Posts made by bored

Well, skills at 1-12 is really confusing, IMO, in terms of what is 'normal' what is 'master', and who gets to have what, and it probably contributes to what you're seeing. Its hard to reconcile whether your 'beginner' should have a 1 or a 3, and it's also probably hard to feel exceedingly competent at 7-9 when there's 10-12 staring you in the face, which may contribute to games using the higher values. I'm happy to link you to the game I'm talking about, if you really care.

To temper my criticism with some kindness, I do think that's a big improvement in your new version. 1-5 is much easier to mentally grasp and to lay out expectations for.

@faraday

There's a weird disonnace here between 'I am faraday the coder' and 'I am faraday the coder and also the person who says how games running my code are run', because while you say 'that would never be approved', it's precisely a character I apped on an FS3 game two months ago, minus a little rounding to make the numbers easy (ie, it might have actually been 3 skills at 10, a couple at 5, a couple at 6, one at 7, etc, not the 8 5s). You seem out of touch with how people are actually using your code, if you're saying 'this would never happen.' My app was hardly a twinky one, compared to characters on the game already.

Second, 1 xp per week doesn't change anything about my example. My example is that with that XP, whether it took 6 months or 12, I can buy up everything their character has, and have several whole skills at master territory.

Thirdly, I'm not sure how that will play out, admittedly, but linear vs geometric will always create an XP gap and encourage people to buy the maximum allowed # of skills at the highest values in CG.

Other people said it nicer, she just noped at it. And she asked me for a specific example of how it's gameable, so I gave an example.

But sure, if you think a system rewarding the people who game it most is good, then that's another stellar argument that this isn't a bug that needs fixing!

Actually, I made the point that I'm sure someone would be willing to code this for her. I would. It's not terribly hard.

@faraday said:

@bored said:

But they will. After 6 months playing, the master will have picked up all your rounded skills, and you will have gained only a fraction of their knowledge.

It's hard to argue without citing specific examples, but I haven't seen that phenomenon. But if true, I would suggest that's a case of the XP awards or costs needing to be adjusted, rather than a problem with chargen itself.

I'm not sure if you're failing to grasp simple math or what. At CG, you get 80 points (or however many). You give yourself as many max skills as staff lets you before declaring you a twink and kicking you off the game. Say that's 3 skills at 10. You spend 30 points, get that, 10 more on attributes (I'm just estimating), and then 40 points on 8 skills at 5. You take nothing at 1 or 2 because lol, that would be stupid. While I'm talking in theoreticals, this is close to me apping a character on an FS3 game a month or two ago.

Some other person, being an non-math oriented, well-intentioned, total opposite of a twink, spends their 70 points after attributes getting 4 skills at 1, 4 at 2, 4 at 3, 4 at 4, 4 at 5. They also take one skill at 10.

Now we play for 6 months. We get 2 xp per week, so we have 48 xp. Skills cost 1 per rank you're going to, I think? I've actually seem games modify this slightly, but I believe this is your normal version.

First thing, I buy their low skills: 4 at 1, 4 at 2, 4 at 3. That costs 4+12+24. I have 8 xp left.

Note that at this point, I have all their skills matched. I've covered their low ones, and their 4 4s and 4 5s are matched or exceeded by the 8 5s I took to start. I also have 3 10s, while they have 1.

If they try and bring their 4s to 5s to match me, that's 20xp. Now they try and catch up one of their 5s up to match the extra 10s I have. They can't, of course. They can get it to 8 (6+7+8 = 21) with less xp left over than I have.

So at this point, I have everything their character does, a 10 over their 8, plus an extra skill 10. And one more xp.

Do you get why your "philosophy" is bad design? There's no argument for this being positive.

@faraday You're still completely avoiding/missing/etc the point.

I'm not arguing that you need to make it easier to catch up with a master.

I'm arguing that the master, who spent, and I will quote you, their "entire prior life" doing this thing, should probably not end up as good at other things.

But they will. After 6 months playing, the master will have picked up all your rounded skills, and you will have gained only a fraction of their knowledge. Their character, in the long run, will simply be a superior human being who has accomplished more with their life.

As for simplicity, the difference between:

'You have 80 points to spend, things cost one, you hit a command and it tells you how many points you have left'

and

'You have 150 points to spend, things cost some increasing amount, you hit a command and it tells you how many points you have left.'

... is not that great. Yes, the second is more complicated, but the fact that you're hitting +raise X and its spamming back your remaining points really makes it idiot-proof, I'd say.

As for your vision, again, I find that strange that you're forcing a particular vision on people to access what you otherwise put forward as a generic system.

Yeah, I feel as though explaining why this is a problem shouldn't be required, it's pretty obvious.

I suppose, worst comes to worse, this is something people can hack her code to do, but again, since most places that use FS3 do so because they don't have a real coder to begin with, I feel like we're going to get 'stuck' with the bad version alot.

@faraday You have a lot of modules and such, seem to support people doing their own thing, why not make this a toggle or something and let game-runners pick? It seems an odd point for you to 'stick' on, as philosophy or whatever, since you're not even the one running the games, you're just providing a tool for people to run games. And to avoid the 'asking someone giving you something for free to do more work to appease' you side of things, I'm sure any number of people here could code that modified version if you want, but if its not included with your stuff, people won't have access to it.

@faraday

I've played many games based on your current system, since it's basically become the go-to for people who don't have a coder of their own (and that's not a bad thing at all; the system is a little generic but it's good it enables those games). Every character I made, it certainly felt like an issue, because every point I took out of a 'peak' skill (regardless of how high the admins set the limit for said peak skills, or what the line between twink and non-twink was for particular people), I knew was effectively oftten several months I was setting myself back.

The problem with your methodology isn't that it espouses 'it takes a long time to master something.' The problem is that what it -effectively- says is: 'If you play a master of something as your CG concept, you will end up well rounded. If you play a well roudned person as a concept, you'l probably never be as good as the Master, and they'll be just as well rounded if not moreso than you.'

You can retain your vision by adding geometric costs into CG. Absent that, its just bad design. Sorry.

@faraday said:

@Packrat said:

One thing that I always run into with FS is that it suffers from the 'linear character generation, geometric progression' problem where having a stat of say, 5 in character generation, will cost 5 points while a stat at 1 will cost 1 point.

To quote a common software saying: "That's not a bug, that's a feature." Not to say anyone has to like it or agree with it, but it's designed that way quite on purpose.

FS3 subscribes to a very simple philosophy that It takes a very long time to get really good at something. So if you want to be an expert in something, you need to start out as an expert rather than relying on XP to get you there during gameplay. (Edit to add: I also see no reason to penalize people in chargen for wanting to be experts by making them pay more. You're designing characters, not character sheets.)

So it's not meant as a "punishment", it's just a consequence of a cardinal assumption in the system's design.

Min/maxing in my experience is easily dealt with during chargen, especially with the new version of FS3 where you get up to 4 interest skills for free. Everyone can be well-rounded without sacrificing their action abilities.

It baffles me that you think this is a good idea. Game designers are learning (slowly, kicking and screaming) not to do this, see the newer WoD.

Making your chargens work this way punishes the people who min-max the least, and make the most well-rounded characters. You may be able to deal with extreme cases as staff, but it's still bad design.

@Arkandel said:

If any element of the game is actually disruptive to its theme and direction then sure, intervene. If you're trying to run a sober political vampiric sphere and some players want to furry it up, come dressed up as furries and do furry things in your Elysia then yeah, you have the right to intervene.

Aka, any game Nuku played on!

That aside, I'm 100% with @lordbelh, and the last thing we need is random people dictating from their high horses, whether it's about 'proper D/s play' (whatever the living fuck that is), professional depictions, race, etc. Obvious egregiousness will be obvious, and staff can police their own theme, but beyond that I don't really give a fuck what you think of my or someone else's portrayal of something.

@Ghost

There's nothing specifically anti-genre in survival about pre-existing couples, but yes, if your premise is totally random strangers only it obviously messes with that and probably won't work great in a MU environment, separate areas or otherwise.

Generally the issue with splitting the playerbase has less to do with splitting up OOC couples (I've never seen people split randomly as you're suggesting, typically it's a choice of apping to play in X region or Y region) but simply one of population density and the whole 'critical mass' concept that is a feature of game survival. Splitting people up reduces chances for public interaction and self-sustaining RP, and encourages people just to RP in their insular groups. And as much as it seems like that's often what people want, they also demonstrate a propensity for growing bored when they don't have the alternate option. At the more cynical end I'd say its because people want an audience for their PDA, on the more generous I'd say its because outside stimuli makes even the personal RP more interesting.

@faraday

I think you really have to think about it in your game design and particularly in your CG rules.

For the BSG version, for example, you could say that after some reasonable point, new military PCs are not going to be 'always been there' sorts, but new recruits off civilian vessels, which is both accurate to the show and would nicely explain bringing them in without them knowing everyone. It's just going to make some people unhappy when they want to play their Caprician elite military family Adama clones. And you just need the staff-balls to say tough shit at that point. On the other hand, you'd want to make your advancement policies friendly enough that these new guys can catch up and not feel like a permanent set of second-class military citizens.

A zombie game is going to be way, way less restricted. Almost anyone can be out there and the stories/justifications for them showing up are equally endless. You may have to limit 'settlement' PCs after some point to avoid the 'I was always here' stuff, but I don't think that's terribly onerous. Again, design matters: if you are gonna limit people in the settlement, you probably want to make sure that coming from the outside is still an attractive option, that they still qualify for jobs in the settlement quickly, etc.

@Ghost

It's unfortunately almost a rule of MU design that if you split your playerbase your game will die or at least suffer horribly until you integrate them. It's not that the idea doesn't sound cool, but it's just one of those things with the size of the hobby etc. Really the only way to combat it is doing the thing you said not to (alts), and even then it tends not to work.