Posts made by Lithium

As a Native American myself, I can't help but want to get stabby about 'American' ideology of what it is to /be/ American.

Fear and Loathing though has a weird scale for characters that really turned me away from it though. Also the transfer character thing. Oh well.

Wooo someone else who played Aether! I really enjoyed that game.

Truly charismatic people are scary as hell RL.

Why shouldn't they be in games?

I think it comes down to not liking to lose. Honestly. People just don't like to lose and so they try to mitigate their weakpoints by just flat out refusing to use the systems in which they are weak in.

I do like the idea of using social combat to try and manipulate someone's viewpoint, or someone's emotions, but I've never seen the emotional tilts used anywhere in nWoD for example.

So how do you make social stats and combat worth as much as the rest? I kind of like the idea of mood health tracks, at one end is happyness, the other is sadness, one is calm the other enraged, you could have stubborn on one end and amenable on the other, you could have more but really... That's already adding a hefty layer of complication.

So when someone gets 'hit' with social combat (And I am fully for social defense stats as well) it's effect changes the characters position on the track and influences them accordingly.

Not everyone has the same ability to roleplay and roleplay styles will determine a lot of whether someone likes or accepts something but our ability to RP is not the character. I'll never be as suave as some of my characters, so I shouldn't be able to play social characters at all? I don't like that one bit.

I suppose you could put in modifiers like in Exalted where well written/described stuff gave you bonus dice but in the end?

I actually really liked the DB universe and such, there is a crazy amount of lore there for sure.

My only question is how do you stop the Super Saiyajin Powerup of the week being the be all and end all?

Everyone can't be a member of a now mostly dead race after all.

@bored I have to agree that the Fate point part of Fate can be a handful on a MU* setting but the core elements of the system however work very well. If you 'lose' social, you have lost any ability to influence the scene further. I've had social combats on Dresden Files games where my character lost the social combat, so they got angry and left the conversation. I've had others where they realized they weren't going to change anyone's minds and thus stopped being socially combative, and still others where my character had their mind changed.

All of this was based on the RP and the type of social maneuvers used per se and it worked very well in my experience.

The part where the system gets tricky is indeed the Fate Point aspect of it, I think it might be better to just have so many fate points every scene. That way having a high refresh is still good. You could still use aspects and tagging etc, but it'd make having to book keep how many fate points someone deserves less an issue.

People could still take compels, and if the scene agreed, gain a useable fate point for the scene but this is a big time tangent.

Sorry.

@surreality That's completely fair, and like I said in my post if it's a primarily PvE game I would have much less qualms about it honestly.

Just was throwing out why I thought it could be an issue on certain types of games.

@HelloProject @ first world problem.

That is really what it comes down to though. Can you make it work, or can you not?

If you can a game can be fun, if you can't, move on and find a game that can be fun.

It's sort of like anything really, there will never be anything that everybody likes, 100% approval. Just not going to happen because people's tastes are different.

Trying to force a square peg into a round hole is just... silly imho.

I am curious about this, I am just wondering how much the God Machine itself is going to be involved in this.

Fun is entirely subjective.

Player Toxicity also in a way because people have different tolerance levels so what is toxic to one person, may not be to another.

The key to enjoying any game though is finding out how much you can put up with, and developing the ability to find those who you enjoy playing with and making it work.

No game is perfect.

No game is even great for everyone.

@surreality said in Identifying Major Issues:

Issue: The Trust Gap.

Reasoning behind this one is obvious enough, and plenty of it is actually reasonable: there are people who gleefully and cheerfully abuse the hell out of any power they have.

((Stuff))

Do you think that sort of reduction helps, or that it still really just won't make any difference in reducing the trust gap?

Here's the problem with WoD/CoD and it comes to everything being on the wiki. A) Wiki's are easily editable, so how do you ensure accuracy? B) People like their dark secrets to be dark secrets. It seems many people do not know the difference between IC and OOC knowledge, and they will let stuff they know OOCly influence their RP or how they act towards a character/person.

I've seen it happen where someone shows up and starts speaking about stuff about my character that they had no way to know because they read it on the wiki.

So that trust gap is there, and it's a hard thing to overcome.

ESPECIALLY for games that can end up in PvP so easily. Politics are a big part of CoD for example, intra-pack, inter-pack, Coterie, Elysium, Tur, etc and politics /are/ pvp most of the time.

I have seen very open games work in the past, but those were mostly Fate games which were more pve than pvp.

@Thenomain For games like Fall Coast (I have never been there so this is pure conjecture) is also one of the reasons that Dark Metal had a huge player base at the time compared to a lot of other games:

Freedom.

From what I understand Fall Coast is entirely about your clique, there's very little interaction between clique's, and when there is it is usually spectacularly nasty which of course drives drama. This allows a wide variety of freedom available for the player base to play out their stories.

Dark Metal was similar in that it was so batshit crazy(tm), and I say that fondly as I quite enjoyed it from time to time, that people literally did practically anything they wanted to, and most of the time it didn't matter.

That's another type of freedom.

So as to why some games don't have the same kind of weight, you get situations where player A gets butthurt because player B does something IC that hurt their OOC feelings. So they run to staff and set up official complaints against others or they start up campaigns badmouthing others. It doesn't matter what type of scene this is, but once it happens and it starts snowballing... people /stop/ trying to include others because the risk is to high that shit is going to go sideways.

I also think the current mindset of just throwing XP at people also doesn't help create RP on the grid, sure, vote systems were something of a popularity contest but at least they got people out there doing stuff.

Of course ymmv and I could be very wrong, but it's just how it seems to me. What's the point of doing anything if it doesn't amount to anything? Where's the incentive? Sure there's the 'story' but for a great many people they also like character development and growth which is part of why some people hate pure consent games.

Uodate, M&B is no longer Free. I checked my e-mail this morning, saw the free, clicked link, and it is gone. Was very limited free period apparently. Which kinda bites, I was hoping to snag it.

@ThatGuyThere This is just another reason why I have long felt that TT systems simply do not work for MU. It's an entirely different medium. Sure we've hamfisted a few systems and made rules adjustments but in my experience everything that has the same cost, needs to have comparable value.

In this case there is no difference in costs between social skills and combat skills, so those social skills need to be just as important and the rules need to be just as followed as with combat skills.

Is it perfect? Of course not, but to do otherwise is quite simply saying: Social characters are pointless to even do.

That's not something I accept.

@Ganymede I agree with what you're saying, and this is one of the reasons I /like/ Fate so much in a MU setting. Social combat? Almost identical to real combat. Losing can actually be beneficial. I watched a Warder lose social combat about a possible Warlock and so they retreated. Sure they could have turned it combatty, and being a warden maybe could have forced the issue but they didn't.

So in the end it comes down to what was said before: The problem comes down to /players/ who abuse/break the rules, and the staff has to be willing to show those types to the door. At least in my opinion, because a problem player or three can chase people away from a game just as easily as bad staffers can.

That said: I don't mind the idea of Social not even being statted beyond a few key things, but otherwise being RP based. My first real MUSH used Amber Diceless and I had a /ton/ of fun there, socially and combatty. Not pure consent, but pretty close all things considered.

@Arkandel said in CofD and Professional Training:

@Lithium said in CofD and Professional Training:

The solution is enforcement of theme and rules. Everyone by playing the game knows (or should) know what the rules are for the game and it's systems. They should know what happens when social skills are used.

I just explained why that approach hasn't worked - in my opinion. Can you explain why you think that interpretation is incorrect?

It hasn't worked, because it was never enforced. I've yet to see a single game since 1992 that was based on WoD where social rules were actively enforced. Oh sure, Dominate got enforced, certain Gift's got enforced, but not actual social dice.

Admittedly I've not played on every WoD game there was, but if you know of a game where social rules were actually enforced, I'd like to hear why that didn't work. If it was a problem with people not liking the rules, or /other/ problems that usually end up with a mu* dying, like bad staff etc.

I'm more inclined to play a space game than a WoD game honestly. I know there are others. Sure WoD gets a lot of traction conversation wise but there were other games that got a lot of traction. The 100 got a lot of traction until it imploded, there's the BSG game, ARX, etc.

There's lots of desire for not WoD... please god not another WoD game lol.

Make what you like, make it good, get good involved staff, run things, it'll grow.

@Arkandel I think if the 'solution' 'must' use positive reinforcement, then the 'solution' as you outlined it would have been done a long time ago.

The solution is enforcement of theme and rules. Everyone by playing the game knows (or should) know what the rules are for the game and it's systems. They should know what happens when social skills are used.

The rules are there.

The only 'problem' is that not every scene is judged by an ST, and this game is /built/ around ST involvement.

That's how I feel about it anyways, we have st's to judge combat scenes, why not st's judging social combat? It costs the same XP, it should be just as useful in situations where it applies.

@Arkandel How's this for justification: Your character isn't dead?

IMHO to many people think it's justifiable to just punch someone trying to socialize with them. I think there needs to be consequences for the violence. Most of the time violence isn't a good thing, especially in public.

I think the only thing that needs to be done is enforcement, not benefits, just play the game by the fucking rules. Otherwise? You're cheating.

There's always this talk of removal of agency like it's such a bad thing, but you know what? If player A knocks player B out with a punch, or kills them, then they just removed player B's agency just the same as if player A had used social rolls in a social conflict.

Probably worse, since most of the time you don't even lose social agency, you just get to decide how your character would react, feeling those things that the social roll made them feelz.

That's not loss of Agency, that's a fucking RP opportunity. A lot better one than laying on the ground knocked out and doing nothing.

On another less fun note, there is rumor going around that there won't even be a sequel anymore, just some DLC, which blows.

I liked the game even with it's flaws and every Asari but one having the same fucking face... it was enjoyable.