Posts made by Groth

@Pyrephox said:

It seems to work reasonably well for Mind's Eye, and probably a lot better than trying to LARP with a whole bunch of dice in your pocket. I suspect it'd be a good idea to take a look at LARP (not just WoD) mechanics and systems when looking at MU*s, since they have the exact same design problem, although a different set of conditions to accommodate.

When designing RfK, Shavalyoth looked heavily on LARP mechanics and how they could be implemented on MU*. On MU* there are a few aspects that most LARPs don't have to account for that need to be kept in mind.

1. MU* is heavily asynchronous. Each time you log into the game tons of things might have happened while you were asleep, it's extremely difficult to stay up to date with recent events.
2. MU* are constantly running. LARP rules tend to assume a more seasonal/session based format.
3. In MU* there's no problem actually roling dice or using other coded systems.

@Thenomain said:

This is the main reason, I think, that we use RPGs nowadays. We don't have as much in common with people online as we did back in the days when we all went to school together. If we set up an RPG, we instantly have something in common: Hey, I like this RPG too!

So we default to the more popular RPGs that we like. It makes sense, and I have no easy answer for how to overcome this.

One way would be to take the popular RPG and liberally rewrite all the mechanics to better work on MUSH. It's what most of us are effectively doing anyway with all our houserules, but by stopping to pretend we're playing TT all together we could probably create something less of a frankensteins monster.

@Jaunt said:

We post an update, what, once a week? Once every two weeks? It's pretty non-intrusive, too. It just says, "Hey, here's what is going on at OR if you're interested."

On this particular point, I'm actually with @Jaunt. It's very easy to avoid this thread if you don't want to be in it, until today I had actually never opened this thread before because I couldn't care less and it was only until I saw the thread that @Thenomain split off to discuss MUSH philosophy that I got interested in investigating the source.

Yes this thread will show up among your unread threads however you don't have to read all your unread threads, you really don't.

@Apu said:

I think that to a lot of people getting XP is gratifying although I can't say why. Maybe they see it as a reward for all the time they spend on a game or something.

People are literally satisfied by watching a number go up.

http://progressquest.com/

and

http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/

Have both proven this beyond all reasonable doubt.

@Jaunt said:

I'm a rather nice guy.

I think we're done here folks.

@Derp said:

@ThatGuyThere said:

In the seduction example Person A rolls well and say gives Person B a 2 or 3 dice penalty on all roles in the presence of Person A because they get flustered. Still no player is forced to do something they really don't want but Person A has definite advantages in a situation of Person B.

Yep! That's the entire purpose for the Swooning condition. I agree that I think this is what the Conditions system is meant to be used for. Nobody loses control over their character (which is why there is a condition associated with offering an alternative). There are incentives for going along with the dice results, and other incentives/disincentives for going with an alternative approach. It's all narrative cooperation.

.

Self-serve conditions was probably the most widely enjoyed system @Alzie ever coded for us.

@Lithium said:

My experience is vastly different than your own.

I've seen people pk'd and permadeath applied a fair few times.

There are games that are consent based, but MUD's for the most part, you die, you might lose your gear you had on you if you can't get to your corpse, but you just respawn. Nothing permanent about that at all.

EDIT: Also, I think it's fair to say that in today's climate, we're moving towards: Player Death is the END of a story and not conducive to MORE story, which is what most people want. That's why there is 'hoops' on some games to avoid player death. Me, personally, think that death should be a part of the story and character creation should be easy, but I think that's a topic for another thread.

I see no problem with derailing this thread.

Oh, I've watched a lot of characters die. I was actually the first person to PK another character on RFK (All previous character deaths had been suicide by plot). However there are good reasons to have hoops to jump through before character deaths on MUSH regardless of how easy you make the chargen because

1. Everyone wants the end of their character to be a satisfying story. Someone randomly deciding to stab your character to death isn't particularly interesting so most people consider it worthwhile to ensure that deaths are always part of a decent story of some sort.
2. Even disregarding any mechanical parts of chargen, it's still painful to come up with a new concept, name, personality etc and potentially draining to try to build a new set of relationships from scratch. It's not something I'd like to do often atleast.

@Lithium said:

P.S. Your fascination on permadeath... I'm willing to bet there's a TON more games running MUSH that feature permadeath than MUD's.

Well, while every MUSH I've ever been on has been hardcore on the subject of death, that is once you're dead you're dead and you're not coming back through any means, you're often not even allowed to reroll a similar character.

It's also common for MUSHes to make it fairly hard to die. For various reasons we are reluctant to go full non-consent and instead require a number of hoops to be jumped through before someone can actually be killed.

@Insomnia said:

I saw this little video on how to tell if a conspiracy was wackadoo or not recently. Now it doesn't work for everything, but it's pretty good:

"Does X affect the really rich?"

So "Do really rich people die of diseases that they could have been cured of if only Big Pharma had released some super secret cure, but didn't want to because they want to keep the population down?" Yes, yes they do. There is no secret cure.

When it comes to Big Pharma and Big Oil, the conspiracy theorists tend to be half right. In most cases the big companies are not preventing any new development (Every now and then there is a case where they deliberately sit on a patent with no intent on using it, but it's fairly rare and usually not something super groundbreaking) however for obvious reasons they don't spend any of their R&D resources on things that they think would lower their own profitability and they do spend quite a lot of their money on advertising their own products over whatever new developments may come by.

However as especially in energy and medicine, there is a gigantic publicly funded research industry, there is nothing they could actually do to prevent something from being discovered and these companies do spend a lot of R&D resources on improving their own products in various ways.

@Sunny said:

People using the phrase "big pharma". I'm hearing a lot of it right now due to current events, and it drives me nuts. "Big Pharma" is the reason I'm fucking alive right now, thanks.

The silly thing is that the current events don't even involve "Big Pharma", it involves "Small Pharma bought by Hedge Funds and leveraged by complete soulless ass-holes"

@Bobotron said:

@Pyrephox
Which is mostly why I gave up on any type of automation (even the really simple 'have them do the test, tell them who failed, allow them to retest, THEN show the output' so that it doesn't spam the fuck out of everyone) for RPG-based systems; there are waaaaaay too many variables to build an effective resolution code around. You really have to have something custom-built and tailored, or something that's already got all the options notated and easy to input (like D&D), or it won't work at the intended effect of making things easier.

And I wouldn't say combat's the only time people tune out, but that's a separate discussion anyway.

I think anyone interested in how to make tabletop games work well online should really take a close look at Hearthstone and compare it to Magic the Gathering.

The problem with many Tabletop systems are:

1. They're exception based. This allows you to design many cool powers however it also means that it becomes a nightmare to code and keep track of all the exceptions.
2. They assume a lot of back and forth between players. "I cast this spell" "I counterspell." "I counter-spell your counterspell!" etc etc. On TT this works fine but online you can't assume the other player pays attention so it can go several minutes before they actually reply 'No, I don't want to counterspell'.

So when Blizzard designed Hearthstone as a game to be played online rather then tabletop, they made sure:

1. All powers are keyword based and simple.
2. Players can only make decisions on their own turn.

As long as you follow those principles, you should be able to build a MU* system that remains sane.

For the most part I don't think GMC combat would be too hard to program into a MU* as long as you take some liberties. For instance Celerity instead of being declared after your opponents action, would need to be declared before your opponents action effectively becoming the GMC equivalent of a Hearthstone 'secret'.

@Thenomain said:

Someone in some other thread made the very simple statement that to a Musher, role-play is the only thing. This is 100% true, even though it's very obviously not.

I don't feel comfortable about making blanket statements about Mushers. However I think it's reasonable to say that as a rule of thumb, the purpose of a MUSH is roleplaying and everything inside a MUSH is intended to in some fashion facilitate roleplay.

In that sense it's not the presence of automated systems that is important, it's the role of those automated systems that are important. RfK almost had enough automated systems to qualify as an independent computer game but all of that was to create more things to roleplay about. I never played on Firan but from what I'm reading in this thread it seems their systems filled the same purpose.

So far this looks very similar to the descriptions I've read about RPI's. The main distinction seems to be that in MUSHes the premise is that we're all players trying to tell interesting stories together while in RPI's we're meant to be characters living in a shared world. In MUSH OOC communication is encouraged because we're meant to be cooperating to have fun together while in RPI's OOC communication is discouraged because everything is meant to be handled IC through the automated systems.

@Derp said:

I've gotten a ton of mileage out of social dicepools, but when I use them I try to play with the other person and their character. If I want to just railroad them, well, I'll use Dominate or its like.

This is the intent behind how the doors system is written. By design it's very easy to successfully open every door a person might have because the point of the design isn't to make it hard to convince people with social skills, the point is to allow the player and the ST to weave a satisfying story about how the target got convinced.

You try to convince your acquaintance to take care of your cat for a week while you're out of town murdering Mages, the ST tells you that as your acquaintance doesn't like cats much that'll require 3 doors to be opened. So you propose having your character first help them with their groceries (Stamina+Streetwise) then take them to the bar (Presence+Socialize) and finally straight up persuade them (Manipulation+Persuasion). Assuming all the rolls are successful, the acquaintance is convinced to take care of the cat and you've hopefully enjoyed telling a small story about it.

@Pyrephox said:

RfK's system was, sadly, inferior to the actual Doors system, but yeah, it wasn't terrible. It allowed too much to rest on one roll, though, rather than an extended interaction. Which, ironically, made it closer to that "one roll and you love me" thing that people tend to complain about.

In the doors system as written the highest number of possible doors is 9 (Resolve 5, Composure 5, against virtue/vice and aspiration). Any character can at that point choose to make a roll with a -9 penalty and open all the doors in a single roll as long as they score a single success, this isn't too hard to achieve without accounting for powers or merits. At that point your target has to do what you want them to do with no ability to say no.

@Pyrephox said:

If you then succeed, the person either does X for you (and may immediately regret it and wonder, "Oh god, how did I get sucked into that?") or they might choose to say, "I don't think my character would ever agree to do that specific thing, but I would be willing to take this Impressed/Swooning/Leveraged Condition instead, and his guilt about not being able to help you out with this will make him more inclined to go along with you in other circumstances."

That's not part of the GMC/Requiem 2.0 doors system. In 'Offer an Alternative' the victim has to do something for the attacker /and/ get a condition imposed (chosen by the attacker). The doors system as written isn't even a little bit tuned to handle player on player interactions however it could probably be modified to be. However do you really want to keep track of which impression level you have with everyone you interact with?

@Derp said:

Lots of people think this, and I'm really not sure where it comes from. Rolls can be contested, and you still have a limited number of rolls, etc, and modifiers for things can still be assigned.

While the social maneuver rolls can be resisted and contested, by default they're neither. Anyone wanting to use doors between players on MU* would have to come up with their own system of handling it, my proposal would be that the victim gets to make all the decisions the ST would normally make. That is each roll interval the victim gets to present the attacker with at least 3 options for how to open the next door with appropriate die pools.

@Pyrephox said:

People on your own game used them pretty regularly, actually. A couple of them were really good at it. A few were a bit annoying, but most people were pretty reasonable in play.

RfK used a social combat system that I believe Shavalyoth originally found on the OPP forum. The idea behind it was to try to make social combat as painless as possibly by instead having characters be directly convinced, their player would be offered a bribe "If you let your character be convinced, you get all these positive conditions and possibly even a beat!'. One of the best things about nWoD 2.0/GMC is the general philosophy of giving characters beats whenever bad things happen to them, it really does help soften the psychological blow.

Even so it was only ever extensively used by one player even though we would have liked to see it used more, because at the end of the day actually rolling the dice is the only way other players can tell if your character is actually convincing or you're just a good writer.

@Pyrephox said:

It's one of the MOST agency-preserving social systems you can possibly have while still having mechanics for social actions. Which, if you're making people spend XP on social skills and merits for their characters, you NEED to have some sort of social mechanical system. If, on the other hand, you're house ruling that players don't have to spend any points on social skills, merits, or abilities, then sure, people can play social cops and robbers "I shot you!" "No you didn't!" all day, and at least no one's screwed out of a character build.

In practise, social combat systems are almost never used because anyone that uses them will be OOCly shunned. It doesn't matter how powerful you are socially if noone wants to enter the same scene as you.

@Pyrephox said:

Much the same way we would if people started throwing shit fits about not wanting to take damage in combat.

It's a lot easier for most people to go along with.

"Your characters arm just got cut off by the ogres blow, what do you do next?"

then

"Your character has been convinced that they're inlove with the prince, what do you do next?"

The former is an event that happens to your character that you're allowed to react to. In the latter case the reaction is dictated to you, your agency as a player is removed and most players have a fundamental objection to that. I don't think PC vs PC social combat will ever be well received.

@Pyrephox said:

With reputation and status, I feel like one thing we need to do more of is incentive BOTH ends of the scale. Everyone wants to have high rep and status because you /get stuff/ by doing so, and no one wants to be shut out of potential RP or plot because their character has low status or rep. So of course, there's a race for the top, and of course people get upset when their characters lose rep, because now those characters are objectively less effective and connected than before. Which means less RP for the PC.

But I think if we offered appropriate incentives for having both high OR low status/rep, then people would be more willing to take the hits. Like, there should definitely be events tied to and benefits for having a low or negative rep, to make it fun for those players to play that, and give some compensation for not having the bennies of high status and rep. Whether it's having targeted RP where enemy factions try to recruit you, or events where there's a Status ceiling of people allowed to join (the police commissioner should not be investigating the gritty street crime), or high risk/high reward plots that require a bit of "plausible deniability".

Yes. I think a reputation system where there are appropriate benefits for being low rep would be really cool.

@Bobotron said:

@Gingerlily
The Status system in MET: Vampire the Masquerade is built around social play and rewarding you for making good on what you do, and punishing you for fucking up.

You get lauded by positive Status, which gives you a variety of social (and sometimes mechanical) benefits, like allowing you to talk to your superiors without permission, to offset an offense when you fuck up, and a number of things.

You bet punished by Negative Status when you fuck up and can't offset it. Most Negative Status imposes some type of social punishment, though you can go so far as to get ejected from your sect for fucking up too much. There's also some interesting political play with some Negative Status, where people whoa re backstabbing vampire bitches to people with those specific Negative Status getting a special Positive Status for insulting and belittling the fuckup.

Overall it works really well for play in my experience, and I've been using in in live-play with a 30 or so player game for over 2 years. You'd need to tweak it to allow every joe to give positive/negative status a little though, since ia lot of it relies on people in positions of power giving out the status (harpies, prince, seneschal, elders, etc.)). You can look at it here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1t3t1c455rcnlcw/METVtM Status.pdf?dl=0

RfK tried to use the MET status system as written and it worked 'ok' while the game still had a relatively small population but as the game grew it became increasingly impossible for the Prince/Harpies to actually keep track of what was going on and properly award/deduct status.

What I'd like to experiment with is a system where every character on the game is allowed to make one positive vote and one negative vote each time interval, these would be public and optional. In theory this could create an effective crowd-sourced harpy that would help make everyone in the game aware of what's been happening.

@Thenomain said:

It was horribly abused and people would stir up a storm whenever they were down-voted, so rank ended up meaning nothing.

The biggest problem with the Harpies/Prince besides the difficulty in keeping track of recent events, is that their players would get OOCly hassled over their decisions. Every month we had to remind players that any issues they have with Prince/Harpy decisions is an IC issue that should be handled by confronting those characters IC. In the end we decided to implement a 1 beat fine for any OOC complaints about status.

The core of the issue seems to be that many players become emotionally invested in their characters success and treat any failure to succeed on the behalf of their character as a failure of their own, rather then a new avenue of RP to explore.

Another related issue is that it's hard to make reputation meaningful on the scene level. It's not uncommon for characters to treat the most respected person in the city like street trash, either because they're not OOCly aware of the status of that person or because they just don't like their own characters reaction being decided by a number, it's similar to how everyone just ignores everyone with Striking Looks.

@Arkandel said:

To make matters much worse, oldbies started risking their characters less and less - after all all that time investment could be wiped clean if dice fell particularly bad against them. I had players actually page to tell me they wanted to but couldn't come to PrPs if there was risk because they hated the idea of starting from nearly nothing.

While I'm not a fan of alts because alts dilute the game, making it harder to find active characters and making less players take more Staff attention, I've always been a fan of allowing people rerolls/respecs/death awards because it's just such a terrible feeling when you're 'trapped' in your character because it has too much investment. RfK awarded 50% for a 'good death' which most people seemed to be fine with, you could probably go higher without any terrible effect.

What I want to do here is encourage activity (so newbies and oldbies aren't equalized, and not certainly not indiscriminately) but giving new characters a fair chance to catch up while allowing alts to be fairly good at whatever they'll do in order to perhaps see inactive spheres resurge somewhat easier.

In your proposed system however, you have no catchup mechanism. The new players will never actually catch up to the older characters, you're just raising the baseline each week. 50xp baseline + 100xp earned is still 100xp ahead of 50xp baseline + 0xp earned. If you want the new players to actually catch up, you need something like TR/FC uses where the weekly XP is calculated based on the highest xp character in the game.

I used to play on an Exalted game where everyone below 500xp gained 4xp per week and then 1xp per 100xp difference between the character and the highest xp character. Above 500xp you earned 2xp per week and above 700 0xp per week iirc excluding rewards from scenes etc.

Disregarding my objections to the goal of your system. I think it's worthwhile to question your premise.

What is the reason that you want to lower the gap between new players and dinosaurs?

In my experience, unless you're playing a level based game such as D&D, the problem with dinosaurs is not that they're more powerful then everyone else. The problem with dinosaurs in open progression systems like nWoD/oWoD is that the dinosaurs tend to break the game in various ways, either by being hypercompetent at something or just having absolutely no weaknesses making it extremely hard to involve them in any sort of interesting plot.

If that is the case, then raising the baseline just means that you're making everyone into a dinosaur and with all the problems that entail. The only way to address that problem is by lowering the ceiling, i.e. some variation of capping.

As long as the dinosaur isn't actually breaking the plots through omni/hyper competence, I've never had any actual problems with xp disparity as the new characters will always be better then the dinosaur at something.