Posts made by Pyrephox

I'm well known to be on the side of a mechanized social conflict system, and for that system to be rigorously used and enforced throughout the game.

However, that said - if you wanted a political game without social stats, I would suggest instead leveraging resource stats. While you are eliminating the potential for a wider variety of players to play a robust series of concepts (if only highly socially competent players can play highly socially competent characters and be effective while having fun, it will reduce the overall variety of character concepts in your game, and skew the game towards combat competent characters), if you're fine with that as an opportunity cost, that's up to you. But you could attempt to compensate for that more by leaning more heavily on resources - money, land, military might, rare economic goods, and by creating specific systems that moderate the ability to trade and cash in these resources. This allows people to do the 'wheeling and dealing' aspect of politics without actually being good at sweet-talking others - you may not be able to craft a persuasive pose to save your life, but you can probably type "Count Rudolfo has 80 acres and a mule that he'll trade Duchess Tupelo, if she will make the bandits on the southern border go away". Design the domains to be diverse enough that everyone needs something from everyone, and make war risky enough that tromping over and just rolling combat dice isn't enough to steal all other people's shit, and at least some level of political play will emerge.

If someone does retain individual social skills/conflict resolution, I've become increasingly fond of incentivizing losing. Yes, if your character loses a social conflict, they have to do something that might not be in their best interest. But if you the PLAYER receive a reward for going along with that (or committing fully to it), then you have a reason to suck it up. Also, perhaps setting a hierarchy of success and what actions can be compelled. For a political game, you likely don't want huge swings in attitude to be compelled from social skills, because you want to maximize negotiation and intrigue space. At the same time, you don't want social characters to feel like they have to 'grind' someone's attitude IC. So what you might do, now that I'm thinking about it, is have social change/combat be sort of an unholy hybrid of 7th Sea 2E's story system, and CoD's Doors.

Social Character has to declare to the GM a meaningful end goal. This social system would not be useful for 'I want you to sleep with me' or other micro interactions (including fast talking one's way past a door guard, etc.) but would instead focus on larger, political play. So, say, the goal might be "I want the Empress to take her travelling court to a specific lady's landholdings, because I'm repaying a favor that lady did for me, and the Empress always awards a boon to her host."

The GM would then say, "Okay - that's not a particularly risky undertaking, so you'll have to do three tasks successfully to get the Empress to agree. The Empress is a PC, so let's rope her in. Hey, Empress-Player, what are three challenges that PC A would have to overcome to get Empress Tidypants to take her travelling court to Baronness Murzi's lands for the next season?"

Empress-Player might say, "Well, no one's requested it yet, so she's got no reason to fight the idea. First, PC A would have to have a good pitch (a scene with Charisma + Persuasion as a roll, maybe). Oh, and Tidypants loves to stay places with luxuries, so she'd have to know that she's going to be taken care of, if you know what I mean (Bribery, throwing her a party showcasing the exotic goods of Murzi-land, or a successful Intelligence + Fashion roll during a second scene might all be options here). Oh, and Empress Tidypants would need to feel safe moving her court, of course (so maybe an Intelligence + Leadership roll, or lending troops, or hiring mercenaries to protect her, could be a resolution of this)."

PC A might say, "That sounds reasonable," or they might say it's not worth it, or if one of the requirements seems excessive, the GM might step in and say, hey, "Hey, requiring that PC A arranges for the death of a rival's kid in exchange for this seems a bit excessive. How about he humiliates the rival at a public scene, instead?" To reduce GM load, you could also build in character types for players who enjoy doing this sort of balancing - a Negotiator's Order, or something, and helping people design these social maps would be one of their jobs.

But what about conflict and failure? You'd have to restrict it somehow. Perhaps you only get as many chances as you have some level of the Key Social Skill. So, like, if it's a 1-10 scale on skills in the example above, and the GM decides the Key Skill is Persuasion, and PC has 5 Persuasion, then they get 5 attempts to get those three things. If they fail, say, to make the Empress feel safe the first time, but got everything else, then they get two shots to make up for that, perhaps at a difficulty increase. If they don't get it by the end of the next two attempts? The Empress is unmoved - and keeps the bribes, of course.

Likewise, under this system, you're less likely to run into direct PC vs. PC conflict, and more into colliding gambits and plots. Which could be a plus, in a political game. I would generally say first past the post - if two people are competing for a similar goal, then the first person to achieve their goals wins. However, you also might work out a success exchange - perhaps people could take their successful scenes, and instead of applying that towards their end goal, they could instead use it to counter a success someone else has achieved towards their goal. Perhaps with some level of investigation/intrigue system so that characters can discover each other's plots and plans.

It would be a very different way of thinking of social conflict resolution, but one which might suit the slower, more narrative style of MU*s better than the "roll and resolve" system that is used in physical conflict.

I like plots to be fast, with lots of action (not necessarily physical action, but I do like brisk progression to certain milestones, even if there might be pauses between milestones), but I like relationships to be slow.

@ZombieGenesis My suggestion might be - use a single ship as the setting. Have three divisions: Command, Security, and Support. Aside from Captain and XO, don't get too persnickety about rank - Star Trek /rarely/ actually cared much about the chain of command, and technically it is a much kinder and gentler pseudo-military than our own. Instead, encourage people to choose based on the kind of RP they are /primarily/ interested in - Command for diplomatic/political (whether it's First Contact protocols, internal crew issues, or Starfleet Command shenanigans), Security for combat/exploration, or Support for interpersonal and support functions (everything from medbay to bartending).

Don't worry too much about what people do between plots - they will be having pretend friendships and pretend sex. But I would dedicate at least one staff member per division - one staff member to send along communiques from Starfleet, distress calls, or communications from aliens wanting Starfleet to negotiate/mediate things on their behalf for Command, one to design away missions and combat encounters for Security, and one to do some of those good, meaty social-based plots for Support (not parties, but bizarre disease outbreaks, engineering glitches that summon dimensional rifts, and the like.) Let people 'cross over' freely, because again, Star Trek characters were always getting involved in things outside their technical duty ("Damn it Jim, I'm a doctor, not a...")

Do NOT attempt to simulate a military. Do not require reports to be written, or allow things to get bottlenecked on the chain of command. You may even want to have an NPC Captain, but I know that's a hard sell. Mostly, focus on what's fun about the setting and the series, rather than the tedious behind the scenes stuff.

@Seraphim73 Honestly? If people aren't capable of or willing to read two short paragraphs one time, then I'm not overly interested in playing with them in general.

EDIT: Sorry, that was snarky. But more, if people aren't willing to read two short paragraphs fed to them right up front, they're /definitely/ not going to put in the extra work of putting in additional commands to read +views or +notes. You can't cater to people who simply aren't going to put any effort in.

Tenebrae is still around, I think, and seems to thrive as a D&D game. But the traditional struggles that have been mentioned are that it's fairly staff intensive - so much revolves around 'adventuring' that people tend to make characters and just hang out in the OOC room until there is an adventure, then go out. That puts a lot of burden on staff to constantly have adventures, or to have things that are very PrP friendly, with all the sandbox-related issues that comes down to.

@surreality said in What locations do you want to RP in?:

People are weird about descs and just not reading them.

I am more or less insane when it comes to grid things. A grid build could easily take me a year putting in full time hours if I'm doing it 'right' to my way of thinking. I end up using season switches for elements of the descs, time of day, weather effects, hell, even a diner menu will actually have different 'specials' on the menu set to switch by the day of the week. Even if any given desc is short to read, it's going to be different on the regular, because it being different to account for the world differences is going to be built in.

It also means... this takes forever. Forever.

It makes me less inclined to add useless grid rooms. If all of the above is going into it, it is damned well going to have a story and hooks built into all of it, too, and it's going to be a place that's potentially useful and is a good resource for players as a location with story ideas built in, but not ones that are so overwhelming that the place is useless for anything else.

Edit: Oh, yeah, the point. I have been told multiple times that this is wasted effort because nobody reads room descs. Further, that it's unfair to put story seeds and hooks in the room descs because the people who can't be bothered to read the room desc might miss them.

Those people are terrible, and they should feel bad. (They are also one of my major pet peeves, along with people who read the descs, and then just flat out ignore them so that they can play the exact same way they play in every room or situation. For the love of happiness, do not take your businessman in the five thousand dollar suit to the fucking slums and act like he fits in. Even if he is a crime lord who isn't in personal danger, he does not /fit in/. I'm not saying 'oh god, never step out of your territory' by any means, but just that if you do, at least play the acknowledgement that you ARE. Your ragged commoner is not going to be welcome at the most hoity-toity establishment in the rich part of the city, and drinking there is NOT like drinking in a slum dive. Your fancy-pants, old money socialite is not going to get the same reception at the wrong-side-of-the-tracks honkey tonk that she gets at the elegant downtown club. )

@Meg said in What locations do you want to RP in?:

Ideally, I'd like to have both. I absolutely dislike RPing in a desc where I can't tell what is physically there at most times. I would rather that, to be honest, than eschew it just for hooks and other things. Hooks and mysteries and atmosphere is a definite bonus, and will make me more likely to RP in a room that already has a good foundation desc.

Oh, absolutely. I don't think you have to give up one for the other - or should. My ideal desc is about two paragraphs - one paragraph with the tangibles, and one paragraph with relevant and interesting intangibles. Something like (off the top of my head, so not brilliant):

*Heidekker Park

This large, concave valley has been made into a popular metro park. Aside from the parking lots at the top, most of the park forms a gentle downward slope to a deep, circular pond in the depths of the valley. The main trail is paved with concrete, and takes a meandering, two-mile path down to a section of lake shoreline, where a fishing dock and concrete pavilion can be found. Other paths have been made over the years by parkgoers; these dirt trails wander through stands of pine and brush, often ending in small, secret clearings where one can find discarded beer cans, condoms, and other curious refuse often overlooked by the park's staff.

During the day, the park is a popular and well-patrolled place, often ringing with the shouts of children, and the excited quacking of ducks being fed down on the pond. At night, however, the park becomes home to an entirely different population; its many secluded areas make it a popular place for prostitution and the selling of contraband, and several of the city's gangs are constantly squabbling over the territory. Police response to reports of violence here after dark is curiously delayed, and there are rumors that the gangs pay off the local precinct to look the other way.*

There. Although that's not the greatest room in the world, it gives the opportunity for two distinct experiences (happy fun scenes in daylight, crime-related scenes at night), offers hooks (stumbling on some of that 'curious refuse' or onto a drug deal or gang dispute), gives people an opportunity to create plots (trying to root out the corruption in the local precinct, or trying to support one of the local gangs in claiming the territory for good), and has enough physical details that you can easily work distinctive details into the setting or playing of scenes.

@Tat said in What locations do you want to RP in?:

@Pyrephox said in What locations do you want to RP in?:

I'd love it if room descs and locations in a WoD game really brought in that kind of stuff. Pointed out the places where the police just will not arrive. Made mention of suicide rock in the park, where every year on the longest night, someone kills themselves, and somehow, the police are never in time to stop it or able to keep it from happening. The other 364 days of the year, of course, it's a LOVELY place. Here's Compton's Vegan Delites, and it's got great selections; let's just not talk about the fact that the last restaurant in this spot closed down because the proprietor was found adulterating the hamburgers with bits of his missing wife. But the fried tofu is fantastic.

These are my favorite kinds of room descs. They don't just tell you what's there, they give you suggestions to fuel your RP. And sometimes they turn into plots.

Yeah! To me, the absolute best location desc is one that as soon as I read it, I have a scene idea that's uniquely suited to THIS place, and isn't just another generic scene in Anywhere, USA. Back when I desced a grid for a game that never got off the ground, I tried to make each location distinct and meaningful like that, including brief mentions of mysteries, plot hooks, and police response times or atmosphere.

@Misadventure I dunno. I think there is a viable happy medium (albeit not for EVERYONE) between sunny happy vampire romance land and crapsack shitstain world of neverhappy.

I would definitely like to see a WoD game that played up how fundamentally corrupt the world was, without making it 'and everyone is always miserable forever'. There should be regular disappearances - largely framed as 'another disobedient run away' or 'deadbeat dad abandons family' in the press. Police solve rates for crimes should be, like two thirds of their real world counterpart in the better areas, and less than one third in the worst areas; there should even, in urban areas, be areas that the police have simply written off. There will be no police response here, although someone might eventually drive through and pick up any bodies lying around, make an cursory effort to ID them, and let their families know, probably by certified mail.

On the other side, in the affluent areas, police response should be /fantastic/, and if you're a resident of the area (and you LOOK like what the cops and other residents think a resident should look like), you have a great time with that. Hello, Mr. Friendly Policeman. If you aren't a resident, or you don't look like someone other residents want in their neighborhood, though, you're police patrolled out, pretty quickly, and if you mouth off or get frisky, you'll be left bleeding. Doesn't mean there aren't good cops, and that a PC can't BE a good cop, but there should always be an implicit pressure to let things go, to not make waves or turn traitor on that fellow boy or girl in blue who's taking the bribes from the drug dealer on the corner.

Suburbs should be more like mini-cities (see the outskirts of Louisville, KY, where a lot of what are essentially housing developments have incorporated and have their own police forces) - pleasant and even welcoming for people who belong, but cold and even hostile to 'outsiders'. Some of them should just be people with means clumping together for shared safety, sure. But some of them should have secrets - rites and cults and deals with dark masters to keep THIS place bright, and THIS place safe.

Entertainment districts should be bright, beautiful, and over the top - but sometimes, it should feel like everyone is just trying a little too hard, partying less to have fun and more to not think about things. The best, most glamorous, and most wild good times should happen right after tragedies, even just small ones. Another wacko killed her family for no good reason. Seven schoolgirls made a suicide pact to drown themselves in the park.

I'd love it if room descs and locations in a WoD game really brought in that kind of stuff. Pointed out the places where the police just will not arrive. Made mention of suicide rock in the park, where every year on the longest night, someone kills themselves, and somehow, the police are never in time to stop it or able to keep it from happening. The other 364 days of the year, of course, it's a LOVELY place. Here's Compton's Vegan Delites, and it's got great selections; let's just not talk about the fact that the last restaurant in this spot closed down because the proprietor was found adulterating the hamburgers with bits of his missing wife. But the fried tofu is fantastic.

I love iconic, flavorful locations that include their own hooks - as long as these are actually used and supported by staff. Give me slums with tragic histories and mysteries attached, or creepy Stepford suburbs, or haunted forests with their own bodycounts. I love any location where I can look at the desc and say, "Oh, yes, I know what I want to play here."

Oh no. I'm sorry to hear this. I enjoyed playing with him, once upon a time.

Number two would be, IMO, pretty damned awesome. That kind of modern day occult stuff is all sorts of fun, and I think Demon is a game I would pretty much only play in single sphere.

He used them! Just very judiciously. I was so disappointed that he never got into a combat worth summoning a big monster for.

@Collective said in Is there a niche for Urban Fantasy that isn't WoD or FC-based?:

@Pyrephox I wouldn't mind taking inspiration from any of those sources, but I definitely don't want to directly base a MU on any of them. I think the headaches are huge, either in blending specific themes or dealing with purists.

Also, something original can be very, very streamlined, as opposed to the baggage of something like the Anita Blake universe, which has a fairly distressing MU side effect of making the TS the plot.

No, I didn't mean I wanted a game set in those settings - honestly, they're so protagonist focused, I think that'd be a bad decision. What I was trying to illustrated was that all of those were settings where the supernatural was known, to some extent, to the humanity (and that this knowing had changed the world from bog-standards mundane earth but with Hidden Magic). Each one did it in different ways, but it would make a really nice change, for a game, from the 'the herd must not know' of WOD and similar settings. Also, gives humans more to do and be than victims or problems.

I would definitely play! My personal preference would be for a world like the Kitty books, or the Hollows, or Anita Blake, where the supernatural is either out, or coming out, of the closet. It allows the most interaction, while still allowing you to build in secret organizations/things the supernatural world doesn't want the mortals to see.

However, if you do go with a masquerade setting, I suggest stating it so that mortal PCs are explicitly able to be brought into the supernatural world, either by each of them having some sort connection or potential, or just by an OOC statement that 'yes, random NPCs should be kept in the dark, so no casting fireballs on main street, but PCs Are Special, so please don't cut the mortal PCs out of the fun stuff.

Things, in my opinion, to remember about creating interesting, playable, and sustainable political setups in games:

1. There must be finite, meaningful, and necessary resources which cannot be evenly distributed to all interested parties for no cost to any one or group of those parties. Politics is, at its core, how societies answer the question of "How do you decide what to do when you can't get everything that you want?"

2. There must be some staging of the setting that incentivizes some level of cooperation, but at the same time incentivizes some level of competition between PCs. Players need incentives on both ends to occupy that happy space in the middle, where PCs are supported in having distinct goals and needs, some of which can only be obtained through working together, and some of which /require/ competing with other PCs or setting factions. You can also use penalties for this, but penalties are a harder sell for players OOC, and often create resentment and the desire to 'beat the system'.

3. The setting should be explained and concrete enough that players largely have similar conceptions of the worth of resources, the expectations of factional behavior, and the consequences of actions they can take. This does not mean players need to know everything about the setting, but if players can't generally judge what the cost and consequences of actions are LIKELY to be, and they don't agree on the culture of the setting, or the worth of whatever resources drive the conflicts, then you will have unproductive OOC disagreements, and IC confusion - both of which harm the ability to design, implement, and respond to political actions. Ideally, you want players to be able to interact with the setting with as little hand-holding needed; political play flows best when people can act, see the consequences, respond, etc. in a smooth flow. The more bottlenecks you have in waiting for responses to "Can I do this?" and "Do I know how X Faction might view Y action", the slower and less satisfying things are likely to be. You ESPECIALLY do not want your political actions and procedures less well-defined or understood than your physical conflict ones. Players will default to interacting with the least painful system, and the one that gives the most predictable gain, and if that's physical combat, then that's what people are going to use.

4. There should be no absolute wins or losses. Politics needs to keep churning to stay engaging and useful - you may be on top one day, and on bottom the next, and while you may have some strengths as a character or faction that remain, you should never be able to either rest on your laurels OR be written off as a threat. There should always be a way to fall from grace, and there should always be a way to rise from nothing. This doesn't mean that every shoemaker should have an equal chance to become King, assuming a medievalish setting, but it does mean that any PC should always have actions open to them to improve their lot, and they should always have risks that they can lose to fall farther, no matter what.

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

If people can just buy a bunch of retainers to help with investigations if they can't/won't purchase their own investigate higher, doesn't that render obsolete the niche for high investigate pcs?

I don't have an investigative retainer, so this may not be accurate, but my understanding is that use of a retainer also takes up your weekly investigation slot. So, you can only toss one retainer at something, and you can't toss a retainer AND do your own, other investigation, at the same time. So multiple retainers wouldn't really help - if you want to get maximized results, you need to seek out other actual PCs (or their retainers) to help.

I will say some of the newer mechanics do HELP with the meaningful issue of XP Bloat (which is 'can some characters contribute so much more than others that lesser XP characters are rendered obsolete'), especially AP. Have AP as a limited resource that everyone has an equal amount of (although some uses of AP are modified by stats) helps to keep the high XP folks from dominating everything. Some of it leads to a certain artificialness in trying to justify why you can't look into something highly relevant because you're out of +storyrequests for the month (and I would love to see that removed in favor of a scaling AP cost, although it might put too much of a burden on staff), but it still means that even the most dino-y dino has an initiative to find people who will be willing to Do Stuff on your behalf.

@Lisse24 said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

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

That said, the XP situation is crazy. I mean, that's been known (and mentioned, even in this thread, I think) for months. Some people regularly get 30/40+ XP a week, and maximize it with use of the very generous teaching system, and I know several characters with 5+ skills at 5 (the highest you can go without being actively supernatural in ability) and 3+ stats at 5.

I'd be lying if I said that this perception and my own perception that I just didn't have the time/desire to keep up, wasn't a major factor in my leaving. It's really disheartening to log in and, week after week, see people getting massive XP gains, while knowing that I'll never be able to do that.

It can be. I've long since come to terms with the fact that my character will never be able to compete on XP gains (or spends, for that matter, since I don't find teaching/learning scenes very fun in a general sense, and thus choose not to use the teaching system), just due to matters of my own availability and my character's personality.

And having come to terms with that, I can find a fair amount of fun, even knowing that statistically speaking, my character is far, far behind others (even significantly newer characters) because I don't fully use the systems available, or spend my time hunting down randomscenes or seeking out the big, social scenes. And, to be fair, current policies do allow new characters to 'catch up' with dinos if you don't mind a flood of people trying to randomscene and firstimpression you in your first couple of weeks.

But for a game that is still, as I understand it, supposed to be at a low fantasy stage, we have a looot of folk who could put Conan in a headlock until he cries, etc. And that's likely not sustainable going forward, while still maintaining an environment where people can be useful in a variety of contexts.

@Roz The idea that anyone is even able to contemplate getting level 6 skills is, in itself, crazy to me, and a sign that maaaaybe XP has gotten out of hand.