Posts made by ixokai

Frankly, all this "is it a rule?" comes off as deeply pedantic reading of text and reactions. There exists between "rules" and stuff that is just fluff, stuff that is guidance and has force of intent though is more flexible.

@lithium said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

I just want social characters to be able to influence people socially, because, that's the point.

I just want everyone to play by the same fucking rules and quit trying to cheat.

"Those who disagrees with me is cheating" is not at all helpful. Your attitude and framing are exactly the problem I have with the other side of the argument.

The only thing that turns me off is the 80's, but it doesn't turn me off so much I wouldn't play. I too would like some non-WOD urban fantasy games.

@Botulism Oops, I somehow missed this was based on a property. Nevermind that complaint! My ignorance is a power in its own right

I know @Botulism posted a 'what do you want out of plots' question, got some feedback, but if you're posting a request for more staff, you gotta sorta tell people: what do you want out of plots, maybe after that feedback or just in general?

I say as someone who might be interested in running certain monster plots after reading the system (I like it)

This is oddly appealing to me. I like the system, the inversion of you don't win against the monsters, you survive the monsters. I like there's a touch of Buffy but without Buffy herself, let alone Willow. And if my character survives, hey, college vampires to survive!

I wish very slightly they didn't name it 'Lovecraft', because that just means something specific. But whatevs. Staff is helpful. chargen is pretty simple. Mechanics are light but not so light that there's just a nod towards mechanics.

Haven't actually RP'd there yet, but making a person was pleasant and the setting is very well fleshed out and staff seems to have thought through things.

@bobotron said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

I understand that they were not designed in that manner, you don't have to keep repeating that point ad nauseum.

Since that's the first time I made that point, I hadn't intended on repeating it.

@bobotron Really, social stats are great... on PVE-focused games. Most of these RPGs were not designed with regular, heavy PVP in mind. They're mostly tabletop games where its assumed nearly everyone sitting around a table are on the same side and the social stats are for the NPCs. So they're balanced in that they are supposed to be effective against the characters without as much detail, nuance or investment.

Not saying the games are designed so that social contests between players NEVER would happen, it just was never the focus in most of them. Its a problem with adapting tabletop RPG's to MUSHes.

I like danger, but it depends on how fatality works on a system. If a single bad roll of the dice determines if I lose a character, I am less inclined to join a scene without being damn sure I can probably survive it. Like, on the 100, @Seraphim73 and @GirlCalledBlu had it set up so when you got KO'd, the next turn if no one else attacked or did something to the guy that got you, the NPC would go in for a kill shot. I liked the balance of this: no single action can end you, but if you're abandoned (or don't have a luck to bring yourself back into the scene) it could be fatal.

I would not mind a roster of support NPCs to help fill things out.

MoTW can get boring after awhile. Plots don't have to be big, super long running, but some cohesion to keep the world going forward is important to me. That said, MoTW is important especially for people who can't commit to schedules well.

Plots in a Box: Yes

Workshops: If needed.

XP/Save Points: As long as there's some way to change and grow over time, or to feel like I'm having an impact on my development, I don't need it to be XP and for all my numbers to get bigger every week.

@surreality said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

@ixokai said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

Social is more nuanced then 'can aim and fire a gun'. Social involves a lot of particulars. I've had more then one woman or utterly incompatible character try to seduce a gay character of mine in the past: I'm not joking, not making euphemisms. I've had a lady roll seduction on my queer ass.

This is always a good example. (Not trying to single you out here.) How differently would you react if, instead of that character trying to get in your pants for info, they sent an NPC (or a PC they convince to do it) to get into your pants for info that's male?

I'd be fine with that, because they would have taken into consideration the nuances of my character-- though my character might be very picky on his 'types'. And if they RP'd seduction horribly, but rolled well, I'd be a little annoyed. But I'd probably go for it if they tried to come up with a reasonable situation that made the roll make sense.

I'm betting hard that there's a much better chance of you being willing to go along with that (which would be the same for most folks, I'd think).

That high social score should inform female seductress 'this isn't going to work due to improper equipment, I need the right tool for this job to get what I want' just like high firearms is going to inform ace sniper that a twig and the word 'bang' isn't going to blow a hole in someone; they also need the right tool for that job.

The problem is rarely purely a matter of agency, it's a matter of how much more agency is removed in the way many people handle social rolls, and have historically handled them.

I agree.

@bobotron said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

But there's tons of 'NON INTIMIDATABLE' or 'OH YOU ARE SO TRUTHFUL BUT I THINK YOU'RE LYING ANWAY'. None of us want Social Stat Dominate, or at least that's how the thread has read to me.

If that's what you're getting, there's a lot of wires crossed, indeed.

IMHO, most of us who do not like mandatory social combat is not that we want "NON INTIMIDATABLE", but that 'Intimidate vs Willpower' (or whatever the contesting stat is), reduces a character's nuance and depth to a fairly silly level. Lots of examples have been given.

The guy who you can't intimidate by threatening his life because he's not afraid to die-- but if you threaten his companion's life, that's different.

You can't encapsulate that kind of character nuance in most stat systems, so it makes PVP Social really silly. Either a character can be intimidated by an angry kitten, or they are nearly impossible to intimidate by anything at all in the universe. There's no importance of context, nuance, and specific character development and growth. Its all or nothing.

On any game I'm on that doesn't have a mandatory social combat rule, then that doesn't mean I will refuse to abide by someone rolling intimidate-- but it's something I'll take into account, but the context and nuances of the situation will be factors in how I write a response. A lady tries to seduce me, it won't work, but maybe I'll find it charming if she rolled well and doesn't press it after the initial gentle rejection. If I can't really die, then I'm not going to be scared by a gun to the head, but once that becomes apparent, I might be very intimidated by a random innocent getting a gun to his head in my place. Maybe my character's Subterfuge 5 is never rolled when lying to old ladies, because all old ladies remind me of my Gran, and I never successfully learned to lie to her.

Dice can be involved, but when all that informs outcomes of social interactions is dice, then you're reducing interesting characters to boring numbers and chance.

I'm just sad that the Dark Ages is NWOD. OWOD Dark Ages was so vastly superior.

Ugh, Evennia just sounds like, 'okay yeah like in a year this game will still not be open'

To state clearly, what bugs me about social combat is its abstracting the meaningful character development I've got going.

If my character is gay as in no really, gay, there exists nothing short of serious drugs he didn't consent to which counts as rape which is getting him to have sex with any lady, no matter how hot, how seductive.

There's no stat for 'Gay'.

Then again, I don't always play gay characters; my main character on the Reach ended up married to @Sunny's character. But he had as one of his absolute core principle points a fanatical loyalty. Where is this represented on his sheet? High willpower? But his willpower was provably weak in tons of other situations. Barely mention pot and he'd smoke out. He'd kill someone without really caring if he thought it'd save a child from harm.

The social nuances of characters are complicated. Maybe your trigger is about the weak, and you'd never go there. Or, maybe you can be easily talked into robbing the rich because those assholes. Sheets don't express any of this.

"Social" touches the key components of the characters we're making, and they can be deep and interesting, but this desire to handwave away their entire concept because Persuasion.... especially Persuasion which is a bland argument with no substance?

It invalidates my character.

I get the whole 'all stats should have weight' argument. I do. I do get it. I just don't care. I don't want to play that game.

@bobotron said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

Let's leave aside 'completely ridiculous argument' because I don't think anyone is going to reasonably argue that 'Hey baby, wanna fuck? +roll' is a valid instigator for Social Conflict.

Let's not.

Because the reason I dislike PVP Social Combat is because I have seen, repeatedly, that. Slightly different words, nothing more substantial then a single pose of a few words and someone rolling a social stat and demanding my character react accordingly.

Its not even infrequent. Maybe its not seduction, maybe its manipulation. You raise completely nonsensical arguments about how people believe these vast conspiracies and crazy things, which are true, but we believe those things because of extremely long, dedicated efforts to convince people of an unreality.

It took Fox News years to convince people that facts weren't facts; and now that they have, they're suffering from not being facts too. But it doesn't happen in just a roll.

You are missing the key point.

If someone wants to back up a convincing argument with a roll, I'm fully willing to take into account that roll, but its not an absolute. If my character agency and his particular nuances are not a factor in outcome, only rolls, in his behavior, then whatever. You can argue all you want, we'll never agree; your game has no interest with me.

Social is more nuanced then 'can aim and fire a gun'. Social involves a lot of particulars. I've had more then one woman or utterly incompatible character try to seduce a gay character of mine in the past: I'm not joking, not making euphemisms. I've had a lady roll seduction on my queer ass.

History matters, in social. How you grew up. The particulars of what makes you angry, not; safe, not. A gun is a really simple thing. You aim it and shoot it and someone else dodges or armor takes it. Comparing Social to Combat is, frankly, daft, in my opinion.

But that doesn't mean social isn't important. Its just not important in some games: particularly, PVP heavy games. I personally prefer strongly to play PVE type games, where social is a thing you target at NPCS, and where even combat is actually rare to target other PCs.

@lithium said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

So in essence, Dice are Dice, they convey what the pose cannot, so why is there such resistance to social dice?

For me, I hate social dice because I've seen them abused too often in the past. Someone posing a completely ridiculous argument and barely even trying to be convincing, but bam, social dice. It completely breaks immersion. This is a text medium; our roleplay is all words on a screen.

I've also seen "Oh, hey, baby, you want some of this?" +roll seduction. The actual RP is so bad and unseductive, the situation is so completely wrong, the person is completely not my character's type, etc.

If someone can't write persuasion persuasively, or write seduction seductively, then I'd rather just go do something else. Mandatory Social PVP Combat on a game just screams 'beware, bad rpers here' to me. I might play there anyways, but I'll have one foot out the door until I am proven otherwise.

Since Demon (the only wod game I'm still into) is on the list, and you are not using the Abomination of Rules, count me as interested.

@saulot When you say CoD, do you mean the first edition, or the new one with a ton of house-rules for those games without the GMC changes, or do you mean some bastardization like The Reach/Fallcoast did?

@the-sands I think you're on the right track as far as setting goes.

Plots (PRP or SRP) can take place via egocasting to whatever place someone wants to run a plot, IMHO. That has the added bonus of balancing the morphs people egocast into with the challenge of the plot. Body hopping on missions is one of the coolest things in Eclipse Phase.

Random idea for a setting thrown at you:

Enclave, a processing locus nestled in an asteroid somewhere -- no one knows where except for Management, for security reasons. Management maintains the simulspace city but its a reputation-based cyberdemocracy, not entirely unlike Titanian Commonwealth, without the Scandinavian socialist parts. Alternative: make it an Extropian colony, and Management is who you signed a contract with to allocate enough processing power to you to run you in the locus.

This might sound limiting at first, because everyone at home is an infomorph, but that's only at the resting state. And what infomorph you take (and how it manifests in the simulspace and what it can do) is important for local jobs.

I agree with the idea that not bothering with spaceships is a good idea; a lot of the theme of Eclipse Phase is about how big space is. Its a setting in space but its not really a setting about space travel.

I was at one time thinking of making an EP game, but got overwhelmed by the setting choices. So much of how the game plays out rests on where in the solar system the game is taking place. In plots, people can egocast around and end up in any of the zones temporarily, but where you set your basecamp sort of defines a lot about the setting for your character.

And they're all so cool.