Posts made by Hexagon

@WTFE What do you prefer? What is Logtalk?

@Kanye-Qwest I played with it some, but it was quite some time ago. I remember getting only so far in before I ran into some error that was sitting in the issue tracker and stopping, waiting for it to get past that. But the web interface was such a beautiful thing.

There are many codebases out there, and I haven't played on all of them. I know the developers and maintainers of some of those codebases are here. I know there are players who have experience with many codebases as well.

What is your favorite code base and what makes it special? What benefits are there to using it that other people might not have thought of?

I'm considering more than just the underlying code (MUX, Penn, Rhost, Evennia, etc). Encompassing soft coded systems are something I'm also interested in. I don't want to exist in a bubble where I only play with the same thing endlessly, never knowing there is a better or different way to do things.​

@Ganymede Some games do allow respecs. Over time some things get used a lot, some don't get used at all. Wanting to play a character that hews more closely to your ideal for them is the only response I can give for that question.

@surreality Yeah, undergoing a massive fundamental code change can eat you alive. Sometimes it makes it hard to remember it's a hobby and not a job.

It looks like a lot of people wouldn't be interested in this, and I'm fine with that. It seems to be the difference in a player who likes that their weapons degrade in System Shock 2 and players who like that they don't have to bother with that in Doom, or the kind of person who installs a life support system in Kerbal Space Program and those who don't.

@Thenomain I've definitely seen games use it and quotation marks work. I know it's doable, I was thinking about graceful. I remembered looking at Rhost and Penn to see how they handled it.

@Thenomain A GUID is pretty much mandatory. I made a very basic version of this for TinyMUX that kept mental stats on the "ego" and physical stats on the "shell" and the sheet took from both. I didn't like my implementation, though, because I was using the shell like an item, held in the inventory. I based it on some old power armor code that just gave a boost to existing stats on the character bit.

@surreality I love that I'm getting a lot of time to discuss this and think about it.

Each dot on a character sheet represents an amount of XP spent with the exception of the fiat dots granted at character creation. If the amount of automatic XP granted is in excess of what is needed to support that, then it becomes immaterial. You will never lose those dots as long as you have the XP to pay their maintenance. Since the "soft cap" of automatically granted XP is arbitrary, to be set by whomever is running the game, that value could be just above chargen (effectively a 0 XP character) or a very powerful character (such as a 500 XP character).

I don't own VtR 2nd Edition, so I had to reference the Reno wiki for XP costs. If they're incorrect, please let me know. It looks like Blood Potency is 5 XP per dot and merits are 1 XP per dot, so luckily there's no equivalency there. If maintenance is 10%, and each XP is 5 beats, one point of merit is 0.5 beats to maintain (its own potential headache, but most MUs seem to have fractional XP gain already) and one point of Blood Potency is 2.5 beats.

Professional Training doesn't explicitly add merits, it gives the benefits of merits according to my reading and I admit that's a subjective difference. Regardless, you didn't "buy" the Contacts as a merit and you wouldn't pay for them that way with maintenance. You're maintaining those benefits by maintaining the merit Professional Training. That might make the coding for the accounting trickier, but that's implementation and not system. The same should be true for things like Mystery Cult Initiation and other group memberships that afford you benefits you didn't buy separately. It definitely wouldn't be fair to pay for it twice. CoD no longer gives an XP break to buying dots of an asset skill, either, but now grants a single beat when you purchase a dot. Could you play jump rope by decaying a stat and purchasing it back up? Sure, but it's not going to benefit you.

If it was viewed as maintaining your current abilities, the way you might keep going to the gym or regularly play trivia or do it every day as a part of your job, is that less egregious than viewing it as tax? I wonder if the connotation is offensive to some people, I mean, who likes paying income tax?

CoD, and other games like D&D or AFMBE or Shadowrun, seem to be designed around particular instances. This is the week where your pack of werewolves saved a town from predatory vampires, or the night you broke into ARES to steal a prototype of the new Predator pistol. They don't award XP for downtime. They award it for accomplishment. MUs, however, seem to award the bulk of their XP for downtime to represent growth as a person through day to day interactions. XP gained for participation is only a percentage of the total instead of the whole. A year long chronicle played twice a month covers a much smaller window of time than a MU that lasts a year, so it has no need to deal with maintenance. You don't have to buy more bullets, you don't have to pay rent for your house, you only do things for your allies if it furthers the story.

Paying maintenance represents all the things you have to do to stay where you are. Does that seem to close to RL? It can. I wouldn't want to do the math myself, at least not beyond a test case or three to prove my coding worked out. So I hear you, I really do. I brought it up here as a question about systems. It's about nitty gritty math and how do we advance and what does it cost us. I think there could be interesting ways to implement it, but that's a conversation for coding I think. Personally, I'd make a command like +stat/lock Computer and it calculates "Oh, you have Computer 5. That is 25 beats. To maintain, you need 2.5 beats" and it adds that value to the top of your sheet as XP Maintenance. You lock your important stuff, you see how much you "owe" and how much you have saved. Would that be a headache to code? Yes, and I'm not suggesting otherwise. This is not a "wouldn't it be cool if" scenario, or hunting for a reason to implement a formidable amount of code.

I do find it interesting that no one has mentioned respecs, because allowing stats to degrade and different ones to be repurchased seems like a rolling respec that doesn't break immersion.

...this was a lot longer than I anticipated. Sorry for the lengthy reply. I appreciate the feedback very much.

@surreality Pretty much my thought but inverted. Show the First and Last, but +glance would give the @alias and shortdesc. I guess it doesn't really matter which is the default. Sadly, I think this probably has repercussions I'm not thinking of.

@Bobotron What concerned me at the time was seeing a John, Johnathan, Jonathan, and Jon all on the same game. Last names give us a chance to differentiate ourselves. I've had problems with internal functions like page, and softcode like +finger, when using them with @names that contain a space. I remember thinking it would be great if they could all have a sort of &last.name and &first.name that together composed the @name, and alternately an @alias because typing the extra characters could be irritating.

@Ganymede Is this not somewhat similar to reducing the auto-gain XP (you're just subtracting it off the front end, before the player gets a chance to pay it later as "tax")? The difference seems to be that a character is stuck with what they've purchased in a system like that, instead of having the opportunity to let their abilities voluntarily degrade because they no longer use them, and spend that XP on increasing something else.

"Tax" may be an ugly word. I have started to think of it as "stat decay" the more we've all talked about this. I'm glad the discussion is changing how I think of it. I came across an instance of this today when discussing ceremonies. There could be an instance where you teach someone a ceremony for an event, they buy it, and they don't need it afterward. If you don't do it, you forget how to use it. When you forget by not maintaining it, your spent XP lowers. You accumulate XP faster at that point and can spend it elsewhere.

I think you're right, though. I think it's trying to complete the same purpose. The difference I'm seeing is that it allows the players some additional agency by choosing what to maintain and what to ignore. I'm unfamiliar with RfK. How did players recompose their characters?

@surreality I was composing a post that addressed maintenance as you posted, but I don't think it quite addressed what you're saying. Wouldn't the 4 dot merit cost exactly the same for the mortal and the vampire? I would be wary about mixing apples and oranges, though I try to address that by suggesting to use the XP costs as given by the books as the basis for maintenance.

The human never has the opportunity to purchase the out of clan discipline, so there's no real conflict there. I prefer playing mortal, though that's immaterial here. I will say that if everyone, regardless of template, approaches the same limit or cap, where one spends the XP becomes very important. Items with high utility tend to cost more. Increasing Dexterity and Athletics will both make you better at football, but increasing Dexterity costs more and reflects that increased cost by increased utility; it can also make you better at using a sword or hiding.

I don't think the system benefits building tall (characters with a few but expensive stats) or wide (characters with many low stats), but it does make building tall and wide difficult. The only real variation seems to be with the innate abilities granted to a supernatural template at character creation. When given characters that approach a limit at 50 XP, this is dramatic. When given characters that approach a limit of 200 XP or 400 XP, isn't this less of an issue?

@Ganymede It might be adequate. CoD seems to be leagues better than nWoD and oWoD with the flat payment per dot, especially when it comes to encouraging drama to gain a beat (such as with rewarding critical failures).

I'm not quite sure how it limits the ability of well-developed PCs to increase traits versus the not-well-developed PCs. Can you elaborate on that? I appreciate the analysis.

By making it based on XP spent, and allowing people not to maintain weak stats they no longer need, they lower their XP spent and accrue XP at a faster rate because they become not-well-developed. Or, they can elect to stay well developed by paying maintenance, which is a fixed percentage of the XP spent. At 10%, you could be very well developed on even a moderate automatic XP allowance.

@Killer-Klown I appreciate the advocatus diaboli approach, it's one I rely on heavily professionally.

1. This is the key design element restated, a "soft cap" that you rise to and fall from on a regular basis as you choose or your automatic income can keep you at the soft cap. It does reward people who gain participation XP (plots, recommendations, or other) with a higher cap, but only if they continue to excel.

2. The majority of people will eventually end up at the cap because the math more or less demands it. You have two curves, an earning curve and a debit curve, and the intersection is that cap. Since this is an arbitrary number, it could be 50 or 500 XP. This is made slightly more difficult if you make preserving Attributes more difficult than Skills by charging extra to preserve those points, but only in calculation. If attributes cost 20 beats per dot and skills cost 10 beats per dot, charging 1 beat per 10 beats spent comes out the same way.
   You make a very good point about extended absences, but consider the costs. If you are on opportunities to participate and earn additional XP, the system encourages people to create more participation events so they can gain XP. Since maintenance is 10% in my example, even 1 XP earned can support 10 XP of expense. It will take a long time to fall to the cap, but there will always be the tendency to approach the cap, from above or below.

3. This is by far my biggest concern. I'm inclined to treat it like a credit check. You pass at the time of purchase, and they don't know you have sufficient income, so you get to keep it as long as you can keep paying for the thing you bought. In this case you drop a point of resolve, you pay to keep martial arts, but you can't increase that because you don't have the resolve necessary to buy it.

@ThatGuyThere The people problem is always going to be the problem, but this is a very cogent way of putting it. I suppose it could also be thought of as XP decay, or altered so that a copy of the initial sheet was always retained and those dots were never imperiled by this, merely advancement. That said, I think most games give out initial XP because the rules are particularly harsh for starting characters. It's an optional mechanic to allow characters to start a a level "appropriate" to the campaign.

What I'm learning is that this method may be suitable mechanically, but it hasn't been tested or applied by any known system out there.

@faraday I think I prefer this approach, having different blocks of drop-in code register their own functions, but it might be good to look at the function list at the end and then tell #1 to register the functions on just those objects once the initial setup is complete.

@Ashen-Shugar Thanks for the input. I want to try an Rhost instance at some point. I seem to recall it handles multi word names well. I was concerned with that at one point, but my interests wander everywhere as I'm not yet completely jaded by being a psychocoder.

@Sunny No, that wasn't my take away. I'm saying that it's not an issue of proposing a solution and looking for a problem to solve with it. It was a concern a year ago, and it's still a concern, and it will likely continue to be a concern in the future as all games will probably want to address it different ways.

I just asked if anyone had any experience with something like it, and then gave an example.

@Thenomain What method was your intended case for Stat Functions Prototype in GMCCG? That was what prompted me to wonder. I had SGP, my own Extended Global Functions, and then your global functions. The #1 case seems like a good one to do after the initial implementation of the core systems.

@Sunny Some of this is in response to thoughts I have had percolating since reading the nWoD 2.0 Experience Analysis from Nov 15. I think you were one of the people discussing the issue there, especially with regards to experience caps. You specifically wanted people who were at the cap to have something to do with their XP. This seems like something to allow just that.