Posts made by Ominous

@Sunny

I didn't say they did. In fact, my example shows you can have strength in one and a lack of the other and be a very good and successful movie. However, it is /easier/, if they're complimentary, and, when it involves a game, it helps reduce butthurt.

@Sunny

I did, but it was more of a sidenote than the main discussion.

I'm going to double post to define some of the things I am talking about and give an example. By mechanics and framework, I mean rules that provide internal consistency. Even if these rules are narrative in nature, they're still rules and a framework. "If you walk outside when it is raining, you'll get wet" is a rule and begins to set some framework. When the servants find the dead king in his bed and see wet footprints leading into his bedroom, they know the attacker came into the room from outside the castle on this stormy night. Maybe they can follow the footprints and try to track down the assailant!

Now, you can use freeform play - meaning play that doesn't really care about the rules - to tell a good story. One of the greatest movies of all time did - Star Wars: A New Hope. If it was following the mechanics, things would have played out like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzoeEdW-EDQ&vl=en

However, in the excitement of the movie, fridge logic hasn't taken hold yet and the story works. At least until you get to the fridge after the movie has ended.

Later they fixed this plot hole in the novelization by giving the Death Star a several hour recharge time, so that within the rules it makes sense why they took the 30 minutes to move around Yavin, rather than destroy Yavin and wait a few hours to destroy the rebel base.

It is easier, though, to tell a good, internally consistent story that doesn't fall apart with fridge logic with a nice set of rules. And, when playing a game, having a good, internally consistent set of rules is important to ensure fair play. In the Star Wars movie, the player of the Emperor would have been understandable in his anger that suddenly Yavin couldn't be destroyed for 'reasons', just so there could be a climactic scene.

This also gets to how differing systems can better produce preferred styles of play. George Lucas did not get angry that Yavin couldn't be blown up for 'reasons.' He probably didn't even think about it until someone pointed out the plothole. Why? Because he wasn't /the/ player of Darth Vader or the Emperor. He wasn't personally invested and emotionally connected to those characters over other characters like how people get on MU*s or in Pathfinder. They were just a character in a wide set of characters that he was invested in. Their own personal stories a small subsection of the wider story that he was trying to tell.

@Sunny said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

On a mush, structure actually tends to encourage freedom and creativity. When people are comfortable that they know exactly what their limits are, they get really comfortable pushing those limits. It might seem counter intuitive, but a heavily structured system lends very well to a narrative game.

One of Mark Rosewater's favorite sayings is "Restriction breeds creativity."

However, what you just said is exactly what I said at the beginning of this entire tangent - you need mechanics to serve as a framework for politics and intrigue. You need to know what the limits are in order to effectively plot and plan. Can you assassinate your target like Brutus did to Julius Ceasar, in front of a governmental assembly, and get away with it (sort of)? Or do you need to set a bomb in a war room because you're playing a game set in Nazi Germany and your goal is to assassinate Hitler?

@Sunny

At that point, you're trying to unscrew a phillips-head screw with a flathead screwdriver. You can do it, but it's cludgy and a better tool exists. It's like when people use Pathfinder for a narrative heavy campaign and get overwhelmed by all the feats and skills and the +1s and +2s and -5s. Then there's the tabletop miniatures wargame combat that they have to cludge through in the rare instances that combat occurs. They could've used a much more streamlined system that incentivizes and supports more narrative play and resolves combat in a couple of quick rolls or card draws.

Since everyone seems more on the narrative side of games, I am shocked that games are still using a framework created by MUD which was aping Colossal Cave Adventure's system, which was like 95% mechanics and 5% narrative. If you're wanting narrative games, why have we not started looking at all of the developments in the past decade with storygames aka Narrativist RPGs? Where's the telnet version of Kingdom, Microscope, Our Last Best Hope, Nobilis, Mystic Empyrean, or Dread?

@Herja

There's a little bit more buy in when the piece of code that the Queen of the Realm has is the /execution command, causing someone to die in 10 days unless she is killed first, or maybe the /treasury command which gives her total control of the coins produced every month and she can dole them out as she sees fit to her subjects with the game eating coins from people every month, and, if you don't have enough coins for Cron, your character starves and dies.

@Lotherio said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

There is sort of a trail of heavy coded MUSH/non-MUD that I sort of follow relative to political type games outside of like WoD; again this is my flow chart only. Crossroads was 15+ years back (2K to mid decade as it dwindled out) ~scramble of a few years~ then Firan and now Arx.

It's funny you mention Crossroads, because that's the game where I reached the conclusion that you need mechanical backing for politics and intrigue. I had someone approach me about negotiating a trade deal between our respective lordships. It was the most boring scene I have ever had, because we were negotiating over nothing. We could have called the items we were talking about widgets and doodads for all that it mattered and whatever numbers we wanted to throw out there were equally valid, because with undefined amounts, we had infinite amounts of the goods. What I should have done is traded an infinite amount out of my infinite amount of goods to all the other lordships in exchange for an infinite amount of their infinite amount of goods and then settled down in my nice, boring post-scarcity lordship.

@Herja

That boggles my mind. If there is no meaning behind whatever it is we're plotting over, I can't get invested enough to care in order to plot. To me it would be like when people get into fights at sporting events. I love watching sports and playing sports. I'm not going to fight someone at a game, no matter how much I have had to drink.

@secretfire said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

I still kinda want to see a Lords and Ladies style game that's either High Fantasy or High Sci-Fi, with plenty of plotting and intrigue. Not in the Arx-style (I can't get my head around the Arx codebase, its too much) - but even so, with plenty of people plotting to get the 'King of the Hill' spot and keep it.

My background is more freeform, where if you want rp - you get on channel and go 'hey, who wants to rp' then people find a spot to play in. I mean, I've done code-heavy places before (and by 'code heavy', I mean some scifi places), but Arx felt more like a text-based MMO to me in terms of implementation. I'm sure its great, and that people into it have a super-fun time, its just...a bit much, for me. I generally want to be able to log on, find a scene, and roleplay. There might be plotting, or intrigue, or backstabbing, or great loss in it...but it should still be rp. With Arx, I felt like I was running around some area in an MMO or a NWN persistent world wondering where everyone was.

I think these desires are mutually exclusive. Plotting and intrigue needs something concrete to plot and intrigue over and that concreteness comes from game mechanics. Otherwise you're just stabbing each other in the back over the color of the draperies. I mean, I guess you could plot an assassination on your brother, so you can inherit a pointless crown that doesn't mean anything, but that strikes me as just being mean to the player of the brother for no reason, because, again, the crown is pointless. Kind of like kicking a dog, because it was sleeping and no one was watching, so you could get away with it.

@Jennkryst said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

So I got my 'Your Eclipse Phase Hardcopy from the Kickstarter just shipped' email today. So THAT. Arx in space, where you can be a squid that shoots lasers.

What about Coriolis - the Third Horizon? I think that would work even better.

It is an awesome party game. One of the times we played it, we were in the coal mine, and one person asked another "Who did you vote for?" The other person responded without missing a beat, "Trump, of course." The whole table erupted in laughter.

Except for one person. We all pointed at them "SPY!"

I just found out they announced Crusader Kings III. Where's a gif of Rinel's avatar?

EDIT - Found it.

As if a non-Hogpit thread was filled with angry posts ripe with gif opportunities that I was missing out on.

@Sunny said in Why don't we have a general board game thread anyway?:

@saosmash

Lords of Waterdeep is hands down my absolute favorite board game ever. I -- enjoy it so much for so many reasons, including the assistance in getting my tabletop group further interested in the actual lore surrounding the world we were playing in for our game.

What about other worker placement games? T'zolkin: The Mayan Calendar, Caverns, Caylus, Pillars of the Earth or my personal favorite worker placement game, Empires: Age of Discovery?

As for my recent games, Captain Sonar, Deception: Murder in Hong Kong, Mysterium, Dune, and Coup. I am really looking forward to Blood on the Clocktower.

@Tinuviel

What are you talking about? Buddhism solves all problems, because there are no problems. It's all an illusion, man.

I am not poking fun at any of it. I have played on Shang with my own odd concepts. I think Dick Cow is brilliant and should be given 1,000 acres of pasture land to graze amongst the dildoweeds, the pussy willows, and the dingleberry bushes.

One of my favorite movies from the '90s. It really needs a remake now that superheroes are a big deal in media.