Posts made by Packrat

I have been doing some thinking whilst commuting and somehow came up with the following rough draft for a setting/idea:

So in the distant past some extraordinarily wealthy individuals set off into distance space to colonize, expending all of their vast wealth in doing so and very much establishing this colony with the intention of setting themselves up as Space Nobles. They did this, and had the resources to set themselves up with an extremely well planned, high technology and rapidly developing base, only for all contact with Earth to be cut off without warning. They were deliberately not connected to the wormhole network used for FTL travel but were still alarmed by this and cautiously expand back toward the core.

At this point they find out that aliens have successfully conquered the human race and start a war with them, a war they are winning and have been for centuries, 'liberating' occupied human populations or isolated and technologically regressed worlds then welcoming them into new lives of being serfs for their genetically augmented and super tech possessing new overlords. The aliens have their own wormhole network but destroy it as they lose territory (Unless daring heroes thwart this perhaps!) meaning that the advance is limited to the speed of light, with new wormholes being brought forward to consolidate gains.

The game is set in a region on the edge of a cluster, with stars perhaps half a lightyear from each other (go for say 3x time in game, fighting across space to new systems is a thing albeit slow) where an advance force of especially ambitious/covetous nobles pushed far ahead, only to fight a bitter battle in interstellar space where their fleet was scattered and their wormhole 'back home' destroyed. They won and seized the sector capital, they are advancing and setting up a local wormhole network, they can still talk to everyone else via Ansible or whatever, but they have no way back and no way for massive reinforcements to arrive for say... 20 years.

There would however be a constant stream of scattered ships arriving from interstellar space, often unexpectedly, to allow new PCs to turn up.

Everyone would be trying to 1) Fight a war, 2) Set up themselves and their families to get as much as possible and 3) Try to ensure that when contact with the Empire is reestablished they are not executed for being Space Traitors but rather get to become the new Space Viceroy. Space Nobles are super capable, products of generations of genetic enhancement, and have really good technology, but cannot make new Space Noble grade ships locally (though starships can probably manufacture new smaller, expendable on adventures grade ships, Space Armour, Space Swords, etc). The aliens are dangerous but on the back foot, the 'Liberated' humans definitely better off under Space Nobles rather than Evil Aliens but likely remembering Space Democracy as a thing.

I do like the idea of the Aliens being Space Elves or something, that opens a lot more options for interaction than if they are bug monsters or robots or similar.

Originally I was thinking that all Space Nobles would have their own starship, albeit varying in size and capabilities, making 'ship owners' a 'class' works though. Reading the above I did think that you could have a divide between Conquistador type Space Nobles, and Space Navy Officers (who would be nobles themselves of course). The former would have more economic clout, likely mandates to administer worlds, ships which make much better Space Palaces and also manufacturies or able to land as a colony, etc.

Space Navy types would have more outright murderous warships (Though certainly not unique access to them), possibly more unity of purpose, etc, but would be cut off from their supplies and with no choice but to work with/for the more privately motivated Space Nobles, even outside of the fact that they have major personal incentives to do so.

@Jennkryst said:

@Sunny said:

@Packrat said:

• Do not have players write up the wiki entry on their own family/house/country or whatever. They will inevitably end up being super awesome at everything with a token flaw.

This one really jumped out at me. If you don't let the players do it, then you're going to have to do it all (something I've run into with my own game, and the scope of the houses I need is very limited in comparison to this). Especially given the 'they will inevitably' -- that's not actually true, and also solvable with an approval system for the houses, too.

Maybe actively work with the player/group. Don't write it from scratch for them, but don't let them write it all up without feedback.

That was what I was thinking, talk with people, collaborate with them, etc, then have staff actually make the wiki entry in light of that. From my point of view writing a couple of paragraphs about a cool Space Noble dynasty is the sort of thing I would find relaxing to do while I cook dinner however. While I admit that not all players would do what I accused above it does seem to be the norm, but I might be mostly channeling rage at what I saw on the Eternal Crusader wiki when I checked the place out.

So between having recently consumed the Red Rising trilogy and recent comments about Lords and Ladies games, plus a lack of space stuff, I have found myself thinking about Space Lords and Ladies. The Fifth World was run by legitimately nice people but never scratched my itch (not to mention being gone) so I found myself sort of musing the following. It is kind of random and a bit stream of consciousness but I thought I should share and see if my thoughts match with other people's at all.

Key Ideas:

• The setting is not supposed to be 'nice', Space Feudalism (Or Space Rome) is liable to be a fucked up kind of place with gigantic inequalities to support Space Lords and Ladies living in unimaginable luxury.

• Space Lords & Ladies should have admirable qualities still, there should be honour, ideals, glory, bravery. Living up to the IC ideals of a brutal Space Noble should be seductive even if the whole society is built upon oppression and exploitation. Being a Space Noble should be amazingly cool.

• Crunchy estate/fief management, resources should be limited, (social or economic), people should compete over them and gain tangible benefits. Resources should be expended and everyone should always want more.
  This should be fairly abstracted especially given the scale, a few moving parts, but people should be able to intuitively grasp what is going on. Also this should require fairly minimal administrative burden. Build in reasons to delegate power also!

• Players should not be in outright warfare with each other in most circumstances, rivals, enemies, but not in open war. Part of the same 'society' with reasons to go to parties even if they are plotting the other's demise.

• Space Nobles need some reason to be seriously important militarily. Magic Space Powers? Magic mind machine interfaces? Dune type shields and magic space swords? Genetically engineered super people? If the latter make it so that they are 'pushing the envelope' and not hugely stable so that fucking idiots and crazy people still make sense (some players are going to fit the bill!).

Thoughts from Prior Games

• Do not have one person make a Space Duke and get four Space Legions also then have the same tier +sheet as the person who makes a Space Knight who has their Space Sword and Space Horse (ship?). Alternative, Space Duke has to have Space Skeletons in the closet sufficient to summon a Space Count of Monte Christo or two, have people pay chargen resources for wealth/power which comes from safely 'Off Screen' and is not tied to drawbacks. So if you want to be a Space Duke who holds Space Lands on the border and is constantly menaced by invasion or is hated by the Space King for murdering his brother? Cool! Want to be the Space Duke who owns rich Space Estates in the core worlds and has an uninterrupted supply of infinite completely legitimate Space Gold? You might have to compromise on your Duelling skill.

• Make the game an actual sandbox, that does not mean staff should not introduce plot elements and run NPCs with agendas but they should be deciding 'Where do we want the story to go?' then railroading things. The meat of the game should be competition between player characters and the environment they find themselves in.

• Keep It Simple Stupid when it comes to economy, it should not be entirely abstracted, it should be something people compete over, but have it at say Reign level rather than trying to replicate Crusader Kings II in MUSH format. Too much administrative burden leads to staff burnout, leads to delayed requests, leads to collapse of trust and interest.

• Do not have an awesome Space King. If there is a Space King then they should be an NPC and be kind of crap, better might be a Space Regency Council or a distant Space Emperor who issues directives then has to rely on local player characters to actually follow/enforce them.

• Some people will try to insist that (Insert Sci Fi Thing Here, often assassination related or utilising of relativistic projectiles to kill planets) or nukes should let them instantly win whatever issue they are facing. First of all make it clear things are soft Sci-Fi, but also head them off at the pass. Fuck nukes, space battles already involve ships throwing antimatter missiles or singularities at each other. For bonus points really crazy tech levels mean that you can have your spaceships look like the ones from Jupiter Ascending (but limit your influences from that terrible film to stealing aesthetics).

• Encourage making older characters or those with ties to the setting with bonus points or something, otherwise a lot of people will make orphan 18 year olds. I could also see giving bonus point for living children, more if they are potentially playable adults.

• Let PCs be the characters who are awesome at things, only do not just let them, spell this out. Also communicate this to new players and publicise things like 'Hey, we have four people who are Supreme Space Duelmasters but nobody who is the Greatest Space Spy.' Try to discourage people making incompetent wallflowers.

• Maybe some kind of Social Currency? Prestige? Something tangible and tracked that really encourages people to blow their economic resources on fancy parties, employing legions of servants and Moon Palaces.

• Do not have players write up the wiki entry on their own family/house/country or whatever. They will inevitably end up being super awesome at everything with a token flaw.

@BigDaddyAmin said:

I want either a Red Rising MUSH or a MUSH based on the Old Man's War universe....

Resurrecting this, I just read the last book in the trilogy and it contains an awful lot of inspirational goodness. Plus, you know, it just topped the New York Times bestseller list along with having a movie in the works and another trilogy planned, so there is presumably a base of people interested in the series.

If that is a design goal then it is better to make it deliberate and obvious, put in rules for different 'tiers' of character where staff or players applying for characters can make a conscious choice to have one more capable than another and say, have more points to spend.

The current system turns it instead into a hidden minefield where making hyper focused characters without rounding life skills is the path to One True Power and does not really succeed in modelling what you set out above either. Take for example two players making police officers of the same age (I do not know, mid thirties), one makes a character who is entirely focused on police stuff and has been a career police officer, their skills are all focused on say Pistol, Investigation, Driving, Unarmed Combat, Intimidate, etc. Another player makes a police officer who was in the army as a Ranger prior to joining the police and drops down some of the investigation and similar skills to a lower level in order to round out with say, Survival, Rifle, etc.

The latter character is going to end up significantly less capable, massively so once some advancement has taken place. Both are likely to be characters which are quite reasonable for somebody to apply for and get approved with sensible staff but the second person has shot themselves in the foot.

Not to mention relying on staff as an arbiter for this kind of thing is in general a terrible idea, sure you can filter out the worst min maxing but even if you do this perfectly and entirely objectively you are setting an invisible bar, the people who find things working out best for them are the ones who skim perfectly under it whilst anyone who drastically undershoots finds themselves effectively a year behind in progression/advancement.

That is the problem, people do not end up subject to the same rules and they do not get the same opportunity, it turns things into a game of guessing what staff what/will allow then squeezing in as close to that barrier as possible. Somebody who guesses 'wrong' ends up with a character who is far inferior to others as soon as dice are rolled and on FS based games? The dice get rolled an awful lot.

The big problem I have with 'linear costs in character generation, geometric costs afterwards' is that this very strongly encourages some concepts whilst punishing others.

Suppose you are making say... A middle aged character who has done a variety of things, maybe you want to have 2-3 points in a number of skills to represent stuff they should know about but are not experts in. You get punished for this. May be you are making a knight in a fantasy/middle ages type setting and rather than just being a sword master you also want some points in unarmed combat, polearms/lances and archery for hunting. You get punished for doing this.

It creates a huge incentive to make characters who have a reason to be monofocused in their abilities and, far from discouraging twinking, turns it into an exercise in guessing what combination of background and the fewest, highest level, skills you can get away with having approved by staff. The incentive to do this on most FS games is also huge, you can literally end up ahead or behind by a year or two worth of progression depending on if you hit the sweet spot or not.

Worse, people who are not thinking this way, can easily make characters who are utterly useless mechanically if they say, do not spend the maximum possible number of points on attributes, or the maximum possible on active skills as opposed to background ones. Background skills cost just as much in character generation but half as much to raise afterwards? Given that I can see literally no reason not to have them as seperate point pools instead of having them pull from the same one but with a maximum quantity that can be spent in the 'better' area, the same for attributes.

One thing that I always run into with FS is that it suffers from the 'linear character generation, geometric progression' problem where having a stat of say, 5 in character generation, will cost 5 points while a stat at 1 will cost 1 point. In play raising a stat from 0 to 1 might cost 1xp while raising it from 4 to 5 might cost 5xp, leading to very strong (year+ of progression on many games) punishments for making a well rounded character instead of aiming to squeeze the 'best' possible degree of min maxing past whomever staff is.

It seems that building in a more balanced advancement system from the start might work better than trying to hope staff on whichever game implement something, especially as it seems common for FS to be implemented by people without any real knowledge of how the numbers work or willingness to tweak them.

@Duntada said:

@Ghost
I love over reaching and getting smacked down for it. Mad grabs for power where you either end up at the end as king, or a corpse are the best kinds of storylines. It's been a while since I had one of those though... back in the 90's and early 2000's though I'd seen some games get BRUTAL. I ended up iced just for being in the same room as someone's enemy before.

The best one I ever saw when it comes to brutality was one person who died on an older Fading Suns game because they had tea with their friend in the library. Unfortunately for them, their mortal enemy was also in the library, blocked the exits with goons, then forced them into a one sided duel to the death as they pleaded and begged. The thing is that 1) Their friend knew it was a trap 2) Was actually their friend and 3) Was forced into it, yet all of the players involved were cool with things OOC.

For that matter Custodius' marriage did not last long or end on good terms and his (now ex) wife always came across as good people to me at least. Admittedly I only knew her via MUSHing and general online chat but still.

Many years ago, when Metro was the place for all things WoD and I actually played WoD, I had a Garou character infiltrate the Wyrm sphere then klaive to death their leader. Apparently the head of the black spiral dancers through it was a sensible idea to shake the hand of an ambidexterous Shadow Lord klaive duellist who claims to be a traitor and has just spent the last ten poses playing with their klaive. He was dead, down to negative health levels from aggravated damage, but the sphere wizard threw a massive shit fit and decided that he survived it for reasons. Also that the reinforcements who tried to get through from the Umbra to stop me would turn up in two combat rounds despite their roll meaning they would take 10 minutes.

I even had a bag ready for his head and a getaway driver waiting for me after I jumped through the window onto the street.

Added: The worst part? My character was super sketchy and the NPC elders had demanded a Black Spiral Dancer head from me, elders run by the same staffer. Did she just expect me to fail? Would other murdered spiral dancers have been acceptable but not this one? I mean he seemed like a great RPer and I can see why you would not want to lose him as a sphere head but still. She was kind of crazy though.

I think that the only time I ever streamed anything was when I decided to play King of Dragon Pass collaboratively with my brother but he was the other side of the country, which did not work terribly well given the delay.

Armello looks awesome and I have been meaning to play it, I wish to convert to this cult.

My LARP story is much less interesting, I caught a taxi to a friend's house (Friend 1) with another of my friends (Friend 2) and two attractive girls who were friends of Friend 1. In the car, we ended up chatting staff and it was mentioned we had played an RPG the weekend before, the two girls immediately asked if this was were we dressed up and acted out being vampires.

We stridently and vehemently denied this and explained it was a tabletop game at which point both girls were super disappointed because it turns out they were really into Vampire LARPing.

Wes Platt of Otherspace infamy actually did this, only without the whole 'Charity' part, I am unsure how much money he actually got from the whole affair but the game was live for I think a couple of years. Needless to say he did not actually pay staff, they just got some of the pay to win beanies for 'free' in return for hundreds of hours of their time.

I still find it crazy that prior to World War 1 the main source of income for the US federal government was tariffs, along with how important that was to the establishment of US industrial supremacy in the early/mid 20th century. But I am huge nerd when it comes to international trade and economics.

@Cirno said:

Now, in real life, the other kid would have most likely been a fat old pervert, I know. That's part of the reason why I couldn't take that episode seriously at all; the Internet usually does not work that way. There are exceptions to the rule, but I am much of your opinion where this is concerned.

Also, the kid's mom actually encourages him to meet his internet friend! Worst. Parent. Ever, as Comic Book Guy would say.

I question this, the internet is just plain normal now and has been for a decade or more, the last couple of relationships I have had were with people I met over the internet, hell my (divorced) mother who is in her late fifties dates people she meets via internet dating sites. Most people are on the internet and doing internet things and is it not the unique preserve of social outcasts.

I might be single right now but that was due to a drunken argument that went really wrong combined with withdrawal from anti depressants, following a year long relationship with a smart as hell microbiologist I had a ton in common with. Where did we meet? OkCupid, neither of us living in a basement or being above a healthy weight. Would we ever have met without the internet? Hell no, we did not live close enough though commuting was easy enough, did we keep in touch via internet stuff? Absolutely.

Honestly if you want to run a Star Wars game where the players get to be movers and shakers and things do not explicitly follow the story of the films? Having the Deathstar blow up Yavin but then be destroyed might be a great way to do it,. Argue that a good proportion of the rebels do manage to evacuate beforehand and that whilst that was their main base they have cells/agents all over the place, plus the vast majority of their actual war fighting power came from those who joined them post Yavin in the wake of the Deathstar's destruction. Does that even change much of anything? Their resources in The Empire Strikes Back were obviously far larger than those they had in A New Hope and Yavin was no longer actually important to them. Basically you just have the canonical initial high command of the rebellion dead and leave the scene open for new guys.