Best posts made by faraday

@ThatGuyThere said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

I will freely admit a new influx could usher in a golden age must neither side has any sort of hard evidence to back up a positive or a negative outlook so I will stick with desiring small growth over large.

Yeah it could go either way really. I mean, nothing says that a game has to accept all 26 apps at once. And if platforms like Evennia or Ares reduced the barrier for running your own game, you'd have more of them. Granted, it doesn't help you staff said games, but one might speculate that's also a problem that would be helped by having more people in your "talent pool" as it were.

It would definitely change the hobby - of that there is no doubt.

@Griatch said in Telnet is Poop:

I would suggest that it's at least a higher chance that a new player is a web developer than them being a telnet affectionado ...

Oh absolutely. But I think this is where the goals of Ares and Evennia differ a bit. You're designing a framework that's readily extensible - and that includes extensible via javascript for folks who want a spiffy custom GUI.

I'm going a different direction for more of a "MUSH in a box" where you don't need to find a web developer in order to customize your game effectively. The reliance on coders and sysadmins to get a game up and running is, IMHO, one of the biggest (if not the biggest) obstacle preventing there from being more MUSHes out there.

@ThatGuyThere said in Attributes or No?:

@Coin
Conversly the well trained but not talented is less likely to produce the maximum result. 1 time out of 64 compared to the 1 time out of 12 of the talented person, but does have the bell curve so his results will settle into the median ranges most of the time, showing a base competency but a lot of true gift.

It kinda depends on whether you think that's appropriate or not, I guess. Should someone with barely any training but natural talent really be 8 times more likely to score an A+ / hit a home run / hit the bullseye / whatever the max result is than the guy with a lot of training who's not especially gifted? Eh... doesn't seem quite right to me. It reminds me of the WoD problem, where the Mind5+Medicine1 guy (smart guy who took a first aid class once) was better than the Mind2+Medicine3 guy (average medical doctor). I also think you'll get some weird effects at higher skill levels, because the bell curves will become so concentrated around average that you might as well not even bother rolling at all because there's so little variation.

@bored said in 7th Sea 2nd Edition:

@faraday
For either of you, I'm not entirely sure why it's unsolvable.

See this thread. If you can do better, knock yourself out. I'm sure @Thenomain will have some kind of prize or something Probably

@Thenomain said in How Many Alts Would An Alt User Alt If An Alt User Could Use Alts:

@faraday

This happens quite, quite often on WoD games, and I was wondering your secret.

I've never played WoD games so it's hard to contrast. But from what I've gathered, there's a lot more politicking and subtle or even overt PvP than tend to occur in my genres.

I mean... so you want to play a Lieutenant AND a Private in the BSG marine company? Is there really a huge potential for abuse there? Even if your Lieutenant tried to pull some shenanigans by letting your Private get away with something he shouldn't have, there are always other officers further up the chain of command to review the AAR and say "Hey wait a minute..." And honestly I get way more problems with that sort of thing from people who aren't alts but are just OOC friends.

So just generally, I give people the benefit of the doubt and deal with problems when they arise. Really hasn't been a problem for me.

What HAS been a problem with alts for me? Say you get a problem player. OK, he's got one alt. Irritating but not the end of the world. You let him have four alts? OMG such a headache.

Also when people leave the game. I'm just going to pull a number out of my butt and say that the average character has 4 really deep meaningful relationships with other characters. If that player leaves the game and has 2 chars, that's 8 people affected. The more alts you allow, the wider the ripple effect is. MU players are notoriously fickle with games, so this is a big problem for me.

I've also personally observed that alts get 'shelved' when you allow a bunch, just because most people don't have the time to play that many. While that's great for the AltPlayer, it's not so great for the people with those meaningful relationships with them. So in part the limit is trying to manage the monkeysphere effect of people getting left high and dry when their boss/friend/SO/nemesis is never around to interact with.

@Sunny It doesn't have to happen often for it to be a big disruption. I've seen just one person leave and abandon 6 characters and have it completely derail a whole bunch of plots and leave a whole bunch of other players hanging because their boss/BFF/SO/frenemy/whatever is no longer there. It's a legitimate problem that can strike at any time without warning. And it's very easily prevented with an alt limit.

If folks don't think it's a big enough deal to have a policy? Fine. Your game, your headache. But I reject the assertion that someone quitting due to RL issues or getting bored or finding a new game is somehow the result of bad staffing, or the blanket statement that alt policies solve nothing. This particular problem? They solve.

@Arkandel said in Game Concept: Paying for rare things:

There are two issues with paying for rare things.

1. Enough people want to be unique snowflakes so the things you'd like to be rare might end up not really being that...
2. It's really hard to find the sweet spot between having the special thing people pay for being so good it makes up for the cost ...

Yeah, this. I mean, it comes down to what you're trying to accomplish with the system.

Is it game balance? If so you've gotta ask yourself whether what you're limiting really needs to be balanced. Is a X really more powerful than a Y with equal stats? If not, why make them pay extra?

Is it trying to get around a quota by actively discouraging people from being something unusual? If so, don't underestimate players' determination to be cool. You'll most likely just end up with a bunch of underpowered X's grumping about the extra points they had to spend.

Making people pay for advantages makes sense. But rarity is not the same as advantage. Like... are all women in your western game who want to be something other than a wife/schoolmarm/etc. now going to be charged a point tax for being uncommon? Do you have to pay extra on a war game to be a Lieutenant instead of a Ensign just because there are fewer of them, even though being a Lieutenant doesn't really come with any inherent advantages? What's the point?

@ThatGuyThere said in Game Concept: Paying for rare things:

@faraday said in Game Concept: Paying for rare things:

Do you have to pay extra on a war game to be a Lieutenant instead of a Ensign just because there are fewer of them, even though being a Lieutenant doesn't really come with any inherent advantages? What's the point?

I agree with your general point but wouldn't a higher rank in a military setting be an inherent advantage? After all the high ranks can order the lower ranks around, that is one of the basic tenets of military discipline.

Yes and no. A squadron leader would order people around for instance but a Lt or LtJg doesn't really have an appreciable amount of authority over other junior officers. And fachead type positions usually come with added responsibilities, so making them pay for the dubious privilege of having more work is.. dubious.

@ixokai said in NO-GO IPs for MU*:

@bladesurfer said in NO-GO IPs for MU*:

I think one of the biggest reasons that they say 'no' is because they have to 'defend their copyright' or else it can be lost. So if you ask, they have to say no.
Except.. this isn't how copyright works. You can't lose copyright. You are under no obligation to defend copyright. If you don't defend copyright you in no way shape or form lose it.

Except except.... many copyrighted RPGs/TV shows/universes/etc. are also trademarked. If you want to make a Shadowrun game, for instance, you're butting up against not only the copyrighted material in the rulebooks, but also Shadowrun itself, which is a registered trademark of... someone. I lost track. Now Shadowrun happens to encourage fan contributions but the example stands in principle.

So yeah, people get the rules confused a lot, but there's also significant overlap in the situations where they need to be enforced. It's messy. I don't blame authors for not wanting to deal with the legal minefield.

@Arkandel said in Where's your RP at?:

@Miss-Demeanor said in Where's your RP at?:

If the world is post-apoc, it really needs to have actual danger of death, dismemberment, getting your shit jacked, etc. or it just turns into sci-fi L&L.

I can't prove this, but my impression is that games with high turnover rates (i.e. lots of character deaths) don't draw that many players.

I love post-apoc, but I wouldn't play on a game where you could lose your character due to fickle dice or staff whim. It's just too much investment to lose in an instant. I don't think I'm alone. I mean, not only is it not the norm in MU-land, but there aren't a lot of MMO's or video games with permadeath either. It just kills the fun.

Now I'm perfectly happy to RP the gritty ins and outs of survival (short of death) to keep it from being Little House on the Post-Apoc Prairie, but I don't know how you do that without a ton of code and/or micro-managing. I want to RP and tell stories, not log on so I can +hunt for an hour so I can +eat.

@Arkandel said in Where's your RP at?:

Well, technically speaking you could lose your character in almost all games' plots to bad dice rolls. I just don't think many people would play where it's practically expected (or even systematized) that this would happen.

Not the games I've played on (and run), but obviously YMMV.

@Lithium said:

If it's /easy/ to get on the game, then Character Loss can (and should imho) be an important part of a post apocalyptic setting.

Not IMHO. it's the investment in the character development or story after joining the game that matters to me.

But that's a matter of taste and I don't want to derail the thread with the same debate about PC death and agency vs stakes that have graced 724 other threads on these boards. Just rendering my opinion.

@Miss-Demeanor said in Where's your RP at?:

Why are people so afraid to have characters die? Why is death such a terrible thing in a game? Yeah, its the end of a story. Not the only story, just one of many. You can make a new story. Stories don't have to stop just because one person dies. The narrative continues under a new voice.

For some of us, it takes a lot of work to get involved in a story. I'm not talking about the nuts and bolts of chargen, I'm talking about the work of really, truly developing a character. Their backstory, their personality, their patterns of speech and little tics that make them interesting. (Some people can do this right off the bat; I can't. I know I'm not alone.)

And then you have to build up relationships with other characters. I'm not talking romances, I'm talking real connections that let you do scenes that are more than just "hey how's the weather" or "let me ask you about your backstory".

And then sometimes you have a story in mind. Not the game's story, your story. Some arc that you want to do with the character.

All told, that is a ton of work and investment, and it really sucks to lose all that and have to build it all back up again just because your character got sucked out of an airlock due to a bad die roll. (True story.)

You don't have to knock off main characters left and right to generate tension. Battlestar the TV show was very gritty and interesting - lots of complications, and yet main character deaths were pretty rare.

Now if folks want to run a game that has deaths-a-plenty - that's totally fine. Their game, their rules. I just won't play there unless it's so awesomely amazing I can't resist (like TGG).

@Warma-Sheen said in Where's your RP at?:

Sure, everyone has their own idea and preferences for story, but I don't understand how anyone can come onto a medium with this many other contributors and still expect to have full control over everything that happens to their character. I know that mindset exists. I'm not putting it down. All I'm saying is that I can't understand it.

As @Sunny said - a lot of people seem to be conflating "I don't want character death" with "I must control everything ZOMG!" While I'm sure there are some extreme folks out there who feel that way, these are by no means the same thing.

I MU* because I love to interact with other people. Stories evolve in surprising ways. I don't mind when bad things happen to my character - actually in most cases I welcome it because RPing complications is fun. I just don't want to lose my character against my will. I don't understand why that's so hard to understand when various people have laid out very concrete reasons why they don't like it.

@Miss-Demeanor said:

I dared to suggest that a post-apoc survival game with actual threat of character death would be fun, and that brought all the anti-PC-death people out of the woodwork to say just how horrible that would actually be."

As one of the "anti-PC-death-people", I will point out that I have repeatedly said that it is a matter of personal taste and that I, personally wouldn't like to play on such a game for these specific reasons. This is merely an opinion to inform someone who may want to make such a hypothetical game. I don't personally like WoD games either but that's a far cry from running around saying they're "horrible".

If someone wants to run a post-apoc game with a high mortality rate - more power to them. I simply won't play and that's totally fine.

@Thenomain said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):

I'm complaining that "web-based" is poorly defined and a poor metric.
We can do better.

Sorry for the double post, but our posts crossed and I think this is a great point that warrants a separate response.

I focused on the web-based aspect to respond to Arkandel, but you're right - that alone is not what makes it an improvement.

What makes it an improvement is having a better user experience. You don't have to learn a set of command-line commands and remember obscure syntax (is it bbpost title/message or title=message?). You can have images to prompt the story appear seamlessly in poses. You can use hyperlinks and bold text and other formatting things that telnet MU*s don't let you do. You don't have the game over here and the wiki over there and have to worry about integrating the two (often times manually). You don't have to clean logs. Etc. Etc. Etc.

And yes, you could do all of this with a new specialized client application. But again that's the beauty of having something on the web - you don't have to download and install a special app. You don't have to develop 7 different versions of that app for all the different OSes.

The barrier to entry would be significantly lower and I think there would be a lot less friction in many day-to-day MU* tasks. But that's just me. I freely admit to being in the minority here.

@Arkandel said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):

The way I like to think of it as an example is this: Imagine CGen where you see a character sheet not much unlike (or even identical) to the one at the back of the RPG book, and you fill it up in exactly the same way.

Yep. The chargen on the web prototype lets you go through the motions so you don't have to imagine quite so much BSGU has online chargen that's not as fancy (due to ugly technical limitations of trying to munge together a web app AND a telnet app into the same architecture) but is actually fully functional.

@Auspice said in Difficulty of single-player computer games:

Won't lie. I go with Easy. Sometimes Normal, but I play to relax. Like video games are where I go to kick back, shut my brain off, and just forget work/school. I don't ant no goddamn difficulty.

Ditto. I'll play Normal if the game is inherently easy. Otherwise, Easy.

@TimmyZ Actually I agree completely. Age has absolutely no relation to skill, which is why FS3 does not give you any bonuses for age. On BSGU you'll see as many 20's characters with Expert level as you will 30's characters.

I do think that your background should justify your skills whatever they are. If you're a Veteran at Firearms because you've got 20 years experience or a Veteran at Firearms because you're 20 and have been training for the Olympics, either one works for me.

Physical abilities - sure, you could make that argument as a sweeping generalization, but there are plenty of RL athletes and whatnot that buck the trend. (My 70-something year old tae kwon do master who can totally kick my butt being one who jumps immediately to mind). PCs are supposed to be the exceptions, so I don't feel obliged to punish them for being older.

At any rate, someone said it in the other thread... FS3 is not designed to be super realistic and model everything. It's designed to be simple. 2nd edition was okay, 3rd has made various improvements around making it even easier to pick your skills without fretting over whether your background skill in Baseball should be a 2 or a 3, or whether that extra point you're spending on First Aid is going to cripple your chances for being awesome in Piloting.

It is not a perfect system because there's no such thing as a perfect system. Everyone has their desired goals for what they want the system to model, and different tolerances for abstractions and generalizations.

@Thenomain Yeah I don't think it was a personal distrust, just skepticism about the system math. I mean , say you're that sniper who botched the 96% chance of success? What's your first thought? For a lot of people it's probably something unprintable followed by wondering if the system is broken. Whereas if they understand the dice mechanics and you show them the results, it tends to be more of, "Man the dice hate me tonight."

@Thenomain said in Identifying Major Issues:

let us look critically and completely into the systems that this broad category interacts with, and how they interact with it.

Fair enough, but my only point is that my broad experience with players across a dozen games and almost two decades is that the people willing to run their own plots are few and far between. Now maybe that's because they're all puppies who have been kicked one too many times, like @WTFE says. Or maybe it's because there's a sense of entitlement that expects staff to be their personal tabletop GM. Or maybe neither/both. I don't know the cause, only the effect.

@ThatGuyThere how is that different from a MU though? I don't see the phone number analogy relating to a MU.