Posts made by Derp

@tinuviel said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

@derp No, we want it actually known.

Trueeee.

@tinuviel said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

Hey, if we/you guys solve this whole 'solving problems when nobody wants to cooperate' issue, I know a few anthropology and political science journals we could submit to...

Shit, could we just submit that directly to Congress?

@ganymede said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

Would people still use social stats to resolve conflict? Why or why not?

I respectfully disagree with @Thenomain and @faraday, and say 'Of course they would.'

Why?

Because it never fails that, no matter how unpopular a decision by a game-runner is, there will be people who continue to play under the ruleset created because they want to play on the game.

While questions of bogging things down and agency and whatnot are all well and good, and I'm sure work well on the theoretical level, in reality these things rarely pan out. No matter how unpopular a game's staff and house rules, no matter how unlikely it seems on paper that people will continue to play on games, it never fails that as long as the staff are there, and active, and doing things with the rules in place, people will be there playing until someone shuts off the lights. They might grumble about it, but they'll be there, even when there are alternatives.

Evidence: Haunted Memories, Darkwater, The Reach, Fallcoast, Fate's Harvest. And that's, what, just this decade? How many decades long does that list stretch?

People are going to play, period. There will always be someone grumbling, but -- ok, just go look at SFMux. Despite the fact that they have wonky rules, and weird staffers, and have outright been accused of stealing from other games, there hasn't been a mass exodus of players from the place. They still play. They still play under the rules given to them. Because that's what players in this genre do. They play, and they bitch about how things could be better, and they play some more, and nobody is every perfectly pleased but plenty of people manage to have fun.

So, distilled -- of course they'll play, and continue to use those rules. Probably even more once it's made clear and explicit that it's safe to do so, no matter what philosophical arguments to the contrary might spring up. At best you lose a small subset of folks who just refuse, but meh.

@ganymede said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

why do World of Darkness players so readily buy into the Violence section (combat) of the rules, but sometimes vehemently oppose any attempt to use rules regarding social influence and maneuvering?

@arkandel said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

In many/most of violence there is an arbitrator (ST) present who can double as a guide, answering quick questions with authority.

The rolls tend to be very straight forward and the effects quite well defined. +roll strength+weaponry+3-4 (where +3 is your weapon's damage, -4 the opponent's defense+armor) is a very straight forward thing; if you roll 3 successes that's 3 lethal damage. If the damage brings them to 0, they are dead. It's all nice and neat, prepared in advance, and even most powers that modify it do it in a direct way (you have Vigor? Well, add it).

It's something we do in PvE. PvE is cleaner, there's way less bitching. Notice how violent PvP scenarios very often do need arbitration (staff acting as a ST, basically) and the simplicity described above is thrown out the window - players contesting each other invalidates the element of collaboration, and that's the result.

I would like to propose an alternative reason, using the following scenario:

Arkandel rolls some dice to punch Ganymede, getting three successes.

Arkandel growls angrily and rears a fist back, ducking under Ganymede's arm to deliver a punch square to her kidney, inflicting three damage (in theory).

Ganymede-player reads the pose, doesn't even roll any dice, and writes a pose of her own

Ganymede rolls her eyes and continues drinking her beer. She's a world-class lawyer and has been in more courtroom brawls than she can even count, and that nerve nexus under her kidney has been dead for years, ever since that judge broke his gavel and shanked her for being so snarky. She ignores the roll and decides she takes no damage, because this element of her story is important to her character's background, and she's the only one who gets to decide how her character is affected.

We would instantly call bullshit on that kind of thing, because the dice said otherwise, using the system put in place, and we would insist that the outcome be enforced because the system says it should be.

On the other hand, if Arkandel had tried to intimidate her and Ganymede had just rolled her eyes and continued drinking her beer because she's a battle hardened world class lawyer that's seen some shit, and this dude can't have an effect on her, many people in this thread wouldn't even bat their eyes.

Why?

Because we have come to expect that one will be enforced, and the other won't be, for whatever reason, even though in both scenarios a player is trying to invalidate the system's results using their own made-up information.

Players don't use the system, and it has no teeth, because we've never enforced this scenario, and every time we try and remind someone that invalidating the results of the system based on extraneous information not contained therein is cheating at its most basic level, we allow this violation of the rules regularly, and so players feel entitled to ignore the system.

That's why players tend to so vehemently oppose any use of social combat -- because they've seen this exact scenario enough to know that if they raise a big enough fuss about it, someone will let them wiggle out of it based on meta-rationalization, whereas with physical combat that rarely happens and they will be called out for acting in bad faith.

This gets even more ludicrous when Ganymede's character has a Resolve + Composure pool of like, 3, and the system itself doesn't back up her story of being a battle hardened lawyer with a will of iron.

At the end of the day, the rules don't get taken seriously because of desuetude, essentially. It's not that the rules aren't there, it's just that people have gotten so used to being able to break them that they have come to expect they will be ignored.

@faraday said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

This "just play by the rules or play a different game" argument is getting tiresome.

So is the 'the rules don't adequately account for every trivial exception I can think up to avoid adhering to the outcome of a contested skills roll, so we need to scrap and/or change the whole thing' arguments on the other side.

Look, do you really think that you're going to be able to find a set of rules that is:

1. Simple enough for people to easily understand and implement

and

2. Complex enough to match every little quibble that comes up in the system?

Because I think that's a pipe dream. Everyone can invent some reason why the stupid rules didn't take into account this SUPER IMPORTANT thing of theirs that would have made all the difference in the roll if just the rules would see how brilliant their argument is.

But on the other side of that, I would ask: If this super-important thing to the character is so SUPER IMPORTANT, shouldn't it already be reflected in their attribute/skill levels and or merits? And if the sheet doesn't reflect a high enough rating in that, do they even really have it, or are you just wishing that they did?

@Ganymede asked for a discussion about social stats in the World of Darkness, and while I'm sure many people would love a more robust system, I keep coming back to the same idea, which I don't think has gotten enough merit so far -- maybe the system isn't broken, and maybe it's just the way we've been allowed to play it so far that's the problem.

Either way, she'll do what she needs to do for her game. I'm just saying that, maybe, at some point, someone needs to say 'Wait, woah, hold up. We aren't going to completely overhaul the rules just because you think your character should be more resistant to this, but don't have the stats to back it up.'

@thenomain

Upvoting because Damon Salvatore fans self.

@faraday said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

There is a ginormous difference between rolling intimidation for "Hey give me your lunch money" and "I've got a gun to your daughter's head, now go in there and rob that bank for me or she's dead".

There is likewise a ginormous difference between 'a five foot ten ninety pound girl tries to wrestle an alligator' and 'a 6'4 250 lb marine tries to wrestle an alligator', but the system uses the same roll to calculate the results of that.

Stop trying to model every real-life scenario in the abstract dice system. It's abstract for a reason. Using that logic, we can come up with flaws in any number of skills -- a boxer with brawl 5 shouldn't be able to do Kung-Fu maneuvers but he can, no can a cardiothorasic surgeon be trusted to remove a tumor from a brain, but that Medicine 5 lets them do that all the same.

This is where people (rightfully) complain that people who refuse to adhere to the levels of abstraction in the dice aren't playing by the rules. Your complaint is that the rules don't adequately model real life. Fine, use a different system altogether, one with much more complexity and nuance than the one given to you in WoD. But if you're using WoD, you should be prepared to have things not perfectly match up every logical gauntlet you can run it through, because it wasn't designed to take into account every real world detail and put in a modifier for it. It's an abstraction for a reason.

Similarly, 'all those weapons and things' are ultimately still just giving you dice modifiers. The different damage types can just be thought of as shortcuts -- enough bashing will fill those the same as agg, agg just does it faster. Shortcuts exist in the Doors system too, if you invest in the right merits. And social dice have equipment just like combat does -- good clothes, nice perfume. There's a whole list. Ultimately, just mods.

The system doesn't care about all the subtleties that you keep bringing up, as if they should have a real effect on the system. THere's subtleties and nuance in physical combat too, but if people try and use those same mazes of logic in physical combat we say they're acting in bad faith because the system is an abstraction and they just want to ignore the dice results.

Same deal here.

It's all an abstraction. The abstraction says 'all of those subtleties are taken into account under varioius skill ratings which we use under this mathematical system which determines the final result'. IF there's a big one, that might be a circumstance modifier, but again, the system ultimately doesn't care about whatever level of nuance you want to give a thing, because the system determines results, not the circumstances which give rise to them. That's up to you to roleplay.

@ganymede said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

I do disagree that the exact step-by-step process is irrelevant, however, because the way that physical combat is laid out plainly makes how you get from the showdown to the outcome detail-oriented. What maneuvers you choose in combat will put you at an advantage or disadvantage as to the probability of the outcome.
You don't just roll Strength + Weaponry to put down your target; you are given a plethora of options and moves to determine how to best do that.

Yes and no? At the baseline you're rolling Strength + Weaponry to put down a target, and all of the other options are, well... optional, or at best circumstantial, and really just give you modifiers to the strength + weaponry roll that is doing the brunt of the work, plus or minus a few cool maneuvers you can do if you invest in some fighting styles.

So while I don't disagree that the social systems could stand to be more robust, there is nothing in the baseline system that says they have to be, and even physical combat isn't all that complicated at its core. It's just a roll. And while one of the big arguments against some of the social stuff is there's no clearly delineated way to defend against it, the physical combat system doesn't always let you defend either. In social stuff, there is almost always a counter-roll that could be made, while for your average mortal there ain't shit you can do against a gun but try and run the hell away and get somewhere the bullet can't find you, or hope you can out-shoot them first (i.e., defense does not apply to firearms rolls, so they're literally just rolling Dex + Firearms at you / each other).

So the creation of a more robust social system isn't necessary. It's optional, and probably a good idea, but it's not a 'fix' to the 'problem' because the 'problem' isn't that the two systems have no parity. It's that we don't view parity in the two systems despite the fact that they operate on almost the exact same level, minus optional things.

@griatch

I think it would be more helpful to know precisely how a session relates to control of a character under the different models. If each session is its own object with its own command set that can run independently of each other, does this mean that each session is calling independent character data? It says that each session connects to an account, but how does it connect to that account (in an abstract way, not necessarily specific technical details).

So for example:

I have an account with a username 'Derp', and I have three characters under this account: Yakko, Wakko, and Dot.

Each of these modes presumably connects to Derp, with varying levels of independence.

Some of these would allow me to independently puppet Yakko and Dot at the same time.

Would any of these, given their relative independence, allow me to puppet two instances of Dot that are each doing their own thing in different places?

What does it mean to puppet a character under an account, and how does that relate to the sessions? How is the character data being called/tracked from the account under the different multi-session modes? Sessions seem to be written to suggest that each of these things could be a completely isolated instance of that character, because it reads as if they are independent connections to some master data template that stores its own unique changes, and that the information can be lost if it's saved to just one session and not something larger (under the larger Sessions write-up, not necessarily this specific instance).

While most of us are familiar with the limitations of MUX-like games and how the connect to characters, this isn't necessarily true for Evennia, and I think that there's a presumption in play with this write-up that it's generally understood that a character can only have a single instance on the grid, regardless of multi-session mode selected. And since we're not actually using MUX, or the limitations thereof, that doesn't necessarily hold true.

I guess ultimately, more information about how the connections work, how puppeting works in the various modes, and the limitations of each mode would be helpful for people like me, who would love something that lets a character be in multiple places at once, each acting independently. I got really excited when I read that, because that limitation wasn't clear, and the wording would outright seem to suggest that the only-one-instance-of-a-character limitation doesn't actually exist in mode 2 and 3.

To be clear:

What I wanted: I want to be able to have Dot giving a fiery speech in the public plaza in one window, while also doing some quieter, catchup-with-a-friend-by-the-fire RP in another, and the two of them be able to act independently while drawing from the same character sheet data for rolls/etc.

What I read: "This is the multi-playing mode where each session may, through one player account, individually puppet its own object/character without affecting what happens in other sessions." and/or "This is the full multi-puppeting mode, where multiple sessions may not only connect to the player account but multiple sessions may also puppet a single character at the same time."

What I thought: Ok, so in one or both of these, I could connect to Dot twice, and each of those be its own session, and if I move one Dot into another room, it won't affect what happens to the other Dot, since what happens to one session doesn't affect the other one.

The reality: Apparently not so much?

That's the kind of language that I think is ambiguous there, and could be cleared up.

@ganymede said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

I don't mean to be blunt or mean, but this is simply the case and I think it has to do with our medium; however, it is less about one's social aptitude and more about one's ability to communicate in the written medium.

Here is where I disagree, and I think that this is the crux of the problem.

Up to this point, we've been talking about various ends and ways to achieve them, and what would be reasonable given certain dice rolls, etc.

That's not what this system does, though. At the end of the day, the exact step-by-step process doesn't matter, any more than the exact step-by-step process matters for determining damage in physical combat. We don't make people come up with exacting technical detail about how their characters duck under a person's punch and apply a certain pre-determined amount of force to a specific joint or nerve nexus in order to determine the level of damage, and we don't allow people to make arguments like 'Well my character is double jointed and extremely flexible so clearly that isn't going to have an effect on me'. The outcome is determined by a level of abstraction governed by dice.

Which is exactly how social combat should work as well. In the end, the exact nuances don't matter, because the END RESULTS are determined at some level of abstraction, governed by dice, and the 'how' is frankly a) not really all that important and b) no more relevant than it would be for a physical contest.

Example: If I roll for intimidation against Jane and win, the dice say Jane is intimidated. Full stop. Whether Jane goes into an apoplectic fit of fear and cowers in a corner or does some quick mental math and decides that the odds just aren't in her favor that day, she is still intimidated because the dice determined that she is. How each of us writes that up into a pose has absolutely no effect whatsoever on the mechanical outcome.

But we've been talking about this system as if the onus of explaining 'how you get there' is up to the person doing the intimidating, and not the person being intimidated. It's not. We got there, because the dice, as an abstract system that determines final outcomes, said so. It's up to you to figure out the 'how', if the how is important enough, and we should be holding people accountable to that.

We only allow deviation from these things because that's how they've traditionally played out, so no, that isn't "simply the case," as if it were some universal law that has to be followed.

Ultimately, this comes down to something pretty basic: do we feel that the dice, as a level of abstraction that determines final outcomes, are valid across the board? And if not, where do we draw the line on that?

So, just my two cents here:

I printed the documentation for both the current and previous version of Evennia, from the available PDFs. I have to say, the documentation is helpful in some areas, but isn't quite as helpful as it could be in other areas.

Here's an example:

11.3.2 Multisession mode

The number of sessions possible to connect to a given account at the same time and how it works is given by the MULTISESSION_MODE setting:

• MULTISESSION_MODE=0: One session per account. When connecting with a new session the old one is disconneted. This is the default mode and emulates many classic mud code bases.

• MULTISESSION_MODE=1: Many sessions per account, input from each session is treated identically. This means that you could use any number of different clients to input something and all would see the same result
back.

• MULTISESSION_MODE=2: Many sessions per account, one character per session. This is the multi-playing mode where each session may, through one player account, individually puppet its own object/character without
affecting what happens in other sessions.

• MULTISESSION_MODE=3: Many sessions per account and character. This is the full multi-puppeting mode, where multiple sessions may not only connect to the player account but multiple sessions may also puppet a
single character at the same time. It is a multi-session version of mode 1. This allows multiplaying of many characters from any number of clients at once.

Ok, groovy -- but what does that actually mean? Does this mean that under multi-session mode 2 or 3, we could have a single character in multiple places at once, since "each session may, through one player account, individually puppet its own object/character without
affecting what happens in other sessions" and "multiple sessions may not only connect to the player account but multiple sessions may also puppet a
single character at the same time"? Because that's a possible reading of the above -- each session is considered an individual thing, and each is treated individually without affecting the others. (I know I asked this on the IRC already, but using this as an example of where the documentation could be clearer).

Including clearer, less ambiguous examples in some of these things might be a good idea, so that people know what it is they're setting up.

I'm with @wretched and @tragedyjones . But I have been for a long time, too.

I don't always agree with Wretched, but in this case I do. I already dislike that social stuff is hamstringed by agency arguments, removing it explicitly just gives people a warrant to be combat monsters.

And I already have an ancient thread about why Doors should be a thing for PCs, as TJ says.

Ok, so the screen splitting is pretty badass.

@josh said in I want to code for a V5 MU*:

picking up MU* coding shouldn't be too difficult.

I think that you would probably find more luck with Evennia (which uses Python) than with MUX if you've never poked at MUX code before. Even for professionals it can be kind of a nightmare.

I was gonna say, I've never had to leave a term window open. I just created a launcher.

Thread necro!

@Ganymede

@surreality

Don't forget jhelp!

@auspice

You do the shrooms with the MDMA. Hippy flipping. It is wonderful.

@ixokai

On mux, this won't match the open/close quotes that it uses by default in the "say" command.

@skew said in Setting up a builder Bit:

Edit #3: On all the games I have helped run (BITN, Fate's Harvest, Fallen World), we just chose a builder and gave them Wiz access and told them not to break anything. They didn't break anything.

As buildstaff for a few games now, let me be the first to assure you that, no matter what a paranoid headwiz may think, your builder is one staffer that absolutely needs wizard powers. Builders do much more than just dig things. They interact with all manner of code, and are miniature coders themselves. If they are efficient, they will be regularly running searches and doing privileged @dols to fix things and ensure consistency. They need the kind of access that wizards get even more than Team Leads in many occasions.

If you are truly worried, just check the log files. Most builders know what they are doing and are not going to break anything. Find people you trust, give them access, let them go.