there's really nothing to it but buy-in. It's not easy to make work (structural problems are many) but really there's nothing there for you if you don't engage.

Playing FATE on a MU generally degrades into just playing FUDGE on a MU.

Its core conceits rely on empowering players to change the world on the fly (particularly using knowledge type skills to declare setting details) which is just something 99% of the neurotic, control-freak laden MU community is never going to be comfortable with. Staff is hesitant to empower junior staff/player STs to run plots with full narrative authority, how are they going to get over that and extend that authority to literally every player on the game? (and conversely, how can we expect players not to abuse it, when people frequently display the 'I don't give a fuck about your theme, I'll play what I want' attitude even on strict games?)

I don't even like FATE much to begin with (some combination of the Forge-era pretentious indy shit with the fact that a lot of the mechanics don't feel like they really work to me), but insofar as I can see how it does things some people might like, they seem totally unworkable on a MU.

Oh, except for Stress Track + Consequences. I love these and want them in more games. But the rest of it is non-applicable.

@reimesu I saw this today too. Very good movie!

Fair warning to anyone considering it, they tuck (as one might not be surprised given the topic) one or two real gutpunch moments in there amidst the goofy Nazi satire.

@seraphim73

We're... and I'm trying to be honest here... we're not aiming for what the average MSBer wants, we're aiming for a game that a critical mass of players wants to play. We felt like we had that critical mass of players pre-holidays

Putting aside the obvious 'not every game is for everyone,' I think some of your game design is unrealistic for this. Nothing wrong with a small game, but a small game with 3 different ships and then assorted shore foo... that's basically asking for half the factions to be dead at your supposed critical mass. I know for as long as I was logging in, only the Pirate and Spanish ship really had anything resembling activity.

@Ghost Oh boy another 'serious writers' vs. 'people who like systems' post.

I don't think the divide you suggest is legitimate or really explains the Star Wars situation. Coded gear/economy systems are absolutely not any kind of requirement, but I think some acknowledgment of their presence and importance is hard to avoid. We can agree that the Millennium Falcon is a character at this point, right? Not just a ship? That a looming Star Destroyer is a powerful symbolic shortcut? That Boba Fett is popular because he had a cool visual design aimed at marketing and toys and it fucking worked? That a lightsaber is an elegant weapon for a more civilized age?

Playing a smuggler, your ship is going to matter. It might not matter that it rolls exactly +8 for 4d8 damage, but it being a scrapyard junker jury rigged to chaotic perfection vs. a well-maintained high end craft matters a lot to the story you're telling. Somehow, you need to acknowledge that the two things are different and it matters, or you're losing something both in the story and in any sense of mechanical verisimilitude. The same goes for a bounty hunter's kit being part of their identity, or representing a lightsaber as something other than 'just a sword.'

I think part of the swashbuckling style has less to do with creating rules for absurd maneuvers and such, and more just a GMing skill regarding constructing your setpieces. An actual chandelier-swing may be a bit on the high end, but just being good about throwing meaningful set dressing into the environment that players can activate (for even mild bonuses) can do a lot. Just your average table to flip over, barrel to roll into someone, rope to cut to (some useful effect), etc. Obviously this is mostly a PvE thing.

Mechanically, they can be pure benefits (you thought of/noticed the cool thing, so you get a bonus!) or they can be some kind of risk-reward tradeoff but that requires a firm understanding of the math underlying what you're doing. In many systems, a 'small' to-hit penalty to do something cool can translate to a purely bad idea if the payoff isn't very large. While you may be tempted to talk about gambling on the big chance... that's going to work against people over time and ultimately weed out the 'guts or glory' players in favor of the cautious mathematicians.

@Misadventure said in Swashbuckling and continued success:

I hate the typical answer that most RPers expect that everything will proceed towards an agreeable end, even if there are setbacks.

This seems a rather separate thing from swashbuckling but just GMing philosophy itself. I don't want to assume too much into this statement, so what do you prefer?

Last night no one died!

This was a nice change after the prior couple sessions where I kinda had to fudge things to reverse what would otherwise have been a TPK of a nearly brand new party.