Posts made by Coin

There may be some server down between me and you guys, I'm pretty far away. Bleh.

@the-tree-of-woe said in Legion World MUX Alpha:

Try legionworld.silvertree.org:3020 - which I've edited in the original post.

You see, I am an idiot...

Still doesn't wanna. And I can connect to other MUs just fine. Hrm.

Hrm. Connecting isn't working on Duck Client (not with the IP either).

What about characters from the past shunted forward into the future?

@Pyrephox Ermagherd, that gives me related ideas.

Like, if you have a TRAVEL TIME resource that you can spend, going places long-distance can cost you more depending on how fast you wanna get there.

Walking is free--but it takes progressively longer (ever tried walking thirty blocks? sixty? five hundred?) whereas a bike might be very cheap, but motorcycles and cars get a little more expensive. You can use public transport--but the time it takes is subject to random traffic or breakdowns--and cabs, etc., can cost more (progressively so).

You would have to make the TIME TRAVEL resource something that was key to the game, but I can see it, especially for games where traveling across places is important (imagine how important it might be in such a setting if the players were competing in a scavenger hunt across cities or even countries--people with access to planes and cars would have xconsiderably more time to actually search, etc.)

Yes, it's a little mini-game-y, but whatever.

@arkandel said in Demon: the Descent:

@admiral I don't think it's a big secret Demon was largely inspired by the Matrix.

To this day I don't know why someone didn't make a killer Matrix game though.

Too fucking meta? Lol.

I always wanted to design and implement some minigames for CofD games based on things that the characters have to do routinely but that can get awkward or old to play out.

For example, a lot of Werewolves with high Primal-Urge need to have a Sacred Hunt more often than others. A minigame that had you make a series of rolls and determined an outcome could serve as a Sacred Hunt. It would take a few minutes at most and players would have on the record that their character did their Sacred Hunt--and recovered Essence, or maybe even got a Spirit to teach them a Gift or something. No fuss, no muss.

Same for vampire feeding, etc.

You could get more sophisticated or less.

Not something obligatory, but definitely an option.

I've had my moments of spamming channels like Wolverine/Pyro does in that log that @Wolfs shared, but it all depends on the frquency, I guess.

Then again, I'm sure I've been the annoying bane on the side of someone more than once. Just ask @ILuvGrumpyCat.

After 20 years of following Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, I am finally going to go see them towards the end of April.

@peasoupling said in Spotlight.:

@faraday said in Spotlight.:

But setting aside the whole "they all got killed" thing, I do think that being one of the few pilots in the rebellion who get to participate in the final epic battle against the Death Star is a "special" thing.

I don't know! Sometimes I think I might prefer playing a janitor with a real chance at meaningfully affecting the cleanliness levels of the Death Star than playing a pilot who is basically just set dressing in a battle they have no real chance of affecting in any meaningful way, other than by exploding prettily against a backdrop of stars.

I am not going to read farther ahead but I want to ask if this reference is on purpose or if you just stumbled right into basically a dig at how someone in maintenance can become the hero of the galaxy because, uh, fucking Finn "Sanitation" FN-2187.

Just sayin'.

@enoch said in Mutant Genesis (X-Men):

A few available characters needing players: Archangel, Beast, Cable, Cannonball, Dazzler, Magma, Moonstar, Nightcrawler, Polaris, any of the Cuckoos, Storm, Warpath and Wolverine.

Tangent--

I find the idea of playing a single Cuckoo super weird. Like, honestly, I can't imagine more than one player playing the Cuckoos. They're too psychically linked with each other. It would take forever to page-communicate, not to mention OOC disagreements... just... nnngh.

I don't know how much appealing to your ego and pride will work, but if you want a REAL CHALLENGE , code some Exalted 3rd Edition.

Just sayin'.

You know.

@the-sands said in Singularity: an Eclipse Phase Game:

@coin I'm always reluctant to put 'hard caps' on things because I worry that it leads to 'well, there's no point in doing anything more right now' and situations of 'Alex has done twice as much as Bob but the two are at the exact same point because they've both maxed out'. If I do decide to put some kind of throttle on XP it may be some sort of graduated curve.

e.g. Alex does twice as much as Bob but he only has 1.4x as much XP because of the curve. Charlie has done four times as much as Bob and only has 2x as much XP.

The pool might reset from time to time or it could be a permanent 'conversion rate'. Either way players never hit a cap on earning so there's always some reward but there is also a point of diminishing returns whereby the mechadino slows and doesn't completely run away from the more casual player (this wouldn't be as necessary if Eclipse Phase used a geometric system for XP progression but it is a linear system).

Given the core mechanics for EP I'm not sure how necessary it will be, however. The game simply doesn't have mechanisms in which one character is completely capable of overwhelming another. About the closest thing is that there is a pretty strong combat advantage in having a high speed but that is very accessible to people in character generation and it is far from the 'I win' stat that occurs in other games since everyone has the opportunity to take their first action before higher speed people can attempt a second action (excluding someone so unlucky as to lose initiative and then be removed from combat before they can act, but that does not appear to be a common situation).

Additionally because of the setting it is practically impossible for one player to kill another. About the most significant effect one player could have would be to force another to resort to a 'starter' morph and perhaps lose some recently gained skills as they are restored from backup. This removes one of the largest concerns with 'dinos' becoming over powered.

The second biggest concerns with 'dinos' tends to be them dominating scenes and other players feeling unable to contribute. Again, because of the rules of the game that seems extremely unlikely due to the rules for teamwork actions. I do recognize that I have seen players in the past who have attempted to 'teamwork' with themselves through a variety of tricks (multitasking, forks, etc.) which I already plan on disallowing (sure, there's multiple copies of you working on the problem but the copies are unable to offer any significant insight).

I'll have a better idea about how significant the 'dino' problem will be once I've got the coding finished. I'll probably try a short run of a few months so we can experiment with a couple of things (allow a couple of players to make 'high xp' characters so we can judge how well they interact with relatively new characters, see what modifications we might need to make to nanofabrication rules, etc.) before resetting for the 'real' game.

Everyone says the same thing about the hard caps (that people will stop doing things because they won't see the point of it), but that has never been my experience. Like, I've never seen someone go "I'm not going to play anymore because I can't get more XP".

In any case, you can always replace XP with something more temporal (perhaps other types of rewards that are "spendable" IC but once spent, that's it) so that people can continue to acquire things even if they are at the cap.

AH, RIGHT.

Okay, so, very broadstrokes, one of the basic and most prevalent problems with XP in MUing is that you get DINOSAURS who've been around for a long long time and then you combine that with people who are active and create a horrible MECHADINO who not only has XP for being around so long, they are super active and continue to rake it in at a disturbing pace.

Not only that, you have people whose playstyles vary due to preference and lifestyle--people who can play for a month or two very intensely and then be almost completely absent for another month or three because of work, life, burn out, whatever.

So what I propose is an ever rising ceiling to the XP that can be earned in TOTAL. This ceiling rises daily by a very small amount (or very big, whatever the fuck you as the game runner wants).

So let's say on March 30 the XP Ceiling (XPC) is 40 XP (abstract number, I don't know how XP works in EP). The absolute HIGHEST amount of XP ANYONE can have on the game is 40. Let's say the ceiling grows at the rate of 0.5 XP per day. On March 31 it would be 40.5, and on april 1 it would be 50--JK, 41.

Then you simply allow people to rake up XP in several different ways. Let's say you put a +vote system with a limit of how many +votes you can give and receive; then you also give out weekly XP (I suggest this weekly XP actually be daily, since the XPC grows daily--I also suggest that the amount be high for new characters and taper off to something negligible, amounts based entirely on how far away you are from the XPC), and then you give them the ability to get a ton of XP (depending on whatever factors you wanna set) based on running and participating in plots.

What this creates is a system qwhere someone new but very active can actually eventually catch up to a dino, even if the dino has been around a lot longer, because the dino can't advance at the same pace anymore.

It also gives people the ability to play intensely for a few months, (perhaps reaching the XPC), but then go inactive for a while, only to come back and have a much higher XPC, that they can put their energy into reaching via plots, etc.

It's important to have many avenues for acquiring XP instead of just one or two, and have each avenue encourage certain type of RP. +votes probably works for day-to-day social RP, but I wouldn't allow people who are in a plot to be able to +vote for people just because they're in a plot together, etc.

The rate at which the XPC rises should contemplate the rate at which you want the PCs to get more powerful at the ABSOLUTE FASTEST.

If you don't want them to have "more than 500 XP at year's end" then the XPC needs to rise at a rate that won't allow them to have more than 500 XP at year's end.

Make sense?

I can't for the life of me remember the system I wanted to implement at the moment but be sure that when it comes back to me I will drop it here like it's hot, XD.

@the-sands said in Singularity: an Eclipse Phase Game:

@coin I'm definitely planning on a grid and a way for storytellers to run stories outside the main setting. Out of curiosity what do you see as different between a 'grid for social RP' and 'a way for storytellers to run stories in the main setting'? Do you mean there should be a grid allocated solely for social RP and it should be off-limits for 'stories'?

My initial plan is to have a main grid as well as the ability to create temp rooms. Temp rooms could either be created off the main grid to represent areas that would exist but had not been constructed (e.g. 'Non-descript Noodle Shop', 'Coffin Hotel', or 'Random Back Alley') or they could be created off the Temporary Room Nexus to represent areas that exist but that lack 'simple' connections to the grid ('A Passenger Transport', 'Meathab', or 'Echo IV'). Most social RP would occur on the main grid but stories would occur on it as well.

I've never seen a game where social RP is forcibly separated from 'story areas'. That isn't to say I'm not going to do this but rather I'm just laying out my plan and experiences. I'm quite open to a different layout if other people have had different experiences and can show that there is an advantage to it.

I meant more in the sense that the main setting needs to have value as a source of plot--give it plot hooks, etc., and make sure the storytellers who want to run stuff have access to those. No, don't divorce the social RP from the plot RP (that's ludicrous anyway since a lot of plots could just be social-based and it would make no sense).

Two other things that I have to start putting more consideration into are earning money and earning XP. Typically these are both under the purview of the game master running stories but I think I would like to try and make things a little more player oriented. I suppose they aren't that much of a problem. I just need to craft up some guidelines that say that this is the XP/credit rewards for participating/running a story. People submit logs and as long as staff approves the log the XP and credits are doled out.

I have OPINIONS regarding this and if you want we can get into it but it's gonna take a while (days and days).

Gosh, guess it's time to define "civilization". XD

Some things you need in a setting for a MU:

1. a grid for social RP;
2. a way for storytellers (staff or player) to run stories in the main setting;
3. a way for storytellers (staff or players) to run stories OUTSIDE the main setting;

Everyone clutch your pearls, but I'm going to agree with @Lithium here: definitely have a gate (make one up, don't feel the need to adhere to canon to build your game) for access to other worlds. Make the gates accessible for plots only--you can't just use a gate to go on a vacation to Venus (unless the vacation is the pretext for a plot). If resources is something that would grant you "civilian" access to a gate, then have it cost something using whatever resources system you end up using. In essence: sure, you can go on a vacation to Venus without it being plot--but it'll cost you resources in-game. Yes, this is abstract. Everything in roleplaying is.

These aren't the only things you need, but they are some basic things. Give players options--but not to many to start. Gauge your playerbase as it grows and start giving them more options later. Pay no mind to people who don't like the current limitations. Make those limitations absolutely clear from the start, and also make it clear that they can change in the future, but you make no promises that they actually will or HOW they will if they do.

And then make sure you listen tio your playerbase and what they want out of the game, because while it is your game and you can do with it what you want, you won't really be able to if you only have ten players who all log on at different times.

@thenomain said in Life... in outer space!:

I have a stupid sci-fi theory that lives in my head, that I kind of like:

You know the gray aliens? Those are us from the future. That's how long it will take us to work it out, knowing by that time we'll be commonly screwing with our own biology. We might as well be aliens to ourselves, tho I wouldn't say as we are to ants as I would ourselves to early Neanderthal, or similar hominid.

The idea that any civilization can survive for thousands of years drives my scientific self insane, because we can't even keep a moderately small civilization going for a few hundred years without it fracturing.

It also reminds me that the sentiment is moot if we don't try to get off this planet.

Then I just get depressed.

You should watch Fringe.