Posts made by bored

@Arkandel

I'd say either your version or the @Salty-Secrets option below (usable vs NPCs only) are your only realistic choices. Rolling generic skills for PvP social is never going to work in a MU environment. We can (and have) argue circles around why it SHOULD work, how people who don't honor dice are bad, awful people, how people who can't pose good social stuff are pathetic RPers, etc, but in the end its just empty sound & fury. It never works, and we know that from experience. That said, I'm not sure powers are in the same category, since they tend to have more defined effects.

Some version of the NPCs-only approach is what many mainstream games embrace (D&D and all its inheritors, Pathfinder, 13th Age, etc) with a pretty self-evident record. They do still have some powers that can control other characters but typically they're very straightforward in the parameters, and where there are glitches in these systems they're usually confined to individual spells/class abilities making it much easier to narrow things down and ban/patch. Otherwise, dice are there to shortcut NPC interactions and work pretty well for that. You can always hand out some bonuses for excellent RP, but the game doesn't hinge on it and it works reasonably well satisfying various player types.

@Jennkryst It's not that it wouldn't work because it's more narrative, it doesn't work because of particular structural reasons. It assumes PCs fighting either faceless mooks or very-different-rules big badguys, and basically can't handle PvP of any kind. Even cooperative activities favor a railroad-y sort of style where, as someone said, its much more about how you get where you're going than where you actually get, and... I dunno, it doesn't appeal to me generally, and I can see it just going eight kinds of wrong with the way MU PCs tend to act.

1e system with 2e setting was one of the many 'system options' on my mind, but on the other side of things, I think 1e is so bogged down in little details (very much like, say, oWoD) that it's very hard to teach to new players in a MU setting and basically impossible to automate to any degree, which is a requirement for me at this point.

Re: what people do, I don't think the setting is any worse than L&L; if anything, it's got improvements on that. Its further ahead in faux-history and the social structures are a little less rigid while still having classes (ie, you can be something other than a noble or a dirt farmer that has no reason to interact with anyone), hanging out in bawdy taverns is actually a huge part of the setting, etc.

The new system is pretty MU-inappropriate, unfortunately (Personally, I think it's just bad, but even if you're into the hyper indie Wick-wank, there are many things it doesn't really support for a game with more than a single troupe of primary PCs).

I'm still kind of wanting to do some kind of age of sail-related game, but I can't really decide how to go about it. A setting like 7th sea's vs a light historical take (ie something like Black Sails), which system, etc etc. Also unfortunately it tends to be a setting that really bumps up against some other long-time MU problem things like travel times.

Semi automated is still a lot more than nothing. Arguably @faraday's stuff achieves a lot of what is mentioned at least on the combat end despite her saying it doesn't interest her, in that it allows players to handle combats of pretty much any scale or seriousness without ST aid.

@Arkandel said in How to Change MUing:

Let's speak in riddles here for a minute.

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

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

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

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

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

The only thing you can do to make people complain more is take it seriously.

And I mean in general, collectively, across all games, as a cultural shift.

The more that staff respond seriously (and ethically, since people they know may be involved), vs. the kind of defensive hand-flailing and denials that we often see here, the more people will come forward. That is 100% the only solution.

@Lithium said in Integrating Combat System and Roleplay:

@bored Why not? Because it's another layer of separation. Some people play from their phones or tablets. Not everyone has a roll20 account, then there's the setup that's needed for those various games.

I played on a Dark Sun game a while back that used an online website called editgrid I think to make maps and run adventures with. Don't know if Editgrid is still around actually...

But it still causes a lot of back and forth. Having it all centralized onto the game, even if a little time consuming to set up, is still putting everyone in the same place at the same time and overall allows the greatest user base.

Sure, but you also have to remember that 8 hour combats are something our hobby is notorious for, and that's playing without a grid that takes multiple additional commands per round (and presumably extra adjudication, people needing to take things back when errors are made, etc).

And it's funny you mention editgrid, because the SW game I played on that used this code, it quickly became the norm that people just started using editgrid, google spreadsheets, basically anything else they could that was interactive and easily sharable, because the code was simply not tenable. People would run it a couple times, but eventually, especially when they needed to do things quickly, wanted more complicated terrain, whatever, it would be simpler just to draw in another window.

So I really think this is a game breaker for a lot of people. Some will enjoy it, but the complexity level and additional time investment is huge. I think the only way around it is better software, or just accepting that our medium isn't really a good match.

I've played on an SW game using that map code (or something equivalent), and while it's able to do a lot, it quickly raises the question:

At this point, why am I not using roll20, maptools, or some other proper VTT solution?

Because while you can make all the terrain, and make your dudes move around, it (like all things MUSH) is a ton of command line shit to do it. It adds massive overhead to GMing, a learning curve to any player who wants to use combat, as well as increasing turn time for the players to sort through all that stuff every round.

I think any MU system should be cognizant of the technology and design itself appropriately. MUers are familiar, for instance, with places as a concept of space, so maybe a combat system that used those would be sensible. But trying to build full grid systems in seems like trying to reinvent the wheel... out of non-wheel appropriate materials. Alternately, we need to up our technology game (presumably, one could make an interactive map in a browser window and have it send information to the game, in Evennia or similar).

@Pandora said in Good Political Game Design:

Maybe it's a perspective thing. I play code-heavy games, so I'm very used to seeing 'Might makes right' & the idea of a game with an emphasis on politics and relationships going the way of 'Idiot with a big militaristic force and no political support, leadership platform, or allies steamrolling to the top via brute strength' would just be disappointing to me, personally. Everyone has their own vision for these games, I'm just stating my opinion that I am against that particular vision and can only hope it doesn't come to pass.

I could take all of this and flip it around, though. Why does the 'Idiot with a big militaristic force and no political support, leadership platform, or allies steamrolling to get to stay at the top via brute strength massive benefits they had from day 1 because they took Duke Fancypants'?

The issue is the assumption that people at the top should be more powerful and stay more powerful, not whether social is more powerful than military, or RP more powerful than +code. The details of how well individual players use the +commands and/or RP to stay in power or gain it is... the game? That's the game you're playing. It might trend code or RP heavy but it's still the game. So it's a problem when the game is ludicrously rigged so that the higher ranking cannot possibly be overcome, for reasons of laziness, favoritism, and poor grasp of the history they're trying to replicate.

@Pandora said in Good Political Game Design:

@Ganymede said in Good Political Game Design:

@Pandora said in Good Political Game Design:

I loathe the idea of a family stockpiling military assets in order to frienemy their ruling house. Sure it's realistic, but do we really want controlling levels of power in the hands of whoever decides to ignore political maneuvering, social warfare, diplomacy & playing the game in favor of stockpiling the military stat?

It depends on how the game manages the military stat.

The argument is about a single family being able to flex on their ruling lord solely through military might. If this is able to come to pass, it doesn't matter how the game manages the military stat, it's being managed poorly.

I fail to see how this is a problem, so long as the assumption is that these +command systems underlying the RP are intended to be a large part of the game, are functional and not broken to the point of RP-ignoring abuse, etc. If you have some vassal with strong resources and they start building a military... maybe take action before they get too far. Maybe ask your other vassal who lives next to them if they're cool with it. If you do none of those things, and you get facepunched out of your crown, it's on you.

If this thing EVER happened on these games, they'd be far, far more interesting places to play.

When I said every game fails at it, I really meant every game.

I think it usually comes from the top-down way people are likely to write out their theme. People write from the highest tier to the lowest, putting the latter in as afterthoughts and filler/roster fodder/etc. The story in their mind is about the cast they originally write, the King and his advisors, rival big lords, the awesome Prince McBadasses, etc.

Then after a while, someone thinks 'Oh yeah, well, I guess we better make House Pigfarmer so uh, people have something to app?'

It's not pure malicious favoritism/saving the good shit for staffalts (although that's usually part of it), but just the inevitable result of all the juice getting pumped into the initial NPC/'top PCs likely to be played by staff or staff friends lineup' and other things being an afterthought.

@Lisse24 said in Good Political Game Design:

Second, the power structure needs to be dynamic and changeable. In too many games that spout being political, including most L&L games, it's really, really hard to change who is in power. Firan was horrible at this, especially in later years. The clan leaders held all the cards and more minor nobles didn't really have much to bring to the table. Politicking was limited to between clans, meaning that 95% of the game population was excluded from that game play. Was it possible to take over a clan? Sure. It happened a few times, but not nearly often enough to make an interesting political game.

I keep wanting to make a permanent version of this I can link to, but I've brought it up in a couple places: L&L games tend to hit the trap of doing a very structured, CK2-like concept of feudalism, where dukes rule counts and counts rule barons or lords etc. Or Clan Leaders rule irrelevant noble families that no one cared about at all (Firan). Almost inevitably, the power of these figures is exponential moving up the hierarchy.

This is both wrong from even the slightest look at history, and stupid from a play design perspective. You want your primary actors to be at parity. Now, maybe it's fine to have only your Dukes etc sitting at the main council (and, see above, I'm in favor of a primary council-like entity that probably maxes out at around 10 people), but all the lesser lords should have pretty much comparable resources, so that their loyalty and assistance is something you rely on, not something you demand.

And to date, basically every L&L game ever gets a big fat F on this one.

@Ominous Limited scope, clear objectives, clear standards for how things are 'won' or decided, and a limited cast of primary players is pretty much all stuff I can sign on to.

There were always be other stuff going on, that falls into the realm of simple interpersonal relations, clique politics, etc, which staff cannot do anything whatsoever about. But for the actual game sanctioned part of things, you want a very clear structure or no one will know what to do or how anything is decided and it will ratchet up the paranoia factor that much faster.

@Apos This is a pretty solid approach to it. The 'is this skill actually worth the points I paid for it?' question is always the most essential, I think, and as long as you give the skills value in game then people can't make that complaint anymore. They might not be as good for making the other dude lose forever because hah hah ur ded, but that's the tradeoff.

Anything else, I think, is pretty much icing. Throwing in status effects/tilts or whatever is a fun system to ponder, but I'd never want to see something as black and white and mind control-like as Firan's social imperatives. Those things were a nightmare because they were so abusable and depended entirely on (obviously potentially biased) staff intervention in almost every case, making the fact that there was code in the first place a joke.

The super powers vs non is an important point. I think people often get so wrapped up in 'dice should matter' that they lose some idea of the scope of this stuff they're asking for. There are things 'good social skills' can do, but outright controlling others, changing their beliefs, etc, is hard.

Consider that in our modern life, we see people argue about politics, religion, various forms of personal identity and belief every day. Nonstop, 24/7, bibles worth of text across various platforms. And we also see people entrench themselves and give very little ground. While the idea of dice rolls for grand debates where one side eventually concedes has cinematic appeal, consider the occurrences of congress or parliament breaking down into insults (or even fist fights), or that the solution to these things in Roman democracy was often mob violence or assassination. Or for something less exaggerated, note that debate clubs involve judging, requiring a third party to sort it out.

Changing belief by talking at someone is monumentally difficult, and for a host of reasons, probably not something great to pursue in coded social systems. I think plausible systems are always going to have to pivot on other parts of the system where you can translate social influence into other spheres: ie intimidation could reduce combat effectiveness, making the choice of fight or flight more weighted, whereas various forms of persuasion and diplomatic meddling probably need bigger NPC and political capital systems around them so you can influence NPCs, gain points, or even steal them from someone else (convincing them to help you). Arx is a pretty good test game for this kind of thing because it has those backends, whereas most WoD-like games will struggle with it.

@Lithium

When I say I dislike the rest I'm mostly talking about the aspect/fate/compel system. I hate pretty much everything about it, and I wasn't meaning to discuss or suggest that part of it at all. Like if someone wants a fate game, cool on them, but that's not what I'm talking about. The stress/consequence system really has nothing to do with the rest of it, and you can pretty much lift it while ejecting that stuff.

Basically it's just a 2D wound system, no different than say D&D w/ an optional Critical Hit module, with the caveat that you're using one to prevent the other. That's the thing I'm getting at. In a non FATE version, the consequences wouldn't be loosey-goosey things that don't do anything unless someone compels them, they'd be more like NWoD tilts or whatever, actual things with actual game effects.

@Sparks said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Thenomain said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Sparks said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Physical combat is easy. There's no "I found your sword-strike unconvincing"; you got hit, you got hit. Social combat, though? That's harder to define.

Fate does this incredibly elegantly, mostly that social combat isn't about social situations, but your ability to maneuver in them. To Fate, social grace is a mental trait.

Fate also requires an active storyteller for many things; it's not particularly great, in my experience, at automated resolution between players.

While I think most of FATE is dull, same-y, and not a particularly great system either on a mush or off (particularly everything related to fate points themselves), there's probably some room where the stress track vs. consequences element of its conflict system could be converted usefully to MU use, and work nicely for abstract things like social and resource/stats conflict.

It provides a kind of release valve where the victim/loser of an interaction can control, to some degree, what they're giving up while still suffering defeat/setback. IE the victim of an intimidation roll can flee outright/surrender/hand over stuff/whatever (equiv to losing all their stress) or stick around while being rattled/nervous (suffering a penalty in combat if that occurs, or in other social rolls, etc). This handles the (totally valid) concerns over different kinds of reactions from different personality types, core values that can't easily be coded, etc. It's also a bit of an escalation/push your luck system, because persisting in conflicts longer tends to reduce your degree of control.

Of course, these systems do tend to make certain outcomes impossible if the victim doesn't want them (seduction is a good example), but I imagine that's a feature, not a bug, to many.

@Packrat Pragmatically, that's a much better way to handle it, for most scenarios, esp things like the Dervishes. Probably should have treated some things in separate categories, ie armor, high-speed cav stuff (whether literal cav or using the modern meaning), but just making stronger things worth more is decent overall. The degree of min-maxing the original system allowed and encouraged was nuts (including things like mixing unit types to shore up weak stats at lower cost) and totally untenable. I think I recall proving that system wise 1 BB could kill infinity of various troop types due to some weird special they had, etc.

If you ever do something and actually have troops, I offer system design help on setting up that side of it because there are some major pitfalls and do/don'ts in that whole arena

Even I'll give them thumbs up for this. Dunno if I'm ready to give the game a chance, but considering the clique crossover back on Firan, it's encouraging to see they can recognize that he's more problem than he's value.

@Packrat

Again, making something "from theme" doesn't really mean shit in terms of what PCs get to play. This is such an easy trap to fall into, but it's not hard to demonstrate how silly it is. It's "in theme" in Vampire to have ridiculous ancients rise from slumber and totally outclass every PC, but we usually gave staffers the stink eye when they let their friends get a 5th Gen ubermonster. So you just need actual rules for this stuff. It's not hard, really!

And I'm pretty sure the 'all troops being equal' thing wasn't remotely true. I mean, I helped Paulus with testing for his mass combat system (I wrote a little app to simulate them out, even) and there were absolutely troops with different stats. Maybe he threw that out later? And the Li Halan guy had a lot of stuff. Again maybe things changed later when they got bitched at enough, or whatever.