@Thenomain I've played both, but my fondest memories are probably the older one, as it was a favorite in my university's gaming club.
Totally insane, and we had a guy who was far more interested in deathmatching than winning the races, but still. Great game, especially for CS nerd type people with the programming angle, and pure gold for the look of sheer 'I've made a horrible mistake' when people realize it's all gone wrong.
Being honest, probably Robo Rally.
I can get into most of the euro-style worker/econ kind of games, although in that spirit, 7 Wonders is probably my actual favorite.
Also:
@Auspice said in The Board Game Thread:
And though I've only gotten to play it once, I really, really loved Shadows Over Camelot and I think it could easily become a favorite, but I'd need to play it again to be sure.
That'd be a toss-up between Werewolf and Resistance for me.
I really love pretty much all of the Mafia/Werewolf inheritors, and SoC and Resistance are great ways of boiling down the concept into something a little faster and more gamified. If you haven't seen it, you might also look at Salem (the kickstartered card game, not the computerized Werewolf/Mafia Town of Salem, although it obviously applies too). It takes the traitor concept but also creates a card game out of accusations etc.
@Thenomain Aw, don't get your tweed jacket in a twist.
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.
Obviously there's kind of a balancing point on the 'players who will not bite no matter how hard you dangle bait' (insert crude humor as appropriate) and 'anyone who can't figure out the precise right stuff to +request and expresses frustration clearly doesn't care enough so fuck them.' The former behavior is very common, but so is the latter attitude in staff, and both are pretty shitty.
I think it is important to take player feedback about inaccessibility seriously, especially if its being actively expressed to staff. Most willing to actually say something instead of just idling into obscurity is probably at least somewhat willing to be involved, and struggling with the how. The overall involvement culture of any MU tends to become impenetrable within a month or two if you're not there on day one, and the difficulty of busting in is one of those things that tends to put every game on a pretty dramatically ticking clock of viable lifespan.
@Misadventure Yeah, I actually really like 'rich' dice mechanics conceptually, which is a general term I've sometimes seen for any system like this including ORE. I think another example of a milder version was the dice system in the Dragon Age P&P RPG, which had off-colored d6s that did special things based on certain rolls. The concept is all the same, you can just do a lot or a little with it.
I don't dislike the concept of FFG's dice (I mostly play VTT so having to get a bunch of unique dice isn't a factor here, admittedly, though it's not like the phone app is some major cost) I simply found that the way they were set up gave slightly undesirable results. For instance, the boost dice a lot of advantage (which kind of fits, as they're mostly used for temporary situational bonuses/penalties) whereas proficiency dice give a lot of successes. I think my major change was adding one success somewhere on the d8 table (and a corresponding failure as well) and maybe removing an an advantage/disadvantage symbol or two across the d8s and d12s.
@Woragarten No, I don't mean physically weighted, sorry. I assume the physical dice are close enough to fair for anyone playing (it's not like comic-store normal d6es are perfectly fair).
The dice are designed in such a way as that each face will have one of various symbols (success, advantage, critical, or blank) with each of the various kinds of dice (d6 through 1d12) having different arrangements of these symbols. There are faces that can have multi symbols, ie 2 successes, 2 advantage, or 1 success/1 advantage. Dice don't have failures (aside from blanks), but there are corresponding bad dice with inverted symbols (though not perfectly so, they're weighted to give players a slight edge on equal dice).
Anyway basically the default dice are more generous with the total # of advantage symbols across their faces but less so with successes (and same with failures/disadvantage), so big pools tend to generate massive advantage/disadvantage totals so often it can wonk with the drama they're supposed to represent.
FFG SW has a lot of flaws. The dice mechanic scales bizarrely as does the combat: a basic blaster pistol is almost never a threat due to base soak levels, while stormtrooper rifles murder starting parties with pretty monstrous efficiency. Greedo doesn't care if Han shoots him, he's walking that shit off, and the stormtroopers go from action-comedy to brutal realism.
Also Due to what I think is too much of a weight on the advantage symbols on the dice vs actual success/failures, you tend to get really wild variance in those totals but not much in success/fail. This means a lot of plain failures (with advantage or disadvantage), a lot of successes with massive disadvantage, etc. While the system provides a few mechanical things to spend advantage/disadvantage on, I found the list wasn't really exhaustive enough. So even though the idea was to promote the whole 'you miss, but your blast bolt hits the door controls and...' the system turns it either into a bizarre comedy of constant errors (where those dramatic narrative events happen non-stop) OR a monotonous 'and bad-guys #2, 3, and 7 all drop their weapons... again'.
It's actually possibly the only game where I've had to houserule dice themselves (and was actually able to mess with the symbol faces since I was playing in maptools) to weight them a bit more toward the pass/fail symbols.
@Ghost re: Francis, I have to say, as a generally very anti-religious person (from a split Christian / Jewish background that basically canceled out into secularism), even I have to love the guy.
When people justify religion's value, it's generally him that they describe: unqualified kindness, charity, good will, etc. I recognize that there are other people that strive for it, too. But part of why I love him is that he's such a visible walking indictment of the organization he represents as well as so many of the tenets of his own faith. Watching American Christian conservatives go into painful contortions on television trying to criticize him without looking like they're shit-talking their 'heir of St. Peter' is downright hilarious. I wonder how long they can even keep it up, when he won't let them use faith as a shield for gay-bashing, poor-hating, generally miserable and hate-filled ideology.
So good on the guy for that. Keep making so much of your flock look absolutely fucking terrible.
@TimmyZ said in How low can "low stakes" be and still be compelling for RP?:
Its some of these pedantics and discussion of castles and manors that's part of the larger bickering issues that showed up at Realms.
Last August on the Historicla Mu's thread, there was discussion about folks discussing the finer points of detail vs the majority of players that just show up for pretend fun time and while to those who enjoy history, the semantics of a building that consists of a few rooms, maybe a wing, down to the invention of the chimney is what drives players away from wanting to wade into historical games. Low stakes seems to border into historical and inconsistency at a smaller level will be noted.
I take blame for misunderstanding and misrepresentation of theme at Realm, as repeatedly said. But as you can see how it mildly turns to disagreement here, this is foreshadowing what could potentially be expected.
I'll be the first to point out that being overly anal about history isn't going to get you anywhere (and I have, I pointed this out to you when you were floating your Reconquista game). That's not the issue here. By all means, if you want to not be strictly historical, don't be strictly historical. Tell people they can wear whatever they want.
You didn't do that on Realms. The issue is you're drawing an equivalency between people who were following the guidelines set for them (wood or weak stone halls, various fashion items on the wiki) and people who said 'fuck your theme, I do what I want,' and calling both sides extremists. You're acting like there's no fault to be found, which is ridiculous. You're also pretty obviously misremembering or outright misrepresenting how a lot of the problems played out.... while sock puppetting multiple accounts, so it comes off as pretty bizarre and suspicious.
@WildBaboons said in [How low can "low stakes" be and still be compelling for RP?](/topic/1759/how-low-can-low-stakes-be-
Real world religion and politics.. don't discuss them with friends or play them on a MU.
You're not wrong, though hilariously the medieval Christianity didn't give people trouble. A big issue was, indeed, the really zealous RL types not only being able to understand that it was a game, but also admit that their religion isn't the same thing. Wicca is a modern invention, and we know very little about Brittonic druidism and other similar things, in large part because the only period sources are Roman (people who wanted to vilify them). But they'd hear none of that 
@TimmyZ Er, what?
I was one of the first people to take a manor on the game, and one of the more consistent players through to the point you gave it up. We might not have been told mud-hut, but we were definitely told we were living at a very low level of development and wealth.
@Arkandel said in Eliminating social stats:
Just to make a quick note here, although that's my stance on the matter and I believe it's what makes the most sense, it'd be silly of me to make a thread asking people what they thought then not listen to them.
You are entitled to your patient tolerance and open mindedness. I laud and commend for it.
I do not share it. 
@Lain I am participating in the thread to support @Arkandel's general notion that the best solution to this whole thing is probably to throw it in a flaming hobo garbage can fire. Ditch social skills so the argument doesn't even exist about what they can do, or reformat them into appropriate NPC-oriented tools for games where that is relevant (it wont always be).
To an extent, part of that means also giving up these stupid arguments where people think they know the One True Way of how social dice ought to work and will keep talking about it until the heat death of the universe. You are coming in as a very amusingly zealous version of that, so, I dunno, convenient target?
@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:
Actually, writing poses after social rolls wasn't suggested in this thread at all, and everybody was speaking in terms of posing your attempt first and rolling to see if it works. In the context of this thread, that is new.
No one has Godwinned the thread yet, either. That doesn't making bringing up Hitler a novel argumentation strategy.
But if you think you just invented 'roll then pose' vs 'pose then roll' and are introducing some great ray of enlightenment here... I don't know what to tell you. That's cute? You're cute!
You still are not adding anything, and you will not add anything. You can continue to write great treatises on this subject, but your content has 100% been covered before. We've been grappling with this for decades, and it's been the same conversation almost every time. You're by all means encouraged to argue for arguing's sake to convince people who have entrenched their positions over said decades, just be aware that's all you're doing.
People tend to believe that they are "above the bullshit" and, by extension, so are their characters.
And this is why the argument will never go anywhere. I'm glad you at least comprehend the futility!
@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:
@bored said in Eliminating social stats:
This is why I'm very much with @Arkandel on 'nah, fuck it, just toss the shit out.'
But how does this differ from
'you better be able to RP charm if you want to be charming.'
Or
'you better be able to RP cooking meth with chemical accuracy to cook meth'
?
To a point you're right, taking out the systems comes down on the side of people who prefer RP.
Part of that is because they win by default, in most cases. As much as we have this argument over and over again, unless you're one of the very small minority of games that heavily enforces social dice and consequences (see Firan social imps) you... can't control how people RP to any meaningful degree. People who don't like how the dice fall can always subvert them (see a corollary to this argument we've had 1000000 times is the classic 'I get angry from losing an intimidate roll'). Very few games even succeed in promoting a scenario where dice are even frequently used, let alone enforcing them to any degree.
The other part is that the argument itself is inspired/encouraged by sticking to systems that do the weird thing of putting a fair degree of social dice into the game (encouraging people to buy and use those stats) and then not really supporting them. nWoD might have made a vague, half-hearted effort at it, and the... CoD or whatever we're calling 2.0 further than that, but these systems still pale compared to the number of pages devoted to combat. Doing away with them removes this incentive. This is useful because it stops encouraging people to build 'social gods' and then expect that to be an actual thing. Without them, people can still play socially minded characters, possibly focusing on mechanics other than combat (like resource-oriented skills or sheet options) so they have capital to trade on in social interactions.
Anyway, I don't mean to overly single you out for hostility other than to point out the at this point comical ludicrousness of people having this argument seriously the number of times they do. Sorry you got to the party late, but you really aren't adding anything.
@Thenomain And much like you seemed bewildered there that anyone would criticize a tool (surely they can only add options and are thus purely good, how could anyone doubt this?!), I don't think much of them here. We've seen it, over and over. These things tend to be placebos and ways for staff to absolve themselves of responsibility, not solutions, not even parts of solutions.
So you have to look at the social side. But in this case, you're never going to resolve the split between people who think 'punching is the same as lying is the same as meth cooking' and the people who think 'you better be able to RP charm if you want to be charming.' This is basically the Israel-Palestine of our hobby. We will have this exact, verbatim argument repeated into infinity on every game that tries to wrestle with it, and no one will ever agree, nor will any code ever fix it. In fact, I made a joke a bit back (apparently a mere 4 days ago!) about how often we have this precise stupid argument, and by speaking its name evidently summoned it into fucking existence once more.
This is why I'm very much with @Arkandel on 'nah, fuck it, just toss the shit out.'
@Thenomain I dunno, weren't you arguing for a ton of different coded solutions (some of which have been tried and didn't accomplish much) in the other thread about whatever, discomfort and boundaries etc? +warn? rp prefs? Color codes changing in the rooms? And a few posts back here you were supporting Ghost's secret rolls, which would essentially be another code solution.
How am I confused here? These are both largely attempts at code solutions to people being dicks.
@Thenomain Cool story. Let us know when you've out-coded all MU social problems, which is basically what you propose in every thread, and has obviously gotten super far in all the years you've been doing this.
Shockingly a new poster is arguing about this as if we haven't read literally everything they just typed dozens of times before!
Regardless of what is good or sensible, what is reasonable, it doesn't fucking work. Option 1: You can trust people to just use dice and negotiate. The result is well explored: it's your average WoD game, where people regularly argue and fight over these things, get angry at people for daring to roll social interactions, lie or refuse to honor them, use them to try and enforce TS, etc. Option 2: You create code to enforce the dice! Your result is Firan, where people abused the social imperative commands with little RP, the code had no ability to deal with any relevant situational modifiers, and staff was frequently called in to arbitrate/invalidate the results anyway because they were frequently abused and/or people didn't like the outcomes. Oh, and people still used it to try and force TS.
It will never work.
It will never work.
It will never work.
