Posts made by Ominous

@Pyrephox Good stuff!

Also it seems people agree that the ideal structure is giving only slight increments in power to higher ranks in a feudal system.

@Thenomain Sadly I cannot, and the threads didn't have any organizational logic to them - they were in different forums and were from different times.

What game design leads to the best political play amongst PCs?

I remember on the old WORA forum three or four really excellent threads discussing how best to design politics in a game. As those ancient texts of knowledge are lost to the ages, I wondered if we could discuss it again and pull up some kernels of insight into it.

A few of the things I remember was advice on deciding exactly what the scope of possibility is. If PCs are jockeying with each other for political favor with the king but there is no hope of revelling and taking over, the designer needs to make that clear upfront and the design will look different than a game focused on war between factions. (The author I recall suggested PCs fighting over who gets to sit closer to the royalty at the dinner table and that ways to gain prestige are trying to dress as similarly to the crown Prince and princess as possible.). Another tidbit I remember was designing the game to be lead at most be 6 to 8 PCs and allowing other PCs to serve as functionaries but able to challenge for a spot at the big boys/girls table.

I love this! This is what I have been looking for in MU*s. It ties skill development to time rather than vague xp, and it creates projects for people to engage in while limiting them to how involved they can be. I think FutureMUD was going to have something like this but that project has gone quiet. It's also similar to Arx's investigations and tasks system, only all tied up into one streamlines system.

As for giving players benefits for playing, I have always said that if you have to be incentivized to play a game, it's work not a game, so why are you playing it?

The only bonus I consider giving players is something like "bennie points" or what Firan called CP. Turn in so many of them and you get a one to three scene GMed plot focused on one of your character's or a fancy item that doesn't give any stat boosts but looks nice and is unique, etc.

@Seraphim73 I like Game of Throne's system for tabletop play. I think what you suggest would work very well on the right server with a more collaborative, story-telling focused environment. Unfortunately, most Mu*s I have been on, players are too antagonistic and zero-sum with one another for it to function. Maybe I'm wrong and it would work great in most circumstances. If that's true, I wish you luck and hope to see it spread everywhere.

Part of the issue comes from the fact that the medium is focused on dialogue and social interaction. By taking that out of the hands of the players and giving it to random chance, you are defeating the major reason people play the games, as well as removing what agency the player has through the medium. If we were instead playing some sort of game built around a fencing club and our matches were built around some stories we came up with, it would be the opposite. We wouldn't care as much about the social circumstances that have led our characters to fence one another. Our agency as players is tied to our fencing skills. We wouldn't care if we drew cards from a deck that said "Fencer A insulted Fencer B's mother by calling her the village bicycle. Duel!" We would be quite irate if then we said "Instead of fencing, let's just roll some dice to see who stabs whom." We're a fencing club and we're there to poke each other with rapiers. We're MU*ers and we're hear to write dialogue, for the most part.

I have recently reached the conclusion that "social combat" that works like physical combat is a misbegotten idea. We don't have intelligence combat or anything for the mental stats, and social stats should be the same if not be entirely subsumed by mental stats into one paradigm. Social skills and such should be used only to influence NPCs and to alter the game world in a manner that benefits the PC or harm the PCs enemies. Spreading gossip, making things more expensive for an enemy or cheaper for yourself, gaining more resources with which to convince, manipulate, and coerce PCs, etc.

Social combat should be PC A asking PC B for some secret and in exchange giving PC B bunches of money or access to certain resources or threatening to spread damaging rumors etc. Trying to interrogate a prisoner would work the same way. Either PC B tells PC A what PC A wants to know or PC A is going to chop off PC B's right hand, which comes with mechanical affect like not being able to wield a weapon. Can PC A actually get away with doing that? Depends on the social connections and resources they have to defend their actions and how much social clout PC B has to have thugs or guards or assassins come to pay PC A a visit afterwards.

Using Arx as an example, I think the Dominion system needs tied to social stats and intelligence stats. I don't know what Apos, Hellfrog, Tehom, et al have planned for the dominion system but I would argue it needs to be very expansive, including things like underworld gangs, merchant guilds, every organization possible, merging the support system for tasks into it. The social (and perhaps mental) skills would then influence how much access to the resources of these organizations an individual has.A High Lord can move armies, direct trade, plan infrastructure, and has the entirety of the wealth of the lands under their direct control. A princess cousin to that high lord can influence those things to a lesser degree. Perhaps she has a Captain in the fealty's forces wrapped around her finger, so she can order a few troops elsewhere without the High Lord knowing. She can have a few shipments redirected or something smuggled through. Rather than defining exactly what she has access to, though, her stats give her so many chips of certain types, much like the economic, social, and military resources that are currently in the game. Thus, when she need a captain wrapped around her finger, she spends so many military resources and voila! We assume she has also had that captain admirer from her time back home, she just never utilized that advantage until now. Basically resources become intangible measures of potential tangible resources.

Coming soon to Arx!

http://archives.erfworld.com/Book_1/140

@Packrat The first question is easy to answer. Commoners are free tenants/sharecroppers. Nobles own the land and the commoners rent it, essentially.

@Pandora How do you deal with people ignoring social skills, since they no longer do anything, and putting all of their XP into physical skills?

Recently I have been wondering if making the social sphere work like the physical sphere is ineffective. Instead of having social combat, social stats should give access to more resources that can be used to convince others to work with them. In Arx's case, economic, social, and military resources and more support points to be used for tasks would be these resources.

Changeling is one of the few WoD settings I have been interested in, but I don't have any of the books. Do I need the books to know what I am doing to play here?

That's not true. Gay Redrains and the straight womenfolk only RP with those who have e-peen.

Zombie is apparently Shadow, who got banished ICly, then kept up his behavior until it was addressed OOCly.

To be Cthulhu's advocate, what if it was a self-fulfilling prophecy? Announce that Thrax has the plague and then everyone in Thrax starts coughing?

Blowtorch stopped functioning on my Android. I miss the days of phones with keyboards. Those were so convenient.

@Thenomain said in FS3:

(Last shotgun post, I swear.)

@Ominous said in FS3:

I have issue with the 18 year old world champion, who is also a renowned surgeon, has been admitted to the US Supreme Court bar, is a Colonel in the US Army, and has a starring role in two summer blockbusters, which is also when their fourth album will be released.

I will channel the long lost @HelloRaptor for this:

"Yeah, because you never see anything like that on TV, or in movies or in books."

Back in my own voice: Yeah, I get it and agree with it, but a lot of people like it. That's the thing about the wish fulfillment that is the entertainment industry.

And that's fine. You can have servers with that. There is no reason why every server has to be that way, though. Some of us want a grittier theme.

@TimmyZ said in FS3:

I think the young prodigy argument is overrated though.

I use age-based expertise arguments all the time as my go-to reason for why I dislike almost all XP systems and prefer it to be age based. My issue isn't young prodigies. If you want to play an 18 year old Olympic world champion, go ahead. I have issue with the 18 year old world champion, who is also a renowned surgeon, has been admitted to the US Supreme Court bar, is a Colonel in the US Army, and has a starring role in two summer blockbusters, which is also when their fourth album will be released.

An 18 yo can be amazingly good at something. A 40 yo can be good at about a dozen things.

I had a random thought today about this. What about Harn? Has anyone run a Harn game?

It might have the right combination of elements for a MU*. It's math heavy which makes having a computer handle resolution an optimum strategy, and it is highly detailed and thematic, so players can get very immersed in the setting.

I measure advancement by my character's impact on the game world. As I have voiced many times on the forum, I am against most XP systems, preferring XP to be tied to character age. If people want the feeling of leveling up their character, there are a myriad of games out there that can accomplish it much better than MU*s can.

@surreality said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

@Ominous ...that sounds incredibly neat. If you find out what that actually is I am tempted to look for it.

Found it. It's Empire of the East and Book of Swords series. I know of it, because I follow the D&D OSR and someone had an article about using the swords from Book of Swords.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_the_East_series

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_of_Swords

@Arkandel Is that the one where reality changed right in the middle of a nuclear war, and all the nuclear weapons turned into demons with the most powerful, Orcus, was one that was in the process of detonating when reality changed?

All of the above?