Posts made by Pyrephox

@DeadEmpire I think you're referring to stat costs, and it's a base cost of 100, not 1000.

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.

It's always been my position that the game badly, badly needs an XP wipe before moving out of 'beta', and a retooling of XP costs, now that there is a solid idea of how much XP can be acquired weekly. And a few more XP sinks added, or a way to 'cash in' XP for other resources.

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

Jesus, people. Share with the class, if there are examples.

That the examples exist is not going to make the place that banned the cause of those examples look bad, after all.

I have no logs. But as I gather it: dude was harassing at least one female character, got banned. Dude immediately started logging back on through VPN and paging Apostate with juvenile insults, including the one referenced above, because dude clearly has not got a lot of imagination. Decided to come here and post his witty bon mot for...some reason. End of story, I'd expect.

Oh no. Best wishes to him.

@Arkandel said in Course Corrections:

Sometimes people are just unable to form abstractions in the context of games. That doesn't mean all abstractions are necessary or even beneficial, just that some are.

There was a guy on Arx who insisted on figuring out if cement was invented in that world. How were they making the kinds of buildings they were without it? How?

But that's not a very interesting question to answer. And each time one is answered someone will push for more ("so if I have that, can I create asphalt? I can, right? Then we can have better roads! Then if we can harvest the power of steam we can have an industrial revolution!").

Just let it be, dammit.

I am sometimes in danger of becoming this. I try very hard not to, but it frustrates me on a deep level if I can't predict in some regard how the world works and what options are available. Like, to me, whether a world has a knowledge of germ theory is /fascinating/, especially if it actually takes the idea that it doesn't, but it does have Some Sort of Magical Healing and run with it. I don't need people to die of infected wounds willy and nilly, but if there is no germ theory, don't refer to disinfecting things! Chase away the fever spirits by getting them drunk on strong alcohol, or point out that in this world, surgeons CAN go bloody-handed from one patient to the next, because they're really laying on hands, not practicing modern medicine.

But I'm a setting geek.

@Arkandel Nah. Comic sales have been on a slow but steady decline for ages, with occasional bumps as new media comes out. Personally, I'd suspect that it's the stagnation of stories in the medium that's more to blame - just as anecdata, I went from a major X-Men fan with multiple pulled subscriptions in the line to not a comic reader at all after getting fed up at yet another reset, and no one ever really changing or retiring for good. Now, there's been some movement on that front, but in the X-Men, it's actually been kinda terrible movement that I'm not a fan of, so I haven't been back.

Entertaining and diverse aren't two competing or mutually exclusive concepts - mainstream superhero comics often fail at being consistently entertaining, whether they are diverse or not, and that's a bigger reason for the slump, I'd say.

@Tempest I'd agree with that, and furthermore say that political games need more stringent XP caps that more adventure/physical conflict based games. One of the fundamental points of a political game is that no one can go it alone, AND that no one can get everything that they want. People need to feel vulnerable, hungry, and need to know that they can't cover all their bases alone, so that they reach out to others. As soon as people feel secure, the game stagnates, because they no longer feel the need to make deals or take risks.

I love skill challenges.

Of course, I also love 4E, so take that as you like it, but skill challenges (even if the math was a bit wonky, and pre-written modules often tried to make them so restrictive as to be useless) were a wonderful system, and one I use with glee.

@Arkandel said in Make a Game with Me!:

@Pyrephox Why not reward long-standing antagonistic relationships?

So for example when you first clash with the Baron in the local senate it gives you a small amount of XP. As the two of you become rivals the rewards begin to scale up; it's becomnig a long-standing feud which trickles in over time. At that point it becomes a periodic income, which adds up.

Then you don't want to kill him. You need the bastard! In IC terms someone else would have taken his place anyway, at least he's the devil you know... and it's giving you the chance to learn from the conflict.

Treasuring your IC enemies seems like an interesting recipe. Thoughts?

Oh, I /love/ that. That's an awesome idea. Now, you'll have to be careful that people don't just...designate a whole bunch of nemeses and then not push that relationship, but you could do that by tying certain rewards to specific actions against your rival. (I admit, I still want to move away from XP as the main reward system, unless you've got some serious, ongoing and meaningful XP sinks that don't boost PC inherent ability beyond a certain point.)

@Lisse24 said in Make a Game with Me!:

As mentioned, I have some systems in mind that would really benefit from having someone work with me on them. However, the TLDR; is that I think you reward what you want to see, and so XP is tied to healthy conflict to some extent and especially to 'losing.' I think the more a character 'loses,' the more XP they should get. Ideally, this should serve the dual purpose of keeping dinosaurs from ruling the game and encouraging loss as positive thing. Although, of course, game atmosphere and proactive staffing is equally important in this area.

I like this idea a lot, although it might a bit tricky to pull off. One thing to support it that I might suggest is to consider reframing it from 'winning' and 'losing' to opening a different set of opportunities. Political battles are at their best when parties are open to maneuver and come at issues from different angles. One of the ways that L&L games tend to falter is that opportunity only really goes up with social status. So the higher your status, the more opportunities you have - a high level noble can FUNCTIONALLY slum it in the poorest parts of the city as well as attend the finest parties in the city, and suffer no repercussions, while a commoner can only do one of those thing (and maybe not even that, if the local dives are filled with nobles throwing around money and influence).

So, perhaps, conceptualize instead of an objective social status, sliding scales of reputation/influence with different groups that are mutually exclusive - If you suffer a major setback/scandal with one group, you lose reputation with that group, but may gain it with another opposing group (who now sees an opportunity to take advantage of a disgruntled member of another faction). So, the commoner who "makes good" and becomes popular in high society loses a lot of his connections with the slums, because he's "better than he ought to be", but the noble who is disgraced in a scandal might lose standing with high society, but the local Hellfire Club thinks she might make a fine recruit.

Now, this could get rather complex, true, depending on how many factions you have, and you have to make sure that the factions are well-balanced in the things they can do (they don't need to be able to do THE SAME THINGS, but the things they do need to be equally fun and useful - Nobles Who Can Do Everything and Hunted Petty Criminals are not balanced factions, for example, but a powerful trading consortium and a powerful smuggling network MIGHT be).

Edit: I'm also going to make a tremendously unpopular suggestion regarding character advancement - if you want a fairly 'realistic' (as in not epic heroism) setting and play, then advancement regarding the characters /inherent attributes/ should be incredibly slow, and likely capped fairly low. Political play is best facilitated, IMO, by spending a lot more time tracking and playing with changing RESOURCES, not static attributes. If you want a truly political mindset, then you need to think of characters in terms of what they have access to, and what that access allows them to do, rather than a stat-block. Also, you need to decide what kind of access is MOST important. For example, a political intrigue game is probably going to prioritize access to information most of all, which means creating, discovering, and tracking secrets is going to need system support, as are things like blackmail and bribery (and they're going to need TEETH). On the other hand, a land-and-trade political game is going to be hugely concerned with finances and trade resources, and so you're going to spend the bulk of your system resources tracking things like production of goods, market prices, trade routes, etc.

@Arkandel It's true. By most metrics, IF is actually a really strong limited series. It's just not groundbreaking, and a lot of the other MCU offerings on Netflix have been.

@Ganymede said in Full spoilers: Iron Fist:

@Pyrephox said in Full spoilers: Iron Fist:

I liked it pretty well, but I think that it suffered from the fact that the supporting cast all had stronger and more interesting conflicts than the main character.

The best hero movies present the supporting cast and villains in a more favorable way than the protagonist. That's because the protagonist is not calculated to change in these stories.

Possibly, but that hasn't been the case of any of the MCU products thus far, and they've been pretty decent hero stories, IMO.

I liked it pretty well, but I think that it suffered from the fact that the supporting cast all had stronger and more interesting conflicts than the main character. Danny is, ultimately, a pretty simple guy - good-hearted, but with some anger management issues from unresolved grief, and with a serious need to reclaim a family that no longer exists. That could be cool (see Batman), except...everyone else has MORE going on. The Meachums themselves steal the show, because watching an emotional trainwreck is always fun, but even Colleen's got a meatier internal conflict going on. Danny is less interesting, not least of which because he's a guy who by his personality, is not good at dealing with nuance.

But it was still entertaining, and I think it had stronger throughplots than, say, Luke Cage, and less filler than Jessica Jones.

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

@Arkandel : To be honest, I feel uncomfortable probably more because I think it's just me bringing up issues which are considered settled and overdiscussed and overargued. Also, I fucking hate slavery and thralldom A LOT. I don't want to look at it as an opportunity for roleplay when in reality if I discovered someone was holding thralls and had the weapons and political tools to stop it, I damned well WOULD, by force, and the idea that all the high and mighty noble houses that are "good" have been around for a thousand years and NOT rolled on Thrax like a Mack truck over a gopher makes all of those houses at the least complicit considering the fact that they're in an alliance. Which with the current threat makes sense to make uneasy allies, and that's how I'm roleplaying it; and willfully ignoring that for hundreds of years these houses have been sitting at the same table with a bunch of goddamn slavers.

I don't think you can call any of the noble houses "good", or the Faith "good", although they all have /good people/ in them. Pretty much every institution of Arx, if you read the help and theme files, is institutionally corrupt, and I think Apostate has said, at least once on channel, that addressing some of those things and doing the hard work of reforming them is part of the story. But thralls are terrible. Serfs, honestly, aren't /much/ better, despite being technically free. The Faith is largely corrupt, and engages in internal politics and backstabbing that's every bit as vicious as a great house (except for PCs). The shamanistic religions occasionally have to put down offshoots that go all human sacrifice-y. The Lyceum is filled with people who think upward mobility is best facilitated by poison (except for PCs). The Crown runs the Inquisition, which is /explicitly/ a bunch of murderous, torturing thugs (except for the PCs, who are honestly all pretty darned cool, that I've met).

Basically, Arx is largely the story of playing the (mostly) "good" people in a world that is kinda crapsack and horrible.

@brent It's true; the characters of Arx (love them though I do) could provide adequate challenge just by the amazing ways we manage to fuck stuff up. Even those things that should be gimmes.

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

Well, I'm sure the AP system was designed (at least in part) to address the multitasking thing, for sure. In a strange way though it will, at least in some ways, actually impact the have-nots more; for instance if it costs me a ton of AP I am least inclined to share my @clues with newbie #2871 that I just met.

Yeah. The AP system needs some tweaking going forward, to be sure (and that part of it does disproportionately impact the newbies, unfortunately) but on the /whole/, I like it and think it has real potential to rein in some of the issues.

But the thing is, it's really hard to systematize these things because in some ways they are working as intended. You pointed out one way; someone with the relevant Teaching skill can convey massive XP discounts, but only get a limited number of training sessions to use per week, so obviously those with resources or allies can benefit more, which isn't unreasonable. People with cash and favors to call are supposed to have an advantage, right?

That is a thing to consider. There's a careful balance to be pondered between OOC equality-of-agency and IC inequality-of-theme. Someone who apps in a hardscrabble peddler of common birth /should not/ have the same access to, say, alaricite as a Great Lord on a systemic level. But, just as true, there should be things that the commoner /can/ do that the Great Lord can't, because being a Great Lord (or any noble) should come with some real consequences for acting in a manner befitting of the nobility.

Spend all your time hanging out in the Lower Burroughs and telling them to just call you Jack? /Your/ commoners should realize that they have a soft lord, and start holding back their taxes and tithes. After all, you are a Man of the People, and thus should be totally okay with them spending that money on their families instead of your silks, right? Want to put yourself on the front lines of the battle when you're not married and don't even have the hope of a legitimate heir? Your vassals should feel some kind of way about that, including seeing if there's a way to take advantage of the instability in the wake of your heroic death (which, you know, if there's a /great/ way to take advantage of it might happen sooner than you think...), which means they should start squabbling among themselves, jockeying for position to take advantage. More IC power should mean more IC consequences.

You know what the curious thing is though? I had a conversation recently with a member of my House who was complaining OOC that he has nothing to do, doesn't know what to do... he's just feeling blah. In the mean time he avoids playing about anything fun; he almost always joins RP, by his own admission, when there are people he can farm @randomscenes from, plays to improve his gear and gather resources to trade and improve his gear, etc. So essentially this guy plays the game in the least entertaining way possible then he's puzzled it's not engaging him. Which is the flipside of this whole situation, and a real head-scratcher for me.

There's a certain sort of player - and I see this a lot in video game discussions, too - who feel absolutely compelled to optimize their character and acquisition of resources whenever possible, even if doing so makes the game actively unfun for them. I don't know where it comes from, but I've seen it plenty of times.

@Packrat Yeah. Honestly, as painful as it would be, the game probably needs an XP wipe at some point before going to its final version. And probably while they're still testing systems, too - if they norm the systems for the current XP distribution, it's going to really hurt people who are new to the game.

@Arkandel The XP issue is actually one of the things that particularly concerns me, design-wise, moving forward. Especially since with the training thing, people who have more money can open an /even larger/ gap in progression between the haves and have nots. It's definitely a concern, I think. Especially since some of the things that SHOULD matter (conflict of interest, other duties) for those in high places don't really matter - a High Lord doesn't actually have any of their IC time taken up by their duties, so they're free to go out and smash things on the battlefield, hang out in the slums making friends with peasants, join the Faith, research all the magics, etc.

The new AP system might help a little with the 'be all the places, do all the things' issue, but the XP is still a problem.

Meanwhile, the "I'm too cool for school" crap is ALWAYS an issue, and it's really annoying. I'm not keen on people who have their characters have hysterics or breakdowns and disrupt plots, but damn, wo/man, show some human emotions. I remember being in one plot where the GM was posing some really great, spooky as hell stuff, and I was enjoying my character having some significant reactions to that...but the other character was just like, "Eh." And then I felt silly.

@kitteh Honestly, that happens a lot in Arx lore. There's a lot of written lore in room descs and backgrounds and various files that implies or outright states things which are later stated to be entirely incorrect by staff in channels. It's my hope that as things reach final release, all of the relevant lore (especially the stuff that should be informing character actions) will finally get collected somewhere, and the room descs, files, and backgrounds will be given a good going over to develop some level of agreement.

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

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

My interruptions have always been more ... severe.

People come in, and have a gun fight. Never try to engage the players there. Just interrupt.

The vast majority of people making really elaborate sets just want to be very evocative storytellers, and I'm really okay with that. But then there's guys who just want to dominate a scene, and it's because of them that I'm instinctively wary of anyone taking tremendous liberties in describing the environment in a set, and trying to force everyone to conform to it, which just doesn't work so great in non-sandboxes. Like I personally prefer people to avoid describing any of the context of the world around them except things that are completely unobjectionable and would fit the context of anyone just wandering in, if they are in a public space. It makes the organic rp a million times easier, and I think rp that's highly referential off of the environment changing is better off done in private when context is easily understood throughout the scene.

Man, that makes for some really bland scenes, though. It's one of the reason I often get burnt out and unhappy with public scenes - they tend to take place in this gray, featureless expanse where the weather is always meh, you're perpetually stuck in a grey sort of twilight so that no one has to remember if it's day or night, and you're surrounded by faceless nonentities of NPCs. Might as well just have a set of blank rooms, at that point.

Places can be awesome, when it's appropriate. I had a really great private conversation while doing a large public scene where there was a central focus that people were focused on (which provided a good cover for the conversation my character was having). But, that sort of large, focused scene is different from the 'increasingly large numbers of people wander into you random scene', and I always feel bad and wrong for confining the conversation I was having to places when there's a couple of new people who clearly want to be included.

I'm not sure there's a great answer that's universally applicable, except to try to be understanding and flexible with other players, regardless of the setup of a scene.