@Ganymede I've read and tried to use the Doors system effectively. I've had a lot of fun with the Doors system. I think you're absolutely bonkers for thinking its a decent way to solve PvP social conflicts, because as I've said before it so utterly favors the aggressor that it just doesn't work in any antagonistic scenario. In the hands of someone who doesn't want to play nice and cooperative its made to be abused.
@Ganymede The difference between vampire disciplines and social fu is that disciplines you can (or at least I can) easily explain why you're doing these crazy things. VAMPIRE MIND CONTROL. There's a cause and effect. No matter how crazy these emotions and thoughts are, they have a plausible reason for being there. To me in this they're like physical combat. They follow the same rules of cause and effect (even movie realism cause and effect) that everybody can more or less get behind. Or should be able to, unless they're just absolute control freaks.
@Arkandel I am in love with this show. The last episode was fucking fantastic! Since I don't actually read all the internet theory crafting boards, I missed that it was a great big theory being thrown around.
The problem with the Doors system, to whoever mentioned that, is that it was utterly in favor of the aggressor. With the amount of XP a regular character on a MU WOD game carries, they could fail like 5 percent of the time (not even talking about a fully stacked specialist who just couldn't fail.). Now in 2.0 they've added more defensive merits to try to balance things more, but even now it heavily favors the aggressor unless you've bought said merits. '
Which makes it a bad pvp system, unless you modify it.
ETA: How is this different from combat? If you start a fight you run a serious risk of losing. There's a puncher's chance of even a mediocre combat character giving you a bloody nose and some humiliation unless you're an absolute beast. And you know, there are risks and consequences of throwing your physical weight around, entirely unrelated to how it goes in the actual fight.
Social combat then shouldn't offer the same absolute success, the same visceral 'I win for completely' reward, because it doesn't come with the same 'I could totally lose completely' risk.
@Coin said in Social Conflict via Stats:
But my point is: physical stats get less flak because there's this tacit and implicit agreement in the hobby that you don't need to get along OOC to get into a physical bloody brawl IC, and "oh well, I killed your character, SUCK IT". And it's a shitty position to take as a hobby.
When do people ever do this, on which games?
Because I can't recall coming across it on a MU I played on, ever. Sure the world's full of bluster, but actual follow through of just offing people? It doesn't happen in my experience, and I expect on games where it was the norm I wouldn't be playing.
@sthanheykel I find the prospect intriguing! If you can get it up and running, I'll certainly try it out at some point. Don't have the time to Staff, though.
@Kanye-Qwest said in Social Conflict via Stats:
yeah, I'm not feeling that. Physical skills can and are used to 'arbitrate' pc/pc conflict, thus social skills need to be at least that effective.
While I believe that social skills and mechanics do need to be important, in fact they should have more metaphysical weight than physical stats/skills, they're not equivalents of each other. They do very different things.
They can't be handled the same, because they aren't the same. The consequences aren't the same, either.
Being beat up is a temporary setback. Even if its not temporary, even if you have a limb chopped off, you're still playing the same character (minus a limb). You decide how you handle the loss. Death is permanent, of course, but at least you played your character to the end. Physical combat is the result of two players' agency coming to a head, and arbitrates the physical result.
In my experience people would much rather be beat up, than have dice tell them that a year of scenes and friendship with character X is now at its end, and you have to play out a betrayal that will branch out and disrupt every story and every scene you were looking forward to. Social combat results in one player seizing the agency of another player, and rewriting it. Often with very little thought to the internal conflict and wider consequences of that rewriting.
Acknowledging that, and thus ensuring that your systems have a decent amount of give and take is imperative. You don't need to cooperate to create a plausible scene and story through physical combat. In social combat, its an absolute necessity.
To the mention of RfK: while valuing social stats, it valued them primarily through giving characters with an emphasis of social stats immense extra resources at their disposal. Those resources then became leverage that they could use in their social scenes. To me that's a great way to do it. The power was indirect, thus side stepping the mine field of player agency. The social character had mortal pull, could destroy your territory, could leave you without blood and a million headaches if she played it right. That in itself was where the leverage came. In addition they had rolls to augment the scenes, in which if you accepted the social dice loss you got benefits, and if you didn't you were punishment.
@Cadi I like this, too. It fills my comedy needs alongside Brooklyn 9-9
@Cobaltasaurus I've already been roped in by someone to play a ghoul! But we can still be mortal buddies when the vampires aren't around.
@Arkandel said in Welcome to Fallen World MUX!:
It's Fallen World. It's a Mage game, not a dating one. At some point, possibly due to the overall inactivity and lack of things-to-do it wasn't about unlocking mysteries or fighting the Seers, it was about who was banging whom. And Incro had a hand in that. Twice I was paged asking to come along to scenes to cockblock him - that shouldn't have been necessary.
I tend to be of the opinion that the dating game is never really detrimental to a game. Whenever they seem to take over the game, its not that they're actually taking over anything at all. Its just that they're filling a big gaping hole where there should be SOMETHING but for whatever reason, the game is failing to provide it. Its the comfortable haven when everything else is a wasteland.
Those players who focus solely on it from the start aren't subtracting anything, they're still adding to the game in a myriad of small ways.
I had a character concept I pondered on, but I doubt I'd have time to schedule in more than a scene or two a week on Reno. Would be a human/ghoul, though. The problem with ghouls of course is that they need a vampire.
So how do you plan on producing a different result than Reno 1.0?
@Ganymede said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.:
You're being sexually harassed because some asshole thinks it's okay to sexually harass you.
This.
While I usually play men, I occasionally play women.
The first time I did was an eye-opener, though. An asexual warrior with the focus meant to be on that aspect, with her just happening to be a woman. The shit that consistently ended up directed at me, without an ounce of solicitation, was horrifying. It certainly informed how I page people, because I don't want to be that person.
I kept going: Why, WHY would anyone think this was OK to page me?!
@Ganymede I think I'd call myself a V20 player, in the sense that I like the game better than I do nwod in nearly every aspect (except the actual mechanical systems, where nwod is a dream compared to the shitty v20 mechanics that makes especially combat about twice as complicated, and that's a feat). I just don't tend to play on v20 games because every one of them seems determined to shoot themselves in the face by trying to shove Sabbat and Camarilla into one game. It wrecks any chance that the vampire game will be about politics and schemes and all the good vampire stuff. Sabbat never plays nice. The Camarilla have to all be combat monkeys so they don't get eaten, and instead of back stabbing each other and fighting for power they band together against the Sabbat (its only logical, yo).
Every game that tries to bridge that gap by presenting common enemies, or whatever, fails in execution, because you're still trying to cram two vastly different games together, and expect it not to blow up in your face.
./end rant.
Actually, I wrote that too soon. While the Anarchs aren't quite as terrible to combine with the Camarilla, I still think you're basically undercutting the basic premise of the Brujah et all, who are supposed to rage against the oppression and regime from the inside. Give them Anarchs in the same setting and you've basically ensured that anyone who sticks with the Camarilla gets branded the sell out pussies (which they are, that's the point of it all). They no longer have their purpose, because you've given the rebel purpose to the Anarchs. And that in turn puts a wrench on the whole Camarilla dynamic. I've seen it occasionally work, but only when the Anarchs are so weak and obviously helpless that only the completely crazy freedom fanatics and Camarilla rejects actually go to them. At which point their purpose isn't to play the rebels, its to play the hopeless.
From what I saw of City of Hope, though, that's just a terrible game with a terrible culture and generally full of utter terribleness, rather than the baseline of v20 players.
ETA: Make a Camarilla game, or make an Anarch game, or make a Sabbat game. Don't start out trying to make one that gives you all three. If you absolutely want to mix Anarch and CAmarilla, start out with one of them and get that sphere on its feet and good and kicking, before you throw in a wrench by adding a second sect. And never, ever, put in the damn Sabbat.
@Lithium I reaaaally wasn't sold on it to start with, but it grew on me. Now I think I like it better than its sister show.
@saosmash Burnout is always a serious concern, especially with a small staff. There's often an enthusiasm and energy dip right after you finish a project, too. I wonder if that'll happen when beta starts (or ends?) and if there's a plan B just in case.
@Auspice I support those I think my character would in some way support. If I'm lucky I do one task every few weeks at this point, myself. But I don't begrudge others being more active, except when they're obviously trying to game the system. Then I just refuse to play along.