Best posts made by kitteh

@Faraday Sure, maybe? I don't know the dice mechanics internally. Maybe it's perception. But also for things that aren't combat skills (like say, my standard L&L trope of taking fairly high Politics/Intrigue/whatever skill they make for that), it's fairly often opposed rolls with other PCs so the differences might be a bit more pronounced (as they seemed to be in your chart for the current system).

Annnnnnnd if you go back to my reasoning, you'll notice its not even necessarily 9 vs 12, but often something like 7 vs 12, just because its hard to grasp how much you should really take and people who are inherently NOT trying to min-max will often hedge toward caution, and then get steamrolled. Basically I dislike the huge range because it means a lot more guesswork at figuring out what number = 'really good but not twinky good'. That's really what it boils down to. The big scale makes that number hard to gauge, whereas in a standard WoD-esque system the answer is almost always 4

@Rook said in State of Things:

I have come to this one conclusion about racism (from this one angle) from knowing a lot of police. Police officers of both sexes, of at least six races, and all of the ones that I'm thinking of are very against the habitual criminals. I don't call them racist, because these same individuals respect upstanding citizens, they segment them differently than they do the criminal element, the ones that they've booked and jailed time and time again. That is something that compounds the problem is personal experience with some of the perpetrators of the crimes that they are investigating and/or called to. Each one of these racially diverse cops uses the 'N' word, and what might surprise you is that it isn't just against the black segment of their 'clientele'. The word (at least amongst that very small segment that I know) is applied to anyone who is (heavily simplified) hell-bent on a life of crime because they don't want to pursue any other life.

I have a friend who is a cop in a relatively poor part of a large city. He's about my age and still at the point in his career where he's regularly on the street. His job is not easy and is often dangerous, and additionally he faces a lot of targeted harassment for being a member of law enforcement (including things like vandalism at his home etc). This has, not surprisingly, increased in the last several years with the prevalence of #blacklivesmatter and related policing practice debate in local government.

All of that said, he is, or has become, not surprisingly... very opinionated on these issues and the people behind them, in ways that sometimes make me uncomfortable. Like you say, I would in no way think of him as inherently racist (his wife is hispanic, and I've been invited to local cookouts and things that are pretty diverse affairs), but some of the ways he refers to the people on the 'other side' is pretty dehumanizing. I've never heard the 'N-word for anyone' thing, but to say he thinks of and refers to these people as less than human would not be a stretch.

It's not an easy thing to deconstruct, because I feel both sympathy for his position while also fearing what his attitude promotes.

@faraday Which we're very thankful for

@Ghost said in RL Anger:

@kitteh what resolution are you actively seeking in this situation?

I'm not being snide when I ask this.

I'm not seeking a resolution, because I think, knowing what this forum is, that would be pretty naive. I actually think it's admirable (and I didn't say this earlier, and I should have) that to some small degree you've apologized/stepped back some of what you said. It demonstrates a level of maturity on your part despite people characterizing you as constantly tone-deaf. But I'm pretty sure that's a rare outcome.

This is going to drag on forever and I think the best thing that both yourself and @surreality can do at this point is to either take it to private messages, or respectfully, without rude language, state what your preference for resolution is.

If @saosmash and I, or @shangexile and @surreality can find a decent resolution that puts the knives away, so can you.

I had dropped it. She pinged me twice in the intervening time, and it doesn't take a genius to see she was looking to restart the fight. And sure, I am taking the bait.

But I'm not obligated to stand around and have mug slung at me and then take the higher stance of saying nothing just because I wasn't on at the literal exact hour she was posting that shit. This is another weird thing about her arguments/attacks: she has an odd conception of how time works on this not in-real-time communication medium. In the other thread she complained it was going on 'for pages' (when that was just one evening of people talking) and here she's acting like I'm dragging up things from the past when she insulted me five hours ago after I'd left her alone for five days.

Anyway, no one gets the authority of the final word, especially when the final word is nasty. I will stop at the point where there are no factual arguments left to make or, like most people, I get bored or RL calls me back. If she's capable of a peaceful resolution, that's fine, and despite all of this I still maintain that if she has issues with ongoing harassment on other games I am very happy to focus on those problems but mostly it seems like she wants to fight. You don't randomly @ people to say nasty shit about them for peaceful purposes.

I restarted on the game now after my first kind of failed attempt (discussed elsewhere with the hooker drama), and I've found the experience pretty enjoyable this time around. While it's impossible to say if she's representative or if I just got lucky, my character who I picked fairly sight unseen has turned out to come with major plot hooks. I'm not sure if it's always clear how to pursue them, but a lot of that is me being a noob I'm sure, and I'm stumbling along!

There is some RP that's hard to access, and it's easy to be overlooked in scenes as a newbie unless you have a close relation there to introduce you around, but to a degree that's just normal social stuff. The @randomscene for newbies is a nice incentive, though it wears off fast and mostly leads to people drive-by posing you those first few weeks before forgetting you. Still, it's something.

I will say that watching people talk about XP on the family channels etc, it seems like the game is already totally off the rails dinosaur wise. People talk about spending 1k+ xp for a new stat, plus everyone also has all these bodyguards, animals, many of which I've heard discussed having stats that would easily eclipse starter PCs. It's not much of an issue for me as a non-combative, although I did spectacularly fail the first thing I was asked to roll, and it felt kind of crappy being hit with that investigating my main plot-hook. You'd think they might have rolled stuff my character had more than 4 dice in, when it was clearly the first thing she'd do as a new character with baby stats. I'm trying to bring them up and I've raked in a good bit of xp, but for non-combat, you run into the problem of not knowing WHAT skills will be relevant or even asked for, and their anti jack-of-all trades things could easily punish you there.

Er, that was long, but I want to stress that my experience has been far more positive more than not. The sad fact is it's often easier to talk about negatives, because the positives - well, they're great? What else do you say?

@Kanye-Qwest Yeah, that's mostly the idea.

I mean, to pivot a little to the purely positive side, there is a lot to be said for how it being a 'lot' of game is also a great thing. Like the other night, with your 'I don't want to post this now but OK I'm gonna' 'OH SHIT!!!' emit, as huge as that was, and some of the other emits have been, they're not even on my radar because I have OTHER big things to be thinking about. That there can actually be multiple BIG THINGS at once, that you can not have an in to one and have ins to another - that's downright amazing.

I came in with seemingly huge-ass plot hooks right on my sheet, and that's something that totally awesome. For as much as I sometimes feel totally lost I've found my way into things somewhat (I think!), and I'm hopeful. Unlike on Firan, I have trust, so I'm willing to play through the overwhelming feelings and see where it gets me

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

Except for maybe the fact that they likely weren't really raising too many skills at the end.

You're completely burying the lead here. This is the entire reason I made the comparison, and it's the whole point. Getting a skill to 5 didn't take that much, and once you did it, that was it (you're right about the voting, but there was a lot of auto-xp you could get similar to Arx's journals, via converting CP). Almost all the people playing focused characters had 5s by the time they'd played for a couple months.

Dinos didn't stomp on people because they had vastly superior stats (with the very limited exceptions of the few legendary people). They stomped on people because they were staff friends or staffalts and the judging was rigged. Events that were pure statistical contests (like the pentathlons) were regularly won by non-dino random nobodies.

Still not saying Arx's system is bad or that Firan's is preferable (for tons of other reasons, and the xp vote scaling is great), but with 3-4 skills you need for combat, plus gear, plus champions and guards that you can dump resources into, I think it's impossible to say that the total range of character advancement isn't vastly wider. That means by definition the gap between newbie and dino will be wider, and grow wider with time.

@DeadEmpire Oh, I absolutely agree it will be more interesting for longer. I think this is one of those talking past each other kind of things. There's no question that Arx's system is a gajillion times deeper, and that there's far, far more for you to spend on. That said, if the dinos are never actually reaching the top where they level out, then simple math, you can't catch up.

What you can do is incentivize newbies and quickly bring them to a certain level of competence, which it does (well). The potential danger is that the scaling required for dinos devalues said basic competence. Group activities like the crisis and investigation systems seem good for this, as long as the default difficulties aren't too high? Like I've got my noob char in a +crisis that's about to resolve, I'm really curious to see how it pans out.

@Ghost It really sounds great to me.

Old BP was a very gamey resource meter, with a D&D 'the party rests' between encounter upkeep kind of feel. It was also very inconsistently important depending on how blood-hungry your disciplines were.

The new mechanic sounds like it will always be important. And if the hunger dice can give you successes you even get stronger as you get more ravenous, which is cool. My only slight doubt is on the whole check off dot vs. roll on table for a trait thing. I can see with multiple rolls at higher hunger how you could accumulate a bunch of these, and it could get a little comedic if you keep piling on traits. Are there any limits there?

@Coin Pretty much 100% what you said.

I feel like a lot of people oversell the 'doing what is IC' point as if it is really as simple as that. Few people in this hobby are devoted method actors. Most of the time character actions are a combination of IC context and OOC agenda. Just think about it for a second and it's pretty obvious. When a character is making a tough/meaningful decision, it could probably go either way. That's the definition of the decision being difficult. And so the deciding factor is usually OOC preference. As a corollary 'I'm just doing what's IC' isn't any kind of special protection or something praiseworthy, nor is it particularly bad. It's bad when people act in ways that clearly are clearly non-IC, but that doesn't make the inverse good.

So I RP what I enjoy (and usually what I think people around me will enjoy, to whatever degree I know and can supply that without bending over so far my spine snaps) and I'm generally not going to go to any effort following through on things I don't. That's not the same as avoiding IC consequences or ignoring the world; I will deal with all that stuff to whatever degree is required, but I'm not going to put substantial personal energy into stuff I don't care about or enjoy (or know that at least others I care about are enjoying, sometimes its worth playing out X because it's meaningful to another person and neutral in value to you).

I also try and be clear about telling people what I like, especially stuff that might be iffy otherwise (say, arranged marriages on L&L games). People usually follow the path of least resistance, so you can often guide RP in ways everyone will enjoy more with a smidgen of communication.

@Thenomain

I don't think anyone has really said that coming up with these systems is going to be objectively harmful, and that's a pretty obvious option. I even indicated as much in my post. But pointing out the whole 'you can't code away social problems' is also a valid point to make here, and you seem resistant to acknowledging it. People (on both sides, the overly willing to violate boundaries, and the overly expectant of others to cater to their own) need to be held to certain standards of reasonable adult behavior.

Tangentially, I think the 'that escalated quickly' scenarios (as @surreality mentions) can/should be dealt with via a whole different kind of policy. While its perfectly fine to say people should be comfortable with bad stuff in WoD, I don't think that can be extrapolated to 'if you agree to meet someone new for coffee RP they should definitely be able to rape you!' This is no different than the people who want to were-hulkout over minor insults, or otherwise justify violent PvP over the tiniest provocation. Conflict should always be to at least some degree proportionate (edit: and rooted in the story), and the people who argue for concepts that get around that (serial killers, etc) are almost always problem players anyway.

@fatefan The Realms Adventurous (Pendragon game) tried to do the more 'your goats survive' level of play when it started out (characters were knights, but the... lowest, shittiest, 'your farm pays for your armor and horse and that's it' level of knight), but a LOT of people bucked theme and went for frilly L&L. I think it maybe could have worked, but staff wasn't very big on enforcing anything so you had people basically playing in completely different themes.

@Lotherio Way to be weirdly nitpicky? Nothing I said was wrong: livestock raiding was part of the theme (maybe not much between PCs, but as something we were afraid of from enemies), and your own wiki supported the earlier period in terms of living conditions and fashion. If you wanted to to be 'just be anything in those 6 centuries', you could have said that, but it wasn't how the game was actually presented, so you have to take some of the blame there.

If I went dirt squabbling goat herder, I'd go 866 York, politics amongst the hirths for who controls what as Ivar moves on with Amlaib to harass Ireland and Scotland. Seeing if players could work together to reach Danelaw with Alfred (886 rl).

Yeah, it was definitely the players who were hyper anal historians and ruined everything!

@TimmyZ said in How low can "low stakes" be and still be compelling for RP?:

Clearly some issues remain from a game that closed 18 months ago. The fae girl did redact and change logs, descs and bg as asked by staff. Nothing warranted 'banning'. If it's really this upsetting after all this time PM me or go to the pit.

No u? (Also I'm confused, why am I PM'ing you? I thought @Lotherio ran Realms)

I think it's pretty relevant when the question is 'how can low stakes be compelling'. Part of the answer is 'actually keep people on the same page about what they're playing.' The fairy might have been dealt with, but it took long enough that it did damage to the game environment and the general tenor of RP.

@TimmyZ How is that not right? The beginning levels of Pendragon are absolutely about characters whose holdings basically support their horse and arms and little more. Only the primary knights were even noble, everyone else was basically a commoner. If you roll badly in winter your horse dies. It's absolutely the survival level of game being discussed.

I feel like you're being bizarrely revisionist, this was a theme you pushed as much as anyone.

What characters are we talking about? It's been a bit since I stopped on BSGU but some of this sounds kinda familiar-ish.

Having (briefly) played one... they treated the IC hookers like OOC hookers. There was a real, if just barely unspoken expectation of TS being on offer and the idea that if you weren't doing it you shouldn't be wasting one of the character slots. Which maybe figured into them not wanting dudes playing them.

That or heebiejeebies over accidentally text-boning a dude... though I dunno how they avoided that worry with all the commoner ladies!

@deadculture I got festival pavilions beat!

As not to be mischaracterized as merely omg so negative...

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

I will also say that I think that the new @action system helps, or can help, in regards to that feeling of flailing around in the dark. The ooc_intent switch is, or at least I have found it to be, /very/ helpful. Hopefully it is as helpful for staff as it is for me, but making me state 'out loud' what I hope this action is capable of accomplishing has helped clarify what I want out of what I'm doing. Before it went in, I know sometimes I would hear people mention that the response to a storyrequest was completely unexpected, and it could sometimes feel like a dialogue in Mass Effect, where the prompt says 'express skepticism' and the dialogue is like, "YOU LYING FUCK."

This this this a million times this.

I absolutely do love @action and think it's a great addition. The prior request system was very vague and my success rate with them turning back anything useful was terrible. And /ooc_intent is like the best MUing invention I've seen in... the entire time I've been MUing maybe? It means that no matter how much you flail around trying to ICly describe sometimes obscure and arcane actions, you can very clearly state: 'This is what I want out of this' in that section. And staff seems good about honoring it.

MORE GAMES NEED THIS OMG. Just culturally, actually asking what your players want rather than make them swing blindly at your plot-pinatas is amazing.

Conversely, the @revelations explanation makes me... uh, even more anxious, because you not only need up to date clues but a perfect combination of clues to get the useful info? Idk. Seems kind of moving backward. The only way I can see this being positive is if 'key' (to completing the revelation) clues get handed out to... the least clued in people (via visions, background ones to new players, etc) with a hint that they're part of a big picture, so that those people can then go and shop their key piece around to get the other stuff from the better-knowing people. Maybe that's the bottom-up structure @Apos is getting at, but I can't say I've quite seen anything like that in play so far.

@seraphim73 Definitely.

And more than just being sets of bonuses and penalties, they'd also provide RP fodder and even a use for social rolls less severe than all out 'mind control,' because every +sheet item is also a data point that can be learned, modified, etc.

Consider: Which of the following seduction scenarios is more off-putting?

• I roll some dice, and the result says that you are now attracted to me to X degree. RP continues and you react appropriately (whatever that means). Maybe I have to make successive rolls to meet some threshold. Eventually we bone. Maybe there's an award for agreeing to the social roll, you get some bonus XP.

• I roll some dice. Because I get some successes, I get to see X items from your list of sexual/romantic preferences, and also automatically learn 1 hard turn-off. I can now use/avoid these in RP, creating romance informed by things you're presumably interested in character-wise. If I want to make a hard sell, I can make another kind of roll, and if that succeeds your +sheet status to me gets upgraded from 'Acquaintance' to 'Daaaaayum.' That could provide further roll modifiers, and maybe XP feedback for all RP that acknowledges it (which could be anything from actual boning to, say, giving me info/favors/special treatment, etc).

This is the perfect social system world I envision, anyway.