My suspicion is, then, that you're likely to end up with ten mini games, each played in private rooms with only very occasional crossover when forced by staff, or when someone wants to hook up with someone outside their pack.
Which is a perfectly viable setup, but may frustrate some players who want to be able to set a fun scene in the industrial area of town without having to jump through three days of IC hoops or get jumped.
@Ex-FaviIIa-Surgo I would argue against encroaching characters being forced into a scene for 'trespassing' for the MU* environment, unless the grid is large, and has clear demarcations between public spaces where everyone can go, and private territories where trespass will be punished.
A lot of players aren't going to want to deal with the OOC hassle of potentially being dragged into a hostile scene when all they wanted was for their character to hang out at a particular book store.for a scene, so they'll avoid traveling or playing in those grid rooms. Likewise other players often don't have a sense of proportionality when it comes to 'punishing' trespass. Together, this seems like a recipe for a balkanized grid where no one wants to leave their own territory or interact with potentially hostile folks.
@Kanye-Qwest said in The Metaplot:
@Pyrephox So what's your solution to that?
I think that depends on the genre and theme of the game, to be honest. Most XP systems are simply not meant to handle progression across years of play, especially in a persistent setting which also includes newbies. I'm not a big fan of 'catchup XP' a la The Reach that tries to address the issue by turning all PCs into XP-laden monsters. I think I would like to see some experimenting with alternate methods of progression - things to sink XP into that provide one time benefits or non '+ to success' benefits. On an OOC level, you /could/, if appropriate for the theme and setting, basically set OOC boundaries on certain plots and adventures - this is appropriate for people with less than 50 XP, or more than 500 XP,. The AP system on Arx does an interesting job of it for 'off screen' actions - everyone only gets the same AP and +storyrequests, so that helps some of it. I'd like to see more games put in a currency like that that limits the ability of any one character to dominate ALLLL the things.
@Apos said in The Metaplot:
@Ominous said in The Metaplot:
This ties into xp bloat. "Oh, there is a metaplot? Well, why should I care, since superman will save the day anyways?" If one person has all the skills and stats to solve all of the problems, it's hard to create a plot that requires group effort. It's like playing the Pandemic board game but giving one of the players three of the role cards and four extra actions. You have to ask "Why are there other players in this game at this point?"
While I understand this to an extent, it's kind of mystifying to me. To me the idea of not being able to design stories for someone is so alien I just don't understand it. Sure they might be more difficult to challenge but unless a character is literally a bag of stats with no personality, goals or interests it really ain't that hard to make a narrative they'll find interesting.
I think, in this case, it's less about "is this an interesting story" and more "what point is there for my character to be here, when Character X has 5 times my XP and thus can do everything I can do, but better, AND can do five other things that I can't even begin to do?" Which is, unfortunately, often a problem - some people share spotlight well, some people do not. And if you have a massively ICly competent character who just /cannot/ imagine not using every ability they have to its fullest extent every time, then it's pretty common to have a scene that is "The Awesome Adventures of Character X (and some other guys)."
I like metaplot. However, I also agree that a lot of metaplots I've seen on MU*s were not very good. Not, generally, because the people who developed them were evil or anything, but because they fell into a couple of very common GMing errors. I think the metaplots I've seen that were the most successful and satisfying tended to share some common traits:
They were scripted and presented as opportunities to make things BETTER, not to restore or defend a status quo. Taking something away from PCs as a precursor to a plot, in my experience, makes players stressed out, wary, and defensive from the start. They start trying to figure out what they need to do /not lose anything else/ rather than to regain what they lost. This may, or may not, be coupled with a suspicion that staff is punishing them and a lack of belief that they can meaningfully impact the plot.
Oriented towards shaping the future, not uncovering/discovering the past. Metaplots about 'uncovering the past' inevitably, in my experience, depress player interest. Because the past is always filled with larger than life characters who did AMAZING AND COOL THINGS...that current PCs are (perceived) to never, ever be able to do. Uncovering the past is reading someone else's story - what tends to get players excited is the chance to write their own story.
Have clear, varied lines of engagement /and/ significant and timely feedback on engagement. Especially at the beginning, the most successful plots I've seen have broken objectives down into small, clear goals that scream 'resolve this with combat' or 'resolve this with talky skills' with low difficulties and small but significant resolutions. People get choice paralysis and many MU* players are fairly passive, as others have noted - giving them something that is /clearly/ meant for their kind of character, isn't high risk, but does have a small but 'real' contribution to the resolution is a good way to hook them in for further involvement. You want players to become invested, and there's no better way to cultivate investment than in offering the players ownership in a fun way.
Remember that it is the PCs' story. Plots which primarily revolve around a set of NPCs tend to turn off players - they're around to tell their own story, not tag along with the NPCs. Also, highly powerful NPCs, especially if they have access to things that the PCs are forbidden to have, tend to create anger and resentment among players. The best metaplots I've seen have made every reasonable effort to reach out to players and find a way to make the plot, stakes, and events /personal/ to the PC (for good and ill, not just for ill).
And, of course, be flexible. Players aren't going to do what you expect. Don't have a metaplot which is so tightly scripted that the PCs clearly see the rails, or they're likely to either disengage, or decide to wreck the train. If something doesn't seem to be working, discard it or change it. The /only/ purpose for an RPG plot is to give the players (including the GM) enjoyment.
I want to know:
@WTFE Synnibarr doesn't count! Nor does FATAL - we have to have some standards.
Traveler is its own thing. And yeah, dying in chargen is silly - but just like the Tomb of Elemental Evil, sometimes you're in the mood for something ridiculously hardcore. I know some people who really enjoy that kind of thing.
@WTFE But here's the thing: you're not arguing that because one time the dice put an end to your story "prematurely" that rolling to determine success at a task is stupid.
There is no RPG system that doesn't have a rule 0, that I'm aware of. And rule 0 is, of course, "If the dice or the rules say something that makes no goddamned sense, or something that doesn't work for your group, then change it."
And if someone made a social action that made no goddamned sense, or would utterly ruin a reaasonable player's fun, then obviously that situation would need a GM's attention. That's just common sense. But that has no relevance to the day to day running of a system, and it's certainly not a reason to toss the whole thing down the toilet and decide you don't need rules at all.
@WTFE Yeah, I admit - I grew up playing 2nd Ed D&D. /Magic users/ in 2nd Ed D&D. So any illusion of a character as an 'investment' was beaten out of me pretty early - I once had a character die by falling down a hill. It wasn't even a big hill. Also, I have terrible dice luck, so my character failing at all things is something I'm accustomed to.
Which is not to say that I don't fudge things or handwave things, or that as I've gotten older, I haven't become more and more of a fan of failure at the dice meaning a complication is added, rather than an opportunity taken away. But I'm also aware that by choosing to play in a system that adds an element of chance, you're going to get some outlier results that completely change the game - or bring it to a premature end, some times. I like making characters and trying new things, so as long as a system is generally fair, losing characters to a crazy roll of the dice doesn't bother me TOO much, as long as the next character is fun.
My general philosophy on gaming is that I'm not investing in a character's story. I'm playing the character's story, riding it hard to wherever it goes. If that ride stops being fun, that's one thing. But if it comes to an abrupt end, that's usually a good story to tell, and hey, I had fun up until that point, so I'm good.
@faraday Nah.
Putting it as a continuum suggests that you can't have or want both. I do. I value good writing, I value good mechanics. I value good story, I value good game. It's entirely possible to do both.
Moreover, I think it's a false dichotomy and has little to do with the behavior observed. I don't want people to follow the social mechanics of a game because I value "game" over "story", I do so because value congeniality among players, even if I don't always live up to my own standards. Which means recognizing and not punishing other players for wanting to take a walk on the wild side and play something outside of their comfort zone or their personal capabilities. Sometimes, that means rolling your eyes at your computer, and then letting something go so that someone else can have as much fun being badass and awesome as you (presumably) do. Sometimes it means compromising on your Grand Writing Vision of your character and sucking up a loss or a setback that you didn't meticulously plot out in advance. Sometimes it means reaching out OOC and just saying, "Hey, I see you're trying to get my character to do X, and you rolled really well, but that strategy isn't going to work. With Empathy 5, you'd probably know that my character would be far more susceptable to bribery than bluster. Would you like to rewind and try a different pose?"
As a side note, that's why I've always appreciated games where it was accepted/allowed to note on a wiki/desc/whatever when someone had exceptionally high social skills. That way, I can give more emotional information to people with better empathy, I can pose being routinely more charmed by charming people, or edgy and wary around intimidating people. I consider doing those things to be my side of making the game a fun and enjoyable experience for everyone. If I want to just be in charge and decide all the factors of the world, then I write books.
@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:
@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:
@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:
This is a great example of 'if you don't do it the way that I do it, you've got bad motivations/are a bad player' when it's actually personal preference.
No more than people insisting that if you are bad with people IRL then by extension so must your character. If "it's just personal preference" can justify abolishing social but not mental skills, then logically, the inverse can also be true. I'm in favor of neither, mind you.
There's a huge, very significant difference, actually. I can see why you would be in favor of rollplay instead of roleplay where it comes to social skills, if you seriously equate these things out to the same sort of thing. Apples and rocks.
I feel like the "rollplay vs. roleplay" thing ought to be the RPG equivalent of Godwin's Law, complete with the "and the invoker automatically loses".
Personally, I've never once had anyone be able to coherently explain to me what is WRONG with "rollplay". I, at least, am here to play a game. It's a game where you play a role, yes, but I've always been perfectly clear that it's a game where you play the interesting parts of a character in a world that is perceived, in part, through the abstracted framework of mechanics and rules, which also includes rolling dice to add an additional element of tension and chance to the game. I can accept that for hit points, for magic powers, for montage mechanics, for PC auras and every other silly, unrealistic, and often counterintuitive part of RPGs, and I can accept it for social mechanics, as well.
Because I'm playing a game. Games are fun, and I'm definitely not ashamed of playing one.
@Arkandel Hm.
With those goals, you might want to build from the domain up - note that this means there might have to be a lot of staff involvement in building domains for OCs, if you have any. But you might need to, essentially, use modules to build equivalent domains - divide resources out into common, uncommon, rare, (and possibly magical/unique), and stock each domain with much but not all of the resources they need to meet their upkeep requirements for food, steel, etc. Now, the downside to this is that you're going to select out people who absolutely do not want kingdom-sim in their political game, and you're probably going to have to do a fair amount of playtesting to balance things, which will (or should) mean wipes and resets during beta. Which will tick people off.
What kind of game is it? Fantasy, SF, historical?
@Arkandel said in Eliminating social stats:
It really isn't an easy choice to make. In many ways it's easier to just leave Charisma in, tell your players 'hey, I got you a damn system, just use it!' and declare anyone who's not using it a borderline exploiter even though it's not very usable. That's the mentality I'm trying to avoid here, misplacing the burden of both effort and blame on players for systems which weren't ever designed to cover the use case they are expected to use them for.
We might be able to do better if we can shift the paradigm in a different direction.
It might be worth building from the ground up. Ask yourself, as the game-runner, what is it, EXACTLY do you want players to be able to do with a social system. This is gonna be different for different games, and that's okay. But once you know what problems you're trying to solve, or opportunities you're trying to create, you're on a stronger design footing. Don't ask yourself "what should a social system do", but rather "what do I want the social system on my game to allow players to do?" And think through that, fully. You may not want PC to PC manipulation to be covered at all, but rather only broad based NPC influence.
@faraday And, as I've repeatedly said, if you're playing on those games, pretty much none of this applies to you. It is an entirely different situation, and resembles breaking into a discussion of people who don't follow the rules in chess to say that people can have just as much fun playing cribbage, and in /cribbage/ there are no kings so arguments about castling never happen.
It is entirely true, mind you, but not particularly helpful.
@faraday But here's the thing - you're also not taking to account all of the factors in 'how intimidating is this person' that would be presence in real life, but are not present and CANNOT BE PRESENT in the game, because we do not pose or model the world down that fine. And that includes the meta-factors of "I know I'm playing a game, and thus can examine this situation from a more detached perspective than my character could ever match." Not to mention the natural and almost ubiquitous tendency to interpret ambiguous events as favorable to your character, AND the difficulty of separating in game and out of game knowledge - for example, when someone poses badly in grammar and spelling. You, as the player, look at that and go 'pff, that's silly, that's not scary'. But your character? Cannot see how that pose is spelled. But it's still going to affect how you play that character.
But yes, social systems - like every other system in a roleplaying game - are abstracted, because no one has time to compare biographies in every single interaction that they're going to have conflict in. Because if we didn't have abstracted systems, we would be in real life. At some point, you have to suck it up and play the actual game. Or write a book, where all the narrative control is totally in your hands.
@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Eliminating social stats:
@Pyrephox said in Eliminating social stats:
@Roz Sorry, I was actually using the generic 'you'. And yes, if you (generic) are not playing on systems that have mechanized social mechanics, then obviously none of the above applies to you.
I'm honestly curious how this discussion applies to PvE environments at all.
I have never seen anyone object to using social skills to bluff an NPC guard, or strike a better deal with an NPC merchant, or talk an NPC antagonist around to being on their side. How often or not often this stuff comes up and how powerful it is in a given scene depends a lot on the GM, but when it does, people are generally pretty enthused about it (I'd like to see it played up more in PvE environments, but that's neither here nor there). This all seems pretty explicitly PvP focused, whenever we talk about social skills on this board, and I think that ultimately comes down to the difficulty of ego management. Which the best system in the world will burst into frustrated flames against, alas.
I dunno, I've gotten the "it's not mind control" and extreme reluctance to allow social skills to affect NPCs in just as many PvE scenes with NPCs, or more, than PvP. All too often, social skills don't let you do anything against PCs OR NPCs, because GMs get just as resistant as PCs to the idea that their NPCs could be talked out of, or into, something that doesn't go along with how they see the course of the plot.
@Roz Sorry, I was actually using the generic 'you'. And yes, if you (generic) are not playing on systems that have mechanized social mechanics, then obviously none of the above applies to you.
@faraday And your character can /try/ to be a cool dude in the face of intimidation, but if he fails, it's just bad playing to refuse to play the failure honestly.
Personally, I think the 'agency' argument is always a little disingenuous. If you have a character in a system that has rules about social interactions, then by making that character, you've agreed to play by those rules. You have made a character knowing those rules existed, and have chosen to play a character knowing how conflicts are resolved.
Deciding that a subset of those rules shouldn't apply to you because you don't like how it plays out in this situation is every bit as mature as a guy who flips the chessboard when he starts to lose, no matter what kind of 'but my creativity!' artiste arguments it gets dressed up in.
@WTFE said in Eliminating social stats:
@Lithium said in Eliminating social stats:
Without bad things, there is no conflict, without conflict there is no drama, there is only bar RP and TS.
I think this may be the very first time I've heard a call for MORE drama on a MU*...
There is good drama, and bad drama! Many MU*s could use more good drama.
@Ominous said in Eliminating social stats:
@Pyrephox uses Wall of Text. It is super-effective.
I worry about how much GM intervention some of the ideas would need. Also, as pointed out, it doesn't address immediate scene issues that require fast resolution, like bluffing a guard.
Yeah, I'm wordy.
Really, there's no way to have a strong political game without either a fuckton of mechanization to track favors/territory/resources/actions/resolutions, or a fuckton of GM intervention, or a slightly smaller fuckton of both.
The very essence of politics is that it's a couple dozen moving wheels interacting all at once, and everything is changing and everything important needs to be tracked so that opportunities can be exploited. You can simplify it down to bare-bones, but then, yeah, you're back to "roll and resolve", and all the whining that comes with it. If you want to protect character agency AND make social skills relevant and useful, then you have to have more of an infrastructure and more oversight than you do for combat.