Posts made by bored

To answer bullet points first:

• Can/should (re: Ghoul/Vamp)? I generally like to frame this as a matter of equal opportunity looking from Cgen forward. Anyone can make a character that could star in big stories. Some people may choose not to (L&L Firan/Arx version: some people just wanna be crafters, etc), and the conventions on what a 'main' char is would probably vary a lot by genre. Now, feasible? I'd actually hope so, but it goes to #2.

• It can't be achieved without making OOC rules about it. You probably want to make OOC rules about it.

• I had a larger (and very @Thenomain sounding) breakdown about this based on player type, but coming up with it I realized that it's mostly incidental. Aside from players who are really thinking about a narrative arc in a formal way (ie, players with writing/acting backgrounds) most people aren't thinking about it explicitly. But the goals they like (defeating big bads, achieving plot milestones, drawing in a social circle, revealing elements of the setting) all happen either exclusively or much more intensely 'inside' the GM spotlight.

Beyond that, I actually wanted to comment on one thing I saw in that thread though avoided it because I figured @Apos would just declare me the devil again and it would kinda derail the point. But it got brought up there, and while this is a more extreme version, it's still essentially the same question:

@cobaltasaurus said in Arx thread 2: Electric Boogaloo:

Do you want me to retire my character into the sunset because he did A Thing in the past season?

I'd argue that games actually probably need to figure out mechanisms to say 'yes' to this question, at least sometimes. To be clear, I'm not criticizing Cobalt here as the game had no such rule (and moreover it sounds like she wasn't the focus anyway). But seeing the same player names associated with big events over and over again absolutely can have a negative impact on the newer players. It's the old dino question in a different form.

Now, I'd also point out that obviously you shouldn't just tell them to literally retire into the sunset, because then the player response will be 'OK well, I guess I quit?', whether to take a new alt or permanently. But there could certainly be something to using, say, narrative currencies or the like to buy into big events, to push to the forefront of those events, whereby you'd have to wait at least a while before you could be the big damn hero again.

In some thread long ago I said something about plot DKP - this is basically that discussion come around again.

@ixokai said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:

Huh, really? Unarmed damage getting a nerf and flurry costing ki made me blink and shrug, I read through the SRD and it didn't seem the other stuff really made up for it. I'll perhaps have to go give it another look and maybe put D&D on my maybe-list.

Kind of off-topic, but comparing 5e to prior editions and calling total redesigns 'nerfs' is a little silly. The whole game is designed and balanced differently.

Extra attacks are a lot more limited in 5e, where only a level 20 pure fighter ever gets 3/turn (compared to say the 4 at 16 bab in 3.5/pathfinder) without additional feats & abilities. Monks get a bonus action attack by default with ability modifier on damage, which would cost a dual-wielder a feat. Flurry turns it into 2 attacks. So they're attacking as often as a level 5 martial dual wielder or a level 20 single wielder, and thus it's 'limited' use. That said, ki recovers on short rest so once you're past the lower levels you tend to get plenty of usage, and at mid-high you can (and do) spend several points every round and not really run out.

Also stunning fist?

@ganymede said in Make it fun for Me!:

@warma-sheen said in Make it fun for Me!:

Many people in this community don't know how to be competitive, meaning they can't stand going up against someone else, losing, and being okay with it - much less have fun with it.

Many people in this community need to grow the fuck up, then.

My experience differ vastly from yours. The people I run with are generally okay with winning, losing, collaborating, competing, and being good to others. Jealousy is a non-issue. Feelings are shared often and openly, with no fear of reprisal.

But if you are correct -- you may be -- this might explain why I find it difficult to stay for long on any place.

Realistically I think these are the problems. You're never going to get away from this stuff in anything but very small play groups.

We've touched on defining game types, player types, etc in this thread, but the large-scale everyone-is-welcome nature of the hobby undermines ever really having much success with this. Games will always be competitive, because even if the main action/plot is still entirely PvE, there's still an OOC metagame of social drama, competition over story spotlight, etc. And there's very little you can do about it.

This can even make actual hard PvP games feel better because at least they're honest about how people are going to approach them. You're not put in the player position of 'do the cooperative thing and then get fucking shanked in the ribs for it,' nor do staffers have to contend with managing the disparate player behaviors. Someone mentioned soap operas, and I tried to take this kind of approach running storylines on comic games, but it can be so damn hard to get everyone to buy into that, and one bad player can readily derail things.

@ixokai said in Life... in outer space!:

There's this cute/funny movie, Aliens in the Attic back in '09. In it, a group of a couple teenagers and a couple younger kids are at this rental house and they need to call the police!

Sure, I get that part of it. But, if pressed, they could look up that information. Their ignorance isn't the same thing as civilization-wide forgetfulness.

I really do find that scene relevant to the discussion at hand, and do think an advanced species/people might have tremendous difficulty communicating with a less advanced people, save for a subset of those people who dedicated their lives to Old Stuff. Ie, techno-anthropologists.

This hits something I've been trying to get at maybe better than I have: I don't think an advanced civilization would want or be able to sit down and chat over coffee, but I imagine that this class of specialists would exist. It's a similar bit with the entomologists. The average human doesn't give a damn about ants, barely notices them, and has no clue about how they communicate. But a few specialists do. In general we can't see and care little about microbes, but a Mars mission would absolutely study them in great detail if we discovered some, not ignore them as 'insignificant.' And per the diminishing returns idea, it should be easier for them and us than for us and animals, not harder.

@coin said in Life... in outer space!:

This presumes that advancement in technology comes qwith a consistent and uninterrupted understanding of how that advancement came to be, but we're talking about a hypothetical civilization/species that has thrived technologically for (if we're using the hypothetical Planet X from the OP link) billions of years. It's easy for mne to imagine them communicating in a way that makes our communication seem painfully and impossibly primitive, much the same way we see ants communicating. Ants communicate via pheromones, IIRC, something that the ancestors of humans may or may not have done--we certainly didn't always communicate via verbal speech and writing.

Why this shouldn't be the case? Did we forget how telegraphs worked when we invented the phone? Sure, we might not read every ancient ideograph perfectly, but we recognize them as language. And that loss is only because they predate certain milestones of information-storage technology. Why can't we store everything going forward? Hasn't the internet already largely solved this one, and won't it also improve?

If you're implying that there are cataclysms that wipe out the civilization's memory, that seems like a really delicate scenario (one that really eats into the numbers even on a big numbers scale): they have to destroy nearly all records as well as kill enough of the population that the living knowledge is erased without wiping out the species... Then the species has to advance back to and beyond the same point without retreading any of the same ground but instead creating an entirely different history of technology?

Or am I flat out missing something you're suggesting, here?

I feel like your assumption also includes that the civilization stops evolving biologically once it starts developing technology, but that's probably not right either. In the past, what, million years, we've evolved quite a lot--imagine what we might look like, be like, how we might communicate and process basic thought in a billion years.

I think the biology is relatively irrelevant. Billions of years, emphases aside, isn't impressive on that scale: life on earth is on that order of magnitude, and per @arkandel's link, there's diminishing returns. The first couple billion get us through various celluar stages and into complex life, but a couple hundred million also only turned giant murder-chickens to smaller nugget-ready versions. That's not much to brag about in a quarter of a billion years, makes it dubious that you get 'incomprehensible' results going forward on similar scales.

So I'm very skeptical of scenarios (fun as they are for sci-fi) where we turn into sentient light balls or 4th dimensional beings or whatever whereby we somehow become incomprehensible to ourselves (or other life-as-we-know-it beings). Future humans might be good at living in a shitty, polluted atmosphere (heck, they better be), but I don't see us developing psionic powers.

Humans today might seem as incomprehensibly basic to those future "humans" as ants seem to us now.

I feel like all of these arguments fall back on a hand-wavy appeal to big numbers as a reason to disregard... well, everything we know about anything. Sure, space and time are vast and the numbers are big. Yet we can see the products of the first ~14 billion years, a third of it up close. It follows observable mechanics, many of which we have a functional, if not total understanding. I'm not sure why the next 1, 2, or 10 billion suddenly equals 'magical transformation into incomprehensible, nigh-impossible forms divorced from everything that happened in the prior 14 billion.'

@arkandel said in Life... in outer space!:

@bored said in Life... in outer space!:

@arkandel I have some issues with the anthill thing. Human explorers may not have stopped to talk to ants, but they knew that they were there, alive, and in some way part of the same existence. Fast forward only a very short while, and we sure try talking to apes, whales... dogs, cats (and some entomologist, probably, yes, ants).

That's kind of the point though. To an alien life form capable of reaching out to us in the first place we would be the ants in that scenario, not the apes or dogs and cats.

I get the analogy, but I think its scale is incorrect. It seems improbable that a sentient, type II+ civilization would be technologically incapable and/or disinterested in communicating with a sentient, type .7 civilization, particularly having gone through the very same process and questions. It only real works with some arbitrary, Star Trek prime directive style narrative, or if the other life form is incomprehensibly alien.

At the same time, we scrutinize every grain of dust we recover within our own solar system. We're not just looking for ants, but microbes.

I would say the chance is very high that we might miss a theoretical life form when we first (or second or third...) encounter it because we are looking for a paradigm similar to our own. It could be anything - and as for any communication, a good example from that OP article was taking ten years to say 'hello'; to us it would sound like white noise.

I feel like this hits the same problem. Their tech is vastly better, they probably understand (and have previously used) something analogous to our tech. They can surpass ridiculous, possibly absolute limits like relativity, but they can't work out how to communicate with a lesser life form that nonetheless possesses structured language, EM communication technology, etc?

I wouldn't so much expect hot blue chicks Kirk would approve of as much as some kind of self-aware wave length or whatever the fuck. Good luck figuring that out, or for the scientist who does, proving to everyone else that he's right about that self awareness.

Which is what I was getting at in my previous post with ' other life is so exotic as to be utterly unrecognizable as life.' I concede this is possible, but at the point you're talking about 'life' as something divorced from carbon (or similar element)-based cell biology.... I don't know. It may be valid, but I also feel like it becomes more a philosophical conversation than a scientific one, as with reality simulations, religious explanations, etc.

@arkandel I have some issues with the anthill thing. Human explorers may not have stopped to talk to ants, but they knew that they were there, alive, and in some way part of the same existence. Fast forward only a very short while, and we sure try talking to apes, whales... dogs, cats (and some entomologist, probably, yes, ants). At the same time, we scrutinize every grain of dust we recover within our own solar system. We're not just looking for ants, but microbes.

So where, exactly, in going from type I-II-III does the behavior reverse or cease? Technology solves communication challenges at that point. To get there, you've had some variation of these same kind of discussions and are aware of your own primitive history pre-interstellar exploration.

To me it only holds up if other life is so exotic as to be utterly unrecognizable as life and/or share none of the same history of evolution, which I'm pretty sure is a different bullet point/metaphor.

@nemesis Your post was about social health tracks, where several prior posts were discussing those in relation to how FATE uses them (including the person you were responding to). Shockingly, context is a thing.

The rest of your post is a strange rant about your RP resume and a ridiculous hypothetical system no one has suggested. Just like combat doesn't need a hitloc for every blood vessel, you can abstract social stuff down considerably as well.

Also you seem like kind of a crazy person, so good luck!

@nemesis said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

The fact remains that a lot of people are asking for a single social roll to have the same impact on the opposition's intentions as a bullet would on their health. They've even suggested a separate health track for socials, just to make sure we all knew that's what they were talking about without any room for confusion or debate. That's what most of the pro-social stats folks want: A manipulation-machine-gun that never breaks or needs repair and maintenance or runs out of bullets, and ultimately a bullet hits your player's active decision-making ability and innate intentions as opposed to their desire to follow a course of action they've already decided on.

So... if you were familiar with anything about one of the systems being talked about for 'social health' (FATE), you'd realize it doesn't have to be this way at all.

Any conflict in FATE works the same way. People roll skills as attacks, stress is accrued (or absorbed via consequences, which are basically victim-controlled crits/lasting injuries/etc). When you run out of stress/consequences, you're taken out. At any point before that, however, you can concede the conflict. In this case, you lose, but you get to choose how: in combat, you're left for dead amidst the fallen, taken as a hostage to the supervillain's lair that you wanted to break into anyway, thrown off the waterfall, etc. In a social conflict, this easily covers 'flee the room in embarrassment' vs 'now we fuck.' You also get some fate points for conceding!

So basically the only situation where your agency is removed is when you, the player, are determined to keep fighting for a win no matter the cost. That alone is pretty much an ironclad buffer against any kind of abuse. There's no way for an aggressor to supersede your ability to lose gracefully on your own terms.

So while I still have my doubts about some FATE mechanics being suitable for MU usage, I will continue to point out that its stress system is brilliant and could be the great basis for a MU design. It's incredibly versatile: aside from social and physical combat, I've seen FATE variants use it for wealth systems, Vampire-worthy influence conflict, etc.

@faraday said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

Man, I don't know what kinds of games you guys are playing on, but I don't have "brain-damaged idiot savants who only know one skill" coming out of chargen on my games.

WoD, of course!

...

Obviously its a bit of hyperbole for effect because its easier to understand the math when the numbers are more extreme, but it applies in the middle values too. WoD also probably exaggerates the effect because its CG defaults to 1 or 0 versus FS3 where its 2 or .. some adjective higher than 0.

@The-Sands Actually, speak for yourself about what words are being used for, because you're not the only one here.

You can absolutely make the strict theoretical 'the two people buy all the same stuff in different orders' as a math exercise (which was my initial point), and it's worth doing because it shows the fundamental flaws to how the linear/exponential thing works out.

However, @ThatGuyThere is talking about what people play and include in RP, and I think in actual play its not really a lot of Sword 6/Polearm 6 vs Swords 8 people, but more like Swords 8 people vs. Stealth 5 Disguise 5 Climbing 5 etc etc people, or various other flavors of support-ish characters who tend to have wide skill slates. These characters are actually useful and utilized, but they get pushed out if the XP works out so that the Sword 8 guy can also buy all those skills. It's why you see some games that have variable costs make something like Healing cost extra alongside combat skills, as a form of niche protection.

@thatguythere I think this is partly a terminology problem. We've been using 'generalist' but in practice this doesn't usually mean 'Guy who does 4 things other people do as specialists, worse.' More typically it represents Utility characters who may have general expertise... in all the stuff the meathead cha 1 int 1 murderbots skipped. This is a specialty (or better, archetype) in and of itself, but its not a specialty represented by peak murdercraft (with 4 other murderkill merits), but rather at having many useful skills that, due to the nature of most RPGs, probably don't require quite as much razor-focus as combat to be utilized.

The important point is, this is an archetype, and it works perfectly well if they have niche protection, whether explicit or implicit from XP costs. Old shcool (1e/2e) D&D Thieves were precisely this kind of character: in an era before skills even existed, no one else could sneak, open locks, find traps, or even climb very well. Sure, they were pretty shit in combat outside of maybe one nice backstab, but had a purpose, and dungeon delving without one could be near-suicidal.

In a modern skill game, this could be the guy with the laundry list of technical, stealth, and related skills that could get you into a heavily guarded location without setting off every alarm in existence. And in my experience, that person will get taken along, because not even the combat brute wants to fail before the fight even starts. They only get left behind when, because of shitty XP design, the min-maxed combat brute also has all those skills... and also seduction 5 and a few other things because 'lol why did you waste so much XP in cgen, bro?'

@faraday said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

And that, fundamentally, is the difference in our opinions. You see that as a problem. I see that as the system reflecting reality.

Even assuming I agree with your version of reality (I don't, it reflects a really flawed understanding of human learning), 'reflecting reality' is a bad excuse for a design choice in any RPG . Doing it highly selectively (because I'm sure I can list hundreds of ways FS3 violates reality) in a way that promotes min-maxing and silently punishes people who aren't min-max inclined to realize it is still bad game design.

The expert will always be ahead of the generalist because they started off awesome.

And people will always min-max or be unwittingly punished, and then frustrated when they realize it.

@bored said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

At that point, the generalists often find themselves pushed out of the story spotlight,

Don't let that happen. Set up your game with safety rails or faction-only plots or whatever else you want. But don't let that happen, because not only does that sort of issue affect the generalist playing catch-up, it also affects new players versus experienced ones.

The history of MUing suggests it pretty much always happens, staff's best intentions aside. Partly because this is a social phenomenon, not a staff controlled process.

It certainly happens on FS3 games. It happened back when I played BSG games (I'm pretty sure I remember some boarding thing where pilots were shooting sidearms), and if it doesn't, it's only because the 'rails' you mention basically equal out to every plot being identical (Cylon shoot #132). By definition, if you create a variety of plots with diverse challenges, a variety of skills are going to be important. You really can't have that one both ways.

@thenomain To be clear, I'm not saying it's a doomed endeavor or anything. I just think we need to dig deep and realize we've basically built new games on the mangled corpses of their original incarnations. Repeating basic WoD-isms in every 'new' system is probably the quickest way to assure we have all the same problems, right?

To maybe give a productive example of the process, see FATE in the other thread. All my other likes or dislikes with aside, I think it borderline totally fails for MU because of Compels. They're critical to the TT working, but also really work best from a GM stance: I bribe you with points to make you accept difficult yet narratively intriguing consequences of pre-established fiction. They work poorly from an adversarial stance, where people would tactically pick untenable choices to drain you of FATE points.

Fixing them is tricky because they're tied to Aspects as a whole. As a 'FATE is tricky in general' person, I might suggest replacing free-form Aspects with an established list on your game, and giving them some more defined rules text that could be used for Compels. Kinda a hybrid of CoD conditions/tilts?

I DID A CONSTRUCTIVE THING.

@thenomain Hey, I'll take a swing at this because yay actually productive game design? Plz don't delete.

If I'm understanding correctly what you're asking, I think before you even start going into individual systems, you'd want to identify the relevant elements of play that differ between TT and MU. I'd argue that these are so wildly, often fundamentally different that we're not even close to playing the same games, which of course highlights the oddity of using the same systems.

Think about player patterns, for instance.

I'd say that tabletop WoD (yes, I'll use the lowest common denominator example here) tends to be some mix of co-op PvE and individual competitive PvE. IE you may have players with competing motivations while the group struggles against whatever antagonists the GM provides, but they're (with rare exceptions) rarely in direct conflict. By comparison, I'd argue MU is a mix of individual & team PvP and team PvPvE. Players compete over their own goals, individually and in small groups, and also compete (as small groups or larger factions) over achieving larger metaplot milestones.

I could probably go into some of the other formal elements, depending if this is actually going to get nuked or not

@thatguythere said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

@bored
I don't see how linear advancement eliminate the gain for min maxing, if Character A has ten points to spend and spends 4 on pie chart creation (wacky example skill) and spreads the other 6 around, and Character B spends his ten points on 8 pie chart creation and dumps the other two else where, at equal rate of XP advancement A will still never catch up he will always be 4 points down unless B decides to spend else where or hits a system imposed limit. the advantage of the min maxer is still there.

First of all, I don't claim anywhere that these different approaches invalidate all value to min-maxing. Obviously, having the highest possible value of some useful skill (Swords 5, whatever) is always very valuable. Indeed, in almost every game, some mechanic will be the best and focusing on it will probably yield a more powerful (or narratively useful, a big issue in MU) character.

However, two points. First, see the bolded: many games do in fact impose system limits. In a basic WoD-clone mortal game, these limits are actually very low. This tends to be true in L&L games as well.

But point two is the more important thing here. You're looking at it backward. The issue isn't whether or not the generalist can (or should) catch up with the specialist. It's probably perfectly fine that they can't, and assuming there's infinite places to spend XP (possibly true in WoD with enough splat books), the specialist will stay ahead in either linear or geometric.

The issue is that in a mixed linear-CG exponential-XP game, the CG specialist can catch up with the CG generalist faster than the reverse. Because there often are skill caps (see above), this means that after a certain time period, the CG specialists cap out their peak skill, and then go back and buy all the generalist stuff. Because of the disparity between CG and XP costs, they do this much more cheaply, and will have all the skills the generalist does long before the generalist matches them in peak skill.

At that point, the generalists often find themselves pushed out of the story spotlight, because why bring the guy who can sneak, handle security systems, and negotiate, and is an OK marksman, when the elite sniper can also do all of those things.

I wasn't even explicitly suggesting linear-linear, though. My example was actually converting your CG points into XP according to your (presumably geometric, since I'm talking about fixing a broken system like oWoD or FS3) costs and then just letting people spend them.

Linear-linear is also fine, but only if your game has a more limited design where every point of every stat anywhere is valuable. IE, not generic kitchen-sink skill systems like WoD.

@the-sands said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

The other thing you really can't do is use a linear system for character generation. You need to use a system more along the lines of 'everyone starts with 1 year of XP, buy your stats'. Otherwise you will absolutely have people min-max the Hell out of the system. It's not that they are bad people. You've created a system that encourages that.

This is precisely the point my post, why did you bother to write the rest of that?

Edit: @faraday I honestly don't know what pros you think there are that can't be replicated in an all XP system.

You constantly use throwaway lines about not wanting to play 'level 1'/noobie etc types and wanting to enable older characters. You can do that with XP. Read my bit about converting between the two; anything your CG allows, can also be done with XP. However, your version makes anyone who doesn't min-max to the extreme on your games permanently at massive statistical disadvantage (and that part is numerical fact).

@packrat The linear vs. exponential CG thing is just it's own category of problem, and one that game designers should have learned better by now (sorry @faraday). Or maybe they have learned, but its the easier option. Path of least resistance.

This one is at least easy to fix: just don't do it! Heck, you can convert any game that does it into a game that doesn't do it trivially. Create a specialized character at the maximum level of min-max god you would approve out of CGen, reverse engineer their XP value, give everyone that much instead of dots. Congrats, your game now isn't punishing everyone who doesn't twink their heart out!

Everything else, I think it does come down to just figuring out what is valuable in your game and only including those stats, as people have mentioned. WoD (and most generic skill-based systems) are shitty games because they're vague real life simulators and tell you to make 'a realistic human' (or former human) with no acknowledgement that the realistic retired Special Forces / Olympic Fencer / Occult nerd is more useful than the former Pastry Chef.

Mostly all MUs are guilty of this and despite the WoD-fetish, again, you can fix it: edit your skill lists.

On the less being mean to @faraday front (sorry!), I totally agree about all the car / skill level stuff. It's another reason I kind of eyeroll at skill based systems. Even the idea of hashing out whether 'medical intern' is Medicine 2 or 3 is pretty ridiculous, because the statistical difference between those levels in terms of results is really low.

In a 'your real life simulator fails at simulating real life' note, it's insane to even put First Aid and Doctor on the same skill with only 5 degrees of granularity unless those skill levels come with huge costs and returns. Being true to WoD math, First Aid should probably be its own skill (with 4-5 being something for EMTs, trained combat medics, whatever) and 'being a doctor' would be a whole laundry list of skills from various (much more specialized) Knowledges to 'Surgery' etc etc etc.

Of course that would be a pain in the ass to deal with on a game. But it kind of illustrates why these things work so poorly.

@lithium said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

Still not sure why FATE gets so much hate honestly.

I've occasionally been one of the FATE-haters, but I think every time I've mentioned it I've also singled out that I actually really love its damage (stress) system. Both the multiple tracks and the use of the boxes and conditions are great.

I dislike FATE for totally unrelated reasons, mostly that I don't think the FATE point economy actually works at all as a game mechanic (even in tabletop, and FAR less so on a MU), and that Aspects tend to become over-saturated and meaningless. Combat boils down to 'Everyone rolls their highest skill, pretty much no matter what it is, as a maneuver to add an Aspect to the environment/badguy, then someone attacks with a bajillion free tags and wins.' Also Compels don't really work for me as a stand-in for 'hard' status effects/conditions (and just like above, they work even less well on a MU).

But I really do love the damage system. Someone should just port that onto a game that doesn't suck.