Posts made by kitteh

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.

I recruited for this game, brought the thread to people's attention, etc. I was in the process of discussing concepts, group connections, etc with some of these people. But not surprisingly, some of them have RL jobs and couldn't leap on instantly this morning.

I appreciate not wanting to GM more than you can handle but this seems like an ill-planned way of handling things, to say the least. Now we're in the situation of having some people who slid in under a wire no one even knew was there, and others excluded just by virtue of not creating a charbit in the first ~12 hours. I get to choose between excluding friends and quitting (and tossing an app I worked on). Kinda sucks.

@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.

So.... I had a long, topsy-turvy relationship with the place but I don't think it's right to say the staff are sinister folks or anything. Up front, as far as I know I've never met any of them beforehand.

Initially I apped, something something disagreement about the char I picked, and I kinda gave up on it. No one really did anything horrible it was just kind of bad communication / difference of direction (and maybe trust, etc). Maybe I felt they were too 'mistrustful' of a new player, assuming the worst etc, but I don't really blame them with what they were going for.

Then I apped later on the DC half of the game, not knowing it was the same folks. Char I've always wanted to play was free, took her, had quite a bit of fun. A lot of good people there (if Wonder Girl/Cassie is around anywhere, I miss you!), and if there were any clique issues... well, I wouldn't say it was the staff enforcing it. Some people apped in with friends and so maybe focused their RP there.

At the point the DC stuff got melded back over, they nudged me toward a mutant alt (and even helped me get one that was idling, a char I'd been too slow on the first time 'round) and into some RP. I dunno if it's a clique so much as they seem to like my RP. Maybe they could be more active about nudging all sectors of the game into activity, though on the other hand a lot of people sit perma-idle who could easily get on grid.

So it's probably a bit of everyone needing to be a little more proactive?

It's a little embarrassing with how many Lords and Ladies games and assorted marriage simulators I play, I've had very few actual marriages. A good handful of courtships and betrothals but so often the games fall through or players lose interest etc etc.

Maybe I have cooties. Or my hookers are just more popular <.<

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!

@packrat Sure, although I don't think those characters are the tricky ones or the problem I was getting at. Since if you want to play something that's basically a knight (an upper class militant character) but just doesn't have 'Sir' in front of their name, that's easy. You just use the same CG and rules and don't put the title in your +finger.

My issue is if and how you can play, say, a noble who is a courtier, or a freeman merchant, etc. How characters who aren't based on face-stabbing can be useful and successful in the game, and not trumped by martial characters who can do all the same things and also fight (which is based on a notable glitch we had on RA with the female knights obsoleting non-militant noblewomen).

But I will talk to @Lotherio about it some more, it sounds like he has ideas!

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.

@faraday I don't know what to tell you. You 'don't want to piss me off' but you seem to take every opportunity to make this more contentious and/or personal. You espouse a 'different strokes' stance (which is fine) and yet seem incredibly unwilling to let even subjective experiences of the game system (not even your game) go unchallenged. And then there's the whole painting me as unreasonable thing.

I was talking about FS3 generally (and WoD!) to begin with, which includes a ton of games. It wasn't remotely BSGU specific. It still really isn't, other than examples that I can only really draw from your game because they happened to happen there. I was echoing an opinion widely expressed here.

My comments regarding sucking there I acknowledge are subjective, although they're based on events that were absolutely happening at the time (a min-maxer dominating, me literally only getting one legit kill ever). I'm not making those things up.

If my factual observations mean nothing because you saw other things at other times, OK. If my subjective feelings mean nothing to you because they differ from your peer group input, OK. Reality check, though: unhappy people often don't leave comments, they just ghost. I've only ended up discussing any of this because it's come up in these threads.

I still really dislike the CG/XP disparity. You don't care. Cool.

@Seraphim73 I don't think it was so much an issue of a house rule or wanting a skill high (I did want some skills high, because I've learned how FS3 works, but that was a separate thing), but rather a skill at... whatever the highest value was before you actually got to the limited skills you could only have a couple of? It was weird because that value was pretty low compared to the average PC and it felt odd to have to fight over it. Doubly so when you have so many points its hard not to have everything pretty high.

But yeah I do think the dice-vs.-expectations thing can be tricky to manage. When you have highly min-maxed people... doing predictably, consistently well, 'oh they really don't have much of an advantage' is unsatisfying to hear whether its true or not. Maybe it's only 17% (or whatever) but when you roll as often as you do in FS3 I do think that stuff adds up. It's fine to let the super-leet be leet, but if you're gonna design the game that way you probably want to create alternate lower-stakes things the 'mere mortals' can do so they can actually feel like they're part of things and not irrelevant spectators to the cool people.

@faraday I'd honestly say one area where most games fails is the last of your bullet points. Our gaming culture has a vague stigma min-maxing in a general sense, despite so many players honestly liking it or simply being used to doing it. So when it's an expected part of a game system, that should be stated clearly. The worst thing is feeling like you're going to be screwed either way, you ask for too much and staff calls you a twink, or you ask too little and have a character worth half the XP of the rest of the players.

This isn't aimed at you or even the FS3-verse. If WoD games are OK with you doing 5 1 1 and spending your first few XP turning those 1s into 2s they need to say that.

@ganymede I have an issue, yes, but not just with 'how long to get from X to Y' but with the entire min-max vs. rounded character that has been covered in the thread. I was referencing that whole discussion, and its not an FS3-only thing so it's not like I'm hating on her specifically. But trying to reduce the argument to one aspect in extreme (noob to expert) seems deceptive.

@faraday Cool. Maybe the XP rates are OKish, at this point I struggle to remember the exact #s/levels and what I was trying to get to. I do think you underestimate the impact of the whole thing, the dice, the psychology of just being worse at everything (both when you start and later on despite your growth) and not having your own thing, etc.

BSG has a lot of the rookies (and I don't think I was even a rookie) being cool, but I felt it was hard to get there on your game. One hyper min-maxed guy having as many kills as the entire rest of the wing, getting all of one (that didn't involve a creeper cheating on my 'behalf') my entire time, just feeling like a joke with a hard time contributing, etc. Maybe its just a disconnect with the dice and fiction or something, or I was just especially awful, I don't know. It wasn't the only (or even the biggest) problem but it didn't help things.

@ganymede said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

Actually, you're the one that brought it up. Unless I'm misreading things, your criticism prior to Faraday's last was that FS3 hurts your RP because you like playing lesser-experienced PCs and growing them over time. This implies that you have an issue with the progression in FS3.

You are misreading things and pretty severely if you think think

@kitteh said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

some people like playing lesser experienced characters and growing them

is equivalent to:

@faraday said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

if your goal is to come in at poor and get to Expert in 6 months

Because it's not. One is a straw man meant to characterize me as unreasonable. 'You like yours and I like mine' is fine, but 'you want something silly and I'm not catering to you' is nasty, and frankly it dispels some of the great respect I had for her. Lots of people have expressed similar feelings in this thread. She doesn't have to accept them, but she shouldn't belittle them.

(I'm aware CoD handles XP differently)

@faraday The idea that anyone is complaining about not being able to go from total noob to expert in no time flat is an obvious and egregious strawman that no one but you is raising. It's dismissive and nasty and shame on you for that.

The issue is limited progression from the middle tiers, as well as the problem that you also end up equal or worse at the other stuff while remaining behind said experts. Many people have explained it clearly. You've said you want it that way. Don't pretend it's our unreasonable expectations.

@faraday I get that you have your reasons and that's certainly your prerogative, but the negative experiences are real too. And I've run across them on most of the FS3 games I've played, both the new system and old. Even on games that are otherwise wonderful and well-run (like yours!). It's been a contributing factor to me giving up on a few of them, too (like yours :/)

Just like you want to play experts and think they should be the best, some people like playing lesser experienced characters and growing them, but it doesn't work well in that system. That's really what hurts my RP the most.

There's other problems too, like the issues I ran into on Pirate Game, where stats tended to bunch and everyone had most things at Good... but then you get argued with for wanting to raise thing one pip to 'Great' (or whatever, I'm not great with the names) because suddenly 'Great' is too good but... Good isn't really good, its actually average, you know? Bleh.

I have to say, I hate hate hate this kind of stuff and I wish games wouldn't do it.

It's a terrible feeling sitting there knowing every point you spend building a realistic character you're essentially just missing out down the road. And you can say, 'it doesn't matter, just RP,' but often other people are doing it and you do get frozen out of RP or quietly ignored or just plain frustrated when you suck so badly compared to everyone else down the line.

It's much worse in WoD, though I feel it in FS3 too. The combination of XP stuff and kind of overall high stats where everyone is OK at most things means that not being a super pro just means... yeah, you're behind forever, at everything, even the quirky things you're supposed to be relatively good at

@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.

@surreality Yeah, I didn't mean that I just want a couple 'outs' to put on character sheets as special category of out of social free cards.

I really mean that I think we need to work from the ground up to build sheets for games that are more about the social interactions that are common to MU and rather than trying to square peg round hole systems that are very wargamey.

Beliefs, values, fears, goals, subconscious drives, likes, vices, and sure even sexual preferences, etc. Ideally some of it would be mostly-permanent (ie maybe it could change but only with +request or whatever sort of limited 'I get to change my sheet occasionally' process), but some would also be more 'live,' so that for instance you could record that character X was a dick, character Y was a lover, etc.

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

Also - we accept that a high degree of randomness in physical combat. "Yes, you shot him, but you hit him in the leg and only grazed him." That same degree of randomness is nonsensical in social conflict because people (generally) do not behave in a completely random manner. They behave in ways that are informed by their personality, their experiences and their values - none of which is reflected meaningfully on a character sheet.

This is really it for me and it's not the first time it's been brought up here.

Compared to many players, I'm very far on the non-consent, OK with random shit happening to my PCs. I don't even see much horror in 'welp, I rolled 20 so now we bone,' because even if its kind of stupid I don't see the result there being so much worse than 'oh, I rolled a 20, you ded.' Generally, it's better! My char is still alive! I have an event in their life to RP around. If the person doing the roll is a jerk/creeper, that's a totally unrelated issue (and would probably make a combat scene suck too), handled by the unrelated solution of not RPing with them (edit: or better, hopefully having staff kick them off the game).

But like everyone I do have visions for my characters and their personalities and that might at some point preclude some particular social outcome. And...

I REALLY WISH THIS COULD BE ON MY SHEET.

Because I don't want to be the person no-selling your dice without good cause. I don't want the stigma of 'she's just dodging consequences.' No, I'm not, it's just that THIS particular time, you picked the thing that's not gonna work for pre-established reasons. But I have no way of establishing those things.

So if people want games with social rolls, game designers need to go back to the drawing board and 2.0 their whole concept of these game systems. Nearly everything we play is a WoD-clone, with the same stat-skill conventions and minimal focus on social stuff beyond 'maybe you can put one virtue and vice.' These arguments will always go back and forth fruitlessly under these conditions.

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 prefer the 'no OC' thing even though it's meant skipping games that otherwise looked good because the good OCs ran out.

The bottom line is that OCs are often disruptive on FC-centric games (just like FCs are disruptive on OC-majority games, not that shockingly). I've had to deal with them glomming on a team I was a part of and trying to be involved with everything while blissfully unaware they were either stomping on people's fun with their powers or just killing the mood RP-wise.

Are there badly played FCs? For sure. But I can count the good comic OCs I've played with on no hands because it hasn't happened yet.

And it really sucks that it has shitty implications for some players but I don't know how to fix it without opening the general floodgate. Maybe the genderswapped/etc alternative versions is a good approach, whether its actually using the main character or using spinoff versions. Could these work as demi-OCs?