Posts made by Ganymede

I'd like to give a shout out to Callie @ Fate's Harvest. She gave me the best compliment I've had in a while: that my character was interesting and I was a great person to RP with.

I've been doing this shit for over 20 years. I've met some great people; like @Sunny, who I've really liked and I haven't always done right by. I implicitly trust her synopses on things, but, recently, I've doubted her. I shouldn't have done that.

So, lemme tell you who I like a lot.

Many people. On the top of my head, I adore @Autumn in ways that shouldn't be allowed. @SunnyJ is someone that I need to play with everyday. I would gladly buy @Thenomain a beer. @Misadventure challenges me by PM at every turn, and I like that. @hedgehog is totally cool. @Arkandel is a great sport, and I will always wonder what might have been, if we only played Star Wars together more. @lordbelh is the sort of person who, if they told me a system was broken, I would do whatever it took to fix it. While it may seem that I scrap with him a lot, @WTFE is the sort of player that you should really listen to. @Caryatid is the person that I always wanted to be best friends with because she's ultra-wise and I have so much more to learn from her.

I'll go ahead and say it: there are many, many, many good people here. We fight a lot, but I think, as a community, we really need to start recognizing that we're all looking for the same thing: people that we can make stories with.

There are several people I haven't mentioned, to whom I hereby apologize.

If anyone swings by where I live, I would gladly show you the time of your life on my tab. Seriously.

MU Things I love? The people. I'm constantly amazed.

@ThatGuyThere said in Politics etc.:

While politics were cutthroat on an IC level, on an OOC level the player base was probably the most welcoming, friendly and outgoing group of folks I have ever run into on a WoD game. They went out of their way to help newbies get involved and feel important, because influences were important I was recruited to help on a plot the first week I was on grid, and even received IC credit for what my char did, as a new player to the game that made me really feel like it mattered that I was around.

That's because a good economy system, which the game had, made it more advantageous to have a lot of friends than to have a lot of enemies. If you wanted to get involved in the politics, you had to be friendly OOC; it was very easy to become a pariah.

At a minimum, you had to be involved politically. The system required it; the game enforced it. And that system generated an awful lot of RP because no one person could run or rule the place. It was literally impossible to do, based on the number of players and how it was set up. If you wanted to get far, you had to have allies; if you wanted allies, you had to get new players into the game.

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

Vampire could be played multiple ways, and technically, per the book, a Vampire could murder their ghoul, legally, because they're having a bad day. This isn't very popular to do with ghoul players, but is the culture of the game playing that level of high risk vampire? Really depends on the game, the staff, and how the Playerbase wants to play.

If the limits of what is reasonable or unreasonable killing is based on how the players involved want to handle it, then you're treading into the "consent"-land of killing. That is, that whether a killing is justified on an OOC level depends on whether the people involved are okay with it. And there will be time when one person says "you must die," and the other says, "but I didn't do shit to deserve it."

That's when staff have to come in and make a call. On the one hand, vampire is deadly game involving characters that are political predators who, in nWoD, can kill each other willy-nilly, barring some Prince's rules. On the other hand, if you have players killing other players for flimsy reasons, you're not going to have much of a player base left that's interested in playing with people they think are assholes.

There are plenty of WoD characters/players that love having that 75 agg per hit means you must fear my UNDEFEATABLE DICE PENIS factor. Some flaunt it. Some don't​. I would never condone that kind of bullying other players to keep them humbled, but the real question is...Is it in theme?

If you don't condone it, then why would you let it happen on your watch? That's the dilemma that staff often face: having to please a diverse group of players who have their own idea of where the "line" is. Theme or not, the question, when faced with it, comes down to: who do I want to piss off? Because if everyone's okay with it, then staff aren't being called in.

Again, this is where being clear about the risk expectation of the game, going in, is necessary.

I've been around the block on this topic for over a score years now. From my perspective now, I can say this with anecdotal and experiential authority: you are never going to be crystal clear about the risk expectation of your game. You can definitely try, but you won't get there. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try, but it's good to be realistic in your expectations.

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

Given that none of that resulted from my own decisions and rolls, probably not. But nice try at misinterpretation!

No, it was a statement for clarification using an absurd situation.

So, it is okay for me to be peckish when I haven't done anything -- deciding or rolling -- that would reasonably result in my doom. But it's not okay if I have taken steps -- deciding or rolling -- towards the edge of and, perhaps off of, the cliff of doom.

Is there a line at which one says, "bro, u totes went over the edge"? Or is that sort of a moving target? Because I think that's what people are arguing about.

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

Not accepting stupid character death based on your own decisions and dice rolls is very much saying 'no, I choose not to accept the rules as they are, I don't want to be done so I refuse to play the game by the rules'.

So, you'd be okay if, let's say, I played a Vampire Sheriff, and you played a neonate, and I think you looked at me funny, which you didn't, so I went and slaughter-killed you with some staff-granted relic that does +5A damage to vampires.

Right?

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

0. What does an economic system bring to the table that enhances my fun?

What I got from your post is: I don't find any economic system, regardless of construction, to be fun, and I cannot identify what part of a system is flawed because, in general, I'm not that kind of player that would find such a system fun -- but go ahead and try to prove me wrong.

And I can understand that statement.

@Sunny said in RL Anger:

I work in IT, and everyone in my office is 35+. We roll out brand new tech all the time. Just got a 3D printer in the office, actually. What you are saying is demonstratively false in the industry, not confirmed as fact.

Yeah, she be old, son.

@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.

This conclusion is easily contradicted.

Blood Bowl is a game based around the idea of football with fatalities; however, in the game, fatalities are ridiculously impossible to achieve, and injuries are difficult too. You could have the most badass Ogre give an opponent a Spinning Piledriver into the turf, and only have about a 50% chance of causing them to roll over and moan.

Is it an RPG? Well, you make the team, which consists of players, and you have a hand in crafting those players when they gain experience. You move them; you determine their actions; and then you roll to determine whether those actions are successful. Sounds like an RPG to me, but you could argue that it is a simulation or war game.

Still a game.

If you play the game to kill the other team, you are going to lose every single damn time. Because that's not the point to the game: the team that scores the most touchdowns wins, to paraphrase John Madden. So, causing character death isn't a viable option in the slightest. Not if you want to reach your objectives. And even if your objective is to KILL KILL KILL, you are unlikely to reach that objective.

So, for some RPGs, character death isn't a viable option, and people still engage in it, and invest ridiculous amounts of disposable income into it.

A character is only as well-written as the person being them. Whether a character has a sense of their own mortality depends on the maturity and wisdom of the person creating them.

@WTFE said in RL Anger:

Weird. I never saw medals for participation or "least best" prizes or the like until I was looooooooooooooooooooooong out of high school. I was positively gobsmacked when I read a report card that didn't have any marks in it.

They were pushing this bumblefuck when I was in teacher's college, and I was encouraged to do the entire "everyone gets a prize" shit when I was a camp counselor before then.

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

If you can sell me on the value add, I'm down for anything. It's just ... a really tough sell given that I've never seen one that added anything I value.

That's sort of the point of asking you to help me conceive of one. You say there's something lacking in every system you've encountered. So, define it, and help me figure out a way to meet that need you perceive.

If you can't define or describe what the "value add" is, it is difficult for any game designer to meet that perceived problem and figure out a solution.

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

What I think, and I don't mean it as a jab for people who prefer a different gamestyle than I do, is there are players who don't like playing a PC for long. They keep rolling alts, trying different things, that kind of thing - so to them the idea of a high turnout game isn't just something they wouldn't mind, they'd prefer it because it fits their preferences.

I don't particularly like any alts, but I do not shy away from death if it comes. Like @Sunny, it just matters how death comes. I don't mind if it is a consequence to an action, but I sort of get pissed off if it is solely the result of a poor roll or random.

@WTFE said in RL Anger:

Not my generation. That's more of an American Gen-X thing that leaked outside of US borders slowly. By the time it became mainstream in Canada it was way beyond my generation's influence.

The fuck it was. I'm not that much younger than you, and my generation's teachers allowed it to continue.

@Ghost

Have you played XCom2? I really hate fucking dying in that game. You spend, like, a dozen missions trying to build up a squadmate, and then bang one stupid step forward and you get mudstomped by a fucking Archon or Andromedan.

It's the worst feeling in the world. I have no doubt everyone here would feel the same.

Here's the thing that makes it feel worse, in my opinion: if your squadmate were taken out and could not be revived during the mission, your chances of finishing the mission diminish substantially. If you lose the mission, your entire campaign is put in jeopardy. Fail too many missions and you lose. End game.

So, what's the point of the death? Probably realism, probably to add further danger, probably to make people give more of a shit of making a wrong step. It's part of the game, sure. But if you removed it, the grand game is no worse off. Maybe your squadmate is taken out for a few months, but the rest of your team could feasibly pull through. Kind of.

That's my mentality when I consider the issue: is death necessary to add risk to the game? On a WoD game, I'd say that the threat of death is essential because there is rarely another direct, punitive consequence for failure. On another game, losing a combat encounter may have substantial effects to the game as a whole, providing a different consequence for failure. On a game that relies on PrPs, I'd say that unqualified threat of death is more important. On a political game like Arx, I'd say that death is less of necessary device because there appears to be punitive consequences for failure.

@WTFE

Feel like working with me on an economy system?

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

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.

In the game I'm planning with TweedBoy, getting taken out in combat doesn't mean death. You can elect this or not, but you just lose the combat encounter. As winning or losing affects whether a mission is successful or not, there is always an incentive to win.

@Warlander said in Fires of Hope: A Star Wars Story:

So plan carefully and do lots of system research if you want to play a Force User. Or anything else, really, since the system seems to demand great attention to detail.

This is what sort of put me off of SAGA. I literally spent hours and hours to make a PC, and, in the end, still overlooked some parts of her.

@Nietzsche said in RL Anger:

I recall being on MU*'s where you can kill people IC but you can't slur them IC. Frankly, I'd rather someone call me a honkey-ass kike white boi than kill me, but maybe I'm insane for that.

That all made so little sense that my racist heart laughed hard.

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

I'm playing on Fear & Loathing and having a fantastic time. Got a great vamp admin who's running an amazing gamewide plot right now and the players are the most inclusive and skillful RPers.

I used to play on F&L, and I can concur here. The Vampire Admin is fantastic, and the players there are inclusive and fun to play with.

I currently play on New Orleans idly. It is a CoD game. It is small and not very busy.

I also play on Fallen World. It is a CoD game, primarily focused on Mage. It is small, but it is engaging and the players there are phenomenal.

Finally, I play on Fate's Harvest. I have a soft spot for Changeling, and this hits the spot.

@Thenomain

I was always fond of Strangers in Paradise.

@Arkandel said in Politics etc.:

I've yet to see a game in which non-physical stats were somehow as needed as physical ones. It tends to go completely one way or the other.

Sure. In this case, physical shit takes primacy. Mass Effect is a war story; the system I'm making is essentially a strategic war game.

If your system has mental/social stats aren't filled with fluff that's at best circumstantial or basically just XP sinks you'd already be ahead.

Funny you should mention that. I sort of mashed Mental + Social stuff together. Where you had 6 stats in WoD, for instance, you have 3 here: Mind; Guile; and Resolve.

Success on skills is simple. Compare the scores of your PC's statistic (Mind, for example) against a static difficulty (if it is a task that is based purely on the PC's skill) or the target PC's statistic (Resolve, for example). Apply modifiers. If the scores are equal, you roll 1d6; if your score is greater, you roll 2d6 and pick the best result; if your score is greater than 2x the target's, you roll 3d6 and pick the best; but if the target's score is greater, you roll 2d6 and the target picks the result; and if the target's score is 2x greater, you roll 3d6 and the target picks. (Yes, I borrowed liberally from Blood Bowl.)

Consult the following table to determine the result for each die:

Roll Result
1 Failure.
2 Failure.
3 Failure, unless roller is proficient OR non-roller is proficient, if contested.
4 Success, if the roller is proficient.
5 Success
6 Success

PCs start off proficient in at least 2 of 18 skills, depending on the species they pick.

As far as mental/social rolls go, success indicates a basic, non-complex success. For instance, a successful Subterfuge roll might mean passing your fake ID off as genuine, but it would not mean that you convince a C-Sec Agent to turn in his badge because Commander Bailey is really a shape-shifted Salarian.

@Thenomain said in Politics etc.:

Also, your system has no politics in it; only combat!

True. The mechanics there are more crunchy. The political part of it need not be so, for countless reasons.

@Thenomain said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

You could be a terrible villain with a terrible villain's-cat. It would be adorable, and you'd be so confused why everyone thinks of you fondly.

Perhaps I am a terrible cat villain?