@Darinelle said in Arx Alts:
@Darinelle @mail clears out when PCs hit the roster. (Messenger doesn't.)
THEN WHY DID I GET ORAZIO WITH 300 FUCKING @MAILS?! <SOBS>
Because being Orazio is suffering.
And I never delete mails because then I will FORGET things.
EDIT: Also, I used to be Orazio, and now I am Perronne (merchant extraordinaire!). After a long, long spate of idling, I'm trying to get back into the swing of being the world's happiest merchant explorer.
Soup. Not good, homemade soup. Canned cream of chicken, the stuff that is that weird yellow glob until it's diluted with water.
Whatever the game is built to accommodate, and staff is capable of handling.
The biggest issue some games run into, IMO, isn't that characters are 'too powerful', but rather that a game is not designed to handle characters of that power level. By and large, most games are made to accommodate low to mid-power characters - by which, I mean characters who may have significant power, but based on the personal or immediate environmental level. A game can handle a mage who can throw fireballs, a werewolf who can tear one monster apart, or a businessman or gang leader who can control a building or small territory just fine.
Most games are not able to handle a mage who can blanket a city in ice, a werewolf pack with a spirit who can tear apart whole swaths of monsters, or even a mayor or lord who can command police forces, armies, and make changes that fundamentally shift economies and social structures.
High power characters need //different// challenges, not just challenges with higher numbers behind them. It's a struggle to accommodate them in the typical 'find thing, beat up thing' plot without making it either trivial for them or impossible for anyone who isn't them. I think a game has to be built to give them an arena that really showcases the privileges and perils of power...and most games aren't. Hell, most GMs aren't experienced in or interested in GMing plots at the upper end of power. That's true in tabletop, too - if you think about it, most tabletop games never get out of that 'heroic' phase, and the acquisition of real power is the end of a campaign.
So, I don't think there's an ideal power range for a game, but I do think a game needs to define the power range it's interested in, and then design itself around that, including not allowing apps below that range, and requiring retirements for characters who exceed it.
I am perfectly happy without an OOC room, and prefer games without them. They don't hurt me to exist, but I'd rather they didn't.
A one shot running about four hours is normal where I play. And they're great fun.
Smaller scenes are, I think, very important when it comes to really engaging everyone. Even the best GM and players can struggle with giving everyone something meaningful when there are 10 PCs, and several of them overlap specialties.
When I have access to people's sheets, I usually try to take a look before I run a scene for them and see if there's anything that they seem to enjoy. Especially if they haven't had a chance to use it in a while that I can remember. If I can't access sheets, then I usually at least go to wiki pages and try to pick out from their wiki pages something that might play to a character's strengths and engage their player for each character. Then I try to build that in, and if possible, try to tie the opportunity directly into a character's background rather than just skills. So when it comes up, it's less, "Roll X" and more, "You're the only cop in the scene, so you know this guy - he's so-and-so and here's how he's been involved in law enforcement in the past."
I am about to finally get to play 13th Age rather than run it and I'm so happy. The gm plans to take us all the way through the Eyes of the Stone Thief, too.
@bored I don't particularly care about fair, to be honest - I was simply responding to the idea that a Great House that has a duchy break away doesn't lose anything. It does, even if it's 'only' tens of thousands of silver in taxes. Which, while it may not be an OOC concern, should definitely be an IC concern. Playing a game with an ostensibly feudal theme should come, I'd hope, with an understanding that nothing about it is ICly 'fair', and it really shouldn't be.
If you're playing a political game, that is. If you're playing a game where every house is entitled to eternal expansion and inflation and the idea is just how you gather the resources to do that, then no, it's not a particular concern. That's not a theme that particularly interests me, and never did.
The reason I originally logged into the game was this, from the front page: "The common people of Arvum wouldn't really call the last thousand years a 'golden age'. Since the founding of the Compact of Arvum, the five great noble houses of the realm have schemed and warred against one another, locked in a millennium-old struggle for dominance kept only in check by the occasional powerful monarch. But even as the fragile peace frays with the latest dynastic crisis, creating courtly intrigues in the capital city of Arx, ancient foes that took mankind to the brink of extinction a thousand years ago stir once more."
It's not something which, to me, really jives well with "and you get an elevation, and you get an elevation, and YOU get an elevation". But that's fine - I rarely even log into the game anymore, and it increasingly doesn't do things that I'm interested in, but which many many people manifestly are.
@Sunny said in Arx's Elevation Situation:
Where are the liege houses losing? Can they not also take steps to.grow their own domains? Can they not regain the income? They aren't being punished. Nobody is taking something away that they earned and worked hard for. Somebody else earned enough pretend money to go off on their own. Earn your own pretend money.
The fact that you say 'regain' their income suggests that you do realize that a Great House that loses a duchy does, in fact, lose a significant portion of its income. Great Houses, in some ways, get hit harder by this than many others, because they have a severely limited number of duchies to work with, and only receive taxes from the duchies and any direct vassals they might have lower on the chain (like De Lire).
One could just as easily say why is pretend land and an imaginary title in a make-believe world so important to anyone? Why don't they just spend their imaginary money on building lots of imaginary statues and houses and not growing their pretend House? It's all equally nonproductive.
Although I will say this: if you really want to slow down or reverse the pace of House growth and wealth growth - things are going to have to be destroyed. Not just armies that can be rehired, but real damage to the Houses and their lands. Fields are going to have to burn, cities are going to have to be sacked, things that people have invested hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of silver, into are going to have to be destroyed.
So that they can be rebuilt, or new things can be built in their places. You can have a cycle of growth and destruction, an artificially-enforced status quo, or you have endless expansion, and at some point, people are going to have to decide which one they'd rather have and realize that if they choose the first, it won't just hit That House Over There, but their own stuff is also gonna get wrecked, and try not to fuss too much about it.
Honestly, it's sort of one of those things I could see putting to an OOC vote with the players just to get it out in the open. Is it going to be a game where you can invest millions of silver and LOSE IT ALL and Houses will rise AND fall over time, is it going to be a game where Houses may get wealthier and won't suffer major setbacks but will never rise above their stations because we say so, or is it going to be a game where everyone just grows steadily (whether it's fast or slow) more badass and powerful over time?
All three of those are good games, depending on what you're looking for. But it would probably be a good idea to pick one and go forward, letting players have the opportunity to decide if it's for them or not.
@Auspice said in Arx's Elevation Situation:
@Pyrephox said in Arx's Elevation Situation:
large scale famines or plagues or natural disasters would work just as well, but wars are the least unpleasant of the big events because they allow players to have input and steer how the conflict comes out in the end.
and people traditionally hate famine/plague type plots.
Which makes sense - there's really not anything you can DO, as most character types, for them. You just suffer through them and hope you come out with enough to go on. I sort of like them, but I like them best when you have a system in place that can note warning signs, you can decide whether to try and invest enough to head it off, etc. I like planning, and I am weird.
But wars are more dynamic, and provide more things for non-planner PCs to do.
Wars.
Multiple wars on multiple fronts which a) provide lots of opportunity for glory and excitement, and b) drain everyone's resources, destroy infrastructure, and take lots of things out of the economy.
Without strong opposing forces, the nature of any game is for the players to accumulate power. Without things that take up resources, resources will be invested in ways that maximize the acquisition of more resources.
And it doesn't really have to be wars - large scale famines or plagues or natural disasters would work just as well, but wars are the least unpleasant of the big events because they allow players to have input and steer how the conflict comes out in the end. A hurricane or a locust swarm doesn't care about your stats.
But really - people elevate because they have the resources to elevate and no fear that investing those resources in one thing will cause them not to be able to repair losses somewhere else. There must be either losses, or enforced stagnation, to counter endless growth. And no one enjoys stagnation.
@Derp And CoD doesn't gate nearly as much Cool Stuff and Neat Powers behind useless one-dot abilities, so a low XP character isn't nearly as basic as they could be in previous editions.
@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.
@Arkandel Note that CoD as written DOES diversify XP options. You get beats for a LOT of things. It's just most of them do involve playing the game. Although 'showing up' is a way to get XP as well, and most games do include some level of auto XP. Which I understand, although I do think it exacerbates the problem of people sitting in OOC rooms gathering moss and XP until they can build their character eeeeexactly how they picture it in their head.
But, honestly, I'm totally okay with accepting that people won't engage with it. I tend to view XP and other rewards as a way (intentionally or not) of incentivising what you want to see people doing in the game. If you give people rewards for not doing anything, they're going to be incentivized to not do anything. If you give them rewards for going out and taking risks and doing stuff, you're going to get more people who go out and do stuff. Heck, even if it takes a player who would not venture out of the OOC at all in a week, and encourages them to do ONE SCENE, that's still more RP for your game. And they might have fun! And next week do another scene! And another!
Reward what you want to see, and you'll get the players that fit your game. Reward what you don't want to see, and you'll end up frustrated as players do what you rewarded them for.
@Ghost said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
I want pho.
That is all.
Not enough upvotes. Pho is so good. now I want it too.
@Auspice Which is why Aspirations are great? If you only have one or two scenes a week, you can actually think, "What would be fun to do with my limited time," write up literally two sentences for two short-term Aspirations, and then go out and make it happen.
Asp 1: Meet someone new.
Asp 2: Get in a fight.
pub Hey, anyone want to meet a new character in a bar brawl? I can set us up a scene.
@Auspice said in What game system would you prefer for a big-tent nWoD project?:
I have to disagree that aspirations encourage RP. I think they actually discourage it.
It's more work, for one. You don't just organically RP and earn XP. If your scene pings an aspiration, then you need to submit code to fulfill it and submit code to claim another.
And that if is a big factor, too. If your aspirations are 'meet someone new' and 'get into a fight' and the only RP being offered is from people your PC already knows to hang out and drink coffee....... well, you're just gonna sit OOC until one of the 'net gain' options comes along, right?
I'd argue that this last idea is outright poisonous to games. The idea of "I'm just gonna wait until X comes along," rather than going out and DOING X is pretty much exactly the wrong way to go about things.
And that's not a system problem. That's a player problem. And a problem player, if only in the passive sense of you know that's the person who is also sitting in the OOC room complaining about not getting RP, but also shooting down every RP idea that isn't exactly what they were looking for.
Just. Go out. Get into some trouble. Stop worrying so goddamn much and play the game.