Posts made by Pyrephox

@faraday And, as I said, there are plenty of people out there like that. But staff shouldn't necessarily assume that every mortal bartender WANTS to be that person. Sometimes you want to play a mortal bartender because you read an urban fantasy series where a guy runs a bar for vampires and ends up becoming embroiled in vampire politics and gains a magical artifact that gives him enough oomph to turn his bar into Vampire Switzerland for political negotiations, and he'd love to at least have the opportunity to do Something Cool Like That, but because everyone treats him like he's useless food because he's not a vampire, he never gets the chance.

So, the only thing I say is - ask. Someone can always turn it down, if they're happy as they are, but it never hurts to find out if someone wants an IC direction or boost, but just isn't sure how to do it.

@roz said in Spotlight.:

@arkandel said in Spotlight.:

@sparks said in Spotlight.:

and if you do, you're going to run into "you got a chance to shine once, a year and a half ago, so you can't go on plots anymore", which is a surefire way to burn out otherwise active players (who are the ones who stir up RP when you aren't GM'ing).

That's a pretty good point and a legitimate question on its own right.

Do all players deserve the same access to the spotlight? That is, if you are putting in a lot of your time building up a successful House which your character leads, run plots for its players, recruit others to it, making yourself available as someone in a leadership position and integrating yourself thematically into current politics, then should I as a casual player who's there an hour here and there get to have equal access to metaplot?

Even more so, does it make sense for me to? Decisions are often made among high-powered or important figureheads, so do I bring my sailor guy to the inner council meetings? Should metaplot be geared so that there are no closed door meetings in the first place?

I think the best metaplot is going to be the stuff not strictly limited by class/position. That is: you may need a high-powered figurehead to access certain parts of the political end of things, sure, but there should be more variety to how to influence metaplot than just that one angle.

I think there should be generally equitable ways for people to pursue metaplot. It's cool to hear from @Sparks that they actually have a GM tool to find people who haven't gotten GM attention so they can toss them seeds/hooks. But especially if there are tools that everyone can use to interact, the people who use them the most are logically going to get the most out of them. I agree that GMs should try to make a good faith effort to reach out to PCs who don't seem to have much, but that is still just trying to give people an extra nudge to use the tools at hand.

Agreed, here.

I think my ideal distribution is the idea that position/class/sphere does not grant you equal access to every part of the metaplot, but that all positions/classes/spheres give you access to /an equally important/ part of the metaplot.

The problem isn't necessarily that a tailor can't sit in at the King's privy counsel and be taken equally seriously, but when the big noble can sit on the privy council /and/ bring in his soldiers to solve the gang trouble on the tailor's street /and/ make better clothes than the tailor /and/ gets the magic sword and stuff as well.

If you're going to have big nobles and tailors as PCs, then I think you need to design the game so that each have exclusive things that are important and meaningful. Whether that's magic clothes that the tailor alone can make or that the tailor has a meaningful impact on the crime and who runs their particular collection of streets - that's entirely up in the air. But it has to be something, I think, that the tailor can do that the noble can't, just as the noble can do things that the tailor can't.

@three-eyed-crow Honestly? Some people are just unreasonable. Luckily, they're fairly easy to identify - such as when they express distress at other people playing a game, and their opinions can (and should) be soundly ignored, and not used to calibrate any expectations.

As for starring - hmm. I would say that if you are a key player at a climax of a plot, such as using, creating, destroying a McGuffin, or leading a major magical or physical assault against a big bad, or you are the lead negotiator in a diplomatic crisis, things like that 'lead role'. If people can legitimately look around and say, "Hey, this would not have happened if not for X", then you were probably a lead.

And note that my suggestion doesn't involve 'taking away' the lead from anyone - some people are always going to be more proactive than others, and it can hurt to have a great idea for your character to do something and get told, "Hey, we'd actually like to give this to other people, so don't do that thing/don't try to get involved."

But do notice the people who don't ever seem to be the lead, and approach them, quietly, to see if there's anything they'd LIKE to do with their character that they aren't getting the chance to do. Some people, again, are perfectly happy never having the spotlight on them. Some people just don't want to talk to staff, for whatever reason. But people like to talk about their characters, and what they'd like to do with their characters, and I think reaching out about that would translate into a feeling of more joy, and might even lead to some really interesting plot ideas/directions that wouldn't happen otherwise.

Spotlight doesn't have to be a zero-sum game, even when it utilizes a limited resource (GM time).

I think everyone should be offered a chance in the spotlight, at some point. And I would certainly like to see GMs across games think a little about spotlight distribution, and develop - as possible - more of a distribution of things that target people and groups that may have missed out on the spotlight for a while. I don't think you can mandate it, because some people really don't want the spotlight, or don't want it from a GM plot, while others will always want it and will become convinced that they are being ill done by whenever it goes to anyone else.

And, of course, you can do everything you can to give a person the spotlight only to have them accidentally hand it off to someone else, or get a terrible run of luck and fall flat on their face (which, while it can be FUN, often doesn't fill that spotlight need).

But, y'know, I think it might be an interesting idea for smallish games to keep track of players and how many plots they've 'starred' in, and just make an effort to reach out to players OOC if they haven't starred in many, or any, and just see if there's something they'd LIKE to do.

I mean, for me, the best question any GM can ever ask me is, "What would you like to see happen for your character?"

@arkandel Is a mini cooler an option? I can't think of any non-cooler method of keeping food in a car during summer for more than an hour that doesn't result in horrible outcomes, but if you could get a small cooler, you could put some ice packs in there, and the lunchbox between the icepacks.

It's a balance, like all things. Part of my fun is that other people are having fun, so I want that to happen - but at the same time, especially in an RPG, I am there to play the game that was written about in the setting files, or books, etc. If someone else's fun continuously means violating that setting or game system without consequence, then my fun becomes harder.

And in any setting/system, there are places where there's wiggle room. But wiggle is not 'stomp on and dance all over'. So if someone is violating setting or theme in a small way, then I don't really care as long as they aren't rubbing it in my character's face over and over again. They can have their fun, and it doesn't bug me. But the more people violate it in big ways, or gang up to start pullllling the theme over to something else, or gang together to cross it in ways that invalidate the parts of the setting or system that actually attract me to it, usually the less fun I have, until I start looking for somewhere else.

Generally, in situations where I have a character who is 'in charge', I try not to be too anal about things, try to overlook what I can, and if I have to lay down consequences, try to find consequences that involve creating more RP for the person, not less. I don't usually do the 'let's negotiate OOC the consequence of this', and maybe I should, but I do try to keep things within theme and not excessive.

That's odd. I haven't usually had any problems with that one. Can you post a verbatim bit of code with the hook you're attaching it to?

One thing I would suggest is that a tabletop character progression expectation does not work in a persistent, indefinite environment, which means that XP or how it's used needs to be rethought. Giving out lots of XP is an easy way to attract players, but it leads to long-term difficulties with a game, because tabletop systems aren't built with the expectation that someone will simply progress forever but that the challenges and plots they encounter will not fundamentally change with them. And MU*s typically don't have the level of staffing needed to be able to provide diverse experiences to both starting players and 'dinosaurs', which tends to cause a lot of long-term difficulty.

How do you fix that? If I knew that definitively, I think I could win hearts and minds. Sadly, I don't. My gut feeling is that it lies in recognizing that MU*s provide a 'slice of life' experience, and vastly cutting down on the amount of character improvement points received, and instead get people invested in more temporary and environmental improvements like territory and status. Things which can be built to decay or be challenged more readily than inherent character power.

@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.

@tempest I'll have to agree with this. It's just a matter of knowing players, and recognizing that there's a pretty significant minority of players for whom system mastery is a part of the game that really excites them. When you obfuscate the details from these players, you don't discourage them, you instead turn their focus with laser-like intensity towards working out the numbers, and they will use every resource at their disposal in order to know them. Not because they're evil or want to break your game, or anything - just because system mastery is part of the fun for them, and puzzles are inherently attractive to people.

One thing to consider is that a lot of players, when considering what makes an 'effective' character, aren't comparing themselves to an outside metric that measures their PCs against the NPC hordes, but rather directly measure themselves against other PCs. So that 'great' rating doesn't mean much if every other PC is also 'great'. This creates a pressure to min-max the areas where the player wants their character to stand out - not against an NPC baseline, but between other PCs.

This also tends to create staff pressure to up the level of challenges facing those PCs, which also creates min-maxing pressure, because it soon becomes that 'great' just doesn't cut it in a typical staff-run challenge or against other PCs, so you have to have 'excellent' to even be considered effective, much less stand out.

I think one way to combat this might be to encourage width rather than height in character design. Have a number of alternate progression paths that help characters stand out and be somewhat unique among other PCs without creating too great of power disparities. Fighting styles theoretically are meant to do that, but WW/OP has never been good at making them balanced between styles or between style/no-style players.

I think, ultimately, any game that wants to have a decent social resolution system is going to have to define the outcomes it wants to enable, pick mechanics that create those outcomes, and then ruthlessly enforce those mechanics for a while, until people who can't abide that particular system have self-selected out, and it's become part of the game's culture. Because there will never be a consensus on what 'good' social mechanics are, because of the wide variety of assumptions and desires regarding them among the collected playerbase. This is one case where you definitely cannot make a game that makes everyone happy.

But I think the one thing you shouldn't do is what too many games actually do - include a system's full range of social maneuvering mechanical options, expect people to pay equally for them as they do combat or magical options, and then refuse to allow them to be useful in actual play. Often against PCs /or/ NPCs.

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.

@derp I have not enough upvotes to give for this.

At some point, players who want to play a game with other people have to recognize that they are playing a game, and that games have rules that abstract certain aspects of reality to make those aspects of reality /playable/. No social conflict or resolution is ever going to take in all the deep aspects of your character - it's not supposed to, it's not fair to expect it to, and /that's part of the point/. Social resolution systems are consistently held to a completely unrealistic set of high expectations, higher than any other aspect of the game.

In order to have a working system, people have to adjust their expectations and work within the stat and skill system given, whatever that might be. If they can't do that, then they need to find a different game with different rules. But refusal to spend the points the game gives to make a 'strong-willed' sort of character, and then insisting their character should be treated in all ways like they are Ironwill McUnflappable because it 'violates their agency' to do otherwise is not a reasonable objection - it's part of the problem that makes having decent social and political play nigh impossible on MU*S.

Smart people fall for stupid, obvious stories all the time. Case in point.

Many RPG players have the Dunning-Kruger effect to the max when it comes to social manipulation - they continuously and markedly exaggerate their character's ability to make good decisions under social pressure or manipulation, and by and large, make their decisions about whether their character finds something IC persuasive based on the OOC factors of absolutely knowing that something is a game, and being able to step back and consider a hundred different factors that their PCs couldn't or wouldn't. And they're not generally willing to buy social resistance skills to actually reflect a character who would be able to do that, because they don't even recognize that what they're doing is not IC.

@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.

@icanbeyourmuse Yeah. As far as personal preference, the youngest I'd really like to play for anything other than a one-shot is college age.

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.)

I love the Aspirations system. It can be tremendously helpful, for me, in thinking about where I want to take my character and communicating the kind of experiences that I want to have as a player. It does need some thoughtful tweaking for a persistent setting (my recommendation would be to allow people to make new Aspirations weekly, rather than immediately when they fulfill a previous Aspiration, or tweaking the amount of XP/beats one obtains from them during a week, perhaps on a diminishing returns scale), but it can be pretty great.

Didn't one of the Amber games have programmed objects that were essentially 'plots in a box' that people could take and run with without a dedicated GM? I never played there, but I remember hearing about it, and thinking just how fantastic that sounded. While there's a fair amount of front-loaded work, that work is something that people can do on their own time, and then players can just meet up whenever for it.