Best posts made by Ghost

Gotta get them IROC-Zs.

Sounds like a cool idea and you clearly love it. Go for it.

I dont currently mush, BUT IF I DID, I'd absoltely make a character that specializes in boosting 2nd rate sports cars like the IROC-Z, Delorean, and the Fiero.

Song of Ice and Fire RPG has a great social combat system. Star Wars FFG has a simple system too that I like.

Let's be really fair though: From D&D to WoD this hobby has seen many systems used for social challenge moderation available, but they are not only not used, but avoided.

And it's not just because of creeper roleplayers who will try to turn it into something rapey.

See, the only way to have a character effectively lie to another character on most MUs is to lie to the player. This is because a lot of players aren't okay with having to RP something that they know is a losing play. Little bits of meaning happens all the time to avoid it, and many of them get pissed when they find out they were lied to oocly (TotallyNotMetaGaming).

It's that sort of vice grip on controlling the experience of their character, up to and including the character not having the winning combination (and the OOC angst that comes along with it) that has kept many forms of social roll systems covered in dice and cobwebs on these games player narrated character showcases for years.

For those of you that love social combat, when your character loses, and that can be mature enjoy to enjoy social risk without making it all about penises? I love you. I love you dearly.

@Auspice I can't get behind this idea.
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But it can get behind me.

Also, spot the comma.

@thatguythere That's something I've noticed wholesale across a lot of games, including WoD. I've seen social stats purchased, seemingly, to fuel the various powers requirements for dice. Social situations for the most part are hand-waved unless they involve NPCs, but PvP power usage for a skill might require Wits+Subterfuge, so subterfuge gets a lot of attention for the power, but not used in regular social RP.

Maybe it's just personal preference or a pet peeve of mine, but I'm a bit opinionated when it comes to the way characters are RPed versus their dots on their sheets.

I've seen a lot of highly articulate and charismatic physically min-maxed characters with very few dots along the lines of social/wits related skills (presumably because their powers didn't require those dots) who roleplay as if those dots are there...they just weren't important to the build they wanted at the time.

Don't wanna sound like grumpy cat, here, but I consider that to be in poor taste. (because I WILL and HAVE often roleplayed characters with very low social stats and very high stats as being socially inept and easy to manipulate, and my RP will reflect my character's sheet, because I believe that doing so is FAIR to the players who statted towards social)

Well, at the least this game would guarantee some 300-500 charbits the moment "Fuck Mountain Orgy MUX" shows up on mudstats.

@arkandel Respectfully, I see it as a conversation about social systems, but the conversation keeps circling around how to get players to use them if implemented.

I truly believe you can systemize maturity with policies, using the game system as designed, and with staff/GMs who won't wrestle with immature players.

My TT night maturity system works. It's called "Be Mature or Be Somewhere Else" and I have asked players throwing drama fits to leave for the night.

But that's a conversation for another thread.

@ZombieGenesis Constructive, here...

So I see you often spinning up new games and then "few people came" gets mentioned later. This very well could be that the right IP/setting hasn't been picked yet, but I'm getting the overall question here is: "Will picking the right setting/genre result in 10-15 unique IPs sticking around?" I think the answer to that may require you to privately poll some of the players on your games to find out why previous efforts didn't result in that.

You can make new games or poll for what people want to play all day long, but if those 10-15 unique IP logins aren't staying, it likely isn't because of the choice in game itself.

@faraday Exactly! We're in sync on this I think.

Social rolls have to make sense, but also have to work within the characters, scene, or setting.

If the bad guy thinks girls are gross, there is no amount of seduction that would make him decide to take the girl back to his room. If your character is a secret service agent, no amount of persuasion would make them take a box from a stranger and put it under the seat of a Senator's convertible.

Since we all like depth and writing so much in this hobby, I don't think that social rolls are a problem, but I think they need to be in proper context.

Sidenote: I've had a LOT of my TT players and some Mushers go the route of oocly explaining their argument and hoping that the justification will handwave the social roll altogether.

"My character is going to tell them that they're a cop and to give them their car"

Roll for it.

"Oh please if a cop told you to give them your car, you would."

Do you have identification? A badge?

"No but..."

Then roll with negative modifiers for lack of looking like a cop, or find some other method like pulling your gun and using intimidation.

I think the above is a good example as to why social rolls are written into systems and shouldn't be handled ad-hoc between the GM without resolution. In some cases social rolls are as vital and treacherous as combat rolls and things like leaping to catch an outstretched hand.

Sci-fi games are basically the technological opposite of high fantasy games. The reason why sci-fi RPGers love gear is because the settings are usually about stuff. X-wing starfighters, lightsabers, cybernetic eyes, cool guns, nano-gadgets.

IMO it's the same thing as fantasy RPGs being all about scrolls, flaming swords, magical horses, and magical potions; just a different level of tech.

Either way, both fantasy and sci-fi are typically about normal people using the setting's technology to become more than the average Joe to do things the reader cannot do in real life.

@ganymede said in Social Systems:

Imagine how fun it would be if vampires were to play their requiem rather than their players' erotic fantasies birthed from teenage fiction.

To the rest of your post, though?

I think some of us are really good at writing it through and handling it as a cooperative story. Nothing is better to me on these games than when I'm in a group of writers all about writing deception, chaos, lies, and plot twists going in knowing that they are happening and congratulating each other on our writing.

However, there's a concept I've mentioned before that I came up with in my LARP years:

PLAYING THE PLAYER

This is when people make their RP decisions poker-style based on what they know about the OOC person or their likes/dislikes. It's a form of metagaming that is hard to catch and even harder to convince players to stop doing.

In terms of social role play without dice, its the "My character isn't going to believe Tom's new character, because Tom likes making characters who lie, and I don't want my character to be lied to"

I won't get on my soapbox about how this I think has become the norm more than not and why so many Mushers care about which player is playing which bit...but on-topic, Playing the Player is one of my big reasons for being into social rolls.

If we are, in fact, gaming, then it should be what happens IC that determines the flow, and social dice provides a little protection from this kind of metagaming.

@Auspice Brain surgery without modern equipment done by candlelight? NO problem. Swish.

@surreality said in Social Systems:

@faraday I have to second this, because I am more than a little disgusted by the idea that 'I know I like playing with this player and we have fun when we write together so I'm going to play with them when I get the chance to' is an indication that I'm a bad evil cheating metagamer abusing all the good-hearted players everywhere with my cheaty cheaty ways.

ETA: I'm doubly digusted that 'that player was gross and abusive to me in the past OOCly, and I don't want to play with them again' apparently also makes me a horrible cheaty cheater McCheatsALot.

No one said or implied any of these things.
Absolutely nothing that I wrote said or suggested that playing with your friends is metagaming or that people should be subject to abuse from abusive players. I regret that you interpreted it this way.

@faraday I love, love collaboration and please understand that I don't have enough time or space to list out every contingency and corner case, but I think you and I really are similar.

For example, I would love to read a log where someone is planning on poisoning or lying to my character, then reach out to those players and say "I loved that log, how can we collaborate to make this awesome?" That, I think, is really in the best spirit to write out memorable stories on these games.

While I have opinions on the term "metagaming" (using the above example re: poisoning), I could even see planning your own dramatic angles regarding attempted poiaoning to be fun and not meta. I was simply more referring to blurring the lines between a character acting on information their player knows, rather than finding creative ways to add to the story from the character's perspective.

@faraday Agree 100%. The non-misery porn apocalypse genre (I.e. not Walking Dead or Fear Of...) are great fodder for RPGs. Mad Max is swashbuckling with car chases. The 100 is fantastic. Lots of good stuff there that isn't misery.

@seraphim73 I see it it, too, and by a decline in proactive players, I mostly see it come in the form of players who don't ask for, seek out, or present options for RP. The last few years I've seen a lot of players wallflowering in OOC rooms waiting for other players to start RP, or events forming, but not a lot of hunting down RP and collaborating with others.

Ideas: I think the more people dig into their characters for content, the better it'll be. I think these wikis having less sections about who your character is and more about where you would like your character to go would help. Things that could help (and I've seen some of these help) might be:

• A wiki section on character pages for plots theyre involved in and help they're looking for
• A list of plot elements that theyre hoping to find for their character (TBH, I don't see WHY saying openly that a player is hoping for a romantic interest for their character, or characters to help with a plot involving the disappearance of their sister would hurt)
• Any other wiki sections dedicated to what the player would like to do

I guess my mindset is that just details about the character or images is okay, but that sort of content tells a lot about the character and is less overt about ways to get into RP with them.

So maybe a trend of these kinds of RP collaboration seeking content on character wikis could help with that.

I truly believe that some of the lack of proactivity is due to shyness, not wanting to beg for RP, and a general difficulty with knowing how to arrange collaboration. If my theory is correct, this could help.

@Ominous That would work nicely alongside: +dig ThatchRoofCottage and +dig ThatchRoofCottagaaaaaaaze.

But define BAD?

I'm sure we can all agree that the following falls under BAD

• Sexual Harassment
• Doxxing
• Unwanted OOC tracking/stalking
• Abusing the game's code for personal benefit
• Quid-pro-quo harassment
• Giving personal information out on people's RL
• Other OOC abuses including slander? Pestering? Unwanted advances after being told to stop?

But even if there's a pattern of behavior, shouldn't the pattern of behavior be related to things that fall squarely under bad? There's a lot of gray area He-Said-She-Said that I've seen many people on this board suffer, myself included, that took a personal disagreement into the realm of personal attack based on disagreements about:

• Being inconvenienced
• A disagreement on what someone meant or intended
• A misunderstanding on what someone was trying to do/not do
• Lack of OOC communication on an IC situation

I think getting our collective heads together around what is actual BAD behavior versus a personality conflict could lead to a lot of good, including (and here's my personal stake in this conversation) protecting any of us from having a bad week turn into having to leave the hobby because of some kind of OOC/Hog Pit bandwagon?

We should define what is actually BAD, so that players will know some sort of suggested code of conduct. This would keep, for example, someone with a somewhat okay reputation suddenly deciding that @surreality needed to suffer because they were upset about a game situation (that was a misunderstanding) and use their reputation to "fuck her up" a bit on MSB.

The court of public opinion, the mob, is a strong factor in the social environment of these games. We SHOULD actively put together a habit of logging negative situations and reporting them.

Likewise, defining BAD and logging would also allow someone with a shitty reputation, be it their fault or not, to prove that people are being "BAD" towards them without these forums going "whatever, you were a shithead on XYZ game and I believe this person because we had fun on another game".

So that's my take on this.

@mietze Quick note. If you're (or anyone reading this is) into less crunchy systems and do tabletop RPGs in RL, check out the "Tiny" set of RPGs from Gallant Knight Games (easily available on DriveThruRPG for PDFs) and the games by Free League, which are slightly more crunchy than Gallant, but still have a low leaning curve.

There's a driving movement in the RPG community for easier, minimalist systems and can attest that the TINY games are a low learning curve, less bulky character sheets, and more "get out there and have fun."

In MU, privacy has a few core problems:

1. There are really no (or few) two-way agreememts as to what game staff can or cannot use your contact information for. A good example of this is Mal from SerenityMush mass mailing everyone his LinkedIn information. Aside from annoyance and leaving the game, there is no guarantee staff won't use your IP or contact info for their own purposes.

2. From an IT perspective, telnet is insecure and any personal information stored on a telnet game could also be vulnerable to a number of attacks. MUs are far less secure than Equifax, and do not have established rules for patching, etc.

3. As we have seen recently, being subjectively kind of like that one guy from Louisiana and also being from Louisiana, will not protect a musher from having someone else's identity knowledge being used against them on an inaccurate witch hunt. Justified or not. (Though, I think the term justified is morally ambiguous in this case)

4. Stranger Danger. I've seen some seriously dark behavior, controlling behavior, abuse, etc in this hobby. Again, I will remind people that while these people share a common hobby, they are strangers. There's plenty of stalking and obsessive behavior on these games, and the assumption that you havent provided enough information to have your private life infiltrated is an assumption. Staffers could perform IP lookup to gather location data, view stored email address information, and either through web sleuthing on Google or social phishing could definitely find ways to violate your privacy.

Keep in mind that this isn't an anonymous online gaming community where you play Call of Duty and are protected by a screen name and 10 minutes of matchmaking. Many people in this hobby simulate very intimate and personal scenarios with people who are strangers, could be misrepresenting who they are over long term, or over time could develop obsessive/controlling/attachment behaviors that can make you regret having shared any information.

It is unwise to assume (with the number of strange and extreme personalities in this hobby) that just because you give a fake email address that you cannot be found.

#2 should be your greatest concern. Technically, Zero/Elsa/OPP/Spider, any of your usual suspects anathema crowd, have at times had more than enough information to breach your privacy or perform attacks on you.

Actual reply to topic.

I think one of the reasons why FS3 is used so much also ties into why minimalist RPGs are doing so well right now: a sort of "time investment to launch" balance. I think the article is really spot-on and I think all of it applies to why FS3 does so well and should be factored into designing things on MUs.

Balance: If the idea/system is new, then something easy for the brain to digest needs to exist to balance it out. Original IPs with complicated systems are less attractive than Original IPs with easy to use systems. Existing IPs (people love star wars, wod, etc or are at least very familiar with them from books, movies, or similar programming) are more accepted with conplicated systems because people really wanna play a Jedi. You can either make a crunchy system less conplicated by using simplified code automation thru scripting, but also by finding other ways to make these new ideas/systems more attractive by doing anything you can to take the weight of use off of the user.

I think this article is aces.

Double post.

I'm not on any games, don't staff anywhere, but before I write this want to make it clear that I'm writing this to drive home my point.

Say I were staff.

I could:

• reverse lookup your IP to gather geographical data
• use your IP information gathered at every login to port sniff your computer(s)
• web search your email address to research who you are. If it's not a throwaway email, this might lead me to your social media where I can learn your name or family members names
• I could then search those names for more Intel.
• if its a throwaway email, I could find other sites where youve used said login/alias to research places where you may have slipped and given details.
• through IP use, if I'm able to break through your security, I may be able to find a port capable of allowing me to insert man in the middle attacks or monitor keystrokes.

After all of these are put together, I suppose I could be an obsessed stalker, or an identity thief, or that guy who is really into rape Role play, but I'd have what I needed to fuck some shit up.

There are reasons why this information is protected on a corporate server level, and I assure you, RanfomMUofDarkness isn't applying Infosec level guidelines and background checks on the people getting access to that information.

And this is just an example for information that you weren't aware that you were giving.

There is a very real reason why telnet is blocked by most infosec orgs and SSL is required.