Best posts made by Pyrephox

@sunny I think that accuracy can vary across experiences. PCs like yours or mine are some of the most socially powerful ones in the game in a way that other characters can't easily match, in many cases. One of the most powerful Duchies in the game can have a very different experience as a social character, I think, than a random Iron Guardsman or a Baron in the hinterlands. At least in part because staff IS very good at letting us use the organizations that we're heads of, and use the non-combat resources we have to affect change.

I can totally understand that if you're playing a non-leader diplomat of some type, it might seem like no one really needs you, because Brawny McSwordlord will do just as well AND he can go on the demon-fighting plots too, without being squashed in the face.

Note: I am part of the problem in some regards - I could and probably should be using PC diplomats more. But then I don't get to roll /my/ social skills, and I enjoy that play and would like to do more of it, not less. So I keep kinda hoping that meaningful diplomatic systems go in that I can participate in, maybe once we find another nation that doesn't want to murder us.

@fortydeuce I think @revelations are meant to partially fill this idea, but I definitely think the clue system could be worked on a bit more in this direction. My concern about a 'tree' is that not all of the clues are pre-written, and it might be jarring to have trees that expand unexpectedly - especially for those players who obsess a bit about getting All The Clues.

@roz And it might mean that people would have to think carefully about appointing Voices who cover their own weaknesses. If you're a fighty lord or lady, then your voice maybe needs to be social. If you're social, you might want a fighty Voice for war-time commanding.

@kitteh I'm not sure any of it is worth anxiety. Revelations aren't particularly important, that I've seen. There might be a few that are groundshaking revelations, but if they are, I haven't seen them - /and/ it hasn't mattered for affecting the game in a positive direction.

In general, Arx is complex enough that I think it's important to recognize a) you will not know all the things, b) it's okay not to know all the things, and c) what you do is ultimately more important than knowing that 800 years ago Baron von Diorite built the Cogs of Awesomeness and then got his face eaten by a demon.

I have been happiest in playing when I have looked around for something that I and my character found genuinely interesting, and poked at it, whether other people were into it or not, and whether it tied into whoever's trying to murder us all this month, or not.

@sunnyj

@sunnyj said in The trappings of posing:

@arkandel I feel metaposing is a great way to feed others why your characters are doing what they doing, and letting your partner use that information thematically. If they realize my character is doing X because they are afraid of rejection, they can then guide the scene to approach that theme, instead of assuming my character is a dick because WoD bruh!

Also, although I like to give others metainformation on my characters, I rarely hand over the core of these issues or why they as they are on poses. That is earned through RP.

As a matter of time, if I had less time I might feel more strongly over long poses, but as is, I work while I RP, so 20~40 minutes lets me get a lot of stuff done.

I have to admit that all of this is in strict and strident opposite to my preferences, especially the metaposing. 20-40 minutes a pose just means that I won't see someone out to play, but that kind of metaposing will make me actively avoid them. If a character acts like a dick, then they get to be treated like a dick, and it doesn't matter what kind of tragic backstory or motivation gets posed in the narration my character can't read, and I am definitely not going to try and 'guide the scene' based on it.

As to the others: Basic spelling and grammar is good, but as long as I can read it and it's coherent, I don't worry too much about it. Pose length can be variable, as long as it flows with the scene - I do kinda have peeves about sticking to third person present tense, but I can over look it. Pose detail, I really only care about if the other poses are a) interacting with my character and the world in a coherent way, and b) are giving my character something to react to in turn. Tempo /is/ important. If I have to wait more than ten minutes on a pose on a regular basis, then I'll usually avoid that person in the future. It completely kills my investment in a scene. No real preferences regarding wiki codes, spacing, or pose order - I prefer a more natural flow than strict pose order, but I can usually go with whatever.

I write little mini-stories in my head about my character interacting with things that no one on-screen cares about. My character on Darkwater had this whole, elaborate relationship with his mortal boss, a nameless NPC who mattered absolutely nothing to anything and was never once on-screen, but I enjoyed scribbling out or visualizing confrontations and complications coming from it. All of my characters have similar situations in their off-screen life that help me flesh them out and enjoy dynamics that are uncommon among PCs. (Typically, as a corollary, when the offscreen headcanon interactions become more consistently enjoyable than the on-screen interactions, it's usually a sign a character is played out on a game, and I need to move on.)

@mr-johnson There's nothing wrong with playing a teenager! I've enjoyed it in many a horror game. And younger, for that matter - I adore Little Fears.

But for a persistent game, I'd rather be 19 than 16. The conflicts of balancing adulthood with still some 'dumb shit' teenaged impulsivity is more interesting to me. And universities allow for people to hang around for longer, assuming the unlikely event that a game lasts longer than a couple of years.

1. Moderately dangerous! Scenes with monster should always carry a real risk of death, especially if you try to fight without preparation, but I like when running away is an option.

2. That would be very cool!

3. Yes, both! I would prefer ongoing plots to be stuff that hits the institutional/overarching horror, so few 'big bads' but an ongoing corruption that has to be continuously fought, but never conquered, that sort of thing.

4. Yessssss.

5. Sure!

6. Yesss. That would be wonderful. I'd love to see something like that in a horror game.

@the-sands IME it is much safer and easier to completely ignore the 'fluff' around a skill level description and just focus on the mechanical meaning of a skill/stat and the difference in levels as a function of "what can I reasonably do with this level". Because the whole 'a 5 means you're one of the best in the world' is complete nonsense, and it's almost always complete nonsense in any system that tries to say so.

More, it then becomes cringey because games start freaking out about 'oh no, this person has a 5! Why is a world-class patisserie in Podunk, ME' or wherever? You need to justify this level of skill!' when the honest justification is, "A 5 is what gives me the least chance of utterly failing when I do a moderately challenging task of what is supposed to be my specialty, and even WITH a 5, I'm still more likely than not going to fail unless I am also using my Magic Pastry Power that gives me +5 to all pastries made under the light of the full moon. And let's not even talk about if the GM decides this tower of cream puffs is difficult enough to rate a penalty."

And yes, in most systems, you're explicitly not supposed to have people at professional or above levels of competence roll for basic tasks involving that skill unless there's some sort of extreme stress or consequences for failure - but GMs do it alllll the time, so players adapt to that.

Yeah. I don't /hate/ theories, but I have very little interest in writing them, and only slightly more interest in reading them. I also sort of worry about tying them to orgs, because at least in the main Faith branch (I know that some of the branch orgs are having...issues with being clue dump sites), I've tried to get people to keep it to historical 'Church facts' and lore about prayers, traditions, and customs that pretty much everyone as member of the Church should know, with very few truly 'secret' sort of clues. Although I probably should go through and see if I can prune it, because I haven't looked in a while. But those sorts of things don't really lend themselves well to theories, although I could make some generic 'practices of the Church' and 'History of the Church' ones.

@Arkandel said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.:

Do you think code could help with our social issue here?

Would voluntarily listing whether a character is single or not help dissuade this kind of behavior?

Not with the kind of subtle page creepiness that I was talking about, because my honest impression is that most people do not realize that they're doing it. You have some dedicated manipulators and harassers, but honestly, I've always picked those out real quick and cut them away. It's more of a social thing.

And, I'll agree with @surreality that relationship status wouldn't help, either, because for a lot of people, being hot/charming/awesome enough to woo someone away from their partner is part of the appeal. And, also, because the default relationship in a MU* lasts until you meet the next hot boy/girl. so "currently in a relationship" is no indicator of actual availability.

@Misadventure Honestly, I disagree with a lot of those, on a design basis. The social conflict system should not be inherently more complex than any other conflict resolution system that the game has, nor should it be accurate to human psychology - any more than the typical RPG physical combat resolution system is accurate to real world combat. Not least of which because the average RPG player has less of an understanding of the realities of human psychology than they think they do - nowhere is Dunning-Kruger in more effect than the average RPG player's assessment of how hard it should be to persuade their character to do something the player doesn't want the character to do.

I will say that the social conflict resolution system should be very clear and well-explained to players, so that they understand it, what it can do, and what it can't do, before they choose to make a character for the game. I also do like the idea that really big and lasting changes should take time, effort, and investment to accomplish. Talking your way past a guard one time might only take a couple of rolls, but creating a permanent mole in the guard should take a while, and require the character to DO THINGS to make their pitch more appealing/terrifying.

@Ganymede said in Social Conflict via Stats:

@Kanye-Qwest said in Social Conflict via Stats:

Conversely, if you spend your cg points to pump up social stats, why in the world would you not use them? If you don't use them, what is the incentive, ever, to pick up those mental/social stats?

Ending combat. It's like whipping out the Majesty card in V:TES. You can effectively end a combat scene in moments with a few easy rolls.

A good game takes this into consideration, though, and makes social/mental characters useful.

And that is where, IMO, a lot of games really fall down. Social stats/skills don't need to work on PCs, IF they work on NPCs and work in meaningful, predictable, usable ways. And in my experience, a lot of staff balk at even letting PCs use social skills/stats against NPCs in any meaningful way. You're far more likely to get a "no, you can't do that" regarding social maneuvering against NPCs than you are if you say, "I'm going to beat him up." Which renders social skills doubly useless.

Unknown Armies had a mechanic defined at chargen called Stimuli - so, every character has a Fear Stimulus, a Rage Stimulus, and a Noble Stimulus. These Stimuli can be invoked through play for various effects, to allow characters to get a significant boost when acting in accordance with their Stimuli. It might be a more workable method to adapt the Hills to Die On, which I like the IDEA, but might be a little too freeform to be workable.

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

I swear Arx has more OOC politics than IC ones.

Is there any political MU* of which that is not true? Which is not to say that it might not be a problem (OOC politics are often problems), but that's been true of every MU* I've ever been on. People take things done IC as proof of OOC dislike, or misunderstand things and don't bother to try and communicate about them, or oppose a faction or a character because they don't like the players involved. Or, worse (and what tends to make things very unfun for me) is taking a character's failure or lack of...expected rewards (be it positions, prestige, inclusions)...as a personal referendum on the player. When, at their heart, political games are built on IC exclusions, preferential treatments, and bargains that involve some compromises and losses. That's what politics is.

@gasket said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:

@Derp said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:

If you DO enshrine them into formal legalese, then please, offer some elucidation on why you think this is so important it has to apply to all people forever.

This so much. If you can't clearly answer WHY, it should never be implemented.

Thirded. I have no problem with House Rules. I do have a problem with ones that are badly thought out and implemented to fix a problem in the heat of the moment without carefully considering how it interacts with the rest of the world, system, and other situations.

I do think that any tabletop system requires house rules to run in a MU* environment, and that one of the things that causes a lot of problems is that there isn't a conversation before a game opens about 'what rules (and setting material!) are workable in a persistent, 24/7 game with 10+ PCs, and which ones need to be reworked to better facilitate the game experience in the setting and system we have chosen.

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

Well, I'm sure the AP system was designed (at least in part) to address the multitasking thing, for sure. In a strange way though it will, at least in some ways, actually impact the have-nots more; for instance if it costs me a ton of AP I am least inclined to share my @clues with newbie #2871 that I just met.

Yeah. The AP system needs some tweaking going forward, to be sure (and that part of it does disproportionately impact the newbies, unfortunately) but on the /whole/, I like it and think it has real potential to rein in some of the issues.

But the thing is, it's really hard to systematize these things because in some ways they are working as intended. You pointed out one way; someone with the relevant Teaching skill can convey massive XP discounts, but only get a limited number of training sessions to use per week, so obviously those with resources or allies can benefit more, which isn't unreasonable. People with cash and favors to call are supposed to have an advantage, right?

That is a thing to consider. There's a careful balance to be pondered between OOC equality-of-agency and IC inequality-of-theme. Someone who apps in a hardscrabble peddler of common birth /should not/ have the same access to, say, alaricite as a Great Lord on a systemic level. But, just as true, there should be things that the commoner /can/ do that the Great Lord can't, because being a Great Lord (or any noble) should come with some real consequences for acting in a manner befitting of the nobility.

Spend all your time hanging out in the Lower Burroughs and telling them to just call you Jack? /Your/ commoners should realize that they have a soft lord, and start holding back their taxes and tithes. After all, you are a Man of the People, and thus should be totally okay with them spending that money on their families instead of your silks, right? Want to put yourself on the front lines of the battle when you're not married and don't even have the hope of a legitimate heir? Your vassals should feel some kind of way about that, including seeing if there's a way to take advantage of the instability in the wake of your heroic death (which, you know, if there's a /great/ way to take advantage of it might happen sooner than you think...), which means they should start squabbling among themselves, jockeying for position to take advantage. More IC power should mean more IC consequences.

You know what the curious thing is though? I had a conversation recently with a member of my House who was complaining OOC that he has nothing to do, doesn't know what to do... he's just feeling blah. In the mean time he avoids playing about anything fun; he almost always joins RP, by his own admission, when there are people he can farm @randomscenes from, plays to improve his gear and gather resources to trade and improve his gear, etc. So essentially this guy plays the game in the least entertaining way possible then he's puzzled it's not engaging him. Which is the flipside of this whole situation, and a real head-scratcher for me.

There's a certain sort of player - and I see this a lot in video game discussions, too - who feel absolutely compelled to optimize their character and acquisition of resources whenever possible, even if doing so makes the game actively unfun for them. I don't know where it comes from, but I've seen it plenty of times.

@il-volpe said:

@Three-Eyed-Crow said:

... avoiding, whenever possible, having Plot Progress depend on one PC being around and doing stuff, and becoming so vital that them dropping off kills the whole enterprise. By the same token, you also want to avoid being so diffuse about the impact any PC has that you nerf the feeling that PCs are impacting the plot at all. Division of labor and responsibility is something I try to keep an eye on, but I've yet to find an ideal way to manage it.

And there is the terrible, terrible rub. Because this is often utterly incompatible with "the focus should always be on the PCs and what they are DOING about the plot," which is also true, and in my opinion, more important.

This is, honestly, why I feel like more MUs should focus on higher quantities of smaller, more personal plots, rather than the sprawling metaplot end-of-the-city stuff that draws in, in my experience, /far more/ PCs than are ever going to have a chance to contribute meaningfully. Which inevitably ends up with people feeling pushed out because they couldn't attend X Plot Important Event, or (sometimes accurately and sometimes not) that some people are 'hoarding' plot or favored by the GMs. And personal doesn't have to mean that it doesn't affect the grid or have wider meaning - that's really an artifact of the cultural expectation that 'personal' means 'PrP' and 'PrP' means 'meaningless sandbox plot', as well as the general lack of communication and documentation of plot results in MUs.

Even the 'big plots' should be broken down into personal-sized chunks. Want to have an army of evil bodysnatchers invading the city? Look through the playerbase, and pick out players who have had previous contact with things that /could/ be evil bodysnatchers, or who want to have a visit from an 'old friend' only to discover someone's wearing her like a suit, and they can try and exorcise it, or kill it and find secret documents, or lock it up and interrogate it or whatever. At the same time, hit a couple of the antiquities dealers/occultists/thieves with a mysterious buyer who wants an artifact that's hidden in the well-protected archives of some ancient recluse, and give the cops on grid a series of mysterious murders. Each plot self-contained, but a part of the larger whole (the cops can catch the serial killer and get closure, but he's branded with the mark of the bodysnatchers. The artifact can be retrieved/sold/destroyed, but it provides a vision or history that's relevant. The old friend can be saved, and retains vague memories of the threat.)- and no one of them 'required' to resolve the overarching issue, but every one of them providing a real adventure for the PCs involved.

Too often, we want to build Big Plots like they would be built in conventional media, which doesn't work, because you've got 25-30 players involved instead of five or six. Instead, we may want to look at a more 'distributed leadership' kind of model, where a big threat is represented by a half-dozen or more 'hub' plots, which each draw in four or five players for a more meaningful experience.

An attempt to gently steer the topic back towards the original topic:

Let's talk about STing plots that don't rely on combat or the rather straightforward 'here's a mystery, solve it' kind of construction. What would make a GOOD social plot for example? How can we make things like court meetings, and such, less of a 'everyone pose standing around while The Important People infodump or strut' kind of thing, and more like a collaborative event where every PC can move forward with one goal or another?

I love skill challenges.

Of course, I also love 4E, so take that as you like it, but skill challenges (even if the math was a bit wonky, and pre-written modules often tried to make them so restrictive as to be useless) were a wonderful system, and one I use with glee.