Posts made by friarzen

@Jeshin http://www.holistic-design.com/fading-suns/

So, I am going to put this project away and move on. It seems the Cthulhuian Mythos is now a bit of a polarizing game topic and I just don't feel like explaining again and again (before the game even opened) that yes, I know Lovecraft was a racist asshole and no I don't approve of that (I am an adult and can, in fact, separate the two).
Oh well, I'll leave the code available over on github for anyone that wants to use it/derive from it.

feel free to start using something like thispersondoesnotexist.com instead...

@Derp The codebase is basic Evennia. The system is a minor variant of Gumshoe. In some sense, I guess, I am recreating parts of Ares's Scenes functionality.

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

So there's a variety of solutions approaches. You can not have advancement. You can have caps (we've circled back to E6). You can do tiers to have different layers of play on one game, which I actually kind of like so long as they're open to all players vs. getting an elder because you TS headstaff are a 'trusted player.' Or you can do full advancement... but not wuss out about death and other endings. A fair way back, I experimented with offering a variety of perks to players re-apping after death (including access to snowflake options), and some people did take it up.

I think this is the real meat of the topic, and I also think some game systems/themes better support the idea than others. I immediately thought of Exalted's various tiered power levels (Dragonblooded vrs Solars vrs Celestial Exalts, for example). It would be interesting to play in a game where dinosaur XP or character deaths could be traded for some other level of story entirely. (Possibly with entirely different mechanical systems....voting/trading/betting/etc instead of dice pools, for example).

Hmm... This topic is timely to a game design issue I discovered after my last Section14 post. I was planning on just building out a traditional grid based on my first couple plots, only to realize that would lead to a sprawling set of used-once-or-maybe-twice-at-most locations that would then just rot. In my head, the game is fairly episodic, with only a couple of small recurring locations (like the secret base where the players reside between missions and the "generic" supply depots/storage-dumps/oubliettes that per-mission resources get pulled from or sent to), and the rest of the grid would be temporary-ish rooms used for part of a "Season". Right now, I'm working on just giving the players a set of commands to "re-skin" temporary-ish rooms as needed for scenes or PRPs.
I guess I'll need to think more on what that design means for privacy/ooc issues, though.

I've decided to open source the (rather basic) code for my Evennia-based game, Section14.
It is a very bare-bones MUSH-like right now, but might help people that just need the basics
(character sheet, dice roller, chat, built-in wiki, and bboards).

Some of the features like the wiki are still beta-at-best , but I'll be adding code over time
as I find things that can be improved upon.

codebase

section14.eridanisystems.com is up and running but is still pretty much empty of a usable grid. I forgot to factor in my job's yearly Disaster Recovery Exercise event that happened at the beginning of this month to my 3-week-ish estimate, so my free time got eaten by life. So, I'm still mostly where I was a month ago.

Edited to correct the link.

This is a solid topic I'm struggling with right now for Section14. My gut is telling me the game needs to have enough pre-exisiting wiki/in-game posts/theme-oriented-code/etc to get the vision across to the first batch of players, so that chargen isn't bombed with a bunch of off-topic concepts. But, at the same time, I know the final game is going to really depend on the back-and-forth with the players that crops up as the first few plot events/PrPs get run.

Just a note that I am nearing the finish line for coding and expect to probably go into alpha testing in a week or two.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think @ghost's point was more coming from the "I'm a builder and want to present the player with something that isn't +docrap/with-some crazy=bullshit_syntax"?

For example presenting an HTML table of the character sheet with +/- buttons next to values to create the character....

@PuppyBreath How am I supposed to reply without hiting <discard> to really prove the point?
AKA me too...

@Goldfish

I'm almost exactly the opposite in my ST skills. I love world-building and thinking through all the crazy interactions between factions, ethics, magics, ecosystems, etc, but my characters usually tend to be ad-hoc one-offs that more often than not fail to gain any real depth before either the players run away to a new area or murder-hobo the villains. I always get a rush whenever something causes the game to suddenly come alive and scenes logically follow one after another in a burst of creativity.

@Auspice It really says something about good casting when: You read the first several books before watching the TV series and everyone is vaguely amorphous. Then you watch a couple seasons and read the last two books and suddenly EVERYONE in your head looks like the TV series. I can't even recall what they were like in my previous mental state.

Shohreh and Wes are beyond perfect.

@SquirrelTalk You're welcome. It is always a little rough at the beginning when trying to figure out which tool does what.

python and pip: this is vaguely equivalent to PennMUSH's hardcode.
virtualenv: this is like a workbench where you keep specific tools for building Evennia birdhouses
git: this is sort of the download utility to get everything else

I would recommend hopping onto the #Evennia IRC or Discord channel. We are a very responsive bunch over there and there are usually several people willing to help.

The article you linked to is written from the perspective of using the Windows Command Line Interface utility (cmd). I.e. Press Windows+R to open “Run” box. Type “cmd” and then click “OK”

Once everything is installed, you will be able to make edits and such without having to use this, but stopping and starting Evennia will still involve a couple of CLI commands.

@Ominous Yeah, after looking through the PDF, it is definitely more crunchy than what I can handle for this game, especially given that more than half of every character will be a "normal human" Host, pregenerated by a coded system on the server side. Multiple Hosts will need to be generated and then presented as options to pick from for each Player, so by necessity, the game system has to be pretty crunch-lite.

@Ominous Hmmm, I am not familiar with it, specifically, so I will check it out! I have a little knowledge of Runequest and other BRP-based titles, so if these PDF's work out, I can see it being a contender. Thanks!

@Ominous After giving this a day to percolate, I will start out by backtracking a little bit and explain what I am actually looking for and then how Gumshoe does and doesn't fit the bill.

First and foremost, I am looking for a system that players are either already familiar with or has enough free information online that I won't have to write everything from scratch. Barely second place in criteria is that it be a simple enough system to where I can build the chargen bits in python in just a couple of days and not have tons of edge/special cases or simulation code that I have to write to make it work for day-to-day gaming...this rules out most off-the-shelf systems (Nearly all D20 derived, level/class-based games, Shadowrun, etc). And 3rd, I'd like the system to have enough elements that it fits the modern-day+near future tech+magic+horror themes of the game, with bonus points going to systems that would have example pre-gen/vaguely balanced stats for Mages/Shogoths/Cyborgs/Tentacle-Monster-Of-The-Week/etc. This leaves (that I know enough about to guess): Fate, Gumshoe, BRP/d100, BESM, and Savage Worlds.

I tend to dislike Fate's dice pool mechanics, couldn't find much in the way of free resources online for BRP, and I've already GM'd enough BESM and Savage Worlds to know what I'm up against. That left Gumshoe as an unknown. I was barely familiar with Gumshoe before this past weekends dive, so that is what started this thread.

Overall, I'd say there is enough free stuff online that Gumshoe checks that box. It has very simple and consistent dice mechanics (baring a few oddball, probably-nuke-able edge cases), so that checks the second requirement, and it has several expansions/derivatives directly involved with the theme elements.

The "Clue discovery" split between the auto-success Investigative abilities and the test-oriented General abilities isn't really something that I care much about, at this stage. It is mostly just a system quirk, and the spends to get Special Benefits seem to be basically the same idea as Fate Points in Fate or Bennies in Savage Worlds. And as you point out, there are plenty of ways to avoid the "game grinds to a halt due to lack of Clues" problem.

The real question for me, now, is "Is there enough of a game inside of Gumshoe to actually work with and enjoy?" and I'm not convinced, yet. There are only two combat skills in the base rules, scuffling and shooting, and the damages seem to be mostly "nothing happened worth mentioning" or "oh, you win". My gut says it's just something I'll have to GM for a few sessions before I really know.

@Misadventure Well, the central conceit of the system is to always give the players the information they need to advance the plot when they need it, preferably allowing every player their chance to partake of the spotlight. This means the rest of the mechanics are secondary (and in some cases completely arbitrary). I'm not sure it makes sense to do anything other than try to track who's had a chance to shine and who hasn't per "episode" plotline.

One of those oddly complex rules does apply to this topic, though: determining how many Investigative autosuccess build points to hand out to each player based on a formula/table involving the number of players that are expected to attend every session. Some extra points then get thrown in for the number of expected "drop ins" for players that don't make all sessions... It is weird and seems likely to be fudged even for TableTop groups but definitely seems awkward for online games.

Investigative Abilities, I'll call these ISkills(IS) for short, have "pools" that only seem to matter when the player wants to try to buy Special Benefits from their use of their ISkill. But there is nothing that says special benefits are mandatory. By skipping them, I think you can reduce record keeping and steer clear of edge cases like the "parade of newbies keep walking into the scenario just long enough to buy a group Benefit and then never be heard from again".
General Abilities (GSkills) would still have pools as normal, since those don't have "whole game" benefits when used. Eliminating ISkill Spends also means that there isn't really any need to put more than 1 point into each ISkill, so then it becomes something you can just parcel out to all characters..."Everybody picks 5 Investigative Skills during Chargen" and can spend XP to buy more later.