Posts made by Lisse24

@auspice said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Desperately need haircut. I think the length (my hair is heavy, it has contributed in the past) is causing some of these recent migraines. Can't afford haircut (since haircut is cost of haircut + cost of rideshare to/from because I don't have the free time to spend a couple hours on the bus).

I'm dangerously close to trying to cut it myself.

Do it! It's ridiculously easy to cut your own hair if you don't mind a little length. There are a couple of different strategies, my favorite involving tossing my head upside down and using a hair band - I've never gotten more compliments on my hair than when I did it using that method.

You can find videos on YouTube.

Things that I have seen work well for creating proactive players:

Non-sandbox games
Giving players tools to be proactive and Do Things (+actions over on Arx, for example)
Putting limits on UberPlayers to do all the things (like with action points used on several games)
Similarly, limits on number of alts - people are more proactive when they're more focused.
Nudging players towards IC activity, through killing off of OOC rooms, encouraging the use of the grid, making finding RP easy and desirable.

TLDR; Activity breeds activity. Games with an active RP scene will eventually lead to players who want to do things. This means encouraging RP and activity, it also means making sure that 1 or 2 players aren't sucking up all the activity.

@faraday said in Social Systems:

@thenomain I understand your POV. But again, it comes down to how much you view these things as stories and how much you view them as games.

Did John McClane just make a whole bunch of really good Willpower / Courage rolls, or is he just fundamentally not the kind of guy who's gonna sit back and let terrorists threaten innocent people?

I would like to posit that his core characteristics determined that he wasn't just going to sit around and let terrorists threaten people and his rolls helped determine what sort of method of stopping terrorists was both possible and in character for him to pursue.

The entire West Virginia teaching force is is about to go on strike, which is nearly unheard of, and their state legislature is still like, "Nah, we don't need to do anything about teacher pay."

@zombiegenesis I'm not really a fan of having to state a goal at the beginning. I think it makes things more complicated than they need to be, I think its makes doing little things like lying or trying to impress another more important and carry more weight than it should.
It also makes it harder for characters to go with the flow and change midstream.

To be clear, I still think every time you make a roll you should state before hand what you're rolling and why, but I don't think that's limited to social stats and I don't think your statements should have to think more than the immediate roll that you're attempting to do.

Maybe we can spin out the discusson on the merits of stats and dice to another thread and keep this one focused on social system design for those of us that agree it might be interesting to try some different types of social systems.

@ganymede She'd been in the NICU for 8 months at that point and you reach a point where babies will progress farther at home than staying in the NICU. She was also hooked up a monitor that measured her heart rate and O2 levels 24-7.

She's been home ten months, and while there have been some ER visits, they were always more precautionary than necessary, and only one visit to the PICU which is better than most preemies with her condition do.

So Viagra, that ubiquitous little blue pill, works because it improves blood flow. That makes it a very useful medicine for people who are struggling with heart problems, which is why it was prescribed for my niece when she left the NICU and was struggling with blood pressure still.

Now, because she was an infant, and because everything needed to be given to her via a tube in her stomach, she needed it in liquid form. Turns out that one-month's supply of liquid Viagra is $7,500. My sister's insurance wanted her to pay for that out of pocket.

I'm going to say again, that I really like nWoD conditions and I think that a system that builds on that idea is more likely to get buy-in.

So, again, keeping it simple and understandable, I imagine a system where a player could declare their immediate goal, and perform a simple, agreed upon contested roll. Keep it uncoded, so that players can quickly adapt to the circumstances.
If the player wins, they can impose a level-1 condition. Level-1 conditions would have impacts that last only a few minutes. The condition would have two options for how players respond, a 'going along' option and a not going along option. Both give a penalty of some sort. The going along option also gives XP.
If the opposite player already has that level-1 condition from that player, it gets bumped up to level-2 which lasts longer, maybe has steeper penalties. Level-2 gets bumped up to Level-3, etc.
However, if the player loses, either the opposite player gets to shed a condition level or there's a condition that gives the opposite player the advantage, but the originating player gets the XP.

This system has the advantage of being simple, predictable, maintaining player autonomy and offering players multiple opportunities to suss out and avoid the situation if they prefer, while keeping "loss" to something that is low-risk.

@ghost said in Social Systems:

See, the only way to have a character effectively lie to another character on most MUs is to lie to the player. This is because a lot of players aren't okay with having to RP something that they know is a losing play. Little bits of meaning happens all the time to avoid it, and many of them get pissed when they find out they were lied to oocly (TotallyNotMetaGaming).

For the record, I fundamentally disagree with this assertion. In my experience, while some players are out only to win, most are out to tell stories and are OK with periodic losses. They are not OK with feeling like they got screwed over. Social skills are often used spuriously and leave people feeling like they got screwed. So lets make a system that negates that feeling and encourages collaboration.

@faraday I mentioned conditions in my post, and RfK used those in their social systems. They basically gave the "loser" two options both of which were well-defined. They could go along and have Option A happen, or they could back out and have Option B happen. They chose which they wanted, both were "negative" for the player, but they still had agency.

@ortallus said in Social Systems:

An interesting idea. Also, I believe in Fate system, if you have something negative proposed, like a shot at one of your weaknesses, you can choose to take a Fate point and roll with it, or effectively burn the Fate point to get out of it. Pretty nice mechanic.

I'm not familiar with Fate, but that system certainly seems neat. I think the way I view it is that you want to give people something so that they don't view it as a loss and to take the sting out of it.

I agree with everyone else that relative simplicity is a must. I'm a fan of a simple contested roll for direct interactions between players.

I think these contested rolls should be done fairly frequently, because then they become part of the games culture. To encourage this I think players need to get something when they lose a contested roll, xp comes to mind. Giving XP for losing a contested roll, would also be a way to help new players catch up to dinosaurs, since the lower-xp players will lose rolls more often.

I think the consequences for contested rolls should be well-defined. For example, CoD's conditions are great. They were fun to RP out, they are defined ahead of time, and they reward players for playing along.

I think anything that has major consequences for a character should always take multiple scenes. Again, this is sort of like Doors, although, I would make the number of scenes the same across the board to keep the possibility of confusion and cheating down (Yes, I am a big fan of simplicity and transparency in systems).

I like the idea of status systems, when I've seen them on a game. I'd like it if they actually did something and were tied in better with social rolls. I think they could give players with social stats something to do. I don't have firm ideas on implementation.

Finally, while I'm lean non-consent, I don't think anyone should ever be forced to RP on a regular and consistent basis with a player they would not prefer to. I think players need to have consent privileges when it comes to things like marriages/ghouling/family/etc. I know it's not explicitly tied to social systems, but probably worth remembering when throwing things together.

Also, women, make sure that you're using Bratabase to make the whole experience a bit better!

@arkandel said in Random links:

https://qz.com/1188058/netflix-explains-why-badly-reviewed-bright-killed-with-viewers/

Relevant quote: "Netflix nixed its old star-rating system last year because people used it to rate the quality of the titles, like critics do, rather than how much they enjoyed them. For example, people usually gave movies high ratings, but watched sitcoms more often, Netflix said at the time."

So .... people like trash? I buy that.

I actually have no problem with who pops up, I like having a mix of well-known and unknown, because it reminds me to touch base with people.
However, I would love it if randomscene worked in pairs, like the way it did on Firan. So, like, if I have JoeSchmoe in my randomscene, JoeSchmoe also has me. That way we're both looking out for each other and it would make coordinating so much easier, especially for us who don't have a ton of time to commit to the game.

Like many other people, I have a degree of impostor syndrome when it comes to work. It manifests itself in normal ways, like talking too fast when negotiating a partnership or speaking to the board (bc wth am I talking to the board!).

It also rears its head when its time for me to do minor tasks around the office, because for some reason, any moment that I'm not spending doing the exact task I'm paid for means that I'm not good enough to be in this job. For some reason, my brain is always telling me that I should do little work tasks like running to the post office to mail something, picking up office supplies, organizing files, etc, on my own time.

I know it's the wrong mindset to have, that my pay includes the time I spent doing all these auxiliary tasks that make my work possible and that my work will be better if I just get them done, but I can't quite get past the struggle. This is why there's been a huge cardboard box that contains my new filing cabinet sitting in the middle of the floor of my office for the past two weeks while the files themselves sit on the floor of the closet.

@roz Not exactly what I'm saying? Even in non-coded games, Combat plots are the low-hanging fruit. Anyone can show up to them and Do a Thing. It's easier to pull someone in. In diplomatic/social plots, you usually have to know the right people in order to get involved. It's also easier to keep pulling on the same group of people.

Also, while you can have combats with huge numbers of people, diplomatic/social plots work best in small groups. Which is why I think there needs to be more of them (in general, I've just restarted at Arx again, can't speak to the current state of things) and why a lot of them should probably be low-stakes letting people create names for themselves.

This may already be happening on Arx, I don't know, but again, the problem I'm trying to point out is really unconnected to how coded things are.

@roz I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying, but I do want to add that part of the reason people choose fighters is their accessibility to plot. Anyone can sign up for a soldier and do a thing and be involved, but in the Nox'alfar negotiations, only a select number of high-level characters got to be involved in that.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing, or that social plots aren't happening on Arx, they are, I'm just saying that there's a perception that it's harder to get involved in social plots - whether that's true or not.

@auspice Give it three episodes to see if you like the premise. Understanding that there are a lot of things going on right under the surface that start bubbling up in Season 2 & 3. It really is one of the deepest most thoughtful shows on TV right now ... despite being a musical comedy.

Updated again.