Posts made by Pyrephox

I think staff is working on the lore issue. There are new news files for Occult and Theology, for example, which you can access based on what level you have in that skill that tell you what you should know. They're still In Progress, but it's a great idea, and I think it will help as those sorts of things get fleshed out.

Good god. I'm so glad she's not seriously hurt; that car is a horrible unhappiness. Threw some money at it, and will keep my fingers crossed.

@Apos said in Sensitive cultural/political/religious aspects of game themes.:

@Pyrephox said in Sensitive cultural/political/religious aspects of game themes.:

@Apos said in Sensitive cultural/political/religious aspects of game themes.:

tbh if someone logs into Hello Kitty, Island Adventure and says that the lack of rape and sexual assault themes just ruins their immersion, maybe the problem isn't the game.

Sure. And if the game is WWII, and the game says, "By the way, there's no antisemitism in this setting," and that breaks people's immersion, maybe the problem isn't the players.

If that's in their intended scope, sure. But It doesn't have to be the absurd example I used. If someone wants to have a game intending to run for a few months just about the Battle of the Bulge and nothing but the battle of the bulge, and a player wants to tell a story about auschwitz, then the problem still isn't the setting. It can just be a matter of not wanting to tell those stories at all, and whether they say, 'this is an alternate world history where there was no holocaust' or just refuse to address it doesn't really matter if that's not in the scope of their focus.

Here's the thing, though - antisemitism isn't just "stories about Auschwitz" in the context of WWII. It's an underlying societal factor that influences every part of the war, from beginning to end - /not just the places where it's on explicit display/. Saying, "In this game, we're not going to focus on antisemitism because we're playing /here/," is actually acutely different from saying, "In this setting, antisemitism doesn't exist, but everything else plays out exactly as it did in the real world because...reasons."

What I'm trying to get at is that there's a difference between a declaration of game focus, i.e. What We Are/Are Not Going to Play In This Game, and a declaration of game /setting/, which is the assumptions that the IC society and world run on. And those two things have a very different effect on people's play and suspensions of disbelief. It's like - if I'm running a superhero game, and I say, "Our focus is going to be on global level play - you guys stop world-ending supervillain threats, not street crime and you don't get involved in national/regional political disputes, so don't worry about someone asking you why, if you're a telepath, you didn't stop their mother from being mugged and beaten up a couple of blocks down from your apartment," that's a declaration of game focus. I'm telling you what we, as a game, are going to focus on, and it's not going to be gritty street crime or the political ramifications of superpowered people. On the other hand, if I say, "In this world, there is no street crime, so as superheroes, you guys are free to focus on global level supervillain threats," that's a declaration of game setting that raises some serious questions, and I would be surprised if my players didn't stop right there and have to spend some time processing what the hell that even means. No street crime? How does that work? Do people just not WANT stuff? Are there unstoppable robot cops? Are there cops? What does that mean for the character I wanted to make who came from a family of Irish cops in New York? Yes, as far as /actual play/ goes, both have the same outcome (superheros don't have to focus on the street level crime), but one changes the world of play into something pretty alien for most people, while the other just says, "Yeah, it's out there, but it's /not what we're playing/."

Which most people find easier to swallow.

@Apos said in Sensitive cultural/political/religious aspects of game themes.:

tbh if someone logs into Hello Kitty, Island Adventure and says that the lack of rape and sexual assault themes just ruins their immersion, maybe the problem isn't the game.

Sure. And if the game is WWII, and the game says, "By the way, there's no antisemitism in this setting," and that breaks people's immersion, maybe the problem isn't the players.

@Kanye-Qwest That seems like a bit of an excessive and unwarranted response, you know.

And it's not just pedantics, either. It's important for a roleplaying setting (yes, even a fantasy setting set in a non-Earth world) to have some sense of cultural realism and weight to it, not just to unrustle people's jimmies, but also to facilitate actually playing in that world. And the more arbitrary unrealities that you set in a world, the less possible it is for people to play in that world, at least without trying to wrap their mind around some fundamentally alien viewpoints. And no, cultural unrealities aren't the same thing as fantastical unrealities - it's a lot easier to accept a world like the world we know, but with magic, than it is to accept a world like the world we know, that somehow lacks, say, marriage as a societal construct. The latter is going to cause /even people who like and want your game to succeed/ to recoil a bit, especially if the premise is "this world is a lot like the world you know, except that no one has ever thought about getting married or spending their lives with just one person in a faithful romantic/domestic relationship".

It's one of the reasons that I don't play Pern games, and often recoiled from Pern as a setting, even if some elements were cool. Dragons? Fine. Time travel and teleportation? Cool. A setting filled with humans without any sort of /religion/? That's just bizarre. And I say that as an atheist. (And yes, there are other bizarre and ill-thought-out bits of that setting, that's just the one that gets me /every time I think about it/, because it flies in the face of what we know about human beings in a weird and gratuitous sort of way.) At the same time, McCaffery's other works, which have just as little religiosity in them, for the most part, but take place in universes where religion exists but is just never talked about or factors into plots or personalities of protagonists? Don't bother me as much. Because the idea is not so much "I want to play a super religious PC and have all my characterization revolve around religion" as it is, "I want to know that human beings in this setting work in approximately the same ways as they work in real life, so that I can play my character appropriate and interact with other characters in appropriate and genuine ways".

Although, for that matter, just admitting that something is arbitrary, and not having a meltdown every time someone points out that it's weird and arbitrary is fine, too. I've run evil campaigns where I've said up front, "Yes, you're playing evil. It's going to be four-color evil, with grand schemes, betrayals, and Taking Over the World, not war crimes and torture, even if your character is written as to not have any problems with those. We're just not going to do it." And then all you have to do whenever it comes up is, "Yep, it's a bit weird, but it facilitates the game we want to play." And say nothing more about it. Because that at least acknowledges the unreality of it - and, as an aside, established the GM as an adult who knows it's unrealistic and is totally okay with that being pointed out, but is just setting parameters for the game, not feeling the urge to start temper tantruming at people for being bewildered.

@Roz said in Sensitive cultural/political/religious aspects of game themes.:

@Derp said in Sensitive cultural/political/religious aspects of game themes.:

@Roz said in Sensitive cultural/political/religious aspects of game themes.:

@Sunny said in Sensitive cultural/political/religious aspects of game themes.:

@Kestrel said in Sensitive cultural/political/religious aspects of game themes.:

I happen to think that rape, sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia and the like make for great storytelling — this coming from someone frequently derided as a SJW — so I tend not to understand why anyone would want to exclude these themes from their story where they should realistically apply.

Some people do not enjoy having to same fight they have to fight in their everyday lives in their pretendy-fun-time games, don't enjoy exploring trauma that they have personally experienced. It's not really a hard concept to grasp even if you don't feel the same way. Empathy is awesome.

Yeah. I don't see why it's exactly hard to understand. People can like all different aspects of a historical time period that are unrelated to specific discriminations that also existed then.

But the point is, they exist whether they are pleasant or not. Pretends fun times doesn't necessarily take a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser to the fact that there are horrible things in the world. Any world.

No, they don't necessarily. But some people would indeed like to take a magic eraser to them in their hobby time. You don't have to be 100% historically accurate for fun to exist. Like, are you objecting to the purity of people's RP experience or something? People who bend settings are generally fully aware of those unpleasant things. They just maybe prefer making a space -- or playing in spaces -- without them.

It's worth noting that people also exist for whom these sorts of cultural restrictions and flaws provide an interesting set of constraints and conflicts to drive RP. Neither of these positions is a wrong one - and in fact, many people (like myself) fall in different places on the scale depending on what mood they're in and what the specific game is. Like, if I'm playing a game set ostensibly in the 1800s, then I want there to be acknowledgement of the mores of the time /even if those mores are not a major part of the gameplay and plot/. If I'm playing, say, a politically-oriented game, then I'm going to want those mores and customs and taboos to be a much larger part of the game, because those are many of the things that drive and complicate politics. On the other hand, if I'm playing a game where the premise is "we're cowpokes putting down a zombie apocalypse with our six-shooters" then I am not going to want racism or sexism to get involved in my pretendy fun times.

Like a lot of things with MU*s, it's not that any one position along the continuum is unreasonable, it's just that getting a group together who are on entirely different places on that line can be...complicated.

@gasket said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:

@Derp said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:

If you DO enshrine them into formal legalese, then please, offer some elucidation on why you think this is so important it has to apply to all people forever.

This so much. If you can't clearly answer WHY, it should never be implemented.

Thirded. I have no problem with House Rules. I do have a problem with ones that are badly thought out and implemented to fix a problem in the heat of the moment without carefully considering how it interacts with the rest of the world, system, and other situations.

I do think that any tabletop system requires house rules to run in a MU* environment, and that one of the things that causes a lot of problems is that there isn't a conversation before a game opens about 'what rules (and setting material!) are workable in a persistent, 24/7 game with 10+ PCs, and which ones need to be reworked to better facilitate the game experience in the setting and system we have chosen.

I'd like some intrigue events, honestly. Things where you can actively USE information to make changes in the world through the right word in the right ear, through stirring up (or calming down) the common masses, through creating the right sorts of deals that have measurable effects in the world. Diplomatic events, etc. Not tasks, but things that actually use skills.

But, full disclosure, that's totally because my character is sitting on a handful of social skills and stats that are largely useless with PCs, so it'd be nice to have something they're good for.

Other than that, my preference is always for small group things, where PCs have a chance to interact, grow, change, and make a measurable difference on the world in the bargain. A big war/battle type event would be fun, but it'd be really nice to see that be a multiscale thing, where the commanders are playing more of a chess game with living pieces, and the pieces are important PC squads who are either fighting battles, or sneaking behind enemy lines for scouting/espionage/assassination/etc, where they're very active but don't have any opportunity to see the big picture that the commanders have.

EDIT: If you go with something like the above, though, you'll need to spread the GMing out, because there's simply not enough of you guys to do something like this. I'd suggest staggered squads - the first wave, y'all run the squad-based plots as a model for what these should look like, etc. Make the first squads also be people who are willing to GM a squad after them, and use it as sort of a training field, then let those players GM for the next group of squads, with staff oversight and aid. Assess afterwards using logs/asking players what needs to be tweaked/clarified, etc, then move into the next with the improvements made. Since the game's in beta, this is a great time to do something that's explicitly test/training, since you can always roll it back if everything goes to Hell.

@Lisse24 said in The Apology Thread:

@Arkandel said in The Apology Thread:

But although that kind of friendship is important I will return what I'm given, too. If I suggest playing together a few times and you decline but don't reciprocate later on I'll take the hint and not ask again. No harm done or insult taken but I'll share my time online with people who like spending theirs hanging out with me. I think that's fair.

This should be embossed in gold and hung over the door. It's my basic philosophy. I'm an easy-going person. I'll spend time with anyone ... as long as I think they want to spend time with me, too. In game, that means if I'm constantly bugging you for a scene, and you never seem to be up for it? Well, eventually you're going to be on my list of people to not-bug. If I page and chat and you're all standoffy? I won't page anymore.

Same here. Typically, I will ask three times. If, on the third time, I am turned down for whatever reason, my general response is that they can let me know if they ever want to play/are available, and then I figure my work is done. If they want to RP, they can let me know, but I'm not going to chase after them. Frustrating thing, though, is when someone pages ME wanting RP, and I say sure, here are the times I'm available, what works? and then they say, uhhhh, I don't know. I'll say, well, you know when I'm on, so give me a wave when you want to play, and then they never contact me again.

@Arkandel I don't think it's fair to hold a game that was explicitly in alpha testing, where the staff outright said, "No real plot movement will take place because we're mostly testing systems and mechanics" to the same standards you'd hold a fully released game.

Now, that said, is it fair to try it out, realize you don't want to play a game in alpha, and bop away? Absolutely. No one is obligated to play a game that isn't for them, no matter what. And I feel like alpha should have a few more game resets myself, to let staff do some of the more significant changes that I, at least, still feel the mechanics need, without penalizing/benefiting characters unevenly.

Now that the game's in beta, though, I'd be hard-pressed to argue that nothing is happening and there is no plot. Now, for the most part, the events and things happening are fairly subtle, because a lot of people's secrets are things on the downlow that provide extra context and information. But those things aren't confined, as far as I can see, to particular social classes, backgrounds, or 'proximity to staff'. In fact, there are things spread /incredibly/ widely over the character base, so much so that I feel like more people are frustrated by "can't know/participate in it all" than "I have nothing to get involved with."

But I think a political/intrigue game does require some commitment to choosing a character who would be involved in the plot you want to see, and then seeking that out, both IC, and by communicating OOC with staff during character creation. Roster characters tend to be excellent in that regards (much to my surprise), but if you want to make a custom character, you'll probably have to be a much more proactive person. Not because you might not have an awesome secret, but because you have to make more of a 'place' for yourself. Especially if you ALSO want to be in a custom family, or no family at all (and not affiliated with any family, either). So, yeah, if you're the lone guy who just rolled, and chose no political or family ties to anyone else on the grid? You're gonna need to find a reason to make people care, and it might take a little while. People should meet you halfway, but not be expected to cross the whole field.

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

I swear Arx has more OOC politics than IC ones.

Is there any political MU* of which that is not true? Which is not to say that it might not be a problem (OOC politics are often problems), but that's been true of every MU* I've ever been on. People take things done IC as proof of OOC dislike, or misunderstand things and don't bother to try and communicate about them, or oppose a faction or a character because they don't like the players involved. Or, worse (and what tends to make things very unfun for me) is taking a character's failure or lack of...expected rewards (be it positions, prestige, inclusions)...as a personal referendum on the player. When, at their heart, political games are built on IC exclusions, preferential treatments, and bargains that involve some compromises and losses. That's what politics is.

Unknown Armies had a mechanic defined at chargen called Stimuli - so, every character has a Fear Stimulus, a Rage Stimulus, and a Noble Stimulus. These Stimuli can be invoked through play for various effects, to allow characters to get a significant boost when acting in accordance with their Stimuli. It might be a more workable method to adapt the Hills to Die On, which I like the IDEA, but might be a little too freeform to be workable.

"Not reading the damn book" is, in my experience, at least 70% of the problem in any discussion about social resolution mechanics.

How exactly do we define "posing quality"? Eloquently written? If so, then we have a requirement for "using my XP-purchased skills and abilities effectively as a social character" that we have for NO OTHER CHARACTER TYPE, including the ones who can kill characters from afar without any interaction at all. Earlier in the thread, it was suggested that we somehow police for the social equivalent of not posing that you've decapitated someone by blowing glitter on them...which I assume means that poses should, then, be somewhat accurate to the realities of psychological influencing and manipulation. Who gets to judge that? Should I? I mean, I have a Ph.D. in a mental health field, and I teach theories of personality and development, as well as psychological influencing skills /specifically developed/ to bring about changes in thoughts, feelings, and actions in other people. And most of what people tend to say on MSB about how people's minds and affiliations are changed is just flat nonsense, and tends to completely ignore what would be realistic effects based in appearance, demeanor, apparent social status, in-group markers, and non-verbal communication, as well as the psychological pressure a person can bring in a single moment.

And an accurate system would not be weighted in the target's favor - people are actually pretty easy to manipulate, especially if it's something that they can do in the moment. And if you can get someone to do something in the moment, you can generally get them to do it long-term. You CAN build up obedience in the long term, through small favors that snowball, but you can just as easily do it the other way around if you have the right conditions and skills, and get them to buy in BIG, and then they'll cooperate afterwards even if they hate it, because they feel like if they've done X, they can't back out, or they've invested too much not to do Y as well.

One of the big problems when we start talking about "accurate" depictions of social skill use is that we dump it all on the actor, when one of the major problems is the target. PCs do not act like real people. PCs act like puppets moved around by real people who know that none of the shit in their lives is real. There is no way for an IC actor to authentically recreate the pressure and influence that a good social manipulator can bring to bear, because the target, fundamentally, /does not care/ about the things that a real person in that situation would care about, and don't make decisions as if they do. Instead, the player behind the person is always evaluating on a primary level, "Does this make for fun for me," rather than "would this be compelling for a person who really lived this life". Which is why threats and intimidation hardly ever work in RP - it doesn't matter that someone in that position might actually be terrified of losing their job/life/family, because the PLAYER is more interested in "plucky hero resists" than "cowed victim retreats".

And there's nothing wrong with that. But part of the reasoning of social skill systems is because game designers understand that all that shit has to be abstracted, because it is /impossible to portray accurately/, even assuming that Dunning-Kruger doesn't kick in and suddenly everyone thinks they're an expert in psychology and sociology because hey, they're people, so how hard can it be? What requirements for realism and authenticity are we making on social skill TARGETS, and what is their responsibility for making the play experience of social skill actors fun and realistic? We can't ask everything from one side, and nothing from the other.

@Ganymede said in Social Conflict via Stats:

@Pyrephox said in Social Conflict via Stats:

Social stats/skills don't need to work on PCs, IF they work on NPCs and work in meaningful, predictable, usable ways.

And this is why I have yelled, up and down, that a successful game is going to need some sort of off-screen system that allows the players to directly affect the setting. That's where Social/Mental skills come into play. RfK did this well, and that's why it was so kick-ass the first time around.

They fell down a bit - namely, they had a GREAT system for the long-term, big influences, but not the small-term, immediate influences, particularly where NPCs were concerned. They were, however, one of the few CoD games that made a real effort at adapting Conditions and embracing the changes that the system made to social interactions in MU*s. The "bargaining" aspect of gaining Conditions in exchange for doing certain things was very cool.

@Ganymede said in Social Conflict via Stats:

@Kanye-Qwest said in Social Conflict via Stats:

Conversely, if you spend your cg points to pump up social stats, why in the world would you not use them? If you don't use them, what is the incentive, ever, to pick up those mental/social stats?

Ending combat. It's like whipping out the Majesty card in V:TES. You can effectively end a combat scene in moments with a few easy rolls.

A good game takes this into consideration, though, and makes social/mental characters useful.

And that is where, IMO, a lot of games really fall down. Social stats/skills don't need to work on PCs, IF they work on NPCs and work in meaningful, predictable, usable ways. And in my experience, a lot of staff balk at even letting PCs use social skills/stats against NPCs in any meaningful way. You're far more likely to get a "no, you can't do that" regarding social maneuvering against NPCs than you are if you say, "I'm going to beat him up." Which renders social skills doubly useless.

I think there's two main 'phases' of social interaction that any social resolution mechanic has to cover, too: the short-term and the long-term.

Short-term interactions are those off-the-cuff attempts to talk your way past a guard, or get someone to follow you into that dark alley, or get someone to rethink drawing that knife on you. Your long, drawn-out mechanics are going to make these things /nightmares/, which means that people are going to be even more resistant to them.

Long-term interactions are things that involve lasting or major shifts for a person - coaxing someone into giving up their society's secrets, or blackmailing someone into supporting your next proposal at council, seducing someone into betraying an ally, or talking your way into an important position you're probably not qualified for. Having an easy, abbreviated mechanism for these tasks makes them feel pushy and too easy, which means people are going to resent being subjected to them.

So, I feel like a good social resolution system really should have variant mechanics for on-the-spot influence (which would explicitly be short-term and relatively minor, not impugning on anyone's deeply held beliefs or values), and for lasting manipulation. Call of Cthulhu broke out Fast Talk from Persuade for just that purpose, but only the skill differed, not really the /mechanics/.

@Misadventure Honestly, I disagree with a lot of those, on a design basis. The social conflict system should not be inherently more complex than any other conflict resolution system that the game has, nor should it be accurate to human psychology - any more than the typical RPG physical combat resolution system is accurate to real world combat. Not least of which because the average RPG player has less of an understanding of the realities of human psychology than they think they do - nowhere is Dunning-Kruger in more effect than the average RPG player's assessment of how hard it should be to persuade their character to do something the player doesn't want the character to do.

I will say that the social conflict resolution system should be very clear and well-explained to players, so that they understand it, what it can do, and what it can't do, before they choose to make a character for the game. I also do like the idea that really big and lasting changes should take time, effort, and investment to accomplish. Talking your way past a guard one time might only take a couple of rolls, but creating a permanent mole in the guard should take a while, and require the character to DO THINGS to make their pitch more appealing/terrifying.

I am, as is probably painfully obvious to anyone who has read more than a couple of my posts here, entirely on the side of stat-based social conflict resolution. I don't think that people who want to play a smooth operator in their pretendy-fun-time games should have to BE a smooth operator any more than people who want to play ninja should have to be ninja. I don't see RPGs as "collaborative storytelling", but as a game. Characters are pieces in that game, whose interactions are governed by rules. If you aren't prepared to play by the rules, don't play the game.

...now, with that said - I recognize and acknowledge the fact that people who play RPGs can attempt to use the social rules (or magic/superpowers that affect other characters' thoughts and feelings) to do things that are simply UNFUN for other players. So, the rules of any social conflict system should be written (or altered, if using a pre-written system) to take that into account, particularly where issues of sexuality and in-character love are concerned. No, a player should not be able to force a character to have sex with their character using the dice without that player's consent - but that's true whether it's using combat dice to rape the character, or social dice to "seduce" the character. But I DO think that one character should be able to use seduction skill (if that skill is allowed), to befuddle another character so much that they let slip the key, or look away from guarding the door for a moment, even if that's not in the best interest of the seduced character, and the player doesn't want them to, provided that action is within the confines of the rules.

IDEALLY, people would cooperate to find a solution that makes both players happen (whether the characters are happy or not), but when you play a game, you have to acknowledge that sometimes, a move is not going to make another player happy, because it interferes with their plans, goals, or desire to win. That's why rules exist.

That said (x2), I really do like systems that reward players for cooperating, whether they win or lose, in a social contest. I'm a big fan of the Doors system, although it's not perfect, for trying to develop a method that allows people to use a wide variety of skills to exert influence, that encourages players and GMs to negotiate the outcome while still providing firm guidelines, and that rewards players for accepting negative consequences for their characters.

@Arkandel said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.:

@Pyrephox said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.:

Does this mean you can't have a respectful MU* set in the World of Darkness? No. But I will say that I think it takes a lot more thought and intentional management than it does in some other worlds and systems. And that very few games put that thought and intentionality into it.

Make it consent-based. Done fixed.

Nope.

Functionally speaking, many games do operate on a loosely consent based system when it comes to the direct use of mind/personality-altering powers on other PCs. This does not stop harassment, or social pressure to agree to have your PC so altered, and it can, in fact, make the problem worse. Because obviously you agreed to become that PC's ghoul, so you should have realized that she'd use her power to loan your character out to her sadistic friends. After all, ghouls are furniture, and if you didn't want to be furniture, you shouldn't have played a ghoul.

EDIT: Note, I'm picking on ghouls not (just) because of my egregious dislike for Vampire, but because it's one of the starkest examples of places where the system and setting are explicitly written to be /rapey as hell/, with plenty of room for crossover from IC assault to OOC harassment, AND there's not really any way to stop an average human from being ghouled if a vampire wants to ghoul them, so the PC's IC defenses are very limited.