Posts made by Pyrephox

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

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

Also at least in Requiem 2E you can attempt to resist the blood bond. But you will probably fail and/or end up a vitae addict.

That's fine, but in Requiem 2E the blood bond is also represented as a substantial penalty to resist your domitor's whims, and not a fiat to do as he/she says.

Keeping in mind that the penalties to resist are more dice than the average mortal even has to roll, of course.

@killer-klown Yeah, but at that point they're probably using the many, many supernatural powers that exist solely for the purpose of dicking with characters' thoughts and emotions. Of which there are MANY.

I mean, I do wonder why we never have this discussion about vampire blood bonds, where three drops of blood snuck into a character's food over a couple of weeks can make them obsessively devoted to their assailant without any chance to IC resist or even recognize that the feelings aren't their own for the most part. Or hell, Spring Court Changelings in the first edition of Lost could directly fuck around with your desires, including making a character desire something /for the rest of their life/ with a single roll.

@killer-klown I found it often did, honestly. Most of your sex-creepers aren't looking for /work/, or for people who actually know the social rules - usually just saying, "Sure, if you want to seduce my character, it looks like the rules on pg. XX of the core rulebook would apply," would be enough to scare them away. And if it didn't, pretty much no one ever persisted after I said, "Oh, and it'll be fade to black."

That would be fine, so long as their effects on NPCs/the world were explicit and substantial enough to warrant social skills costing the same amount as combat/magic skills which CAN be used to affect PCs, OR if combat/magic skills also could not be used to affect PCs except through the same indirect means (like, you could beat up someone's NPC ghouls, but not their PC ghouls), OR if social skills cost proportionately less to buy than combat/magic skills to reflect their restricted utility in the game.

@ganymede My style when I'm running a combat scene is:

Brief OOC declaration - "I am using my X power to do Y on Z enemy."
Roll
Brief OOC declaration of results - "That's a miss/hit/oh wow you mauled them."
Player directed to pose results as next player OOCly declares action.
And so forth.

If you go silent on me on the declaration stage, I will ask three times, and then usually I will skip you for that round.

@roz It was beautiful but flawed. I really wish they had continued to refine the friendship and rivalry system, though. It was one of the things which should not have been dropped.

@cobaltasaurus ...and now I'm scared. Good job!

I do have an actual question, though: Do you plan to support 'foreign' PCs as concepts, or keep PCs to native concepts? My personal preference would be for the latter, since I think it's much harder to keep people to theme when you have half a dozen foreigners running around who don't have a very good connection to their 'home' culture, but I can definitely see an argument (especially for intrigue) in having at least ambassadors/etc. represented by PCs who can be around and active more often than an NPC would manage.

Oh this is sounding coooool. And I love that there's the potential for diplomacy and intrigue with other nations that aren't (from this) either Good or Evil.

It won't be unique if a few more really good games are out there! And I think that would be a good thing - each game will be shaped by its staff and playerbase to be something different, and provide a different experience. It'd probably be best for both Arx AND other games in the same niche if people had different places to go, so that they didn't try to shoehorn every possible experience/playtime into one game.

@arkandel Indeed. I am still intrigued by the possibilities of playing BATTLE CHEF. Or throwing elemental magic around, too. That would work. (but...battle chef...)

@saosmash Don't you know that there are a finite number of games in the world, so no one's allowed to create too many? And, obviously, it doesn't matter how many people have fun playing a particular game - if that game doesn't last for five years, then it must be a failure.

More seriously - @Cobaltasaurus does good design work, comes up with interesting settings and is willing to take risks on games that aren't a sure bet to get fifty log-ins a night. Sometimes that means that they don't catch on (and I hate every single one of you for not playing on the angel game, because I fucking loved that game), but MOST games don't catch on, or they have a brief honeymoon period and fall off into obscurity. That's just how the hobby goes. I, for one, am damned happy that she's willing to take chances on things people didn't think would succeed - single sphere Changeling games, FAE games, Witchcraft games, etc. because I think that each of those games contributed something to the hobby, both in way of fun for people playing, and in the way of code, ideas, inspirations.

There's nothing wrong with any of that.

Yeah. I don't think I got to have many scenes with her, but she seemed like a lot of fun.

@demiurge Particularly where sexual harassment is concerned, forcing sexual interactions on a character is often done for the purposes of getting off to the idea of forcing those sexual interactions on the, usually presumed female, player. I guarantee that if you do have someone posting about how they want to commit sexual assault on Character X, they're not doing it because they're a deep and thoughtful roleplayer who wants to explore how their character's subconscious reality includes a highly sexualized id that has been shaped by the violence of their childhood.

There is a reason that games like Shangrila have MORE restrictions and abilities to nope out any content, in some ways, than other games - because they know that people are going to be playing with some damned disturbing content, and thus that players need more control over their interactions with the inevitable creeps who want to force people (usually women) to put up with their creepy bullshit because "it's IC". Not that places like Shang do a great job, mind you, and have plenty of creeps nonetheless, but this sounds like a 4-chan disaster in the making.

Which is a shame, because the idea of the game itself is really cool, and I had been thinking about making a character there. I hope it works out.

@demiurge So, your proposed solution to if someone is using your system to harass another player is for the harassed player to simply remove themselves from a part of the game? The part, it sounds like that is the closest to a general social hub the game has, which will likely also have knock-on effects to their access to other parts of the game, and which by its anonymous nature means that they'll have no idea which of the character who want to join their dreamscape are being played by their harasser?

That may be a policy you want to rethink.

@demiurge Um...it's not "disturbing content" that I think is going to be the problem, but possibly people using the anonymous nature of it to actively harass others. Like, if someone starts posting to the collective unconscious a lot of sexually explicit fantasies about what they want to do to Character X, knowing that the player of Character X can't identify who's talking about the gross stuff, or encouraging more people to start talking about sexually explicit fantasies about that character. And for 'sexually explicit', you can also sub in violent fantasies, or whatever - having a free for all to be able to talk about how you fantasize about skinning Character Y alive, or whatever, knowing that the player of Character Y can't do anything about it...that's a bit offputting.

I would hope that would never actually happen, but I think you have to have a policy in place for when it does. Likewise, for being able to bar someone from a dreamscape if they are just...utterly gross towards the character who 'owns' the dreamscape to the point that it makes the game unfun for the player.

@arkandel I think they've talked about something like that before earlier in the thread, with monsters apparently finding Seeded /extra tasty/, and therefore tending to be attracted to and desperate to munch on Seeded out in the wilderness, etc.

@cobaltasaurus Ooh, very cool!

• What are the major guiding values of the culture(s) that are playable? Like, is the concept of good stewardship /super/ important, since so much of the culture revolves around the idea of this sacred agricultural product?
• What playstyles are supported (i.e., political, chef-crafting, intrigue, adventure, direct CvC (personal and direct organizational conflict), indirect CvC (by means of competing for limited resources or boons))?
• What characters does the game explicitly not support? (Not just things like rape, but also, like, I think you've mentioned Gardeners aren't PC-playable, so things like that.)
• In broad strokes, how do people of this land Not Think Like modern American folk? Not in every little detail, but just if there are any major ways in which they significantly diverge, such as an expectation that an adult isn't an adult until they've done some specific ritual, or that there's a certain class of people who are untouchable, etc. (And what consequences can characters expect if their players decide that they will stand in opposition to these cultural mores - is it more of a 'the NPCs roll their eyes and gossip' or something stronger?)
• What are the absolute coolest things about this setting/theme in staff's eyes, and how do they see PCs interacting with those things from the start?
• Finally, what does staff think are some of the character types who are going to be able to jump in and get involved the /easiest/, especially if you're a brand new player and just starting to read up on theme?

The pledge mechanics have been entirely rehauled. They're significantly less powerful, but also a lot simpler - making an oath or a bargain no longer involves breaking out a mini spreadsheet and balancing the equation on the fly. Also an interesting thing - there's no mechanism that I saw (in my brief readthrough) for 'enchanting' a mortal to see the fae world, but in order to make a bargain with a human, you have to shed your Mask and show them your true form. Which is a risky thing to do - but at the same time, bargains with mortals hide you from the huntsmen and the fae. So, it's very likely that every Changeling will have at least one mortal who knows their 'non-human' state, although you don't have to tell the human what you ACTUALLY are, and certain Contracts can change aspects of your mien so you could still be deceptive if you like. But it's a great hook to bring mortals into the game, along with touchstones.

After reading it, I think the new Lost is one game line that would actually really benefit from having a small town setting in a MU*, and putting some restrictions around it that, yes, every PC was taken from this town and returned to this town from the Hedge. Your fetches are all around you, your family is here, fragments and shreds of your life are here but maybe you can't reconnect with them, so you're always living on the edge, looking in at the familiar edges of your past, trying to figure out who you could trust to anchor you, and who you love /too/ much to bring them in. Strong collection of ongoing mortal NPCs to hang bargains/touchstones off of, where the Lost are reluctant caretakers and protectors of family and friends who no longer recognize them, and you can get a lot of mileage out of small town ghosts (real and metaphorical) and /history/.

I have lost 33 pounds!

In less 'I love' news, none of my clothes fit any more, but I'm not sure when the weight loss is going to even out, so I'm just trying to make do with belts. But I continuously feel like I'm playing dress up in an adult's clothes.

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.