Posts made by mietze

If you want to retain agency and be able to put things in a direction that makes things comfortable for you, then I think by necessity you are going to also have to do some work other than batting down someone else's perfectly reasonable roll and success with a "nah, that just doesn't work for me." Doesnt that other play partner have just as much need for feeling validated and comfortable?

I do not think a prerequisite for having social skills should be that the player is psychic. But that can be how they are treated like they should be otherwise "well you just didn't convince me oocly."

I guess if you wanted to eliminate all need for player discussion/negotiation, you could have buyable abilities that give you social immunity from certain applications that are a hot button/sore spot for the player. ("I can never be convinced to follow someone else's suggestion about my business." "I can never be charmed into giving a favor or discount." "Oratory dice have no effect on my willingness to be moved by a political speech." Usually sexual situations are off the table for rolling, as they should be.)

This whole discussion is about how/if to incorporate social skills into a mush where the system being used heavily relies upon them.

Using or adapting the system that has already been written to help with this, and reflects a player's desire for agency but also the risk that comes from playing a dice-rolling game seems like a no brainer.

I actually don't think there are really super understandable reasons for being knee jerk resistant to this idea of doing this, IF you want to play on a game that is not full consent. Hell even if you ENJOY full consent (as I have very much so) you still need to talk/negotiate with the other player. And if you never want to talk to another person, then why complain about the dice compelling you to just give in?

We are discussing this because of the nature of WoD themes and storylines being not so black and white, because theres a lot of flexibility in what the skills can do (by design), and because there are a lot of misunderstandings that crop up because of that.

Being willing to discuss/roll/resolve is already in the system. You can customize the bells and whistles so that it is less overwhelming for people who dont handle newness well.

And yeah, maybe I just has shitty GMs in my tt experience but I have indeed told them I wanted to sneak past a guard, gotten info about the set up of the area, then used that info to make my pitch, rolled, and resolved. It made it fun and I got to be creative, esp if it was a super hard situation. I'm hard pressed to think of any tt session, from high school D&D to present where I didn't discuss things with my GM, and where I didn't reap rewards for doing so.

And in fact, if you read previous versions of CoD the discussion pre roll/roll has existed in that game for a long long time. You just did it with the GM.

As has been said over and over again about many subjects, though a MUSH is not TT so I'm not sure why we are getting hung up on that. Given the nature of mushes, the interactions you have between PCs are very much as if you are sharing the responsibility of GMing/working it out amongst yourselves so why would it seem or be weird to engage each other in that discussion piece?

It's just a part of the game. Maybe we should stop treating other players like they're NPCs in our tabletop game, where we can be very passive in what is done to/with us?

The rolls and discussion can increase the fun immensely, as well as provide a lot of character development, assuming normal players (no bad actors) and willingness to hear people out.

@faraday the last time I saw this on a TTRPG was Chronicles of Darkness. It's WoD.

I understand you dont like this? But there are systems that already exist that do just that. Its not a hybrid. It's just a system you dont care for.

It seems strange to me that people kick and scream using /rules and suggestions that are right there in the sourcebook of the place they're playing at/, and I suspect a lot of it comes from the attitude of "what? That's just not done! No RPG is like that!" But there are RPG systems like that.

@seraphim73

I don't understand why there tends to be so much resistance (I've seen this a lot) to the idea of "discuss" when it comes to social skills. Granted, this works a lot better one on one rather than in one vs. many (like a speech to a crowded room).

I really enjoy using the doors/other systems where dice can be used "against" me when someone is using their social skills, but I get to be involved in tailoring it for my PC (which is what those skills often represent, finding an opening/weakness/some kind of indicator they can move in on and get on with the con or whatever). It creates much more enjoyable RP for me the victim than for some person (no matter how well they pose) making a guess bout what would move my PC or what opening they could make and then be so off it's hard to play along with the roll.

It lets me really think about my PC and possibly go in a different direction than what I had envisioned, because the other player is making me think as we work towards a resolution to achieve the goal and their dice roll. I feel like someone gets to know MY character a little more. (Usually because this is fun, I also then have the opportunities to be intrigued/ask questions ICly so I get to know that PC a little more too, which means that player gets to feel like someone else not their OOC friend gives a shit about their character.

It can be really really fun to resolve conflict that way. And it definitely CAN be done. But you have to set the expectation from the start, staff may need to handhold or set good examples or whatever. But I find using dice to open the conversation about resolving conflicting goals has been really satisifying when it's done well, and I think people who totally close themselves off to any possibility whatsoever that their PC can be influenced by another in any way that cedes even a minor degree of control over the outcome are missing out.

That is one of the reasons why I've enjoyed the open sheet games I've been on, actually. It's like a little challenge to me as a RPer all on its own. Especially when the person has great stats for social stuff or motivational stuff or whatever, but their RP isn't to my personal taste. It's been fun trying to tease out at least one thing in their pose/scene that I-player can have my PC seize on for a more positive reaction.

You know the funny thing is though, that when I do that, it's fun to see how excited the other player gets about it. I guess this shit is easier when you really like to make other players feel good about the interaction, whatever it might be. I've also seen people improve greatly over time once they get more comfortable with me as a player too, knowing that I won't mock or make fun of them oocly and will respond to them as if they had posed their action (which they are entitled to/it's appropriate) in a way that spoke to my PC organically. A lot of people pick up on that also, and I find I'll get back over time what I complement in my poses, so it becomes enjoyable for me too, if I'm willing to give that player a chance.

@ganymede I agree. I understand the compulsion many folks have to resist learning anything new for systems they're familiar with but...2.0 has so many upgrades that reward people for collaborative play, who make things a little more interesting than input/output dice, it's a shame that people knee jerk hate it.

I love the investigations/doors/chase/quick combat stuff. It's really useful and fun once you get to know it. I know the quick combat stuff has allowed me to run scenes that are super exciting and where the PCs actually get to be the supernatural badasses they are against normies without tying everyone down to hours of regular combat where everyone is exhausted before we get to the good stuff.

I think if used as intended, social skills do add a lot of fun to the game. They are very useful in gmed scenes where the runner is willing to allow them to be used (rather than just combat for everything). They can be used to reclaim player agency as well by the non-combat PC (when someone wants to kill/attack them which will remove them from play, they can mitigate some of that by talking the person down, making it just a beating instead of the PK.) Since presumably the PC doesn't want to die/be forced physically into that box/ect.)

In order to support social skills to their fullest potential though I think its probably important to use them as intended--mostly on NPCs or against organizations not individuals (I think combat skills should be limited mostly to NPCs too.)

Eliminating personal PVP solves a lot of the problems.

@magee101 no offense, but unless someone is pressuring you to play out minutia that you don't want to (in which case you should dump that person's ass, they're not a good RP partner for you), why would you care? That seems to be an odd thing to fixate on to ruin your enjoyment of a game, because other people are playing something you don't like in their private scenes.

But it is something that has been the mainstay of MU bitching I guess (what other people are imagined to do/are doing in private not with the person doing the bitching) I guess.

WTF? How can you read the splatbooks and say that WoD is not about relationship play? I mean for goodness sake, vampire and werewolf are arguable ALL about maintaining, gaining, and destroying relationships and have extensive sexual themes in too much detail.

To be clear, my kiddo is in a private preschool (That is supposed to be play based) in a church building. But I am very worried about public school kindergarten, which in our area is highly academic and full day for everyone (when my bigs were little, it was half day, you had to pay for full day). I mean I support full day for everyone because at the very least I want every single kid who can to get breakfast and lunch 5 days a week, and it helps a lot of families, and does have some good effects too, especially if you have a lot of parent volunteers in the class so that one teacher isn't having to deal with 25 kindergarteners with a huge spectrum of school readiness all by themselves all day. So I'm not anti-kindy.

But I really don't think my kid is going to be ready at 5 for what seems to be the current non-academic expectations. I guess we will see though, the nice/frustrating thing about little kids is that things can change dramatically as far as tolerance/readiness in a year. Or even six months.

Yep, I actually do not think that he's behind at all developmentally (My bachelors is in Family and Child Development, plus that whole experienced parent thing). I am glad we qualify for state insurance for the kids though, because otherwise those assessments (which are not covered by insurance) would have cost us in the $800-1200 range for us to be told by every single evaluator but the OT "why the fuck are you here".

I am worried that this year will go much like last year, when by the end of the year he was showing stress behaviors (like thumb sucking/shirt chewing) that he does not do at home (or didn't until last year at school) that totally disappeared this summer.

To some degree I have empathy for the preschools, because the state mandates for Kindergarten are pretty crazy from when my high schoolers were young. Now they expect all children to be writing their names and reading by the end of Kindy, and it's a full day for everyone. That's an incredible leap for the "average" expectation. I think my guy would easily meet standard even now, but I am worried about the sitting still expectations, as well as discipline issues where playground time is taken away.

I guess I'll have to wait until I can tour the kindergarten class to see how the teacher at our local school (it's pretty small, there's usually only 1 kindergarten class for the neighborhood kids). and withhold judgement until then.

@goblin Yeah, scale matters too. The electoral area I'm an elections observer for (King County, Washington State in the US, it includes Seattle and much but not all of the Seattle burbs) has 1.2 million registered voters. If everyone registered that was eligible it'd be likely double that or more.

@ganymede I know. But I think becoming an elections observer is usually a lot more fun than becoming a member of the DCC (or RCC) at any level. Having been an official at the precinct and county level. It's a huge time commitment, and if it involves travel it's not an insignificant amount of financial sacrifice too. We've been working to lessen that burden so that more people than silver haired white guys and rich people can make up those bodies. It's been a long slog, and we've been prioritizing purging the rapists/predators from our ranks first, pretty successfully, so that those meetings are actually safe ones for women to be at.

Also putting in a plug--If you are able to donate the time for the actual work plus any training, please please PLEASE consider becoming an elections observer. I have now been a certified elections observer for 2 years in my county, and it is both uplifting personally and very very important. If you cannot do that (usually it's done via the local parties) then please consider getting involved with a group that provides transportation to polling centers (if your community still has those), or who is doing help outside a polling place.

Mostly American elections are about disenfranchising people, either by laws, funding (not funding polling places in poor/urban/college areas and not funding vote by mail), or propaganda ("It doesn't matter if you vote or not, it never makes a difference).

My youngest's preschool teacher sent me a pretty nasty email last week, disclosing that she had "made" him sit and work on a cutting project (he is currently getting OT for fine motor strength, specifically things like scissors that require pressure as well as finesse, and pencil grip issues), and then she was very disappointed that he "whined" when he was allowed to get up from that project only to be forced to do another one.

I really loved this school when my older kids went there 12 years ago. My kids all are quirky kids. And I have has one of my older boys be a very kinetic kid so I get it.

But honestly I think my trust has been irrevocably broken at this point with this school. And that teacher. They can give me nothing positive to say about my child.

Even doing therapeutic foster care with some extremely challenging kids, even working corrections, I could always come up with at least ONE positive things to say in addition to the laundry list of problems.

He seems to like going, which is the only reason he didn't get pulled that day. But I think its likely I will pull him by t-giving or December break, and I am currently rearranging my life and current wants/goals so I can be available to homeschool kindergarten next year if necessary. Waiting on getting the actual school district to do an evaluation and observation at the preschool too. Just so I know what the reality is. Every evaluator we have taken him to through his insurance gives us a weird look and asks us why we are there being evaluated because he is normal (except for the fine motor muscle issues) if very high energy kid.

I'm just really sad. It is selfishly very hard to contemplate trashing my work desires/hopes again. The nice thing 12 years ago is that the kids had a little more time to set settled before being expected to do desk work/learning through circle time instruction. But at least I do have the resources to try and give my kid a foundation where they dont end up hating school and have their teacher hate them in preschool or kindy.

I'm sad that preschool is so academic and kindergarten is more so. And I'm worried for my very happy, kinetic kid.

My heart breaks (and I lost it during Dr. Ford's testimony about looking towards Mike Judge, her friend, while she was being attacked) for all the people who saw that their friend could have helped them and they didn't.

I am so lucky that in the times when I've been assaulted when other people were around my friends always intervened. Including one rescuing me from his own father who had drunkenly cornered me at a military ball.

Or "who did you watch be assaulted/raped and then engage in her shaming/blaming afterwards?"

Which is probably even more people, men and women.