Posts made by Cura

An afterthought that occurred to me as a 'oh, right -- duh' when I woke up: In space, time acts differently for people depending on circumstances.

Traveling at luminal speeds makes time pass more slowly for the person doing that traveling than it does for someone who isn't doing that, because PHYSICS~!

And the 24-hour day is an Earth-specific convention that doesn't apply once you go rocketing off into a void where 'day' and 'night' have no meaning other than the one we ascribe to it. Most sci-fi settings try to work with 24-hour days based on the very real consideration that we're a diurnal creature that evolved to live on that schedule (though non-24 sleepers like myself might have a small bone to pick with the assumption that this is an inflexible habit, but I digress). In practice, that would probably change regionally to make easier whatever a local lifestyle might be (and I think the Expanse books get it right: we'd be living in shifts, and it would always be someone's 'daytime' and someone's 'night time' in the same location).

Throw these things at a space-based setting and it does a lot to help fuzz up the lines of 'what day even is it right now?' -- because nobody is going to keep track of what day it is EVERYwhere (or at least, I'm sure as hell not), and if Zapp Brannigan is just getting into town from somewhere else in the spiral arm and for him it's Tuesday, and Zaphod Beeblebrox has been on Earth getting wasted for a week and says he's pretty sure it's Friday, well...that's probably business as usual.

Especially for those two.

@faraday Yep, pretty much. That's what I meant about characters being on different days. Nobody would ever be spending them precisely the same. It's not the kind of thing you'd be able to draw hard lines in the sand with at any point other than at the weekly mark. I mean...I honestly think anytime you let people fudge timelines significantly enough to allow for something like space travel, they're doing that, anyway -- they're just not thinking or worrying about what that means, most of the time. (Which is totally easier, and why I don't intend to implement stretchy weeks -- but then, I'm not too anxious about finding a way to put restrictions on people, either.)

@SG said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

Anyways, design a setting with this in mind, I guess.

I quoted because this is a good springboard into my thoughts about it.

Most games with huge settings compromise by doing this by offering a central hub location that's equally accessible to all factions/nations/whatever, to make it easy/logical for people to congregate, and then having 'everywhere else' available on the side. The game I'm working on at a snail's pace does this, because the setting is Absolutely Gigantic.

I could choose to limit the setting to strictly that space station hub, sure. @faraday chose a very concentrated setting for BSG:U and that degree of purity in setting works very well for how she wanted her game to work. For the kind of game I want to make, there are aspects of Space Opera as a genre that bring a lot to the table for RP, though, even if it makes the question of travel time something you then have to consider.

It's a grand, over-the-top genre, and invites plots that are both of those things. If I want players who feel free to flex their storytelling itches, a game where I can say 'yes' to people who ask me about a plot they want to run more often than I say 'no' out of a need to safeguard my theme, it's a GREAT genre. Space being absolutely gigantic means there's room for a lot of stuff to be happening at once without necessarily ruining anybody else's day in the process, no matter how many explosions you want your plot to involve. You can break the setting, but it's harder to do because even something as shockingly serious as destroying an entire planet doesn't have to be game-breaking anymore.

It does mean there need to be some clear lines to describe the boundaries of the theme, to avoid it becoming a sandbox with no cohesion at all, if you want a cohesive game.

As some others have mentioned previously, worrying about travel time only matters if your game has elements of intrigue or pvp. Mine is intended to, so it's relevant. There's no cut-and-dry solution, because:

@Arkandel said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

It's the same thing for sci-fi. There shouldn't need to be artificial barriers keeping you to a certain geographical location - just the reasonable OOC obligation to be a responsible player who contributes to the MU*.

Putting hard rules on travel time doesn't appeal to me. I like flexibility to accommodate players and like at least one person in the thread has already said, removing barriers to people actually getting RP is hugely important. It means being willing to accept that some people will probably push the envelope. If you have a big enough game (I should be so lucky!), you're never going to be able to keep track of where everyone is and what they're doing. You can put people on the honor system, but how well that works depends entirely on your players. I do think that players running plots in which the presence (or absence) of individuals matters are likely to report problematic time-travel behavior, though, so it's probably not a huuuuuge worry, as long as you establish that you expect people to be reasonable about not being everywhere at once.

I think RL:IC time compression can be a good partial answer, depending on just how much travel time you need. I've been on games with a 1:2 compression ratio -- one RL day being 2 IC days -- and that was hugely useful. It gave players the ability to backdate things easily enough, or slot them in one day ahead if they were indisposed IC, but still needed to get something in.

I've thought recently that experimenting with extending that window might be interesting. What if one RL week is one IC week, but a player gets to RP those days however they like in each window, like the proverbial stretchy rubber sheet of time? It would put characters on different days within their given weeks, but that may not actually be any more problematic than leaving them to fudge things a bit in the name of getting RP in, and it would make people think about how they wanted to spend their time.

It's still more regulation than I personally care to do, and probably won't, but I think about these things a lot now.

@testament said in The Churn: an Expanse game:

Though I'd be careful about allowing PCs getting weapons on their ships.

@seraphim73 said in The Churn: an Expanse game:

In my opinion, for something like The Expanse, battleships should be plot points, not on-screen rolls.

It is indeed built on Ares, which is lovely. Including FS3 was not the selling point of using Ares, for me. I like FS3, and I like that it's simple and lightweight, which is why I'm leaving it in, but the Expanse is classic space opera, which means over-the-top action and grand adventures and, generally speaking, things that FS3 may not be perfectly modeled to represent.

It's important to me to emphasize that the game favors narrative value over rolls. If somebody doesn't want to roll dice on that game, they probably won't ever have to, beyond the occasional perception check, maybe. I want it to be a fun box of toys that people can play with if they like that sort of thing, and I think +sheets are a good way to make sure everyone is on the same page about things, but using it to roll dice won't be compulsory.

Just copy-pasting from the policies that are up on the game's portal, in the FS3 section:

• FS3 is meant to be a very simple, very streamlined option to guide, expand, and enrich RP here, to help prop up RP in interesting ways and lend an element of chance to storytelling. It is NOT intended to restrict or define RP, or put hard boundaries on storytelling. On this game, RP always comes first. If two characters want to RP an over-the-top action scene without rolling dice, we are A-OK with that. (You should probably not pose your character being an expert marksman if they have no firearms skill, but if you wanna pose them as having no skill but somehow getting that one-in-a-million headshot, against all odds, because it makes for an awesome moment of story and everyone else in the scene is okay with it? Nobody is going to have a problem with that.)

• FS3 is not designed or balanced for PvP. The PvP this setting encourages is strategic, political, and resource-based rather than reliant on a system for combat between two characters. If players want to try using it for PvP just for fun, that's cool, but no PvP consequences using FS3 are ever going to be enforced by staff.

• We've adjusted the points a character is allowed to spend in chargen substantially upward. New characters receive an abundance of points to begin the game with, and it's possible to create a truly badass character with them, straight out of the gates. You do not HAVE to use all of the points you're allowed to, but you won't be side-eyed for doing so. Progression/advancement in FS3 is intentionally slow, and fairly limited -- there's not much point in racing off to try to max everything, given the difference in your odds of success between ranks of skill is not immense, and it's easy to consistently succeed at rolls with even an average skill level. The amount of points you are given here in CG makes progression even less emphasized once IC. See above: FS3 is really just here as a fun option, and the game is not excessively system-oriented. You can probably spend the entire duration of your time on this game without ever doing more than rolling occasional skill checks (and maybe not even doing that).

@testament said in The Churn: an Expanse game:

a lot of big and small changes in the third book to the third season, but I don't think it's bad. I think they're both really good on different merits.

This is how I've felt about it. It's increasingly deviating from the specifics of the books, but it's maintaining the dynamics between factions and characters, and I can understand why they've made the changes they've made, either as shorthand for a limited window of time, or to work in a visual medium. Granted, the authors produce the show and have written multiple episodes themselves, so I guess that's no surprise.

The nice part of that is that it's still worthwhile to read the books even if you start by watching the show, because there's so much more of the story to experience.

@Insomnia : I've been watching this! I am personally interested in seeing how it turns out, but not for the MU*, probably. Even if I were up to the task of sorting out an Ares plugin for that system, I think I'd just rather dive into the epic narrative end of space opera.

@testament said in The Churn: an Expanse game:

I mean it's just more Amos appreciation which I can completely get behind.

He and Avasarala are my far-and-away favs. So many of the characters are great, but those two...

@seraphim73 said in The Churn: an Expanse game:

happy to help with stats if you'd like it

We caught up on discord about this a little before I had to jet for this trip, but yes! I am not too proud to accept all kinds of help, thank you!

@testament said in The Churn: an Expanse game:

Isn't Medina Station in S3 still considered the Behemoth? Its splitting hairs, I know.

[...]

kinda glad there won't be a Jim Holden running around to be Sols resident white knight.

It may be. I actually have six episodes left of the show to watch, so I'm not sure how they broke it down, other than I know they heavily compressed a lot of the book events and slid things into more overlap with one another, time-wise. Once it's through the (spoilers), and after the Roci crew goes to (spoilers), it turns back up as Medina, and this is roughly when the game takes place. (The Roci crew, in the game, stays on the aforementioned spoilers.)

There are so many fantastic characters that make that setting up that it does seem a little sad not to have them kicking around, I know. But if someone wants to app a character that relentlessly mashes the Paragon Interrupt option like Holden does, or just happens to be a rumpled, hat-wearing, sardonic detective type, I am sure there's a place for them somewhere.

@templari said in The Churn: an Expanse game:

We need more grim space based games. You know, one of the best things about being in space is the ability to give under-performing minions an Airlock Promotion.

Agree. The series is pretty cool for me in that it manages to be both hard sci-fi and also dirty, industrial space, and doesn't lose its grounding in familiar things, even though it has over-the-top space opera action, too. I always prefer 'blue-collar' scifi. (Probably something I can lay at the feet of the movie Alien.)

@faraday said in The Churn: an Expanse game:

@cura said in The Churn: an Expanse game:

Overhauling FS3's default BSG loadout to appropriately reflect this setting. I'm the first to admit that statbrain is not my strength. For that reason, this is probably going to take the longest of any task on the list.

I happen to know someone who's pretty good with FS3 stats if you want help with that. Y'know, just saying...

OMG. I would absolutely love help from this hypothetical FS3 statwizard. I just did not ask because it sounds like a huge amount of work and I have already gotten a whole lot of help from another nameless FS3 expert.

(Seriously though, if you're actually willing, that would be incredible.)

@Peppel I would prefer that the trajectory of the game hinge on what people choose to do IC. How much that deviates depends heavily on how much initiative players take, and whether people plot and plan and push things in directions of their own.

There are things the book establishes as true about thematic elements (like the protomolecule) that may influence future events in similar ways, but I have no desire to retread canon things happening in canon ways. (Since the crew of the Roci isn't in play, that would be difficult to recreate, even if I wanted to!)

@auspice Oops! Sorry about that. That would be great, thank you!

Yeah, I remember you had mentioned/we talked about it way back when I first got the itch to write in this setting. I went radio silent after that, but I've been poking at it ever since.

I would also rather be a player than admin something, to be 100% honest (I feel like most sane people have this preference, haha) but since it doesn't exist, I suppose somebody has to get it started. And, hey -- it creates the opportunity to maybe foster the kind of game culture I'm most interested in, so there's that. Hopefully it works for other folks, too.

@insomnia said in The Churn: an Expanse game:

How easy would this be to get into for people who have it on their want to watch but haven't gotten around to it yet list? Will they be completely spoiled by playing if they procrastinate and don't catch up first?

The really nice thing about this setting is that, in spite of being hard sci-fi, most of its sci-fi elements are intuitive evolutions of very familiar present-day technologies and cultures. There's lot of cultural blending and things are in general a lot more socially progressive, but it has a familiar feeling that I think probably makes it easy to pick up and run with.

There are totally spoilers in the theme, though. It takes place after events in book 3/4, and events at the end of season 3.

It's nowhere near done, but people keep bringing the setting up, so I guess it's worth mentioning: this is in the (slowest of slow) works. It's built on Ares (with help from @faraday, thanks lady) and will use FS3, but not in any especially crunchy way -- more as a flavor supplement to RP for those of us who like a little bit of chance mixed in with our RP.

Trying to avoid spoilers for anybody who watches the show and isn't finished with watching season 3: the game's timeline is set following events that happen late in s3, with Medina Station as the central hub/factional melting pot. (The scope of the setting is the entirety of the Sol system, however, with some lightweight handwaviness for travel time, because this is a MU* and the point is to RP.)

There will be no FCs. The crew of the Rocinante has been written out of the story (as much as I love Amos, RIP). At the moment I'm planning to leave some major factional NPC roles filled with canon characters (examples: Avasarala, Dawes, Johnson), but they won't be played -- more as plot devices when big faction decisions are necessary. Ultimately, having those roles become occupied by PCs instead would be ideal.

Stuff that's going to take a while to complete:

• Overhauling FS3's default BSG loadout to appropriately reflect this setting. I'm the first to admit that statbrain is not my strength. For that reason, this is probably going to take the longest of any task on the list.

• Finishing out the wiki and all of its player resource pages: there are fiddly (read: boring) things to compile like the pre-game timeline, and less fiddly but equally necessary things to sort out, like how to organize player contributions to theme (pop culture, player-run factions, etc).

• Gridbuilding: This isn't going to take a terribly long time and it's partially in place, but I do need to do things like 'set up weather zones so that there isn't a warm spring rain happening in the cold vacuum of space.'

• Metaplot. This piece will probably wait until a soft open so that I know wtf kind of characters are even going to be on the grid, and can figure out what people might enjoy and be most interested in engaging with, for those people who like metaplot.

Right now, the staff consists of...me. Hence the creeping pace of development! There's information on the web portal about the kind of game this is intended to be, and in an ideal world it would attract people who like to run plot when they have the freedom to do that, in a lenient setting that allows for a whole lot of flexibility and large-scale storytelling.

On a personal note, in the last few years I've kinda come around to feeling as though being able to say 'yes' to players who are motivated and active is a critical part of a healthy game, and that those sorts of players are happiest when staff can just help them do their thing, and then get out of the way. I've gotten weary of Fun Police stepping in to discourage things that don't actually actively damage the theme or anybody's actual IC experience. I'd like to try to create a game that is mindful of that, and encourages people to blow things up and make messes, as long as it creates RP for other people instead of hindering it.

It's probably going to be a work in progress on that front, and I've seen enough games open (and close) that I know there's an element of luck/chance involved with the playerbase a game draws when the doors open, too. Those are my intentions, though.

I'm actually going out of town this weekend and that makes this timing awkward I guess, but I'm happy to answer any questions that I actually have firm answers to at this point!

(Side note for the curious: If you were on BSG:U toward the end of its life, you might have seen me wandering around that grid as Ines.)

@cura Oops. Cura = juke. Cura account is (potentially) for posting about that game thing I'm building that I haven't talked about until now, because I'm lazy and it's not done. Second mystery solved.

@aq You think right! It'sa meeeee. Mystery solved! I probably should've mentioned that in this thread, huh?

@apos said in What does Immersion mean to you in MUs?:

So as an example, let's look at IC messengers versus @mail or page.

This made me giggle because I suspect this comes from a conversation I had with @faraday about the Ares project I'm (shh) building. The setting is science fiction, and so comms/digital communication are a huge part of the setting, inherently.

Functionally, @mail is more than sufficient to the task, at least for things like in-game email, but it feels 'off' to me in the way that RP in a google drive document feels 'off.' There's no measurable reason that should be the case -- text is text -- and yet.

In my conversation with Fara I mentioned that the word 'immersion' feels weird to me, even though I understand why it's used. I think that's because it's less that it 'maintains the illusion of a false reality so that I can believe it exists,' and more about 'getting into an empathetic headspace where I can put myself in the fiction and thus interact with it in authentic and organic ways.'

When I'm writing non-MU* fiction I don't convince myself the world is real, nor for the purposes of most of the messed up stuff I write would I ever want to do that. >.> But I do try to get 'into the moment' for the duration of my time with the writing I'm doing, because that's how I produce story that feels 'right.'

As for how code bits, etc., interact with those instincts, I think it's all just down to acclimation and custom. I, personally, do not think I could ever do forum-based RP. It just wouldn't work for me. Similarly, I could not be on an RP server for an MMO. It breaks my brain to even think about it. This works for some people, but not for me. It's all about compartmentalizing things in a way that lets you get into that writing zone, and I guess it just differs depending on what you're used to, or how easy it is for you to slide into that space.

EDIT: Edited to add that I think the reason comms and email work better for me than @mail that way is that I've just kinda mentally flagged @mail as a non-pretendy-thing. In that sense, immersion via code is really a pretty clear indicator of a strong feeling of IC/OOC separation, y'know? I don't get weirded out by @mail in-game IC emails when they're tagged that way, but I actually do dislike using pages for phone calls/texting/etc. Pages are player communication with me. Mentally, I have a hard time comfortably making the adjustment to any other utility.

“The plain truth is we are going to die. Here I am, a teeny speck surrounded by boundless space and time, arguing with the whole of creation, shaking my fist, sputtering, growing even eloquent at times, and then - poof! I am gone. Swept off once and for all. I think that is very, very funny.”

― Charles Simic

SPAM INC

I love this thread. I love risk-taking players. I love thinking about how to make people more comfortable with risk. I have a buncha thoughts, but I feel like @Tat and @Sockmonkey drilled into the heart of the problem, at least as I see it.

I honestly think at the end of the day this comes down to you (and your storytellers) knowing your players and your game, and understanding how to engage with that. That's going to look wildly different, depending on the game you're talking about -- not even just the TYPE of game, but the specific game. Because so much of a game's culture, IC and OOC, is the product of its community of individuals, and I feel like the culture of the game will always define expectations and tone, and therefore how things happen in practice. And it's cyclic, too. Your players generate your game's culture, which defines what kind of players like your game, and etc.

It's almost impossible to make a system that works for everybody when it comes to motivation. @Faraday and I have talked about this elsewhere, but: everybody rps for different reasons. What people get out of RP, what they find satisfying, it's always spread across a wide spectrum. You can lump people into broad categories like 'story-driven' or 'system-driven' in an effort to figure out how to create incentive for them, but that seems inadequate to me. There are self-motivated story-driven players and people who don't generate plot. Of those self-motivated players there are people who like (for instance) grey ethical areas of rp, and people who do not. Of the people who like grey ethical rp, some (like me) love to be surprised by curveballs in story, while others (like some dear friends of mine) are a little uncomfortable with that, and might actually be nervous having that come at them from a staff direction in particular. So not only can you not say, broadly and without thinking about an individual's interests, 'I'm going to reward risk-taking and failure by giving more story to story-driven players' -- because you've got some players who are more into running their own stuff than being GM'd for, or who may not share your interests in types of story -- you may actively deter some of them. And you've still got players who aren't going to be motivated by story, anyway, particularly if you have a crunchy stat/combat system. Probably that'll be true even if it's as lightweight and RP-supporting as FS3.

I think my main quibble in the thread is that I really don't like the idea that success ought to be paired with a negative consequence. I think the idea is actually really intriguing and fresh as a mechanical concept, but as a storyteller it feels a bit skeevy and railroady to me. Ideally, a storyteller's job is to make an arc challenging, presenting players with problems to solve en route to some desirable end. That challenge is what makes the victory (if it comes) satisfying for the players in the first place, so those things are the price of success and they're already built in to the story. Sometimes there are more, when the victory is not unqualified. Often, even. But it's not assumed. A good storyteller is already thinking about the players involved, their unique preferences, and the kinds of hurdles that will be interesting for them, so tacking on a victory tax or making it impossible to succeed without some additional penalty feels weird and forced to me. The karma system @Seraphim73 suggested -- credit from past failures permitting future victories -- cushions that a little and it's a good thought, but still feels artificial for me personally, and shifts things on-balance toward being a mechanic. ('I haven't had a lot of time to play lately, and I don't have a failure-generated point to use for a victory, so I just decide, hey -- I'm not gonna get involved in this plot that's happening while I'm actually around and able to play, because I would want to lead the charge and I know I can't, so I'll just save this point for later.')

Players come up with surprising, creative ways to beat the odds all the time, and I feel like storytellers should respect that when it happens. You don't want your risk-averse players to feel like they can never win at anything because they don't want to gamble in order to do that -- plus, you wind up in a situation where you now have to incentivize them to eat the cost of succeeding, whenever that's not enough on its own. You don't want your bold players to know, going into something, that there's a going exchange rate on success, and that they're going to have to buy a win somehow. And for players like me, who like to be surprised by organic developments in RP and are already not risk-averse, it kinda saps all of the interest for me -- this thought that I know something bad is going to happen because something good is going to happen. Or that something good can't happen unless something bad already did.

None of this accounts for PRPs, either, if you want people to run those. Do your player GMs now have to figure out a way to tax success? Should there be limits to what they require people to sacrifice..?

I'm way more about incentivizing the behavior you WANT to see, and I love this thread so hard for making that a subject of conversation, especially when it comes to players being comfortable with failure. I just think how you wind up doing that is going to depend on the players you have, and trying to build a specific model, while it's interesting as an exercise, is probably not possible. It's still hugely useful to think about, granted, because your preferences there (do you want to reward with story, xp, karma, some combination of the above?) are probably going to play a big part in defining what kind of game culture you try to create.

There was an exchange early in the thread with @Ganymede and @Faraday about whether or how it's possible to make failure more appealing than success. I think it's true you can't do that for every player with one system...and you'll probably get a player or two whose needs you're not willing to cater to. All you can do is try to curate a game culture that draws/retains players with what you feel is a reasonable threshold of willingness to take risks when you offer them 'x' kind of incentive, and the others will just kinda weed themselves out. Then you stay consistent, and with time and experiences that don't leave people feeling burned, I think they gradually acclimate. But if you have a game, particularly a small game, where the bulk of players don't care about the incentive you want to offer them and you just try to ram that into practice, it's never going to work. It has to start as something based on what you have, and move toward being what you want to have.