I stopped smoking over eight years ago, which resulted in my gaining weight, but I haven't drank any Coke (despite temptation) in three weeks, and I'm going back to kung fu and riding my bike around, so I should shed some weight soon. I remember when I was a teenager and weight was a non-issue because my metabolism was of the gods.
Posts made by Coin
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RE: Fitness and Whatnot
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RE: XP Rollover
@Bennie
TL;DRYour analogy is a bad one because you're comparing two very different types of video game while applying both to the same type of roleplaying. Alas.
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RE: XP Rollover
@Bennie said:
Could you imagine how well Assassin's Creed would sell if you had to make a new char every time you turned the console off?
I'm sorry, this was just the absolute dumbest comparison you could have made. In fact, turning off the console is more akin to logging off for the night. You save the game and you go to bed and then you pick up where you left off later.
Consider this: when you play the following Assassin's Creed game, don't you have to learn a whole bunch of tricks again, go through the tutorial again, gain bonuses and moves and items all over again? You don't start AC2 with all the shit you gained during your entire playthrough of AC1, do you?
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RE: Twinking in RP MU*
I will run plots for anyone that asks and knows what they want. It's just sometimes very hard to stay motivated to do that when my own character has absolutely nothing to do.
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RE: Gaping Hole in My Soul
@BobGoblin
All I can say is: if you want it, build it. -
RE: Twinking in RP MU*
@mietze said:
Maybe the difference is "really wanting to participate" (which I now read as "happy to be entertained and to be involved") vs. "wanting/capable to put in the work to keep things dynamic and active." They're two very different things. I think most people really want to participate. The number of people willing to put in the real work involved are very few.
These days I'm always happy to participate but leery of joining up with a group where there is not at least 1 other person who's willing to put in the work OOCly.
I'm getting to the same point, yeah.
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RE: XP Rollover
@mietze
Honestly, I dislike XP transfers in general.I am willing to make some leeway for people who lose their character contrary to their wishes (PK, death by plot, etc.), but if you get bored with your PC, I don't particularly think you should be able to just flip all that XP onto another character.
But I do think that there should be a difference between Character XP and Player XP. If I run plots, it shouldn't matter who I run it as, the XP is for me, the player. This should be awarded separately and be available for any of my characters, including new ones I decide to make. But once I spend it, it's spent.
So if you run a lot of stuff and are active, you get to make an elder vampire, a legendary werewolf, a Renaissance psychic... but at the same time, by accruing that much player XP you've kind of proven you can be active as a storyteller and make plot happen, which is often the sort of thing one expects from high-tiered players like that.
In theory, it works out. We'll see how it works in practice, since this is the type of system we'll be using at the game I'm spearheading.
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RE: Twinking in RP MU*
@Three-Eyed-Crow said:
This is totally different than actual unavailability due to RL or health or whatever. That's just life.
Yes, but they compound each other.
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RE: Twinking in RP MU*
@Arkandel, what?
I was referring entirely to the point at which you find yourself in an IC group with friends who are either busy or idle. For example, I recently made a werewolf pack about six months or so ago on The Reach. But after playing for maybe a month (at the most) regularly, the following happened:
- One player went on their honeymoon, leaving the game for an extended period;
- Another has health issues that make it very hard for them to be consistently around;
- Another two got touched by drama in another sphere and lost their desire to RP for a while;
- Another never finished their character at all;
- Two others felt like nothing was happening, so they hardly log on;
- Another stopped logging on and idled out;
- I myself ended up trying to find others to RP with, which is hard when your central theme is Pack play.
It doesn't help when people really want to participate but aren't willing to be pro-active, requiring others to constantly motivate them, which is what I run into over and over and over and over.
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RE: Non-WoD
@Thenomain said:
@Coin said:
This doesn't take away from it being something not everyone can grasp, or even likes.
Thank you, Captain Obvious. If you don't get Aspects, you can't get Fate.
You're welcome, General Jerkfas.
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RE: Twinking in RP MU*
@Three-Eyed-Crow
not only that, but even the people who want to work together, are totally into the group, and would love to do all that... often become less than active, get busy randomly, enter a slump of non-activity, or whatever, just as they should be playing with the rest. It's often just bad timing and the fact that there are players that are just... idle-prone. -
RE: Twinking in RP MU*
@Bennie said:
That begs the question, do we think we will ever see a game that uses that model? A game where you can purchase Attributes and Skills ad infinitum as opposed to the 'human' cap of 5. We already have specific ways to raise Attributes over 5, but has anyone ever thought of incorporating a specific system for Skills? If not, why not? If yes, why not employ it?
You can raise Skills above 5 in the same way you can raise Attributes above 5. Unless I missed it, it's "traits" in general that can be raised above the mortal limit of 5 once your Supernatural Tolerance has risen above 5. So this is basically already present in the system.
I was thinking this week about quite the opposite: Why 5 dots? In so much as, given rules for working together, fighting as a group against a dangerous foe, and so on. It got me thinking, we never seem to touch on the idea that the world doesn't really operate solo. You don't see a single soldier making up a squad, for example. Backup usually involves more than one more cop showing up to make an environment of two. There's never only one person in the ER. You never see just one legal assistant working late at night.
Rule of 5 is just simple, usually. there are systems that allow you to go higher and higher, for example, many D&D systems don't have limits to how high you can raise Ranks in Skills (and if they do, they certainly aren't limited to 5).
Most things come in groups. So if you apply it to the GMC rules most things can be accomplished successfully with a group, and the rules seem to make this pretty obvious, whereas alone not so much. Would this be something worth integrating into the MU* environment? Why don't we push for this more often? Why is it so often a Me Against The World motif?
I don´t know what to tell you: I've seen a lot of RP that concentrates on having to work as a group. Cops, in specific, tend to have group scenes. MUs have a hard time developing groups due to scheduling conflicts and the fact that familiarity breeds contempt sometimes, in my opinion. I have tried and tried and tried to geenrate groups that work together and complement each other. It often fails, but that doesn't mean it isn't the intent and desire of many.
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RE: Non-WoD
@Thenomain said:
People always get stuck on Aspects, while Aspects are bar none the single most compelling reason to play Fate.
My name is Cobalt and I take the aspect Artistic Firebug. I get to re-roll failed attempts that have to do with fire! I get bonus points when I succumb to my love of fire!
How is this not non-stop awesome? The rules are still written in a way that's not trivial to grasp, but this one, right there, is the key to almost all of them.
This doesn't take away from it being something not everyone can grasp, or even likes.
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RE: Jennkryst's Playlist
@Jennkryst
Man, I never got around to apping in any of the Exalted MUs. I didn't even know there were more than two. -
RE: Twinking in RP MU*
@Glitch
I agree with that somewhat; I mean more along the lines of discouraging people who don't like someone and then socially go out of their way to mess with their character, just so they can complain about the other person.I don't like Spider, for instance. I am highly unlikely to try to seduce her PC. I might use the social system to intimidate or inconvenience her PC, if my character would, in a mutually shared social setting--Mage meetings, whatever--but I'm not going to go out of my way.
It guess it was meant more of a: don't seek out RP that isn't going to be fun for you. It will happen, it will always happen and that's unavoidable in MUs, but don't actively seek it out on purpose with people you know you won't enjoy it with, which is common sense, which we all know isn't very common.
Also, I mildly disagree that it invalidates the need for a system. Some people like the randomization; I do. I like to be able to roll dice and let them decide the degree and speed at which my interactions go. It's fun for me. That, I will agree, is subjective; but I don't think it invalidates it.
@Arkandel I think @Coin's first point addresses much of your concern. You don't need it for every social interaction, only those where conflict is expected and dice is the desired way to handle it. You certainly don't need to start rolling dice to buy another PC a drink at a bar and maybe make a nice impression.
Yeah. I mean, if you keep that in mind, it's fine.
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RE: Twinking in RP MU*
@Arkandel
I think the Social Maneuvering system (i.e., and from now on referred to as "Doors") is great, as long as it adheres to the following:- Its use is the default, but players can agree to discard it (this is going to happen whether you want it or not);
- The times element is adhered to--impression levels are important, if you are very intimate with someone, maybe you can seduce them with one roll; but if you're talking up a stranger at a bar, unless they're looking for a lay, you're gonna have to play the long game, over several scenes, with one roll per scene, etc.;
- Its use in PC vs. PC confrontation uses the compromise options at the end of the system description that say that even if PC1 has won every challenge and passed all of PC2's Doors, PC2 can still choose not to comply with the demand and take a Condition (e.g., Sam wants to seduce Anne, and his rolls decimate her social defenses, but Anne is married, and her player doesn't think she'd ever cheat. Anne decides to take a Condition--maybe she briefly considered it and now feels Guilty, which influences her actions with her husband when she gets home. Sam didn't get what he wanted, but Anne didn't just disregard the skillful way he attempted to seduce her);
- Crucial, in my opinin: you follow the logic: ask then roll then pose. Ask refers to: communicate with the other player, ask them whats ort of actions on behalf of your character might get them closer to their goal with regards to theirs; roll refers to rollign your dice with appropriate modifiers, to see how well you do; and posing refers to posing the action you asked about in a way that reflects its efficiency based on the roll. If you follow these steps, it's much less likely that you'll have people flailing about hwo you power-posed or whatever. People might still flail because you have too many dice and now they're stuck in something, but it'll be less often. In short, communicate.
- Don't fucking play complicated social interactions with people you don't minimally know, and especially with people you don't like. Keep those simple. Don't try to seduce the PC of a player you don't like or who doesn't like you. It will never end well IC or OOC and will cause drama that will inevitably spill over onto everyone around the both of you and on behalf of all those people: fuck you, jerkface.
Above all, though, communication is key. It also helps if we can, as a community, dispell this ridiculous fucking notion of preferring "roleplay over rollplay". It's stupid.
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RE: Twinking in RP MU*
Pretty much.
e.g., I could be wrong, as I do not have the book with me at the moment, but I think in Demon: The Descent it says that you can buy Primum (the game's Supernatural Tolerance trait) at chargen for 3 Merit dots. But Merit dots cost 1 experience a piece and raising Primum with experience costs 5 experiences per dot. I am not sure if this was a mistake in printing (it might have been, since in the first edition it was 3 merit dots per point of a power stat), or not. Regardless, if I am not remembering incorrectly (which I very well could be), the game we're making will be switching to 5 Merit dots per dot of Primum, to keep the costs even. If we allow it at all. We might not, and just make people spend their starting experiences on Primum if they want it higher, especially since Primum is particularly useful for Demons, as it gives them access to more Covers.
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RE: Twinking in RP MU*
@HelloRaptor said:
Scaling XP costs were bad. Incredibly bad. Because they were both kind of dumb to begin with, and only really matter if you have a relatively finite amount of XP to play with. If your xp is at a constant upward trend, no real scarcity or diminishing return is had. I mean from a purely technical sense yes, there is a diminishing return in paying 15xp when you buy the fifth dot in a skill instead of 9xp for the third dot, but if you've got a pool of XP not only larger than what you need to buy but everything else you're likely to need to buy, AND you'll end up with enough XP to buy the next thing you want by the time you want it, more or less, diminishing returns are pretty pointless.
Scaling costs work fine in tabletop, or on MUs that have very little or slow XP gain, yeah. I remember when I started MUing on Devilshire (a Buffyverse/Unisystem game) it was impossible (literally, there was a cap) to get more than 10 XP a month, and getting those 10 was really hard. And Attributes cost like Current Rating x 5, so I had to save up all of my experience for like two months just to get my Willpower to 5 on my Wizard, for example; and that's if I was raking in the maximum XP per month, which I often definitely was not, despite being one of the most active plot runners there. On that game? Yeah, sure. (Though see my complaint below regarding the 1-5 scale.)
Scaling XP costs really only exist to slow you down, and there are ways of doing that which don't require the irrational irritation factor of a big chunk of XP doing virtually nothing for you. Going from Professional (3) to World Class (5) in a skill isn't enough to even, on average, bump your expected successes up by 1, more than likely. Meh.
This is why I really kind of dislike the 1-5 scale. It's just not broad enough for the difference to really stand out. I get that if you have a Supernatural Resistance Trait that is above 5 you can go higher, but I'm still talking mortal-wise. If 5 is as high as a mortal can get, then 3 (above average, but not rare) shouldn't be less than 1 success of a difference.
Plus, we finally aren't paying for invisible fucking merit dots, which has always made me grind my teeth in the worst ways.
Still kind of are in that there are merits that are worth 2 and then another version worth 4, with no 3-dot version in the middle. But at least now every dot costs the same.
This begs the question, in a MU* environment, strictly using GMC, how fast is too fast to gain Beats? In an unlimited environment - long term speaking - how fast is too fast, how slow is too slow?
Reno gives 2 experiences per week, doled out in percentages over the course of the week. I think this is a fine number at the beginning but should probably be scaled down. I detailed somewhere else the type of gain system we'll be using on the game I'm working on with friends, which starts out at about a minimum/maximum (minimum being weekly passive gain and maximum being that plus whatever you gain from beats and plots) of 2/4 experiences for the first set of six months, 1/4 for the second set of six months, 0.5/4 for the third set, and then 0.2/4 from then on.
This would allow for an easier time for new characters to catch up to old dinosaurs, unless the dinosaurs were incredibly active, which is usually not the case and if they are, well, then they deserve the rewards of that.