@Ganymede It's like everything I thought I knew is a lie!
Back on topic... @egg We try to make it accessible to folks who have not seen the show. There's a cliff notes version of the theme on the wiki. That said, it's more of a war MU* than most "sci fi games" so YMMV.
@kitteh I can’t argue with perceptions because they are, of course, in the eye of the beholder. I can only speak to the math. Dice suck sometimes, whether you’re Good or Great, and different situations can contribute to negative experiences.
But yes, if your goal is to come in at poor and get to Expert in 6 months then FS3 isn’t the system for you. Just as D20 isn’t the system for me for very different reasons.
@paris Yes, contrast is also important. Especially on a MU environment where you only have a handful of colors to work with and need to handle both light and dark backgrounds. In Ares, each game can configure their color schemes, so that's more of an implementation detail than something central to the engine. Also, many clients let you customize your color values, so you can adjust if a particular game makes poor choices. But still good for folks to be aware of.
@kitteh We can certainly disagree on how things should be - and I did make some tweaks to combat (armor wasn't working quite right) and XP costs after you left. But regardless, I meant no offense.
Back to the original topic though.... I mean, what others have said is factually accurate about systems in general (and FS3 in particular):
@seraphim73 said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:
It was totally frustrating, especially watching other characters soar ahead of him. But it totally happens. Not just a "low skills" thing, just a luck-of-the-dice thing. Which doesn't, of course, make it any easier.
Yeah honestly from what I saw behind the curtains - some people just had crappy luck. Which comes down to what someone said a few posts ago... how much responsibility does the GM have to make the players feel like they're playing up to their skills, as opposed to just saying: "Ah, well, them's the breaks, the dice hate you tonight." I mean, I know the latter was more my experience in tabletop RPGs. I try to err more on the side of story in games but as long as there's automated dice involved, there's really only so much you can do.
@arkandel said in A theme-less, CGen-less game:
Correction. With a bit of effort to focus on that 'isolating sandboxes' part I'm pretty confident it would work since a troll wouldn't be able to reach those playing in any way in-game yet genuine friends could do it by messaging in MSB itself.
How? When you think of all the ways that there are to communicate in a MU - pages, mails, channels, bbs... I'd think you'd want at least some of them to work within the game (to coordinate with people within a sandbox) otherwise it would be a PITA to play. To try to restrict that to only work within sandboxes seems like it'd be super-hard in Penn/Tiny. Slightly less hard in Ares but still a pain.
@kitteh said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:
But yeah I do think the dice-vs.-expectations thing can be tricky to manage. When you have highly min-maxed people... doing predictably, consistently well, 'oh they really don't have much of an advantage' is unsatisfying to hear whether its true or not. Maybe it's only 17% (or whatever) but when you roll as often as you do in FS3 I do think that stuff adds up. It's fine to let the super-leet be leet, but if you're gonna design the game that way you probably want to create alternate lower-stakes things the 'mere mortals' can do so they can actually feel like they're part of things and not irrelevant spectators to the cool people.
But, see.... I really don't mean to piss you off or disregard your feelings, but your opinion seems to be the minority there from all the feedback I've received. That doesn't mean your experiences aren't valid just.... no system can please everyone.
There are plenty of people who didn't have maxed-out stats at all who did perfectly well in combat, both on the marine side and the pilot side. AND there were several people who actually did have maxed-out (or nearly so) stats who were often griping about feeling "useless" just because they didn't get any kills or didn't do much damage in a couple missions. It was definitely more common on the pilot side because of the kill board, because there IS an IC competitiveness among pilots.
So yeah... perceived performance versus expected performance is definitely a valid issue for game systems to address, but... how? Short of dispensing with dice entirely and just leaving it up to skill vs skill... what on earth are you supposed to do? (Serious question.)
ETA: To clarify - I'm not saying nobody complains about FS3. Lordy do they. But "the newbie can't hold their own against the vets" is really just not a complaint I've received repeatedly.
@Seraphim73 said in Wheel of Time:
most FS3 affects take place the turn you do them, save for reloading, from what I've seen
That's just the way the standard actions are coded though. If you're adding custom code (which would be required to do any magic system) then you can make it as complex as you wanted. Subdue, aim and reload are all examples of actions that can span multiple turns.
@Tat has spent a ton of effort coding up SL's magic system, so I don't want to make it sound like this is easy to do. But as long as you stick within the effects provided by the system (damage, knockout, subdue, suppression, etc.) it's possible. New effects are possible too but that requires more in-depth surgery into the guts of the system versus just leveraging existing code with new actions.
@the-sands said in Skills and Fluff in WoD:
Thus this is a strawman argument unless you would let someone with Medicine-4 + Int-1 do brain surgery.
It's debatable whether someone with Int-1 should be allowed to have Medicine-4 (Surgery) in the first place unless there were a compelling story attached about how exactly they managed to make it through college, medical school and the exceptionally challenging specialty of neurosurgery with such a low IQ. Just as I would have a hard time buying someone with Dex-1 Piloting-5 claiming they were an elite fighter pilot. I believe that sheets and backgrounds should hold together in a logical fashion.
But assuming you let them get it then sure - they should be able to do it.
@jennkryst said in Skills and Fluff in WoD:
So massive Int is not a requirement.
I think someone with average (2) could argue they just worked really hard. But 1 is pushing it for me.
Either way - a GM's job is to use the rules to enable other players to have fun and tell a good story, not to be a blind slave to said rules and allow situations that defy common sense.
@Sparks said in Saving Pages to the Database:
this just doesn't seem a practical place to use public key encryption
That's exactly right. Even if you have to pass the key to decrypt your pages, you're still passing it to the game, and thus effectively giving nefarious staff access to your key - and your pages - anyway.
Not to mention the fact that a nefarious staff could still intercept the page and log it before it was encrypted and saved to the database in the first place.
Encryption might make people feel a little better, but it's not really a viable protection in this case.
@the-sands said in Skills and Fluff in WoD:
Ok, but can you honestly look me in the eye (metaphorically) and tell me that they skill descriptors were intended to be 'rules' and not 'guidelines'? They are so hysterically badly written that it says that a General Practitioner only has to go through 6 years of school and that driving a stickshift requires the same rigor to master as a college (pre-med) degree.
Having not picked up a WoD book in almost 20 years, I would not venture an opinion as to the current state of WoD skill descriptors. I was just musing about the general importance of fluff text in rulebooks.
That aside, lots of things in RPGs are hysterically badly written when compared to reality. That's why there's a GM involved - to interpret the rules and keep players from trying to take out a tank with a dikoted crossbow bolt (true story - just not WOD related) just because the rules say they can.
Random side note - becoming a general practitioner does typically take 7 years of medical training so it's not like they were off by a mile or anything.
@Ghost It's been a few years since I've run a Penn game, but last I knew there was no ability to save pages to the DB or snoop live as Seamus describes. You could turn on command logging for everyone or set people SUSPECT, but that stuff all went to a text log file on disk.
Ares presently has no SUSPECT flag, but it logs all commands (from everyone) except for pages/channels/poses (and a few other private things like passwords) to the text debug log on disk. Channels are saved to the DB for channel/recall and web portal chat. Poses are saved to the DB if you have scene logging enabled. Individual players can currently log pages they receive in a very limited fashion for abuse reporting.
Can't speak to the other codebases.
@surreality Yeah we played with 'GM Fiat' long before Storyteller - even with 1st Edition Shadowrun. I agree with @Thenomain though that AFAIK Storyteller was the first system that made it an explicit part of the "rules" to avoid people trying to rules-lawyer the GM by bludgeoning them with the force of the rulebook.
@Arkandel said in City of Shadows:
Do we check if years have passed between raising Medicine from 3 (medical school graduate level) and 4 (experienced doctor level)? No, although it'd take that long.
Well umm... some of us in some of our systems do? Staff just has to decide what level of realism they want in their game and then stick to it. But I agree with you in general that if you don't want a player to have something, just say no. Don't make the obstacles silly.
@thenomain said in Skills and Fluff in WoD:
And I wasn't saying that it wasn't a thing, but saying there was a historical timeline.
I never said you were being antagonistic? You said "Rule Zero flipped the discussion." and I disagree. I think Rule Zero was just a game explicitly stating something that lots of people had already been doing. Stating that Storyteller was the first game to explicitly put it in the rules is factually accurate AFAIK. Suggesting it was a game-changer in some way seems like an overstatement IMHO. We can agree to disagree, as I have no hard evidence one way or the other.
@ZombieGenesis said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:
were worried that it would scare people away(it being a system at all and not having the online c-gen that some associate with Ares).
Haha - I love that a brand new feature that isn't even out of beta is now a potential dealbreaker. (that's not sarcasm; that makes me happy) Someday I'd like to do web CG for the extra plugins but y'know - priorities.
I did use the saved NPCs fairly often, but the ability to just 'goon' and 'henchman' NPCs in Ares might serve the purpose they mostly did. I suspect that for recurring big bads, I'll create a character object to use.
Yeah that's what I was thinking. You can even create additional NPC types beyond goon/henchman/miniboss/boss if you want to have more fine-tuned pre-set NPC types.
@Sparks said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:
If I spent a year and a half building custom bespoke systems and doing world-building, then having 7 people have fun for four months would feel like the game was a failure, to me. But if I literally just opened it as a sandbox with minimal code and had 7 people have fun for four months? Worth it.
Yeah I understand. I keep shooting down my own game ideas because I'm convinced that they won't last past six months and will feel like a failure.
But there are times when I want to smack my inner naysayer upside the head and remind them that if you have fun doing something, and you entertain other people in the process, and you maybe learn something from it that can help future endeavors... why isn't that enough?
@ixokai said in What's your identity worth to you?:
They are offended by the very presumption one would ask for an email address, not hindered by some lack of technical ability to use a throw-away address.
Yeah, from the polling I did for Ares it's usually either principle ("You shouldn't need to know that! You must be dumb and/or shady!") or just not wanting to be spammed and not wanting to be bothered creating a MU burner.
@apos said in What's your identity worth to you?:
Oh yeah I'm sure they exist, I just think it's so small and so niche that it's not worth it to factor them into design decisions.
I guess it depends. Unlike Arx, most MU*s are pretty small. The idea of potentially alienating up to 10% of your already-small population seems like something many games would want to factor into their design decisions - even if that decision is ultimately "screw it, we're using email".
@Apos said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:
Number of logins is an incredibly silly way for people to define success, since I think virtually everyone would far rather play a game of 20 people that are enthusiastic and having a wonderful time making stories for one another, than a game of 300 people where everyone hates one another and logs in only out of a grim sense of obligation and habit
I'm not saying people should necessarily use activity as a measure of success, I'm saying people do. I know this from comments on forums, comments on games, and comments I've heard first-hand.
And the activity thing is not entirely without basis. As @Sparks said, if you only entertain five people it can feel like the effort wasn't worth it. And as people grow more and more picky about who they're willing to RP with, it requires a wider player base to find someone whose style matches yours.
I prefer smaller games myself, but not everyone does.
@surreality said in What's your identity worth to you?:
So if someone told me "Hey, update your home network so that this guy you don't know can connect via IPv6 to your home server to play an online game" I'd:
Me: "I'm offering something free under the terms I'm comfortable doing so, and no more." (The end.)
@surreality - I think maybe you've got Ghost's point backwards (or I'm seriously missing something here).
Ghost wasn't saying that you, the benevolent game-runner, need to do anything with your router (let alone spend $120 - or any money at all) to enable their fun.
The point was that a benevolent game-runner hosting a game on a PC on their home network was potentially opening themselves up to security vulnerabilities if they didn't follow network precautions. And if Ghost were that game-runner and some player complained that those network precautions prevented them from connecting to the game via ipv6, Ghost would tell them to pound sand.
There's no entitlement here.
@ghost said in What's your identity worth to you?:
Game Owners: From IP information to email addresses, what are the current standards of collection?
For Ares - your last IP and an email address (if voluntarily supplied) are stored until your character bit is destroyed. On some games, that may be forever.
I believe this to be appropriate use. Your email is attached to your account so it makes sense that it would exist until your account was deleted. (Of course you can always manually wipe it when you leave a game.) Most privacy standards recognize that web providers (the closest analogy to MU servers) are allowed to collect IP addresses for security reasons to protect against and pursue security violations. If someone's hyper-conscious about people accessing their IP address, they should use a dynamic VPN.