Posts made by bored

@ixokai said in FCs on Comic MUs:

@bored said in FCs on Comic MUs:

I don't find this attitude productive, personally.

It takes a certain mindset to run plot. It takes certain mindset to run plot your character is in and not consume it yourself. These mindsets aren't exclusively what I think a good iconic character should be played as.

To tie, "plays iconic character" to "able to run good plot" together is something I don't feel comfortable with.

First, as a couple people already kind of clarified, 'plot' is a bit of a short-hand here and note that I talk about 'doing things for others' in more general terms as well. If you have ways as an iconic-player to meaningfully to contribute that isn't strictly a 'PRP', such as creating regular team RP at the base, that's a reasonable alternative. It's just hard to give quick terminology for those alternatives. But you're not creating stuff for people, there's a problem.

You seem to want to limit this to the very fewest number of players (ie only to strict 'faction leader' types), but this is the attitude we tend to see on these games by default, and the behavior we see by default is camped characters, Spider Man having coffee once a week, and the people who do run things quickly burning out because there's not enough of them. This is just the tragedy of the commons in MU form: meaningful (non 1-on-1 relationship) RP is a public good, and unless you create structures to obligate people to support that public good, it is quickly exhausted.

You can shrug at this, but the problem will still be there, slowly killing the game.

I agree, if you want a certain type of character that tends to be the center of attention, you need to be willing to encourage and allow others to shine in their moments.

But I don't agree this means that they need to run plot.

I'm also not sure what third way you're implying here. Either you're a person who promotes and creates story, or you're a person who largely consumes it. And while there's nothing wrong with consuming, you need the creators for your game to function. If staff isn't doing it, players need to. And you need to motivate them somehow. Do you have a better (or even alternative) way to do this, or is your 'solution' just to throw up your hands and hope it happens? See above.

And I'm not even talking about huge, complicated, far-reaching storylines. Just that if you can't emit some of the Sinister Six out causing problems, I don't think you have any business playing Spider Man (who notably, doesn't really have a 'sit and lead meetings' alternative RP option, either). And if you don't have the attitude that you can participate in a scene you're 'running' without totally god-moding and invalidating anyone else, you're also not the sort of player that should have these characters. It's not even fucking hard.

Whether you're a plot runner or not, having Super Man show up to a scene and pose 'Supes zips around faster than light, ignoring all the enemy attacks, and punches everyone unconscious' is fucking horrible and shows zero comprehension of how to RP comic tropes. Just don't do that thing.

@ixokai said in FCs on Comic MUs:

I find this a reasonable approach -- but you have to be very careful with it. Its already really hard, for example, to fill a Charles Xavier position, and he's so important for the X-Men. The bigger the burden we put on it, the even harder it will be, I think. There's a delicate balance you have to find between them being the "job" and them playing.
For characters like Cap, or Xavier, who may be iconic but themselves can't usually solve all things, that's not so bad, but for some of your iconics they're heavy hitters in their own right.

FWIW, I usually see Cap played and he's fairly straightforward and popular, so I don't think he's in a similar position to Xavier at all.

For Charles, if an individual character doesn't attract characters, that's more of a reason to look at them than to change your overall policies. I think with Xavier, there's various issues (the physical handicap, the 'mission command' position where he's not necessarily going out and fighting, his age, etc) that maybe suggest he should just be NPCed. That also pre-emptively avoids the UH drama where you have staffers suddenly putting a character in charge of the school as Xavier's come and go. There's nothing wrong with a backup NPC in the shadows, and if someone really wants to play him, they can talk to you about it etc and he returns to NPC status if they drop him later.

Also this "PRP Runner" thing is very a concern. If Superman has to run PRP's to play, then there's a very ripe opportunity for him to basically be the center of all the plots. And that's boring. Just by being himself he is apt to solve most problems if he shows up to a plot. Who wants to show up to a plot where Superman saves the day again and again?

In the words of my recently abandoned UH EFC, I say thee 'meh.'

If you want to be a star of the show character, you have to be willing to do things for others. If in attempting to do things for others you only end up doing things for yourself and people complain about it? Then you shouldn't have that character. It really isn't hard, and staff can afford to be a little stricter with the big guns if they're a little looser with everyone else. That's why I suggest a fairly loose standard for everyone else paired with the strict standard for the iconics. If a player literally cannot bring themselves to play anyone but, say, Rogue, but also won't run anything that isn't about themselves (gee, we've not seen that happen recently, have we?) then you probably don't actually need that player. Be firm, and they'll probably content themselves finding another high-power bombshell to TS on. If they leave, no loss.

@arkandel In the spirit of the upcoming Black Mirror season, who put this (fellow) sub 1.0 in charge of the forum??

On activity, I think you basically need two standards. You can have a basic one for FCs that's fairly... standard MU whatever, lose the character if you're idle for X amount of time without Y votes/logs, whatever. That works for 90% of characters that exist.

But I'd also put all of the iconic roster (ie, basically anyone who's in the main cast of a movie or TV show) in another tier. Most games only do this with the absolutely top characters (Superman, Cap, whatever). Those people are expected to keep up public activity etc. It's in the job description and sorry, if you're not willing to be a PRP runner, you don't get to play the current hotness characters.

With that setup, staff doesn't have to review every log or monitor everyone's RP. But they do keep an eye on what the stars of the game are doing, and push them along.

I've played a little on mafiascum. They definitely have a huge community devoted to it and a lot of different game variety etc, as well as maintaining a wiki that has some excellent stuff on the theorycraft behind the game (which is, as you might imagine, pretty involved if you care to get into it).

Generally the games had schedules where each 'day' lasted a certain number of RL ones, depending on which area of the forum it was (some were meant to be faster). They'd use PM and some parallel chat threads for mafia communication, sending night actions to the mod, etc. But I also found the pace a bit slow, where you'd sometimes get people dropping out of the games and having to be replaced with how they dragged along.

@three-eyed-crow Well, Firan was huge and often lethal on pretty large scales, but yeah, it did have some other characteristics.

So you're right, it might not promote a huge game. But we talk a lot about quality vs. quantity here, so that's not necessarily what should be the only goal. There are also probably ways to tune the lethality a bit so that people can volunteer for it or avoid it. IE, flag specially dangerous missions for being so, and let the high risk folks throw themselves at those if they want.

Anyway, I'm definitely not promoting this as a right-way/wrong-way kind of situation, it's obviously not that and I like the idea enough I'd play either way. Just expressing that I think there is some desire out there for a more lethal setting and that it could help keep it fresh in ways that some games in related genres struggle with.

I'd definitely be for a bit more death in a game like this. It's one of the things that always had me inevitably lose interest in BSG games, because after the first couple scenes 'omg we survived' stops having much weight. Yeah, NPCs go, and you can and should be RPing the impact of it, but again, it's a matter of how long you can keep it up. Real risk just adds another layer of psychological stimuli that can really push the RP. Yeah yeah, we're all authors, but (good) authors write from and capture real experience and emotion so OOCly meaningful moments in RP help supply that.

And while the inevitable argument is that no one will like RPing that... between TGG and freaking Firan, people obviously have gotten into those kind of setups.

@social-diseases I guess I'm sort of confused what you're looking at as the alternative, particularly since you were largely talking about timeline stuff. You want a timeline but... you also want it just to be a mish-mash of various comics supporting every possible character? Are you actually planning on researching every one of those comics across multiple lines to figure out which characters are playable in what state? Or are you going to leave it to the players?

The UH take of 'everyone just uses whatever comics they want' gives you such a cluster fuck of realities that it's basically impossible to RP any further continuity in. People's very existence ends up retconning facets of others characters, etc. This is what I'm talking about resolving. Creating a definitive timeline (which is what it sounded like you wanted to do) is necessary for any kind of real consistency in RP.

@social-diseases You're kind of missing things if you think that post was 'you need to run Xavier's in Westchester', and you're specifically failing to read if you take it as a suggestion of strict year one. It can be set anywhere, if you want X-colony, that's fine. As I said, you can have characters of different ages and experience levels. But the timeline really needs to be something fresh and self-contained to the game. At the point where you find yourself typing 'Well So and So's Run is canon' you've already made a game that caters to only the narrowest set of pedantic comic nerds and your game is already doomed to be a repetition of the same RP you see everywhere, that's usually also just a rehash of comic stories.

What I am saying is that you really need a specific to game history of limited defined scope, a fresh starting point, and a commitment to unique rather than re-hash concepts going forward, at least if you want any kind of hope of unique RP. Otherwise you get all kinds of problems as various people bring different degrees of continuity understanding with them, and it's just constant iterations of the same plots, and particularly really Speshul Snowflake-y plots that are only barely tolerable in the comic format and totally eyeroll nonsense when you have to put up with them on a MUSH.

Seriously, I would bet money that the only people who are remotely interested in RPing around Jean/Scott/Emma/Madelyn/Rachel/Nate/Cable/Hope nonsense are people who want to play those characters to be the de-facto center of the game world.

@social-diseases said in FCs on Comic MUs:

I think the addendum I at one point suggested for Utopia was "at the end of one of the stories, use that for the cut-off but instead of how it ends say the Phoenix Force or whatever undoes that 'No More Mutants' shit"

To be hoenst, this is already eyes glaze over levels of too much comic continuity in game. While I disagree with the sentiment somewhere further above that these games test for comics knowledge (maybe they did once, but every game I've joined recently I've apped characters successfully with no more than a quick wiki read of info on them), once you start defining things inside the ongoing continuity like that you bring in so much baggage and set a really high bar for understanding.

My preference would probably be more of a blank-slate setting. It doesn't need to be flat year one (you can have more and less experienced characters, teachers and students, whatever) but it needs to be fairly neutral on main events, pre-established relationships, etc. The one thing I really loathe in comics games is people using them simply to pantomime out the existing storylines (oh my god, is it Jean and Scott or Scott and Emma? Who WILL HE CHOOSE?!?!?! shoots self in head). It feels like you're totally wasting the purpose of even having a mush.

Have an X-school full of X-people. Maybe they're familiar people with familiar power sets and base personalities. But then let it proceed organically from there. Once you get to 'well now Jean has to go Phoenix and then her future babies start showing up and you know what that means' you've already jumped the shark. That stuff ends up being barely tolerable in comics after a while, it's 1000% eye-roll worthy when you see people trying to replicate it on a MU.

Just create an environment with mutants and let them RP new stuff. Let Jean be a telepath/tk like her original incarnation, and leave out the god level mutants you have to throw in for omg drama (and of course the 'haha my char is the stronkest!) I think this would also have the effect that it makes things more OC friendly. OC mutants with 'you get one, very clear and limited power, that's how mutants work' is a lot more doable than 'sure, just make dragon elf wizard, why not?'

I didn't even know FFG SW code existed, huh.

That said, I feel like the rough thing in the new L5R is that it's still roll and keep but now its roll and keep with meaningful options/decisionmaking, meaning every roll is a two-step process. You can't simply put in a +command and even get a success/failure message. That alone seems like it's going to be incredibly slow to resolve in a MU setting.

An actual correct usage of FS3.

+1 just for that.

I don't think the rank stuff is actually as bad as it seems if you examine how it works and actually look through the tables. You count all XP for advancing a qualifying skill, even for multiple raises, so you can focus if you want to. Every rank has a skill group, so you have a variety of choices every rank from that. Ring purchases always count. Then there's a good number of other wildcard entries like 'Any 1 X Kata.' So between all of that, you have a pretty fair amount of choice in how you want to spent your xp (more skills, more rings, more tech focus, which ones, etc), while still sticking to the idea that schools... do teach specific things. That's part of the in-game fiction, and it shouldn't be ignored.

While the system may encourage you to plan your buys to some degree to maximize rank gain... that was true in prior editions too (ie, raising a stat that didn't make any sense just to up the ring for insight). Also, if you choose to buy something 'off menu' it will probably be low and thus pretty cheap, so you're not delaying yourself much.

@d-bone said in The guy who coded Kishi Kaisei MUX [L5R]:

So for examlple.. take the Hida Defender- a Bushi warrior class. Look at what ranks you are and are not allowed to take certain skills to level up. Develop a strategy now to game the system to level up as a fast as possible while also making the most hyper optimized character while still leveling up. For example, level up Martial skills as much as possible in first and second ranks, because you can't for some reason level them up in 3rd or 4th. Dump stat skills like Command, Tactics, meditation and Theology becuase taking them in cgen doesn't count towards leveling up, so you can buy them on the cheap to help kick you over the edge to level up.

This... is wrong/doesn't make much sense. Your Clan, family, and school give you a ton of skills with minimal choice, so you can't really 'dump stat' much nor does it make any sense to. You advance by xp spent not by ticking off which skills you raise, so raising a higher skill contributes more. In the end, you have to spend 16 xp no matter what you do, and there's no difference getting 2 skills at 1 for 4 xp or 1 skill to 2 for 4xp. And if double up where you can (even on 'dump' stats like Fitness and Tactics as a Hida Defender) you end up with more XP worth of character. I simply can't imagine the scenario you're trying to describe. You're also confusing Skills with Skill Groups when saying you can't raise them in ranks 3 & 4 - you just become more focused.

All of this actually reflects the game designers having a pretty good grasp on how characters tend to develop. Most bushi will rank up pretty easily just raising Martial Arts a couple times early (ie, 10xp from a free MA 1 to MA 3), then polish off the remaining 6xp with a mix of minor skills and techniques. In later ranks, they'll dump big chunks of XP to max MA ( leaving secondary skills at ~1-3) while shoring up rings (due to the max ring rules) and buying more techniques. All which feeds into a nice ranking up pattern for most bushi.

Why is this a game that is about narrative focus with one of the most obviously abusable level up designs I've ever seen that also clearly destroys character variety. No more Samurai with deception or persuasion skills, becuase lul fuck you. This system also is meant to replace the system where-in every school gets a set of unique abilities. Instead of getting 5 abilities, you get one. (which in turn explains why characters can only level up certain ways- because all the classes are the same practically)

This... kind of suggests you haven't actually read or grasped the new rules at all. It looks like you skimmed through to things like Rank tables without reading the underlying material.

Deception and Persuasion aren't skills, nor are there equivalents. They're approaches. Being deceptive is an Air approach, and so any character with a high Air Ring could be deceptive (ie, any Scorpion or Crane + various families + various schools). Persuasion could be basically any of the other approaches, depending on flavor: persuading someone via logical argument is earth, charm is water, provocation or other strong emotional approaches are fire, etc. As for the skills, any of the Social skills can basically slot into this function, as can Skulduggery in Trade. A Crab with Command is an effective social character in these rules, right alongside the standard Crane/Phoenix/Scorpions with Courtesy. It's pretty easy for bushi to start with one of these skills at 2 and increase them for rank in rank 1 as well... so you're flat out wrong, here.

Nice!

My first thought is that while it shares some similarities to the EotE system as I mentioned it might, they really seem to distinguish the L5R flavor nicely. Variously:

• I really like that they've somewhat divorced rings from stats (or made stats implied inside of them) with all of them touching all areas of the game. It's a lot more philosophical than the prior systems where rings were locked to certain stats. Reinforced by the fact that you can use any Ring for basic attacks in combat.

• it looks like they've dropped difficulty dice, so rolls are simpler to assemble and the game should have less of the nutty variance that plauged EotE.

• They use the dual symbols well, and have come up with a nice way of keeping explosions while also putting some limits/drawbacks on them.

• It seems like Opportunity will have a lot more structured usages compared to Advantage in EotE, which was the biggest problem with it: you'd end up with so much it became repetitive to use.

• Clan, Family, School all still seems accounted for in traditional fashion. Characters also seem like they have a broader variety of options, as there's some crossover in Kata, Invocations (shugenja spells), Shuji (courtier kata), etc.

• 20 questions and Heritage tables!

Sadly, the methodology of assembling pools and whatnot seems like it would make it a poor fit for MUing.

@Seraphim73 said in New MUSH 'Game' Mechanics:

@Lotherio If you're looking at two pools anyhow, how about Storypoints and Plotpoints? Other players can give you Storypoints (or fractions of Storypoints, or however you want to handle the math) for taking a failure in any scene (they're given sort of like noms) and can be spent in any non-plot scene to gain a success. They can be used to effortlessly leap across to the balcony to kiss your lady love, but they can't be used to slay the dragon. Plotpoints, on the other hand, are given by GMs (player GMs provide a fraction of a point, Staff GMs provide whole points? Any GM provides whole points? Any GM provides a fractional point?) for failures during plot scenes, and can be spent on successes during plot-scenes.

FWIW, there was a brief period where I was flirting with (and even wrote +sheets etc for) a FATE game (I know, I shit talk it to hell now, but I really loved the stress/consequence mechanic) and I had a plan to do exactly this with FATE points since they serve this same function. Basically there'd be an unmonitored FATE economy for any random interplayer storytelling, and then separate and a more staff-curated version for major metaplot usage and the like (maybe called Destiny or whatever).

They also had different time scales, because FATE assumes you getting refreshes fairly often, but also a consistent TT timetable of scenes, game sessions, and stories. The GM points were going to refresh more on the scale of weeks and months so that their usage wouldn't be frivolous and that compels (basically the mechanic by which you 'lose' to get more points in) in GM scenes would be really valuable and attractive to players.

So yeah, I highly endorse this kind of approach and think it would be necessary.

@Seraphim73 I've never really liked the 'just pose cool for bonuses' way of doing things. It was a mechanical fad for a while ('stunt dice', etc) but it can often become meaningless when everyone poses something 'ridiculously cool' every round to get their bonus dice, turning the cool moments into the default and penalizing people in the odd case where they just want to stab a motherfucker.

I think in something like FS3, it's probably best to mostly leave thing to flavor and stances (and indeed, various stances probably cover both the flavor and mechanics of... 90% of swashbuckling moves) and not try to GM excessively on top of self-contained system. The one thing I'd probably do in FS3 GMing to reward particularly impressive (as opposed to 'cool for the sake of cool') play is occasionally mess with the NPCs. It's easy enough to make an NPC skip an action, remove one from combat early, or even create penalty stances or something to that effect. Thay way you preserve the limited complexity of player-side input but can give them some flavor feedback if you prefer.

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?

I am aware of the FFG stuff, and keeping my eyes on the progress (although they definitely seem more interested in the LCG than the RPG). I do like the new storyline from the LCG (an alternate history that diverges at a successful Scorpion Clan coup), so I'm hopeful. However, seeing a lot of the issues I had with Edge of the Empire, if their take on L5R uses similar mechanics I don't know that it will be a great fit (either for me personally, or for MUing).

That said, AEG's L5R 4th ed is quite complete (it had a huge run of splat books covering... pretty much anything you'd ever need, I think) and quite sufficient to run the game, including one in any timeline you like, including the new LCG one. Many of the older books are also still usable, particularly setting books (Shout out to City of Lies) and adventures, since converting among editions is usually pretty trivial. It being unsupported really has no impact on that, any more than people have had to stop playing their favorite D&D edition because newer ones came around.

I'd also add that L5R is really a game about the setting and the lore. If you love that, the system side of things is probably secondary. But this also circles back to my old game and why it failed, which had a lot to do with lack of familiarity in the setting and difficulty among new players in figuring out how to RP in it. Honor and the particulars of Rokugani etiquette are easy things to get wrong and the setting can be pretty punishing when you do (and I even intentionally dialed it down by setting the game in a rowdy Crab port).

@Arkandel said in How much plot do people want?:

The TV show model should still be applicable here. On TV their formula is one-third long meta-arcs, two thirds shorter duration stuff, so that regular viewers have something to look forward to but newcomers get the chance to be hooked into the day to day events.

I think this is really spot on and the most succinct explanation of how you want to structure plots, and also a good look at how most games fail (because most do, when it comes to plot, meta or otherwise - these things wouldn't be so infamous/unicorn status-y if people did them right more commonly). It almost always veers too hard one way or another. Either it's a sandbox and nothing matters long term, or everything is doom doom doom, to the point where it's trivial.

When there IS metaplot, the buildup/resolution is poorly balanced. Entry level storytelling is disregarded and basically left to the players, which leads to the inevitable case of a few indispensable people holding all the keys and the newbie role being to suck up to them to get clued in, and maybe if they're nice dragged along to watch them solve the plot' Lead-up tends to either be nonexistent or mostly irrelevant filler: if there are prelude steps, they either won't affect the outcome much and are just time-wasters until the inevitable 'everyone shows up and the dice god dinos make the bigbad go away', which is usually the only relevant scene to the outcome of the whole plot.

STs everywhere need to learn how to do something other than all-or-nothing. Short arcs that are widely accessible, even to new players, that feel like they have meaningful outcomes even if the scale is small. If you're doing a big metaplot, it's probably better if people are only even vaguely aware of it, and that when it finally rears its head, there has been plenty of diverse lead-ins heading toward a fairly timely resolution: you don't want to get bogged down in it. Nothing takes the impact out of metaplot than the big doom looming so long that looming doom becomes status quo.