Best posts made by Ghost

Agreed with @surreality

I've heard from time to time statements like "why should I have to deal with <issue> when it's against my faith?".

The question to this is (just using <issue> as an example, not here to discuss if it's right or wrong): "Are you truly dealing with it, or offended by the idea that you're living in a world where others partake in it?"

If you do not believe in doing a specific thing, then by not partaking in doing these things, one is not only not dealing with it, but they're practicing their belief. This is a good thing and has many positive examples!

But if it's still not okay to simply not partake, and actions are taken to try to create a world where others are not only barred from doing so, but could be punished for doing so, then it is not a statement of "I do not believe in doing these things", but instead: "It is unacceptable for me to allow others to do these things."

No one has a problem with people choosing to not partake in these things, but in a free society, the imposition of force to deny others by means of religion and personal preference isn't your field to tend. It's theirs.

See...I'm not so convinced that "consent" is across the board a 100% good thing. YES, consent is 100% important when it comes to activity that could lead to abusive or sexually abusive roleplay. 100% full stop.

But somehow it's (consent) been blended into meaning things like:

• I have to give my consent for RP to go ways contrary to what I want
• I have to give my consent to fail at something I want my character to succeed in
• You have to have my consent for you to make decisions for your character that impact my character

I feel like at some point in time the concept of consent and "failure" were blurred into something...disruptive. I've personally been threatened OOCly or harassed for making character decisions that impacted other players without their consent. Shit, I got banned from Serenity for it. A number of players sort of latch to other players and then "consent" becomes a vehicle to control other players, their IC decisions, etc.

So when it comes to incentivizing IC failure I feel like the most immediate thing you can do to actually incentivize IC failure is to codify it into the game rules that A CHARACTER FAILING AT SOMETHING IS NOT A CONSENT ISSUE.

If I had my way, MUs would work like this:

• DICE determine pass/fail results, and the only things that must be consented to are capture, torture, sexual situations, and unthematic player-killings (unthematic meaning: you can't just PK because your character has a +400 combat wang, but if your character is caught betraying the king a PK is warranted)
• Social dice ARE acceptable to allow for deception, lies, and IC manipulations, and failure to roleplay the results and/or metagame around social failures would be punishable by suspension (up to being removed from the game)
• Failure to roleplay or accept IC failure (up to and including no-selling failure results as things like "I'm not going to roleplay it to look as if I failed because that would make my character look bad") would be considered VERY bad form, because it incentivizes other players not to accept RP failures (thus, no one ever wins and no one ever loses without some kind of OOC manipulation/bartering, which is where we are today).
• Anything else, where it's free-form and without dice results, is between two consenting players, but refusing to RP with other players who do not wish to consent to "free form roleplay" to avoid potential failure is considered bad form, and those people may not be a good choice for the game.

Ultimately, what I'm saying, is that I feel the only way you can incentivize IC failure is to mandate it.

From my Vampire LARP days there's this concept I like to call "Stock Exchange Dice Bartering", which became a bad habit in my tabletop games. Basically, players would AVOID putting XP/Dice/etc into specific skills, and when it came time for a pass/fail result they'd all holler at the GM at the same time with ideas. The GM would then pick the best idea they heard, run with it, dice weren't rolled, and the results were roleplayed. This led to a REALLY bad tabletop RPG habit with some of my players where they'd do things like this:

• "If I as a player can Google instructions on how to build a bomb, then why should I put points into demolitions on my character sheet?"
• "If I can come up with a convincing lie OOC for my character to tell, then why should I have to roll? I have 2 social dice and 34 combat dice, but anyone can lie, right?"
• "Even though my character failed to detect the hidden vampire in the shadows, I'm randomly going to decide to rearrange the furniture mid-scene to try to move a desk on top of where the vampire is...because feng shui reasons".

Diceless/freeform systems mean that you are constantly going to have players playing around with "ghost dice" and using these OOC-leveraged explanations as to why they should and should not fail (up to and including a simple "well I didn't consent to failure and that's not fun for me, so no one gets to win" Because that's really the issue with incentivizing IC failure and players that refuse to play with scenes or other players in situations where a win for the other player means a loss for another player.

• Story is about conflict.
• Conflict means something has to succeed.
• Something succeeding means something else fails.
• And if the stories are about characters, and characters have conflict, then in many cases for a character to win another character has to lose
• And players who refuse for their characters to fail (I don't consent!) are ultimately deciding that other players are not allowed to have wins if it means their character isn't going to, as well.

So, again, I can't stress enough that where the line is drawn on how much of a "GAME" it is determines where the whistle is blow, the goals are scored, and where the rules apply. If it's a game, it needs rules, it needs referees, and it needs to determine pass/fail results. The byproduct of this is "success", "failure", "cheating", and "poor sportsmanship", and when you look at it from that perspective...most of us have been used to these concepts since childhood and have a whole lifetime of understanding those concepts. BUT if you leave it to "negotiation" then all you will ever do is negotiate, and while you're busy negotiating with people who don't play fair you will be critically impacting players who DO play fair.

From a MU perspective, I'll warn that I don't think either system would work well in a MU format.

Starfinder is Pathfinder, so essentially DMG, stat blocks, level progression, loot tables for miles, and all of it would require either a lot of GM attention or automation.

FFG SWRPG Is designed to be collaborative between GM and players, so assumes there will always be a GM present.

One thing I think this game has going for it is the FATE system. You're right, @ixokai , in FATE these things need to be BOUGHT, which presents an interesting concept that doesn't exist in some other systems. To have that kind of authority, or riches, or benefit, it needs to be bought, which balances out the character sheets in a way most systems aren't used to.

The major question, though, is are the character sheets of FCs such as Darth Vader going to have additional purchases so that the character FITS the FC version?

During FATE character creation, there's a # of skills that can be selected via character generation. There's also alternate ways to make veteran characters, etc.

So using Darth Vader in mind:

• Sith Lord
• Former Jedi
• Master Force User
• Commands the Super Star Destroyer
• Pilot
• Parent to 2 major FCs. Ahsoka?
• Has his own legion of Stormtroopers
• Fought in the Clone Wars (Skills, Aspects)
• Fame. Rank. Infamy. Fear?
• Throneworld: Vjun. He has his own throneworld.

I think the challenge that your game may face is in asking themselves "How do we make this FC what the FC really is without writing prepackaged player benefits into the character sheet? Do these FCs get extra benefits that OCs don't in an effort to make them truly the FCs they are?"

EDIT: There's plenty of skills and aspects that would be needed to make Vader. So as a constructive suggestion, this will be where your decision to use FCs may break, and where your players will be watching.

@Lain said in RL Anger:

@Ghost Americans like to bitch about crazy Christian crap because Christianity is the dominant religion in the region (North America) and as a consequence of that their crazies get a lot more leeway than the crazies of any other religion.

It has nothing to do with the content of the religion and everything to do with the one that is dominant and therefore the one that most of us have to tolerate in spite of their insanity.

Agreed and well spoken.

I live a few miles away from a site where a Hindu group petitioned to create a temple. The city council is heavily Mormon, and the empty site of the proposed temple was zoned for religious structures. It was already a part of the city zoning that a temple could be built there.

After the Hindu group had already placed thousands of dollars into getting permits to break ground, the city council held an emergency session and had the proposed site of the temple re-zoned to block it's building.

Right across the street from that site?

A Mormon temple.

ANOTHER FUN FACT: Here in Arizona (which boasts a staggering number of Evangelicals and Mormons in city government) it was approved that Mormon "Seminaries" could be built across the street from public high school (paid for by tax dollars). These Seminaries are attached to the school and were originally designed for Mormon students to meet separately on school grounds from the other students, but it was later written into the school board's code that any student who chose to go to the Seminary instead of their homeroom at the start of the day to attend teenage Mormon gatherings would receive school credits towards their graduation.

@ghost said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

Social dice ARE acceptable to allow for deception, lies, and IC manipulations, and failure to roleplay the results and/or metagame around social failures would be punishable by suspension (up to being removed from the game)

Note:

I -get- that (some) players don't think it's fun to act on incorrect information, their characters being manipulated, or to be moved down a path of making bad decisions because their character was lied to. Some players also think making those bad IC decisions because they failed a manipulation roll is fun!

But the alternative of "oocly lying or withholding information" (which I've been forced to partake in) never ends well, which is...

• I have to OOCly tell everyone what my sneaky player is up to, giving them the playbook to blocking everything I'm trying to do ICly to MAKE MY CHARACTER FAIL SO THAT THEY CAN CATCH THEM IN THE ACT...which fucking sucks because those players rarely see how unfair that is
• Everyone gangs up and OOCly shares that information so that everyone -but- the sneaky character wins
• Everything is boring and scripted and pre-prepared
• Intrigue isn't a thing. Ever.
• You get accused of one of the many go-to Hog Pit key words like "unsafe", "OOCly manipulative", "liar", "sociopath", "omg just like Spider", etc.

I mean...FFS fiction is FILLED with amazing characters who are impossible to write in MUs without outright constantly OOCly lying to other players who refuse to consent to failure. Characters like Gaius Baltar from BSG or Crowley from Supernatural or Margaery Tyrell from Game of Thrones, all of whom weren't technically abusive or rapey in ways that most games would accept, but because of the issue in this topic are near-impossible to play unless you receive notarized consent in triplicate that the other player is okay with being lied to...but then they're most likely to act 100% of the time as if they don't trust your character.

But I do feel this topic could segue into a thread about how to make it so that RP reflects what's on your sheet. I don't think it would be a wasted topic, either.

Min-maxing takes advantage of rolls that people aren't asked for often, who then turn and use those dots towards stats that are intended to be used more often.

I warned my tabletop group, I really did. Once I started enforcing rolls for things like academics and socialize, they started buying dots in it. That learning curve was treacherous, but (again, metagaming) just because you oocly know how to look stuff up on Google doesn't mean that your character knows it.

I may show up and app a Bothan just before the Rebel Alliance starts asking for volunteers to steal the plans for the second Death Star.

Show up. Play. Go out like a bawss. A hero, even.

@WTFE said in RL Anger:

@Lithium said in RL Anger:

@WTFE So that they can gerrymander the counties and take control of everything without having the popular vote

It's not a true democracy, it's technically a republic.

That's the reason that the PTBs want you to register.

WHY ARE YOU REGISTERING!?

The only truly democratic process of our alleged democratic elections are what are called the "Primaries". This is when the two-party system (Democrats and Republicans) field a number of prospective candidates per party as options to vote for.

Each of our 50 states has a state value per party, based on the population of the state. On a calendar, each respective party holds a Democrat or Republican vote that only registered party members can vote in, and they can only vote within their own party. There is no electoral college. Each vote is counted as a vote. 1 citizen? 1 vote.

The political parties have also provided a number of "Superdelegates" per state to influential party members, lobbyists, and historically these superdelegates will not commit their votes until the state has been won, and side with the candidate who won the state. California has 546 superdelegates and a population of 39 million, which comes to about each superdelegate (elite) vote in California being worth over 17,000 citizen votes.

(This should be maddening.)

In an unprecedented move, the Democrat party's superdelegates declared near unanimous support for Hillary Clinton before a single citizen had cast a single vote in the Primaries, placing her within reach of winning before the Primaries had even begun.

By the end of the primaries, this process helps decide who the (Democrat|Republican) nominees will be in the general election.

Which is, clearly, not a corrupted, usurped democratic process leaned towards focusing on the interests of the elite.

Thus concludes your 2 minute lesson as to why our democracy is clearly better than any other of you CLEARLY freedom-lacking nations, because we are the best.

@faraday said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

I agree. I played on a few pure-consent games early on in my MUSH days and I hated it. It was like playing cops and robbers with small children "I shot you!" "No you didn't!"

OMG I've used this exact analogy too. It's spot on.

Laser Tag > "Guns in the yard" because at least that little laser tag vest would make the ruling.

@ortallus said in Social Systems:

@thatguythere said in Social Systems:

@ortallus
I think you are misunderstanding my position. I am not against social skills I am against the idea that they are should only work on NPCs.
And yes I do think if they are an NPC only thing then they are mostly pointless since I would say 75 % of mushing (at least in my experience) has dealt with the interaction between PCs. True not all of it is diced out or need to be but I think that any system that is being used should be used for the majority of situations where mechanical arbitration is needed/desired.

K, I could get into the math here, but I'm not going to get all fancy with it.

tl;dr

If you're spending the majority of your time interacting with PCs as needing mechanical arbitration, you're way too aggressive. Or they are.

If you're spending the majority of your time interacting with NPCs as needing mechanical arbitration, you're a gamer. Congratulations.

Let's not get snippy and hyperbolistic. @ThatGuyThere wasn't saying that 75%+ of PC to PC interaction required dice intervention. Don't put words in their mouth. @ThatGuyThere simply said that 75%+ of their interaction on MUs is with PCs, not NPCs.

Frankly I agree with them.

So there has to better a better resolution system to tasks, including social challenges than "whatever they agree to", because in many cases "whatever they agree to" consists of ONLY what works for them.

Let's be cool here and not put words in people's mouths.

@Faceless There are angels.

I've heard the deep space pilots talk about them. They're the most beautiful creatures in the universe. They live on the moon of Iego, I think.

Edit:
#L337PickupSkills
#InvisibleMissionaryBaby
#ShittyDialogue

@Lain

I'm kinda picturing one side of this potential civil war having military BDUs with corporate sponsorship patches based on the modern age Plutarch who conscripted you.

"SERGEANT Bob McBob, United States Marine Corps, 2nd Ronald McDonald house Batallion as brought to you by Blue Cross Blue Shield, Wal-Mart, and Johnson and Johnson reporting for duty SIR."

Next life I wanna come back as a kangaroo. Fuck this shit.

I wanna be a kangaroo that hops around, gets in fist fights with koalas, and hooks up with a wallaby to cross-breed a wallaroo because, god damn it, I believe in diversity

@Kestrel said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

@Ghost, though? I'm still waiting for receipts. Who have I bullied on these boards?

<groan>

Give it a rest.

Slow news day apparently.

Edit: AH. I see what happened, here. Since the Hog Pit was made available for viewing again Kes went back into the history to grab links and recant previous arguments and try to renew them as current arguments. Not a slow news day, but a lot of free time and an "oh I should have said this <types up OH YEAH! EAT THIS post>

I think you're putting entirely too much work into trying to scry and unveil the super nefarious secret agendas of people chatting on an internet forum on their cell phone in between WWE2K22 YouTube clips.

@Ganymede said in PC vs Player Assumptions:

If you are playing a role, then should your decisions for the character be based entirely from the perspective of the character itself?

This is a matter of personal choice.

I wholly disagree.

If you're running a game and 3 players are using OOC/Player knowledge to solve problems and 3 other players are taking the time to build what their character does or doesnt know, then your game has a problem (or will soon, as the 3 players who are focusing on the PC's perspective begin to feel like the other 3 are metagaming).

You would essentially have 3 players powergaming it and 3 other players taking a slower, more methodical approach.

You absolutely want to try to make sure all players are using similar playbooks to solve IC issues.

This shouldn't be a matter of personal choice but an expectation set and policed by the GM. Preference? Sure, people can have a preference, but dealer calls the game.

@Seraphim73 said in Fires of Hope: A Star Wars Story:

Both Blu and I play on Fires of Hope, and Blu is indeed wiki-staff, but that is her only role on Staff (and she only has a Staffbit so that she can get +requests regarding the wiki), and I have no role at all on Staff.

Good to see you two roleplaying. If I ever break my self exile and log in there, I'll ping you two so you know I'm around.

Is it okay to admit that I find myself oddly missing the Spice Girls lately?

@hobos said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

how easy it is to paint people with unfavorable rumors in a way that is unfair and untrue, just based on who is or is not in the dominant friendship circle.

Pretty much.

Last night I was alerted to that one of my fans took a reference I made to the literary use of Comedian's smiley face button^ in Watchmen as support for a rapist. Yikes. That's how hard some people try to stretch things.

I don't really know what else to say anymore other than that there are people engaging in ACTIVE attempts to belittle, smear, and slander others, and a number of them apparently (mind-bogglingly) do so with the entitlement of being the moral authority. Maybe people should start to pay attention to those who are unwilling to stop this unethical shit.

^ Alan Moore is a fucking genius.

Call me cold or callous if you will, but honestly when I GM I couldn't care less (from a fairness standpoint) about someone's vision of their character or their personal aversion to failure when it comes to what their PCs know vs what they know. I know some players are averse to being told what their PCs know, whether or not it fits into their views of what they want, or whether or not not being successful is fun. The fact remains that as a GM of scenes (or a game) including multiple players, those particular whims are far less important than maintaining a fair, GM-corruption free environment.

Some gamers often like to throw fits about poor dice rolls, not being successful, or not getting want from the GM, and it can be very spoiled angry child behavior. They do it to pressure the GM into giving into their Aisle5 temper tantrum over a candy bar, or else they'll make the experience negative or exhausting. Like children, if you reward it, you legitimize the behavior.

Of course, as a GM I'm sympathetic! Losing doesn't give that addictive brain chemical response, but if the rules of the game are "Your OOC knowledge of the setting or what's in the book do not equate to your character knowing it" or "Failure and success both happen and each should be approached maturely", then PPFFFT people who pull that stuff can walk. If they can prove why their character knows said information without referencing RL googling or their own personal experiences, I may allow it. Regardless, what a player wants for their character" or vision of it, can often mean that they win where others fail. So...nah, don't like that one bit.

But then again, I like to run tabletop games and not "writing clubs with some dice included".

@WTFE said in Looking for a Pennmush coder:

@Ghost said in Looking for a Pennmush coder:

What's creepier is that she's using MY RL picture as HER Facebook photo.

What the fucking fuck

That's your photo?

You married? Happily? If so, do you have a twin sister who isn't?</icky>

Well, I'm personally a mid-30s male who is happily involved, but hang on, I'm going to need a little time to find the right girl on Chatroulette to take a screenshot of and try to pass her off as my sister.