Best posts made by Pyrephox

The proper answer is "Disco Elyisum".

@Misadventure said:

Hunter presents a significant difficulty for day to day role play. People want it, people will do it, but instead of contrasting with the horror, it will emphasize the artificiality of all these Hunters hanging out in a coffee shop, or banging each other, or posing really hard about the cigarette they are smoking. It will have all the intimacy needed for horror and discovery of the X-Files or Supernatural shot with a cast of thirty main characters.

Realistically, how is that any different from any other World of Darkness line when translated to MU* format?

@WTFE Yeah, I admit - I grew up playing 2nd Ed D&D. /Magic users/ in 2nd Ed D&D. So any illusion of a character as an 'investment' was beaten out of me pretty early - I once had a character die by falling down a hill. It wasn't even a big hill. Also, I have terrible dice luck, so my character failing at all things is something I'm accustomed to.

Which is not to say that I don't fudge things or handwave things, or that as I've gotten older, I haven't become more and more of a fan of failure at the dice meaning a complication is added, rather than an opportunity taken away. But I'm also aware that by choosing to play in a system that adds an element of chance, you're going to get some outlier results that completely change the game - or bring it to a premature end, some times. I like making characters and trying new things, so as long as a system is generally fair, losing characters to a crazy roll of the dice doesn't bother me TOO much, as long as the next character is fun.

My general philosophy on gaming is that I'm not investing in a character's story. I'm playing the character's story, riding it hard to wherever it goes. If that ride stops being fun, that's one thing. But if it comes to an abrupt end, that's usually a good story to tell, and hey, I had fun up until that point, so I'm good.

@Cupcake That episode did a genuinely better job at portraying a sex positive society that still has certain gendered expectations that most fiction I've seen. I loved the fact that, while it seemed clear that you had to start paired up with a member of the opposite sex, everyone involved emphasized that the important thing was that people participate, not HOW they participate. Friendship was just as valid as sexytimes, in whatever combo you wanted. It was all very low pressure and accepting in a way I appreciated for that sort of trope.

@seraphim73 said in Is Min/Max a bad thing?:

I enjoy playing characters with large dice pools. Some of this is because I love posing people doing awesome things, and some of it is because I have to make up for my generally horrid dice luck. But as long as my character is within the same range as other PCs at what they're supposed to be good at, that's plenty good for me. Because posing utter incompetence can be entertaining too, as long as you know that's what you're in for.

As I've gotten older, this is one reason I've become more and more a fan of systems with some sort of metacurrency that lets you counter dice luck when it REALLY matters. Hero points, Fate points, Luck, whatever. There's nothing more frustrating than finally getting a chance to shine in your character's area of expertise only to roll a gigantic pool of NOTHING, or a Nat 1, or whatever outcome represents embarrassing failure.

And honestly, that's more a MU* thing. In a tabletop, I know that I'll get more chances to let my character shine. But in a MU* with a lot more players and a lot less attention to go around, there might be months between chances to Do My Thing, and of course all anyone's going to remember about my character from now on is that they Botched That Thing.

I lean towards the ignorance side, as well, but for a different reason - a Hunter/Mortals game shouldn't be beholden to what's just in the other splat books. I mean, sure, maybe one werewolf you hunt is a spirit cop, but maybe the next is just some poor bastard who got bitten by a wolf and can't control his changes - and never will be able to. I don't mind people having a baseline of information to work from, but if the WoD isn't throwing something crazy and unexpected at you, then it's not a proper game of occult horror.

I like metaplot. However, I also agree that a lot of metaplots I've seen on MU*s were not very good. Not, generally, because the people who developed them were evil or anything, but because they fell into a couple of very common GMing errors. I think the metaplots I've seen that were the most successful and satisfying tended to share some common traits:

• They were scripted and presented as opportunities to make things BETTER, not to restore or defend a status quo. Taking something away from PCs as a precursor to a plot, in my experience, makes players stressed out, wary, and defensive from the start. They start trying to figure out what they need to do /not lose anything else/ rather than to regain what they lost. This may, or may not, be coupled with a suspicion that staff is punishing them and a lack of belief that they can meaningfully impact the plot.

• Oriented towards shaping the future, not uncovering/discovering the past. Metaplots about 'uncovering the past' inevitably, in my experience, depress player interest. Because the past is always filled with larger than life characters who did AMAZING AND COOL THINGS...that current PCs are (perceived) to never, ever be able to do. Uncovering the past is reading someone else's story - what tends to get players excited is the chance to write their own story.

• Have clear, varied lines of engagement /and/ significant and timely feedback on engagement. Especially at the beginning, the most successful plots I've seen have broken objectives down into small, clear goals that scream 'resolve this with combat' or 'resolve this with talky skills' with low difficulties and small but significant resolutions. People get choice paralysis and many MU* players are fairly passive, as others have noted - giving them something that is /clearly/ meant for their kind of character, isn't high risk, but does have a small but 'real' contribution to the resolution is a good way to hook them in for further involvement. You want players to become invested, and there's no better way to cultivate investment than in offering the players ownership in a fun way.

• Remember that it is the PCs' story. Plots which primarily revolve around a set of NPCs tend to turn off players - they're around to tell their own story, not tag along with the NPCs. Also, highly powerful NPCs, especially if they have access to things that the PCs are forbidden to have, tend to create anger and resentment among players. The best metaplots I've seen have made every reasonable effort to reach out to players and find a way to make the plot, stakes, and events /personal/ to the PC (for good and ill, not just for ill).

• And, of course, be flexible. Players aren't going to do what you expect. Don't have a metaplot which is so tightly scripted that the PCs clearly see the rails, or they're likely to either disengage, or decide to wreck the train. If something doesn't seem to be working, discard it or change it. The /only/ purpose for an RPG plot is to give the players (including the GM) enjoyment.

As a counselor, what @Cupcake says above is absolutely true. It's worth noting that research suggests that the factor MOST associated with improvement in therapy is the quality of the relationship between therapist and client, so if someone doesn't work for you, do not hesitate to try someone new if you can (I know that our fucked up healthcare system can make that hard). Look for someone who shows you respect, who is genuinely easy to talk to, who you feel safe being vulnerable with - and who challenges you appropriately.

@Tempest said:

I have nothing but for you both, but that is the flakiest headstaff combo possible.

Eh. Even if the game only lasts a few months before people get bored or distracted by the newest shiny, if it's a FUN few months, I'm not going to complain!

@Kanye-Qwest said in The Metaplot:

@Pyrephox So what's your solution to that?

I think that depends on the genre and theme of the game, to be honest. Most XP systems are simply not meant to handle progression across years of play, especially in a persistent setting which also includes newbies. I'm not a big fan of 'catchup XP' a la The Reach that tries to address the issue by turning all PCs into XP-laden monsters. I think I would like to see some experimenting with alternate methods of progression - things to sink XP into that provide one time benefits or non '+ to success' benefits. On an OOC level, you /could/, if appropriate for the theme and setting, basically set OOC boundaries on certain plots and adventures - this is appropriate for people with less than 50 XP, or more than 500 XP,. The AP system on Arx does an interesting job of it for 'off screen' actions - everyone only gets the same AP and +storyrequests, so that helps some of it. I'd like to see more games put in a currency like that that limits the ability of any one character to dominate ALLLL the things.

@faraday The realities of a pandemic and keeping people alive in a pandemic are inconvenient to the desires of late stage capitalism, so the wealthy class is more than happy to sacrifice thousands of people a day as long as their short-term profits don't take a hit that makes stock prices drop.

I think Maine has that sort of interesting combination of not being a place many people know intimately, but also being a place where people have vaguely positive feelings about. Like, no one wants to put a game in North Dakota, because no one wants to even pretend to live in North Dakota. (Apologies to North Dakota.)

Whereas, Maine at least sounds like somewhere that you can imagine someone living and enjoying themselves, but is much less likely (although not immune from) to have a great many people who want to tell you how you're Doing Maine Wrong, unlike a lot of the more 'iconic' places.

Which is not to say that I wouldn't love a resurgence of games set in iconic places like New York, or LA, or even Atlanta or Austin or St. Louis.

One of the subsystems in its draft form, for the process by which characters can discover new flora and fauna, capture and study it, and eventually cultivate it for use by the colony (if it is able to be used for that).

The purpose here is to provide a blueprint for players to run the process with minimal bottlenecks from staff, and to know exactly what they need to do to achieve an end result, while leaving a lot of room for playing things out.

Discovering New Food

While it is definitely possible to just start chowing down on purple grass or that twelve-legged bug that was crawling up your trousers and hope for the best, that’s not likely to be the best way to find a stable supply of food for the 100+ colonists who have been awakened. Much less the thousands of colonists to come. There are four phases of creating a viable source of food for the colony:

Exploration: First, you have to find whatever it is you want to try to eat (or build with, or make clothes from, etc.) out in the wilderness. This requires a +job or a PRP to go out and find samples of whatever it is you want to develop. You can highlight a specific plant/animal/material that comes up in a scene, or you can specify certain criteria (“I want to find small, fast-breeding meat producers.”) that you think the colony might need. Someone will have to make a Survival roll vs 6 + the number of specific criteria (So, “I want to find an edible vegetable” is a straight 6 but might find you anything from a tuber that feeds on blood to a sour grain that froths into a fermenting foam almost immediately when ground, while “I want to find a sweet vegetable appropriate for making Earth-style breads and pastries that can be cultivated easily near the ship” would be an 8, because you’re asking for two specifics beyond ‘edible vegetable’ - that it has a sweet taste, and that it can be cultivated easily near the colony ship.) in your search. Failure on this roll usually means that the sample is guaranteed to have some significant drawback that will have to be overcome before it can be added to the food supply. A crushing success on this roll usually means that the sample is guaranteed to reveal some un-asked-for benefit that can be exploited if the sample is thoroughly studied and cultivated.

Capture: Once a viable sample has been located, play a scene to secure it. This might be run by staff, but can also be run by the players or another player based on the information returned by the job or PrP runner. This doesn’t have to be a dangerous scene, but it can be, and depending on what you’re looking for, there might be an inherent difficulty: for example, if you want to try to domesticate a native animal for a battle-capable beast of burden, you’re probably going after something large, brave, and with defensive capabilities - that has no fear of humans. Have fun!

Study: Once you have samples and can return them to the ship, there will usually be a Medical Sciences and a Chemical Sciences check, at a minimum, to see if the sample can serve as a food source right out of the field, if it will need specialized breeding or genetic alteration, or if it has unexpected or unsuitable side-effects. Success on the roll will usually uncover the sample's mechanical effects after a set time period, while failure on the roll will only uncover a few of them, positive or negative. Characters can study multiple times, but they generally require fresh samples to do so, which should be acquired through scenes. You can, of course, choose to skip this step and simply consume the item! This may lead to character death, illness, or entertaining side-effects, but it is absolutely an option. Choosing to consume native fauna and flora without studying it first is considered to be consenting to all potential consequences.

Cultivate: Assuming that something has been found to be safe for consumption, either through the rigorous process of study by qualified professionals, or by shoving it in your face and seeing what happens, then it can be cultivated provided the proper skills and conditions are available. This is considered a Project. Once the Project is complete, it’s assumed that the item has now been added to the list of the colony’s resources and that scavenging patrols are regularly hunting/harvesting it. This raises the Colony’s morale and health by a set amount based on the food quality of the item and any special attributes it might have, as well as if it is a new ‘niche’ (a type of food that the colony doesn’t currently have a lot of, like meat, or starch, or fiber). Successful cultivation also serves as a positive event to affect the colony's survivability rating.

Thomas Truesdale.

Still one of the characters who had the most going on under the hood, as one might expect from a Changeling. Also one of the first male characters that I played for longer than a one-shot.

He was from an incredibly small town in the back-end of Kansas, wandered into a fae domain, and was turned in so that another Lost could escape. It's possible that he eventually did the same to some other poor bastard - he could never remember how he got out of his durance, and that killed him. Either way, he got spit back out in the same small town, where there were no other Lost and he'd never had a fetch, with next to no memory of where he'd been or why he was a nightmare to his own eyes but /no one else saw anything different/ (except that he'd aged up). It wasn't long until he went completely bugfuck, and got himself involuntarily committed to the state institution.

I didn't want to go with 'hellish asylum', so it was actually the place where he met a Winter Court mentor who was looking out for Lost who got committed. He helped get Thomas' Clarity back up, and with the help of a Duchess of the Icebound Heart, got him capable of interacting with the world and pretending to be human again (then she broke his heart, because of course she did).

What came out the other end of all of that was a /deeply/ broken man who was emotionally manipulative, controlling, and even abusive, while sincerely believing it was For Their Own Good. He wasn't really capable of deep positive emotion, although he could fake it well enough for his day job, and although his dearest wish was for a boring, stable, ordinary life, he was absolutely willing to murder the hell out of someone if they were in his way. If they were Lost. He valued human life much more highly, and he was deeply opposed to magical predation on humans (aside from himself). He was a bundle of curiosity, especially about occult things that didn't come from the Fae - he had this secret dream of figuring out a way to send a bunch of human psychics into the Hedge to burn down everything and take on the Fae with telekinesis and nukes. It never quite worked out, though.

Amusingly, /nothing/ he ever did quite worked out. I'm not sure he accomplished even one of his intended goals the entire time I played him. When he failed, though, he just grabbed what he could from the situation and acted like that was the plan all the while. I would have really loved to have more fun occult adventures with him, or for his position as a reporter to have meant more, but I loved playing him.

@tinuviel I think it's okay for games to exist that aren't 'for' every player. Just because something isn't to a player's tastes, doesn't make it wrong.

Roster characters aren't my first choice, generally, although I do consider them a fun challenge if there's one that sparks my fancy. But there's nothing wrong with a game having them. More diversity in games and game philosophies is a net good, I think, even if it means not every game out there will be my style.

@Paradox My preference is somewhere between your Light Stats and Crunchy categories. I want to be able to make meaningful choices to progress my character and distinguish them, mechanically, from other characters - which includes having to 'give up' certain things to gain others, but also includes (ideally) flavorful, interesting abilities and powers.

The difficulty, of course, is that such systems need to be balanced so that there's no One True Path that lets you do all things better than anyone else, and no Trap Paths which allow you to accidentally create a character which is equally useless at all possible endeavors.

Which is why it is super hard to come up with original mechanical systems for MU*s, I think. You have all your balance issues in regular design, AND the engine needs to be tuned for long-term, persistent play where you will be interacting with characters of very different power levels.

@kitteh As I understand, Prestige will be reset when the social system goes in, based on org strength and social skills, so that list may look /very/ different when that happens.

But, honestly, I don't disagree, and I do think that at some point, Arx is going to need a character reset or XP wipe or /something/. By the time the final systems go in, if not before. Both to really push back against the massive XP that has been accrued by characters (including my own), but also so that people can rebuild their characters with the final systems created, instead of having to try and pivot builds as new systems come in, something that can really hurt new characters who come in at the wrong times.

Number two would be, IMO, pretty damned awesome. That kind of modern day occult stuff is all sorts of fun, and I think Demon is a game I would pretty much only play in single sphere.

Option A. I find the premise really interesting, and think it'd be fun to game in. I also think it's probably a bit more flexible for the variety of outcomes you're considering than the historical setting. Any kind of historical setting requires a higher buy in up front from potential players to at least pretend to acquaint themselves with the mores/culture/context of the time.

Inspired by, but not entirely appropriate to post to the Social Systems thread.

Reading that thread made me remember one of the most satisfying and enjoyable 'social manipulation' sequences I've ever had on a MU*. It was on Darkwater (Changeling version, using CoD rules), and used the Doors system. My character, an underworld smuggler with some legitimate business concerns as cover, ended up crossing/getting up into the face of another character. Both were Lost, and the other character decided to put my character over a barrel by undermining and influencing his mortal connections in order to get him to do...something. I've actually forgotten what. So, we used the Doors system, and I laid out and ran several mini-scenes where the character had a chance to meet up with specific connections my character had, and woo them to her side. Each success opened a door on my character, and when all doors were opened, she confronted him and revealed just how screwed he was, and got the concessions.

It was great fun, and I loved having a chance to explore that sort of social maneuvering. And my character ended up respecting and liking hers a great deal, because she was both clever, and gracious in victory. It was just fantastic, even though my character 'lost'.