Posts made by faraday

@Ganymede said in High Fantasy:

Well, to the abdomen. But it's a RuneQuest joke for me.

"Abdomen" is... y'know, the abdomen. Not the junk. But hey, RP whatever makes you happy

@Ganymede said in High Fantasy:

Also, brutal as fuck. My poor PC has, like, huge gaping holes in his junk, apparently.

Err... that's not a standard hit location. Somebody with a really sadistic streak or a wicked sense of humor must've added that

Which just goes to illustrate... FS3 is very configurable, so it's as brutal or as fluffy as you want it to be.

@Wizz Cookies don't give you XP on BSGU; XP is a flat award of 1 per week to everyone and advancement is super slow. Cookies give you luck points to keep fighting if you get knocked out in combat, but since it's all PVE that's not really a big advantage.

@Lisse24 said in Eliminating social stats:

Muers don't think that way. In general, I believe that there are two major stumbling blocks to MUers telling compelling narratives.

I'm going to echo @WTFE by saying that while that may be true on the games you've played -- I'm not here to question your experiences -- it is by no means universal. I have had tons of compelling storylines on MUs with zero dice involved.

I'm also not saying "dice are evil". I mean, I put an immense amount of effort into making a dice-based skills and combat system for goodness sake. I'm just saying there is a natural tension between rolls (which by their nature are random) and narrative (which by its nature is planned), and different people have different preferences on what an appropriate balance between the two is.

@WTFE Yes, exactly. It would be like: "And Luke Skywalker teamed up with Obi-Wan Kenobi to go rescue Princess Leia from the clutches of the Empire, and on the way they died because Han Solo failed his piloting check and crashed the Millenium Falcon in the debris field that was once Alderaan. The end."

Now to be fair ... most "game versus story" conflicts aren't quite that extreme. Sometimes fickle dice can take you in an unexpected yet narratively satisfactory direction, and that's why a lot of people like them. But sometimes they're just fickle and dumb.

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

This is you being insulting and dismissive.

No it was me laughing because your comment "I'm not sure if you've ever read a combat pose" is a ridiculous thing to say to someone who designed a widely-used combat system and has run several successful war-centric MUSHes. It's a pretty insulting and dismissive thing to say to anyone, really, but I found it hilarious.

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

Except "I lie <clatter of dice>" is about as immersive as "I cook the meth <clatter of dice>" or "I fortify the Sanctum <clatter of dice>" or "I cast magic missile against the goblin <clatter of dice>."

I think you're missing the point that some of us are saying that "I cook the meth" is no more satisfactory than "I lie" or "I treat the patient" or "I fight Bob". We come for immersion. We come for story. We expect some measure of detail in poses -- all poses. Social skills are a little different because they're harder to fake. Not everyone has a BS-o-meter tuned for medical stuff or meth cooking, but everyone has a BS-o-meter tuned for socialization, and socialization comes up literally all the time.

It's fine to have a different point of view. Really it is. It's not okay to dismiss the alternative as some form of "I just want my character to be immune to social stuff" powerplaying just because you don't understand and/or agree with it. That's insulting and dismissive. Lots of games do this successfully. It's not some alien concept that's never been tried.

@Ominous said in Eliminating social stats:

@Arkandel Most of the servers that I have played on did not have a social resolution mechanic and did not have social skills. I think that is the more common option actually. The general "solution" to making that choice is expanding the number of physical and mental skills to keep combat monster bloat down.

Same here. Actually in 20 years I don't think I've ever played (more than briefly) on a MU that had a PvP social mechanic. Most didn't have social stats at all, or if they did they were just a background thing alongside hobbies, sports, dancing, etc.

@Pyrephox said in Eliminating social stats:

Putting it as a continuum suggests that you can't have or want both.

I didn't say it was either/or; I said it was a spectrum. There are games where there are literally no mechanics -- that's the far right of the spectrum. There are games where there are no poses - that's the far left. The vast majority of games fall somewhere in between, but they fall at different points on the spectrum. And the degree to which someone values story over rolls colors what they're willing to handwave versus what they expect to play out.

Also, you're allowed to like different things at different times. I can be perfectly happy playing tabletop where it's "I bluff my way past the guard clatter of dice." But that's not what I personally am looking for on a MUSH.

@Pyrephox said in Eliminating social stats:

Personally, I've never once had anyone be able to coherently explain to me what is WRONG with "rollplay".

I think the mistake people make is equating it to "right or wrong" instead of calling it what it is: a spectrum.

ROLL <---------------------------------------> WRITE

Or to put it another way:

GAME <---------------------------------------> STORY

Different people have different preferences and fall on different parts of that spectrum. Different games do too. But I think that MU*s in general fall more to the right side of the spectrum, whereas MUDs and MMOs in general fall more to the left side.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. What's wrong is somebody saying that someone whose preferences fall on a different part of the spectrum is an idiot or playing MU*s "wrong". (Not saying you were; just saying in general.)

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

1. I'm not sure if you've ever read a combat pose.

LOL. I'm not even going to respond to that one.

2. Bleach-and-ammonia analogy. It's so obviously wrong that your cook meth roll should autofail. And further analogously, this thinking says "I cook meth" should not cut it.

So then that one is cringe-worthy. Somewhere in between would be the Hollywood zone.

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

So if you can suspend disbelief for factual inaccuracy, why not for low interpersonal skill?

Various folks have tried several times to explain why, but since it was buried in other walls of text, I will pull them out for emphasis:

1. Because social ability comes up in literally every pose, whereas those other skills are not "in your face" as often.

2. Because what (most of us) are griping about is not the borderline "I can suspend my disbelief" zone, but the "OMG really?" cringe-worthy stuff like in @Arkandel's recent example.

ETA a recently-made point:

3. Because dialogue is, by convention, not abstracted in MUs.

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

Maybe my experience with this sort of thing is different, but I hang out with STEM people. If you say "I cook meth," and then you follow it up with something that's incorrect to the end of cooking meth (like my "mix ammonia with bleach" example), they'll call you on it.

Sure, there are players like that. Those are the same people who will refuse to watch Breaking Bad because they got some silly detail wrong. But most people are used to fiction not getting things exactly right. That's why we have the tern "suspension of disbelief". The trick is to suspend the disbelief and not beat it into a bloody pulp. That line varies by individual, but somewhere in the middle is the "generally acceptable" Hollywood zone.

There is a spectrum between "story" and "game". If you fall more on the "game" side of the spectrum, you'll be totally fine with a pose saying "... and then Cate treats the patient" followed by a Medicine roll. But if you fall more on the "story" side of the spectrum, that's going to be wholly unsatisfying. It would be like reading a James Patterson novel where the meat of the investigation was... "And then the detectives found some clues". Good writers have to do their research. In my experience, the best RPers do too.

@Salty-Secrets I'm not talking about strict accuracy. That's a pretty high bar for a RPG. I'm talking about cringe-worthy stuff in the same vein as some of the social examples.

@Arkandel said in Eliminating social stats:

I can't just abstract all that with the Persuasion skill because at some point my PC is gonna have to open his mouth and actually say things, things that you are going to have to read. There will be non-persuasive words involved. It will make you sigh.

I gotcha. And I agree - some skills are easier to fake than others. All I meant was that the problem you're describing is not unique to social skills. We don't do persuasion rolls on the sorts of games I play on, but I've seen just as many sigh-worthy medical or military poses. I think it's just more pronounced with social skills because they apply literally all the time.

@Arkandel Well unless I misread, you said it like a negative against social stats... like, they were useless because they never got rolled. I've never rolled my BSGU char's Dancing skill either, but her skill (or rather, lack thereof) has come up in several scenes. The problem isn't them not getting rolled, IMHO, the problem is when someone has Dancing:1 but RPs like they're going to win So You Think You Can Dance (or conversely has a char with Dancing:5 but their dance poses are cringe-worthy). Short of coding everything, I don't know how you ever really fix that problem (and even that probably won't work either). You can mitigate it somewhat with open sheets and letting players keep each other honest, but that only goes so far.

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

Here's why that doesn't make sense: it would be like expecting someone who wants to play Walter White to actually know how to make methamphetamine.

Well, as @Arkandel and @Ganymede have pointed out, social skills apply in literally every scene on the game. Expecting every social interaction to be handwaved through a roll: "I say something charming... +roll Charisma" seems pretty untenable.

Also, while nobody expects someone to be a RL doctor just to play an IC doctor, you have to at least be able to fake it to Hollywood-esque levels of plausibility. If you can't do that, you probably shouldn't play a doctor. If you can't be bothered to do the slightest bit of research about how meth works, you probably shouldn't play Walter White. And by that analogy, if you can't fake being Charming McCharmer, you probably shouldn't make up someone with Charisma 5.

This is a game, sure, but it's more importantly a story.

Side note to @Arkandel's point about going many scenes without seeing a roll: You say that like it's a bad thing. That's my ideal. Rolls are for when players can't agree on which way the story should go. If nobody ever rolled a single stat on my game I'd be perfectly happy. That doesn't absolve them from the responsibility of RPing according to what's on their sheet, though. And that much is true for social stats as much as it is for not RPing like you're Dr. House when your sheet says Medicine: 1.

@Pyrephox said in Eliminating social stats:

@faraday And, as I've repeatedly said, if you're playing on those games, pretty much none of this applies to you. It is an entirely different situation, and resembles breaking into a discussion of people who don't follow the rules in chess to say that people can have just as much fun playing cribbage, and in /cribbage/ there are no kings so arguments about castling never happen.

It is entirely true, mind you, but not particularly helpful.

Given that @Arkandel's original question in the thread was During game design, one of the potential ideas for its systems is to eliminate all social mechanics from it. I find the analogy of "breaking into a discussion" to be both baseless and insulting. But I'm stepping out because I have nothing more to offer here.

@Pyrephox said in Eliminating social stats:

At some point, you have to suck it up and play the actual game. Or write a book, where all the narrative control is totally in your hands.

Or play on games where social interactions are left up to the players. Because they actually exist and - believe it or not - people have fun there. A great many of them can actually divorce themselves enough to say "wow that's really scary" and behave appropriately in that sort of environment. I can understand not wanting to play in that kind of game - to each their own. What I can't understand is the blatant hostility, disdain and "wrongfun" toward people who just have a different style of play.

@Pyrephox said in Eliminating social stats:

@faraday And your character can /try/ to be a cool dude in the face of intimidation, but if he fails, it's just bad playing to refuse to play the failure honestly.

I don't disagree with that basic premise. What I disagree with is the way that every system I've ever seen tries to figure out whether my character should be intimidated. It's almost always "Intimidation vs Willpower" and that, to me, is woefully inadequate.

It doesn't take into account:

• My character's relationship with yours. If you're in a position of authority, that's more intimidating. If you're a hated enemy, she's more likely to dig in her heels.
• Her past experiences. A past victimization may make her cower or be more determined not to be a victim again.
• Her personality. If she's with someone, she may be more inclined to protect them or not want to back down and have them think less of her.
• The stakes. Intimidating her to hand over her wallet is way easier than intimidating her to give over secret codes that might cause harm.
• Your strategy. Do you have something on her? Are you bigger than her and resorting to physical intimidation?

And those are just a few factors off the top of my head. There are probably dozens more. Sure you could try to boil all those down into some kind of modifier, but in my experience that just never works well.

So what I personally prefer is to let you do your roll to say "Ok wow he did a really good job at acting intimidating" but then let me take into account those dozens of other factors to decide based on the situation how to react.

And for those suggesting that I'm looking for plot armor so my character never has to fail, come RP with me sometime. I routinely have my characters make all sorts of poor decisions because it makes for a good story. I just want to be the one owning their bad decisions, and not leave it up to a coded system.

But that's just me. I'm not saying the opposing view is wrong or evil, I'm just saying I don't like to do things that way. YMMV.