Posts made by Groth

If someone wanted to create their own heavily political vampire game, we (That is the former staff of RfK) would most likely be willing to help create a more streamlined version of the systems we used and pass on the lessons we've learned. We're not going to create that game ourselves partly because we want to take the opportunity to experience something different and partly because the players would expect it to be a continuation of RfK and we'd rather it be a fresh start.

Most of the systems (Boons, status, influence, feeding, beats etc) were relatively easy to maintain, the system that would have to be redesigned is the system for taking over and managing territory. The problems that became obvious as time went on was partly that time became an unlimited resource as the characters grew in XP (Actions per week should probably not scale), dogpiling became the way to get territory once territory got scarce (Teamwork should be sharply limited) and having every territory disruption handled manually by staff requires way to much work(Something more automated by code would be more manageable).

@Coin said:

I can do all sorts of different types of playing, but I don't want to do highly political vampire in the same game as laissez-faire mage and resources-heavy Hunter and plot-driven werewolf. All games I would play. But not in a MU where they coexisted.

That's not a question of want, those elements are to a non-trivial extent mutually incompatible. If you want to create a game that's more then just a sandbox then you have to decide what your game is about and everything about your game has to work towards that goal.

In highly political vampire, you want resource scarcity, you want enforced social systems, you want mortal politics. Having laissez-faire mage present in that setting would undermine everything because suddenly nothing is actually scarce anymore.

Indeed all incentives can be viewed as punishments for those that do not take them, however taking that pessimist view does in my experience never lead anywhere positive.

The reason to provide players with incentives is to make them more inclined to take actions you feel are desirable but not necessary.

@Misadventure said:

Again, if it's not going to be used, it is serving no purpose save a barrier to play. If the player will get use out of it, or if other players will get use out of it via IC investigation or Player as StoryTeller, great. Otherwise I see no point to it.

No need to convince me about lack of STs etc, I am aware. I am focused on functionality.

That's why they should be an optional incentive so they can serve their actual purpose of helping the player provide more depth to their character.

@Misadventure said:

I do not like staff asking for anything in a BG that they won't use.

Usually in a MU*, there's very few BG's that ever see use by Staff, not because Staff don't want to create more personalized stories but simply because the Staff to Player ratio is often 10:1 or higher and it's infeasible for Staff to pay that much attention to individual characters. Even so it's often worthwhile to ask players to answer questions of that nature since they create deeper more nuanced characters. The best method I've seen so far is to make the questions optional with xp rewards for answers.

Also I'm sorry for derailing this topic so much.

@ThatGuyThere said:

And how fiction characters experience their lives vary greatly with the medium we experience them in.

My point is that characters are made, not born. They generally speaking start as a concept and are fleshed out from there. Very few people make a character by going 'My character was born in a small fishing village in the outskirts of the empire, their father was lost at sea so my character had to learn how to fish so their family could get fed etc etc.' rather they usually go 'I want to play Mage Batman' and go from there.

@ThatGuyThere said:

@Groth
History is what creates a characters mindset and philosophy. Any character or person for that matter is essentially the sum of their past experiences and genetics. And sense fictional characters hove no genetics all they have is the experiences.

As someone that's read a lot of character backstories, I will tell you with great confidence that if someone took 10 random backstories written by players and swapped out all the biographical details like where they were born, when they were born and basic activities and completely replaced them with something else. In 9/10 cases you wouldn't notice the difference because those details did in fact not in any way influence the resulting character, because the character was actually designed in the other order with the mindset being designed first and then some random background fluff is thrown into the CG to make Staff accept it.

Fictional characters do not actually experience their lives in chronological order.

@ThatGuyThere said:

Maybe we are talking about different things but to be a background doesn't go often into a lot of detail just the broad strokes, born this time in x place. A rough description of family life even if just the sentence basically normal. And basic activities since adulthood. To be if you can do that then you really don't have a character just a collection of numbers.

I consider those parts the shittiest things possible to include in the backstory, when I processed characters as staff I usually just skipped over those sections entirely because they tell you nothing.

The interesting parts tend to be.
"Does your character have enemies, who and why?"
"What's the worst things your character has done, does your character regret them, why, why not?
"What's the worst things that has happened to your character?"
"If you have special skills, how did you come to acquire them and how did they change your life?"
"What does your character do for business, what does it do for pleasure?"

What you need to bring a character to life isn't their history, it's their mindset. It's their philosophy, their justifications, their interests and relations.

@ThatGuyThere said:

@Arkandel
I can defiantly see not wanting to do a bg but to me it is an important part of the character as the numbers.
But then I am also that odd GM who requires a background for table top as well., not always written out but always fairly in depth.
And yes i have lost a player or two because of that in the past.

I don't mind answering questions, especially relevant questions that explain the characters strengths and weaknesses. I really detest being asked to weave all those answers into a narrative. I also don't like determining everything about my characters before I start play, I really enjoy inventing new details in their backstory as I go along and get more comfortable with the character.

@JDCorley said:

For the same reason I would not count on staff to tell meaningful stories, I would not require anyone to write a background on a Shadowrun place. Who could even tell if someone was lying about their background anyway? That would only become relevant if someone wanted to make it so, and they'd reveal the lie in RP anyhow.

I've never understood the demand for background stories. Most players don't enjoy writing them, most Staff don't enjoy reading them and at the end of the day, poses are written in a very different style from short stories so they're not a great indicator on the quality of RP. All the relevant information can be handled through a Q/A format that's less painful for both players and staff.

@Denver said:

A second reason is, frankly, to weed out those who don't have enough interest in the game to commit the time to writing. It improves the quality of RP on the grid by making it so the people who are approved are those who want to play here.

Sure, if you don't want new players to join your game, that's one way to go about it.

@Lithium said:

I am coding in a rep/notoriety bit so that people with social characters /can/ influence things more than dealing with just the Johnson and the occasional soft entry or getting better prices through a fixer.

Now for those that actually do want to improve the quality of grid RP, my experience from RfK tells me that reputation/influence systems do absolute wonders for social characters and grid RP in general.

Don't have anonymous contacts of no notability like Denver, instead have a very limited very specific list of NPCs that you can fight over with social skills. This makes access to services a limited resource and the faces/fixers that can provide access to those services become very desirable friends.

@Arkandel said:

Wow, that's a crazy amount of work!

Without wanting to derail the thread, maybe this kind of thing could work better crowd-sourced. Spread out the task of looking at Beast - anonymously - through the populace maybe. Better to have a few more Beast given out when they shouldn't than need so much manpower just to keep up with a never-exhausted pool of requests.

Up until recently, it was deliberately not crowd-sourced as it was one of Shavalyoths most valuable tools in keeping up to date with what was happening IC.

@Pyrephox said:

I dunno - it seemed like they DID work, for a while. Vampire's the most popular game-line, it seems. I suspect one of the less popular ones that had the same amount of care in the systems (GMC Changeling, please GOD, GMC Changeling) could be sustainable for quite a while. Especially if (and this probably isn't a popular idea, but what the hell), there was a game cap at the point where staff felt they no longer could continue to expand.

RfK staff never made decisions based on what they believed would be popular, there were in fact many many requests for us to cap the game. The main reason it wasn't done until very recently was that Shavalyoth didn't feel comfortable with the idea of turning down potentially awesome players from playing in her game, especially when less great players were already present which you can't kick out in any way that's remotely fair or ethical.

Any future project has a loot of good lessons to learn from RfK in regards to keeping a game manageable.

@Ganymede said:

@Coin said:

I would like to see the breakdown of how the beat-sheet system worked, mostly because the way we're doing it on Eldritch is a little hard to control. This isn't to say I want to switch, because I have no idea how it works, but I am asking to see what other people have done because it interests me.

Essentially, you log in reasons for getting a beat. There are categories of reasons: a scene with another PC; a thematic scene; running an event; etc. You also got beats for "votes" from others. All such beats were capped off; for instance, you could only get 7 bears from "votes" every cycle. Each cycle lasted a week.

Every +beatsheet was submitted for review weekly. And it was reviewed personally by Shav, and then Myno after. It was labor-intensive.

The coded +beat system wasn't that labor intensive. Myn's first week was harsh as she didn't know all the commands but used properly it represented an hour or so of work per week. I think it's the best XP system I've experienced so far as it encouraged participation.

@Nukem said:

Huge numbers of changes were made to procedures. Then Shav stepped back, but didn't trust anyone else to run the game. So she would sign on every 4 days and tell everyone they were screwing things up. She half assed providing information to her staffers, which led to constant bailing of staff.

No happy staff = no game.

Add to that, the Prince was idle. So IC was in flux, OOC was in flux = dead game.

Requiem for Kingsmouth has always been a game very tightly tied to Shavalyoths personal philosophies of how a game should be run, it was originally created as a sort of protest to the previous vampire games in which she had been a player. Part of that was to always put player characters ahead of NPC's or staff characters (Her preference was always that staff should have no characters at all). This has always made it hart to find staffers as most of those that like the game really want to play the game.

Requiem for Kingsmouth has also always been a game that has required a very large amount of staff work in order to keep itself running. Many of the changes made in the past 6 months were made in attempts to lower the workload neccesary to keep the game running however recently Shavalyoths RL situation changed and she was no longer capable of spending the vast amount of hours per week on the game she previously had. Other members of staff offered to step up however it became evident that they didn't fully agree with her philosophies and she would rather have RfK remembered as what she wanted it to be rather then watch into something else under other management.

There is discussion on creating a new MU* that won't require quite as much staff hours and those interested can email npc.kingsmouth@gmail.com and will be notified when there's more details.

On the subject of Staff and XP, on RfK all Staff bits as well as NPCs*can receive Squees(Basically a form of +vote) just like any other character on the game and then have them transferred to their playerbit, the actual XP income from those is abysmal, on a good week the most active staff members might get 3-5 beats. However it feels really nice as a member of Staff when you do get Squees because it means someone appreciates the work you put in especially as all +squees must come with some sort of justification that the target gets to read.

I agree with the various persons in this thread that have pointed out that our current policy is not clearly written out on the rules page.
EDIT: We've now updated the rules page, hopefully it's more clear now.

As @Alzie has explained the actual policy is that whenever we need a kindred for purposes of plot our preference is to use abandoned PCs rather then introduce new NPCs as we have a 'No random vampires' policy. Most of the time we do this it's with the permission of the player (As they've moved on to a new character) however we've also done this with characters we've been reasonably sure they're not coming back and @Tempest character was one of those.

There are some misapprehensions in this thread that death is something that happens to all inactive characters and I'd like to clarify it's not however unless you notify staff in some way they're allowed to use your PC for plots*. If you know you want to take a break from the game and you want your character to still be there when you're back, then all you need to do is notify staff and mention that your character is going out of town or some other excuse for IC inactivity.

*Sidenote: When we do use abandoned PCs in plots we prefer to use them in an off-screen fashion as we're not comfortable playing other peoples PCs.

Names can't contain ansi code because they are names and having code in them would be terrible.

@exitformat here=Exits: %r[iter(%0, name(%i0) <[ansi(default(%i0/COLOR,d),alias(%i0))]> - [name(loc(%i0))]%r,,)]

and
&color <exitref>=<whatever color>

Is the way to do it, replace exitformat with whatever you feel like.

You could also instead of color have some sort of type attribute and use a switch in the exitformat to pull out the predetermined colors. Worthwhile types to consider for this game could be Open, Closed, Controlled, Rack, Safe Place, Elysium etc

What I find frustrating about working with aJobs is that it's so hard to maintain context, you'd think that having someone's sheet open, looking at a job and having a conversation in pages wouldn't be an exercise in frustration but it is.

Not to mention when you have several jobs on the same topic (For instance a plot that three different groups of players are working on) you end up having to copy paste the jobs into notepad documents, not ideal.

@Cobaltasaurus
The problem is that a lot of the issues you have with aJobs are things I believeare impossible to fix while still working with MUSHCODE.

For instance take private conversations between staff and a player. On our game all members of staff are Royalty which means they have the SEE_ALL power, this is rather useful when it comes to helping people out with various things however it also means that no matter what sort of locks you put on something, all members of staff can read it by simply get()ing the data directly rather then using +job <x>.

The sensible thing to do I feel is to move the jobs system off the game objects and into the SQL database.

One of the dreams that I've discussed with @Alzie is to take one of the web based ticketing systems like Bugzilla and connect it to the same database as the game. Then players would be able to create and manage their tickets from the game but they'd also be able to get their tickets on their webbrowser/phone etc.

I will admit to being both pedantic and argumentative.

Out of the hooks used by aJobs itself, &HOOK_MAI is the only one that works on the comment that triggered the hook while OTH/CRE/CKI/CKO/APR/DNY/COM/AUT all work on the job itself or the first comment. Knowing this is not necessarily helpful but I think it does explain why the author thought it to be better to use %0/[last(sortby(%va/SORTBY_COMMENTS,lattr(%0/COMMENT_*)))] for MAI rather then pass the comment reference to every hook.

The good news is that if you want to change this behaviour, the only part of the code that currently triggers hooks is &TRIG_ADD so you could just extend &TRIG_ADD to pass the comment reference as a fifth variable and nothing should break.

Quite a few people have expressed in this thread and elsewhere that they'd like to replace aJobs with something else. I believe most of my frustrations with aJobs come from the inherent problem of trying to work with job tickets inside a glorified telnet client so what I'd like to know is, what do you wish aJobs did differently?

Most != All.

I imagine the reason is that for most hooks you don't actually care about the comment.