Best posts made by faraday

@Roz said:

For other instances of things, we're free with utilizing +rolls and letting GMs kind of mold the scene around the mutation use.

Yeah, you've hit upon a lot of the things that can be modeled using the combat variables - attacks, defense, initiative, damage resistance and damage. But a lot of superpowers just don't relate directly to combat, and thus I'm not sure how you would model coded effects for them. Even if you could, it would be highly system-dependent, and I'm not convinced you could make it generic in a satisfactory way.

This is essentially the model used by The Greatest Generation rather successfully for war campaigns. It did various battles of WWI, WWII, the Spanish Civil War, the Finnish Winter War... it was very interesting. Knowing that the theme would recycle in a few months made it easier to swallow when your cannon fodder soldier inevitably got killed by the brutal combat system And it was nice that every campaign told a full story with a beginning, middle and end. But yeah, it was tough for me at first because I'm the sort to get attached to my characters and their ongoing storyline. I got over it.

I like it. Don't agree 100% with every little thing but as you said up front: 'take what you need and leave the rest'. Overall I think it's a good set of guidelines.

But this: "A good RPer can turn a nod into a six-line pose."

Really? That I'd like to see

But it ties into my pet peeve, which I'm guilty of myself: enough with the smiling and nodding. Seriously, if I had a nickel for every time a MUSH character just nodded or smiled as their only action in a pose, I'd be rich.

@Lithium said:

I've done it in TT, when my dice were on fire and I kept rolling nat 20's, well, I didn't feel like total PK'ing the party that night and so some crit hits became misses. I think there requires some trust in the group with the DM/ST/GM in order to create a good story.

But why is that so different in a MUSH environment? Don't you want your MU players to have the same opportunities for fun and a good story as your tabletop ones in that scenario?

Sure you can say you wouldn't have exactly that same mix of people together, but so what? As long as your mission is always "help players tell a good story" and you apply that mission fairly to everyone (and not, say, just to your buddies), isn't that fair enough?

@Halicron Hee. Okay, if everyone nodded and smiled like that I'd have to rescind my pet peeve

@Lithium said:

Because as soon as you play favorites one way, it will bite you on the ass eventually once drama hits. Around a gaming table drama is less an issue, people will just say: Shut up Diana, or Bob, or whatever and the game will move on. In a MU* it's a whole different environment.

I think, as @Tat mentioned in a later post, that we play on different kinds of games. My combat code will never kill/maim you in the first place, so the stakes are different. Also there's no PvP and I strive for an atmosphere of trust like one would find in a tabletop setting. (Sometimes it works better than others.)

If skewing results to help players have fun causes drama occasionally, I'll take it.

It sounds like Sam's just not into that plot. Forcing it is likely to not get you much satisfaction, as @Arkandel mentioned. It could also be that he just forgot, and another gentle nudge might get clarity on what's going on.

In general, though, how long you put your own fun on hold for someone else is more of a personal choice. There's no right or wrong answer. Couple of other options to consider:

• Go ahead with the plot with someone else (perhaps a NPC) in Sam's role.
• Work out what happens off-camera with Sam so the plot can proceed.
• Try to pin down Sam to a specific date/time. "How about Tuesday evening" in general works a little better than "Let's play sometime."

@surreality Absolutely. I’m not advocating taking things to unreasonable extremes, or running to staff with every little thing. Common sense must prevail. But I do think things are not always so cut and dried - particularly when your characters have closer ties. Here are some more actual examples of more subtle situations - all assuming Bob has vanished for a moderate period of time with no word and no prior instructions:

Bob just started teaching your character something, but you haven’t seen him for awhile. Jane asks, “How are those lessons with Bob going?”

You’re a doctor and Bob is your patient. Last time you RPed with him, he was critically injured. Jane asks, “How’s Bob doing? Has he been discharged yet?”

Bob is your IC boyfriend. Your last scene involved them having a big fight and you cried on Jane’s shoulder about it. Jane asks, “How are things with Bob? Did you patch things up?”

Now you can try to do some RP gymnastics with vague or evasive answers. You can just beg Jane OOCly, “Please for the love of all that’s holy stop asking about Bob!” But sometimes neither of those things makes sense and you’re forced to make an assumption about what’s going on with Bob.

A considerate BobPlayer will just go with whatever you decided because they’re the ones who left you in the lurch. But sadly, not all players are considerate. Or, as @Sunny mentioned, the avoidance was for OOC reasons and they’re not comfortable with you making assumptions about them. So that’s when having staff backing for your assumption can come in handy.

@Ganymede said:

In your examples, however, Sam's decisions affect Ingrid.

There's a difference between making a OOC decision that affects Ingrid and making an IC decision for Ingrid.

Example of the former: I don't feel like RPing with you, so we need to work this out off-camera.

Example of the latter: You don't feel like RPing with me, so I'm just gonna assume your character is out of town/sick/working late/avoiding me without asking you.

@ThatGuyThere said:

Also I wonder just how would staff enforce a relationship reverting back to what it was. It might sound alright on principle but how would it be enforced.

It's something that has to be handled on a case-by-case basis, but I can give a hypothetical example.

Bob has vanished again. Poor Jane, his IC spouse, is sick of this nonsense and wants to move on. She RPs that Bob has been absent a lot ICly, and uses this as justification for breaking up with him.

Bob returns and takes exception to this. He wouldn't avoid his wife! It's not fair of her to have RPed him being gone all the time. He wants it retconned. They can't work it out, so they come to staff.

If Bob had only been gone for two weeks, I would tend to side with Bob here. If he had been gone for a month, I would tend to side with Jane. But it's all very subjective. Either way, somebody walks away unhappy.

And btw, in either case Jane could've avoided the conflict by coming up with an internal justification for Jane wanting to move on, rather than making it have anything to do with a presumed IC reason for Bob's OOC absence.

@Ghost said:

Some players will get uppity on an OOC level about it, but the ones that stay will be your good roleplayers who care about things like metaplot, art, and story over whether or not they're getting their super sekret quasi-cheating romance escape.

I think that's an gross mis-characterization. I am against involuntary character death, but it has nothing to do with romance. I care about metaplot, art, and story. But when I'm playing a MUSH, I'm writing my character's story.

You don't read a novel expecting the protagonist to get killed off halfway through. Yeah, sometimes it happens (I'm looking at you, Game of Thrones), but it's the exception not the rule and often times it's not done for "story" but just for shock value.

This is not in contradiction with the idea of telling an overarching story, as @Seraphim73 described. Just look at the expanded Marvel Universe for an example of how to tell individual stories that allow their separate protagonists to shine while still tying into the larger metaplot.

That said, run your game however you want. But understand you'll be potentially depriving your game of a large pool of otherwise good RPers.

@Seraphim73 Yes, I meant the movie/TV universe. I haven't read the comics. As for the rest - we can agree to disagree. What you see as the (possible) problem I see as the sole reason I play (and run) MUSHes - to enable people to tell their individual stories in a collaborative environment where the sum is greater than the parts.

@mietze said:

I've found that most people with some ooc encouragement and knowledge that even if they don't know you/you don't know them that you're wanting to share the stage are far more common than people think. But too many people exclude/don't bother to get to know strangers or are afraid of taking that first step because of course everyone else must be selfish unless they're a friend, and when you come into it with that viewpoint, that's exactly what you're going to get most times.

That's been my experience too. And I think staff can help encourage this cooperative sort of environment with thw world setup and plots that give different people chances to shine.

@Seraphim73 said in What do RPGs *never* handle in mu*'s? What *should* they handle?:

But I'm one of those people who thinks that you can change a PC's body if you've got the stats (it may be FTBed), but you should never be able to change the PC's thoughts unless the player chooses to allow it. I realize it's an odd line to draw, and I think it comes from the point of view of a writer.

It's not an odd line to draw for me at all. For performance/artistic skills, there are two facets: the objective quality and the emotional impact. Quality is something you can measure with dice. Wow, that was a really rousing speech. Man, that was a slick sales pitch. Whoa, worst pickup line ever.

But the emotional impact? That's for the receiving player to decide. Just because it's the best sales pitch ever doesn't mean you're going to buy it. Not everyone likes the Mona Lisa. Not everyone appreciates Shakespeare, even though these things are objectively speaking considered amazing works of art by millions.

Sure it's jarring if you've got someone who can't RP their way out of a paper bag trying to play a highly successful social animal. But that's not unique to social skills. You can get the same effect if someone's playing a doctor and knows zilch about medicine, or playing a tactical genius and knows zilch about tactics. Social skills are just more noticeable because they get used more often.

@Kanye-Qwest said in What do RPGs *never* handle in mu*'s? What *should* they handle?:

If you are in favor of being able to ignore social dice rolls at will, what's the point of having them at all?

Well I tried to explain why - because a social "contest" if you will depends a great deal on the person's personality, morality, personal preferences, etc. most of which are not reflected by stats. This is very different than the situation with combat rolls, which are very well modeled in most systems.

Someone who has deliberately chosen to have "gullible" as part of their personality would react very differently to a mediocre con roll than a cop who is suspicious of everyone or a character who just doesn't like your PC. Someone who is married or highly religious or interested in members of a different sex or only into redheads would react very differently to a seduction roll - even a very good one - than someone who isn't.

So the roll is just half the story. You should still RP "appropriately" to the roll, but what that appropriateness means is not a one-size-fits-all answer that can be reflected by "Joe rolls seduction - Good Success".

I don't expect everyone to agree with this. As someone said earlier in the thread, the debate about how to handle social skills has been raging since the beginning of MUSHdom. Just explaining my position.

@Ganymede said in Alternate CoD/WoD Character Growth / XP Systems:

I'd amend my statement to: no form of role-playing requires an increase in total XP spent on the PC.

I disagree strongly there. Just because I go to dance classes and get a dot in dancing or take some introductory German... why in the world does that mean I lose a dot in something else? That's just nonsensical from an IC perspective IMHO.

Skills atrophy if not used, absolutely. I haven't done martial arts in almost 10 years, so I certainly suck now compared to what I used to be able to do. But I don't buy into any system that asserts that they atrophy just because you learned something new.

Where in the world does this concept that "protagonists must risk death or it doesn't matter" come from???

I think MUSHes are most like book/TV series, because of their longevity/multiple storylines. Character death in this sort of series is infrequent and mostly played for shock value. Series like Game of Thrones / Walking Dead made a name for themselves for their body count precisely because it was rare.

We can enjoy Firefly and Star Trek knowing that the crew will almost certainly get out of whatever peril they're currently in. Why do folks rail so much against the same standard being applied to MUSHes?

(Side note: I don't mind if you have a preference for one way or the other. Everyone has their own style. It's the rather vehement statements that death is necessary or lack of death is "couch warming" that I'm reacting to.)

Before the other thread veered off into places code (especially since @ixokai and @Thenomain deleted their posts before I could quote them :)), this is something I've been contemplating for awhile.

I hate the old-school places code, and I know I'm not alone because I've literally not seen anyone use it since the late 90's. Things I hate:

• Using 'tt' to pose everything just pisses me off (and half the time I forget to do it)
• Two people are having a fierce argument at the other table but you can't see it because they're all using table-talk. So something that you should be reacting to ICly is either missed, or requires them to double-pose "Bob and Joe argue" to the main room.
• Having "Round Table" "Small Table" and "Square Table" with arbitrary space limits and nonsense like that is a pain to configure when you're building.
• Don't even get me started on the clunkiness of moving chairs from one table to another.
• Phantom people left behind when they log off / leave. The auto-clear code never worked right on any MUSH I was on.

But the idea of being able to have smaller scenes in a big room is a useful one. It's just the execution that kinda sucks.

For AresMUSH I basically have a clean slate, so it makes me wonder... how can we do this better? Make it more useful and dynamic? I have some ideas but I'd like to hear from the gallery.

@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

Everyone in a room is expected to involve everyone there, and you cannot really move your character around without ending the RP taking place.

That's not entirely accurate. There are many situations in MUSHing where you have sub-scenes in a room (as discussed in the now-split places code thread) and often a scene that starts in one location will continue in another as players walk from point A to point B.

I think more specifically though, if you ask to join folks in a room, the implication is that you want to play with them, not start your own separate scene. If your characters want to go to the bar ICly, and the bar is OOCly taken up by another scene that can't accept more, there's absolutely nothing wrong with taking your scene to a "RP Room" and pretending it's the bar at a different time than the other scene is happening. MUSH time is fluid. As others have said, it's also not a cardinal sin to just go to the bar and take your chances. They are public rooms for a reason. It's not black and white.

@Pandora said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

So this got me to thinking - how could A -ever- murder B and make it look like an accident if C is apparently omnipresent?

I wish people would stop taking things to extremes I never said. All I said was that when the people involved were actively seeking C in a life-or-death situation on the ship that there was no logical reason why they wouldn't find her. That's vastly different from saying that C is some kind of all-seeing ever-present beast. Goodness.