Posts made by bored

@Pyrephox said in Arx's Elevation Situation:

Playing a game with an ostensibly feudal theme should come, I'd hope, with an understanding that nothing about it is ICly 'fair', and it really shouldn't be.

If you're playing a political game, that is. If you're playing a game where every house is entitled to eternal expansion and inflation and the idea is just how you gather the resources to do that, then no, it's not a particular concern. That's not a theme that particularly interests me, and never did.
...
But that's fine - I rarely even log into the game anymore, and it increasingly doesn't do things that I'm interested in, but which many many people manifestly are.

I don't disagree with any of your analysis. And you found the solution. If you don't like enforced PvE (that nonetheless will occasionally have PvP consequences/implications), don't play Arx.

The only issue is you have people who omg love Arx to death forever but also really really obviously want nothing more than to fuck up Pravus as hard as they can, because how dare they benefit by PvE?!? They need to pick one.

@Pyrephox said in Arx's Elevation Situation:

Great Houses, in some ways, get hit harder by this than many others, because they have a severely limited number of duchies to work with, and only receive taxes from the duchies and any direct vassals they might have lower on the chain (like De Lire).

So you mean, the people who got the most free, totally unearned advantages early in the game, have less growth opportunities late in the game? This is unfair, how?

I've seen it repeated several times that playing a Barony-level PC is the least attractive option in the entire game, as you get none of the swag commoner market abusing code options and your house is probably tiny and poor. Do you have literally no empathy for other players or any sense of fairness? It's really mind boggling how greedy the atttitudes being expressed recently are, in contrast to the perpetual claim of universal, benevolent positivity on Arx. Really, all the complaints just seem hugely entitled.

@wahoo I suppose I'd counter, why is it a problem, so long as staff is creating suitable boundaries to what is required for the process? Or alternately, what goals to do propose for these houses in lieu of advancement?

Arx is frequently (if, I feel, disingenuously) advertised as a PvE game. That means shedding a lot of the zero-sum instincts that players have, where they see any gain by another player as diminishing them (which is clearly the case for a lot of the objections here), and instead simply focusing on your own advancement. If you apply this to houses, what are lower tier orgs supposed to do in a purely PvE environment, if not grow and potentially eventually strike out on their own? The only alternative seems for them to essentially be pawns/supports for their lieges, throwing their resources into stuff that isn't their own story. Why should they do this? Why is it owed to their lieges?

I will argue with @Tempest for once that I don't think the liege relationship seems relevant. It might have been for Pravus, but the PvE mantra means there can never be true rebellion (it seems like this was a compromise to prevent it, in fact?). There's only 'the children growing up and striking out on their own.' Which is a natural outcome. It will continue until there's no more room for growth, at which point you'll be back facing some de-facto PvP realities.

@ZombieGenesis said in Old Republic Star Wars Game - FFG System Poll:

I know this doesn't go much into theme but that's not really my concern at the moment, I very much like our theme. I'm just wondering if people would play at a Star Wars game using the FFG system modified as I've described above.

There's a couple issues I've brought up in prior threads. For reference, I ran FFG Star Wars for a VTT game for ~a year (after which we decided to move on from the system). We started with EotE but mixed in some later stuff as the books came out. We didn't have anything remotely approaching an actual Jedi, though one character was a largely non-trained sensitive who took a few Influence powers.

Positive: I don't think changing the talents from trees to pyramids is any big deal, as long as you've looked through the specializations you're allowing.

Negative: the system is really sensitive to min-maxing, which can foul up some basic Star Wars assumptions (ie, that having a blaster pointed at you represents a serious threat). Standard 1h (ie not the DL-44) blasters are too weak to actually be threatening (because of base soak values and armor) without serious talent investment, while blaster rifles up things enough that basic Stormtrooper squads outright murder PCs. And there's both equipment and talent scaling, which can very quickly yield even moderate xp combat specialized characters 1-shotting even the strongest NPCs in the book or just wiping out whole encounters in a round (say if they happen to pick up a light repeater from an ST).

The other thing is the whole narrative dice system, which is a lot of fun but is also antithetical to any kind of PvP (which may arise on MUs) and requires a really high degree of player-ST trust, familiarity, and common understanding. The nature of the dice tends to yield polarized results (ie successful rolls often also have a lot of threat, or vice versa) and some players may have trouble grasping these.

That said, I love the Old Republic as a setting, so I hope you do something successful with it, but I did want to present this as a serious evaluation of the system.

@surreality Yeah, which demonstrates the necessary policy/cultural change. I also think @faraday really deserves some credit here (and its unfortunate she was kind of jumped on) because developing vastly more technically complicated code to facilitate the reporting process on Ares and thus make complaints more actionable is an important step there and one that reflects the technological improvements we need to keep up with. 100% client-side logging isn't reliable, and so it's not reliably actionable, and that helps undermine the entire process.

Basically, trivial code or trivial player effort will be sufficient in trivial cases (ooc please stop -> ooc ok!, or +ftb -> silence). Its the non-trivial cases that are largely the issue, not only when they happen, but because of the specter they cast over other interactions. And it's here that it's important to know not just that you have whatever initial command, but also an entire route you can follow-up through with a reasonable expectation of support and action.

@Kestrel Oh for sure, nothing wrong with trying them out (again, it's trivial on a code-effort side). I just think there's maybe a weird tendency to lean on this like 'oh if only we'd do this, it would make such a difference,' and I feel its worth highlighting that we have done it and it wasn't particularly any sort of panacea.

Which is why I emphasize its more about the collective approach. Its not how many pieces you have, its how you put them together into a cohesive set of game policy & culture.

Yeah, +warn (along with +timestop, +ftb, etc) all existed for a long time on WoD games and probably elsewhere. So if anything it's not that we've never tried something like what's being proposed here. There were versions of +ftb that were definitely meant to a hard stop & contact staff for whatever details, and not a licence to pose a bunch of excessive extra stuff as has been described. Games have tried different versions of it throughout, yet in the end seemingly gave up on the idea and moved away from it. If I had to guess why, it's because those commands were often pretty underutilized.

Which leads me to the thought that it's not merely a matter of having the commands or not. We've had them, they're not magic bullets. It's really about building an overall structure of all the involved parts: staff policy (and follow-through), overall player culture, individual willingness to act, and the appropriate OOC tools. This kind of thing is trivial to code (its what, basically just an emit and maybe a staff channel echo?), but it's hard to implement culturally and see adopted.

@Auspice said in The Dark Side of online Role-Playing:

15-year-old RPing vampire sex with another 15-year old: OK
15-year-old RPing vampire sex with a 45-year-old: Not OK

Which, realistically reduces to '15 year-old RPing vampire sex: not OK' because you're never going to know. So many people here who've been MUing since the early WoD days were lying back then, myself included. I have no idea how many were obvious as minors or who could pass as adults. I had adult women hit on me OOC. Maybe some of them were secretly dudes and murders, too, I can't really know. I also had a situation where I, pretending to be an adult, was TSing with someone else, also pretending to be an adult, and in reality we were the same age and went to high school together. Accidentally harmless (and hilarious), but could have been bad for either of us, right?

I don't know how parents can really contend with any of this stuff safely. It would be great if you could encourage your children to participate only in age-appropriate explorations but do those even exist? Even age-appropriate online games are full of this (I've seen someone being groomed in an MMO guild). And society isn't actually comfortable enough with adolescent sexuality to intentionally create vetted forums to intentionally promote kids doing this. I think all you can really do is accept that your kids will lie (as all of us did) but do your best to be aware of what they're doing anyway.

@Carex Pick Mallah instead? No one should mistake him for hetero.

Wasn't the last time this thread was active also about Batman getting special treatment?

Oh wait its a necro so I can just look back.

Yes, yes it was.

@Bananerz I think you're (possibly vastly) underestimating the appeal, even with code limitations.

So you may want to seriously consider when you say 'planned to ... be interesting and engaged with a few players' how you will deal if you get more. You may need to consider player caps (and after the Spirit Lake situation, raise them in advance) if you're planning on more intimate STing that won't support a literal horde of people.

Because... I think you're going to get a horde of people.

I think this raises a question: is this really planned as a quasi VTT 5e game being advertised here, or as a full MU that will get as many players as it gets?

Because yeah. Given the lack of medieval/fantasy games that aren't Arx, you'll probably have a LOT of interest.

@Pyrephox I think that's all that she was clarifying, possibly because of how you wrote it out.

@Pyrephox Its dicepools not target #s.

@Carex said in How to Approach (nor not) a Suspected Creep:

Is it just me or do you automatically suspect anyone playing a wraith/mage leans towards stalker/creep?
Has that been your experience as well?
Have I just had bad luck and ran into the worst people?

While this is broad enough that I suspect you're going to get pushback, if we edit it to

anyone playing a wraith on older games with realm flags

...then, yes. My experience dealing with one wraith sphere on an oWoD game back in the day was that they were largely there to voyeuristically peep on TS. We ended up giving every build an automatic wraith-locked room (regardless of supernatural ability to do such a ward) just so players could have some expectation of privacy.

@Bananerz I was DMing on Monday, we have an assassin rogue and let's just say he's gotten some very underwhelming surprise auto-crits. Also the conjurer summoned a shadow demon, which preceded to get lose, hide, and then sneak-crit one of his allies for... well, a lot more than the assassin rogue.

Basically they almost TPKed to a throwaway fight where all the monsters were <half their level in CR.

@Auspice The futziness of theater of the mind combat distances (since almost everyone will have their own slightly different vision of the layout) is a bit of its own whole thing.

But certainly I think 'X is clearly disrespecting the scene by posing over/retconning a clearly established prior fact' is a huge red flag pretty much in any case, be it for creepy fixation or just spotlight stealing. 'Playing with others' is basically the definition of our hobby, so if you're bad at it...

@Auspice Looking back, it was actually @onigiri's comment that focused my attention on this aspect of it (to give proper credit/citation!) but regardless, yeah, its an important distinction to make. IC isn't automatically OOC, but OOC-in-IC-clothing happens.

To me (in part because I'm admittedly a horrible elitist writing wise), these poses always stand out like they were decked out in freaking X-mas tree lights, too, which is more of what I was talking about from the other post. The tunnel vision and way they tend to either ignore or pose over both the person and others around to 'win' the 1v1 interaction are often jarring to the scene continuity (ie, retconning prior interactions to pull out a seat for their 'target' or whatever). Its the exact same way that "Jane listens as Bob pathetically tries to turn her friends against her and says..." immediately scans as 'Lol, well obviously Jane is butthurt and couldn't actually RP her way out of a paper bag.'

I think the one problem here (and it applies to both cases) is that while really these are behaviors we should nip much more aggressively, they're allowed to stand because the result really would just cut too many players for numbers-focused game admins to bear. Its hard take the honest stance of 'this behavior isn't the absolute worst (yet), but we're gonna get rid of you anyway.'

I'm just going to register another 'I would not intervene OOCly in a purely IC situation.' To me that's pretty bonkers and definitely taking this whole thing a bit down a slope to crazy.

HOWEVER (and this is a big however), someone pointed out upthread that OOC-creep and IC-creep poses look different and that is a HUGE big thing to acknowledge.

'Purely IC' is a definition that expands a bit beyond 'this was in a pose/emit' vs this was <OOC> text/page.' OOC can and very often does bleed into poses, and there's nothing wrong with applying our experience and human judgment to these things (and in fact it's a bit willfully oblivious not to). We do it easily for the 'obviously butthurt snarky metapose' shit, and I tend to find that OOC-creepery in posed/emitted form is just as obvious and cringe. We engage with one of these pretty aggressively, so leaving out the other is clearly a bit of a willful blind-spot.

Now, some percentage of creepery may slip through from much more skillful writers/manipulators but I think most of this is going to be under the public radar vs. something 3rd parties are casual witnesses to. Most of the serial, problematic, frequent creeps are kind of shit and easy to pick out, and it's fine to narrow in on that behavior sooner rather than later.

@insomniac7809 said in Potent Potables:

@TNP said in Potent Potables:

@Rinel said in Potent Potables:

The White Russian

Oh, these are so very good. I highly recommend.

Also a fan, as I'm a vodka drinker (must be the slav in me; in related news, Russian Standard is a nice balance of price to quality) but do occasionally prefer to temper my distilled misery with something more flavorful. Substitute Irish cream for even more yum (evidently a Blind Russian, never knew the official name). A fun party trick is that either variety can be pretty cleanly layered.