Best posts made by Pyrephox

I love the Aspirations system. It can be tremendously helpful, for me, in thinking about where I want to take my character and communicating the kind of experiences that I want to have as a player. It does need some thoughtful tweaking for a persistent setting (my recommendation would be to allow people to make new Aspirations weekly, rather than immediately when they fulfill a previous Aspiration, or tweaking the amount of XP/beats one obtains from them during a week, perhaps on a diminishing returns scale), but it can be pretty great.

@Lotherio Thank you, that's very kind of you to say!

I don't think people are trying to avoid specific people or anything, usually. It's just a little more intimidating, for me, to sit in an empty, open scene than it is to do so on a grid. It's not logical, but I can see it being inhibiting to people for opening those scenes and hoping someone wanders in.

@macha said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

Have I entered a state of delusion, or can a landlord suddenly change rules/terms/fines for xyz on a lease without advance notice or it being.. oh, signed?

This is a question that you should ask your local tenant rights or renters' advocacy organization immediately!

@icanbeyourmuse Yeah. As far as personal preference, the youngest I'd really like to play for anything other than a one-shot is college age.

Yessss. I would play this forever.

@jinshei said in The Work Thread:

@faraday Exactly! I'm not even hanging around with uneducated people. These are university staff with advanced degrees in medical sciences...

Engage pedantic hat:

Because the human brain is very, very bad at sustaining a state of alertness over time. Just, biochemically, absolutely PANTS at it. This is adaptive, because it allows us to live in a risky world without being in a constant state of meltdown, but maladaptive, because it makes us willing to take dumb risks that we know are risks and feel good about it even if it WILL kill a certain percentage of us.

We're also just horrible at risk assessment, particularly if we're given too much warning. It's one of the reasons why things like traffic lights and railroad crossings have to be specifically timed, because if you give people too much warning, accidents go UP because our brain is filled with dumb ass reasoning like, "there's plenty of time for me to get through the intersection/crossing before a car/train actually comes".

It's stupid and frustrating, but it's just something we're bad at as a species.

I think everyone should be offered a chance in the spotlight, at some point. And I would certainly like to see GMs across games think a little about spotlight distribution, and develop - as possible - more of a distribution of things that target people and groups that may have missed out on the spotlight for a while. I don't think you can mandate it, because some people really don't want the spotlight, or don't want it from a GM plot, while others will always want it and will become convinced that they are being ill done by whenever it goes to anyone else.

And, of course, you can do everything you can to give a person the spotlight only to have them accidentally hand it off to someone else, or get a terrible run of luck and fall flat on their face (which, while it can be FUN, often doesn't fill that spotlight need).

But, y'know, I think it might be an interesting idea for smallish games to keep track of players and how many plots they've 'starred' in, and just make an effort to reach out to players OOC if they haven't starred in many, or any, and just see if there's something they'd LIKE to do.

I mean, for me, the best question any GM can ever ask me is, "What would you like to see happen for your character?"

If you decide not to go F3S, then it sounds like Fate is already coded, and IMO does freeform/flexible supernatural things very well.

@Cobaltasaurus Fire. Fire works on JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING, and if it's not working, that's probably because you're not using ENOUGH.

@roz said in Spotlight.:

@arkandel said in Spotlight.:

@sparks said in Spotlight.:

and if you do, you're going to run into "you got a chance to shine once, a year and a half ago, so you can't go on plots anymore", which is a surefire way to burn out otherwise active players (who are the ones who stir up RP when you aren't GM'ing).

That's a pretty good point and a legitimate question on its own right.

Do all players deserve the same access to the spotlight? That is, if you are putting in a lot of your time building up a successful House which your character leads, run plots for its players, recruit others to it, making yourself available as someone in a leadership position and integrating yourself thematically into current politics, then should I as a casual player who's there an hour here and there get to have equal access to metaplot?

Even more so, does it make sense for me to? Decisions are often made among high-powered or important figureheads, so do I bring my sailor guy to the inner council meetings? Should metaplot be geared so that there are no closed door meetings in the first place?

I think the best metaplot is going to be the stuff not strictly limited by class/position. That is: you may need a high-powered figurehead to access certain parts of the political end of things, sure, but there should be more variety to how to influence metaplot than just that one angle.

I think there should be generally equitable ways for people to pursue metaplot. It's cool to hear from @Sparks that they actually have a GM tool to find people who haven't gotten GM attention so they can toss them seeds/hooks. But especially if there are tools that everyone can use to interact, the people who use them the most are logically going to get the most out of them. I agree that GMs should try to make a good faith effort to reach out to PCs who don't seem to have much, but that is still just trying to give people an extra nudge to use the tools at hand.

Agreed, here.

I think my ideal distribution is the idea that position/class/sphere does not grant you equal access to every part of the metaplot, but that all positions/classes/spheres give you access to /an equally important/ part of the metaplot.

The problem isn't necessarily that a tailor can't sit in at the King's privy counsel and be taken equally seriously, but when the big noble can sit on the privy council /and/ bring in his soldiers to solve the gang trouble on the tailor's street /and/ make better clothes than the tailor /and/ gets the magic sword and stuff as well.

If you're going to have big nobles and tailors as PCs, then I think you need to design the game so that each have exclusive things that are important and meaningful. Whether that's magic clothes that the tailor alone can make or that the tailor has a meaningful impact on the crime and who runs their particular collection of streets - that's entirely up in the air. But it has to be something, I think, that the tailor can do that the noble can't, just as the noble can do things that the tailor can't.

For me, it's always deeply encouraging when staff using PrPs to change the world in some way. Not huge ways! But I remember on Darkwater, something a few of us in the Autumn Court did unexpectedly gave a bonus to Harvesting fear in part of a grid for a while. That was /cool/. It made me want to run more things.

Anything that helps me, as a GM, feel that I'm running something that matters in the over all story of the game.

From players, what really helps inspire me to reach out to people and run things for them are good RP hooks. Meaty ones that aren't just a list of hobbies. 'Once ran with the South Side Manglers, was jumped out after being accepted to college' is something that would inspire me to go 'what if a Mangler showed up needing help? What would this character do?' and then I want to find out.

Nope.

I want to. I wish I did. I've read extensively on paranormal phenomenon, and done exploration on it with various sites/people who claim to be involved in paranormal abilities/manifestations. But I've never seen anything I can point to as evidence for the existence of the paranormal. Just a lot of logical fallacies, wishful thinking, and physiological illusions.

@faraday And, as I said, there are plenty of people out there like that. But staff shouldn't necessarily assume that every mortal bartender WANTS to be that person. Sometimes you want to play a mortal bartender because you read an urban fantasy series where a guy runs a bar for vampires and ends up becoming embroiled in vampire politics and gains a magical artifact that gives him enough oomph to turn his bar into Vampire Switzerland for political negotiations, and he'd love to at least have the opportunity to do Something Cool Like That, but because everyone treats him like he's useless food because he's not a vampire, he never gets the chance.

So, the only thing I say is - ask. Someone can always turn it down, if they're happy as they are, but it never hurts to find out if someone wants an IC direction or boost, but just isn't sure how to do it.

Yeah, I don't think the 'make your own spells' format really works that well in a MU* format. It usually ends up being a matter of who can BS the current GM the most effectively, which is ultimately frustrating for everyone else.

Side note: There is really very little as amusing as going on a ghost hunt with two self-proclaimed "sensitives" who don't know each other. Turns out every single building we entered had multiple ghosts of horribly abused children, as the two of them wound each other up and tried to play "who's got the clearer picture of this sad spirit".

I would really, REALLY dig domain management mini-games, or farming minigames, or animal taming/training minigames. And I think MU*s have a lot of potential to reduce the feeling of 'repetition' by stretching out over time and targeting interesting decisions. Like, a farming minigame doesn't, or shouldn't, need me to log in every day to type +water for each plot of land - It could focus more on the planning of different difficulties of crops, of hardiness and soil, and of events that happen when you do log in - "Rabbits are infesting your crops! What do you do?" and can even tie into a mini-PrP system where you can enlist other people's help to chase rabbits around the field in a scene, and they can roll against a hidden difficulty to the crisis object, and you can see the outcome. And at the end, you get stuff that you can sell to a market for cash, or use in recipes, or whatever.

@kay said in What Is Missing For You?:

@lemon-fox My favorite superhero trope was always the 'group that fights crime while also being on a tv show' thing. Especially if you give it some kind of cat fight twist that's clearly obvious OOC but might still trip characters up ICly. Did the Blazing Wonder really hook up with Fantastic Horse's sidekick/girlfriend Megafox while they were trapped in the X Dimension? Find out next week!

ETA: Granted, that might be more suitable for a tabletop set, or for inter-group tension. I'm not sure how you'd set that up to be MU* wide. Unless there are several competing shows.

What would be really interesting there is if you could have logs of the action scenes, the "on screen" stuff, and then some sort of mechanics for analysing the logs for ratings. Like, was there a Surprise Revelation? +100 ratings points! Did a fan-favorite villain show up? +50 --Did he get punked and it was clearly too easy for the heroes? -100. So on and so forth.

And then have the various super teams conspiring and competing for the highest ratings, maybe with perks to their teams for being in the top slot (suit upgrades! Fancy lair! etc.)

And the villains, if you have PC villains, could gain fan followings so that shows with them became highly boosted for popularity, so that super teams were sneakily trying to convince them to agree to drop a hint about their next attack so that a specific team could be the one to head it off, etc.

I think it goes to show that there's really a lot of space in MU*dom for diverse cultures and visions. It's a different way of conceiving of the game space, but if you groove with it, it works really well, and has remained in play for...decades? at this point.

I have been Pyrephox since AOL days - largely thanks to the fact that it was very hard to find an AOL username that wasn't a string of random numbers. It's adapted from a very minor character named Phyrephox in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age - the character shows up for a couple of pages, gets tortured, and dies.

But when I was 14, I totally thought the name was cooool. Since then, it's mostly been that it's fairly unique, so there aren't 5 million other people running around with it, and I can almost always use it as a username on games, etc.

@thenomain said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

@ganymede

This Makes Me Think Of:

There are different types of LARPs. Some of them you rely on the dexterity of the player as the character, in others the combat is done via cards.

Because we MUSHers are essentially writers using a loose system to fill in the rest, then starting with a system where "making an impassioned speech" is rolled and not role-played will be...a challenge. How do you tickle the writer and role-player when you say, "You can do this, but you need to roll your success and write accordingly"?

A decent writer or roleplayer should be thrilled about that. That's standard procedure in using social skills among most people I know. Declare what you're using, what you're hoping to achieve (or however the system works), THEN roll, then pose out the result of your roll.

Do not pose first and roll afterwards. It is a recipe for inadvertant hilarity (which can and has kicked me in the butt a few times where I thought, "I've got like a three percent chance to fail this roll," and so busted out this great dramatic pose, roll just to confirm and...crit fail. Then you have to do a hasty, "Or that's what she MEANT to say, but instead she stands up, looks around, opens her mouth, and all that comes out is a frog-like croak. Her face turns desperately red, and with all those wonderful words running through her head, she flaps her hands a few times in desperation and then sinks back into her seat and covers her face in her hands." to save it.

Roll! Then pose. The fun roleplaying part is finding a way to make the roll make sense!