Posts made by Pandora

@Ganymede said in Good Political Game Design:

@Pandora said in Good Political Game Design:

I loathe the idea of a family stockpiling military assets in order to frienemy their ruling house. Sure it's realistic, but do we really want controlling levels of power in the hands of whoever decides to ignore political maneuvering, social warfare, diplomacy & playing the game in favor of stockpiling the military stat?

It depends on how the game manages the military stat.

The argument is about a single family being able to flex on their ruling lord solely through military might. If this is able to come to pass, it doesn't matter how the game manages the military stat, it's being managed poorly.

@Lisse24 said in Good Political Game Design:

Anyway, right now, this is how Arx is set up, too. And like every other L&L game, politics has been hoarded in the hands of a few. HOWEVER, Arx has Dominion coming in and I'm really interested to see how that will change things on that game. Already, houses can improve their incomes. What happens when a Duchy has control of a military larger than their lord? The cynical side of me says that peer pressure to be "nice" will keep everything static, but I'm really hopeful that a Duke/Duchess at some point decides to pay less taxes, because what's the ruling family going to do?

I loathe the idea of a family stockpiling military assets in order to frienemy their ruling house. Sure it's realistic, but do we really want controlling levels of power in the hands of whoever decides to ignore political maneuvering, social warfare, diplomacy & playing the game in favor of stockpiling the military stat? I get it, Arx is becoming more PvP by the minute. Here's hoping the ruling houses are given some flexibility with regards to limiting the aspirations of those houses beneath them, or what a headache that's going to be.

@Thenomain Cliques can certainly be non-inclusive. I've never subscribed to the idea that I owe RP to everyone, or that I am obligated to RP with anyone out of some sense of fairness and/or equality. I RP for fun, I RP with people I find fun, I RP with groups of people I have fun with. That's a clique, right? A roleplay clique? No one is being harmed.

@Bananerz went off on me in a private message about someone having a negative clique experience on Arx, but I'm not going to go searching the thread for it. I'm sorry if the cool kids don't want to play with you on Arx, find some friends and RP with them instead? There are so many more pressing issues in the mu* community than a group of people not wanting to play with someone for whatever reason. Key word is 'play'. Playing with someone you don't want to play with isn't play, it's work. I don't work for free.

@Bananerz
Stats: 30 XP per week is a lot but it's not game-breaking. Those people chasing 6 are very focused and haven't spread their XP around as much as others. That's their choice. Raising anything else close to that high will have a steep cost, but there are other things to spend XP on, retainers, for example.

Cost To Actions: Just because people aren't dropping dead left and right doesn't mean there aren't costs to actions. You don't know what compromises/promises/heartbreaks any character has gone through to achieve their aims. Dig deeper, player-death isn't the worst thing that can happen.

Social: I'm not going to lie, I'd love to see more class division, as it stands the whole concept of nobility seems like flavor, the ability to let people call themselves pretty princesses. I'm not knocking it, though it's not exactly what I was looking for. Can't please everyone though, and forcing it down people's throat is often more trouble than it's worth.

Cliques: You didn't make an argument against cliques, so my point stands: I don't see the problem with cliques unless someone -in- the clique is breaking some sort of game rule.

Animals: I almost quit the first time someone's snake or cat or gerbil brought me a message. No argument here.

@Bananerz
It gets so expensive to raise any stat once you've invested a sizable chunk of XP into a character. Arx is designed for masterful specialization, or jack(ass) of all trades. You can't be 'the best' at everything, but you can certainly be fair-to-middling at a lot of things. It's up to the player. Not sure what you mean by no realistic costs for actions with consequences, that doesn't seem to happen now and I don't see how or why it would suddenly start happening later.

I hear so much about how terrible it is, all the social classes mixing together with wanton abandon, but you never really see anyone make a fuss about it IC. Make a nobles only restaurant if you want exclusive RP (class exclusive, not player-clique exclusive, it's not the same) or strong-arm commoners into etiquette classes and teach them how to curtsy, sip tea, and stfu in the presence of their betters (YMMV but some people who play commoners do like this sort of RP, my etiquette classes on Firan were always full). Be the change you want to see.

Cliques are a part of life. We have them at work, at school, and on games. If you're not part of someone's clique, why does it bother you that it exists? If you want in, make yourself appealing to those cool kids. If you just think 'they think they're so cool', let's not be five years old about people having friends. @Apos hands out plot pieces like free candy (no seriously, just show up and actively RP and you'll see what I mean) and anyone can run PrPs so it's not like being outside of any clique will limit your RP possibilities unlike in many other games.

Any time you punch someone because of 'what they are', be they black, male, white, gay, disabled, a veteran or a Nazi - that's a hate crime.

So punching a Nazi for no reason other than that they are a Nazi and are doing Nazi things = bringing hate to solve hate (punching someone doesn't solve anything it just makes you feel better, unless you're actually punching them to death, which is another thing entirely)

Punching a Nazi because they stole your parking space is bringing violence to solve rudeness, though again, YMMV on the effectiveness of punching anyone for results.

@Apos I have no qualms against anything presented here, I fully agree that social skills levied via NPCs are impactful and can give players of non-combatants some meaningful agency. I was simply balking at the idea that all social combat mediums operate/operated under that same pretext, because some seriously asinine things have gone down in the name of a dice roll.

@Apos said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
That's actually a design flaw that isn't really addressed so much- characters should always be representative of actual people, they shouldn't really be permitted to take actions that are so self-destructive they make absolutely no sense in the context of the story, and are a result of ooc collusion or ignorance.

Mein Aldrette.
/sob

@Apos said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
Same will hold true for any kind of social combat, where, 'tell me ur sekrits so u die' is pretty much the social equivalent of some dude standing outside of the newbie gardens spam killing people in a MUD.

Except isn't this exactly how the interrogation social combat worked on Firan? Not that anyone is holding Firan up as some paragon of coded system excellence by any means, but you can't quite claim that any social combat system will punish people for that kind of fuckery, because it was pretty much the status quo on the last L&L game we all knew and loved(to bitch about).

@Lisse24 said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

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

There's a difference between 'The NPCs say my scandalous vomit-green dress is hotter than yours' and 'I rolled the dice now tell me about your ties to the demonic horde while we prep the executioner's blade, traitor'.

No one has argued for either of those things. The first is boring, the second robs a player of their autonomy. However, as @Sparks pointed out, there's a more indepth conversation about social combat in another thread.

Some people don't care about fashion and sparkly shit and gossip and that's 100% perfectly fine, but writing off a system that would benefit the fun of people who do enjoy it as 'boring' would be a disservice to those who appreciate the less-feudal warfare side of L&L games. All I want is to play a pretty political princess with lots of fucking diamonds. Somewhere, someday, someone is going to enable that.

@Lisse24 I'm all for fashion combat and who-wore-it-first or whatever Arx wants to do, social stats used to affect the world around the characters is what I mentioned in my post.

There's a difference between 'The NPCs say my scandalous vomit-green dress is hotter than yours' and 'I rolled the dice now tell me about your ties to the demonic horde while we prep the executioner's blade, traitor'.

@Paris I have no dog in the 'defining microaggressions' fight but this post has made my morning bleak and my coffee bitter. Sorry that some people suck.

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

@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?

Social skills shouldn't be the equivalent of font-boxing. If you're cunning, you should be able to get people to believe things that aren't true. Make it a system of extra-powerful gossip, rumors that won't die, slandering your opponents to the NPCs effectively in plots. If you're charming, you can accomplish the same thing without lies, sway NPCs to your side in plots. Etc. and so on.

I remember when Arx was billed as a PvE game, not PvP; every character skill shouldn't be a way to ruin/kill someone's story or character. I got grief for simply not being ICly nice to someone that was slandering my character all over the city in a bid for power then crying to staff that I was a bully when I didn't cave to his demands. Now you lot think Arx staff is going to support your turning social skills into more methods of fucking with each other? Get a grip, and by a grip I mean learn to nicely hold hands tightly, because that's all you're really going to be able to do with other PCs if you don't want to pick up a sword. They've worked hard to give you enemies to fight against, why do you have to measure your dick social stats against each other?

I'm opposed to any system which compels people to spill their secrets against their will due to dice rolls, when it's perfectly possible to get people to spill their secrets willingly by doing that thing we signed on to do - roleplay. I've heard the argument 'What if my character is sheeted to be cunning but I'm not particularly cunning in real life?' but I'm afraid I'm not very sympathetic to that plight. If you can't get people to like and trust you without brute force dice rolls, I very gently and politely and sympathetically suggest you play a character more in-line with your comfort zone.

@Ganymede So noted; I'm all for calling people whatever descriptor they like, be it nationality, race, gender, or purposeful lack of any of the above.

@Coin I used MU-examples but the gripe is very general - people that use alternative-words to make themselves sound more worldly, but wind up just sounding like they've raped a dictionary. I cringe every time someone at work says 'Let's get some verbage on that'.

As for the use of 'Asian' as a descriptor - fair enough. Though in general many people (not all, I am definitely making a generalization here) aren't good at telling the difference between a Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Thai/Viet person, especially at a first glance. So a descriptor of 'A middle-aged Asian man with poor posture' would be fine to me, with bonus points if their look-desc goes into more detail about what specific nation they seem to hail from, and extra bonus points if they're ultimately Middle Eastern.

@Thenomain You should have just discreetly inquired around town about who did his cosmetic work.

@Arkandel Good luck with the new job! Remember, if someone offered your boss a better job with a better salary, he probably wouldn't hesitate to leave you all behind, either.

Every word in the thesaurus is not created equal.
'Asiatic' is kind of offensive when describing a person. Why can't your character just be Asian?
'Florid-cheeked young woman' over there, rosy cheeks would have worked just fine. Whenever I see you, I will think that you're angry or drunk.
'iconoclast' is a cool word, and it might even describe your character, but it is not a physical descriptor, I didn't walk into this bar and think 'This poorly-dressed iconoclast drinking the cheapest beer on the menu gives zero fucks about tradition, clearly!'.

@mietze Send the spouse and the kids to a movie or something some time. Everyone needs alone time.