Posts made by faraday

@Ghost said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:

Because for these games to function properly all players need a clear vision of what the game is and how it is to be played.

Yes, all players on THAT GAME need a consistent vision. But not all MUs need to share that same vision. That's what I meant by global.

Also a missed reply...

@Ghost said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:

Using systems like WoD/StarWars/etc and then not fully utilizing these systems is confusing to half of the playerbase.

I agree that you need to pick the best system for your game; many TTRPGs are not well-suited to MUs. But I also think that you can use any die-roller you want for lightweight conflict resolution without using all of a RPG system. We did that on Babylon 5 by using just the dice and basic stats part of Storyteller. It works just fine.

Can it cause some confusion? Sure. But it can also provide a common frame of reference for folks already used to how those dice work. You just need to be clear up front what you're doing.

@Ghost said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:

MU can't seem to decide if these are RPG games where the systems matter, or if they're just writing with systems used for dispute resolution. (RPGs with writing or writing with some RPG systems thing).

I don't see why this needs to be a global decision. Narrative->System is not a boolean but a continuum. I agree that each game needs to be clear about where it falls on that spectrum, but that decision doesn't need to be the same for every game.

My games are heavily consent-driven, but not entirely. When you join a combat scene, you're implicitly consenting to injury and trauma. If you mouth off to the CO, you might be demoted or brigged. If you choose to commit treason and get caught, your character is probably toast. Death is only one type of consequence, and its minimization does not equate to the absence of all risk.

@Ghost said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:

If a brand new PC is allowed to join a 3 year old dinosaur PC in going into Leviathan to fight Pinhead himself and death is only on the table for the new PC if they choose it to be, then does power level TRUUUULY matter?

Sure it does. Because if the new PC is just ineffectively whiffing in the background while the high-level characters do All The Important Things, that's not fun.

You see that sometimes in my combat system. Instead of matching targets based on skill (as a TTRPG GM might, or a writer crafting a challenge that includes both Thor and Black Widow), you can easily end up with a rookie pilot trying to take down a Cylon ace and being entirely ineffectual. Sure, it's IC, and it can drive "hey help me out" type RP and whatnot, but it can also be frustrating.

@Sunny said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:

I don't remember which game it was that put a brake on all PCs lower than 25 earning X or Y level of title. Suddenly we had 30somethings getting played.

You see that a lot on the military games as well. We had a slew of older characters on the BSG games. I didn't do a scientific analysis, but off-hand I'd say the median age was 30-something, and we've even had some fifty and sixty year olds being played.

@mietze said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:

I admit, I'm not edgy enough to want to play average joe PCs, so I guess I kind of assumed that PCs were going to be exceptional regardless of age.

That's my philosophy as well. All characters get the same number of starting points, so you can be exceptional regardless of age. I even see a lot of younger characters deliberately not spend all their available points because they want to play the younger more inexperienced newbie. The system has brakes that prevent someone from being good at everything anyway, stopping the 18 year old Doogie Howser who's also a top gun fighter pilot and sharpshooter types. If they want to make a top gun rookie pilot OR the talented young surgeon, though, I really don't care.

@Ominous said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:

So, yes, the grizzled veteran is going to be more skilled, but his/her dexterity isn't what it used to be.

That's one possibility, sure. My point was that being old does not necessarily equate to being a "grizzled veteran with loads of experience". You could be old and crappy at your job too.

@Ominous said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:

Attributes are nature; skills are nurture. Attirbutes are the natural talent; skills are the acquired wisdom of life experience.

Sure, there are a lot of systems that work that way. But there are also a lot of systems that don't, because the line between attribute and skill is often very blurry.

Where's the line between Strength and Weightlifting? Clearly there is skill involved in learning to lift weights, but isn't it also building muscle mass in a way that could probably aid you in other strength-related activities?

Does special forces training give you a skill in "Torture Resistance" or does it hone your underlying Willpower in a way that also helps you slog through all-night hikes, push past injuries, etc.? Or does it do both?

You can make arguments either way. There is no perfect skill system, just as there's no perfect power range. Everything is a balancing act of pros and cons, and it comes down to what system fits your goals for your game. If you want to reward people for making older characters, go for it. I'm just not a fan personally.

@Ominous said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:

The latter option for me; though, I would have it tied to age.

I don't favor age-based chargen. An older person is more likely to have breadth of experience, because they've just lived longer and experienced more in life, but they aren't necessarily going to be better at the core skills of their profession. Particularly if those skills are athletic or reaction-oriented in nature (e.g. most fighting skills) which can peak in young adulthood. Even with technical skills, I've seen no link between age and skill in my career. There are young, eager talented guys and older, useless "veterans". Also I can't help but recall TTRPGs where everyone would just min-max "how old can I be to get the max skill points without suffering a decrease in physical stats". They were designing a sheet not a character.

Do you want to make a young, talented, top-of-the-class ace? Old, grizzled veteran ace? Past their prime "I'm too old for this" person treading water till retirement? Fresh-faced newbie learning the ropes? Go for it. They're all potentially good characters. It just comes down to what story you want to tell.

As others have said, you just need to make sure your story/systems support the power levels you allow.

I think the "no high-level characters" effect is just an extension of what you see in fiction in general. It's very difficult to make compelling stories for supremely powerful characters, especially ensembles. Sure, you can have a story about a king's political struggles, but what do you do with a whole pack of kings and queens? DCU/MCU shows the kind of world-ending insanity you constantly have to cook up to challenge epic level superheroes.

Yet with people of the low-to-mid power range, there are tons of stories to tell. These characters have room to grow, the challenges are reasonable to write, etc.

As for mechanics, anyone who's played FS3 knows my take on it. I despite being forced to make a low-level/low-power character. It's only mildly frustrating in a MMO or video game, but on a story game it logically means you need to be playing somebody who's just starting out, unskilled, inexperienced, probably young. I don't like being shoved into that corner.

FS3 lets you start out as an ace fighter pilot, and acknowledges that if you start out amazing, you don't really have a lot of room to grow from there mechanically-speaking. You could expand horizontally to some extent, but not vertically.

That doesn't mean you can't still tell stories. Starbuck in the revised BSG was pretty kick-ass from the get-go and yet still had an interesting character arc. Skill advancement isn't the be-all-end-all. Many (most?) MU players are perfectly okay with that as long as they know what they're getting into.

Double post sorry but I missed replying to this:

@TNP said in To OOC Room or Not to OOC Room (and Other Artifacts):

And there are people - like me - who usually keep channels turned off. One of the biggest things I hated about Arx was the lack of an OOC Room. And I don't even make a lot of use of them.

No solution is going to catch everyone. Some folks turn off channels, some folks don't hang out in the OOC lounge (or are already RPing).

It's largely a matter of preference, but I do think there are objective benefits to the channel option:

• It is available to everyone on the game, no matter where they are.
• With the web portal and/or OOC player bit characters, you can keep the chatter away from your RP windows.
• With channel recall, you can catch up on what you missed later.
• Abuse is more easily reported and monitored because staff doesn't have to keep an alt in the room every minute of the day, and (on Ares) players can make use of the channel abuse reporting tools.

@Derp said in To OOC Room or Not to OOC Room (and Other Artifacts):

Right, that's what I was getting it. It then doubles as a quiet room.

Yes, if you leave or mute the lounge channel (when enabled on a game), it effectively becomes a quiet room for you. It's just a channel you can talk on using regular poses/says when you're in the lounge room.

Ares also has an actual quiet room built in, which mutes talking and arrival/departure/connection messages.

Ares has an OOC room because it supports the onstage/offstage system where players go 'onstage' (IC) to engage in RP and go 'offstage' (OOC) when they're between scenes. Because of the way MUSH client interfaces work, the character object has to be somewhere when you're not actually roleplaying.

Personally I find it preferable to have that be in a designated offstage area rather than an IC private room (especially since not all themes support such a thing - e.g. Battlestar) or worst of all just idling on the public IC grid somewhere.

Whether people chat there or not? I'm indifferent. I get that some folks like it. I find it too spammy and prefer the quiet room over the lounge.

Ares also has a configurable option that ties the OOC lounge to a channel. I think that's preferable, because it lets folks who aren't in the lounge still participate in the chat, and it enables the other channel features like recall and abuse reporting.

@Jennkryst said in Old Republic Star Wars Game - FFG System Poll:

I am torn on this vote, because modifications are obviously needed. But not to the degree of the Ares Pyramid.

Just to clarify for those who are not familiar - this wasn't something designed specifically for Ares. The talent pyramid system comes from FFG's own Genesys RPG, which is the generic RPG that grew out of their Star Wars games.

The prevailing sentiment in the FFG forums seems to be that folks prefer the talent pyramid because it offers more flexibility, and folks don't do as much cherry-picking to get just the talents necessary to "unlock" whatever high one they really want. I presume this is why FFG went that route for Genesys.

@ZombieGenesis - one other thing to consider in this is something that Chontio ran into. Players familiar with FFG often expect the whole system, not just chargen and rolls. I think this is largely true of many Star Wars players as well, since most of the existing SW MUs have had coded ships, economies, combat, etc. While you certainly could code all of that up for Ares, it would certainly be a sizeable task.

@Selerik Yeah, there are many reasons why AresCentral accounts are a) optional and b) not tied to the logins for individual games. Those are both cultural and related to security and trust. I don't think centralized accounts are feasible in MUs today.

Interesting idea, though I think some of the terminology runs contrary to what MUs already use so I'm not sure how the various pieces correspond to MUSHes - what's a hub, what's a repository, etc.

MUSHes notably don't have an overarching "account" concept. Even the Ares player handle accounts are linked to your characters; you don't use it when logging into individual games.

@Sunny said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

I think she's interested in discussing solutions to the problem; your contribution seems to boil down to, 'it's not a problem for me'.

No, I'm discussing a solution to the problem of people establishing personal boundaries. It's just a solution that doesn't involve a new coded tool. But fine, folks don't want to discuss that avenue further. I'm done.

@Pandora said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

Hopefully you can appreciate that this thread is about the people that don't generally come to you or staff on other games with their problems though

If someone is not willing to take advantage of my open-door pledge and policy to help them resolve problems on my game, then I am not interested in expending my free time writing extra code to let them do things they can already do with existing tools.

If you are, and you genuinely feel that it will help, then go for it.

@Pandora My policy is simple: Work it out amongst yourselves. If you can't or aren't comfortable doing so, contact staff to help mediate.

This applies to FTB, to disagreements about skill rolls, to harassment issues, to whatever. It's simple, it's effective (*) and I don't see how having a coded command to say "Hey I'm not comfortable" will aid that in any way whatsoever.

You're obviously entitled to disagree - I'm not trying to convince you, merely to express my opinion since the topic opened with an open solicitation of feedback about the idea.

(*) I'm speaking of cases where people came to me about problems they were experiencing. If someone won't come to me, or will only come to me about second-hand complaints that I am unable to corroborate (I did try), then that's outside of my control. I genuinely don't see a coded command helping with those situations. YMMV.

@Roz said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

which I don't think counts as a tool.

+request is a tool. page is a tool. ooc is a tool.

What I'm saying is that we don't need a different tool to enable this.

You can contrast this with the anti-harassment tools I added to Ares because for those, the existing tools were IMHO inadequate. Client logs could easily be faked. Server-side suspect logging needed to be done in advance and felt like using a nuke to kill an ant hill.

If you think the existing tools are inadequate for saying "Hey I'm uncomfortable with this" then by all means make a tool for your game(s). I'm just saying that - for me - it's got no more weight than ooc Hey I'm uncomfortable with this. backed by a policy and enforcement of said policy that says it's okay to do that.

@Ghost I think the key is expectations. People have to not take the game (and their characters) so bloody seriously. It's something that HorrorMU and TGG got right. They weren't PVP, but they set the stakes right so that you go into it expecting to die, and when you do it's not a big deal. It's certainly more of a challenge to implement such a thing in a PVP environment with strangers on the internet, but I don't think it's impossible. You just need to set expectations and have a staff willing to enforce them.

@Derp said in Armageddon MUD:

If I want to run a Dark Sun game where everyone starts as an Arena Slave and then gets to fight their way to freedom, that isn't going to appeal to some people. It doesn't have to. It shouldn't. If you're fresh off of a MLP Mu, it's probably going to seem like the most hideous and abusive thing in the world to you, and a toxic environment that you don't want to be a part of.

While I agree with you that it's ultimately subjective, I think your example misses the mark a bit. As @L-B-Heuschkel points out, you're describing an ICly harsh environment. That says nothing about the OOC atmosphere.

In college I played in a couple PvP type games where everybody was plotting against everyone, even killing them in some cases. But there was no OOC toxicity at all. Everyone was friendly (even if not all of us were "friends"), and when Bob's PC killed Sam's we'd all have a good chuckle about it afterward (including Sam). It's called good sportsmanship, and as @surreality said in the other thread, it's something we all should have learned as children on the playground. That so many adults engaging in what amounts to community theater with virtual dice can't manage it is sad.

@Derp That’s dumb. There’s a world of difference between two people discussing the law (which everyone knows at least a LITTLE bit about) and someone trying to pass themselves off as an attorney (or a doctor in my example). If someone is going to act on legal or medical “advice” from some random person on MSB or reddit or whatever, that should be on them.

Though I do get why someone might be confused if it were an actual lawyer saying it, hence the need for “I am a lawyer but I don’t know YOUR situation/jurisdiction” disclaimers.

@Ganymede said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

When you seen what I’ve seen, friend, you will burn that sign.

Now I'm curious. I assumed it was kinda like practicing medicine without a license. Like you can say: "Oh you should try some honey tea for your cough" or "Put some ice on that bruise" but if you go beyond layman stuff and start claiming to be a medical professional and performing back-room appendectomies you're gonna have issues. Is it not?