Posts made by Ghost

@surreality All my love, too.

I'm just going by this: game: a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck.

I think you're misunderstanding the holistic point I'm trying to make, so let me recalibrate.

• If we are opening playspaces to support players in writing novels, stories, etc about characters of their own design, where they get to decide what does and doesn't affect their characters (to maintain their enjoyment of the space), then we should come out and say so.
• If a playspace is using WoD or another game system as a system, and the game system is holistically important to task/risk resolution, then it needs to be stated up front that the entirety of PC story direction will not be decided by the player, but at times, by the dice.

There are thousands of ways to resolve a task, ranging from humiliating failure to heroic critical success. I'm NOT saying that death is always on the list. Using TurboTax doesn't include death as a failure option, and I'm not saying that it's not a game unless you can die using TurboTax.

What I'm saying is that if it IS a role playing game, the one that uses the dice and the books, then task resolution may not always go the way the player wants it to.

Philosophically, if all of the characters, per the genre or setting, are expected to be at risk (let's use zombies as an example), and you have twelve players using the system with the dice (because that's what they had to do to make a character sheet, use the dice, system, etc and when they fight zombies they have accepted a certain grade of risk to whether or not they get to finish that character's story how they want OR the character's story ends in being eaten alive) and then another eight players not using dice, but roleplaying fighting through hordes of zombies, having already predetermined the outcome...You're going to end up with a disgruntled Playerbase.

I don't care if death is a super constant option.

I'm just

Just

Just

JUST saying that in terms of risk and how much is game vs how much is telling your story, that the entire player base should be playing the same game and that it's best to be very clear about this up front.

I have a preference. My preference, I feel, keeps things fair and I enjoy the titillation of not knowing whether or not my character will succeed. That's me. That's me. That doesn't have to be everyone, not everyone has to be me.

My earlier examples about zombie games and survival, I feel, require the game aspect or else the setting doesn't read right.

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

And cute, you little hypocrite. Insult everyone else every post, and then object to someone else calling you on it? Classy.

You win. I'm an unintelligent hypocrite who doesn't understand things and gosh darn it, I'm just really stupid, too.

Now stop.

@Sunny saying that I get it, but don't entirely believe it makes for good playspace are two entirely different things. I get the motivation behind it, and think it works very well in some non-dice playspace like superhero MUs where people go in with the expectation of diceless task resolution. I just believe that going through the task of getting a book/PDF to use in generation of a character, or using a system where task failure up to including rules about health levels, hitpoints, and character mortality, are running a weird line when adding in the element of players feeling that the results of those tasks need to fit to their liking. Seriously. Stop it with the trying slow-burn forum tactic of trying to paint me as some rules Nazi.

@faraday Cool beans. I'll pull it back a bit. We've already derailed the ass off of this thread. I would also like to note that I'm not a PKer or that guy that would join a game and scream and bitch on channels about players who have their own viewpoint on how their character works or how they think a story should go. Each game has their own view on how this should work. I'm just trying to say that when you have two camps of players getting together with differing views on whether or not the danger-level of the setting applies actual, quantifiable danger to their characters, then there will be problems. I just needs to be defined up front. That's all. Sync it up.

@Roz Not...Exactly. I'm waxing philosophical about the concept of is it really a dangerous setting if every player decides on a personal level whether or not they choose to ignore that the setting is dangerous at all? In the sense of running or maintaining a fair play space where players are expected to have their characters interact, you inevitably end up with some characters written as if being entirely unafraid of things like laws, death, personal injury, etc because the player seems to understand that there's really only risk when they choose for it to apply to them. Immersion suffers as a result. Sometimes it ends up with different groups of players seemingly playing by two sets of rules. GMs have to judge each case as it comes along. I know some people are very staunch about "this is my character, my story", and the want to write that story is reasonable, but the game element of rpgs is where sheets, dice, task resolution, hitpoints, failure, and death and dying chapters comes in. So not non-consent death, no. I'm saying non-consent other stuff, too, including just how much the setting applies to their characters and whether or not everyone is playing by the same set of rules.

Roleplay is great. I love it. It's fun, but if we also design these games to have that game element, then we should be clear about how it's intended to be used, and how it applies to people's characters whether they consent to things going their way or not.

Not everybody can win. We go through sooooo muuuuch shiiiit on these games with people getting upset because they want it this way when someone wants it to go another way.

I'm. Just. Saying. There's. Dice. For. That.

@Sunny Oh don't get catty at me about the fact that I feel strongly about my viewpoint on this topic. I've said plenty of times (in this thread) that I get the story crowd vs the game crowd. I do see other people's points on this topic, but just that without dice to resolve, up to the point of deciding character death, it sets an uneven playspace.

If you can't express your viewpoints without getting personal about it, then fuck off?

When character death isn't a viable option, then you're playing the rpg with cheat codes. It sets a potential expectation for NPCs, bad guys, sometimes other players, but not for your character. I mean, even from a point of artistic integrity, for the people who prefer their story>game, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

1001 and 1001 now.

Fuck you.

Edit: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T UPVOTE THIS. JESUS.

A fair economy for a game with a large number of players, in an online setting, without dice to determine winners and losers, is a fucking mess. I just don't think it's possible, either.

Sooner or later, on every MU, you're going to come across PlayerA thinking it should go one way and PlayerB thinking it should go another. If it's about story, then the resolution of the scene comes down to PlayerA vs PlayerB, not CharacterA vs CharacterB. It's ultimately an argument about who is right and who maintains creative control.

It takes a very tight, very team-based environment to survive that. This is, IMO, why so many of these games turn into throat-punch festivals. When it's down to deciding what the players want, no one wants a 50/50 coin toss or some staffer who is ultimately going to be called out for potentially playing favorites to be the tie-breaker.

Light systems are great for this, too. Light systems are harder to hack, like FS3, but still allow some measure of IC challenge/conflict resolution to keep things IC and not being hashed out OOCly.

But, then again, we've all seen plenty of examples of players refusing to accept the IC resolutions, even when dice have determined the results. For this hobby to work well, it requires a fair-play understanding that sometimes, CharacterB won the scene.

and we have derailed the fuck out of this thread

EDIT: I am also proud to announce that this is my 1000th post and I have EXACTLY 1000 upvotes.

I AM KILLING IT NOW THAT THEY TOOK AWAY THE DOWNVOTE BUTTON.

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

This is a VERY different statement than, and I'm quoting here:

Then it's not a game.

Games do not have predetermined outcomes. They require skill, tactic, risks, and some luck.

Stories do not require the player to invoke skill, tactic, risk, and luck. They merely require telling. When the winners and losers are predetermined, or decided with a handshake, then it's not a game. It's a story.

Stop scratching and trying to twist things.

When Mike Tyson and his management work out a deal before the prize fight that his opponent will go down after one punch and quietly collect a predetermined dollar amount, it's not a game.

When Mike Tyson has zero goddamned clue whether or not he's going to win or lose, but goes into the ring anyway and hopes for the best, then it's a game.

@Misadventure All Flesh Must Be Eaten has a very brutal firearms combat system, but guns are scary and I somewhat approve of it. One thing that I do love about it, is that it allows you to design your zombies. Is it "one bite equals dead", or "one bite and there's a chance" or "multiple bites and there's still a chance"?

That's one method. When I ran it, tabletop, I would pretty much always have a zombie grab in one turn, then try to bite the next, which usually left ample time for other players - even the player who was grabbed - to wrestle free or save the others before a bite was attempted, and even then, there were save rolls made against the zombie infection.

In the end, after someone was bitten, he/she was kept under observation, and the stamina rolls were made in private to leave the players with a sense of drama until signs of sickness did, or didn't, settle in.

I made ammunition and gas supplies that needed to be tracked. I incorporated conflict resolution when coming across certain bands of other survivors, and other groups of survivors were antagonists. There. Would. Be. Risks. The risks weren't insurmountable, though. Social/leadership skills could be used to sway the opinions of even the worst raiders. It wasn't "they're bad guys, so you're screwed". Everyone has a price, wants, needs, etc. Negotiation was a thing.

I presented certain options with degrees of difficulty and let the players determine whether or not it was worth the risk. If they decided not to run into the zombie-infested Wal-Mart, I gave other opportunities to find food and supplies with lesser difficulty, but those lesser options yielded less bountiful gains.

Most importantly, I kept introducing problems. Sure, they could wall up an area and try to make things comfortable, but just like TWD, I'd keep throwing things that would require them to exit their comfort zone. INSULIN IS LOW. Strangers come by. Zombies approach. Food is needed. The crops aren't growing. Someone comes by begging for help.

If I got the idea that the players were just content to go "No thanks, I'm gonna stay back behind this wall where everything is safe, where I've got a small farm and plenty of security." Then, eventually, storms would come, or a long winter, or and npc would hide a killing bite, and throw a monkey wrench into the whole goddamned thing.

Survival games are about an inability to secure lasting, meaningful resources, and just like TWD, the likelihood of the majority of the starting cast making it to the end of the show is low.

To ensure that the proper sense of risk/reward matched the setting, I would require the use of dice. Sometimes you cannot convince people. Sometime you can't shoot a zombie through the eye from a hundred meters out with a compound bow to save your girlfriend.

The bitch of the survival setting is that you must place yourself at risk to place yourself in a state of well-being, but that state of well-being isn't going to always last forever, so the job of the GM is to keep the genre relevant. Give them survival. Make them fight to survive.

(Sorry about the potential tl;dr)

@surreality Well, yeah, a good GM doesn't go:
"You went to go break up the mugging outside of the bar and he was hiding a sawed-off shotgun in his pocket ROLL INITIATIVE, FUCK YOU YOU DIE."

I always like to approach GMing as finding ways to feed entertainment to the players. Entertainment isn't always this huge degree of risk. Risk ebbs, flows, and doesn't always involve death. One of my favorite playbook options is to avoid a TPK (total party kill) if group combat goes bad and have them wake up in a cell, or in a strange hotel room, or somewhere else. It's like playing with a beach ball. Keep it in the air as much as you can, but let them be prepared for the risks when they decide that it's time to strap up with weapons and take on a hive of vampires. Even then...being captured is an option.

@faraday I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm not. Where my head is at in this discussion is that "people that enjoy the dice/rpg style of risk with xp who view the dice-assisted risk experience to be thrilling because the outcomes are not predetermined or railroaded, up to and including character death" don't necessarily mesh well with "people who want to tell a story and want to control the risk via story intention, but ultimately be in control of the outcome."

You're right, there are equally valid styles of play.

It's just that when you have one population of people who believe that the game is about risk, character sheets, and dice rolls, and another population of people who believe that the game is about what they decide the outcomes to be, then stuff gets awkward.

One crowd won't agree with the "never rolls dice" crowd deserves the rewards.

The other crowd doesn't want their characters or story risked to dice rolls, and doesn't want to be forced to do so to move the story along.

So my point is: Figure how it's going to work going in, make it clear to your players what kind of game it is, and draw in your target audience. Don't leave it vague. Put it in the "news" or "policy" articles. Just...whatever you do, don't let the players figure out what kind of game it is after they've become invested in it.

Edit: And it is probably very obvious, at this point, which style of play I think balances fairness across the playerbase. Dice tend to put everyone on the same, weighable odds. The more free-form approach, which I prefer in certain kinds of settings (but not all), runs a greater degree of risk in terms of dispute/story resolution turning into a nightmare where you need to find out what everyone wants on the pizza, who doesn't get their favorite topping, who does, and who gets stuck eating the crappy salad.

There's talk of "generic sci fi game" on another board that is looking to be promising. @Seraphim73 speaks highly of Star Wars: Fires on Hope. I've heard mention of some other Star Wars, Superhero, and a Galactica game. If you do those genres, those might be a good start.

I wish you the best of luck and may the odds be ever in your favor.

Anyone have any suggestions to @WTFE as to where to find some good roleplay, then?

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

@Ghost Well, sure, when you take an obviously, ludicrously over-the-top speshul snowflake as your baseline metric you come across as reasonable.

I get the sense you're being rude, and this isn't the Hog Pit. We can be constructive without the snark. So let's not do that and get back to the topic at hand.

Where are you roleplaying currently, @WTFE?

@WTFE Nope. Don't do that. I'm speaking specifically about the survival genre, where antibiotics are few and a bite from a zombie turns you into a zombie. The mortality rate on a survival/zombie game doesn't often result in "scraped knees" and in many ways, keeping someone from dying is far, far more difficult than keeping them alive.

When I run games in other genres, say Star Wars, I will allow characters to fail, which can result in all manner of other options. However, if someone decides that their story means that they run off on their own with an X-Wing to take on the whole of the Empire and go solo against an Imperial Star Destroyer, I will advise against it. If they persist, I will let them know it will result in dice. If the dice result in a critical hit to seventy-seven different points of their X-Wing starfighter because that's how the dice went...then to avoid cheesing the game for other players, that dude's making a new character.

That dude just got serial crushed.
Where's he goin?
No where.

I agree with this sentiment. Without occasionally kicking over the sand castles in the sand box and ruining everyone's progress, it's not possible.

In the Walking Dead, they were forced to leave the prison, then Alexandria went from a nice, suburban burg into a tribal war camp.

Maintaining a survivalist feel on a MU is simply not possible while there are players holding the my story attitude. The genre, by definition, requires survival, and survival (as a word) infers that failing to survive is a possibility.

Roleplaying needing to find food to survive is a meaningless effort if you have predetermined that you will find food and everything will be okay until you decide to roleplay a scenario where your character is at risk...but will ultimately be fine in the end.

Then it's not a game.

I don't say this to sound combative, but there are people who approach this hobby like playing a tabletop RPG, using the tabletop RPG systems, but with more fleshed-out roleplaying features, and others who approach this like RP without the G.

It's just usually best for a game to flesh out exactly where it stands on that spectrum.

Personally? I don't seek to kill off characters. I just believe that risk needs to be actual risk, which means the possibility of failure, and when I GM games, I will allow characters to fail, because games that do not do so tend to become snowflake fests. Bear in mind that characters are not required to risk themselves in all settings, or can rely on other characters to mitigate their risks.

One player, or multiple players, having predetermined the outcome of their story (be it predetermined or decided on the fly that "whatever this is doesn't match what I want for my character, so...no.") means that the decisions of other characters may be met with a wall of refusal. ICA then fails to meet ICC, and it's no wonder why so many people butt heads on these games.

Ram A on a log says: "This is my story"
Ram B on a log says: "Correction, this is my story."
They butt heads.
Both rams say "That bitch is a cunt and I'm not roleplaying with them anymore."

@GangOfDolls Oh god, that sucks. EEek.

My space hipster character is named Ezekiel "Megaphone" Wyatt, a level 20 barista who specializes in ancient Earth cassette tape entertainment. He can, at any given time, produce up to ten copies of Sonic Youth, Radiohead, or Pixies cassette tapes. The kicker is that you have to be cool enough to provide your own cassette tape player to use them.

He has thirty cassette tape players, but fuck you, they're vintage.

He has a -5 to all dice rolls to avoid being punched in the face.
He has a +10 beard.

He is the Captain a space freighter named the:
Captain Jane: Also known as the day where people gathered under the sun and witnessed a sonic explosion of such great magnitude that systemic racism was never again seen PART SIX.

Yes. That's the entire ship name, and when he asks for landing clearance on space station, he whiteboy raps the request in the style of De La Soul.

Edit: His preferred war cry is: KMFDM TECHNICALLY ISN'T MUSIC.

@GangOfDolls

For the record, I wasn't critiquing that there WAS yoga, just that as I understood it, the town in No Return became so sheltered at one point that it was getting near Gilmore Girls Star's Hollow levels. I apologize if you felt slighted by the yoga mention. I don't know you, and it wasn't about you. Just about...the setting and stuff.

I'll let the topic get back on track nao

Be careful what you ask for. There have been post-apocalyptic and zombie-themed games that have come and gone. These games were plagued with four major issues that, IMO, eventually caused them to go belly up:

1. PLAYING HOUSE: Since these games tend to run the theme of "everything has gone to shit", the logical direction is to "make things not shit". The result was less a survival scenario and more of a "community building RP sandbox" that eventually resulted in plenty of scheduled yoga lessons and movie nights.

2. I GUESS I'LL SCAVENGE?: Problem two. When everything is shit, you don't have shit, but after 10 or so scenes of picking through houses, gas stations, and Wal-Marts, you end up having shit, and players who have shit are not often keen on losing shit. Refer to problem #1. When they've based their character around being some kind of sheltered post-apocalyptic horse whisperer, having zombies eat their horses has a negative effect on their RP.

3. HIGH DANGER, LOW MORTALITY: Why should we let a setting filled with a severe lack of medical supplies, flesh eating undead, and lack of sanitation impede the survival rate of our characters? On one such game, cancer was diagnosed, operated on, and eventually cured without much electricity, access to imagery machines, important medicine, and proper tools. In this case, the game took place 20 years after the fall of mankind, and the surgery was performed by someone who didn't have such specific training. Unfortunately, the setting, in itself, is a massive Miley Cyrus wrecking ball to the 4th wall. The suspension of disbelief simply will never allow these settings in a MU format, with players having such an avoidance to character death, to make any form of sense.

4. OMG ASSHOLE CHARACTER: The last, is something I've seen first hand. With characters like Negan and the Dixon brothers from Walking Dead being so popular, players inevitably make characters that are designed to be hard to get along with. Ten seconds later comes the roleplay response of "I don't trust him, he shouldn't be here" followed twenty seconds later with "my character wouldn't spend time alone with that person, so I can't RP with her/him". When the logical concept of survival means excluding people who are "edgy" from the survivalist community, due to a logical assumption that dangerous people are bad for survival, then you end up with whole groups of characters excluding people who don't follow the "nice guy/girl, doesn't cause problems" flow. Then, refer to problems 1-3. People get excluded from roleplay, are shunned because of the larger community ideal that argument roleplay isn't fun, and then they're left with...more scavenging scenes.

Not to rain on the parade here, but when it comes to these genres, be very, very careful what you're asking for. Unless the status quos of MY STORY or I DON'T WANT TO LOSE MY CHARACTER loosens up a bit, I wouldn't suggest a survivalist/post-apocalyptic/zombie setting for the community as a whole.