Best posts made by faraday

@Ganymede said in FS3:

Apparently, @faraday fixed this in FS3 3E, which @WTFE has no experience with. But he'll still knock a game with FS3 because of his experience with 2E.

But that's the weird thing... I really didn't change the dice mechanic appreciably in 3rd Ed. I mean, yeah, a bit? I think overall it shifted percentages like 10%? But that doesn't feel like that's enough to explain such a dramatic shift between the experience WTFE describes and what you've described. It also doesn't match up with what I've personally experienced in FS3 games - even ones I haven't run personally. So... I'm kinda at a loss?

@kitteh said in FS3:

12-point skills in 4 tiers still kind of give me anxiety. Love Faraday but no idea what she was smoking there

:grins and shrugs: It seemed like a good idea at the time? I mean all I really did for 3rd Ed was collapse two ratings into one.

2nd Ed     3rd Ed
1-2     -> Amateur
3-4     -> Fair
5-6     -> Good
7-8     -> Great
9-10    -> Expert
 11     -> Elite
 12     -> Legendary

I've already had some folks lament that there isn't more differentiation between character skill levels in 3rd Ed. Almost everyone's at Good/Great/Expert in their relevant combat skills. But when there were more levels, people lamented that it was too confusing and unclear what each level meant. (Despite my attempt at making detailed skill ratings.) Kinda feels like a darned if you do darned if you don't situation

@WTFE While I would be more than happy to have a separate discussion about the tools and policies I have to support PrPs - including the ability to run meaningful plots and change room descs - that's not really the point of this thread. This isn't "wah wah why aren't players running more PrPs." @Seraphim73 identified what he felt was a major issue about players expecting to be spoon-fed and I agreed. It's okay if you disagree and think the problem is on staff. I don't.

@ThatGuyThere I like to think of it more like showing up in a new town at a gaming store (or a con) looking to play. Yeah, you don't know these people and I wouldn't expect you to act like they're your new BFF. But there's a shared interest and experience there... some common ground you don't have with a random dude on the street. I think people have more fun in those situations when they extend the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. Why would you even bother if you you went into it expecting them to all be a-holes?

@HelloProject said in Identifying Major Issues:

While I'm not saying that you can't have a preference for not giving out or just having an extra email that you use for unimportant shit, the strong resistance to simply giving an email is still one that's very strange to me. It's one that I've literally only encountered here and WORA, like, even outside of the hobby it's not a thing I've really heard before.

Yeah I don't quite get @Thenomain's concern here. You'd be hard-pressed to register for anything without an email address these days. I seriously don't understand why people get up in arms at the idea of a MU* doing it.

If they spam you? Report it as spam in your email client and block them. If they send you a LinkedIn request, ignore it. If you really don't want to have the games tied to your RL identity, use a burner email. Even my mom has a burner email, for goodness sake. And if it's a dealbreaker, then that's totally your choice, but I don't think it's cool to act like staff are insane for doing what almost every other site on the internet considers a best practice.

But @HelloProject -- I think the number of people objecting is less of a minority than you might think.

@surreality While I appreciate the positive example, I fail to see how any of that relates to what we're talking about here.

It doesn't matter who's running a game, or how many staffers there are, uncomfortable scenes are a thing. Much as I encourage people to work together and try to work with them myself, my games are non-consent. BSGU may be a PvE game about fighting robots, but there are also gritty themes of war and genocide. Even in that theme, which I'd say is miles safer than something like WoD, there's a non-zero chance of a sexual assault plotline coming up. After all, it happened in the show.. twice. (Edit to clarify: Not a PvP assault that the victim didn't consent to happening; I would never allow that to happen to someone.) Sweetwater wasn't set up as PvP either, but I actually had to navigate a situation where some PCs had a legitimate historical IC reason to want to put together a lynch mob against another PC (want to talk about an uncomfortable plotline? Geez.)

So yes, I care, and yes, I run most (but not all) of the event scenes, and yes, I don't have to play whisper-down-the-lane with other staffers. But none of that makes these problems magically go away. And even with all that, I still have people who are reluctant to bring up issues to me. (Just as @Auspice , who has helped to nudge some into speaking up.)

At the end of the day though, players need to take personal responsibility for their own fun. In my view that means being willing to speak up for themselves.

@bored said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Or put it simply: it is currently against the rules to post 1-star yelp reviews where the public will see them.

I'm actually with you there. I just don't think that forum software like this is a great vehicle for reviews. Would yelp or amazon tolerate one of the review areas devolving into a "You!" "No you!" type flame fest, complete with "F You" meme GIFs? I seriously think not.

Good review sites let you give a star rating and your opinion, perhaps with a chance for a rebuttal from the owner. It varies of course, but a review is very different from an ad is very different from a discussion. What we have here is discussion software trying to serve many masters.

@kitteh said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

I have to say, I hate hate hate this kind of stuff and I wish games wouldn't do it.

Everything's a tradeoff.

Look, it's easy to say, as @Misadventure and @Seraphim73 have, "Just make chargen use XP"

Mathematically that's easy, but there's a people-cost to that. The #1 thing that people love about FS3 (and its #1 design goal) is "Wow chargen is so fast and easy!" Guess what - if you make chargen use XP costs? It won't be. I've played systems that have tiered costs in chargen. It's a PITA to figure out how to spend your points, and personally I've found that it penalizes people who want to be expert at something. They end up having to spend all their points in that and have nothing for the basic "human being" type stuff. I've seen more min-maxing in those systems, not less.

With FS3, I choose not to penalize people for being experts. Yes, that means that a min-maxer can end up with a few more "dots" than a non-min-maxer. But guess what again? Mathematically, those extra dots don't matter very much. Seriously, the difference between 8 dice (someone who took good/good for attribute + skill) and 12 dice (someone who took exceptional / legendary) is 3% on an unopposed roll and 17% on an opposed roll. On a PVE game, those differences are nigh-irrelevant, and even on a PVP game 17% is hardly "OMG I'm going to be left in the dust and be completely irrelevant in plots."

ETA: You can argue those differences "should" be greater, but again that's a design choice. And the extra dice do come into play when there are wound modifiers and whatnot. The legendary guy won't be slowed down as much by the bullet in his shoulder, can make the hit at super-long range, etc.

Again, there are different ways to solve problems, but first you have to decide what problems are most important to you. Different people have different ideas about what those should be.

@arkandel said in Spotlight.:

The game had become a zero-sum one to her. I suspect this might be more widespread.

Yes, I think it is.

You can see it in a number of venues. Attention, like you said - if someone else is getting more RP, then I'm less special.

You can see it with skills. If you let everyone start with "Amazing" then my Amazing rating isn't as Amazing any more.

You can even see it with things as ephemeral as in-game scoreboard, like pilots or warriors tracking kills. There's absolutely zero practical benefit to being higher on the leaderboard, but ZOMG the OOC drama. Players paging each other "You stole my kill!" or "Back off - I want this one!" (IC drama? Sure! Play out Top Gun as much as you want. But why does counting virtual bad-guys need to become a zero-sum fun experience?)

@arkandel I don't think that will work. The jealousy is secondary to folks wanting to feel special. If you spread the spotlight around and everyone’s special, then nobody’s special and folks lose interest for a different reason. Plus even sharing the pie doesn’t prevent petty competitions about whose slice was bigger.

Bottom line - as long as staff isn’t being horrible with blatant favoritism or anything, I don’t think this is a problem than storytellers can solve. It can only be solved by players showing some maturity.

@three-eyed-crow Yep, ditto. It's not the travel itself that's the issue, it's the inability to do the thing that the game is about... roleplay. Whether that's because you're stuck on a planet/ship by yourself (my first experience on a Star Wars game was being stuck alone on Shesharile for weeks waiting for an IC shuttle pilot... ugh) or because you're twiddling your thumbs waiting for a travel timer to expire.

@arkandel there are different kinds of creativity though. Someone can be great at telling stories and crappy at world building and/or game design. I think that’s part of the reason we see so many existing themes used vs original ones. The other reasons of course are name recognition and familiarity, both of which apply to game restarts too.

As @Jaded mentioned, this issue has been studied. Just google and you'll find tons of results. My personal non-scientific summation of the consensus is that yes, people often act much differently online than iRL, and in many cases worse due to the anonymity, the lack of personal connection with the targets, the lack of real consequences, etc.

That said, I agree with @Roz: You can't be "a good person" and also be a jerk to people online. Online people are people too, so if you're a jerk to them then you're a jerk, period.

@thatguythere LOL that's horrible.

Not to derail the thread too much about automated combats but I think it's at least vaguely relevant...

The nuts and bolts of automating combat are actually pretty easy. Entering your action, rolling initiative, and then iterating through the actions inflicting damage or effects... you could code that in a lot of systems. In fact, the original versions of my +combat were for B5MUSH (which used a sort of oWoD mortal-only homebrew) and BSP (which used FUDGE). There was nothing FS3 about it.

What makes FS3 unique is that the mechanics are optimized for MUs. There's no concept of "holding your action", for example - not because it's a bad idea, but because it would disrupt the scene flow too much. There's nothing like: "Oh, he just shot me, I'm going to activate my Iron Skin power to soak the damage better..." or "I'm going to allocate half of my dodge pool to this attack and save the rest for the next one..." or "I'm going to try to riposte..." or the other more 'interactive' combat mechanics that you might find in a traditional tabletop RPG. There are also no creative powers, like, "I'm going to put ice under his feet..." because okay, how would you model that effect with an automated action? (rhetorical question)

That kind of stuff is what makes combat systems difficult to automate, and why MUs trying to use traditional RPG rules for even GM-ed combats get so bogged down. There's just too much back-and-forth.

@kestrel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

when people think of a character like Wash from Firefly/Serenity, his two most memorable scenes are: A) goofing around with toy dinosaurs; B) dying horribly. His legions of fans prove that a suave, successful sexpot isn't necessary to portray a great and deeply beloved story, which is the ultimate aim in designing this kind of system.

Except look at MUSHers. How many people want to play Wash vs. how many people want to play Mal or Zoe or even Inara. It's horribly horribly lop-sided precisely because those are his only two memorable scenes. There's a difference between what kinds of characters people will love to watch on screen versus what they want to be in their player-proxy avatar.

@tat said in Heroic Sacrifice:

one had FS3, where the results of combat were in the hands of the dice, but death and permanent maiming were consent-only and generally you assume that the dice are going to be /largely/ in your favor.

Well, with FS3 the dice literally are largely in your favor. The stats are slated heavily towards PCs and it's a very consent-ish system, where death occurs by choice and there's no built-in mechanic for maiming or lasting injury.

@arkandel said in Search Broken:

@surreality I'm not sure nodebb is that bad after looking at other options. We even considered thinking-out-of-the-box approaches such as Discord.

The MU community could make use of real-time chat for shooting the breeze, a wiki (as @surreality mentions) for static, updatable information, and of course a forum for in-depth discussions. There doesn't exist a free tool that does it all well, and having multiple signons (or getting SSO to work) for multiple tools would be a pain. I don't really see a huge value in switching. NodeBB at least does two out of the three, even if it's not ideal. It is one of the more reputable and established forum software systems out there.

@thenomain said in Heroic Sacrifice:

And again and again and again, I say that there are several games out there, popular games, where failure is baked in, where sharing story is baked in. Saying that it’s the industry is not all that correct, and more of what we hang onto.

So talk about them, and what you think makes people more willing to accept failure in those games. What makes them into group story as opposed to individual story? I'm going by based on what I've observed across countless games and hundreds of players, even in the face of me trying to steer the game in other directions. Your experience doesn't invalidate mine; it runs parallel to it. So - in all seriousness - let's hear more about it. If there are transferrable lessons here I'm sure folks would like to hear them.

@ixokai said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

What's this 'no support thing'? I find people on the games I play are incredibly supportive of new players. I find that when I invite someone to a game, I support them.

I don't know what to tell you other than we've apparently had vastly different experiences.

People on games are incredibly helpful to people who already know MUSHing, yes. Trying out a BSG game but don't really know Battlestar? Sure, there's probably a theme file to give you the gist of it and people helpfully steering you towards YouTube clips or whatnot. First time on FS3? No problem - here's the tutorial about how the system works, and a slew of people on the Questions channel to help you out. Having trouble with the scene system code?
Absolutely someone will chime in to steer you in the right direction.

But going out of their way to actually hand-hold some stranger who wandered in off the street and wants to learn how to MUSH? No, I haven't seen that. What I have seen is a lot of eye-rolling and general impatience/intolerance/avoidance towards people who don't know what they're doing.

Also, looking at the game wiki/help/etc., most games are centered around the assumption that the people coming to it already know how to MUSH and just need to know the specifics of how this particular MUSH operates. Even someplace like Arx, which someone mentioned as being particularly open to other online gaming styles, is still geared this way.

I'm going to put myself in the shoes of somebody who's never played a MUSH before and doesn't have a buddy who invited me and is showing me the ropes. I've googled "Pendragon Online RPG" and somehow stumbled onto Valorous Dominion's website.

OK umm... now what? It says it's an online roleplaying experience, which sounds cool, but I don't see any clue as to how to actually play. There's a cryptic IP address, which I don't know what to do with. There are some policies and world articles and characters pages but how do I play?! ... oh, wait, down at the bottom there's a cryptic link titled "What is MUSH", I wonder what that's all about. Okay that tells me about MU clients and connecting and whatnot, so I manage to find and install Atlantis, connect to the game and get a welcome screen. It says 'create <name> <password>' ... okay, easy enough. Woohoo I have a character. I get spammed with a Great Wall of Text including a room description (but I don't really know what rooms are), a MOTD with a list of BBS posts. It does say (+bbread) after it and I'm smart enough to guess that I'm supposed to type +bbread to read messages. But all that does is give me a list of subjects. Where are the posts? Now I see someone say <Newbie> RandomPerson says, "Hello Guest!" Are they talking to me? How do I talk back?

I don't know about you, but I'd be pretty overwhelmed at that point.

And even if by some miracle I figure out help/+help and start to learn commands, I still really don't know how to play -- the nuts and bolts of how you find RP and how stories are told in this medium. Once I figure that out, I run into the clique issue. Most folks are OOCly chatting or in private rooms doing plotfoo or relationshipfoo. Won't someone please play with me?!

(I hope @Lotherio doesn't mind me using their game as an example... it sounds like it's a great place and this really isn't meant to be a criticism of that game in particular. It's just a commentary on the New MUSHer Experience overall.)

Some of this we can fix with system changes: better help files, built-in web clients, "MUSH 101" tutorials right from the wiki landing page / telnet welcome screen ... that sort of thing. This is the sort of thing I've been working on with Ares and my MUSH 101 tutorial. But a lot of it is cultural, and as others have said it requires a community that's really dedicated to not just tolerating newbies but actually reaching out and welcoming them and integrating them into the community. That takes real work, and people willing to do that work seem to be in short supply.

@Derp said in How do you like things GMed?:

People can talk about not liking things being 'on rails' or whatever, but sometimes you just gotta use that fiat.

I'll second that. If you leave everything up to player decisions and/or dice you can end up with some really random, nonsensical and lame stories. "So you know that big boss you guys have been working towards for the last six months? Yeah, one-shotted in the first round. The end." or "Yeah this vast conspiracy that was going to drive fun for players for months? Unravelled in the first week." That kind of thing is just unsatisfying, both from a narrative standpoint and from a game standpoint.

I don't think every story with a plan is on rails, though. I think the most effective plots have a balance of flexibility and direction. You're going to end up somewhere in the ballpark, but how you get there and exactly where in the park you end up is where the player actions come into play.

@Ominous said in How do you like things GMed?:

One of the blogs I linked to in the OSR thread actually has an example of a big bad getting smoked in the first round and the players loving it:

It really depends on the players and the setup. If 12 MU players show up to a +event expecting a scene where they get to fight the Big Bad, and it's over in 5 minutes because Joe got a lucky hit and got all the glory? I think you're gonna have 9 or 10 pretty annoyed "I showed up for this?!" MU players. It's a very different environment than a TTRPG.

If the players felt like they were on rails, you've failed (even if they actually weren't). If they leave fulfilled because they felt like they influenced the outcome, who cares if the GM had a specific outcome in mind? No one will ever know the difference.

@Cupcake said in SerenityMUSH - Discussion:

An Ares/FS3 version would set my heart pitter-patter.

Yeah, what brings me to the Firefly setting are the stories. Coded space? Gear? Money? Cargo runs? No thank you.

All that stuff gets in the way for me. Just give me a grid and a simple skills system (FS3, Fate, whatever) and let me tell stories. I could set up an Ares game like that for someone in an hour. I just don't want to run it, or write a ton of custom code for systems I have a philosophical objection to