Posts made by faraday

@surreality Absolutely. I’m not advocating taking things to unreasonable extremes, or running to staff with every little thing. Common sense must prevail. But I do think things are not always so cut and dried - particularly when your characters have closer ties. Here are some more actual examples of more subtle situations - all assuming Bob has vanished for a moderate period of time with no word and no prior instructions:

Bob just started teaching your character something, but you haven’t seen him for awhile. Jane asks, “How are those lessons with Bob going?”

You’re a doctor and Bob is your patient. Last time you RPed with him, he was critically injured. Jane asks, “How’s Bob doing? Has he been discharged yet?”

Bob is your IC boyfriend. Your last scene involved them having a big fight and you cried on Jane’s shoulder about it. Jane asks, “How are things with Bob? Did you patch things up?”

Now you can try to do some RP gymnastics with vague or evasive answers. You can just beg Jane OOCly, “Please for the love of all that’s holy stop asking about Bob!” But sometimes neither of those things makes sense and you’re forced to make an assumption about what’s going on with Bob.

A considerate BobPlayer will just go with whatever you decided because they’re the ones who left you in the lurch. But sadly, not all players are considerate. Or, as @Sunny mentioned, the avoidance was for OOC reasons and they’re not comfortable with you making assumptions about them. So that’s when having staff backing for your assumption can come in handy.

@surreality said:

In such a case, unless they've left instructions that 'all proceeds as normal' in case of their absence? They kinda have to suck it up.

Well, as @Sunny indicated - not everyone is cool with that. Rather than sucking it up, they could appeal to staff, who might turn around and say that you had no right to assume their character's actions and force you to retcon.

So yeah - working things out with the player in advance is great. But if you don't, it's probably safer to involve staff up front rather than making assumptions that might lead to a sticky situation.

@Lithium said:

If that means RP'ing that someone is avoiding them, then you are RP'ing what your character is feeling. It may or may not be true.

It wasn't clear to me at what point you would involve staff in all this, so if I've misunderstood you I apologize in advance.

The trouble with RPing what your character is "feeling" is that ICly there is really no middle ground. Either the other char avoiding you or they aren't, and that should be their choice (or staff's), not yours.

I mean, it's kind of weird to be RPing feeling like someone is avoiding you when ICly you see them frequently.

Here's an example: A character was gone for awhile. I made the assumption that our characters hadn't interacted ICly and RPed accordingly, but I neither attempted to confirm this with him through OOC channels, nor asked staff to intervene. I thought the other player would be okay with my assumption. Turned out, he wasn't. (My bad.)

So then we were in an awkward position where he's either forced to accept my assumption about how his char acted (removing his agency), or I'm forced to retcon scenes where I had RPed not having seen him in awhile (impacting other players).

@Arkandel said:

At the point it gets to this something has already gone wrong. Why is someone another's spouse if one of them never wants to play for the other? I'd start there (in the hypothetical @Misadventure brought up).

Maybe the players had a falling out. Maybe the spouse has gotten bored with that particular character. Maybe the spouse got burned with one of their other characters and is now in a funk where they don't want to RP anybody but still log in just enough to avoid the idle timer. Maybe the character was re-cast and they want to go in another direction. I have seen all of these situations and a dozen more, both first-hand and as staff. Crap happens.

So yes, I agree that by the time it gets to this point something has gone awry. If the players can't work it out themselves, then like @Sunny says, that's what staff is for.

It sounds like Sam's just not into that plot. Forcing it is likely to not get you much satisfaction, as @Arkandel mentioned. It could also be that he just forgot, and another gentle nudge might get clarity on what's going on.

In general, though, how long you put your own fun on hold for someone else is more of a personal choice. There's no right or wrong answer. Couple of other options to consider:

• Go ahead with the plot with someone else (perhaps a NPC) in Sam's role.
• Work out what happens off-camera with Sam so the plot can proceed.
• Try to pin down Sam to a specific date/time. "How about Tuesday evening" in general works a little better than "Let's play sometime."

@Arkandel and @mietze: Yeah, I agree, you can go too far overboard in the other direction. I know I did that to one of my poor engineer players back on BSP (I still feel bad about that). I think there's a happy middle ground between ignorance and hyper-critical expertise. It only takes a modest amount of effort.

People who can't RP in accordance with their character's skills is a pet peeve of mine. It's like if I read a crime novel and the writer hasn't bothered to do any research to get any of the police procedural details right. I'm not saying you have to be an expert, you just have to be good enough to fake it. And if you can't fake it, be vague. Don't pose details that make no sense. Or maybe consider that this isn't the best character concept for you.

@Lisse24 said:

I would rather this rule be called, "Look for and respond to hooks," because right now, the phrase "be proactive" is my pet peeve. It seems like I've recently seen a spade of people criticizing players who are reactive. Players are told to "make their own fun" and then criticized when a game seems to be overwhelmed with bar rp.

Yeah, I think there's some mis-matched terminology going on here. When I see "RP Hooks" and "proactive" I usually see it in the context of plot hooks.

What I think @Halicron is talking about is more like conversational/action cues in a given RP scene, like:

(A) Jane walks through the park, her nose buried in a book.
(B) Jane walks through the park, her nose buried in a book. She appears to be on a collision course with (a tree / a street busker / your character / whatever ).

With (B) there's a cue/hook that the other player can react to easily. Of course you don't have to grab the bait on every hook. Maybe you just sit back and get some popcorn to watch Jane crash into the tree and then tease her about it. But in general RP works better when it's more of a give and take.

As far as plot hooks - I agree, "proactive" is vague. It can mean anything from "follow the hooks if you want to be involved" to literally "if you want a plot, run it yourself." It's important to provide further clarification to set expectations.

I haven't criticized players if a game devolves into just bar RP. But I have criticized them for complaining that there's nothing but bar RP when they're not showing up to events, responding to plot breadcrumbs, or making any attempt to run their own plots. That's just obnoxious.

@wanderer said:

I use metapose as a tool to build mood and atmosphere. I'm not going to describe in minute detail how someone's eyebrows and eyes are positioned in order to describe that they're sad. I'll say something like, "she's sad, it's in her expression." Even if it's an outright thought-pose you can't react to, if it brought a sense of mood, or a creative spark, it has contributed to the scene. With the caveat that it has to be well written.

I agree. I'm not a good enough writer to convey subtle facial cues, and even if I could - would anyone pick up on what I meant? Describing feelings that others would have a chance of picking up on isn't metaposing to me. Metaposing is like: "Jane smiles, but inwardly thinks: OMG he's suck a jerk." I have no issue with something more like: "Jane smiles, but the gesture is tainted by the obvious disdain in her eyes."

@Lithium said:

@saosmash We're using different definitions of PvP.

Yes, I agree. My definition of PvP involves more of the direct, often violent opposition format. Cops vs robbers. Empire vs Rebels. Humans vs Cylons.

Also I was specifically speaking of skewing +combat results in my post. Yes, technically there could be some kind of IC rivalry where they're competing over kills or whatnot, but I'm not terribly concerned about that.

I see more scenarios where the PCs have waited all week for this cool combat plot but bad dice are about to make it over in a single turn. Or the opposite scenario where everyone's like "OMG this combat is dragging on forever, why won't the Cylons just DIE already?!?" and I tune down the badguy skills so they die. Or the aforementioned situation where someone wants to be killed/injured for specific dramatic purpose so I arrange it.

I don't think there's a right or wrong answer, just different playstyles.

@Thenomain said:

The fact that I can disagree with most of those points was my goal, my own version of "nnneehhh, it depeeeeeends". I feel a little bad about it now, but I don't think I'm going to change how I pose, or what I think is important in scenes.

I agree wholeheartedly but I viewed the original post as more of a guide to new players. You're experienced enough to realize that the rules (and I dislike calling them "rules" for that reason) are meant to be broken sometimes. That doesn't make them bad guidelines for someone just starting out, but there is no one-size-fits-all approach.

Also I was a bit tongue-in-cheek earlier about the 'nods' business. If someone posed six-line nods to me with nothing else of substance in the pose all the time, I'd be irritated

@Lithium said:

Because as soon as you play favorites one way, it will bite you on the ass eventually once drama hits. Around a gaming table drama is less an issue, people will just say: Shut up Diana, or Bob, or whatever and the game will move on. In a MU* it's a whole different environment.

I think, as @Tat mentioned in a later post, that we play on different kinds of games. My combat code will never kill/maim you in the first place, so the stakes are different. Also there's no PvP and I strive for an atmosphere of trust like one would find in a tabletop setting. (Sometimes it works better than others.)

If skewing results to help players have fun causes drama occasionally, I'll take it.

@Halicron Hee. Okay, if everyone nodded and smiled like that I'd have to rescind my pet peeve

@Lithium said:

I've done it in TT, when my dice were on fire and I kept rolling nat 20's, well, I didn't feel like total PK'ing the party that night and so some crit hits became misses. I think there requires some trust in the group with the DM/ST/GM in order to create a good story.

But why is that so different in a MUSH environment? Don't you want your MU players to have the same opportunities for fun and a good story as your tabletop ones in that scenario?

Sure you can say you wouldn't have exactly that same mix of people together, but so what? As long as your mission is always "help players tell a good story" and you apply that mission fairly to everyone (and not, say, just to your buddies), isn't that fair enough?

I like it. Don't agree 100% with every little thing but as you said up front: 'take what you need and leave the rest'. Overall I think it's a good set of guidelines.

But this: "A good RPer can turn a nod into a six-line pose."

Really? That I'd like to see

But it ties into my pet peeve, which I'm guilty of myself: enough with the smiling and nodding. Seriously, if I had a nickel for every time a MUSH character just nodded or smiled as their only action in a pose, I'd be rich.

@Misadventure said:

**There are many forms of fudging the roll: ...

I like that a lot. When I have open rolls, I try to do some of that stuff. Failing a perception check doesn't mean you don't notice the wild boar charging at you, but maybe you don't notice it first, or don't notice it until it's almost on top of you or whatever. Use roll results creatively. Tossing them out completely makes people wonder why there's a stat system at all.

The FS3 combat code comes with built-in published "cheat" commands, so it's no big secret that I do that a lot. But I run cooperative PvE games not PvP, so it's not like any one player is getting an unfair advantage over another. I use it to tune combat to try and improve the story and help folks have more fun.

That's not to say PCs always win, but battle scenes aren't much fun if you're getting completely steamrolled, or if you wipe out all the badguys in one volley. Also sometimes folks will come to me and say: "I'd like to do a scene where my char gets seriously hurt..." and I see no reason not to oblige them.

Jumping on the bandwagon: I've seen more drama and IC/OOC boundary-crossing by Online-BFFs who have never actually met iRL as I have by RL spouses. Not to say it never happens, but certainly not to a degree that singling them out would be appropriate.

@Ashen-Shugar said:

MUX is lacking the majority of regex functions that Penn and Rhost both share. Without those functions, your system won't be compatible.

Yeah, that's the same problem that prevented @Thenomain from porting my softcode package to MUX.

@Thenomain said:

For instance, one moment it's "make whatever kind of game you want" and another it's "I don't do it that way and I designed the core system around how I do things". Again grossly oversimplified, but these two statements are mutually exclusive, or close enough in my book that I'm going to make the assertion. It tells me that there's a wrong and therefore a right way to implement the toolkit. This way may not have straight-up rules, but we've seen at least one guideline for it come from your posts.

I think part of what you're seeing is simply the disjointed nature of forum posting, replying to individual thoughts and comments.

The coherent viewpoint is more like: Here's a toolkit. Here are guidelines for how the system is intended to work and how I believe it works best. (Those guidelines could be better but they do exist.) At the end of the day it's your game and open source code so you're free to use the system however you want.

@Thenomain said:

My place in it has been, "Okay, what's the game design?" The over-simplified answer has been, "Whatever you want."

I apologize if I'm still being dense, but this is the part I don't quite get.

I'm gonna use "system" here by my definition, since yours is forthcoming

2nd edition is a system where there are attributes (representing physical characteristics like Body and Mind) rated from 1-4, action skills rated from 1-12, background skills rated from 1-12 and unrated language skills. Characters also have this goofy thing called Quirks. In chargen, skills cost (this), dice work like (that) and XP is completely customizable but the default recommendation is (this geometric progression).

3rd edition is a system where there are aptitudes (representing talents like Athletics and Technical) rated from 1-5, action skills rated from 1-5, and unrated interests, expertise and languages. Characters have RP hooks and Goals. In chargen, skills cost (this), dice work like (that) and XP is still completely customizable but the default recommendation is (this other geometric progression).

Is it really so impossible to provide feedback about the 3rd ed changes without knowing exactly what's on the action skill list, which is the 'whatever you want" part?

You do not need to like something to give useful feedback.

Quite true. But likewise, I do not need to implement all feedback given.

I have tried to explain why I have chosen not to implement the particular piece of feedback about geometric skill cost in chargen, rather than just putting my foot down and saying 'thanks but no'. Perhaps I beat the dead horse too much but I honestly felt like there was some serious misunderstanding/miscommunication going on.

And just to be clear - I do not mind that feedback. What I mind is the repeated badgering that says that the system is utterly broken/unusable without it and I'm a crack-smoking idiotic despot if I disagree.