@kanye-qwest said in Rosters: To PB or Not To PB?:
@faraday Different strokes, I guess. To me as long as the pb is superficially similar, change away. But changing the in game stats that are visual signifiers needs a story reason.
That's fair. To me, somebody's height or eye color (which are stats) are way less important than their face (which is just a soft desc or PB). But like you said - different strokes.
@surreality said in Sci Fi/Opera Originality:
I vehemently disagree with what you are saying as it pertains to a MUX on which players are going to be making characters that have expertise in some area or another that you have to define as existing in the first place, what it entails, and why it's the difference between life and death when you're living on a space ship.
Yeah I agree with this. Take Firefly for instance. It was definitely a "dole out theme as needed" sort of thing, because it was an intensely focused story with a very limited number of characters. It didn't matter what Bellerophon was like - or even that it existed! - until they got there. Everything Kaylee did with the engines was a level of Handwavium that frankly most MU sci-fi players wouldn't tolerate.
That is an extremely different animal than a MU, where you have a widely diverse group of characters doing a widely diverse set of things with a whole different set of expectations.
Fantasy settings often get around this by having everyone be from the same kingdom - and travel isn't as easy / important to the setting. Plus the audience is a bit more tolerant of "eh it's magic, just go with it" than sci-fi folks tend to be.
Sadness. I didn't know him well, but he was always a decent guy. I had lots of fun on TGG, and his combat code there was the most impressive MUCode system I've ever seen.
To be clear, I don't see this as a right-or-wrong issue. But my personal preference is to maintain continuity. Everybody has their own personal pet peeves, and continuity is mine. If something was true in RP yesterday, then I expect it to be true tomorrow - otherwise I feel adrift in terms of how to play my character. That's why I could never play on a game that allowed significant retcon to occur when a new character took over a role.
Respecs are like retcon to me. If you have RPed that your character is a virtuoso violinist in some significant way, then you can't just one day decide to take those points and put them into firearms instead. That breaks immersion for me.
Little things? Sure. If you realize a couple months in that you really should have a skill you forgot to buy in chargen, or want to swap your never-RPed hobby for some other never-RPed hooby? I'm happy to consider those on a case-by-case basis as long as they don't cause big ripples in what's already been RPed.
@apos I'm not saying they're story-critical, I'm saying they're roleplay-critical. I, for one, don't want to be going through every scene feeling like I'm on shifting sands of not knowing the way the world works, nor do I want to be constantly having to interrupt a scene to ask basic life questions.
Sure, you can boil everything down to tropes. That's basically what I did with BSGU. "It's Space-France with this, or modern-day tech with that." But most sci-fi fans find that lazy and unsatisfying. 
YMMV.
@bananerz said in Rosters: To PB or Not To PB?:
Just because someone is in the public doesn't mean you have a right.
I never said I had a 'right' to do it - I said it was a pretty commonly-accepted practice. Nobody has a 'right' to do fanfic either. Some authors are pissed off by it, but others see it as a flattering homage. YMMV. If you think it's skeevy, that's your prerogative. I respectfully disagree.
@apos said in Sci Fi/Opera Originality:
People are used to approaching things as the protagonist of the story, and sci fi is pretty steeped in discovery, so they want to be the one to do that, and it is impossible to do that for a full player base.
That is exactly the sort of thing I'm getting at as to why original sci-fi settings are so hard. Players want to do this. Sure you can try to fight it but you're swimming upstream. Good luck with that.
Sure I'm a Stage Manager on Broadway now, and all my xp is into this but i have high survival because at one point in my life i used to be a park ranger' That shit should be kept, not washed away to minmax better.
This. Skill atrophy is totally a thing, but it mostly strikes really low skills (yeah technically I took a sign language class ages ago, but I'd be hard-pressed to remember much now) or really high ones (it's easy to slip down from Olympic levels if you slack off). In the middle, humans are actually pretty amazing at retaining old skills and knowledge. Not always, mind you, but in general. I don't really see that as a compelling reason for allowing respecs.
But at the same time... if somebody came in as an elite sniper but wanted to do a story where over the next few months they stopped their hard-core marksmanship training and instead focused on working out, I'd have no problem letting them shift a point from firearms to athletics. Those sorts of minor, story-driven changes aren't jarring and I definitely think they should be considered on a case-by-case basis. They're just not "respecs" in my mind.
@arkandel said in Social Systems:
after all things with the most impact in a system should be the ones most clearly provisioned and accounted for, right?
Or they are the ones that should be most left up to consent-based cooperative resolutions unless both the players involved, with staff mediating, are absolutely unable to come up with any sort of compromise. That's just my 2 cents though - I respect that folks like social systems for a variety of reasons. I just don't personally.
My ideal plot scene time is 2 hours; max 3 hours. If I'm GMing and it goes longer than that, I apologize and consider it a failure. People get bored and tune out at around the 2.5 hour mark in my experience.
What @Valkyrie said about pose ground rules is important. I think it's the GM's job to herd people along if they're taking a long time to pose, and skip them if necessary. Don't let one player derail the plot for everyone.
@arkandel said in Plot session duration:
How easy is it for a PrP runner to predict how long a scene is likely to run in the first place?
So I take the opposite approach and make them take a certain duration rather than trying to predict how long they're going to take.
If the players are going too slow despite my efforts to speed them along, I might gloss over or change some of the things I had planned. In a combat scene, for instance, I might tune down the difficulty on the remaining NPCs so they get taken out quickly, or cancel a wave of reinforcements I had planned. If it's a meeting with the Commander, they might get called away suddenly with a "We'll have to pick this up next time..." Worst case, we can FTB and handwave the end.
OOC Time > Plot, in other words. In this regard it's not unlike a convention game that has a fixed timeslot.
@arkandel said in Plot session duration:
if IC it's a single uninterrupted adventure that gets broken down into two parts for OOC convenience how do you best handle concurrent on-grid RP taking place between those PrP sessions?
I do everything possible to avoid this situation because It sucks. The OOC convenience of breaking it down rarely outweighs the OOC inconvenience of being scene-locked or having to dance around continuity issues with scenes taking place out-of-time.
@arkandel said in Plot session duration:
How do you handle players having to go in mid-scene due to RL
Try to pose them out ICly if possible - they got called away, stepped out to take an important phone call, went to the bathroom, got knocked unconscious, their fighter started having sudden engine trouble, whatever.
Otherwise they become puppetted in the background.
@fei-dawen Depends, I guess. I've spent most of the past 20 years playing on strictly PvE games, so my perspective is skewed compared to a lot of people here. I think 1998 was the last time I can recall a situation where two PCs came to blows in a non-consensual manner.
@thatguythere said in Plot session duration:
I know most won't agree with me but I would much rather have the preamble RP in the scene and the fight part quickly summed up or cut than vice versa
I think it comes down to your audience and the type of plot. If it's "Sunday 9pm - Big Battle" then people are kinda coming assuming a fight and skipping the setup would make sense. If it's "Sunday 9pm - Plan the Big Battle" that's different. PCs take freaking forever though to make plans and get organized (and many players aren't into that at all), so I would never try to do both in the same session - that strikes me as a recipe for an all-day event with some very bored players.
@lithium said in Social Systems:
I don't know why people are so against the system when it handles social combat so well without removing agency unless you simply refuse to let someone 'win'.
Because of agency.
My characters have been conned. They've been used. They've been seduced. They've been manipulated. They've been cowed into submission. I am not in any way, shape or form against the idea of someone else 'winning', nor am I against bad things happening to my character. I just want to have a say in whether it makes sense for it to happen, and not leave such decisions up to the whims of a crappy (in most RPGs anyway) dice mechanic.
@thatguythere said in Social Systems:
On a stat-less game there is not real uncertainty unless it is a continuing plot the PCs will win
And why is that? Because most players don't like to lose unless they're forced to by mechanics. Otherwise the PCs in a statless game would choose to lose (sometimes) for the sake of drama, furthering the plot, providing challenges to overcome, etc.
@arkandel said in Plot session duration:
As an exaggerated example imagine I determine to run a 'political game', yet my CGen and the vast majority of my system revolve around stabbing people in the face. To gain leverage you must have stabbed important people in the face, it's far easier to get stabbing plots approved at whose end you get XP you can spend in face stabbing skills.
Yes and no. I mean ... system is only a part of the story. Even if your system is slanted one way, you can still roleplay whatever you want within the setting. There are players who are motivated solely by the system and the rewards, but that's their prerogative, not a limitation of the game.
Take BSGU for example. Sure there's combat, that's a big part of the setting/show, but there were plenty of other avenues to explore. Intercolonial tensions, post-apocalyptic drama, general military issues, I even ran a couple left-field campaigns involving tsunami disaster relief and helping a village that was experiencing a virus outbreak. There's no real XP or rewards system to steer you to do one thing over the other. And yet what did people engage with? Combat, combat and more combat.
On BSP there was an entire civilian faction, 'soft' non-combat skills, and staff trying actively to steer things on that front. And again - what were people into? Combat.
I've seen that pattern across all kinds of games, even systemless ones (e.g. old consent games), games that aren't inherently combat oriented (e.g. westerns) and open-ended games with multiple factions (e.g. Star Wars or Babylon 5), so I really don't think it's a system issue.
@lithium said in Social Systems:
This is FATE social combat in a nutshell. You can argue/debate (Roll social combat fu), you can leave (Concede to losing the scene, have your character leave before any major consequences), or you can go for help (Maybe use contacts or resources as a social attack by calling friends or paying the bouncer to bump someone out the door).
FATE has everything to do with Player Agency, while also keeping system there to adjudicate.
Having never actually played FATE I might be missing some core component of the system, so please forgive my ignorance here.
I thought you had said that if my PC failed a social roll to rebuff a persuasion attempt, for example, my only options were to either concede to being persuaded or to get mad and leave the scene. I just don't like that. I'm not saying it's the most terrible thing in the world or anything, I just have a philosophical objection to it because once again it's taking away my ability to decide how my character reacts. Maybe they argue, maybe they throw a drink in his face, maybe they just scoff and say "You're an idiot" and go back to their drinks.
Someone can be the absolute most persuasive salesperson in the world (i.e. roll Amazing Success every time) and still not close a deal because the other person isn't interested in what they're selling, not because the other person succeeded in their Willpower check.
@admiral said in Open Sheets?:
slow-revealing my character's quirks and motivations over time and giving people access to my sheet would give away far too much information about them.
Others have mentioned not wanting to reveal their powers for PvP or secret reasons (you're a secret Jedi ZOMG!) which I can understand even though I lean the other way. Your comment here though strikes me as more system-specific. In WoD or Cortex where there are codified Merits/Flaws/Advantages/whatever that can give away plot secrets (he has a dark past / addiction / whatever ... ooooo) it's more of a concern than in something like FS3 or Shadowrun where the most you're going to learn about somebody is that they have an hobby of reading Detective Novels. Most of the time, it really doesn't prevent you from doling out your character's "quirks and motivations" over time.
@admiral said in Open Sheets?:
There's no reason for open sheets in any circumstance anyways
Except of course for all of the reasons a half-dozen people have given in this thread.
@ghost said in Social Systems:
One of my cardinal rules as a GM is that TV, books, and movies can help GMs figure out how scenes can make more sense, so here is another example.
Totally with you there actually. And I think that doing that sort of stuff makes it more likely that whatever gambit you ultimately decide to try has a better chance of succeeding because it's not wildly out of character for the mark to fall for it.
Like, maybe you trick the Pope with a faked email spoofing one of the bishops saying "Notes for next week's sermon" or something.
Then target's player won't have grounds to pull a Red Card on the play. And if they try, you'd have way more leverage on an appeal.
@thatguythere said in Player buy-in:
All three are John Wayne movies but none would really mix well in theme or tone.
Yeah. Staffers may have a very clear idea in their head of what they mean by "gritty post-apocalyptic" or "John Wayne Western", but ask six players what that means precisely and you'll probably get six different answers.
And it's not unique to westerns or post-apoc either. Pick any setting and you're likely to get different takes on it. With WoD you get different prefs about how 'dark' the world of darkness should be. Military themes have a tension between folks wanting a Hollywood military versus those wanting more realistic consequences when you do things like decking the XO. Even something as universally recognized as Star Wars can veer sharply in tone between A New Hope and Rogue One.
It's hard, and it borders on impossible when a LOT of players really don't care what kind of theme you're pushing, and view it merely as an obstacle to get around to do whatever THEY wanted to do.
@packrat said in Encouraging Proactive Players:
One creepy stalker, one person who is ICly in charge of your character starting to complain that your event takes into account X but they think X sucks and so it is unfair for people who think X sucks, etc. At some point things cross over from a fun relaxation diversion to 'I am going to play a computer game this evening or go to the pub instead.'
Creepy stalkers should be dealt with harshly. But anyone who puts out creative work for strangers' consumption (which includes game plots/stories) needs to be prepared for some amount of criticism. That's just life. If that's too discouraging, then sure -
don't play. But the idea that a game-runner can possibly police a game of all negativity is just absurd.