Best posts made by kitteh

Everything being automated is really the only way I can even handle doing combat on the big scale that these games tend to. Heck, even smaller scale stuff can be a real headache, depending on the level of complexity of the system (ie WoD things where you have 10 different merits and powers from 8 books and all of it's done by hand). So I love just being able to enter one command (at most 2!), wait on the turn to run, and spend the rest of the time reading poses and doing mine with no other pressure.

I've seen FS3 get knocked for the 'generic' style of the system and games but I think it's great if you just want a little bit of system context and then are mostly focused on the RP. And I suspect a GM who wanted to finesse it more could do so with a smaller group and taking the time to do other rolls between automated rounds, apply modifiers per the other thread, etc.

@faceless said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Back to the issues of dinosaurs: Arx features something that some folks don't notice(I know I didn't when it first happened to me) and that is that Prestige does begin to deteriorate after reaching a certain point. So if you get to be the biggest, shiniest Prestige-bearer and then decide to just sit back, relax, and think you'll be the Kingliest or Queenliest of All Kings and Queens? Well, that's going to slowly erode away the longer you're not working to offset that deterioration. You want to offset it? You have to do things, probably involving others, generally create/generate RP, and ultimately participate in the game.

This is largely what I'd look for, in terms of the future design for this system vs. how its current very Firan-eqsue version. Regardless of whether they do a reset, they need a system that isn't just static accumulation, or you're guaranteed to end up with an unremarkable list of dinos who are millions of points ahead and discourage a new player from even interacting with the system (and I say that as someone who will arguably be much more dino than new player by the time any such system comes around). If it has decay now, well... it doesn't seem significant, considering the top list is filled with several characters that haven't been actively played recently, are dead, etc.

So they need to think about that, and maybe design it so those points are being spent as much as earned.

@icanbeyourmuse

Fwiw, that's generally all that's required for me to pick someone out in a scene and pose at or engage them. Just seeing my name in someone else's pose is a basic flag for 'RP maybeeeee?'

There are... plenty of times and scenarios where it can be hard to get even that. Especially on a bigger game like Arx. So I'm not going to be picky about how someone signals interest. As long as they display 'hey I am RPing here and I see you RPing and acknowledge your character's existence' that's... probably enough?

At least to pose back. At a point, the RP itself requires more significant engagement, but that's not usually hard if the person isn't a potato.

@roz I realize plenty of stuff happened with the Nox long before I showed up, and I didn't mean to come off as negative toward that plotline (if anything, I mentioned it because I wanted to be fair / didn't want to short change staff on credit for it). Certainly it's the thing I've had some of the most fun with on the game, with my favorite NPC, even coming into it at the tail end.

Taking it as the gold standard of non-stabby offerings, however... well, it's exactly that. It's the high point, and things go downhill (or simply grow more scarce, there were what... 5 of us there for the final Nox thing?) from there. So really, I'd love to see more plots of that kind. For instance, we have a bunch of far off kingdoms menacing us... it would be cool if not all of them were not pure evilocracies and there were major opportunities to treat with them diplomatically over prolonged periods, both inviting and sending emissaries, working on cultural exchanges, building alliances, etc.

Maybe this is precisely what staff has planned, in which case great. But it doesn't hurt to ask

@Ghost said in Lords and Ladies Game:

and I'm fucking NO ONE, but I'm supposed to be fucking WHOEVER MY DAD TELLS ME TO.

Don't judge my fetish.

I think one of the biggest things is just the inadequacy of the systems we use. People compare 'I shoot you!' and 'I lie to you', but these are games that devote dozens if not hundreds of pages to combat and often barely a few if any to social mechanisms. Including social skills in a list means nothing on its own. And even the tacked-on 'social combat' systems are obvious for what they are.

And this is a fundamental problem. It affects perception, buy in and legitimacy. Even if we say we honor both, is it reasonable to grant equal agency to the person who's spent 20 xp maxing one social skill to the person who's spent 500xp on twelve different combat skills, stats, merits and powers? And whether it is or not, people rarely do.

So I'm kind of with @Thenomain (and curious about that other system!). I don't see how the situation is salvageable when we're stuck trying to jury rig combat-is-king games with hundreds or thousands of xp worth of character growth space for murdering and maybe a couple dozen for 'social stuff.' People will play a wargame like a wargame.

I'm all about this, especially the setting!

On the 'what can we play' angle I also want to bring up something that was a problem the first time around and wonder how it will be handled. Namely non-knights, whether commoners or non-militant nobles or really anything else.

The underlying system often assumed these people were NPCs (make some winter rolls for your wife!) so it'd be good to know if and how the game will give them a proper role.

@Arkandel

Obviously the precise correlation of certain behaviors is going to vary a huge, huge amount. Some people are trolls online just to be trolls, or because the anonymity encourages the behavior. But the other side of your coin, and I brought this up in another thread, is the scary and very uncomfortable truth that: there are actual rapists in our hobby. Statistically, there just are.

One set of antisocial behavior might genuinely be '4 teh lulz' but another might be the person's actual lack of respect for other human beings showing through.

So in the case that (presumably) encouraged this post? Yeah, I'd be equally or even more cautious of a person who acts like this online in an RL context. Because "other peoples opinions don't matter" is a really red-flag kind of mindset, as is going 0-60 with "the ladiez are always complainin about the rape!" Same thing with all the infamous stalker/creeper/etc models. There are some cases that get discussed here that to me, have every hallmark of RL predatory behavior (from the control tactics and gaslighting to repeat targeting of prior victims, etc). I have trouble thinking that's a coincidence.

I also ran into this issue back when I looked into apping here, and ultimately just passed the game up.

Limiting power levels is one thing, limiting power levels and then having exceptions where a special few are designated as 'the most powerful' is not great. When many games manage to be chill about this and not really care if you don't try and run over anyone else's fun, it seems telling of certain negative motivations when staff is visibly concerned about setting particular characters explicitly on top.

@surreality It doesn't need to autosubmit, but for example something like what BSGU or some of the comic games have that can at least spit back out the scene without need for further cleaning. I'm aware you can do some of this in a client, but there's inevitably stuff it misses.

To comment on the other part of the convo, I don't think I'd typically want to post personal, 1 on 1, private bedroom thrust by thrust TS and I agree it seems weird to me, not to put down anyone who wants to do it. But for things like:

@surreality said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

there are some areas of the grid that WILL be labeled NC17 by default

It makes more sense, and I highly approve of this. I've played my share of brothel workers etc, and at locations like this it makes sense that you'll have some degree of public sexuality. I'm thinking of any scene at the brothel in Black Sails, for instance. There's basically never a shot that doesn't have a boob in it, and people may be in laps, but people probably aren't straight-up fucking on the tables... most of the time.

@surreality

Yeah, I like playing them because usually they have an above-average draw for people to actually come RP at the location, which is hurdle #1 in the hobby, and the locations tend to be a little more colorful than Ye Olde Starbucks. So even the random filler RP is a bit less generic. The standard RL comparison applies: I spend lots of time in bars/cafes, but at brothels? Not so much! (I'm such a prude, I know)

Plus you do tend to get up to all kinds of stuff, much like the ones in the show are core rumormongers, etc. Just because people are willing to walk up to you and RP is a big icebreaker and it gets you in on things.

And even people coming looking for TS usually have the sense to do what I'd hesistantly call... foreplay RP? IE, 'I hand you money, you give me secks' doesn't tend to get you much effort in return, but if people hang out at the place and establish good RP with the characters (like they would anywhere else) the chance of naughty typing where I give a shit highly improves. And I think people know this. So whether horniness is the motivator or not, they're still good draws.

So uh, pre-sign me up for a spot at one of those places, finned or not, probably

Collected thoughts:

Tools are great, and if you can give people more tools, why not!

However, they will never solve social problems 100%. Never, ever.

Thus, as a player you have to reasonably watch yourself and this will mean probably avoiding some games merely due to their general rating/theme. The kidnapping vs. Changelings thing is a preeeetty good example, but also Vampires vs. autonomy issues and lots of other things.

STers should also do their reasonable best not to surprise people with extreme shit. Like I don't know where 'surprise, RAPE!' is ever really going to be a great plot inclusion, when it really is a surprise (vs. a possible consequence among others, for example).

Also someone made the point of general, open, whoever wants to hop in scenes vs. running longer plots for people you know. This is a good distinction and if anything, STs should trend more cautious the more shallow, wide-open, etc the plot is. If you have10 random people to show up and then declare 'baby murder funtime!' the chances of someone being upset are much higher.

@Arkandel

A normal complaint system is high effort (ie reasons, logs, evidence) requires almost wholly manual processing, and expects to get immediate investigation/results. A social downvote system, is low effort (you just hit a button, maybe with a short description), mostly mechanical, and promises no immediate action but rather the eventuality of bad actors accumulating enough that they can be considered guilty by consensus.

They both have advantages, but the disadvantage of the second is that you don't get to really control what it's used for. You may not mean it to be for conflicting opinions or general not-liking, but what guarantees its not used that way? (assuming it is in fact a low-effort mostly mechanical system)

Again, it sounds like you're just trying to encode basic social behavior (ostracism) which should happen anyway if people are visible bad actors. Gamifying it only serves to make it easier to cheat and abuse for the people who want to do that (ie, a clique going around spreading nasty rumors is somewhat obvious, a clique coordinating mass downvotes is not).

I would imagine the bad name comes more from the out-of-the-box nature of the codebase, which encourages quick, sometimes low quality / protest games using it. Which obviously says nothing about FS3, but it causes people to associate those games with it, and then maybe look for anything to poke at?

I'm probably weird in that I don't particularly care about the dice-feel, and I like the idea behind @faraday's chart above, where you look at what you want and make the system conform rather than the opposite way around.

It always seems so weird to do a lot of the stuff we do on MUs, using systems that are designed for easy math at the game table, when we're playing on supercomputers that can calculate out all the ridiculous complexity, extra steps, etc that we could ever want! Stuff like hit locations, armor systems, etc are all just eyes glaze over if you have to do them step by step yourself, but if the magic box can do them for you, you get all the extra detail with none of the effort.

This is my general experience with the sphere on multisphere games, yep. I think it's basically the one game that should be put in a ghetto and never allowed to play with others.

The others may have disparate power levels and create various kinds of twinkery, but Mages are gods in a game of mortals. It's an interesting theme on its own, but in mixed play its not fun for anyone but them.

I'm excited for this place, too!

The system is really light, and it feels like a perfect alternative to using mortal-only WoD and still ending up with a ton of min-maxing to deal with. CG is super fast. It really just lets you focus on the dumb movie tropes etc.

Last night's scene was a good creepy intro and now we've all had bad dreams. Oh no!

I'm sure someone could investigate this quite efficiently on Shang.

For science.

@faraday

Oh, I mean I acknowledge that's just my personal feeling on it, but to me the 12 thing was just far too daunting, largely from a chargen perspective. I'd always run into (and I'm facing it right now) the standard situation where you have a bunch of 6s, and the game lets you have X (often 3, maybe this is your default?) skills at 7+. So you bump your big focus to 7. But you have some points left. Do you go to 8, or 9? Well, you probably should, since if you don't you'll never get there in game, right? But then you have a bunch of 6s and then one 9, and it looks really skewed on your sheet (like a middle finger sticking up - that's not metaphorical, its what it looks like when you've got a bunch of 6s and then one 9 sticking out 3-dots higher)! And that makes me feel like I'm twinking, having this one skill so skewed and higher than the others. So maybe I lower it.

And then everyone has 12s and I'm useless.

Obviously, you've moved beyond this so no reason to harp, but... yeah. I'm not exaggerating when I say it would give me anxiety

Re: people wanting more differentiation, I only think that makes sense in a system where there's more progress. If you have both vast skill gaps and almost no advancement, you're going to end up with PCs who basically can't be in the same room with each other without breaking things. Permanently.

@surreality Haha, because obviously between 12 and 19 is not in any way, like, the time when you absolutely most need that bit of information, or anything.