Posts made by Misadventure

I don't understand how fish get fleas, though I can see getting flea collars on them might be hard.

Or digital personalities/Artificial Intelligences/Memetic Viruses.

The sci-fi version of being Loa.

Was time travel the only outside the box thinking we are going to talk about?

How would XCOM rule outside of a MUD context?

Put three drafters in one place with Anchors.

Time travel and causality is a headache. Your solution essentially says you can do nothing. Not even the Bill and Ted thing of remembering in the future to go back into the past to put something somewhere. Causality is an all or nothing affair without a corrective force, then you have to explain that force. Also, see the film Primer. Or the XKCD comic that as a diagram of the time travel in Primer.

Other things:
Multiple players play one character alternately.

Avoid player carried, theme unrelated RP with them. Common examples give would be playing house, white hat (aka white knight ) play, black hat play, everything is gritty, everything is rainbows, everything is noir, TS, politics are simple, politics are overly complex, etc.

Players can and will identify themselves to other players, and so OOC groupings, factions, networks, can form.

Game uses rules set that is for the most part never used. Just collected. Such as having many powers, and no particular reason to ever use them, collecting high stats and items.

Players are able to create ideas, technologies, that actually alter the setting. Doing so isn't just buying a high stat or perk.

The game setting resists the players and keeps towards the status quo and cannot be ignored, yet can be changed.

Players don't known, and won't know exactly how powers work, yet staff won't be abusing it.

Players work on making progress, not on accumulating xp /permanent power levels.

It bothers me that it's a prime example of just stopping a process. If your goal is to end the process, say so. If not, you have to bridge the disconnect. If given the authority to say no, you had better learn how to do it and move things along.

They have already repeated the balance thinking. So they won't be fixing it.

You could try to balance Aberrant/Scion out a little bit.

Or build it all with M&M. Straight out, build it power for power with M&M.

~ Maybe.

Well done! Governments can be slow, but every push helps.

Everyone has to learn for themselves. We don't mind it in children, but many important life lessons are still being learned in your twenties and thirties, and that's besides life lessons about being a parent.

I'd suggest trying to lovingly accept it and guide folks, but I'm not nice like that.

Did this have anything to do with Sinterklaus?

That look suspiciously like a clock-bomb.

What do you do with the scope?

@Sundown That's what I was talking about. Be proactive and persistent about motivation/inspiration as much as with skills as if it was to pay the bills.

I've seen many artists who "like to draw", and think that means they have a vocation, or even the skills to be a pro.

I wasn't making a dichotomy, I was describing a spectrum.

What I meant was there is a line between working when it comes to you, and you are inspired, and working when you don't have that, and still making progress, and hopefully kindling that creative enjoyment along the way. I deal a lot with creators who basically only chase that high of their ideas. They don't sit down and work on techniques and all the hard work when they don't have that fire.

I use the term art there as that thing you create from inspiration, and vocation meaning you get that inspiration.
I use craft to mean the technical aspects, and profession to mean you do it even when the urge doesn't strike you.

Part of that is as an outsider looking in, many authors I've read say write every day, whether you are feeling fired up or not.

Me, I work when fired up, but a lot of things can fire me up. When it doesn't happen, I am really really ... procrastinaty.

I completely support the idea that a failure, whether from a roll, player decisions, or plain old GM fiat (there isn't enough to make that clue out YET) shouldn't necessarily be the end. I have had good success with taking a failure and using it to add a dimension to later success, often including that aha moment of what it was that caused the failure before, whether it was chance, poor skill, or lack of information to make the important details stand out.

In a way, as long as you encountered Detail A, whether you succeed in revealing subsequents A1, A2 and A3 right then, or later doesn't always matter. But the act of looking at Detail A does, and hopefully that give the characters, and their players, a direction to think in.

In a "logical sense", it sounds like your approach is let them roll until they succeed, and once that isn't viable, have a fallback plan that goes into definite failure but still leads somewhere. I /think/ that this is much more compatible with the GumShoe idea if it was packaged right, than your think.

I really think the GUMSHOE approach (for those who don't know,. you have 0-10 points in 30+ forensic skills, and if you want to be the one to find a clue in a situation, you spend a point and find it. What it means may or may not be included, but what it means in context of the whole mystery is usually left to the players to work out) is about spotlight sharing. It's my turn to show I can find a difficult fingerprint anomaly. Otherwise the team could just have an even spread across all things, and the GM could turn it into an OOC guessing game by having more clues than they have points in a give forensic skill, and if the players don't choose to spend when important, too bad.

So, I think you could really read it as "Chararacters never miss a chance to interpret a clue, though they may fail if they are missing another clue to add context to the first." After that, its about players talking it out, and giving skill rolls to understand what a clue means, or where it leads.

Specific example: Locked doors and windows, no finger/glove prints on anything. I know that a wall crawling spider themed villain was in the room, and stuck to the ceiling, lowered themselves down on a web, and did X, then went up and crawled through the ceiling panels the same way they came in. IF a player asked, they could quickly find clues on the ceiling. If they had no reason to look, their rolls would just confirm the details. No nothing was cleaned off, there are no impressions on the carpet even. A remote drone would have disturbed the papers on the desks, etc. Later on, finding some web, or whatever, they might think to check the ceiling. I might even allow that with new info their skill could suggest check the ceiling.

Framing is important, especially when the characters are supposed to be talented pros like on Star Trek. (This is where limiting margin of success by how many points were in a skill made characters who invested in a skill feel like pros).

You may be describing the dividing line between writing as an art/vocation, and writing as a craft/profession

I get where you are coming from. I'm not talking about you literally, just a pattern in games in general. However, I will ask you this: would you be fine if you went in to a investigation scene, rolled crappy, and then either the GM told you flat out that the investigation will bear no fruit unless something false in your lap in a few weeks, or even playing through all the dead ends etc and not getting any further? And that was that? Would you expect several more chances for whatever reason, like another crime in the string, or someone offering info? Or no?

I have been the person running mysteries, and trust me I am not an author, nor am I perfect at all. I did this in Champions (superheroes, often with wacky powers and high skills), Deadlands (often little character skill, just player intelligence or imagination), GURPS (player skills and player intelligence).

In all cases, one major lesson was this: if you spend a lot of time on something, and the players never see it, it's as if it was never there.

I often relied on the noir/hardboiled detective approach which was that persistence would inevitably get one of the hidden actors to act against you directly, and as player characters you were heroic enough to survive and learn critical info. Being super heroes really helped with that. I also made experts available, and had the players direct their efforts the same as they would direct their own: was there anything in particular they should look for,m or a theory they should try to prove/disprove?

In the end, I probably let the players succeed by giving many chances often. If they repeatedly did terrible with rolls, their experts, and their as player thoughts, that could lead to a mystery. This is how the NPC they were meant to protect eventually was subverted to join Grendel and his syndicate and help cover up that telepaths were reading various critical minds and not controlling but benefiting from economic decisions in the realm of billions a year. The heroes utterly failed and that stood as a mystery until the post game rundown of what was going on.

Apologies to the Star Trek topic. Another way to look at this is how often did Star Trek character fail to spot something, then fail to note something due to that failure, then when confronted with the consequences then failed to be of use, and THAT all was the focus of the episode? Usually we focus on who will be an active part of the storyline, right? Not the almost was's.

Weird, I don't worry about failure. I don't want to make the effort until I feel inspired, even if it will succeed.

Even if hungry, this can stop me from cooking. I'll sleep through the hunger.