Posts made by faraday

@seraphim73 said in What Is Missing For You?:

You don't even have to make this a different command. All you have to do is have a Fireball weapon--each weapon is already set up to use a particular skill. You might need a little tweaking for the default defenses, but it shouldn't be -that- hard. But yes, you could absolutely create a "combat/spell <target>" system that laid alongside weapons in combat. Then your weapons list wouldn't be as long (although you'd have a whole other list).

You could, but I would do what @Ganymede suggested. It's not that FS3 can't be made to do spells, it's just that it doesn't come with a magic system built in (because of pitfalls in trying to implement a generic magic system, coupled with the fact that magic just isn't really my thing and I can't be bothered). So yeah, you can kinda sorta hack it with weapons, but if you want it to work well, it requires custom code.

@arkandel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

Agreed, but I think that's not relevant to most of this debate here. I mean the question isn't really how to handle character death but overall adversity.
You don't lose the character - which we agree on carries heavy social consequences - because someone called them a poohead and everyone laughed OMG.

Absolutely - but the OP did ask what would incentivize people to allow their character to be killed or maimed, so I think it's relevant. And I think for an awful lot of MUSHers the answer is: absolutely nothing.

The laughing thing - yeah.

@arkandel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

Fair enough, but many do.

Yeah, I wasn't meaning to downplay the impact of XP loss when it happens, merely to illustrate that you can take advancement completely out of the equation and a lot of people still won't want to start over purely for social reasons. As you say, it's not a systems problem, which is why I don't think it's going to be solved through systems/incentives.

@tat said in Heroic Sacrifice:

@faraday I think there's something to be said about the OOC shift of names too, though.

Oh, maybe I misunderstood what @Arkandel was getting at. I agree that the loss of OOC identity is a hassle. It's the IC identity that I think is a much bigger deal though.

@arkandel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

Your identity. You are Joe, and once Joe dies and you become Bob. This is a subtle loss but not one to be underestimated since it does matter, and there's no way around that one

This is not a subtle loss, though. This is the main loss for an awful lot of players, myself included. I couldn't give a crap about the XP/rank lost -- on the games I play, mechanical advancement is downplayed or non-existent. I care because my investment is in the character. Their relationships, their personality, their goals -- their story in other words. All the scenes played, all the knowledge gained ... gone. Congratulations, now you get to start from zero and do BarRP all over again to build up new relationships and get used to a new character's shoes and invent a new character's family history and life story... nope. Not interested. You couldn't bribe me enough for that.

But anything short of that? Sure, I'm game. My characters have been conned, dumped, severely injured, arrested - as long as it's on mutually-agreeable terms, I'm down with almost anything for the sake of a good story.

@arkandel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

Because if you fail your character doesn't typically end up in jail (fatal or truly bad endings don't happen very frequently) but there's a worse hell than that for PCs to end up in; irrelevance.

And there's an even worse hell than irrelevance: embarrassment. Because @Apos is 100% correct that the overwhelming majority of players would rather be banned for a meltdown than see their character suffer a humiliating setback. Which is ironic since many of the heroes they're emulating did just that in the stories (Luke in Empire Strikes Back, much?)

It's good to say that we want to make people more amenable to failure, to cater to the people who are, but how is the million dollar question.

@tat said in Heroic Sacrifice:

Yeah, that's what I mean... Done right, it might even mean that there's a lot of RP around other players trying to save your butt on the battlefield and freaking out about you being down or too injured to fight well, which again - attention, man. It's intoxicating.

Yeah sorry I misread part of your post But yes, I agree. A system like FS3 makes it easy for people who are inclined to do those things to do them. It's just that most people aren't.

@kestrel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

when people think of a character like Wash from Firefly/Serenity, his two most memorable scenes are: A) goofing around with toy dinosaurs; B) dying horribly. His legions of fans prove that a suave, successful sexpot isn't necessary to portray a great and deeply beloved story, which is the ultimate aim in designing this kind of system.

Except look at MUSHers. How many people want to play Wash vs. how many people want to play Mal or Zoe or even Inara. It's horribly horribly lop-sided precisely because those are his only two memorable scenes. There's a difference between what kinds of characters people will love to watch on screen versus what they want to be in their player-proxy avatar.

@tat said in Heroic Sacrifice:

one had FS3, where the results of combat were in the hands of the dice, but death and permanent maiming were consent-only and generally you assume that the dice are going to be /largely/ in your favor.

Well, with FS3 the dice literally are largely in your favor. The stats are slated heavily towards PCs and it's a very consent-ish system, where death occurs by choice and there's no built-in mechanic for maiming or lasting injury.

@lithium said in Heroic Sacrifice:

And I know for a fact, a LOT (relative to my perspective) of people never played on TGG because of the short campaign length.

Oh, yes, I agree. I must have misunderstood your point. All I meant is that there are many people who will cling tenaciously to their character in a long-running campaign but at the same time happily take risks and sacrifice themselves in a short-running campaign. These people are not polar opposites, they're just behaving differently in different environments.

@kestrel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

So for me, this is very much a key aspect that needs to die. ... This is a good example of something I see as a game culture issue. Ideally (in a perfect, utopian MU) people shouldn't be focused on 'my story' — this is hero-think; protagonist-think. It should be first and foremost about the story, and sometimes for the benefit of the story, an important character has to die, or suffer.

I don't think you can kill that part of the culture though. It's been fed by decades of RPG culture, video game culture, and media culture - all of which is what we (as a collective) base our games on. We use RPG systems. We retell stories from books, movies, etc. that are often about the Hero's Journey, the awesome badass(es) who may struggle a bit but ultimately save the universe.

Trying to fight that culture through incentives, I think, will just lead to what @Pandora and @Seraphim73 said about making "losing the new winning", with people just min/maxing their failures in order to build more success.

Incidentally, it's funny you mention FS3, because in FS3 you never die unless you consent to it. (And hardly anybody does.) I've seen far more sour grapes and whining about how someone wasn't as badass as they thought they should be in +combat than I ever have people taking creative license and failing/struggling in an interesting fashion. The stuff you describe exists, but it's a minority.

So I think you'll get more success just by trying to attract the scattered folks throughout the hobby who are already craving more of a story environment than by trying to bribe people into playing a completely different style of game than the one they want to play. As @Lithium said - find like-minded people and cater to them. Even if, as with TGG, that's just a small group.

Side note - Cooperative tabletop games work by making it all about the group rather than the individual. The group wins or loses together. You're investing in the group, not in your own character. There are mechanics that make it easy for you to trade cards or moves or whatever so you can enable somebody else to do something that furthers the group's agenda more. I have no idea how you'd try to apply that concept to a game with dozens of individual characters played by strangers on the Internet, but food for thought maybe.

@lithium said in Heroic Sacrifice:

Those who are willing to cycle characters more often, and those who won't even bother with a shorter term story. There is not a lot of middle ground for those types to meet.

That hasn't been my personal experience. For example, everyone talks about the character death on TGG, but I think part of what contributed to people's tolerance of that turnover was the campaign length. You knew that each campaign would only be 6 months or so, so it wasn't like you were losing characters that you had been - or thought you would be - playing for 2 years. And on other games, I witnessed people who were suuuuuuper attached to their long-term characters take more creative challenges - including agreeing to killing their characters off or doing dramatic betrayals - with shorter-term ones. There will always be people on either extreme, of course, but I think there's more of a middle ground than you may think.

@seraphim73 said in Heroic Sacrifice:

What about a game with only a single stat: Karma. In order to gain Karma, you have to take losses--personal, professional, physical, whatever.

I think something like that would be more story-oriented. In fact, that's similar to how Storium's mechanic works. You start the game with an equal number of strength and weakness cards, and have to spend all of them before your hand refreshes. Systems like this have other issues, some of which you highlighted, but they do put more emphasis on the fact that storytelling is about more than victories.

@ganymede said in Heroic Sacrifice:

For many, you have to make the incentive greater than the loss.

Sound theory, but that's where I think the "player proxy" bit makes it hard. If the reason people are playing is to feel good about virtual status and badass heroics of their avatar, what possible incentive would be big enough to get them to accept losing virtual status and not being heroic?

Side note - I think the indefinite timeline of MUs is another factor at play here. I've run a few short-term sub-campaigns on various games, and I've noticed that people are way more likely to take risks and accept losses when they know that the storyline has a finite shelf-life.

I'm in favor of this general philosophy, but I see it as an insurmountable challenge.

• The majority of MUers regard MUs as games, not stories. Yeah, there are some stories involved, but in many ways the stories are secondary to the game aspect - XP, advancement, minigames, status, and even TS in a way.
• An awful lot of MUers (perhaps even the majority here too) view their character not as a fictional character in an ensemble story, but as their personal proxy. When their character wins, they win. When their character loses, they lose. This is why we see so much unhealthy IC/OOC.

I don't see how you can incentivize people against these core ideals. It would be like trying to incentivize somebody to take a dive in a game of chess or to end their Uncharted game midway through. Sure, you might be able to bribe them, but it's going to be unnatural and probably resented because it runs contrary to the whole reason people are playing.

The only way I can see to steer away from this is to remove the game-y aspects. Downplay stats, remove XP, remove artificial systems of advancement, make weaknesses as important as strengths, remove the quest-y aspect of our plots. You know - all the things that RPers generally despise. But until we start treating these things as stories instead of games, I don't think we can reasonably expect people to embrace them in a literary fashion.

I think that there are all kinds of ways to handle FCs. None is more "right" than another, but each have different pros and cons.

Allowing FCs to be featured and special is true to the implicit meaning of "FC", and usually implies a greater degree of power and responsibility. But then it tends to overshadow the OCs, leading to sour grapes and people left out in the cold of metaplot. Making them on the same level as OCs, on the other hand, kind of detracts from their mythos. Does anybody really want to see Luke Skywalker as a level 1 Jedi in post-ROTJ timeframe? Or Captain America slumming in a bar every night just because the player has nothing better to do?

My only personal hard stop is on history revisionism, because IC continuity is important to me. If something was RPed, then it happened. I don't care who takes over the character after that point, the character's history is set in stone. I can't even imagine how I would RP my character if suddenly their BFF had never been their BFF at all, or the shared adventure that shaped their relationship with someone had suddenly never happened. Retcon like that on a global scale I find completely revolting. But I know comic games do it all the time and they somehow survive, so... to each their own.

ETA: I don't think anybody should be chained to relationships moving forward if they take over a character, but I think it needs to be addressed ICly ("Wow, Cap is acting strange all of a sudden - is he having a mid-life crisis or something" or "ZOMG did you hear Han dumped Leia!") rather than trying to rewrite RP history.

@auspice said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

And call each other out. Not by attacking one another, but by a mere "Hey, that wasn't cool." Just like you'd (I'd hope) call a friend to task for being an asshole, pull someone here aside. It doesn't have to be out in public, but it can be in PMs or in your private chats / pages. We want to be a more uplifting, positive community? It begins with ourselves. Be better, yourself. Pressure your friends to be better. Start small.

It isn't even remotely like this, though. These people (for the most part) are not my friends - they're strangers on an internet forum. Moreover, they're strangers who by the very nature of the problem we're describing have demonstrated that civility and respect for the rules (and by extension other people on the forum) are beyond them. Someone with no authority telling other strangers on the Internet "that wasn't cool, knock it off" is most likely to be met by "hahaha yeah whatever" at best or "F you" at worst because these people don't care what we think. They may only marginally care what the mods think, but the mods at least have the authority to kick them if they don't listen. If there are flagging/downvote tools like on many forum software systems, I'll use them, but I'm not going to play Lone Ranger moderator. That's just not going to end well.

@thatguythere said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

Honestly from what I have seen actual moderation is less the issue and more how posters start to behave, it usually becomes you said something negative about something or disagreed with someone I liked so now I attack your post for being overly negative and I have seen that sort of thing be every much a dogpile as anything that has happened on here or Wora. That becomes my issue.

If posters are misbehaving that's exactly the sort of thing more moderation would be intended to solve. I agree with you that currently the mods don't jump in usually, and that's as they intend it. I would argue that somebody overreacting to criticism and launching into personal attacks/dogpiles is just as guilty as somebody who goes around hurling insults. Moderation should go both ways.

@bored said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

@faraday I agree all those specific things are not constructive and should be subject to moderation even in Mildly Constructive (and if any of them are me, my bad). That said, I still think there's levels of skin thickness, hostility and defensiveness across the entire spectrum of forum posters where it would be beneficial to have a designated high moderation area.

But just to be clear -- those are the only kinds of things I'm asking to be moderated. That's it. That's all. Stuff that even you agree doesn't belong in the constructive area.

Seriously, there were what - 10 pages of various people (including you) arguing about FS3? Only two or three of those comments went over the line for me. So for me - it's not at all about needing a "high-moderation zone" it's just about moderating the stuff that already doesn't belong in mildly constructive according to the current policies.

Now I can sympathize with @ThatGuyThere's concern that moderation will go overboard and stifle any sort of criticism, but that's not what I want either. You can't debate if you can't criticize ideas.

@bored said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

My argument is they have a fundamentally different view of what 'constructive criticism' even means.

Look, when people are throwing around insults like "that's the stupidest thing I've heard", "this is exactly what's wrong with MUSHing", "clearly you can't do simple math", "trash like @surreality" and my personal favorite: "clearly you're just an asshole"... none of that is in any, way, shape or form constructive and yet I could go hunt down specific quotes for each and every one of those things from the "constructive" forum. I'm not going to, though. The mods know what we're talking about. I have repeatedly pointed to the Rules of Civil Discourse as the yardstick I favor, and "never criticize anybody" is nowhere in there. You may not think what I'm asking for is realistic, but don't put words in my mouth and claim I'm asking for something that I'm not asking for.

@bored said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

Again, I really don't care how its organized. But its important to clarify that 'highly moderated discussion with almost no criticism' (which seems to be your / @surreality's / etc's preference, and don't think is bad, to be very clear) is very different from 'criticism OK but no flaming' which is different from 'poo and gifs.' Everyone can have all these things, as far as I'm concerned, but we should be cautious of any of them being removed or diminished.

That's not my position, which is why I was trying to clarify. As @surreality mentioned, criticism != personal attacks. I am in the "criticism OK but no flaming" category. That's just not what we have today in the constructive section, which is what I'm griping about.

You would think that with competent adults, "criticism OK but no flaming" would not require heavy moderation but, well... points to the internet.

ETA, and not directed at bored particularly... I'm just kind of irritated that every time this discussion comes up, "mudslinging should be kept in the hog pit, if there even is one" is being misconstrued as "happy rainbow unicorn land where nobody says anything negative ever". Literally nobody is suggesting the latter.

@bored said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

The forum needs to be able to handle that. As usual, I do not care about the how, I am ambivalent among different solutions. I do not begrudge anyone their more polite areas.

Just wanted to note that nobody is suggesting that negative reviews be shunted off to the Hog Pit. Reasonable adults should be able to post a negative review: "I cannot recommend playing on this game because staff did (this bad thing, with facts)" without the entire thread turning into a freaking dumpster fire complete with people posting popcorn GIFs and random snarky commentary to egg on one side or the other. Sadly we've seen more of the latter.

Shifting gears... I agree with @Auspice. If it's an "Ad" thread then it should just be for game staff to post ads/announcements IMHO. There's nothing wrong with having a separate thread for Q&A and discussion (positive and negative, as long as negative doesn't get too deep into the mudslinging). Splitting up positive and negative commentary about the same game always struck me as goofy.

@ganymede said in General Video Game Thread:

Again: the Shadow Hawk blows, has always blown, and will continue to blow. Fuck the Shadow Hawk. (I like the way it looks, though.)

Hee. I was always quite fond of the Shadow Hawk. Then again, I was, like, twelve and more concerned with how the 'Mechs looked or some cool feature about them (like the Hunchback's AC20) than their overall stats. But yeah - yay for a new Battletech game.