Posts made by bored

@Packrat I got the first Red Rising book for free at comic con and it struck me a bit like 'I'm gonna combine every popular Young Adult series I can think of!' (Hunger Games + Harry Potter + whatever that one about the genetic super kids). Not a terrible book for all of that, but still kind of my impression of it.

THAT SAID, uh:

• Crunchy estate/fief management, resources should be limited, (social or economic), people should compete over them and gain tangible benefits. Resources should be expended and everyone should always want more.
  This should be fairly abstracted especially given the scale, a few moving parts, but people should be able to intuitively grasp what is going on. Also this should require fairly minimal administrative burden. Build in reasons to delegate power also!

Good luck with that.

Or, more constructively, you need to scale this ambition way back. Some of your ideas are contradictory (crunchy and abstract?) and some require more code than you likely have coders to slave away for ('minimal administrative burden'), etc. I shouldn't need to remind you how SC's spreadsheets of doom worked out.

Want to be the Space Duke who owns rich Space Estates in the core worlds and has an uninterrupted supply of infinite completely legitimate Space Gold? You might have to compromise on your Duelling skill.

I do approve of this, given by fairly stringent belief in having everyone use the same chargen. Fuck features, now and forever.

@Jennkryst If you're actually interested in running L5R as opposed to kludging it for 7S (which was the original poster's aim), I could make efforts at resurrecting what of the code I have. The main advantage is that I actually did an automated CGen that handled most of the printed 4e material.

However, it's not in a convenient textfile form like Theno's stuff (ie, I'd have to boot up a server, do decompiles, and then probably fitz around with DB#s etc to get it working on a running game). But I put a lot of effort into it, so I'd not mind seeing it put to some use.

@Arkandel said:

Double post: I'm terrible about my use of commas and semi colons. It's empirical if anything, and I use it when it ... feels... right.

This may help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M94ii6MVilw

(It won't help)

I guess we'll just have to agree to agree that we think the other is shit at reading comprehension.

@Thenomain

Well that escalated quickly.

His post absolutely implies a sense of best practices, and saying 'which you can violate sometime if you have sufficient reason' (like uh, playing a character who specifically breaks the 4th wall as a personality trait, I guess?) doesn't really especially soften that. He goes on to use a 'rules are meant to be broken' analogy, which sort of implies a level of authority on the initial, which he's trying to backpedal on.

I think it's fairly obvious there's a prescriptive element to his post, and I disagree with some of it (like the idea that metaposing is inherently to be avoided - I only agree in the very narrow passive aggressive subset).

Also, since you decided to be a cock, you should actually read that wiktionary link, I don't think it says what you think it says.

@Halicron

You can't put up a definitive list and then wave off criticisms of it with 'all lists are made to be broken'. If that's your feeling, you probably should have written a different post to begin with.

@Lithium Ok?

It's my experience. The times I've had people rant and rave and argue super strongly that they are doing something for OMG IC REASONS THAT ARE IN CHARACTER AND ITS WHAT THE CHARACTER WOULD DO, it's 99 times out of 100 an excuse for them being shitty and disruptive.

I doubt you're probably one of these people, as similar to other observations, you're probably just wrapped up in the weird semantics of it. A lot of people took it on as a mantra in early MUing and really internalized it, but don't necessarily seem to evaluate what they're arguing for otherwise.

To talk a little more about the meta stuff, @saosmash and otherwise:

I definitely do it for humor a lot too. And not just humor. When I talked about the evolution in my writing from MU infancy to now, I think the big difference is that when I started, it was strictly an interactive medium through which I was playing a game. I wasn't writing, I was communicating in-game actions. Now I think of it a lot more as an exercise in shared writing, and so I write for people to enjoy what I'm writing, not just to deliver information. So if I can make a pose more interesting, funny, sad, or what have you by injecting a subjective authorial aside, I'm really happy to do that.

I think there's also something to be said for getting at a character's emotional or mental state in the text of a pose beyond 'Name frowns' or so on, to facilitate accurate interaction (this gets at the classic characters are better than their players trope). Players are generally good at neither typing out the specific nuances of facial expression nor at interpreting them from others' texts, while characters might be good at these things. Characters develop bonds and rapports that might be much stronger than the familiarity of the two players may be OOCly for one another's RP. So I often find it's useful to be descriptive and let others decide what they pick up on and react to ICly.

The people who are willing to make metaposed swipes at people are generally nasty little weasels impersonating human beings, and getting them to stop this won't stop them from being douchebags in other ways.

I agree that the idea of acting like you can totally split OOC and IC is hilarious, also.

The people who pretend that there's some concept of strict 'ICness' are generally either total nutbags who get way too wrapped up in things, or assholes who use 'well it's what my character would do' as an excuse to, well, be assholes. There is no point at which the OOC entity behind the keyboard is not making decisions, so there's no such thing as pure IC.

Registering to violently disagree that breaking up actions into multiple poses and making simple things into six-line affairs is any sign of quality. To me, it's generally a sign of being a purple-prose loving douchenozzle and I don't see any reason to encourage this. It's good to have a sense of continuity of activity between poses, but if the only way you can pad out a pose is describing the physical process of a basic action I'm very likely capable of imagining on my own in minute detail? I think that's a sign that there's nothing interesting to actually RP about and the scene is probably dead.

I'd also quibble about metaposing. It almost certainly depends on the tone of the scene and your company, and of course the content of the actual pose, but personally as I've gotten better at RPing since my MU-infancy, I actually use more meta content than when I started. Subjective vs objective writing is hardly settled in other literary forms, after all. I can see the point of including this to warn against the 'hostile' metaposing that we're all familiar with, but otherwise I'd say its pretty unfounded as a 'best practices' sort of rule.

Otherwise I mostly agree. The tense thing is wrong on a pedantic level (there's plenty of cases in writing where you can switch tenses to actually show or refer to a necessary difference in timing), although I imagine you mean it in a more general sense.

As a rule, I don't do it in my tabletop because it's simply not the style of my group (and we're people who've been playing together for a decade+ at this point). We have a fairly adversarial GM norm, the players like number crunching (we mostly play D&D) etc. The only time I'd really consider it is if for whatever reason the dice got so far off statistical expectations that it was destroying a game, although even then I prefer some other type of solution (ie, I'd rather have an ally NPC show up, give the players some tactical option to pursue as the map changes, etc).

This isn't to say I have a big problem if other people do as part of their style. I do have a feeling that if you need a situation to have an outcome, you simply shouldn't be rolling, though, because it's disingenuous to go about the process like that. You also have to be careful about how you distribute your fudging, since it can end up effectively as a form of favoritism.

On a MU, the player-competitive dimension can exacerbate the above. Players may be competing socially for who does the best in certain contests, adventures, benefits they can gain, etc. It's well and good to say everyone should be more cooperative, but the reality is that often that's simply not how it is, so fudging can end up giving someone a leg up unless you're very even with how you do it ('everyone gets one', etc).

This has come up on a game I'm currently playing, in fact, as a certain GM sometimes (but not predictably) will fudge down damage on a player to save them horrible fates (death, permanent injury, etc). The problem is that it's a fairly high-lethality game and other players have suffered these bad results, so there's an argument that fudging in favor of anyone is a disservice to those who've taken their bad dice and lived with the consequences at other instances.

@Songtress said:

You know "Shin Sekai Yori", would make sort of for an interesting Anime. (Since its not about the 'action, but how Fucked up Society can be... its a great show. Admitedly hever one has TK!, but its interesting, and really thrilling.
You'd need to do something to make it mushable a bit.

At the very least, the inevitably huge amounts of TS would be totally canon!

@faraday said:

Perhaps you missed the part where I specifically said "And, btw, I'm not saying the people who do #1 or #2 are "ZOMG evil min-maxers" or anything. It's just a different approach, totally valid on some games. But that's not what I want on mine." I don't want automated bots or character classes/levels on my game either. That doesn't mean I look down on people who play MMOs. In fact, I quite enjoyed Star Wars Galaxies and WoW. It's just a different style of play.

I didn't miss it, I just don't think its genuine. It's like adding a smiley to a nasty remark, or saying 'no offense' before you offend someone.

No offense, but you seem like a smug elitist with a poor grasp of the narrative-mechanical relationships you claim to be promoting with your badly designed XP system

See how that works? I harp on it because its a really pervasive attitude and I think you're doing a lot to promote it here, including by stamping your feet down at a widely-made suggestion in a thread where you were supposedly looking for feedback. Even in your supposed clarification above, the attitude is there. 'Some games' and then you start talking about MMOs. Right. You're totally not painting in people who know and care about the rules as much as, or alongside of and in support of RP as some kind of vagrant tribe of powergamers, inferior to your soulplaying contingent of deeply immersive writers who don't care about those rules things because RP first man (who, I think history tells us, have just as many shitty twinks in their ranks).

I cannot physically roll my eyes harder.

It's also totally bizarre, because your concept of design-promoting-philosophy is actually backward. Your design doesn't promote your philosophy; it promotes min-maxing in the extreme (as I've demonstrated repeatedly with the basic math). All your 'well your BG has to justify it' shtick does is force people to come up with BGs to support their twinkery, which isn't hard (see my 'rural hunter turned weapon specialist').

I made it before, in fact! But you know, she keeps saying she'll stop, and she doesn't.

Besides, the whole 'there are these 3 kinds of players, and while its cool if you want to be one of these other two, I prefer the one I am not-so-obliquely suggesting is more RP-focused and less powergamey' shtick really gets to me. It's a nasty, negative attitude (shaming anyone who does the slightest bit of math in a game full of numbers) wrapped up in nice words. I think it deserves to be called out as smug and nasty.

@faraday said:

None of these ways is "right" or "wrong" in the absolute sense of the word, but #3 is what I would call closest to the "spirit" of FS3. There's very little thought involved in chargen. You just go through the very short action skill list and pick the descriptive name that best fits your character in each one. Then you pick a couple interests to round

The 'spirit' of FS3 is still that the guy who apps, say (using your fondness for military stuff), a hunter turned weapons specialist, with max for CG firearms will be a fundamentally better character than the guy who apps, I don't know, a military college trained commissioned officer turned desk jockey with a broad range of academic and social skills on top of military stuff from basic.

The redneck hunter, after a couple months, will be just as good at all the random stuff the above character has, while the other guy will never be as good of a shot. BOTH people are approaching CG from your #3 option 'organic CG' approach, yet one is punished by your system.

Hence, that part of your system is bad. No amount of your vaguely smug elitist RPer justification will change that.

@Apos said:

I'd be less concerned by twinks and more concerned with completely new players getting through CG, playing a month, then feeling 'cheated' later when they realize they could have designed their sheet a different way to save XP. In making a newbie friendly system I think that case is significantly more worrisome than random assholes (see @bored ).

Assuming you're not calling me the random asshole (well, or at least, hopefully, not a random twink, I probably qualify as a random asshole for other reasons) this is absolutely something I tried to get across and that people like to ignore to shout twink. It is every much a TRAP for all the absolutely not a powergamer superior roleplayer bambis who don't mean anyone harm, as it is an exploitable playground for the evil, mean, dastardly twinks who learned how to do arithmetic and selfishly decide not to gimp themselves horribly.

You can look at it from either perspective, but it will always generate huge gaps in effective XP, and this will exacerbate real problems (like the oft-discussed issue of niche protection vs toolbox dinos).

@Thenomain

That was an awful lot of words. None of them remotely invalidate anything I've said.

It's still absolutely used as a playable out of the box system by lots of games, and whatever pedantic magic you want to attempt doesn't change that, nor does it justify the base framework, system, system of systems or whatever you want to call it for having a fundamentally, deeply flawed CG/XP model that produces, almost as a matter of course, huge XP disparities between CGs.

@faraday
I don't think you're really engaging this honestly (and thought you'd stopped caring).

You say it's not broken from your POV, even after you asked me for specifics and I showed you, what, nearly 100xp worth of gap between characters cged in different ways. What would be a problem, by your standards?

The rest of your text above, I don't know what it even means. 'Core values?' The core value of FS3 is linear cg, exponential xp? Really? It feels like you're just doubling down harder and harder on this being something worth defending, despite giving no reason it's actually valuable or defensible beside your vague 'philosophy.' I think we can toss realism out, because your preferred version is hardly any more realistic, nor is the system on the whole.

@Alzie

Except... it is largely fixable here. The fix has been discussed. The fix is obvious and will work. For reasons of 'philosophy' (?) and 'realism' (lol) it will not be implemented!

Right, and an issue not being 100% fixable is a reason to discount any attempt to fix it.

@Warma-Sheen

It's bullshit, of course.

I have a real issue with the people who talk about systems like this and habitually put the onus on the players, calling them twinks and worse if they make the slightest observation about good mechanical choices and bad mechanical choices, rather than acknowledging that an exploitable system should be fixed. The average player who tweaks their sheet to be efficient per the game rules is not a 'twink'. They're just someone who knows the game and isn't interested in playing The Price is Right with their stats, guessing at how high they can go without going over some staffer's totally arbitrary high mark and getting screamed at and branded The Worst Kind of PlayerEvar.

Saying its 'what your BG supports' tends to be polite language to cover up staffers being able to be arbitrary, nepotistic lunatics. I'm not saying @faraday is this, but considering how I've been yelled at for totally sane sheets and OKed with borderline abusive ones on the same games sometimes (and by people who are considered sane, credible posters on this board) I have basically 0 faith in any staffer's 'good judgement' as a benchmark of anything except whether they're in a good mood that day.

Well, presumably with so many fewer skills and so many fewer ranks, the XP costs are higher?

It might be less of an issue if there's really less variety you can do in CG, but it still sort of boils down to setting a 'trap' for the players who don't take the time to 'powergame', 'twink', or in less hostile, loaded words, simply figure out the implications of the system. If its 20 points among 10 skills, and the game limits you to say, one 5 starting, 5, 4, 3, 3, 3, 2 (which covers your 6 relevant skills) is still simply better than 5, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 1 or 4, 4, 3, 3, 3, 3 etc.

And I think saying 'well staffers will catch the twinks' is an awful, awful way of monitoring it. Is one of those obviously twinkier than the others? This mentality basically makes CG a game of chicken where either you see how much you can get away with before staff decides (completely arbitrarily) that you have one 4 too many, you powergaming asshole (see how stupid that sounds?), or you spread things out and find out you're perpetually behind other people, who have all your skills and more.

So, maybe it won't be as bad, but its still bad design. And I don't say that to be insulting, as in you are a bad person for coming up with the design, but rather in that it is a framework that causes a lot of problems for very little (if any? I struggle to think of any) reward.