Best posts made by kitteh

So hi, I played here a bit but ended up fading off due to a mix of RL and difficulty getting in on RP and with some of the uh, support system? commands.

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

A note about courtesans, as was discussed heavily recently, there is no institutionalized prostitution in Arx at all, so courtesans are not selling sex. They are event planners, host/esses, companions, etc. The description of the receiving room in the Whisper House can be a bit confusing since it says that people occasionally show up thinking it is a brothel. That doesn't happen as there are no brothels. The very idea of a brothel is an alien concept. The description is likely a hold over from very early alpha.

Personally I found the Whisper thing confusing. I appreciate that staff is willing to challenge the grimdark sexploitation that GoT etc has made so chic, but I felt like they kind of couldn't make up their mind on this.

My roster PC's bg was basically Memoirs of a Geisha. Reading her, she sounded not just like a hooker, but a (implied) sex slave. It really felt like it clashed with the 'there is no prostitution or sexism!!!' files.

I even had a player challenging (not rudely, but basically in a friendly newbie-helping, 'you're getting theme wrong' way) my RP as incorrect when she was trying to share some of her life. So that came off a little strange. I've been looking at coming back but I'd probably stay away from the faction.

@Faraday I love the sound of your thing (and I sort of enjoyed Storium for a bit, and can see some similarity)! I'd really love to be able to use visual aids, and just the portability of playing in a browser would be nice. I am also garbage about logging and hate having to fiddle with wiki code even though I like character pages, so that being automatic would be wonderful.

As a current mermaid player, I am in favor of the mermaid (sexy?)funtimes.

So hooray.

With all the log-based XP, I'm hoping there's an automatic in game logger? One of the things that kills me in the current culture is that while log sharing is a constant thing and sometimes tied to XP, it's still often manual. But time to wrangle log foo becomes time I have to subtract from RP or shows up randomly later in the week so I don't submit things in timely fashion.

@Arkandel

I agree it can be weird OKing some horrific things and not others, but we do also tend to have some fairly set social conventions about these things. Some of those are silly (graphic violence OK, me shirtless = won't someone think of the children?), but we can modulate a bit between the two and come up with something reasonable as a baseline. And then RP that goes beyond the baseline can be restricted (whether that means it needs a warning or just shouldn't happen is up to the staff).

Her game sounds like it has a pretty obvious set of inspirations, and Black Sails is among them. It has both a fair bit of graphic violence (including some of the nasty realistic consequences like amputation with shit medicine) and sex, and even sexual violence (see Max), albeit in the last obviously more is implied than shown. From that you can pretty easily find the common (sex, violence) that people should be OK with to even step foot on the game, but also probably the high end where a warning might apply (extreme gore, actual porn, rape, etc). Doesn't seem crazy.

@Thenomain said in Course Corrections:

@kitteh said in Course Corrections:

Maybe they really were legos. This has happened before.

I mean, nobody here is complaining about five people hearing a Bob Dylan song 30,000 years before he was born. Sir Terry Pratchett (RIP) said he tried his hardest to not do things like this, but the idea of interlocking blocks as educational building tools shouldn't be the problem; calling them Lego should be.

Right. I just meant it's possible in BSGverse that there's literally some kind of time loop and Legos might have actually existed both before and after because there's no before or after and it's all circular. Or.. maybe an angel did it?!!!?

But I'm just being a nerd. The player still sounds like an asshole, and it definitely defies the genre expectations to be tossing a lot of current-Earth brand references into RP.

@faraday

Ok, that's good! I mean, maybe the guy we targeted was REALLY SUPER BADASS because even when there were 3 of us it wouldn't die, IDK.

I do still hink it makes sense to telegraph ridiculous skill levels on opponents to some degree. Even if it motivates the players to act differently, so what? It's RP, and it should be apparent if someone is that totally amazing, but it's impossible to glean that info from dice.

@faraday

Because there's no feedback to indicate whether our miss streaks are due to a skill gap or crappy luck? We don't see rolls or margins of success (unless we're hitting?). To some extent we can RP "Oh, you finally got that guy who was giving me trouble, thanks", but for a low-skill character that's about as far as it goes.

Also, this stuff does happen. I did RP asking for others to help me get my target. So people are already doing these things you say we should be doing. But the system is fairly opaque and its hard to distill some information from the feedback we get, and so a lot of it is just kind of making things up. We can thank the better pilot for helping out, but no one can really say "Oh wow, you killed their superskilled guy."

@Thenomain It still comes off preachy. At least being told 'hey if you don't like it, don't play' comes off as unnecessarily extreme. I've praised the game in many places and overall I'm not even in it for the combat. But you know, we're having a discussion!

If she doesn't want to change it, that's fine. Her posts often include things like 'if there are better ways to do this, tell me' so... I don't think I'm being rude offering my thoughts. There are things I've mentioned she can pretty easily do. Identifying 'really badass NPCs' is doable in the existing game I'm sure (just naming them?). If she doesn't want to do it, OK. Exposing the degrees of success on rolls I imagine is doable also (the basic roll command shows them, the combat autocode doesn't), so maybe that would be a thing too.

If she doesn't want to change anything or doesn't like my suggestions that's OK too! Maybe someone else will offer something. But I'm pretty sure we're all enjoying the game and don't need to be reminded we can take our balls home.

@faraday Sure. I just mean that a lot of what I was suggesting was off the assumption that it was 'oh, you're fighting something with 4+ more dice than you and you should really know better (except, we can't)', which is quite a bit more different than, 'uh, yeah you can beat up most of them even if you're a rookie and at worst you're evenly matched, so don't stress it too much'

@faraday I'll resist the 'not me' reply Though as more of a 'not us' version of it, didn't we break up into teams in the last fight on BSGU, assign wingmen, etc?

I think the assist is good. It handles the issue I mentioned where even if you want to 'help' your teammate, you're effectively stealing kills from them (or at least, nulling them out so neither of you can get any). This way there's definite value, as an Ace, to taking some rookie under your wing and having them as your wingman, expecting (or even, gasp, ordering!) them to help you out The noob won't get kills but they're not going to (get many) anyway, statistically.

Re: the 2nd to last thing on your list, I think people do communicate and pose tactics in combat but... there's too many people, too little time, etc, for you to skim through all of that and translate it into bonuses? I mean if you actively do this and we just don't see it, I stand pre-emptively corrected. That aside, the one thing I've rarely seen is a tactical briefing or even an in-flight but pre-combat 'huddle' where there's a specific chance FOR the PCs to come up with tactics. This item doesn't seem one solved by code, so much as GMing/player culture.

@faraday Yeah, in my small bit of reading (to get the flight lingo) I found some... dunno, fighter instruction/tactics stuff and it's all complicated diagrams very specific to the exact two planes engaging. It left me awed at people who do that stuff for realsies but also recommitted to a purely... cinematic level of tactics

So your suggestion is mostly that we should page if we wanna do something specifically cool/unorthodox, over in general just trying to pose solid tactics etc? That's fair enough, and I will try and think about this more going forward (just sitting here, I came up with one I should have used last time!). Though it can/will be hard, I think, for some to figure out what the threshold really is (and to not feel like we're bugging you), especially when the 'standard' for space stuff is frequently flipping your viper around 180 to blast things, etc.

Definitely easier to mess with on the ground! Even for the fliers. At least then there's stuff on the ground to buzz

Some videogames have vote/devote systems but I think that's a way of building social contract into larger, even more anonymous spaces than MUs are.

This proposal seems like trying to codify (and even gamify) social interaction, reputation, and popularity. Which makes it sound mostly like a tool of potential abuse for cliques, staff, more established members of games, etc. I mean, you guys apparently removed downvoting here, what does that say about the ability for this same community to use it maturely on a game where the stakes are just a little higher?

@surreality I believe it!

The system works fine in really large, really anonymous settings, like some multiplayer videogames that may have many thousands of players at a time. On these, 'some dude and their five friends' is usually not enough voting weight to break the system, and they work well for slowly identifying and quarantining toxic players (generally by matching people to people with similar votescores, so the trolls just play other trolls, and polite people play other polite people).

But when you have an actual (small, relatively intimate) community, it's just taking something that community should be doing and shuffling it off to some easily to manipulate shortcut. The community should have no trouble identifying actual bad actors. And the people it can't easily identify? Are maybe not bad enough that they need to be ostracized in the first place, but fall into the realm of 'personal differences that people are going to have and staff doesn't need to resolve every one of.'

@Ghost Yeah. I mean I totally understand the temptation, especially for people who love the hobby and may not have a ton of options for a particular style of RP, genre, whatever. Or they feel they can play under the radar because staff only handle the big stuff, etc.

But it's definitely a losing proposition in the long term. Sooner or later you'll need their help and it won't be there, or you'll accidentally run afoul of their clique or some other unknown but sacred line that shouldn't be crossed, and by then your investment will be all the more.

It certainly seems like the dice work like they should on the long term (even if we're not strictly getting a 'scientific sample size'), and I think most of us are perfectly OK with that. The multi aces are people with the higher skills who've been in lots of combats. The schlubs perform schlubily. For all the talk earlier about fancy tactical choices or whatever, but it mostly boils down to that.

I'm not sure FS3 gets singled out here since no game system (that I know of) is performing 1000 rolls and averaging them to determine success/failure. Maybe in WoD you can min-max a whole lot more to have ginormous pools, but presumably those chars should be fighting equivalent challenges. Maybe the one thing in FS3 is that there's less differentiation in what you can do or what you can fight, but that goes with the setting, too. Only so many ways a Viper can pew-pew.

Yeah, I do have to say BSGU kind of spoils me. Any criticisms anyone wants to make, it's obvious she's doing tons of work to improve things.

I'm apping on a FS3 (version whatever every game ever has used) game and the 12-point skills in 4 tiers still kind of give me anxiety. Love Faraday but no idea what she was smoking there

Edit: I suspect that old system also has to do a lot with @WTFE's seemingly berserk hatred of it and insistence that people sucked at things even though Faraday says success % was always high. The issue was probably all the generic games using it having really terrible guidance for players / GMs on skill ratings. How do you balance a combat when one guy is skill 1 and one guy is skill 12?