Best posts made by Pyrephox

@faraday "Feeling intimidated" is defined by the system. If the system says, "when a character successfully wins a contest of intimidation, X happens" then that is what happens, and if you don't like that, then don't play the game.

Part of agency is responsibility - don't play a game with rules you can't abide. And EVERY system (professional system, at least, not homebrew) that has social contests tends to define what the acceptable outcome of those contests are. Read the rules, know the rules, follow the rules.

Or explicitly house-rule the rules, or don't play the game. But once you agree to play a game rules as written, don't throw a fit because you don't like what the outcome of a social contest is.

EDIT: I suppose this is the core of my frustration with this endless round of arguments, because people are so damned generic about it. You can't say you like or don't like 'social systems' because there five billion of the damned things. And almost no one on the "no social stats/skills" side has been talking about /World of Darkness/ social skills/stats/processes and what specific problems they have with them in play. Possibly because I'm not sure anyone's actually read them - certainly, the situations they describe /cannot happen/ under most versions of the rules as written, without someone being ignorant or lying about the rules that exist.

You can't have a reasonable discussion about boogieman that people make up in their heads, and I don't think anyone has been advocating FATAL as a system here.

Now, there are issues even with the Doors system, as much as I love it. For example, when I ran an organization Doors attack for someone who wanted to get my character over a barrel by attacking his business interests, it was great fun, but one problem I DO think exists is there's no real way to 'fight back', so to speak. You can counter attack (open a Doors attack in return on an asset of the attacker, if your character knows about it), but there's not really anyway in that indirect conflict for your character to find out about it and shore up their defenses. The system is oriented towards PC -> NPC action, with the Doors as obstacles to overcome, and could probably use some tweaking to be more PC <-> PC friendly.

And in an earlier version of the intimidation contest in WoD, for example, an exceptional success on Intimidation made the target permanently intimidated. That was great when you're talking an NPC who might become a reoccuring character who gets cowed into helping the PCs. Not so much in PC <-> PC conflict. No game that I know of ever House Ruled it to something more reasonable.

Oh for fucks' sake.

If you expect a social system to map out every possible use of the system under every possible circumstance including whatever whackadoodle scenarios you invent specifically to try to break the system, then no, you will never find any that does that, because it's not physically possible to write that out, and if you did, no one would ever read it.

Game systems, every single game system, operate under the assumption that the players want to play the game, and not set out to try and act in bad faith at every possible level - bad faith actors should be expelled from the game. No system will ever stop an idiot from trying to abuse mechanics - that doesn't mean a system is useless or broken, it means that idiots shouldn't be humored.

Getting rid of social systems won't stop idiots, either. If you're trying to build a game under the premise of "how do we stop idiots from being idiots" then no matter what systems you use, you are doomed to failure.

If the system has a luck-type stat, have people roll Luck at the beginning of a travel scene - this scene can encompass a day of travel, a week, whatever. Low or high rolls trigger encounters at some point during the scene, and the intensity of that encounter will probably depend on the theme/setting of the game. It doesn't have to be combat or danger! I've had wonderful travel scenes that involved just seeing creatures that the PCs have never seen before, or stumbling into a traveling group of entertainers. Dangerous encounters also don't have to be combat - make use of weather and terrain offer exciting encounters. Mudslides, flooded rivers, snow or thunderstorms, or non-combat dangerous encounters like a stampede or a swarm of tiny insects that can't be beaten with swords.

To me, the trick is to keep encounters balanced between travel disasters and travel opportunities, and that each character gets a chance to shine. 13th Age, which is admittedly more narrative, also suggests a 'travel montage' if there's a lot of travel involved but you just don't want to play it out fully, but you want to have things have happened that give PCs a chance to talk about and develop relationships from it. Basically, it starts out with the DM narrating the travel, and mentioning an obstacle, then picking a PC and saying that they solved it, and asking the player how. No rolls required. Then that PC narrates the next obstacle the party ran into, and calls out another PC as being the 'hero' that time, and so forth. Until everyone has a chance to have solved an obstacle, and the party has some fun noodle stories to bond over.

This is a really interesting topic. OOC, I'm a straight cis woman. On MUs, I play about equal numbers of male and female characters. Most of them are straight, which made me try to think about why exactly that is. Outside of sex MUs I mostly fade to black anyway, so it's not discomfort with typing out the sex, or with being particularly titillated by the sex. I read fiction with all manner of romantic configurations and enjoy it.

Part of it, I admit, is the reputation "straight women playing gay men" tend to get on MU*s, and my own experiences with some of the worse examples of that demo (although nothing as bad as being shunned for not making a straight character gay!). So, even my male characters who are not straight tend to keep their non-straightness on the downlow and be discreet. Thomas on Darkwater, for example, was bi, but his successful relationships (to whatever extent any relationship with Thomas could ever be called 'successful' since he was a terrible person in so many ways) were with women; he had an unvoiced attraction to one other male character, and an outright crush on another, who turned him down. So I don't even know that he counts, since his bisexuality was more of an informed trait that I knew about, but I'd be surprised that more than a couple other PCs did. As for women attracted to women, mostly I've not found the right dynamic that clicks for me between two women characters thus far. I have played a couple of lesbian characters, but all of their relationships were off-screen with NPCs rather than onscreen.

I've not really received a lot of harassment for my characters' sexualities, although people are sometimes surprised that I'm a woman when I'm playing a male character (and at least once refused to believe that I was, actually, a woman). I've had people assume that I'm gay when I play a male character who is attracted to women, but mostly on sex MU*s, if it happens to come up.

I can barely even remember NOT being a nerd, but I think one of the earliest formative experiences that I can clearly recall was the children's book version of 'Little Fuzzy'. It was beautifully illustrated, I got it very young, and it pretty much hooked me on science fiction forever. Everything else just flowed outward. It's a bit odd, in that neither of my parents share my interests, although my mother DID get me into horror movies, for certain. But fantasy/SF just came from books that I could grab.

I think that sounds wonderful. The biggest thing to make sure of, though, is that there's follow through on the part of staff. If you set up the expectation that hey, here's a thing that will help you get involved in the plot, and then don't follow through, players will feel more put off than if you offered nothing at all.

I've found some great new artists/bands by clicking on other people's playlists, so sure! I don't usually associate the songs with the characters in the same way that the player who made them does, but it does absolutely no harm.

@Ganymede That.

Also, Conditions are GREAT. Yeah, they're a little clunky to do on the fly, especially as more have been created, but they give you a very clear mechanical effect for things without 'removing player agency', AND you get actual XP for leaning into the Condition and having fun with it.

It's not a bad thing! It's a learning curve, yes, but worth investing the time in for.

I feel like some of it is just inertia. A lot of people in CoD MU*ing seem, in their heart of hearts, to still be playing 1E WoD, and resent anything that reminds them that this isn't that game.

In this, I agree with Derp. Aspirations require a tweak of thinking, but it's a tweak that I think nWoD games in particular seem to really need. Because there's a real tendency for WoD games to die because //nobody does anything//. People just sit OOC and chat about what they could do, or about niche character concepts.

Anything, ANYTHING that creates an incentive for people to get out and start actually playing the game rather than talking about the game or redesigning their wiki page is a net positive.

@Ganymede To be fair, I do understand worries about being left behind, XP-wise, because power tends to inflate quickly, which prompts plot runners to make enemies nastier and nastier, until you can, essentially, be priced out of some plots.

But I think the solution to that is capping XP gains very low, honestly.

@A-B said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

There's just too MUCH. Too many possible variables. I mean I see where you're coming from - but are you sure that asking what you did wrong or apologising is always a bad thing? (Faraday didn't seem to think the same. Is that conflicting data?)

You really need to seek out pro-bono online counseling or consultation with a professional. There are peer support groups online that are specifically oriented towards helping you through those feelings. This is not one of them.

I was kind of hoping that online ones existed, being currently not good in person - sometimes it seems there are and sometimes (notably by local professionals on the brief, disastrous occasions they've tried to do anything for me) I'm told firmly that there aren't.
If you happen to know where off-hand it would save time. If not, no harm done. Just asking in passing since, you know, there's sometimes a limit to how much web-searching one person can stand in one day.

The state of online counseling is...extremely variable. I cannot actually give recommendations, because I haven't assessed the efficacy of any of the options. I can only say that this community has a varied step system, from volunteer listeners, to online support groups, to what they claim are licensed professional counselors. They also have some guided self-help things you can do on your own. I cannot evaluate their service or claims, but only the professional counseling costs money, so you might find something useful here: https://www.7cups.com/

Again, I cannot verify or support the above link, because I honestly have no data on their practices or outcomes, and this should not be considered a professional reference or endorsement. But I do hope you find help, and I hope you find a place of peace and support!

With reputation and status, I feel like one thing we need to do more of is incentive BOTH ends of the scale. Everyone wants to have high rep and status because you /get stuff/ by doing so, and no one wants to be shut out of potential RP or plot because their character has low status or rep. So of course, there's a race for the top, and of course people get upset when their characters lose rep, because now those characters are objectively less effective and connected than before. Which means less RP for the PC.

But I think if we offered appropriate incentives for having both high OR low status/rep, then people would be more willing to take the hits. Like, there should definitely be events tied to and benefits for having a low or negative rep, to make it fun for those players to play that, and give some compensation for not having the bennies of high status and rep. Whether it's having targeted RP where enemy factions try to recruit you, or events where there's a Status ceiling of people allowed to join (the police commissioner should not be investigating the gritty street crime), or high risk/high reward plots that require a bit of "plausible deniability".

@Coin said:

And, to add to @Pyrephox's example, there's no reason why things can't happen in the scene that change it. Maybe there's a tense moment of sexual interplay that leads to a steamy night--how does that influence whether or not you'll vote for them?

Honestly, the problem is:

1. People who want something out of people who have no interest in giving it, regardless of how important it is or not (such as Player A randomly deciding they want to either scare the hell out of, or super-seduce, Player B, and whether they can or not having no effect on the story whatsoever);
2. People who engage every social contest as if it were actually a competition. It's not, it's cooperative.
3. people who get super butthurt when shit doesn't go their way.

Yeah.

It's worth noting that the Doors system incentivizes letting yourself be socially manipulated (you can get Beats from someone helping you meet your Aspirations or accepting a negative Condition, and recover WP from meeting your Vices, or Virtues), and explicitly encourages the target to negotiate what the effect of a loss is. In the case of that 'I want to seduce you', the target is entirely justified in saying, "Yeah, my PC isn't going to sleep with you, dude. But he's Swooning, so if you want to persuade him into anything /else/, then he'll go along with it despite his better judgement (and I get a sweet, sweet Beat for resolving that condition)."

None of which will stop someone who isn't playing in good faith from abusing the system. But I've yet to see a system that DOES stand up to someone not playing in good faith. One of the big issues with social systems on WoD MU*s is that we let far too many people get away with playing in bad faith in this particular subsystem.

@surreality said:

@Pyrephox said:

None of which will stop someone who isn't playing in good faith from abusing the system. But I've yet to see a system that DOES stand up to someone not playing in good faith. One of the big issues with social systems on WoD MU*s is that we let far too many people get away with playing in bad faith in this particular subsystem.

This is essentially the problem in a nutshell. There are plenty of people who have zero qualms about playing in completely bad faith.

This, and...well, there are a lot of people playing WoD games who don't know the rules. Or who KNEW the rules when they were oWoD, and are still trying to play by those rules in GMC. More than a few of them are staff, who then enshrine their erroneous knowledge as house rules (often trying to fix something that didn't need fixing), which then gets internalized by other players as the way the rules are, when they aren't.

See all the many, many people who complained about 1st Ed nWoD social rules being "one roll and they get to tell me what to do".

@Groth said:

@Pyrephox said:

People on your own game used them pretty regularly, actually. A couple of them were really good at it. A few were a bit annoying, but most people were pretty reasonable in play.

RfK used a social combat system that I believe Shavalyoth originally found on the OPP forum. The idea behind it was to try to make social combat as painless as possibly by instead having characters be directly convinced, their player would be offered a bribe "If you let your character be convinced, you get all these positive conditions and possibly even a beat!'. One of the best things about nWoD 2.0/GMC is the general philosophy of giving characters beats whenever bad things happen to them, it really does help soften the psychological blow.

Even so it was only ever extensively used by one player even though we would have liked to see it used more, because at the end of the day actually rolling the dice is the only way other players can tell if your character is actually convincing or you're just a good writer.

RfK's system was, sadly, inferior to the actual Doors system, but yeah, it wasn't terrible. It allowed too much to rest on one roll, though, rather than an extended interaction. Which, ironically, made it closer to that "one roll and you love me" thing that people tend to complain about. However, I suspect it was used more often than you realize - I was in several scenes where different people used it for different things, and one of the things I thought DID work really well was extending it out to apply to creative works. Letting crafting/art rolls give people beat-giving conditions if they accepted them was great, and a house rule I fully intend to steal for any games I run in the future.

Moving back to an Influence/Rep system - if we're not talking about WoD, I think that a "Faction Status Seesaw" would be useful in some ways. Have the factions in the game each have an opposing faction, and if you earn/buy status in one faction, the status in the opposing faction automatically goes down. (In GMC terms, you might create a persistent Condition called Opposed, that gives a -1 to social interactions to people from the opposing faction for each level of status that you have in the rival faction, that gives you a Beat whenever a member of that faction blocks you from achieving an Aspiration or takes direct action against you.) And then open up events and character opportunities that can only happen if you've got negative Status. If, say, you have negative Status (local government), then you can join the local violent anarchist mystery cult and take advantage of their bennies, or when a plot comes along that involves screwing with the local government, you're first on the NPCs' lists to be recruited.

@Groth said:

In the doors system as written the highest number of possible doors is 9 (Resolve 5, Composure 5, against virtue/vice and aspiration). Any character can at that point choose to make a roll with a -9 penalty and open all the doors in a single roll as long as they score a single success, this isn't too hard to achieve without accounting for powers or merits. At that point your target has to do what you want them to do with no ability to say no.

I'm not entirely sure where you're getting that? Under the normal Doors system, each successful roll removes ONE door, no matter how many successes you score (although Merits and exceptional successes do alter this). Now, if you're FORCING Doors, which I assume is where you're getting the dice penalty from, that's another thing - but in that case, you're also using Hard Leverage, which involves risking an Integrity break, and if you /don't/ make that roll, then that character is immune to all further attempts at social maneuvering from you from then on.

Furthermore, if Forcing the Doors succeeds, it does not make your PC target "have to do what you want them to do with no ability to say no". Per the rules, (GMC, 194) you proceed to "resolution as normal". Resolution as normal always offers PCs two choices: Go With The Flow (do what the other PC asks, and gain a Beat), or Offer an Alternative, which is what I was alluding to previously. And yes, either way, the targeted PC will be doing something beneficial for the targeter, because it's a game mechanic, and it was resolved in the initiator's favor. That's what game mechanics MEAN. It's one of the things that distinguishes a roleplaying game from collaborative storytelling - sometimes, the dice mean that things don't always go your way, or as planned. There is pretty much no way to develop a dice-based social resolution system that doesn't...well, allow one character to influence the other. I mean, that's the point of these systems, and if your bar for a system that works is "no PC ever has to accept any kind of influence from any other PC under any circumstances", then that's a pretty impossible standard for any system to meet.

However, the point about the -9 is well taken, largely because the Storyteller system in general breaks down once people have Enough Dice to throw at any problem. Honestly, my preference is for a blanket +5/-5 modifier limit to any roll, supernatural or otherwise, so that no one has any more than 15 dice to throw at a single given roll. For me, any pretense of risk or of being a "horror game" goes out of the window when you can throw thirty dice at any given problem.

But then, I'm one of the crazy people who would also want a blanket XP cap, set at about 20 XP (GMC), because I've yet to do see a MU* that really distinguishes the qualitative difference between street-level and high-level play. Most MU*s just...scale up street-level type threats/plots by adding more dice and more minions, which, to me, isn't the best way to handle it. I suspect most STs would do much better jobs if they knew they didn't have to accommodate Random PC With 30+ Dice Pools in their plots.

I do like the idea you mentioned of making it explicit that the target gets to present the targetter with three options for each roll. Anything that increases communication between players about how to make things fun is a good thing, and helping players feel empowered even when their character is stymied or influenced is ALSO a good thing.

@runescryer There's something to this, but I think it's largely a part of how the tabletop game has been translated to the MU* environment. The setting was really never designed to be used in a large group, persistent environment - a lot of the toxic elements, particularly rigid hierarchies and cruel superiors out to exploit everyone for what they can get, were designed to be the /antagonists/ to the presumed low-level, new/young supernaturals who are trying to maintain a spark of their humanity in a cruel world.

That's even made more explicit in Blood and Smoke, with the sidebar that points out that the 'inviolable' rules of vampire society get /violated all the time/. They're not supposed to be something that PCs are actually supposed to live; they're supposed to be invasive enough that the typical PC pretty much has to break them occasionally, because that's where plot and drama happens - how do you get out of this, this time?

Similar things are in all the game lines; they have taboos and terrors because it's assumed that the PCs are on the side of having to violate those for the greater good (or at least THEIR greater good) and the abusive hierarchies of authority are usually assumed to be NPC antagonists. But those archetypes have empowered a lot of players who just kind of want to be controlling assholes to feel justified in being controlling assholes.

@l-b-heuschkel said in Battling FOMO (any game):

I find that open scenes and open plot events are a very big deal when it comes to battling this. Make it hinge less on me to reach out -- I am putting myself somewhere and signaling I'm available, and if people secretly hate my company they can just not turn up.

Alas, then no one turns up to your open scenes, either, and there's nothing quite as crushing as sitting for an hour or two with an open scene, uh, open and no one showing a lick of interest.

Events aren't so bad, because if no one signs up, then you just don't run it. But man, those open scene deserts hurt.

@krmbm said in Online friends:

@bear_necessities is one of my bestest friends. We met on a MUSH and now hang out in-person every few months. Is she my online friend? My real friend?

THIS IS TOO MUCH

I also met my best RL friend through my first MU*. A++ friend, definitely 'real' friend. And several others that I've met in RL from online spaces who are good, fun friends.

@saosmash said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:

@pyrephox so you're saying this is another book series i should read

I mean. Yes? But also...maybe. It is a DOORSTOPPER of a series which got so long that it is no longer being published by traditional publishers. It starts with Hunter's Oath/Hunter's Death, which primarily involves another part of the world which another interesting take on hereditary nobility (where the hereditary noblemen adopt commoners to be 'huntbrothers' and grow up with them as nobles throughout their lives, because the duty of nobility is to take part in a Sacred Hunt every year, and one of them - nobleman or huntbrother - will die horribly on that hunt), moves down to a very patriarchal and restrictive land in the southern part of the continent.

There's also a fair amount of difficult content - the protagonists of the House novels, for example is a child thief whose found family is comprised of children she rescued from a brothel. So. Yes, it's very good if you like epic magic, epic politics, and very LONG plots - but it also hits some painful content along the way.