Posts made by Ominous

I am fine with people having settings that avoid certain themes, even historical fantasy settings. As long as everything makes enough sense not to break my suspension of disbelief. Slavery can be removed for a good portion of American history from sometime between 1800 and 1850 on by delaying the creation of the cotton gin. Without the increased efficiency, cotton never became king, and slavery eventually phased out like it had in the North. You also don't end up with the Civil War or a very different Civil War at least.

In general, I think as long as at least some sort of effort is put into the logic of how something would change or develop differently, people can swallow the change without much argument.

@Faceless said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Staff on Arx has previously been pretty vocal that they don't wish to hold new players of a @roster character too closely to what a previous incarnation had going on. There's some liberty available for players to do what they wish with a character, within reason(I imagine). Like, if you decide your style doesn't mesh with Jim, then there's not a problem with your character becoming distant from Jim. I suspect that it's sweeping changes they want to avoid. The devout clergyman of the past 40 years suddenly deciding he wants to become a courtesan, or something. This segment is considerably shorter only because I have not played a @roster character yet, so I have less insight there.

Well, that would be playing off-sheet at that point.

I play on both Arx and KD. They scratch different itches. Arx is code heavy with a lot of spinning wheels and it can be a bit overwhelming with what's going on. I'm not sure how staff is keeping up with it all. KD is a bit of a more gentle pace. They're both equally as dark in theme, I feel. Also KD sticks to its courtly etiquette. Using titles and forms of address are expected. On Arx nobles seem to routinely go 'Feel free to call me Bob. Lord Bobsworth is my father.' So if you're really looking for that noble court feel, KD does a better job at it.

It helps that there is a pretty large player base. There seems to be a critical mass of players for around the clock events to start being a thing.

@Glitch True, but the system could do much more. I honestly think it can do what Tasks does, only better. Right now, it feels a bit more of a 'I am investigating this', roll, get result, wait another week to investigate again. Letting the dice mechanics provide little RP hooks would be fantastic. It could be extended to requiring certain missions (GM-ed plots) or even use the task system, only instead of giving resources it gives a new clue.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Ominous There are red herrings in the system, you get them when you botch a roll.

I am referring more to the idea of providing a list of clue holders along with clues. The danger there is, using Gareth again, why doesn't Gareth just go around killing everyone on the list he gets? Well two of the people on his particular selection of clueholders are the pope-dude whose title I forget and the Duke of a great house, and pestering them about this info might not go over well.

@Apos said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Ominous That's a pretty good one, and I like that, though I'd have to think about how to implement it in ways that don't give a significant advantage in conflicts- some of these are designed to be very, very dangerous to look into and so on. Will need very careful tweaking.

That's where the false positives can come into play. You're looking into the magic spell that summons a demon? We'll list Head Inquisitor Gareth as one of the people with clues you can get. He doesn't have any clues actually, but he will be very interested in hearing why you are asking. Or maybe Gareth does have clues for this but he ain't sharing his and is offing anyone who comes asking him.

Knowing the system gives a few false positives that can bite you in the ass should be enough that the first thing out of your character's mouth isn't "Hey, what do you know about dirty secret X?"

With regards to the @randomscene code, it should be noted that BOTH players get a bonus - the player who gets another player as their random scene and the player to be scened with, so there is incentive for the person to be scened with to cooperate.

@Apos Then my suggestion would be to give a list of names of people who may have clues related to what is being investigated. Include a few false positives, so its not a definite thing. I honestly would appreciate a list of 'go pester these people and RP it out' rather than the 'wait for the roll every week' approach I am using now.

EDIT: Spelling errors. Phone posting is hard.

I think investigation needs some TLC as a system. While I have my issues with tasks, for the most part, it does what it is supposed to. Investigation, though, doesn't require any real interaction with anyone else. It would be nice if each clue had 3 to 7 "tidbits" (Tidbit 1 of Superman's Identity, Tidbit 2 of Superman's Identity, etc. with a little bit of info to correspond to the tidbit) that get dispersed to those with information on a topic.

When you put in for an investigation on a certain topic, you get a list of the few people with tidbits on that topic, prompting you to RP with them. They can exchange their tidbit with you using the @clue system's functionality. Once you have all the tidbits collected, you get the full clue. To compensate for being unable to get the people with tidbits to RP with you, you also get the system's current rolling that, instead of giving you a full clue, will trickle in tidbits instead. Thus you can still investigate without RPing but it's quicker to RP.

Example: Kristin shot J.R. (spoilers) Considering how big of a plot element this is, a bunch of tidbits are used. Tidbit 1 - It was a woman. Tidbit 2 - The shooter had brown hair. Tidbit 3 - It wasn't J.R.'s wife's lover. Tidbit 4 - It wasn't J.R.'s wife. Tidbit 5 - J. R.'s wife's fingerprints were on the gun. So on and so forth. Once all the tidbits are gathered by a person, the system reveals Kristin shot J.R. (spoilers) to that person.

@Arkandel

I would rephrase what I said to "Once the details of what your goal is known, then you have that discussion, make the rolls, and RP it out." The doors system might work if we can trust people to offer a fair number of doors.

@Arkandel said in Social Conflict via Stats:

What I like about social (and mental) stats being part of the game: That otherwise they are greatly underdevalued, for the same investment, compared to their physical counterparts; a punch is a punch and it counts, but anyone can play being manipulative even if their actual attributes suck.

What I dislike about social stats and powers being part of the game: They are disruptive in scenes. Violent scenes are rare but social ones are constant; it's really inconvenient when people start rolling for things every other pose ('I roll for Dominate. Oh, it failed. Okay, I roll again next pose. Oh yeah, let me look up if it works like I think it does or like you think it does. Oh, let's ask staff. Oh, why are you slicing your own wrists?').

A good system would probably be greatly dependent on its interface... and it'd need to be a damn good interface to get around this.

I addressed this in another thread. I posited that the solution may be using a "fortune in the middle" system instead of "fortune at the end" like most MUs use. Instead of person A poses, person A rolls social skill against person B, person B reacts, repeat for next set of poses, persons A discusses what their goal is at the start of the scene with person B, they roll and find out how successful or unsuccessful person A will be, then they play out the scene knowing which direction it's going to go.

If you require this at the start of every scene you suddenly make social skills very important as they are used for every scene. It also boils down what could be a scene with lots of rolls into a simple set of rolls up front. Finally everyone knows ahead of time what the gig is, so you don't get those surprise "I'm trying to bang you" scenes halfway through the scene. You could just nope out at the get-go before you even roll.

@Pyrephox said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

My feeling is that tasks are designed the wrong way around. Right now you do stuff to get resources. I wonder if it wouldn't work better and be more intuitive if you spent resources to do meaningful stuff.

I might, if I were redesigning it, do away with silver income for people above a certain social strata. Instead, they'd get an automatic salary of social, economic, and military resources each week based on the total resources of the house/organization that represents how much of that house's resources that they, on their own authority, can bring to bear. Tasks, then, would be meaningful activities that require resources to accomplish, and once accomplished, would have some significant effect. Default tasks for noble houses might be Land Improvement (improve econ resources of the house), Play the Game (improve social resources), Military Training (improve mil resources), Trade War (reduce economic resources of the target House/Organization), Character Assassination (reduce social resources of the target House), Sabotage (reduce military resources of the target House), plus a few tasks devoted to whatever phase the game is currently in - right now, for example, it might be Calm the Commons or Rouse the Commons (increase or decrease civil unrest in a House's territory) that could have consequences for specific houses or organizations. Task thresholds would be large enough that people would have to get other PCs to support their Tasks, but without the current restriction on 'cannot be of the primary organization as the task', so if all the Velenosas want to spend their resources on making their House bigger, better regarded, and militarily powerful, they can, although it reduces their ability to be able to wheel and deal in the short term with other Houses, which means others could form an alliance against their interests.

This please.

I think the problem with tasks is how unthematic it is. It feels very much like a weird mini-game inserted into the overall game rather than a fluid part of it. It is as if Bioware had had a game of Tetris pop up now and then in the middle of Dragon Age. Or maybe a better comparison is the diplomacy system in Oblivion. Pyrephox's suggestion might help reconnect the mini-game to the theme and overall game.

On another note, I am enjoying the investigation system so far. Not that I am using it to spy on people at all. <.< >.>

@Sunny said in Leadership, Spotlight, and PCs of Staffers:

I don't think that it's a cultural expectation that staff should be selfless, masochistic martyrs. @Ominous has said that she/he doesn't think that those staff (in those circumstances) should get the perks of being a player, but I don't believe anyone else is advocating such an extreme stance (or if they are, it's all blurred together, sorry). Hopefully folks are sensible enough to not be this ridiculously extreme about these issues. 'Playing in a scene that you're storytelling', rule wise, is (or at least should be) something that applies to both staff and players equally.

Not quite. I said that perhaps we need to consider our GMing approach towards these games. Instead of trying to utilize the D&D method, maybe servers should experiment with systems developed by storygames that allow for shared GMing.

You have to be among the glorious chosen ones to access it. By glorious chosen one, I mean you chose to apply the Pitcrew tag to your account so you can access the Hog Pit and wallow in the fifth like the rest of us. The option should be in your profile.

That makes staffing sound like a chore. I much prefer DMing D&D than playing it. I get a lot of joy from drawing maps, creating new cultures and lands, watching my players puzzle things out, develop clever solution, etc. Is staffing a MU* different from this, other than the obvious coding?

We may need to recognize that what we have is a clash between two mutually exclusive outlooks in roleplaying. There is the old-school game master style, such as in D&D, where the DM is the final arbiter of all, and there are the newer storgames with very limited GM power (Mouse Guard Tabletop) or no GM at all (Microscope, Mystic Empyrean). The first doesn't really allow for the GM to be a player in his own game world: someone else's sure, but not his own. It's hard to run a dungeon crawl where the person who made the dungeon is a player. They're going to know where all the traps, treasure, and secret doors are.

The only tabletop RPG that managed to pull it off somewhat was Ars Magica with its troupe style play; however it works, because everyone that plays eventually gets to GM. In essence everyone is staff and the rules are built around the setting so there aren't too mane secret bits that only the GM knows, except for what is secret in the self-contained adventure they are running. The overall metaplot and development of the convent is steered by all players, so it is more akin to the no GM style.

Perhaps the solution is that, if you wish to play and experience character development and staff, then your server needs to run with a system geared towards joint GMing by all players. If you want one where a select number of the players are staff and serve as final arbiter, a la White Wolf, D&D, etc, then you have to accept that choosing to be staff means you don't get to enjoy the perks of being a player.

To be actually constructive for once, I am growing into the opinion that if staff want to have PCs that aren't on the bottom of thr totem pole, the game needs multiple spheres and if someone has a character in a sphere, they cannot staff it.