@SG No, that won't help. What I presume you ultimately want is for a jedi with a lightsaber to defend with "lightsaber skill" but everyone else to still defend with the base defense (or "3" by default). And even that wouldn't let you deflect a blaster bolt back at them (which is what I meant by "riposte") or use any other force abilities.
You can hack all that into the system in whatever way you choose. It just doesn't support any of it out of the box via configuration.
@ThatGuyThere said in FS3:
I have always been curious how FS3 would work for a Star Wars game.
There have been a couple places that tried it. Jedi are the big problem there. FS3 doesn't scale well for superpowers. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, the difference between starting PC and max PC levels is relatively minor. This is by design to avoid the "dino problem" endemic to MUSHes but it also means that it's hard to be really super duper awesome like jedi are supposed to be. And there's no "riposte" type action for deflecting blasters with your lightsaber.
Shields are also something it doesn't really model, though you could maybe fake it somehow.
@Sunny Right. That's why for the 3rd Ed docs I made a whole article about what kinds of games FS3 was suited for and better guidance for tweaking it. I mean sure, you can use it for other things, but that doesn't mean it's going to do what you (or your players) want.
It's like... sure, I could make a WoD game using FATE but dear lord why do that to myself???
My biggest beef with FS3 has been what people have forced it to do. It felt really clunky on the few games I tried to play that had it.
Isn't that kinda like saying your biggest beef with a hammer is when someone uses it to smash a glass window? 
I tease. But really, I get it. @Thenomain is always ribbing me for trying to talk people out of using FS3 around here, but seriously... folks trying to square-peg-round-hole games into it causes no end of frustration for all concerned.
@Tempest Yeah, that's been my biggest disappointment with the system. It's like people are all: "Well, I know this system isn't really a good fit for my game and I don't like it all that much, but I'll inflict it on my players anyway because I have no other options."
It's still important that a system tries to prevent people from screwing themselves over.
I don't disagree. But for perspective: The delta between minimum junior professional (Fair+Average) and maximum starting level (Expert+Exceptional) in FS3 is only about 20% (give or take, depending on what kind of roll you're doing). There's a difference, sure, but I seriously don't think anybody's getting "screwed over" here even if they don't absolutely maximize their point expenditures.
I'll just leave this here for @Auspice 
ETA: I would make that smaller if I could figure out the right syntax for the board here.
@Arkandel That's a question I think everyone has to answer for themselves. The D20 system, for instance, is just a general turn-off for me personally. A game would have to be pretty dang awesome to get me to grit my teeth and make up a D20 character.
I would say, though, that some of the aspects of FS3 I mentioned (level playing field, min/maxing) can lead to definite friction in a PvP type of game. When everyone's on the same side killing Cylons, it really doesn't matter too much if Bob skated through cg with a couple more dots in Gunnery. But if Bob is fighting Harry? Is it really fair to start them off unevenly - especially if Bob knows how to "game" the system more?
@Kanye-Qwest said in NeverwinterMUSH:
Someone explain to me what is so wrong with FS3 that it ruins rp?
Now that I have a minute to reply, I figured I'd save you the trouble of mining the old threads for my own TL;DR; answer:
Characters don't start on a level playing field. For instance, Bob could come out of chargen with 4 skills at level 3 and Harry with 2 skills at 6. Bob will never be able to catch up to Harry. Some people see that as unfair because they think characters should be evenly balanced.
Many games limit the number of starting points for "balance", leading people to min-max. Example: On 100, I wanted to make a badass archer. I didn't have enough points. I deliberately upped her combat stats because they mattered more, figuring I'd buy up the less important "fluff" skills with XP later - even though it was a bit weird for a veteran archer to be lacking in basic things like Riding and Warfare. Some people again see that as unfair, because someone who spreads out their points more realistically / less min-max-y will be at a disadvantage. The intention was to curb this through app review, but of course it's all highly subjective.
Outside of combat, which is automated, the mechanics are very 'soft'. The Shadowrun rulebook is 489 pages long, with rules for everything from hacking to climbing. FS3, in contrast, is more like 30 pages if you printed it all out. Everything is resolved as a generic ability roll. While the lightweight rules are a plus for some people, the subjective nature makes them a big turn-off for others.
People change the system in weird ways. Like, I wouldn't expect to log onto a WoD game and find that someone had completely re-defined what the dot levels mean, or onto a D20 game where they said "actually you can't start with any attribute higher than 12" for some reason, yet people do this kind of stuff all the time with FS3. I'm not mad about it - the system is open so people are free to adapt it however they want. But this strange variance leads to sort of a "FS3 is like a box of chocolates... you never know what you're going to get" mentality.
At the end of the day, no system is going to please everyone. I made FS3 for myself, for my games. Most of the issues people take exception to are either by design (I like it that way) or outside of my control (like how people use it on other games). But some things were genuinely bad, which I've tried to make better in 3rd edition.
@ixokai said in Information Storage Question:
@Bobotron said it doesn't do that with the new mux aliases.
Oh I thought he (Bobotron) was talking about the + prefix and the custom aliases. I haven't used Penn with the new aliases so I have no idea. At any rate, Theno wasn't the only one who missed it if that was the case.
@ixokai said in Information Storage Question:
I don't know either of these things for facts myself, I wouldn't use Penn if you paid me, but its not everyone else having trouble listening here, man.
I think people are missing the part where @Thenomain said:
The softcode or softcode-style parsing of special characters also makes me cringe. It's starting to make me cringe with 'say' and 'page' too, mind you. I want to have '%' be by default '%' and not need to escape it or use 'page/noeval'.
That's the softcode or softcode-style parsing he's talking about. It's not that the channel stuff is written in softcode. It's that it treats your channel comments like softcode by default. Which leads to having to do some weird backflips to escape things sometimes.
@NightAngel12 said in Information Storage Question:
I'm inclined to ask what's sucky about the Penn channel system, because I've never seen any issues with it. What does MUX have in their channel system?
Primarily, Mux channels in let you can create custom aliases for each channel. Whereas on Penn you're stuck with +h for help and whatnot. Mux also lets you 'say' commands to the chan so you can do 'help who' instead of @chan/who help
I really don't think it's a big deal objectively. But if you're used to the Mux way, the Penn way is frustrating. And vice versa.
Sounds neat for map purposes, but I know a number of people who play from tablets though, and I worry about the compatibility of the client and the resources required. Does anyone know how well (or if) it works?
@BobGoblin What @Seraphim73 said, pretty much. 3rd ed (in Ares when it's eventually released) is better but still a bit awkward. That said, you can do whatever you can imagine if you're willing to carve up the code enough.
@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
@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.