Best posts made by faraday

Most of the apocalyptic games I've played on have suffered from what I'll dub Isolation Syndrome. When new players arrive, there's no easy place for them to arrive from. They often have to play the "I've been here all along, really" card, which can be awkward for a new person. When players inevitably idle out, there's nowhere for them to go. You're forced to roster/NPC them or kill them off.

I've had some experience managing these types of themes, but I'm looking for other peoples' insights. What's worked well, what hasn't?

(Btw, "never run a game like this" is not very constructive. It's just the only option for some themes.)

@ThatGuyThere said:

Thing is I don't mind being the pilot/Driver and quite frequently make that.
What i hate is being not that guy but having folks trying to guilt me into blowing points on a skill I will never use for the nebulous reason of "you should have that."

For me it's not a question of guilt it's just a question of consistency. When I review character sheets, it is mainly with an eye of "do you have all the skills that a character with that background should have". For me, it's not a nebulous reason - it's 90% of the review process.

Why? Because for me the primary purpose of character sheets is to reflect your character. If they don't do that... if they're just "hey this might be useful someday so I'll take it", it bothers me.

Not saying it has to bother anyone else; we all have our pet peeves. But that's what I do on my games.

Side note: Even if Drive isn't an action skill you can still take it if you want to be the wheelman.

@Coin Well if someone comes into with the assertion that PrPs are horrible, then I think it's important to be on the same page as to what it is we're talking about.

@ThatGuyThere It depends on what you look for in terms of justification. Improving a skill at "hobby" levels was basically automatic when I did it, unless they were trying to do something weird like pick up Fighter Pilot when they're a doctor At higher levels, it's more about time and training, so no amount of goofy justification would help if they didn't have the IC experiences to back it up.

@Thenomain Yeah when I said the "FS3 codebase" I was talking about the Faraday Code. People started calling it the "FS3 code" even though it's more than just FS3. :helpless shrug:

Anyway, it's a pre-loaded database that has everything already set up just waiting to be configured, including FS3. That's what I used to help @tangent set up the Marvel game.

I mean, yeah, you've still got to configure it but that's no different than your WoD setup right? You don't have to write new code to switch it over to Game of Thrones or Wild West, you just change the weapons and skill list.

And it's modestly plug-and-play-able. For Marvel, I removed maps and groups and a couple other things they didn't need just by running +uninstall. It's not perfect, not by a long, long shot, but I think it's pretty close to what you're describing.

@Caryatid said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

It sounds unfun to me but it isn't inaccurate by RL standards.

Except that the idea of a Golden Hour has been disproved as a myth. Response times matter, but it varies widely. For a cardiac arreat, it's more like a Golden Ten Minutes, with bystander CPR being a huge determining factor.

For a game... yeah, sure, do whatever you like. But there's no real basis in reality here.

(Paramedic and former medic instructor here)

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

You do have a lot of the great globals that seem standard plus a lot of your own that, including some of the new standard globals like tracking PB or porting to wiki. I admit I used it for Realms, but stopped at FS3 to make something towards the Chaosium d20 for the stat code.

Thanks. But yeah - that's what I was referring to about the system being plug and play to an extent. You can ditch or replace FS3 or pretty much any AddOn and it'll work OK. Changing the Core packages can be done, but you have to do some surgery to resolve the dependencies that other Addons have on them. So it's not completely plug-and-play, I get that. My only point was that even having a MUSH-in-a-box softcode package still doesn't help people get over the installation and configuration hurdle, nor are they comfortable managing it without a coder.

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

Without any risk of death... what is there to really fear in the ruins of your destroyed society? 'My stuff might get stolen... but its okay because I'll somehow get new stuff so I won't die of starvation' Where's the risk? Where is the ACTUAL risk?

You're equating OOC risk with IC risk. Just because you, the player, know that your character won't die doesn't mean your character knows he/she won't die. Think about an author writing a novel or a writer on a TV show. They know exactly what's going to happen and yet they can still manage to have characters react appropriately to the situation and exhibit the necessary angst and pathos.

Now maybe you haven't ever experienced that working well on a MU*. That's fine. But I have, so I reject the assertion that it's impossible. Just this past month I killed off a beloved NPC and spurred a lot of RP about it because people did care.

It's okay if people play differently. I've played on games with PC death. I had a character on TGG get blown to bits because I AFKed to get a snack while in the base and there was an artillery strike. I lost a Star Wars character to one bad Athletics roll and got sucked out of an airlock. I once participated in a PK plot to take someone out. I respect these styles of play, even though it's not my personal playstyle. But it doesn't feel like people are extending the same courtesy to the opposite point of view.

@Clarity said in Names:

The interesting question would be, do females names RL also have that tendency?

In modern day America, yes. For example: "Baby girl names ending in a and ah are climbing the popular baby name charts with no signs of slowing down, so choosing a baby name like Ava or Hannah will give you top baby name that is sure to stand the test of time. " (source) Just look at historical "top 50 female names" lists like this one from the 1950's and you'll see tons of ones ending in -a or -ah.

@Arkandel said in PC antagonism done right:

So let's say all of the great players are playing your friends. In fact everyone is friendly to each other. Now, obviously you can have as many scenes with these guys as you want - there's no reason not to - but what are you going to be playing about? If all challenges come from the environment then the game is stagnant in the absence of someone playing its elements.

Sure, that relies on having something in the environment or NPCs to react to. But I've seen that work successfully an awful lot more often than I've seen people play healthy IC antagonists (outside of short-term 'bad-guy' type plots). And I'd personally rather a game stagnate and die if I don't feed it enough than have it blow up spectacularly due to OOC drama. YMMV obviously.

FS3 is designed around the concept that you should be able to make a skilled veteran right out of the gate. Now it's configurable so not all games use it that way, but that idea was central to its design. Many of the Battlestar games have used it along with a hodgepodge of other MUs (Game of Bones, 100, Wing Commander, at least one Star Wars game, etc.).

Because you can start high, XP is intended to be superfluous, and the slow advancement pisses some people off. Also some folks don't like it because not everyone starts out "even" in terms of their power level. But both of those things are by design, so c'est la vie. Can't please everyone.

@il-volpe said in Magicians Game:

Same here. Faraday is also very helpful. But you might want to be careful about Ares, since it seems really different to me and may limit your help, and certainly stop you from using stuff off mushcode etc.

Thanks, I do my best to help people get the initial 'out of the box' setup working, but you're on your own for any custom code.

Re: Ares, you're correct that the coding experience is extremely different and you won't be able to use any existing MUSHCode without rewriting it. But the intent is to make it easier to learn the code or to get help from friends who may know code but not MUSHCode. Also I am working on a comprehensive series of tutorials. So I think on the whole it will be easier to get help... otherwise I've done a very poor job with the project since one of the driving goals is to make it easy for a non-coder to run a game

That said, as @Auspice mentioned, it's still in beta and not ready for public consumption yet.

@Meg said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

Oh come on, what theme doesn't fit with a 'personal room'? Are your characters literally /never/ alone? It doesn't even have to be a 'room'. You could have a 'barracks' and have a 'bunk' room for each person off it. There are plenty of ways to work in a place where a character can go just to put their bit without having to be around others that would work just the same as a quiet room but also give the player some breathing room to do other things.

Creating an entire MUSH 'room' for a bed seems a bit weird to me. There have been several post-apoc or war themes where you don't have any real privacy. There are RP Rooms for off-grid areas if you want to find a supply closet or something for whatever reason.

But hey, if you want to make bunk "rooms" or places or whatever for everyone just to avoid an OOC lounge - go for it. Someone asked what value OOC rooms might provide and I answered it. I don't really care what other games do.

@Ganymede said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

@faraday said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

If it's breaking a rule or creating an unfriendly environment, deal with the actual problem.

If people being obnoxious pricks sometimes with others is an offense to be banned, I'd have no players left.

While I don't like or see the need for an OOC Lounge, I know others like to use it to meet others OOCly and chat, so I'd leave it. I'd create a Quiet Room for people that want to idle peacefully, but be available by page to others who may want to specifically RP with them. And if the chatting gets tart or combative or abusive, then just fucking deal with the abusive shits as if they were abusive shits, no matter where.

There's people fucking dying in South Sudan, and this is what we're wasting our times with.

First of all, I never said anything about banning, I said IF it was a problem then deal with the problem.

Second of all, why does every single freaking discussion need to descend into hostility and profanity and insults around here? We're talking about whether to have a dang OOC room or not on a text game. If you want one on your game, have it. If you don't, don't. If you don't like to hang out in them, don't. The OP asked a legitimately constructive question but it only took three pages to descend to levels I'd expect in the Hog Pit not in Mildly Constructive.

Maybe I should start a new thread titled "How to keep MSB threads from becoming flame wars."

@saosmash said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

@Thenomain Oh, I thought Arx's system was taken from L5R ... (speaking of tangents)

L5R and 7th sea used the same basic roll+keep system initially.

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

Look, I know it's not in the works. And I don't want to derail the thread.

But a web-based game instead of relying on telnet has got to be the largest innovation to the form we can have here.

You mean like this? Just a prototype, btw. It doesn't do anything for real.

But really, it's hard to motivate yourself to build something new when hardly anybody seems interested in changing the way things have always been done.

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

@faraday Perhaps? I'm at work now so I can't quite look at this, but what is it based on? Or is it home-grown? What are the features?

Home-grown, but based on AresMUSH. Basically it's my imagining what a MU* would look like if it were entirely web-based with no telnet connection. It's basically a game wiki and the game itself bundled into one. Chargen is online. You don't need to create wiki pages for your char because it's done automatically. RP is centered around scenes (which can be public or private). You don't need to post logs because RP is done on the site in the first place, although you can keep a scene private and then publish it when finished. It takes a lot of the friction out of MUSHing.

Aaaand the reaction from almost everyone has been: "Eeeh, yeah, it's neat but I'd never want to play that way."

Here's the blog post with some more detail if anyone cares.

@Runescryer Recent versions of FS3 spit out the die results and highlights successes. Success level is just based on the number of successes. It's really just Shadowrun 4's die mechanics with D8's instead of D6's

<FS3> Faraday rolls Firearms: Success (8 5 4 4)

@Seraphim73 said in FS3:

That said, I think that gamers are (to some degree) competitive by nature. We like our numbers to go up, we like our numbers to be at least in the same ball-park as those of our fellow players, and some of us like to brag about having bigger numbers...

I don't disagree, but this is simply not something I see as a problem needing to be solved. The difference between Great and Expert is a few percentage points. If someone's going to be bent out of shape just because their rating only says "Great" and Bob's says "Expert" and they can't catch up to Bob....that's on them. They had a chance to start out as "Expert" too.

@kitteh said in FS3:

I could see the dice pools being rolled and it seemed like everyone either matched (at the thing I was good at) or exceeded me, but maybe that was a small selection, I dunno.

When you're talking about a character's core professional skills, there are really only 3 common values - Good/Great/Expert. Occasionally there's a rookie with Fair (like @Three-Eyed-Crow) and very rarely there's an Elite, but most are 4-6. So yeah, there's not a huge amount of variation. That was one of the sacrifices made in the move from 2nd Ed. to 3rd Ed. by compressing the ratings chart - a choice of simplicity over flexibility (since the bigger range was causing no end of confusion and nitpicking).

The thing in combat is that it mostly seems like I miss all the time. Even when I'm piling on bonuses (I was whiffing with luck and aggressive stance). Maybe that was a string of really terrible luck, I dunno.

Since people tend to pick a target and stick with it until it's dead, sometimes what happens is you've picked one of the higher-rated badguys without realizing it. Also, most combats are over in 6-8 rounds, so while it takes a few hours of RL, you really don't have a ton of rolls there to even things out if you're just having a string of bad luck. I don't know what can really be done about either of these things but I'm open to suggestions.

Isn't Fair to Good 4 months? I see 1/4 on my thing, anyway. And after that it's a year, right? Those are both pretty big chunks of time.

Fair -> Good was supposed to be 3, that's just a glitch. And Good -> Great is "only" 4 more months. I know that's a good chunk of time in MUSH timelines, but it's still very compressed compared to RL.

I'm totally fine if people don't like it. But it's done that way on purpose. FS3 doesn't have a 'dino' problem because of the slow advancement. You can be fresh out of chargen and be on par with existing characters in the skills that matter most for your character.

I'm moving the discussion from BSGU over to here because talking about FS3 in two different threads is a little weird.

@kitteh said in BSG: Unification:

Certainly, it was explicitly pointed out that this is the assumption of FS3; one round isn't a half second of quick reflex action, it's some vague (but considerably longer) stretch of dogfighting that is at least enough for some significant maneuvering and exchange of fire at probably multiple points throughout. So it's not 'how much do people really miss' but rather 'how often do professionals fail to carry out their job at all.'

Close. As evidenced by the ammo tracking (which takes off one round per combat action), a FS3 turn represents one attack. Now it's assumed that you’re not sitting still pumping round after round after round downrange. There's going to be a pause in-between shots for maneuvering, tracking your target, etc. So it really is one attack = one shot = one miss.

(Before anyone says it - I know, I know, that’s not a perfect reflection of real combat. It’s just a game.)

Anyway, there seems a lot of hate here for 'people complaining about missing' (ie, probably at me) but also a lot of it seems completely stripped of the context of the original thread. It wasn't really about 'omg we miss so much wah wah,' it was about whether or not there was ample opportunity for lower-skilled PCs to actually have fun in combat…

I don’t know who specifically you were replying to there but just to clarify ... when I brought up complaints about missing, I certainly wasn’t intending to hate on anybody or single anybody out. As @ThreeEyedCrow said, it’s a recurring theme that’s been brought up time and again on FS3 games for ten years.

And in large part I agree with it. It’s not fun to miss all the time. It’s not fun when you build a character around a concept of being good at X, and then the one time you have to use X in a scene, you fail (even if you would’ve succeeded at that roll 95% of the time overall). It's boring when combat rounds are just everyone whiffing at each other (in fact, I've been known to immediately trigger another turn when that happens).

I just don’t know how to fix that with dice. Dice will always be random - that's what they're for. If you look at the combats on BSGU, one could argue I’ve tuned it too much in the direction of being a cakewalk. There have been like two PC KOs in 7 months of constant combat. We’ve got two people who are nearly triple-aces. And yet I still get people (not just you!) who aren’t having fun because they feel like they miss too much.

Maybe I take the criticism too much to heart but I just want people to have fun. And, well, it’d be nice if they didn’t hate my system.