Posts made by bored

@Lithium In the end, there's always a sheet, no? The only way to totally avoid 'sheet warrioring' is to run a statless game, and then you get 'I shot you' 'no you didn't'.

Actually putting this stuff on sheet is a big step up from the prior game (where some people were rich and had super stats, some were poor and had super stats, and some people just fucking sucked). There are still going to be issues in terms of how much wealth and title (which are theoretically separate in the books) costs you vs other stats and probably a min-max point, particularly because its an equipment-heavy game system and money can in some situations replace stats (ie, for those unfamiliar with it, the 'energy shields' mentioned at the PC midrange noble tier are Dune-style and make you casually immune to a number of threats).

The game is mostly not designed for everyone playing landed Counts and Dukes (who thematically rule whole planets or more), but that tends to be how MUs trend because... people like their titles. So balancing stuff at that end will be challenging, but at least there's an attempt being made.

@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.

@seraphim73 If you redid the grid that's a good fix.

Ultimately its the supernatural stuff that's hard. I'd guess (admitting I could be wrong) that for the average MSBer, Black Sails is more inspirational than Pirates of the Caribbean. Or even PotC 1 (that most people love) vs all the later garbage cashgrab ones. The skeleton pirates as a reveal was interesting. Ghost/monster pirate captain #12 is dull.

Obviously I read the theme when I started, but I also kind of assumed that the storm was there to bound RP and that the supernatural elements would filter in. Instead my very first scene was people telling me about troglodytes. So I was playing D&D. Which is fine, I do play D&D, but it wasn't what I signed up for (or even designed my character for).

Unfortunately this is kind of a cat out of the bag thing and I don't know how you put it back in. The world of the game is no longer set in a pirate world, it's some kind of supernatural survival horror thing with optional eyepatches.

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.

@packrat FWIW, it looks like you're repeating a lot of Paulus' design (and thus, mistakes).

First, no one is that interested in peasants with pitchforks. People want their toys (see many SC examples and how few people bought anything low-tech with discretionary money). So in your example, you're just making the game less fun for the Baroness, more fun for the guilder with his fancy tanks or spaceships.

Second, 'Elite, Training 3, Motorized Grenadiers' is already way past 'moderately' complicated. How many Training 1 Regulars is that worth? Do they beat or lose to Training 5 guys with no fancy stuff? Etc etc etc. I'm the kind of player willing to do spreadsheets or write a simulator to sort this stuff out, but I'm not most players.

Finally, 'if you're rich enough': How big of a gap can you really create here without recreating SC's Counts of Doom vs. Barons of meaninglessness? It seems like any scale where one dude can conceivably field full units in one of the rarest pieces of equipment in the game is going to have a pretty major haves and have-nots.

To end with something positive: the situation you describe at the end of your post seems like the ideal you want to push for, so maybe you should make that more inherent to the design. IE: everyone gets some appropriate troops and then one special thing. FS was never a game with all this civ stuff, it was all background to players running around with the really badass toys.

@faraday said in [The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?]

It's completely attached. The sheets that you see on BSGU's web portal are pulled from the DB. When you edit your profile on the web, it updates the DB so those changes are reflected in the game too. The list of 'locations' you see is just a list of grid rooms. Having a tightly-integrated website/wiki and telnet game is what makes it cool.

Well, what I meant re: the grid is that while it's pulling the locations/descs from the rooms it looks like it has its own method of including people in the location/scene (and isn't mirroring people's grid locations), allows you just to change the location on the fly, etc. So at least in some sense, it's a parallel way of RPing, right?

I don't mean this as criticism I'm just getting a handle of what it does and how, and the location distinction is interesting because that's been one big thing separating MUs from a lot of other real-time chat based RP platforms.

Then there are some more subtle impacts. Let's say that you allow people to log in on the web side and submit bbposts or post to scenes. Should that person be reflected on the 'Who' list or the scene's room in-game? How? Let's say you allow a GM combat management screen on the web. How does it know when someone has updated their action in-game? How does it alert the GM to that fact so they don't accidentally overwrite someone's changes with their own?

This is what I was getting at above, I guess.

Anyway, I dunno, both of the responses to me stressed how complicated it is, as if I was trivializing that, which I didn't mean to be. I simply meant to offer that as we have a couple of projects doing both so it seems silly for the peanut gallery to be arguing about only having one or the other.

@sparks ... ok? Pretty obviously 'it does both things' means more work. That's generally an issue of backwards compatibility of any kind, that you have to have some redundancies.

But both those codebases are doing it. You have a problem with them doing it because you want them to do less work? I'm kind of confused what your comment is supposed to get across, I guess.

There's really a reason why expectations was the word I kept going back to. It goes to leadership and activity level. It goes to conflict and fairness. Pretty much everything, really.

Setting and communicating expectations, and similarly calibrating your systems and staffing to actually meet said expectations, is pretty much the single most important thing you can do staff wise that pretty much most games fail at. Games will boast that players can change the world... but how much? Almost always there's some kind of implicit boundary, often for very reasonable reasons ('if we let you do X we'd have to totally rewrite theme and the game would just be too different for everyone') but these are often not or poorly communicated until it's far too late.

Arguments over telnet and whatever ill it does or doesn't do aside, I think there's probably at least some kind of general feeling that a modernized web version would do a lot if it could do it without totally jettisoning our more advanced text-land backend stuff. This is the route that both Ares and Evennia are taking, where you have both the text interface and a web portal, so... I dunno why anyone has a problem with that?

Also @faraday's log/RP screen demo looks really cool and I didn't realize things had come along that far. While I'm unclear how attached/detached it is from the game (ie is that roll actually pulling from the db, both sheet wise and roll code wise? it doesn't seem to use the grid but rather it's own locations? etc) I can see something like that being pretty usable as an RP environment replacement. You might need to add some OOC communication tools to replace the whole MU experience (where would we be without our OOC room/pub chan toxicity?) but otherwise it look like it handles most of what you'd need.

@darinelle said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:

To say "staff is lazy and disinclined to let people affect setting"

I didn't say anything about staff being disinclined to let people affect setting. I said that setting up things in the way they do creates mountains of setting expectations that players are uncertain they can challenge.

When something is the 'Great and mighty royal house of X, with vast lands, riches, a history dating back to the founding of our civilization by its greatest culture hero' it's not surprising that 'Count Bob of the SomethingLands' might feel the task of challenging that is just insurmountable. He might be right if the mechanical benefits skew enough in their favor. Regardless, its psychology, and has nothing to do with what you're actually willing to let BobPlayer do.

Breaking by replies up a bit some (oh and more stuff)

@Arkandel When I say lazy and corrupt are the options, I don't necessarily mean that every staffer at every one of these games is terrible everywhere, but that ultimately the persistent failure to make a different choice probably comes from one of these. It's either (intellectually) lazy, which is the 'its done in the source material and on every other game and I'm not going to think about alternatives' explanation, or its 'corrupt' in a broad sense that I take a hard line on all unequal chargen being in some sense corrupt.

It's not in any way difficult to do these things differently, it's just uncomfortable because it deviates from the 'everyone does it this way' familiarity and it takes away the ability to let your friends play pretty princesses/badass prince mcmanlypantses. You can give some high nobles better titles but equal or worse stuff, it's not at all difficult mechanically and its quite true to history, which is full of powerful 'Count' level nobles overthrowing Dukes and Kings.

@Kanye-Qwest Maybe that's true but it's not what I'm talking about? That's plot access or 'speshulness' quotient. I was having a very specific argument about the construction of noble hierarchies and the impact that has on feudal conflict. Arx's hierarchies are equivalent to Firan's, Star Crusade's, 5th World's, etc, and one of your staffers admits people are shy of conflict, so I think it still fits the mold.

@deadculture You know me and know I'm a fan of equitable CG in general.

FS's book rules vs say the implementation on SC kind of get at one of the big problems, that there's basically no way to 'fairly' (and math-ly) balance out the sweeping advantages a top-tier landed noble gets on a game in that style with CG points. Which is why I tend to suggest you just need flatter, more realistic feudalism. A higher title costing a marginal amount of extra CG points works if most domains are still roughly equivalent and all you're getting is a touch of prestige/IC clout/etc. It doesn't work if the higher titles come with an order of magnitude of IC benefits across every facet of the game.

@darinelle I feel like staff sets the norms here, the expectations, the culture. When the situation at the outset is 'The Top tier nobles are Gods and everyone else is a clod. They have tons of shit, authority, prestige, way more money than you, awesome castles and the best land, possibly fancy magical heirlooms, the backing of history and culture, etc, also probably more PCs', it becomes something more than risking conflict, it becomes a monolithic task to overthrow the presumed status quo of the game, thematically, structurally, and mechanically. There's also the pure pragmatic side. If the big dogs are so much bigger than your chance to win is well under a 50-50 shot, it doesn't make a lot of sense, especially when 'losing' on a MUSH is often very much an OOC thing as much as IC.

Now you're claiming (or at least implying) Arx is an exception and the setup is fine and the players are a problem. From as much as I know, I'm dubious of that, since the game ticks most of the boxes of extremely tiered feudalism, the top tier folks being richer, having better stuff, disproportionate PC population, and just a giant weight of theme behind them. If you feel like you've balanced things perfectly and are baffled people fail to pull the trigger, maybe you should look at how you set and communicate expectations.

@packrat I've railed against the 'standard L&L hierarchical feudalism' a few times. It's a structure that seemingly gets repeated on every game, and it's idiotic on every game. High tier nobles absolutely make the low tier nobles pointless. Staff will always claim that they're not, that they can agitate or band together and cause problems, but I've seen that happen organically precisely zero times ever.

Blame lazy staff, the ever present corrupt/just stupid need to give people feature characters, etc.

@surreality It didn't really. Players for missions was a mix of OOC @mail and IC in-game messages, and then submitting them on a google doc that had a calendar of the mission dates. But at the same time, that stuff isn't unmanageable for anyone who isn't a total ditz IRL; I asked everyone to submit availability/interest, picked out lists w/ alternates, handed those in.

That said, you're right about the expectations. The one thing that was unique to Firan is the game's... harsh staff culture eliminated player entitlement. Players understood that going on a plot/mission was a privilege and that these were going to be run promptly whether or not they showed up. So they were motivated to submit quickly and not flake out, which is a 180 from highly sandboxy PRP-heavy games - the WoD scenario you describe.

Re: the standard WoD game version, this is precisely what I mean about the problems not being so much 'what is required' but more on 'what players demand.' I'm not saying positions don't turn into massive RL jobs, just that it mostly happens due to lack of player etiquette, which you mostly describe ('no one reads', etc). People who can't be bothered to communicate aren't in any position to bitch about an IC leader's availability/activity.

So I think we mostly agree, yeah. Although I think there's a pretty wide margin that a lot of it can be solved by game staff looking at whether their positions are type 1 or 2 above and setting expectations - both for the leaders and their subordinates - appropriately.

@surreality To a degree, yeah, that's a game structure issue although I think it's pretty rare that it actually legitimately gets that bad, and that when it does it's usually not because the role actually requires that much investment. When it happens, it's usually because of gross inefficiencies, ridiculous staff or unreasonable player demands on the time of others, etc.

For instance, take doing High General for a Firan war season. I'd say that was a pretty top level example in terms of workload etc: singular decision-maker, scheduling player rosters for missions to submit to famously ridiculous staff, and screwing up anything anywhere would get everyone killed and your name dragged through infamy. But... despite that, I'd say the OOC shit was probably mangable in 1-2 hours a night, and the 'required' RP could probably be boiled down to a couple scenes a week. Plus, a lot of it was the sort of thing that was fun for the sort of person who'd volunteer for it in the first place: strategic min-maxing spreadsheet foo, leading missions, meeting enemy envoys, RPing meetings, authority showdowns with a rival former position holder, etc. Firan-isms aside, I don't think it required an unreasonable investment of time. On the whole, I had fun doing it. War was always the best thing about that game.

But for the counter example, I got passive aggressively guilt-tripped by staff on Star Crusade playing basically the same character at a lower authority level (tier 1.5 noble where the game had only 4? I think tier 1s and the rest of the playerbase tier 2s or mooks) but not... I don't know, constantly RPing, submitting +request background actions, etc. My lack of constant RP affected basically no one (I had no actual PC vassals and communicated regularly enough with my own liege), but staff used it arbitrarily to take the high ground in arguments about their own poor management of the game's military storyline. Some of those staff arguments could drag for hours. It was tiring and amounted to nothing, fun the least.

So I think a lot of it really comes down just to shitty people who are either envious of other people having a shiny they don't (even if it's basically an intangible with no mechanical benefits) or staff using 'activity' to bully players and cover up for their own failings or poor organizational skills in terms of the plots they run. If a role 'requires' an RL job's worth of work, it's almost certain that there's some guilt-trip RP, overly long staff arguments, or other massive inefficiencies going on.

I think game genre/overall play design/'what is this game about' is also a pretty big factor in terms of how you define IC leadership and OOC responsibility levels. People will complain about all kinds of inactive leaders, but how justified those complaints are depends heavily on what their actual function is supposed to be on the game.

If the faction/org is part of a major axis in the game's conflict, then high expectations are reasonable: if these people are supposed to be navigating IC conflicts, organizing responses to metaplots, meeting regularly with their rival counterparts, etc... then it's normal to expect them to be involved, active, and available. Absences will cause IC consequences and OOCly disrupt everyone's fun. In this case, it's prudent to have lots of redundancy (proxies, lieutenants, etc) and to have easily-exercised removal/replacement clauses. Relevant examples here are anything from top-level nobles in conflict-heavy L&L, office holders in Praxis-politics focused Vampire, to small org or sub-org leaders (packs, military squadrons, whatever) etc.

On the other hand, if the organization is a background edifice or wide-scale and passive player grouping, then these expectations are often kind of silly. These are often positions that could easily be NPCs. While some might argue that in that case you shouldn't let people play them it's just as reasonable to ask: well, why not? Even if the player isn't super active, if they're active at all they're taking work off some staffer's shoulders and providing background color that the game wouldn't otherwise have. Examples here are often top-level figures in games not actually about their decisions (ie, a town mayor in an urban supernatural game or even a King on a more fluffy, marriage-simulator L&L who has no real duties, a ship captain on a sci-fi game that's all about smaller away missions, etc), or required 'org leaders' for large/mandatory umbrella orgs that encompass huge numbers of players but aren't really in conflict (one that springs to mind is old-school Pern Weyrleaders).

I feel that complaints about idle leaders in #2 scenarios often comes from little more than status envy; people are annoyed that this person has a title and isn't 'doing' anything to justify it. But if the status is merely an IC fluff detail and not a structural one, these people should probably just learn to stfu.

@seraphim73 Yeah, this one for me too. Not a game-breaker (since obv, D&D) but definitely a peeve... especially when newer systems throw it in or layer it unnecessarily on top of a system that could handle it another way (ie margin of success) and there's no history to justify it. People need to l2stats.

Non-coded combat of any significant complexity is a really high bar for me, similar to @Aria / @faraday. Not because I dislike it (I play D&D weekly etc), but MU* is just garbage for it I just really can't bother with the 8 hour timestops / PrPs.

Which, for better or ill, hits most of WoD.

@rebekahse said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

(It was probably Firan, AKA "the best argument in the world for the idea that people are willing to play characters in games that poop on everybody except rich white men").

It pooped on them pretty well too. See pretty much precisely what @Apos described a bit back or the hypothetical western sheriff, re: leaders getting a lot of this piled on them. Firan was a pretty perfect example as they loved making players guess over the correct moral judgment (when, surprise: there's no right answer and they'd skewer you either way). I had to arbitrate racism (miscegenation, no less!), and class issues, with very vocal PCs on both sides of both issues and the staff controlled NPC mobs ready to lynch at the slightest misstep. Good times!

I think @faraday's 'Taurons and Capricans' hits exactly why fantisizing it isn't actually that much of a cure all.

Especially there, the RL links are all too easy to draw, between the rich, high-class, sophisticated elite group and the rough poor agrarian / oh yeah they're criminals too group.

Heck, it allows it to push RL buttons even more widely because it's not specific to an earth race and yet hits a lot of markers of common rhetoric toward a variety of RL races. Bonus points!