Best posts made by faraday

@horrorhound said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

Using the difficulty system provided by WoD.

Right, so me and my buddy just sit around typing roll Melee vs Hard for an hour.

@insomniac7809 said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

@Tributary This is not an unfamiliar issue.

Not at all, unfortunately. Consolations.

@Ganymede said in What even is 'Metaplot'?:

"Metaplot" suggests that the game operators have a point to which they wish to see happen go

I agree this is often the case, but it isn't a required feature of a metaplot. You can allow players to shape the direction of the metaplot, within reason.

Funny story: In the first use of +combat on Babylon 5 MUSH, the bad guy NPC overpowered two of the FCs due to a couple fluke rolls. This had the potential completely derail the metaplot by exposing the Army of Light and bringing down about half of the FCs. All parties involved agreed to just ignore the code results and RP it out for the good of the game.

So in my mind it's a balance. Metaplot requires enough of a boundary to keep people from breaking the game, but not so much that you put your players/stories on rails.

@Seraphim73 said in Star Wars: Insurgency:

@Jennkryst Heck, Dahan already did that.

@Jennkryst Yeah I did it too as a silly challenge on one of the coding threads. The code is here. I like the idea of a more involved die mechanic ("you succeeded, but..." is a neat idea) but it seems like the execution leaves much to be desired. And people already complain about "fuzzy" success levels on dice systems; this seems like it would be even worse.

@arkandel said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

They are not being used. Most players don't roll in social encounters unless there's some kind of pivotal moment, usually around conflict. That's pretty rare. They do get used in PrPs when prompted by a GM but of course that, too, is biased toward those with access to such scenes.

Totally agree, but I don't see that as a problem. My games always contain this guidance:

Players are always free to skip rolls and negotiate a resolution as befits the story, as long as everyone agrees. You should consider using an ability roll if the character is under significant stress, facing challenging circumstances or in conflict with another character.

You can use your character sheet as a guide for what your PC can accomplish without ever picking up dice. I rarely call for rolls in GMed scenes, and when I do it's mostly for "who notices this thing first" not "roll to see if you fall and die".

It all comes down to your philosophy.

@Sparks said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

Adult diagnosis of ADHD continues to be an adventure in "Oh, that's not just me being weird?"

Yep. My life as well.

@Seraphim73 said in New MUSH 'Game' Mechanics:

They can be used to effortlessly leap across to the balcony to kiss your lady love, but they can't be used to slay the dragon.

Does anybody really need points to use in private scenes to jump across a balcony to kiss their love? I mean, this sort of thing is typically just RPed anyway 99% of the time. I would also worry about people taking a dive when it doesn't even matter to save up points for when they want to do something important.

But as a general idea I like the idea of a diceless sort of tradeoff system. I explored something like that for FS3 at one point. The devil's in the details.

@Arkandel I don't suppose for poor @Tirit's sake (and, um, ours too?) you could just move the last couple days of rage-ranting vendetta posts against Evennia over into the hog pit or something?

@ganymede said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

For example, in the Chronicles of Darkness, a player can surrender to a beatdown in exchange for a small XP reward; aside from the benefit to the player's character, it is also a benefit to the GM whose NPC initiates the beatdown because it saves a lot of dice-throwing.

I can see that. All I'm suggesting is that there may be value in flipping the question on its head and challenging some of the basic assumptions. Why is the beatdown happening in the first place? Why does it necessitate a ton of dice-throwing to resolve? What is gained for the story if the players lose versus win?

You could try to incentivize it with XP, sure, but you could also just communicate with the players and say: "So for the story I have in mind, the NPC would give you a beatdown and then... (as vague or specific as you wish to convince them)..." and it becomes more of a negotiation than a systemic reward. There's no right or wrong here, just different ways of looking at it.

@GreenFlashlight @Auspice Yeah I've forgotten things in the trunk. Repeatedly. I put things in the front passenger seat whenever possible.

@seraphim73 Totally. And, I mean - I get it. As an audience, it's hard to make yourself care about RedShirt#72. As a player, you don't want to be all maudlin all the time crying over the latest NPC that bought it. But I think if you want to capture the wartime 'feel' you just have to do it. Killing off PCs isn't some magic bullet either. For every really 'impactful' PC death on TGG (and there were some, sure), there were a whole bunch of other ones that registered about as much as Redshirt#72.

@ShelBeast said in Interest Check: Assassin's Creed (CofD/2nd Ed) Game?:

Does FS3 take care of things outside of combat?

If you're looking for specific code/mechanics for things like investigation or research, then no - there's nothing like that. Outside of combat, it falls back to more of just a freeform roll system, which is not dissimilar to most tabletop RPGs I'm familiar with (FUDGE, Fate, Shadowrun, Cortex, 7th Sea...) There are some guidelines for the types of games FS3 is suited for.

@arkandel said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

The way I see it the problem we are really trying to solve here is that, unlike table-top or video games, on a MU* there is limited access to desired venues, achievements or outcomes.

There can be, sure, but there doesn't need to be. Even if your game has that setup, I would argue that the way you'd solve a problem like "when you die your OOC name changes and you lose social connections" is very different to how you might solve "access to structured plots varied".

@devrex said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

Well I think the idea is that nobody would go to a movie where the main character wins every interaction.

Sure, but I don't consider that "failure" in the way that much of the thread seemed to be emphasizing. There may be setbacks along the way, but the protagonist (generally) prevails in the end.

Anyway, it seems I'm just approaching all of this from a very different perspective than the rest of y'all due to the type of games I run/play and we're just talking about apples and oranges.

@groth said in Good TV:

In a world where Kanye West exists, is a black billionaire playboy really that unthinkable?

Not at all. I liked Connor Mason's character very much in Timeless as the eccentric billionaire inventor.

But I think it gets murkier when you have established properties. People come at it with expectations about the characters. There's more to Tony Stark than just "billionaire playboy". He has a backstory, which comes with a certain set of baggage.

For example, I didn't like it when RDM's Battlestar gender-swapped Starbuck. Not because I have anything against inclusion (on the contrary, I think it's vital), but because I had this "Dirk Benedict" image of this character etched in my head and it created a weird cognitive dissonance. I would much rather them have reimagined Sheba or Athena, or promoted a new character.

I get that it's different in comics, since there are already so many variants of characters. And that there's some marketing value in making a "female 007" versus a new and original spy character. At the end of the day, I applaud having more diversity. I just sometimes wonder if there's maybe a better way to get there.

@thatguythere said in Make MSB great again!:

Except a section when criticism is not allowed as the current rules of the ad thread state is not discourse civil or otherwise it is a commercial followed by a pep rally.

That wasn't at all what I was talking about, if you read my comment again.

And if you read my other comments about the ad thread, you'll see that I agree with you. I suggested having just one "Game" thread for civil ad/q&a/reviews/feedback all together.

@Ganymede said in Interest Check: Assassin's Creed (CofD/2nd Ed) Game?:

The advantage that FS3 has over a CoD game is the combat engine. FS3 lacks the crunch and customization of CoD, mind, but it can work for what you want. (Despite @faraday's protest, in my opinion.)

The reason I think it doesn't work well (which is not the same as 'can't work') comes down to what you consider an action skill. Once you start including a half-dozen crafting skills and a half-dozen social/political skills and a half-dozen different weapon skills (because in a fantasy setting people are normally unsatisfied with just "Melee" and "Firearms") ... now all of a sudden your action skill list is 30 skills long. And oh by the way, a lot of those skills are things that everyone knows to some extent or another (like Persuasion). That makes chargen more complicated, blows the mix-maxing thing up to epic proportions, and dilutes the difference between Action and Background skills (which is a hallmark of FS3). It can be done, sure. That doesn't mean it's the best way to go.

@Ghost said in The Great PC Death Dilemma:

I feel like there's something healthy and logical about understanding the difference between "MUSH that uses a dice system" and "TTRPG", where the general culture, approach to dice, use of system, focus of RP are simply different.

Agree 100%.

In fact, that realization was the ultimate reason why I created FS3. I had spent many years trying to use or adapt various TTRPG systems to MUs, and eventually realized that none of them really fit the MU model that I wanted.

FS3 is not without its flaws, but its core strength is that it was designed for the type of game I wanted to run.

@boneghazi For me I think it's some kind of perverse optimism. Like... I want to like it, so I keep hoping it will get better? I still watch it, kinda halfheartedly.

@three-eyed-crow Right. "Nobody but the owner can post" is very clear and easy to legislate. "Anybody can post good or the bad" is easy to understand too, because anything that's not hog-pit worthy is valid. The middle ground sounds problematic to me (both from a poster perspective and imagining a moderator's perspective) but @Arkandel is aware of it so -- we'll see how it goes.

@ShelBeast Various games have used it for fantasy settings. It has rough edges but that doesn't mean you can't make it work. You just have to examine what you want to accomplish with your game. Then you can weigh the pros/cons of trying to adapt a system that was fundamentally made for something else vs making your own.

Sometimes people have no coder and it's really not a choice for them. Putting a square peg into a round hole is sometimes better than not having a game at all