Posts made by Groth

@lordbelh said in Social Conflict via Stats:

@Ganymede I've read and tried to use the Doors system effectively. I've had a lot of fun with the Doors system. I think you're absolutely bonkers for thinking its a decent way to solve PvP social conflicts, because as I've said before it so utterly favors the aggressor that it just doesn't work in any antagonistic scenario. In the hands of someone who doesn't want to play nice and cooperative its made to be abused.

I think the only social system I've seen that can't be brute forced is the one they made for Exalted Third Edition, where compulsions required the support of an equal strength intimacy and upgrading an intimacy required the support of two lower level intimacy, effectively forcing you to go through quite a lot of actions regardless of the number of dice at your command.

I found it rather unwieldy though and it arguably made it excessively hard to impress minor characters.

@Lisse24 said in Social Conflict via Stats:

@Groth Got access to the bank accounts, didn't I?

I mean, it's all what expectations are set by the rules being put forth. If you create a ruleset that is focused on results and everyone knows that they can't dictate feelings, then yes, people might be frustrated, but they should be OK with that.

The problem generally is that people don't roll up Swordsmen to kill people, they do it because they want to be awesome at swording. If you offer them the ability to kill all their enemies through carbon-monoxide poisoning, while having a terrible reputation as a swordsman, that would probably not feel very fulfilling. In the same way I don't think I'd feel very good about my Casanova character if it was talked about as a pushy stalker.

The problem from a game design standpoint is that when you look at the actual situations in which people want to use persuasion, they tend to either be rather short term (Hostage negotiation, wanting to get through a door, offering a bribe etc) or they're about changing someones mind. In a purely results focused system you can support the former however to be useful, it would need to be resolved within a single scene and that's the use-case most of the single-roll social combat systems attempt to fill.

@Ganymede said in Social Conflict via Stats:

Litigants determine the outcome of their cases all the time prior to trial by settlement, regardless of whether their claims and liabilities are consistent with the law.

If the core of every conflict is resolution, I see no reason why the affected parties cannot resolve their conflict as they see fit, provided that outcome does not affect others.

In a MUSH it does affect others. If the local combat monster opts to lose a combat to someone that barely knows which end of the stick is pointy, that'll make people confused. If I send my minions to capture you and my minions choose to lose, that affects me. If you try to seduce my faction leader and my faction leader opts in, that affects me. That's where the Shared part of the MUSH acronym comes in, the characters are supposed to all be within the same shared and consistent universe.

@Ganymede said in Social Conflict via Stats:

This is why I'm confused as to why someone would be okay with Dominate, but not Majesty; it's like they didn't read the damn book.

Some people are fine with their characters actions being controlled but not their feelings. I don't see what's confusing about this. "Dominate can force you to eat shit regardless of how you feel. Majesty can force you to eat shit and like it."

@Lisse24 said in Social Conflict via Stats:

@Groth

A social combat system does not necessarily have to dictate how someone feels.

Example:
Person A wants access to Person B's bank accounts. Without social combat, they're up a creek unless they're have skills in thievery, hacking, whatever OR they're a manipulative RPer.

With my ideal social combat system, Person A decides to Seduce Person B. They succeed at their roles which happen over several scenes and weeks. This doesn't mean that Player B is seduced. Player B does give over access to the bank accounts, but if Player B wants to decide that Player A is coming on really strong and they're a bit afraid of Player A being a stalker and that's why they give over access to their bank accounts. Good on them.

Because it happens slowly, if they also want to arrange an intervention with their PC buddies, because they think Player A is an asshole and they don't want to be mixed up with him, they have time to do so. They can also avoid the player in the future, just like someone might do RL.

So if you were player of A, having succeeded on your dice rolls to seduce character B, and you're then treated like a creepy stalker. You'd be fine with that?

@Ganymede

Generally speaking we expect players to follow the rules of the game they're playing. In trivial cases or cases where the outcome is predictable it makes sense to handwave the rules, however players determining an outcome by themselves that go against the rules are cheating.

@Lisse24 said in Social Conflict via Stats:

Maybe this is why I enjoy playing ghouls and thralls on vampire games. I like being the underdog that has next to nothing going for them (except the one thing if they can figure out how to leverage it), and then seeing them rise above their circumstance. It's a good story!

Losing control and having to fight your way back is a good story. This is why I don't understand the resistance to social combat. No one likes to have a character pulled from them, but allowing a system to mess your character up (without dictating how your character thinks or feels about it) is a really good dynamic to add to a story and something seen in almost every piece of fiction.

Of course, this runs on the assumption that people are on MUs to tell character-driven stories and not just look cool, and evidence tells me that assumption may be mistaken.

The dictation of how your character thinks and feels about it is what this is ultimately about though isn't it? In a robust social system your characters emotions and opinions would need to be codified and open to manipulation the same way your limbs are in physical combat and you'd have to be willing to accept the result of that.

Further to actually be meaningfully robust, this would have to be used for all non-trivial social scenes the way the combat engine has to be brought out for all non-trivial combats in order to be reasonably consistent. So instead of simply posing out a social scene in the local coffee house, you'd now declare each characters purpose and then use their social stats to determine if they develop friendship or let slip an accidental insult or what have you.

This wouldn't necessarily need to be overly cumbersome for individual players as long as it was all coded but it would like combat probably involve atleast one command per pose.

@Ganymede said in Social Conflict via Stats:

@Groth said in Social Conflict via Stats:

I've had a number of people express intense dislike of the discipline Majesty for that reason. Arguing that with Dominate they atleast get to keep control of how their character feels, while Majesty is a profound violation and that kind of OOC backlash was why it was never popular to use.

I'll bet they also don't like Nightmare because it may make them run like a damn fool, which counters some deep-set need to always be cool, calm, and in control. I'll bet they also don't know that you can counter Majesty and Nightmare by Lashing Out, whereas Dominate is a one-shot-crush.

You'd lose that bet since I've never received any complaints about Nightmare. You might not understand why these players feel the way they do and that's fine. The hypothetically solid social game might be a game you'll love and they'll never play and that's fine too. I'm just saying it'll be a very different game from how every MU* I've ever played has been and I doubt I'd enjoy it.

@Ganymede said in Social Conflict via Stats:

@Groth said in Social Conflict via Stats:

The game decides what motivates the character, what their emotional state is, what their reaction is supposed to be. We the players would then merely be the actors playing out the actions given to us by the game system which might be fun but it would be a very different kind of game.

And yet, this is what WoD 2E does through Conditions. It's built into the game. If a vampire uses Majesty to inflict the Charmed Condition on your PC, guess what? You're charmed, or you're breaking the rules.

I've had a number of people express intense dislike of the discipline Majesty for that reason. Arguing that with Dominate they atleast get to keep control of how their character feels, while Majesty is a profound violation and that kind of OOC backlash was why it was never popular to use.

@Arkandel said in Social Conflict via Stats:

@Miss-Demeanor said in Social Conflict via Stats:

And people don't like it when they don't have full autonomy over their character. So you will never get that relatively easy ruleset until the players stop bitching about not being in complete control of their character's choices/actions/etc.

Absolutely. That's why I keep repeating the same thing (so forgive me one more try ) - in order for a social stats system to have a chance of being culturally accepted and actually used, as opposed to being merely forced on people, it must offer something we don't currently have.

In other words it can't just be an addon to the way we already play in scenes. That's a disadvantage then. It's interrupting scenes which already flow a certain way with extra delays for OOC conversations, dice rolls, looking up tables, debating mechanics, etc.

What it must do is make things better than what we are doing now. And not just better because 'whelp, we are using social stats now' - that's the goal, not the means. We must answer the question 'how is this making things more fun than before? convincingly.

This is also why I don't think it'll ever happen.

Consider, why do we roleplay in the first place? I believe most of us enjoy imagining ourselves as someone else, trying to figure out how our character would feel in any given circumstance, how they would react and seeing how they in turn affect other characters.

In a hypothetically robust social system, that would no longer be in our control. The game decides what motivates the character, what their emotional state is, what their reaction is supposed to be. We the players would then merely be the actors playing out the actions given to us by the game system which might be fun but it would be a very different kind of game.

@mushered said in Tracking Alts on Dynamic IPs:

Based on what you all are saying, it seems like ipv6 is one of those 'theoretically impossible' things to track. While I understand how various analysis tools and methods would work fairly well, I can't imagine anyone would be able to invest that kind of time and effort into a game? I guess what I'm wondering is: What is your personal experience? A few people mentioned some games, and what they've done, but what I'm wondering is, did it work for you? Are their issues of cheating, for example, and can it usually be detected?

It's not impossible to track, it's just not generally worth the effort. The lowest effort method to track someone on a dynamic IP is simply tracking the host-name because while that will have quite a lot of false positives, in my experience there's usually only a few people from any given host playing on the same MU* at which point you can do something more laborious with the few remaining connections. At high levels of effort you can log all their activities and develop probabilistic models based on their activity times and word choices, but unless you're actually tracking terrorists, why would you bother?

Generally in my experience, someone trying to play alts against the rules or someone violating a ban tend to make themselves fairly obvious in the ways that they speak and interact with other players and whenever you become suspicious, most MU*'s support flagging characters to have all their commands recorded, allowing you then to quite easily tell if there's actual cheating going on.

I don't think I've ever encountered anyone trying to break a rule against alts (connecting to the same game from two different IP's at once seems like a logistical nightmare for little benefit) and most people who get banned tend to stay away in my experience.

@Alzie said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:

RFK's system was pretty crazy actually. However, someone before me had already typed out literally every stat category/restriction ever on a single object. So it was a simple check to see if you qualified, a simple check to see if it was in the 'this automatically creates a job' category and then process. Later on, we found out I had actually been processing the xp costs wrong (in the player's favor), so that was an amusing revelation. I don't think I ever fixed it after that because I was working on the giant auto territory system and we had enough staff to handle every xp job.

I remember other staff members explicitly requesting the automated xp spends to not be put back in because doing the xp jobs made them feel productive while taking a break from staring into the dark abyss that is plot based jobs.

@ixokai said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:

@Arkandel said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:

I asked Theno once if character data was all in MySQL tables anyway so that we could just make a web interface for CGen. That'd be as ideal as I can think of it, because then we could have a character sheet taken straight out of a WoD book (or whatever) to let players fill out the dots, then magically they'd have the corresponding +sheet in-game. Unfortunately that's not possible with the codebase.

Me, I like wikis, I like the web, but IME there is a significant subset of our player population who do not want to so much as touch anything outside of the game.

So having a web chargen has been something I've thought about from time to time but ultimately a no-go for my priorities.

I'm philosophically on the other side of this. I believe the game should be mainly dedicated to direct in-character actions (ie poses and walking around) while whenever it's feasible to move OOC functionality outside the game that is a good thing since it leads to less spam in the main game window. By moving things like chargen, wikis, rules and forums to a website, you free the game up to be about actually roleplaying.

@Arkandel said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.:

@Groth said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.:

What I am saying is that the standard for what constitutes an offense in the first place must be staff's, and that if a player violates that standard they need to take action on their own accord. No waiting for someone to file a formal complaint or to tell them what happened was too much - it's staff, not the potential victims (I don't like the term but it will do) who must determine just what 'too much' means.

So if someone took things too far, or if there was inappropriate OOC contact, then staff must absolutely get involved. Drama very, very rarely occurs because staff intervened early, it festers when they don't.

I think that even thinking of these things in terms of 'offences' and 'formal complaints' is a trap. What you have is a certain standard of behaviour and OOC atmosphere you want to maintain, and if you detect behaviour that falls short of the standard or appears harmful to the atmosphere, you'll want to talk to the people involved to make sure they're aware that you want them to change their behaviour in ways beneficial to the game.

If a player is uncomfortable with anything about the game, the goal should be for them to be comfortable with making staff aware without that being considered any sort of formal action.

@Arkandel said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.:

Two things though:

1. To someone else it might be enough to ruin their fun completely, or leave the game, or be guilted into playing with me just to shut me up.

2. The only standards regarding "am I a creeper?" should be staff's. Else the creeper bar is all over the place depending on who they ask and their particular tolerances.

It's important to handle these incidents early, either way. Else they fester.

The problem is that the cases where you have one obviously creepy person pestering other people that you can shut down are relatively rare.

The more common situation is that the people played together, one or both of them took things OOC and they didn't work out and now everything is a drama fest and if you simply kicked out everyone making inappropriate ooc contact you'd end up with a playerbase of about 5 people.

@Misadventure said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.:

Assuming any given set of actions has at least one context where it is acceptable or better, who is responsible for making sure those contexts are clear? Who should be teaching these limiters? Is every human innately capable of walking these lines for everyone?

I'm sure we're all familiar with the expression 'It takes a village to raise a child' and what it comes down to is that it's everyone in the communities responsibility to teach what is and isn't appropriate behaviour. People will act in the ways which are condoned by the community they're participating in.

@ixokai said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.

And ignore it more when more things that made them uncomfortable happened. More pages, more comments, ignore. Ignore was how the someone expressed 'no' in this situation.

As @surreality points out. The option of talking with the person in question and explaining why their behaviour isn't ok goes a long way. There's no need to make any threats, those tend to be implicit. If the person still persists in the behaviour after being told it's not ok, then you have all the justification you need for removing them from your game.

Most of the time the 'creeper' isn't aware that their pages are being received so poorly, because noone ever talked to them about it and the conversation will make them chill out. In the cases they don't, it's easy enough to show them the door. There's no need to be particularly hard-ass about it either with talks about hammering or flattering. What's most successful in my experience is just telling them you believe it's better for both them and the game if they'd seek their luck elsewhere.

@mietze said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.:

I really don't think it is much of a stretch to expect that people ask before making sexual or physical contact with someone. Do you really need someone to say don't touch my tits to you every time you meet someone with tits in order to not do it? If you fuck someone on the first date does it give you the expectation that you will fuck everyone on your first date even if they did not give indications they wanted to, and kosher to blame it on "well I went on a date once and we fucked, so I just assumed I got to do that with everyone?" Gimme a break.

In my experience it's rather rare for verbal consent to be given for sexual or physical contact. Usually it's signalled through some form of body language to mixed success. You hold our your hand before a handshake, you hold your arms wide before a hug, you bow before a sparring bout etc.

There are however people arranging events where each and every physical contact has to be verbally consented to and it's kind of neat.
http://www.cuddleparty.com

Before you arrive

Arrive on time.
No drugs or alcohol, period.

After you get there

Pajamas stay on the whole time.
You don’t have to cuddle anyone you don’t want to.
Ask permission and get a verbal yes before touching anyone.
If you’re a yes to a request, say YES. If you’re a no, say NO.
If you’re a maybe, say NO.
You are encouraged to change your mind.
Respect your relationship agreements and communicate with your partner.
Come get the Cuddle Assistant or me if there is a concern, problem, or if you need assistance with ANYTHING.
Tears and laughter are both welcome.
Respect people’s privacy when sharing about Cuddle Parties.
Keep the cuddle space tidy.

Maybe it would be better if the barely twitch legal sex appeal streams had their own category just like gaming talk shows and speed-running rather then bloat up the stream lists of individual games?

@Insomnia said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.:

Twitch IS trying to curb it, at least. No nipples on a live person for anyone! Doesn't matter if it's legal for you to go topless down the street, if you have nipples, you can't show them on screen.

Which has been sending people to Youtube. Only Youtube has a vague no partial nudity rule. Also no profanity, or sexual innuendo as part of the ToS. So in theory people could complain if they are offended by it. And with this new Youtube Heroes thing it could get... internesting.

(Pixilated nipples are okay on Twitch though, so long as they aren't the focus of the game.)

American censorship policies in regards to human bodies has never impressed me. I'd rather the viewers themselves decide what they want to watch.

@Insomnia said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.:

It just makes it harder for women who just want to be gamers. Or... women online really. I'm not knocking sexuality, I'm knocking the women who use that sexuality because all it does is make it okay for other people to treat other women like that.

While I've never spent any non-trivial amount of time watching the boob-window streamers (I mostly watch high level hearthstone or Lirik when he's playing story games) I think it's worthwhile that only part of the Twitch audience is about watching the game being played as such and a significant part is about enjoying the personality.

For instance I've spent many many hours watching Amaz simply because I find him very entertaining and TotalBiscuit regularly scores a very healthy amount of viewers even though noone would accuse him of being good at most of the games he plays.

I don't think there's anything wrong with these ladies producing content that they've found an audience for and I suspect desperate people online would remain just as desperate even if they stopped.

In my experience it's not problematic that creepy, rapey stuff happens on WoD games, because as mentioned it is in theme and most players actually like those things as long as they happen in the right context. Quite a few people even enjoy playing with Rex until he starts taking it OOC.

The problem typically is when a player stops caring about if the other players in the scene are having a good time or not. When characters start getting stalked and their players OOCly harassed, when a player constantly makes the scenes about sex, when antagonism is clearly caused by the rejection of their advances.

As a community we need to ensure that we treat eachother with respect, regardless if the game is consent or non-consent you should try telling stories that others can enjoy. It's usually not hard to find players who are into whatever dark things you'd like to inflict so you should never try to force it upon people who don't seem into it. What can make it a difficult judgement on a non-consent game is that there's no shortage of players who simply want to dodge the consequences of their actions but that is also what the fade to black rule is for.

@Ganymede said in Leadership, Spotlight, and PCs of Staffers:

For example, on Reno, I used my PC as a sacrifice in a scene I ran as staff. I used him as the victim of a plague that was infecting everyone in the city. He thereafter became virtually unplayable, save as an NPC. I clearly didn't gain anything, and neither did the PC; further, pretty much everyone there knew that Oz was the PC I played before becoming staff. However, by your rules, what I did was forbidden, even though the scene was a launching event to try and get some activity going.

On retrospect, I would have done nothing different. But, again, I was a staff member using my PC in a scene I was running. Would you have censured me?

One way to handle such things is to officially convert the Staff PC to an NPC before the plot is run. That way you're perfectly transparent in regards to what is going on.

@lordbelh said in Leadership, Spotlight, and PCs of Staffers:

@surreality Justification scenes for stats generally makes me want to shoot myself. I hate my RP turning into a joyless chore just for some numbers on a sheet. And I know from experience that Staff barely glance at the stuff anyway, and feel the same way. Might as well just handwave it for everybody's benefit. Ultimately I generally tend to just.. not get those stats, and avoid playing concepts where they're essential.

Overall I think justifications do more harm then good. Most of the time the players know what their own characters development is supposed to be like and if anyone tries to build their character in a way that makes no sense, it makes more sense to talk with them directly then force everyone to jump through hoops. I've also found that the players that want to build crazy characters are often more then willing to jump through any hoops you put before them either way.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Leadership, Spotlight, and PCs of Staffers:

My real ? is this: aren't staffers usually chosen from players who have risen to/performed well in leadership positions? The one time I was elevated to staff, that's how it happened. I already played an 'important' character before I was made staff, and while my experience is limited to one big game - in that game, that's how a lot of people were made staff.

So, what's the solution there, if you feel staff should not hold positions of IC power?

Players in leadership positions generally do not want to be staff since they want to play the game. In the end finding qualified staffers who are willing to step aside from IC responsibility is hard, there are no easy solutions. The problem with Staff PC's in position of power is that my experience is that the game tends to revolve around those PC's in rather unhealthy ways and if the game has PvP, there's no expectation you can fairly compete against those PCs.

My biggest complaint about the Evennia platform so far must be the way it silently disconnects you and just swallows any commands you send instead of severing the connection.

It means at any one time you have no way of knowing if you're connected or not without manually sending something to check for response.