Posts made by faraday

FS3 is designed around the concept that you should be able to make a skilled veteran right out of the gate. Now it's configurable so not all games use it that way, but that idea was central to its design. Many of the Battlestar games have used it along with a hodgepodge of other MUs (Game of Bones, 100, Wing Commander, at least one Star Wars game, etc.).

Because you can start high, XP is intended to be superfluous, and the slow advancement pisses some people off. Also some folks don't like it because not everyone starts out "even" in terms of their power level. But both of those things are by design, so c'est la vie. Can't please everyone.

@Arkandel said in PC antagonism done right:

@faraday said in PC antagonism done right:

But I've seen that work successfully an awful lot more often than I've seen people play healthy IC antagonists (outside of short-term 'bad-guy' type plots).
I mean your IC friends in games give you so much even just counting system benefits. You exchange +votes/+reccs way more often, they can buff you in games like Mage, exchange +task support on Arx, lend you their well-statted Haven and Herd on Vampire, share pack bonuses on Werewolf... that's before we even count scenes.

I think it's an interesting question. But I will point out that I come from a different game world than most of the people here. There are no system benefits to having friends in the games I play, so there are no systemic downsides to being an antagonist. Even so, the social downsides are so severe that almost nobody wants to do it. That's why I think it's not a problem that can be solved with systems. But that's just my 2 cents. I look forward to seeing what others suggest.

@Arkandel said in PC antagonism done right:

So let's say all of the great players are playing your friends. In fact everyone is friendly to each other. Now, obviously you can have as many scenes with these guys as you want - there's no reason not to - but what are you going to be playing about? If all challenges come from the environment then the game is stagnant in the absence of someone playing its elements.

Sure, that relies on having something in the environment or NPCs to react to. But I've seen that work successfully an awful lot more often than I've seen people play healthy IC antagonists (outside of short-term 'bad-guy' type plots). And I'd personally rather a game stagnate and die if I don't feed it enough than have it blow up spectacularly due to OOC drama. YMMV obviously.

@Arkandel said in PC antagonism done right:

So, what do you think? For starters do you agree with the general premise of having PCs antagonistic to yours being a good thing or do you believe it's a lost cause, and games should stay purely collaborative?

Antagonism makes for good stories, but in a MU* environment I think it's a lost cause. Mostly for the reasons you mentioned, but it's even more than that. Let's pretend that there's a totally mature player who won't start OOC drama, needs no encouragement to play antagonism, and is an awesome RPer. I don't want that person playing my character's antagonist, I want them playing my friend. Because 95% of MU scenes are social in nature, and who wants to hang out with their antagonist? Antagonists are best metered out in small doses, and that runs contrary to what you want to be doing with your awesome RPers.

@Arkandel said in City of Splendors: A Forgotten Realms Adventure:

But the second issue has been no easier to resolve even if it sounds like it ought to be. It's sometimes not easy to be part of a group for people who're not very well connected OOC or are just a bit ... introverted personality-wise.

The places that I've seen this done successfully have all relied on an external catalyst to force the characters together. This could be a commander (BSG games or TGG), a fixer (Shadowrun), or fate (various contrived GM scenarios in TT RPGs).

@Clarity said in Names:

The interesting question would be, do females names RL also have that tendency?

In modern day America, yes. For example: "Baby girl names ending in a and ah are climbing the popular baby name charts with no signs of slowing down, so choosing a baby name like Ava or Hannah will give you top baby name that is sure to stand the test of time. " (source) Just look at historical "top 50 female names" lists like this one from the 1950's and you'll see tons of ones ending in -a or -ah.

@Miss-Demeanor said in Where's your RP at?:

Without any risk of death... what is there to really fear in the ruins of your destroyed society? 'My stuff might get stolen... but its okay because I'll somehow get new stuff so I won't die of starvation' Where's the risk? Where is the ACTUAL risk?

You're equating OOC risk with IC risk. Just because you, the player, know that your character won't die doesn't mean your character knows he/she won't die. Think about an author writing a novel or a writer on a TV show. They know exactly what's going to happen and yet they can still manage to have characters react appropriately to the situation and exhibit the necessary angst and pathos.

Now maybe you haven't ever experienced that working well on a MU*. That's fine. But I have, so I reject the assertion that it's impossible. Just this past month I killed off a beloved NPC and spurred a lot of RP about it because people did care.

It's okay if people play differently. I've played on games with PC death. I had a character on TGG get blown to bits because I AFKed to get a snack while in the base and there was an artillery strike. I lost a Star Wars character to one bad Athletics roll and got sucked out of an airlock. I once participated in a PK plot to take someone out. I respect these styles of play, even though it's not my personal playstyle. But it doesn't feel like people are extending the same courtesy to the opposite point of view.

@Warma-Sheen said in Where's your RP at?:

Sure, everyone has their own idea and preferences for story, but I don't understand how anyone can come onto a medium with this many other contributors and still expect to have full control over everything that happens to their character. I know that mindset exists. I'm not putting it down. All I'm saying is that I can't understand it.

As @Sunny said - a lot of people seem to be conflating "I don't want character death" with "I must control everything ZOMG!" While I'm sure there are some extreme folks out there who feel that way, these are by no means the same thing.

I MU* because I love to interact with other people. Stories evolve in surprising ways. I don't mind when bad things happen to my character - actually in most cases I welcome it because RPing complications is fun. I just don't want to lose my character against my will. I don't understand why that's so hard to understand when various people have laid out very concrete reasons why they don't like it.

@Miss-Demeanor said:

I dared to suggest that a post-apoc survival game with actual threat of character death would be fun, and that brought all the anti-PC-death people out of the woodwork to say just how horrible that would actually be."

As one of the "anti-PC-death-people", I will point out that I have repeatedly said that it is a matter of personal taste and that I, personally wouldn't like to play on such a game for these specific reasons. This is merely an opinion to inform someone who may want to make such a hypothetical game. I don't personally like WoD games either but that's a far cry from running around saying they're "horrible".

If someone wants to run a post-apoc game with a high mortality rate - more power to them. I simply won't play and that's totally fine.

Yeah this totally belongs on a different thread. Sorry OP. But since we're on the derailed train...

I totally agree with @ghost about setting expectations. Consent/control is not binary; it's a scale. On one extreme you have a fully consent game with no GMs. If players can't sort things out, the only resolution is for someone to take their ball and leave. On the other extreme you have a fully-coded system with no GMs. If the system says you die, you die. No negotiation.

Most games fall somewhere between these two extremes. And since everyone has their individual preferences, it's important to set an expectation of where on the scale you fall.

My standard policy regarding consent is this: "This is fundamentally a non-consent game, but we encourage cooperation among players and staff. We use the FS3 skills and combat system to resolve conflicts when players cannot agree. Although bad things can happen to your character without your consent, we try to avoid character death unless you really paint yourself into a corner. The coded combat system cannot kill you outright."

I have been running games with policies like this one since the early 2000's and during that time have killed maybe 2 PCs without their consent (both very extreme situations). Are these games for everyone? Certainly not. Are they perfect? Certainly not. But I think the assertion that such games are massively unfair and result in disgruntled playerbases is simply demonstrably false.

@Ghost said in Where's your RP at?:

When character death isn't a viable option, then you're playing the rpg with cheat codes. It sets a potential expectation for NPCs, bad guys, sometimes other players, but not for your character. I mean, even from a point of artistic integrity, for the people who prefer their story>game, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Look, we're obviously not going to agree on playstyles, and that's fine. But is it too much to ask to stop bashing the players you disagree with as being nonsensical and/or whiny wusses who can't handle losing a character and are ruining the hobby? (Not all your words - summarizing the thread here.)

I don't want to read a novel where the main characters get knocked off halfway through the story. If you do - great. I'm not judging.

@Trevler said in Where's your RP at?:

That might be another good solution- give each character a number of 'revives'. With TGG, if you took your revive, you survived, but there was a loss to your stats to represent the grievous injury. You were also given the option of just re-rolling right away and rolling over your XP to a new character. I can't remember if there was a bonus involved with that option or not but I feel like there was.

Even TGG toned that down in later campaigns though IIRC. Along with the increased number of revives, the revive didn't come with a permanent stat loss. It wasn't a grievous injury, more like a "bullet hit the flask in my pocket" sort of thing. I think it says a lot that even the hard-core people who were willing to play with permadeath on a deliberately-short campaign wanted to ease things up a bit.

@Misadventure said in Where's your RP at?:

How long were the character runs on The Greatest Generation?

It varied. Some campaigns gave you more revives. (For those unfamiliar - it was like a limited number of "lives" that would undo a lethal wound.) Not many people got permakilled in WWII Stalingrad, but WWI Arras was more of a bloodbath. Looking back at my logs, the campaigns themselves lasted about 6 months on average.

@Ghost said in Where's your RP at?:

Then it's not a game. I don't say this to sound combative, but there are people who approach this hobby like playing a tabletop RPG, using the tabletop RPG systems, but with more fleshed-out roleplaying features, and others who approach this like RP without the G.

But why is the latter not still a game? Kids playing cops and robbers don't have dice or strict rules, but it's still a game. Fully consent-based MU*s are still games. There are lots of different, equally valid styles of play.

Storium, for instance, has challenge cards, but even a "weak" outcome doesn't derail the story. If you fail to defeat the pack of wolves, you don't get eaten, you just suffer some kind of complication/setback.

Is that style of play for everybody? No. No more than TGG's "prepare to die - a lot" style was. But you can set up a game to your preferred playstyle(s) without thumbing your nose at other ones.

@Miss-Demeanor said in Where's your RP at?:

Why are people so afraid to have characters die? Why is death such a terrible thing in a game? Yeah, its the end of a story. Not the only story, just one of many. You can make a new story. Stories don't have to stop just because one person dies. The narrative continues under a new voice.

For some of us, it takes a lot of work to get involved in a story. I'm not talking about the nuts and bolts of chargen, I'm talking about the work of really, truly developing a character. Their backstory, their personality, their patterns of speech and little tics that make them interesting. (Some people can do this right off the bat; I can't. I know I'm not alone.)

And then you have to build up relationships with other characters. I'm not talking romances, I'm talking real connections that let you do scenes that are more than just "hey how's the weather" or "let me ask you about your backstory".

And then sometimes you have a story in mind. Not the game's story, your story. Some arc that you want to do with the character.

All told, that is a ton of work and investment, and it really sucks to lose all that and have to build it all back up again just because your character got sucked out of an airlock due to a bad die roll. (True story.)

You don't have to knock off main characters left and right to generate tension. Battlestar the TV show was very gritty and interesting - lots of complications, and yet main character deaths were pretty rare.

Now if folks want to run a game that has deaths-a-plenty - that's totally fine. Their game, their rules. I just won't play there unless it's so awesomely amazing I can't resist (like TGG).

@Arkandel said in Where's your RP at?:

Well, technically speaking you could lose your character in almost all games' plots to bad dice rolls. I just don't think many people would play where it's practically expected (or even systematized) that this would happen.

Not the games I've played on (and run), but obviously YMMV.

@Lithium said:

If it's /easy/ to get on the game, then Character Loss can (and should imho) be an important part of a post apocalyptic setting.

Not IMHO. it's the investment in the character development or story after joining the game that matters to me.

But that's a matter of taste and I don't want to derail the thread with the same debate about PC death and agency vs stakes that have graced 724 other threads on these boards. Just rendering my opinion.

@Arkandel said in Where's your RP at?:

@Miss-Demeanor said in Where's your RP at?:

If the world is post-apoc, it really needs to have actual danger of death, dismemberment, getting your shit jacked, etc. or it just turns into sci-fi L&L.

I can't prove this, but my impression is that games with high turnover rates (i.e. lots of character deaths) don't draw that many players.

I love post-apoc, but I wouldn't play on a game where you could lose your character due to fickle dice or staff whim. It's just too much investment to lose in an instant. I don't think I'm alone. I mean, not only is it not the norm in MU-land, but there aren't a lot of MMO's or video games with permadeath either. It just kills the fun.

Now I'm perfectly happy to RP the gritty ins and outs of survival (short of death) to keep it from being Little House on the Post-Apoc Prairie, but I don't know how you do that without a ton of code and/or micro-managing. I want to RP and tell stories, not log on so I can +hunt for an hour so I can +eat.

@surreality said in Web-based MU poll:

@Roz It's things like this that make me wonder if some of this couldn't be done as extensions to mediawiki in some form. As in, it's probably possible? But I wouldn't know where to begin.

I think that's the rub. With the proper know-how you could certainly tie together all these different systems and get things working. But it would be a lot of work and it would probably be fragile as the different tools change (because they weren't really designed to work together).

A centralized system would be one-stop shopping for everything you need to run a game, but it couldn't possibly do any one particular thing as good as its specialized tool counterpart. It has a wiki, but not as fancy as MediaWiki. It has forums, but not as fancy as MSB. Is that good enough? I dunno. Given that a lot of games are settling for +jobs and +bbs and +events, I'm thinking the bar isn't terribly high on those three systems in particular. With a wiki the bar is higher because people are used to it.

@ixokai said in NO-GO IPs for MU*:

@bladesurfer said in NO-GO IPs for MU*:

I think one of the biggest reasons that they say 'no' is because they have to 'defend their copyright' or else it can be lost. So if you ask, they have to say no.
Except.. this isn't how copyright works. You can't lose copyright. You are under no obligation to defend copyright. If you don't defend copyright you in no way shape or form lose it.

Except except.... many copyrighted RPGs/TV shows/universes/etc. are also trademarked. If you want to make a Shadowrun game, for instance, you're butting up against not only the copyrighted material in the rulebooks, but also Shadowrun itself, which is a registered trademark of... someone. I lost track. Now Shadowrun happens to encourage fan contributions but the example stands in principle.

So yeah, people get the rules confused a lot, but there's also significant overlap in the situations where they need to be enforced. It's messy. I don't blame authors for not wanting to deal with the legal minefield.

@Miss-Demeanor said in Web-based MU poll:

@faraday I wouldn't say they're content with the wiki... given that they felt it necessary to make their own wiki, since the one provided didn't meet the needs of the players.

Oh did they? I didn't know that. (I don't play there, just chat with folks who do.) Curious what needs it didn't meet.

@surreality said in Web-based MU poll:

If you went that route, I'm happy to share stuff I have that might be handy and am willing to poke ideas to help foster that kind of environment from the wiki side where/if possible.

Thanks. I tend to be in the same camp with @Sparks, though, in thinking that trying to interconnect a half-dozen different web apps (forum, wiki, chat, tickets, events) with the RP engine is just... Nope. APIs have all sorts of limitations (when they exist at all, which is less often than you might hope) and trying to tie into the database directly is varying degrees of nasty.

At the end of the day it comes down to setting and meeting expectations. If people come to a web-MU* - are they really expecting nodeBB levels of forum features, or just Web-Myrddin? Do you really need to reinvent Discord or just provide something on par with MU* chat channels? I don't actually know the answer.

Edit to add... For example, people seem to be reasonably content with Arx's website even though it's not a wiki. Most MU*s, I think, don't utilize wiki features so much as they just need a website that's tied in with the DB.