Posts made by Coin

@Eerie, tentacle monsters are our friends. Don't slander, it's not nice.

That said, what Eerie put up above is spot on. It's also that we're not making a game that ignores the community as a whole; we're making one that tries to embrace it. Or at least it tries to embrace its more creative and less pathological aspects. I took a pretty hard look at what I wanted, what Eerie wanted, what the other staff members working with us wanted, and then I looked at what I've seen run and what people were most into. Invariably, I found that people like shit that's funny. Look, people are going to go balls-to-the-wall ridiculous whether we want them to or not, so it felt wise to integrate it into the theme. You don't want to shake your finger at people and go, "you're doing it wrong", when it's just as easy (and fun) to make what they're doing right.

I mean, there's limits, but those tend to be self-imposed. I'm not going to want to run around participating in only gonzo-style plots, and I certainly don't want to just run those. But the balance has to be organic. I think people will have more fun if the game tries, at least in small part, to account for their preferences, rather than being uniform in tone and making them go elsewhere for their fun when they feel like something slightly different.

Right on, @Wizz.

@Glitch said:

The Forums went down for a bit. A rogue plugin was at fault. It is entirely @Coin's fault. May be some residual effects with logging in, but should be fine shortly.

Fear my power.

Like you can talk, @HelloRaptor. Your entire existence is dubious.

@Creepy said:

I can see your points and understand where you're coming from. I think the main translation issue is a matter of visually wrapping one's head around the size and scope of the grid, in comparison to a real life representation.

Based on the wiki data present, the city has a Total Metro Land Area of 73.5 sq. mi with a Metro Population of 732,521.

That's double the land area of Manhattan (33.77 sq miles, not counting the boroughs) with a little less than half its population (1.6 million). So the scale of Eldritch, physically, isn't huge but I wonder if the available space would really equate to such a compact demographic. I suppose it does, depending on the historical development as various ethnic groups arrived and pretty much "found space where they could".

I can't talk with any real degree of authority on this since @Eerie is the one that came up with the numbers and I trust her implicitly in that they make sense. And if they don't, blame the God-Machine. I know I will.

Edited to add: those are figures for the city; they don't take into account other areas, of which there are many: desert, mountains, island, forest.

@Arkandel said:

@Coin said:

@Arkandel, your mom was a drama queen last night, WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT.

That... that doesn't even make sense!

You're just not trying hard enough. Unlike your mom.

@Arkandel, your mom was a drama queen last night, WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT.

@Glitch, this is essentially what we're doing. While we are letting people "create areas", we're also making sure those areas make sense within the scope of the larger area they're in. I doubt that Eldritch itself will ever get bigger on a size-level; it'll develop within itself, grow in complexity and detail rather than size.

But in short, I agree.

@Creepy said:

The neighborhood system is very interesting. Given the soft opening (or whatever else you'd like to call it) and initial player disorganization, do you intend to uphold the "3 players to claim a neighborhood" or will you allow smaller units to pitch ideas for neighborhoods without owning them?

We'll be receptive to ideas for Neighborhoods, but we will likely be leaving the creation of Neighborhoods to 3+ groups. Neighborhoods aren't meant to represent the entirety of an area as a whole, but rather "powerful, representative areas of a larger area", that is to say, even if there are three Neighborhoods in a disrict, that doesn't mean that that's the extent to which the area exists. Locations, in general, are basically like Neighborhoods, but aren't claimed by players.

In short: sure, you can pitch locations within grid squares. Anyone can ask "can there be this sort of area here", really.

Of note: there will be a limit regarding how many Neighborhoods can exist in each area, and we'll probably be sticking to that pretty strongly.

I noticed in a few of the grid-square descriptions, notably MW1 and MW2, that there is a Pan-Asian, Eastern European, and Middle Eastern component. That's a pretty huge and diverse ethnic and religious spread. Would my assumption that you intend the neighborhood system to allow for some narrow focus ethnic communities (Chinatown, Little Albania, etc.) be correct or did you want those areas to be a general ethnic mishmash?

There's the possibility that there could be a narrower focus in places, but we actually were aiming more for a mish-mash. This isn't to say that if someone manages to build a Neighborhood there, they can't build it around a narrower focus, but since one of the themes of the overall game is pushing diverse and different groups together (represented player-level by encouraging different splats to interact), having neighborhoods be a little less delimited is definitely a conscious choice not only on our part design-wise, but also probably in world, as the design of the people running the city in the game, forging its history and shape in a way that fits them (which is why you also see a very clear top-mentality in how Eldritch's classes are divided, to an almost archetypical degree).

"The Mob" seems to be a general clumping of organized crime that isn't Triad or Mexican Cartel. Do you intend to flesh out some sort of overall, loose structure that portrays how all the various mobs (Russian, Irish, Amish, Albanian, etc.) work together under this framework? Will players take a general Status-Mob merit or will they focus on their Status-Amish Mafia specification?

Here, we see the same concept as above represented again. Remember that "The Mob" is no more a clumping together as "The Triads" or "The Cartels" are. All three are unsteady alliances between different, smaller organizations (The Triads have the Yakuza, for example, while the Cartels are as much Colombian and they are Mexican as they are others). Again, this is sort of a theme in Eldritch: people come together and put aside differences while allowing said differences to rot them from the inside.

Sure, you can make your own Russian Mafias within the Mob. That works fine; you can make a Yakuza gang inside the Triad, and a bunch of Calaveras who work for the Cartels. The idea behind the Big Three Syndicates is that everyone needs friends, even if they don't trust them, and that big fish bring smaller fish under them. The leaders of these Syndicates are strong powerbrokers, undoubtedly, but that doesn't mean there aren't subdivisions.

The Status Merit is probably going to just remain either Syndicate-specific, or just in general Organized Crime-specific. Being a high-powered member of one still demands respect in the others, etc.

This was definitely inspired by our weirdly twisted version of "Come Together" theme, but I confess to probably also being influenced by how Gotham has structured their criminal families in the city.

How involved in the God-Machine happenings will players from the non-Demon spheres be? How rare will knowledge of its existence be for the general supernatural population?

People will be able to involve themselves in the God-Machine happenings pretty easily--they just need to partake of the plot hooks and events and stuff. It's unlikely we'll encourage Vampire or Werewolf characters who begin the game having a connection to or knowledge of the God-Machine, but that's honestly more a product of our wanting people to interact, and learning about something like that is a great excuse.

Great start guys. Looking forward to playing there.

Thanks!

@Bobotron said:

So, I have a general question for you guys.

How do you come up with inspiration for mapping on a MUSH? I mean, specifically, coming up with city layout for a modern city? Do you reference real cities and steal them? Do you combine aspects of real cities or do you spitball things?

I'd like to know the techniques and tricks you guys use beyond 'using a real map for the map'.

I just made @Eerie do the initial mapping and then made the grid to fit. >.>

@Huzuruth, in a week or two we're ging to open log-ins at the game proper for networking between players, etc. Not because you can't post here; just letting you know that that will be happening.

@Admiral said:

One thing that I thought HM did well was to open as Mortal-only before they rolled out the supernatural spheres.

I think you guys discussed something earlier in the thread about it, but do you guys have any plans for something like that? Or any kind of 'soft' open?

This is essentially what we're doing.

@Huzuruth
Not to the extent they are detailed in the book, no. We'll likely just allow it as flavor/fluff for Stigmatic characters, though we may do more with them. But if it's important to your character building decision process, especially mechanically, err on the side of "no".

@Thenomain, it's not explicit on the news files, but rest assured we'd have shaken you from your code-induced trance to tell you if we wanted to change that.

@Glitch said:

@Coin I used the generic you, when talking about it. I was not assuming you would be part of the group that resented it, I was merely addressing what you brought up.

Noted.

And I did say I recognized that XP as a reward is common. These are tabletop games, so a MU translation obviously requires reworking some things. Taking it a step further than "2xp flat-rate, 4xp max, etc, etc" is just another part in the process, so I don't really find that argument as compelling. Like I said though, I know I'm in the minority there.

Differences of opinion are great, and I don't expect everyone to agree with me or like my ideas and implementations uniformally. That would be foolhardy and pretty frustrating in the end, for me especially.

@Glitch, I never said I resented it; I said it could create resentment. I am perfectly capable of seeing a repercussion of a thing without actually being part of said repercussion.

I agree that perhaps "reward" was the wrong word; but if roleplay is its own reward (which I agree it is, not mentioning it explicitly doesn't mean I don't), that still leaves me with experience being the only thing I can, as the game-runnner, gauge.

Furthermore, these games in particular work on experience; the game itself--the system it is built with--reward you doing things with experience, as exemplified by @RDC above. These are the games we chose to create a MU for, so we follow that criteria.

@Ganymede

Active means active. It means engaging the game. It means being present and interacting with the environment provided. It means, in general, not sitting in the OOC Lounge all day talking about how much your job sucks and never going IC. It means having goals and doing things when you can to achieve them. You don't have to play every day, you just have to give the game you're playing some time. And if you can't, that's a shame, but hardly crippling.

You're assuming so much with absolutely zero knowledge of how I operate, which is basically your biggest mistake in this instance. Especially when you start trying to explain to me what I want by qualifying and classifying it based on your opinions. What I want is a good game where everyone gets along and can tell the stories they like within the theme and setting my fellow staffers and I have worked so hard to create. And if some of those plots are of great quality and if some others are of low quality will be determined by the players, when they play them, and in how much they enjoy them.

Furthermore, since I am offering about 100 experiences (GMC-style, over the course of a year and a half) with no real activity required, anyone who can't make "the character [they] want to play" with that kind of experience (which is, by common translation practices, about 500 first edition XP, without diminishing returns), is, "in kind words", short-sighted and narrow-minded, in my opinion.

@RDC said:

It's remarkably easy to get 'activity' XP in a GMC system, so long as you're willing to learn how it works, set goals that you want to pursue with each and every scene, and allow "bad" things to happen to your character, then react to those bad things in ways encouraged by the system. Get out there, fail. Dramatically fail. Take conditions. Resolve those conditions. Pursue your Aspirations. You can earn quite a few Beats in a scene or two. Will you have exactly as much XP as someone who actively runs plots for people twice a week every week and also has the time to RP and pursue their own goals/conditions et cetera? No. You might only get 75-80% of what that person gets.

That doesn't really bother me, and I don't really see it as "crippled".

Pretty much this. If a person "brings something to the game" with their limited activity, it is insanely easy to make that limited activity pay off big.

@Ganymede, I'm running a game that needs activity to thrive. If a player doesn't do anything because they have RL obligations, I'm not going to shun them or punish them, but I'm not going to continue to reward them beyond whatever passive experience sthey'd be gaining. That creates a whole lot of resentment among those that are active.

I don't consider it narrow-minded or short-sighted; rather just taking a stance in the sort of policy I want to adapt for the game I'm running.

There are elements of my game that support people who want to run their own stories in their own slice of the setting without having to deal much at all with those outside of it. I did this specifically so that people could enjoy the game at their own pace as much as possible.

I have played on The Reach for a long time, I played on HM, and before that I played on a game with a much more "miserly" XP awards, and I've played on games without XP at all. Based on my experiences, this is the system that I feel will best represent a compromise between these styles of experience systems.

@Glitch, I understand. It's cool, and appreciated.

Explaining my rationale a little, there are a few reasons why I chose this method: 1) the one @Arkandel mentioned above; 2) I prefer people gain experience actively, even if it's a lot, to passive; 3) and the limit is mostly to have an idea of where the ceiling is, you know? I need to know, as the game runner, just how high people can be at any given time.

@tragedyjones
Dude, your sheet does not translate well. Maybe put it between code lines?

@RDC Yeah, I'm not too worried about that, anyway. Aspirations in general are just something people need to get used to.