Best posts made by faraday

@arkandel said in Potential Buffy Game:

That's the thing though. What makes Buffy Buffy is a very specific blend of themes without which it is just a generic urban fantasy game.

Like @Coin said - what makes a show special is different to different people. The characters, the snappy writing, the campiness, the teenage coming-of-age drama, the smallish-town setting, the idea of the Slayers, the Scooby Gang stuff... these things and more are components of Buffy, but everyone values some of them more than others.

Battlestar Galactica, for instance, obviously puts a great deal of emphasis on the Top Gun fighter pilot aspect. But you could do a completely non-military BSG game and it would still, IMHO, be "A BSG Game". It may not be what you or anyone else sees as "what defines BSG to me", but that doesn't make it illegitimate or anything.

@ganymede said in Encouraging Proactive Players:

We're two different people! If we ran a game together, you'd be the good cop, and that's okay with me. But, as I said, I don't mind complaints or whining as long as they aren't broadcasted because I think that has a very negative effect on a group of players.

Whereas I think that welcoming and responding to feedback - even in a public venue - is an important way of building trust and rapport with players as long as that feedback is delivered in a calm and respectful manner. So yeah, I think we just draw the line in different places and that's okay. :fistbump:

@ganymede said in MU* Server Technology/Features. What do you WANT, what do you SEE?:

Have you tried Role? It's an app.

No. It bills itself more as a 'party game' version of a RPG, so not really my thing.

@kumakun said in MU* Server Technology/Features. What do you WANT, what do you SEE?:

I've yet to play a Storium game to get much further than introduction and setup.

@auspice said in MU* Server Technology/Features. What do you WANT, what do you SEE?:

Not one single Storium game I've been in has ever gotten past the initial setup / "scene."

This is a common complaint, but I do think people (not necessarily you - but in general) are quick to blame the technology for what is really a social problem.

I've been part of several ongoing Storium games, and the one thing they all have in common is a narrator that keeps things moving. The better narrators (and they're the exception rather than the rule, I admit) know how to structure the challenges in a way that doesn't require everyone's participation, and then skip over people when they drop out. This is really not so different from successful MUSH storytelling.

I mean, imagine what would happen if you set up a MUSH but then told people: "You can only pose in this one scene this week, and it involves everyone on the game, and you have to wait for the storyteller in-between rounds, and 1/3rd of the players are going to drop out before the first scene even finishes." It wouldn't work very well! But that's not a problem with the technology, it's a problem with the way the game is structured.

@auspice said in Encouraging Proactive Players:

These, Fara, I think are the types of people Apos is referencing. The ones that are just overwhelmingly negative.

I think it's just a question of where you see the line. As I mentioned, people who are disruptive are a problem, and that guy would clearly fall into the obnoxiously-disruptive category. But @Apos and @Ganymede both have mentioned a stricter line against public criticism about the game or PRPs. That's their prerogative of course. I just disagree.

@il-volpe If you use Ares, you also have a couple other skill system options ready-made. One of them might be better suited to a magic system than FS3. FWIW.

@surreality said in Creative Outlets:

I actually agree with you about this completely. And per the way WoD is written, it should be like that.

A professional rolling 5 dice (3 skill + 2 stat) gets at least one success about 83% of the time. So if you rolled a "few dozen times" and literally never got a single success then please never take that char to Vegas because your luck is astonishingly abnormally bad

Arguably though 83% is low for a competent professional doing "their thing" under routine circumstances. But that's an artifact of the nWoD dice in particular. SR4 and FS3 have different percentages.

@tat said in MUSHgicians elements:

There are a lot of things I've just designed a certain way explicitly because that's how FS3 does or does not work, and I think that's a lot better than designing a system you love and then trying to smoosh it in.

Yeah, I think the reason you've been so successful is because you've limited yourself to doing things that work well within the existing framework. FS3 has first aid healing - you've made a magical heal spell. FS3 has explosions - you've made a magical fireball, etc. With an original system you have the flexibility to fit within that framework. When you're trying to model something pre-existing, it gets messy, as seen in this discussion about why FS3 doesn't really model Jedi powers well at all for a Star Wars game.

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

@packrat The linear vs. exponential CG thing is just it's own category of problem, and one that game designers should have learned better by now (sorry @faraday). Or maybe they have learned, but its the easier option. Path of least resistance.

Or here's another possibility - that we're well aware of the effect you're describing, but decide that the pros of such a system outweigh the cons after a well-reasoned analysis. Because different people want different things out of a game. I know - inconceivable, right? It's far more likely that we're just incompetent idiots who fail to comprehend simple math.

@d-bone said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

if a system is inadvertently designed to punish players so that they don't have a realistic expectation to become that brawler monster or stealth master out of cgen, then not only should players min-max, they should be encouraged to do so.

The expectation with FS3 is similar - if you want to be an expert then start the game as an expert. Not because it's a punishment, but because it's my game system and going from zero-to-hero in the typical lifespan of a game is a cruel destruction of my suspension of disbelief.

To that end, I don't mind if people max out the skills they care about as long as they don't leave critical gaps in skills that they logically should have (like the aforementioned pilot who should have basic military skills and an area of interest from college along with Piloting:6).

But y'know, FS3 is configurable. All it takes is tweaking one attribute to change the XP costs from exponential to flat. The fact that most games don't - and several published game systems work this way too - indicate that many people do not find it such a reprehensible decision.

&XP_PER_LEVEL FS3 XP Data=0:1 1:2 2:2 3:4 4:4 5:4 6:8 7:8 8:8 9:12 10:12 11:12

@pyrephox Yeah it's fun to go back and read your own logs, or to keep up with logs on your games because you have a personal connection to the story. But reading random logs from random games is really kind of jarring.

Man, I don't know what kinds of games you guys are playing on, but I don't have "brain-damaged idiot savants who only know one skill" coming out of chargen on my games. The overwhelming majority of characters are perfectly reasonable and balanced. Then again, I run PvE games where people aren't at each others' throats all the time, so there isn't this insane one-ups-manship you seem to envision going on. There are no cross-functional glory hogs running around stealing the spotlight from everyone else. And with very rare exceptions, nobody gets bent out of shape that Bob the Expert started off with more points than they did. Heck, I've got a large percentage of players who don't even bother to spend their XP and are perfectly content because chargen let them make the character they wanted.

I'm not saying my games are perfect or that they're for everyone. They're not. They have issues too, just not those issues.

You're describing a doomsday scenario that doesn't exist if you have a halfway competent staff. There are lots of different ways to solve problems, and refusing to acknowledge that is either willful ignorance or a failure of imagination.

@Sockmonkey - Good luck with your system. Seriously. I shared those same goals once. My advice now? Make the system you like and then never share it with anyone.

@arkandel said in A theme-less, CGen-less game:

if this would work at all it would need to be rudderless or ran by trustworthy inmates.

What from the experiences on MSB would suggest this place could be rudderless? Unless you want it to be HogPitMUSH, which... yeah, no thank you.

I don't really see what this offers that you can't already do on the other social sandbox MUSHes, so I don't see the need/value personally.

@lithium said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

That's not to say anyone here is doing that, but there comes a point when: You are playing a game, the game is going to take you out of your comfort zone eventually (Sooner in some game systems), and if it's so far out of your comfort zone, that you have to try and make rules not apply then... maybe it's you, not the system.

As someone who will die on the social combat hill... I 100% agree with you there. If I choose to play on a game with social combat, then I'm honorbound to follow the rules, whatever my preferences may be.

Where I find value in this thread is seeing where potential compromises can be found. For instance - after this thread @Seraphim73 and I went off and worked on social conflict systems independently. His was obviously more non-consent oriented and mine more consent-oriented, but it was hilarious how similar they were otherwise. If I was going to venture onto a game with social combat, I would be far more comfortable on a system like his that with the traditional "roll Persuasion vs Willpower and do what they say". There IS room for compromise here.

@Packrat said in Wheel of Time:

One issue is that FS has each 'attack' keyed against a specific defense roll/skill but there should probably be multiple ways to defend against a lot of stuff.

That's no longer true in 3rd edition. Defense skill is determined by an algorithm, so via custom code you could make that method as complicated as you needed it to be.

The standard version is keyed off weapon type. Melee weapons defend with whatever weapon you're holding (so if you've got a sword in your hand you defend with sword skill), vehicles defend with piloting skill of your vehicle, and ranged weapons defend with whatever ability you configure as your basic defense skill.

You could (with modest effort) make different spells use different defenses depending on the person's magical school, their highest magic skill, their previous round's action, their stance, something they choose via a command, or whatever else you saw fit. Just depends how much effort you want to put into it.

@lithium And here we go again, with "my way is the only possible way for anyone to play and if they dare to suggest that maybe different rules would be better they're rules-breaking lunatics who shouldn't be playing in a virtual world" nonsense.

Yeah. This is productive.

@Arkandel Thanks for the suggestion, but I'm not going to do that. That's not how PMs work in any other system (Discord, Slack, even this forum right here). If MUers value their privacy that much, they can do without the feature. These are chat messages, not state secrets.

@lithium

I was unduly snarky too, sorry.

@lithium said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

The whole idea of player agency is something I don't understand.

Likewise, the "you're cheating" argument is something I don't understand because games have different rules.

On a full-consent game ... you're not cheating because the game literally has 100% player agency.

On BSGU... you're not cheating because the game policies expressly give you agency.

On Fate... you're not cheating because (as I understand it... please don't nuke me if I got it wrong from 2nd hand information) the game rules provide "outs".

Even on WoD, the game rules acknowledge that some things are not possible no matter the die roll, and that other things require modifiers - sometimes extreme modifiers depending on the situation.

So unless a game system has an expressly written rule for resolving social conflict with expressly listed available modifiers and limits, this whole "you're cheating" thing doesn't hold any water for me.

@lithium said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

We're not writing a book here. We really aren't. We're playing a game in a medium that involves writing, not writing a book and using dice to determine the outcome.

You can't make a blanket statement about "we" are doing. That may be what you are doing, but that doesn't mean it applies to everyone equally.

MUSHes are not a book. They're also not a game. They're somewhere in-between and different people view them differently. It's that Narrative->Simulation continuum I'm always going on about. I fall more heavily on the Narrative side and you fall more on the Simulation side. That doesn't mean you're a bad person or you're wrong or anything - it just means you like to play differently.

Why the heck can't people just leave it at that and stop attacking each other?

@Arkandel said in Saving Pages to the Database:

rather than how to best safeguard it since otherwise staff will always have access to full records of pages.

Staff can already have full records of pages if they want to, on every MU server ever built. Whether that's enabling full command logging, or setting people SUSPECT, or whatever.

There is no real privacy on a MUSH, from a technological perspective. It is entirely reliant on the ethics of the staff involved to not go digging into things they have no business digging into.

So I'm not really interested in adding a complex encryption scheme to perpetuate the illusion of privacy (because even with encrypted storage, the game itself needs to be able to decrypt the pages somehow to display them, and that means the capability exists for code-staff to decrypt them too).

What I'm really asking is whether the illusion of private pages is important enough to players that they would not want to play on a game that was explicit about the fact that they're saved to the database.

@lithium said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

Also, I have no idea why you think these aren't games. They use rule systems. They aren't reality. They aren't us. They are fictional characters.

Duh. Nobody is saying they're reality or that they're us, the players. But MUSHes are a collaborative storytelling game. They're not a pure simulation. They're not a video game where you're completely bounded by the physics of the game engine. They're a game of imagination.

And to the whole "they're based on tabletop RPGs with rules" argument - I call BS because I've played in tons of tabletop RPGs where the GM and players are all: "Well, yes the rules say that, but that's complete nonsense so let's ignore it." Where story trumps mechanics. Where GMs fudge rolls in the interests of making the game more fun.

You can claim all day that those people were playing "wrong" but to me that's about as sensible as someone saying that people who like comic book movies are wrong/dumb just because they personally do not find that genre appealing.

ETA: And just as you're apparently not including games that flat-out state their consent rules in your arguments, nobody talking about player agency is claiming that they should be exempt from rules on a given game that's fully non-consent. It's the difference between saying "TGG has permadeath - I really don't like that because <reasons>" and "TGG has permadeath but that shouldn't apply to me." The first is a discussion. The second is absurd and I haven't seen anybody saying that.

@Ghost said in The OOC Masquerade ?:

Sometimes it's a fight that isn't worth it, but it's a fight I think is important to keep things fair for everyone. For someone to win, someone else may have to fail.

Also absolutely. Even as much of a metagaming proponent as I am, I recognize that there are times when staff needs to step in to keep things fair.

If your character has been established in several scenes making a habit of sweeping the room for bugs prior to starting a meeting, or it's mentioned in their bio or whatever, that's one thing. But if you suddenly out of the blue decide to sweep for bugs because you read a log in which Joe was talking about bugging your office? I call BS, as a player and as a game admin.

I don't think that it's uniquely a WoD problem, though, or even a MUSH problem. In Storium for instance, all scenes are essentially public, so scheming happens out in the open and you have to trust the narrator to call people out if they're unfairly using OOC information ICly.

@the-sands said in Skills and Fluff in WoD:

And I do apologize but in this context what's being discussed is quite definitely whether the fluff descriptors for oWoD (there are no fluff descriptors in nWoD) are 'rules' as some people want to maintain or just descriptors meant to give people some kind of idea as to what the dots represent. I know there are games where the skill descriptors are quite important. We simply aren't discussing those games.

Yes, I'm aware of the thread title. I'm making a point that applies to RPGs across the board, WOD included:

Flavor text is there for a reason. It provides context and details beyond the numbers. It clarifies how the designers intended the system to work. There's no inherent reason to discount a section on "here's what you can do with these skills at different levels" any more than there's reason to discount a section on "here's what these attributes cover" or "here's what these disciplines cost". They're all pieces of the game.

Whether or not they're "rules" is a matter of semantics, as @Thenomain pointed out, and ultimately irrelevant.

Because your problem isn't that it's flavor text. Your problem is that it's broken flavor text. It's flavor text that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense in context with the dice mechanics, nor general common sense. Like any other broken rule, it falls to the GM (or staff, in the case of a MU) how to remedy it.

Personally I don't think skills need to be valued equally, so I have no objection to the fact that a modest skill in driving costs the same as a master's degree in theology. Maybe they did that on purpose because they figured Drive would come up more often. Maybe they always intended skills to have their own independent scales. Maybe it's just a goof. Who knows. In the end, all that matters is how an individual game chooses to set their playing field.