Posts made by bored

@Arkandel said:

• Pick the best player from those applying, in your opinion.
• Exclude good players you know because you happen to know them, thus penalizing them for it.
• Randomize the selection. Roll the dice!
• Don't have an Elder at all.
• Have Elders played by staff.

You missed "let everyone play elders if you want elder rp". That or 4 are my preferences.

If you really need them as NPCs in the background, 5 is OK, but this is really a fine line and many staffers will just try and use the NPCs as personal PCs or ignore them. But that gets into the whole 'don't hire shitty staff' (and perhaps more important, 'actually fire your friends when they turn out to be shitty staff') thing.

@Apos

Ah, ok.

First, while you're right that some jerks might still guilt trip people over 'wasting' their potential, I think that's a pretty small problem by comparison and a small sacrifice to make (and that those jerks will always be jerks). It's mostly an OOC social problem, at any rate. By contrast, it's pretty hard to be stuck with a character you see potential in, but that staff has arbitrarily decided has no future. That's a gameplay problem.

Beyond that, I'm also not advocating every char on a roster be created equally ambitious, just that there be no weird OOC dictate that X shall be able to advance and Y shall not. You never know how RP might go, and if some random blacksmith stumbles naturally into heroism, that should be OK, rather than triggering a response of 'well, you should have apped someone else if you wanted that kind of RP' Similarly I'm not advocating that everyone have the same strength score. That's silly.

A normal by-the-points CG can generate a wide range of characters based on how people spend their points, but maintains at least some vague standard. A roster system should follow that same idea of a standard, and merely pre-generate a wide variety of characters by a similar standard.

@Ganymede said:

I hope this post clarifies my position.

I think so, and I'm mostly in agreement with your last post.

My big thing is that I wouldn't want to name a Prince from the get-go, which we seem to agree on. If for whatever reason you are forced to (we're obviously moving away from game creator to average sphere staffer now, and I've been assuming the former), naturally you would prefer someone with a good reputation to the alternative.

I still think that the MU (and WoD MU in particular) culture is waaaaay too attached to the notion of feature characters as necessary to begin with, and that generally they're a net negative for the hobby, but that doesn't seem to be your issue.

@TNP

I don't think that's how sampling works.

@Apos said:

So you get into a case where you say, 'Well if players want to make characters that are intrinsically worse, let them CG them themselves and handicap them' but then players complain about story aspects or slice-of-life characters being overlooked, and I'm not totally sure how to balance those demands from groups that want much different things out of CG.

I don't get what you're saying here, or rather, I don't understand how you think the part you quote as not solving things doesn't actually solve things. Why isn't leaving them to handicap themselves if they want a solution? Why do you need to pre-handicap a character? I just don't see the justification. Someone who doesn't want power won't grasp for it.

I may or may not have misunderstood you. I'm not 100% sure. I took:

@Ganymede said:

Fair? In a way, yes. Earn a good reputation, and doors will open. Don't expect to waltz into a game and be made Prince.

to mean, at game opening, you make so and so Prince because you knew them on Starbucks by Dimness MU and man were they awesome. I think it's fairly obvious why that's nepotism and sets a standard of favoritism from the get-go. Not only does it put those players way ahead, it does a good job at making it much less likely you'll notice quality players you don't happen to know, because they're likely to be boxed out by their preassigned inferiority.

If you think its just good sense, we disagree and I think your method is a major problem in the hobby.

If by

What does this mean? If you want your sphere to work well, you let everyone come in. When it comes time to give them hats, make sure that the right hat goes to the best candidate. Use your personal experience and judgment to guide you in that decision. For the open roles, see if others want it, and try to encourage the "best" person into that role. If you have difficult people, keep them out of those important roles.

you mean more of a situation of sorting out in game leadership after the fact (ie, Vampire titles, promotions to some high office in your theme, whatever) then I have no problem with it.

There are also probably other variations of this. Some games will have by their nature have tiers of power and influence that are part of the theme. I don't think everyone needs to be equal in the sense they all have to have the same rank, but generally on games like that, I feel it would be preferable to use a CG method where people are paying for that rank, so Prince Shinypants is not also a better fighter than Soldier McFightsHisWholeLife.

@Derp

Where is this personal attack (aside from, amusingly, most of your post)?

I don't think (nor have I said) that most people are hugely unethical or 'bad', but I think most people do have giant blinders when it comes to their friends as well as some 'flex' in their standards where such things are concerned. We've seen @Ganymede's approach time and time and time again, and my sense is the results being bad far more often than good.

MU's are not democratic organizations, in many cases. Therefore, you also have no right to expect to be treated the same as everyone else, or have access to what everyone else does regardless of reputation or personal history. If that's not a concept you can handle, then this hobby is not for you.

I think you're making a huge leap here, as well. I'm not suggesting that you need to make your game open to all regardless of shitty behavior. If a player is bad, by all means do not welcome them at all (I have people I would absolutely never knowingly allow on a game I ran). But the idea that some people are 'ok' enough to play on the game, but only in some intentionally marginalized role, is silly. If you think that little of them, just get rid of them to begin with (hence my initial suggestion of invite only). Beyond that, quality players will do better on their own, so giving them 10x the stats of everyone else seems fairly unnecessary.

IE, if you want elder politics on your game, set some basic elder statline that anyone can get, then let the player politics sort out who is Prince. This is opposed to just statting some guy (who you happen to think is SOOOO amazing) as a so ungodly powerful they can hold the position by force alone, which will tend to make even genuinely amazing players act like douchebags and stiffle meaningful competition anyway.

@Arkandel

It's obviously beyond scope for me to try and argue or prove 'how games are' in general so I'm not going to try I will acknowledge that nothing is 100% and my experience doesn't include all games, although despite @Derp's certainty that I'm not suited to the hobby, I've been in it as long as any of you, on many of the same games. So if we have totally different recollections of these places... well, I dunno what to say about that. Maybe I'm bitter, or maybe some people have rose colored nostalgia glasses.

My sense is that @Ganymede's method is basically the rule more than the exception for allotting features and that features have been bad (stomping on people and hogging plots) more often than they've been good (unselfishly promoting fun for all). On the contrary, I've usually seen more open and equal CG systems not create THOSE precise problems. This is not to say that they create perfect games, I just have a lot of trouble seeing the advantage that is gained out of the favoritism, justified or otherwise. You will have a host of other problems to deal with on a MU, why add huge disparities in character ability based solely on personal connections to staff?

I will stress, since you again seem to keep making the point about success/failure that I don't think it's tied to that. There have been long running open CG games too. If the purpose of this thread is to figure out what's likely to get you the most logins, I don't even really care.

It's not agitation, its lack of equivocation

There's a lot of 'oh well good staffing can make anything work' in this thread, and on this forum in general, but I think that's BS. The sort of thing @Ganymede is suggesting is a) not actually different from how MU* have always worked and b) fundamentally terrible, as the history of this stuff tells us.

Its fine to make adjustments in game, as I hope I've clarified, but the 'casting' analogies are just kindly euphemisms for nepotism. If you don't promote equality at the fundamental first step, when people are joining your game, you set a precedent of favoritism and bullshit permanently.

@Arkandel said:

@bored said:

Sure. Your game, your dime for the server, you can do anything you want, include being a nepotistic scumbag.

Because that's what you're going to be when you decide to play director, cast your stars, and then oh yeah, we need some extras too.

This bullshit gets you one thing. It gets you Firan.

Not quite. Lots of game have had narcissistic despotic owners over the last couple of decades - most of them were incompetent and, as such, died the quiet and quick undignified death they deserved.

Firan did not. It ran for a long time, attracted a lot of people and some of them must have have fun. That's not a sign of incompetence; you can argue its bullshit and many people will agree, but not that this is what this is the game it gets you.

It takes the combination of consistency, skill and effort to make a successful game no matter if you're an asshole or not.

Yes, you can be a nepotistic douchebag and create a successful game (or be ethical and create a failure, and yes, vice versa). Firan could have done all its good things and not been shitty to their players. Rampant favortism was not a key element contributing to its success (indeed, lack of ethics was still what killed it, when they got past a certain ratio of shitty to actual fun shit).

That is not an argument in favor of being a nepotistic douchebag.

@Bobotron said:

@bored
I dunno. Many MU*s I've seen have had an 'audition process,' especially for FCs, and it seemed to work out pretty well (again, not WoD, so different cross-section).

I think basing handing out certain things that have to be handed out in game, based on in game observation/behavior is fine (although this is usually beyond the CG process, and on to things like 'who gets to run the org' - I think everyone should use the same CG). That is not what I understand @Ganymede's suggestion to be.

@Ganymede said:

@bored said:

I think if you want to cast your MU like a play, you should consider OTT or an invite-only game instead.

You say this like someone that has not been involved in the casting of a play.

Correct, I do not have your level of amateur theater wisdom/dictatorial megalomania.

I have seen most games run like this, and mostly it has shitty results. Because I don't understand that you're advocating for anything other than the pretty much bog-standard (and bog-shitty) approach of 'just give shit to my friends.' Everyone pretty much does what you're suggesting already, except its just a way of justifying their nepotism. We've seen the results, they usually suck.

@Sunny said:

@bored said:

Sure. Your game, your dime for the server, you can do anything you want, include being a nepotistic scumbag.

Because that's what you're going to be when you decide to play director, cast your stars, and then oh yeah, we need some extras too.

This bullshit gets you one thing. It gets you Firan.

Nobody is claiming what you're responding to.

Sure they are. What do you think happens when you cast a bunch of your friends as all the key players, give them all the toys, and then open the game to 'other people who aren't as OMG awesome.' You get a bunch of haves and have-nots, stars and extras, and all the bullshit we see on every WoD game ever.

Saving the interesting reply for last:

@Apos said:

@bored said:

Sure. Your game, your dime for the server, you can do anything you want, include being a nepotistic scumbag.

Because that's what you're going to be when you decide to play director, cast your stars, and then oh yeah, we need some extras too.

This bullshit gets you one thing. It gets you Firan.

Serious question. If you were the one running Firan in an imaginary scenario where you somehow had the game and were in complete control, how would you have handled their roster system with its playerbase at peak?

The full answer to this is beyond the scope of this thread I think.

Relevant to this argument, not designed it with 3 tiers including characters that were purpose-built to be shitty nobodies who could accomplish nothing?

Sure. Your game, your dime for the server, you can do anything you want, include being a nepotistic scumbag.

Because that's what you're going to be when you decide to play director, cast your stars, and then oh yeah, we need some extras too.

This bullshit gets you one thing. It gets you Firan.

I think if you want to cast your MU like a play, you should consider OTT or an invite-only game instead.

My philosophy is that CG should be CG and everyone should use the same one, with the same systems and points.

If your setting has need of special positions, rare concepts or abilities, etc etc, you can address those things by making some kind of tradeoff in CG. Pay some points, get access to whatever thing.

'Some people just get more XP/all the cool toys/whatever because they're special' (which nearly always means they're staff's buddies or just got to the game first) is a fundamentally retarded idea and everyone who supports it (so, I dunno, most people who make WoD games) is wrong and should feel bad. The end.

Now quick, some masochist make a game so we can all sit here judging/criticizing your work!

Eh. At the point of actual online TT I'd rather just... play online TT. With a pr-arranged group and not just whoever shows up. And I do! albeit not for Fading Suns.

Well, I didn't say they were bad ideas or a bad thing overall. But I think the chance of a more TT-oriented idea working out well on a MU is slim. A big problem with his setting, like the prior ones, is it immediately puts the focus on certain factions and then you have usual issues with that.

In this offering, it's the Decados. In a TT, you could as the GM simply say, OK the Decados are major antagonists here, if you play one you're going to be working against your own house because I don't really want PvP inside the party (or maybe you'd say something else - whatever). In a MU, it almost certainly ends up with people playing Decados as the ruling class of the game, whether as favored PCs, standard staff-abused NPCs, whatever.

@Apollonius Cool TT, terrible MU. Which I think describes most of your FS ideas so far.

@Alzie Right. Imperial involvement guarantees the necessity of huge staff fiat trampling over people. While staff might do that with their own NPCs anyway (as @mietze says) I still think it's better not to make it a REQUIREMENT by including that content. There's basically no way it can end well, ever, so why do it?

It's not terribly hard to just say 'the wars have ground to an inconclusive stalemate,' is it? Current modern setting, just short of any one actually winning?

That said, I don't think having an Emperor is a problem really. Putting larger scale Imperial forces into play is the problem, or really anything where you try and base too much of your game on metaplot and book NPCs and all that drek. But it's an impulse some people seem to have, to want to tie in as much of it as they can.

I don't mean not having Questing Knights as individual, unsupported characters. I mean the idea of 'the Imperials show up and <whatever>', basically anything remotely close to a role as a relevant faction in the setting itself. So the looming fleet in @Apollonius's example (as well as all the silly 'omg who got to have the Emperor's baybeee?'), them showing up and setting up a garrison in yours, etc. I think the game plays much better when there's no higher authority to appeal to or give a shit if you get your head splattered by a barbarian.

I'd stay away from any Imperial involvement/giving any shits at all. They're one of those things in the setting that once you invoke them, it sets off the rabid player instinct to fight to be the shiniest of the shiny and be connected to it in some way.

@ThatGuyThere said:

Like @bored I was mainly responding to the idea that FS is some how especially bad, I do consider it a better game then most out there.

Well, I wouldn't go that far either. I'd say its pretty much average as skill based systems go. It's workable and so long as the GM sets expectations in terms of min-maxing, it will tell the story it's trying to tell, mostly (which is part of why Plastic Plate making you as tough as a tank is OK, btw: I'm preeeeetty sure it's a game where weird sci-fi feudal knights are supposed to charge tanks and kill them with swords).

I think its one of the unfortunate things in RPGs that we haven't seen a lot more innovation on some of these basic approaches over the years. The vast majority are pretty similar, and so they also tend to duplicate the same problems over and over again (huge variance in success based games, broken bounding in additive systems, etc). It's one reason I've enjoyed the FFG system recently (custom rich dice). It's not perfect either (no system really is) but its nice to do something other than the familiar suspects. This praise would also apply to things like the ORE mentioned above, Weapons of the Gods, etc.

Stealing board games is an interesting idea. I feel that a lot of the RPGs that try to come up with large scale systems ultimately kind of fail at it for being either too abstract or just giant piles of tables, but I'd never really considered that a lot of board games probably get the level of detail/crunch vs abstraction a lot closer to what you'd want.

This definitely gives me some thinking to do in regards to future games.