Best posts made by Pyrephox

@il-volpe Also, XP caps. Most games are not adequately designed to handle the quantitative and qualitative differences between most characters with little XP and most characters with massive amounts of XP, and especially not both categories existing on the same game. Particularly in systems and settings where XP doesn't just make chance of success go up, but gives you the opportunity to purchase distinct abilities. Without an upper cap, your dinosaurs inevitably end up able to be the astronaut doctor forensic scientist superhero mentioned above, even if they're not actively trying.

Now, there's nothing wrong with a high-powered game, but unfortunately, a lot of GMs aren't necessarily comfortable with the kind of world/setting-changing influence that high powered characters can/should have in many settings, so the plot challenges tend to be 'more monsters, just bigger numbers', which means that lower level PCs can't participate in those plots without exploding on contact with the monster, but the upper level PCs can trivialize any plot beneath them.

@misadventure said in FFG L5R:

Anyone ever considered role rosters, meaning you list the skills and relationships needed (or already established) but the rest of the character is up to the player to create?

Not useful where you want specific family members probably, but a good way to both demonstrate thematic skill sets and tell players where there is a need.

I'd considered this as a possibility, especially for games with high turnover where it wasn't hereditary relationships. Like, "Police Chief: must have X skill in Politics, Y level of status, minimum age Z, will have a corruption hook to the underworld" and then when one Police Chief character disappears/retires/idle out, you just stick the role back up there with any tweaking that needs to be done for hooks, etc.

@carma In Ares, I really wish there was more cultural acceptance of, "Joey filled in Susan on the events of <link to log>last night," instead of having to do direct dialogue.

Or, honestly, on all MU*s, a little more acceptance of, "Joey spends some time explaining the benefits of this arrangement," <roll for relevant skill>, rather than poor Joey having to come up with specific points of an arrangement that relies on bits of the setting that haven't been explained or operationalized, but PROBABLY exist, but don't really matter in the details. Not every conversation needs to be verbatim! Joey can condense it into 'makes an argument' and roll for how GOOD an argument it is, and Susan can condense into "responds with her own concerns about her personal priorities", and roll for her counter, and then they can decide on the end result and flesh THAT out.

@bear_necessities said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

@arkandel said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

The problem with that is exactly what you'd expect. It's not coming up with the concept that's the blocker. Most people can cook up a "my dog was kidnapped by a goblin, get her back!" questline, WoW-style.
It's running it. That takes more time, effort, following up.

I think that about sums it up. Having the tools available (bingo cards, random plot generators, actual dungeons they can crawl) is great and I think it can be helpful but I don't think it makes an actual noticeable difference to the players who are willing to run scenes on their own. I would actually say that the people who would use those tools are already the people who would run small one-off scenes without them.

Yeah. I think this is where support comes in. @Devrex 's suggestion about having staff partnering with potential runners, working through mechanics with them, or being on hand to provide pinch hitting support (whether it's running a specific NPC, or what.)

Which is also an idea. When I played on a private pick up sort of MU*, one of the things that we did was have other players play specific NPCs for scenes. So there might only be one PC doing something important for their personal growth, but other players got to play from a stable of NPCs to be involved in that scene.

It's a 'small game' adaptation, for sure, and helpful in that it was a private MU* and so we didn't have to worry about Weird Player X having a meltdown and trying to burn the whole thing down with an NPC.

I think there are two issues here that are separate (but often overlapping).

One is a player who doesn't understand or agree with the theme as related by the staff. This is an OOC issue, and should be addressed OOC - first, through having a strong STATEMENT of theme. And no, "this is a Vampire game" isn't a strong statement of theme, especially if we're talking Chronicles of Darkness. The nWoD books, in general, are written broadly enough to support a wide variety of themes and settings for any particular game. For example, the first Vampire book I ever read was Smoke and Mirrors. The theme and setting described in that book is nothing like any sphere of Vamp I've ever seen on a MU*, even the ones ostensibly using Smoke and Mirrors. Nothing I read ruled it out, either, of course, but it was pretty clear if you wanted to play a bunch of vampires who said fuck covenants and Princes, didn't mind teaming up with the local Mages and even informed humans against a horrible extra-worldly threat, and were just trying to get through the century without being complete monsters, that was totally a game that was supported by what was written in the book. So - if you want people to play the game you want to run, make sure it's explicit what that IS. Second, if someone seems to be willfully ignoring that, talk with them OOC, make it clear that's not the game you're running, and if that doesn't suit them, they can find another game that will hopefully meet their needs better.

However, there's another problem that's brought into that, and that's - doing things IC which are not perfectly optimal for the IC environment. This may have absolutely nothing to do with the OOC understanding of theme - that guy who cannot have sex with someone without telling them his Super Sekret Supernatural Identity probably perfectly well understands that this is a dangerous and inadvisable IC action. /That's why it's fun./ Or meaningful for the character. "Here is information that could get me killed if it falls into the wrong hands. I will entrust it to you because that's how much I love you," is an /ancient/ trope of dramatic fiction. Likewise, "Person is entrusted with an important task/important information and fucks it up in a moment of weakness," and "character on the outside of his/her society is looked down upon and harassed until he or she proves their unique value and talents during a moment of crisis," and just about everything else.

One of the problems I tend to see isn't necessarily the 'theme-breakers', but that other players get so damned overwrought and histrionic about (what they perceive as) theme-breaking actions. Where 'theme-breaking' often is just as likely to mean 'is something I find annoying'. And I have sympathy with that, because oh god, do I find some common character concepts and actions to be really annoying. But having people OOCly treat the IC tenets of a group as Holy Writ that is always taken with utmost seriousness and punished extensively whenever they are broken is, to me, just as annoying. Especially in the WoD, where the inevitable march of hypocrisy and the slow death of ideals in favor of survival is, arguably, part of the central theme of the setting.

Not to mention the fact that the Chronicles of Darkness, at least, are pretty clear that the IC rules are MADE to be broken. They're designed so that there's lots of incentives to break them, and that Things Will Happen when they do. Because Things Happening is where the game happens.

Which isn't to say there isn't a line. There's always a line, and usually that line is the point at which other players are being intentionally or repeatedly antagonized by someone's rulebreaking IC AND their failure OOC to treat other players and other players' fun with respect. It's the line between the party rogue who is caught stealing from the PCs one time and this creates fun IC drama from which the rogue learns that his friends' patience extends only so far (or the rogue who is played by someone who has approached other players and together created an IC rivalry that expresses itself in petty thievery and bellowing revenge)...and the party rogue who pickpockets other PCs constantly and says, "I'm just playing my character!" whenever people OOC tell him to cut it out, it's not fun anymore. But that moves back towards an OOC problem that needs to be dealt with on an OOC level.

@Miss-Demeanor said:

"Theme normalization" makes it sound like its supposed to happen, or is a good thing. I think its more of a hijacking or kidnapping than anything. Its a conscious effort put forth, generally by a group of compatriots with a like-minded goal, who will not hesitate to make life miserable for everyone if they don't get their way.

From another angle, is it a good game if it's demanding an experience that players don't actually want? In my experience, it ISN'T a single group of unified people who are actively running off all the silent masses who want to play the game The Way It Should Be Played. Rather, it's the simple fact that people aren't as devoted to playing within a given theme as they might say they are. A lot of people say "Oh god, Winnie the Pooh bars in the Hedge - it's the WORLD OF DARKNESS"...while, at the same time, they're totally running their Victorian tea houses, or playing Biker King of the Wastes.

When it comes down to it, quite a lot of people want to play something that's fun, has an element of wish fulfillment (wish fulfillment about being an over-sexed, druggie biker who turns into a ragewolf without having to worry about cops or consequences is as much wish fulfillment as the pretty sparkle princess with her true love) or power fantasy, and is easy enough to get into that you can go from contemplating to playing within a day or two.

While I would like to see more games with a stronger theme, I don't think that the theme drifters are actively setting out to "ruin" a game, and I don't think they're a unified crew of saboteurs - they're just players. Playing what they consider to be fun. I feel like, if you want a stronger adherence to theme among the playerbase, you have to show the players WHY and HOW playing to the theme you're hoping for is going to be fun for them.

@Coin Woot! Should we ever be on the same game, we'll have to give it a try.

Also, regarding IC incompetence...there's a line, too. A character that does a stupid thing is great. A character that continually does nothing but stupid things (especially if they do so in a way that wrenches the scene's focus from whatever it was to mememememe) is less great. Likewise, a character that violates the assumed competence of a particular setting or game (in either direction! Unflappable Marines with perfect combat skills are disruptive in a scene about the Scooby Gang investigating a haunted house. But, likewise, Shaggy isn't appropriate for a Delta Green plot.)

I think, in general, a lot of people just have trouble with figuring out where the lines are for various things.

@Arkandel said:

@SG At a certain level we need to establish what 'conflict' means in the context of the game you're playing.

If all it means is "the characters hate and will attach each other on sight" then yes, obviously that's counter-productive to playing in the long term since the opportunities to actually roleplay are slim.

If they are political rivals but have a healthy respect for each other - for example - or fight their wars mostly through proxies (think Moriarty versus Holmes) it's a different story.

The issue tends to come in when, as some people have been fairly open about believing on WORA in the past, that if your character feels that someone might potentially be a threat to them, then OF COURSE you're going to use every IC means in your disposal to remove them from the equation entirely, because leaving them alive to oppose you further would be stupid. It's not OOCly malicious, but it does make it much harder to have a hate-ship or rivals relationship, because MU* conflict tends to escalate crazy-fast into "unfun".

I like IC conflict, but I don't like the rate of escalation and OOC drama that tends to happen, so I've become really wary of initiating any significant conflict.

@Arkandel That would be an awesome relationship. Especially for vampires, who literally CAN nurse grudges into eternity.

I always wanted a Professor X/Magneto relationship - where two people who were very close personally had been split by ideology, and were each passionately committed to destroying the works of the other...all the time hoping that "winning" would make the other person realize that they were Right All Along and they could be besties again.

@Coin said:

@Pyrephox said:

@Coin said:

@Pyrephox said:

@Coin said:

@Pyrephox said:

@Coin said:

@Pyrephox said:

@Coin said:

@Pyrephox said:

@Coin said:

@Pyrephox said:

@Arkandel That would be an awesome relationship. Especially for vampires, who literally CAN nurse grudges into eternity.

I always wanted a Professor X/Magneto relationship - where two people who were very close personally had been split by ideology, and were each passionately committed to destroying the works of the other...all the time hoping that "winning" would make the other person realize that they were Right All Along and they could be besties again.

Dibs on the Ordo Dracul vs. your ... honestly, the Order can be an ideological enemy to just about any other Covenant. >.>

But they're all vampires. And vampires are terrible.

So picky.

I'm a picky bitch, it's true! I just never got into the appeal of playing Vampire. At least, as it seems to be played on MU*s. I can see the appeal of the scrappy, newly-dead trying to maintain sanity in the face of an eternity spent playing meaningless political games with corpses that literally have nothing better to do with their lives.

I have never been able to understand the appeal of playing the corpses that literally have nothing better to do with their lives than meaningless political games, and...that's the game.

All right. Mage then? [ducks]

Only if I get to throw some goddamned fireballs.

Changeling, then. I woudln't want Paradox to outshine me as your nemesis.

Hell yeah. Changeling crazy is the best crazy, and I get to throw goddamned fireballs.

You probably would have liked my first changeling on The Reach.

Probably! I stayed faaaaar away from that sphere during my brief time on the Reach, though. Seemed like too many people were going into it with the intent to reenact OOC grudges from previous games.

Yeah. That was a thing. I was ... sort of removed from it, but in the middle. Because reasons. >.>

There are always reasons. REASONS.

Ahem. Back to the more general topic. Another type of scene I'd love to see more often is referred to, in TV Tropes parlance, as the "wham episode". Something that significantly shakes up the status quo or the assumptions, and then everyone has to move forward from there. I love plot twists. I want more plot twists, and Grand Reveals.

Oneriophages eating people's hopes and dreams, piece by piece.

Supernatural parasites that feed off of rage. They lay eggs in someone, and then the larvae hatch, crawl their way under the skin to the base of the victim's brain, and start stimulating his or her angers. Once sated with rage, they burst out of the body in a swarm, scatter, and infest new hosts.

An unearthed book that contains traces of a language no one's ever seen before. A living language, that worms its way into the reader's mind, creating obsession and madness as it tries to reclaim its previous vocabulary and infect others.

Munchhausen's by Proxy by means of psychokinesis. (I actually have a whole plot worked up for this one that I've never gotten to run.)

The Midnight Song. Heard by some people at midnight on a station that's normally dead air. The listener commits suicide or homicide soon after, but doesn't understand why, only that they must.

I believe I first ran into on AOL. The terrible, terrible chat room RP. And then I found a MUD. One of those that was aggressively PvP - it wasn't a matter of if you'd die, just how long you managed to survive this time. Then there were message boards in college, but I just don't like freeform gaming. I didn't hit MUSHes until I picked up In Nomine at a gaming con, and really, REALLY wanted somewhere to play it. There was an In Nomine MUSH, and I found that I very much enjoyed the 'drop in anytime, get RP' aspect and the ability to play both character-development/social scenes AND plotty/action scenes.

@Lithium It's not empowering anything. It's a sexual fantasy. It's not realistic, it's not meant to be realistic, and it wouldn't be fun if it were realistic. It doesn't hit your buttons? That's fine. It doesn't hit my buttons either, although mostly because it's not terribly well-written and I don't find the characters all that interesting. But recognize that the millions and millions of readers are not willpowerless dupes who will, zombie-like, parrot anything that they read in fiction. Turns out, I can play D&D without having an overwhelming urge to break into people's houses, kill them, and take their stuff. Shocking, I know. But neither Harlequins nor Fifty Shades of Grey are corrupting the women of the world. Neither is all the naughty fanfiction out there, much of which makes Fifty Shades look downright utopian. People like porn. People like dirty, boundary-crossing porn not DESPITE its boundary-crossing, but BECAUSE of it. Because it's something they can't do, wouldn't do in real life, and that makes it forbidden and tantalizing. It's a basic and very, very common psychological impulse, and all the handwringing in the world won't change that.

I find that most of that handwringing is a lot more about infantilizing women and scoring easy shots off of fairly silly stories that no one really wants to defend than it is about making a change in the world, anyway. Come back when you've gone to Super Bowl parties this weekend to tell the fans how football depicts and endorses unhealthy violent attitudes and encourages vulnerable young men into dangerous actions and predatory relationships with older men who largely plan to use them for profit then throw them away when they become too injured.

To answer your last question - neither. They're both good stories, if you're into that sort of thing. Whichever one you're into more will probably be the one you like best. And that's okay.

@Groth Same here. I'd much rather see us focus on encouraging players to treat each other with respect, rather than spend time judging the kinds of scenes they like to play, so long as they play them with people who have informed consent and are also enjoying them.

@Arkandel said:

@Pyrephox I think a good way to look at rolls as a Storyteller is to consider them hooks tying the players to your story.

Everyone wants to be useful in a plot; to come in and have an impact. Some players are proactive enough to do so no matter their stats but not everyone is, so giving them an entry point into the story ("roll wits+composure please") so you can hand-feed them some information perhaps unique to them achieves at least that much - they are now relevant.

Rolls are also an opportunity to highlight character aspects which are not often useful to them. A combat PC is never going to be out of fashion but how often does a locksmith, med student or car mechanic get to do their thing? Perhaps less often, so give them that nice fat exceptional success to go with the rest of the scene. I've specifically add elements to the story before to let the spotlight be shared.

Especially in systems like GMC where failure is actually rewarded it's even neater.

Yes, absolutely. Of course, the flipside of that is the frustration that can come of just having a run of bad luck, and your character not being able to do things that they really /should/ be competent at because the dice just hate you one night. A certain amount of failure can be fun (especially with a GM that lets failure add complications, rather than just shut down an action), but if it starts to feel like you can never succeed at a roll just because your dice have forgotten that high numbers exist, that stops being fun.

It's a balance.

@Coin said:

@Pyrephox said:

@Coin said:

@Tez said:

if players do something and you think it's stupid, think about how to make it awesome),

This can backfire if the same person always does really stupid shit and you always swing it around to being awesome, because other players will resent actually making good decisions when the ST is willing to make stupid shit awesome.

As an ST, I'd much rather have someone who's willing to do SOMETHING, even if it's non-optimal, than the players who are so busy trying to find the best action that they paralyze themselves, and then complain when other players go ahead and move forward with the plot. Incentivize action!

Sure, but there are people in between the two extremes of STUPID ACTION and SMART INACTION.

Yes. But I admit that I see way more of the latter than the former in modern MU*s - and a lot of STs who shut down player actions when they step slightly out of what the ST thinks is a "good" action. I would rather see players empowered more to do those fun, cinematic actions, even if some of them might be slightly crazy.

Also, if a player is having their character take actions that are deliberately disruptive on an OOC level to the point that it's preventing other players from having fun (or, as is most likely, they're just playing with a different and incompatible tone than other players), then that's an OOC issue, and there's no storytelling skill that's going to solve that...except for the storytelling skill of sitting down with your players and talking, OOC, about assumptions, enjoyment, and how to find a compromise. It's not really a plot-running issue, it's an OOC communication issue.

I would love a urban fantasy game that moved away a bit from the baggage of the WoD. I'd really like something that took the fun stuff from Anita Blake (namely, no masquerade, and supernaturals having to try and integrate with the "real world" with all the messiness that entails), without getting bogged down in the soft porn. I mean, we're MU* players, we can (and will) bring our own porn.

I've always liked, and wanted to see coded, a variation on the Chaosium CoC system. When you successfully use a skill during play, it gets flagged. And at the end of the session or adventure, you roll your flagged skills, and if you /fail/ that roll, you gain a couple of points in that skill. It creates a curve where skills you're good at are easy to flag, but progressively difficult to improve (because the better you are, the harder it is to fail). In a MU* setting, I suspect it'd be something like 'successfully checked skills get flagged (automatically or manually), and at the end of the week, you may choose to execute a command like +improve, that automatically rolls every flagged skill, tells you which ones improved, and by how much. Now, this works better with percentile systems - I note that the new version of UA seems to be leaning towards this, as well.

I hate automatic XP, though. I like XP from dramatic failure, aspirations, breaking points, and negative Conditions - those are fun, and incentivize play in interesting ways. I like vote for selfish reasons - mostly that I like to vote for people, but I do /not/ want votes that they automatically know they receive, because that leads to that bullshit of <OOC> Player says, "Voting for you all, now." and then obviously waiting to receive notices of return +votes. I also liked Darkwater's little message where you could show your appreciation with puppies and all sorts of silly things - no XP, but it still incentivized showing people hey, you were awesome.

@The_Supremes said in Finding roleplay:

@Pyrephox said in Finding roleplay:

@The_Supremes That makes you Good People in my book! I always love more character-focused plots...not in the sense of internal navalgazing, but in the sense of actually furthering character goals, or giving them exciting things to do that are tailored to them.

The real challenge I have is in getting people to create jobs for that sort of thing. Impromptu stuff is harder for me than things I can think about and Plan(tm). A lot of people seem allergic to giving me "this is what my character is up to" jobs that I can be like... "Oh really... well then... -PLOT-"

Oh, well, yeah. +Jobs are where fun goes to die, lost in a hell of nitpicking, boring rolls, and being forgotten.

@ThatGuyThere I think of them more like committees. They can serve a purpose, but generally are used to evade having to make decisions, or get so diverted into pointless minutia that they suck all the life and inertia out of the initial proposal. Typically, putting anything into a +job means that it'll be forgotten for weeks, then someone will get around to asking you to make a series of rolls, there will be more weeks of waiting (by which time whatever it is has probably been done/discovered by someone else), and then you'll get a reply of, "Sorry, you don't find anything" or "Hey, it looks like this was already wrapped up in X Event, so I'm going to close this," or "You rolled really well, but you're asking the wrong question/using the wrong method, so I'm just going to close this out because I don't have anything to give you," or, "Hey, this is a cool idea, but you can't do it because it conflicts with something else that's going on - I'm not going to tell you what that is, or how you could get involved, or why in a city of tens/hundreds of thousands of people two similar events couldn't be happening, but just ask people IC and try to figure it out."