Posts made by Pyrephox

@surreality It is one thing that has always bothered me about WoD games. "Playing the monster" is not a bad thing - in fact, you can get some great, intense, fun, and also thoughtful experiences out of exploring what that means.

But WoD is not meant to be played with a random collection of internet strangers, and when it comes to making a space where everyone can play and have fun, it doesn't do it well, especially in the hands-off mindset that a lot of staff have. It's meant to be played among a small group of people who have agreed to the rules and assumptions of the campaign - if you're going to be full-blown horrific monsters, then everyone's on board with that, and you're probably going to be laughing as you stab each other in the back.

WoD/CoD isn't really even meant for PvP. All of those horrific, decadent elders/fun police/betrayers/etc aren't really meant to be the default PC. The default PC is the young convert, with their humanity still fresh in their minds, trying to buck the system as much as they can without getting horribly murdered. Those elders, etc, are the default /antagonists/, which is why the setting is built to make them horrible. Blood and Smoke is even explicit about this when they talk about the Laws: The Laws are literally written to be kinda stupid so that PCs have ample reason and opportunity to break them and create dramatic plot by doing so. They are NOT meant to be something that actually works and creates a stable and functioning society.

The mechanics are not written with an eye to using powers and skills on other players, and sure as hell aren't balanced for it. Even CoD, which has tried to make steps in this direction, simply isn't very good at making PvP an enjoyable experience for everyone concerned, and still has a huge amount of wiggle room for plausible deniability "I'm just playing to theme" when it comes to being a skeevy horrible harasser to other people.

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.

@Arkandel I'll throw another thing out there, specifically regarding WoD/CoD:

Sexual harassment and assault are written both explicitly and implicitly into the setting and system, which makes it more attractive for harassers. Explicitly, in powers and mechanics (no, not seduction rolls, but straight up 'you can change the desires of this target to what you want' or 'this person is devoted to and obsessed with you regardless of their true emotions about the matter'. And implicitly, in the whole "you are the monster" schtick which an unfortunate number of players take as license to let their ids run wild with the excuse of, "It's not the World of Happy Kittens!" And, from a strictly IC point of view, it's hard to argue that pretty much any CoD vampires, for example, would view hitting a human with a mind-altering power, then taking them home and drinking their blood while having sex with them as "bad" rather than as "Tuesday". So when a PC vampire attempts to do the same thing to a PC human, it CAN be a perfectly IC thematic action, while also being unwanted OOC harassment.

And people are generally bad on games about dealing with that.

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

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

I do like how KD's wiki and some other L&L games mention relationship status. Something in prefs/etc. could mention this sort of thing as well.

That's pretty much what I had in mind. I don't know if it will do much but I'm trying to think of a way out of this really bizarre situation, where sex/relationship based games like Shang or KD seem to do way better on the harassment front than MU* where such things aren't thematically emphasized.

Couple of different things.

One, in a sex game, it is expected and encouraged for people to contact others regarding getting sex, so it's a lot easier to be forthright about it. You don't have to wade through the indignant, "That's not what my intentions were" and "I was just being friendly!". On a sex game, you know what you're there for.

Two, most sex games don't penalize you for not playing with a particular person. If I block someone on Shang, this will have no impact on my play experience, directly on indirectly. There's no chance of them ending up as my boss, or as the person holding the One Vital Clue that I need to make my character effective. Sandbox games can afford to have policies that just say, "If you want to block someone completely, do it. If they try to override a block in any way, the hammer comes down," without having to worry about, "okay, we've got to organize a whole game battle scene, where the three most notorious creeps on the grid somehow got ahold of the Important McGuffin, and now everyone HAS to cooperate with them."

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

Do you think code could help with our social issue here?

Would voluntarily listing whether a character is single or not help dissuade this kind of behavior?

Not with the kind of subtle page creepiness that I was talking about, because my honest impression is that most people do not realize that they're doing it. You have some dedicated manipulators and harassers, but honestly, I've always picked those out real quick and cut them away. It's more of a social thing.

And, I'll agree with @surreality that relationship status wouldn't help, either, because for a lot of people, being hot/charming/awesome enough to woo someone away from their partner is part of the appeal. And, also, because the default relationship in a MU* lasts until you meet the next hot boy/girl. so "currently in a relationship" is no indicator of actual availability.

I definitely play more male characters than female character on MU*s (online tabletops it tends to be 50/50, RL tabletops it's almost exclusively female), and it's solely because I have significantly different experiences when I play male characters than when I have female characters, and one of those differences is the lower amount of page creepiness, /even when I play a flirtatious male character/. And, not in the harassment realm but still interesting, is that the opening page from people tends to be different when I'm playing male than female. When I play a female character, a majority of opening introduction pages tend to be somehow focused on the PC's appearance. Either "Oh, she's cute" or "Oh, wow, a female PC who isn't <insert various-degrees-of-derogatory here>". Whereas, with a male character, people's first pages tend to be more about what the character does or is, rather than how he looks (or doesn't look).

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

@Karmageddon Sure, but that's not the point. For starters I just didn't want to reuse any whether it was allowed or not.

But the real issue is any number of custom pages can be quite handy (maybe you want to add a quote to your character page for example, or create an primer for a PrP series you're running or... anything, really) and we're all used to them given how popular wiki use has gotten over the last decade.

Just as another perspective, I'm very much enjoying the standardized content and format. It's really very nice to be able to go to any given character page and see only the useful information, without fifty half-dressed photos, sparkly gifs, or every "funny" thing the character has ever said in any scene. coughs I also love not having to make a wiki page, or keep it updated. All of that just...happens. It's great.

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

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

Right now, there's not a lot of...coherence? Across mechanics, which means that you're learning a lot of completely unique and separate mechanical systems that nonetheless are using the same resources and stats, but not necessarily in the same or predictable ways.

I completely agree, actually. I'm profoundly unsatisfied with how disconnected the various systems are - they only have the most tenuous of connections with one another since each were just created to satisfy different requirements, and it's something I've spent quite a lot of time thinking about. The task system I'm very unhappy with currently (it only marginally fulfills some of the purposes it was created for, but is needlessly complicated and onerous, while completely failing to fulfill other roles envisioned for it), so I definitely want to change it significantly, but I don't think I have the luxury of doing that for some time, unfortunately.

I give you major kudos for being honest about that! And, really, I don't envy anyone the task of trying to build a game system while people are currently playing the game, especially with the numbers Arx is pulling at the moment, much less put in revisions.

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

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

@Kanye-Qwest said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

They are definitely meant to be mini-games that are opt in. Why do you feel like you'll be screwed if you don't participate?

I think there's a bit of necessity there, as tasks are a way to get resources, and resources are necessary to do some things - but those things are also meant to be opt in. The most rp/story 'necessary' use of resources I can think of is investigations, because it costs 25 social to start one (with a discount for each point of the investigate skill you have). But, you can get enough social resources to start an investigation by doing @task/work 7 times a week for ...well, 3 weeks if you don't have any of the investigation skill.

I'm honestly very curious what is making you feel you'll fall behind if you don't do tasks.

Out of curiosity, why DOES an Investigation cost social resources? I've never quite been able to understand that, conceptually. Originally, I rationalized as oh, I'm probably getting scribes or underlings to do a lot of the heavy lifting for me. But that doesn't really make any sense, because that's never factored in as far as I can see, with chance of success. Chance of success seems to come strictly from a PCs own stats and skills with no bonus or penalty due to the organization they belong to. Now, you can pay /extra/ resources to get a better chance, and that makes more sense in a way, I can see how that plays into it, but the initial cost seems to just be a random speedbump like the designers thought, "Hey, we need something for people to spend social resources on."

My guess and I am not affiliated with the game in any way is that it takes a far bit of time and effort to track down the people you need to learn stuff from and likely more pressure/influence/bribery/blackmail to get them to talk.
Unless it is something that can be researched completely in a library it takes a fair bit of effort. Heck even with modern tech a lot of investigations stuff requires things like stakeouts etc.
Now that could be RPed out but I can also see the logic of this work costs this many units of whatever.

That sort of makes sense, although 25 social resources is equivalent to what...12K silver? Even if you're a terrible investigator, you're probably not spending a noble's salary worth a week of effort on just getting people to talk to you. And I feel like the "not have five hundred investigations going on without thought" is already covered by the fact that you can only make progress in one investigation per week.

It's not, I should clarify, the IDEA that bothers me, but economies of scale are currently /really/ wonky when it comes to resources, money, how they interact, and what they're supposed to represent. I struggle to relate any of them or the requirements to how things translate from "I filled out this code bit" to "this is a logical chain of IC events that receives a logical result". Which is to be expected when people are creating a system from scratch, but I'm enough of a system person that it still bothers me when I interact with a lot of the systems. Right now, there's not a lot of...coherence? Across mechanics, which means that you're learning a lot of completely unique and separate mechanical systems that nonetheless are using the same resources and stats, but not necessarily in the same or predictable ways.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

They are definitely meant to be mini-games that are opt in. Why do you feel like you'll be screwed if you don't participate?

I think there's a bit of necessity there, as tasks are a way to get resources, and resources are necessary to do some things - but those things are also meant to be opt in. The most rp/story 'necessary' use of resources I can think of is investigations, because it costs 25 social to start one (with a discount for each point of the investigate skill you have). But, you can get enough social resources to start an investigation by doing @task/work 7 times a week for ...well, 3 weeks if you don't have any of the investigation skill.

I'm honestly very curious what is making you feel you'll fall behind if you don't do tasks.

Out of curiosity, why DOES an Investigation cost social resources? I've never quite been able to understand that, conceptually. Originally, I rationalized as oh, I'm probably getting scribes or underlings to do a lot of the heavy lifting for me. But that doesn't really make any sense, because that's never factored in as far as I can see, with chance of success. Chance of success seems to come strictly from a PCs own stats and skills with no bonus or penalty due to the organization they belong to. Now, you can pay /extra/ resources to get a better chance, and that makes more sense in a way, I can see how that plays into it, but the initial cost seems to just be a random speedbump like the designers thought, "Hey, we need something for people to spend social resources on."

My feeling is that tasks are designed the wrong way around. Right now you do stuff to get resources. I wonder if it wouldn't work better and be more intuitive if you spent resources to do meaningful stuff.

I might, if I were redesigning it, do away with silver income for people above a certain social strata. Instead, they'd get an automatic salary of social, economic, and military resources each week based on the total resources of the house/organization that represents how much of that house's resources that they, on their own authority, can bring to bear. Tasks, then, would be meaningful activities that require resources to accomplish, and once accomplished, would have some significant effect. Default tasks for noble houses might be Land Improvement (improve econ resources of the house), Play the Game (improve social resources), Military Training (improve mil resources), Trade War (reduce economic resources of the target House/Organization), Character Assassination (reduce social resources of the target House), Sabotage (reduce military resources of the target House), plus a few tasks devoted to whatever phase the game is currently in - right now, for example, it might be Calm the Commons or Rouse the Commons (increase or decrease civil unrest in a House's territory) that could have consequences for specific houses or organizations. Task thresholds would be large enough that people would have to get other PCs to support their Tasks, but without the current restriction on 'cannot be of the primary organization as the task', so if all the Velenosas want to spend their resources on making their House bigger, better regarded, and militarily powerful, they can, although it reduces their ability to be able to wheel and deal in the short term with other Houses, which means others could form an alliance against their interests.

Characters could still exchange resources for silver, if they wanted, or trade resources directly to artisans/crafters (who would continue to get silver salaries, not resources) so that they can accomplish their tasks (which would have much smaller thresholds, since such PCs are usually working for themselves, not for a large organization) in exchange for shiny gewgaws. Throw in a few special tasks that can ONLY be accomplished through spending large amounts of silver cash (Establish New Trade Route, perhaps), just to change things up on people.

To me, it just makes more conceptual sense for people to have the income first, and be courted on how they should spend/invest that income, rather than having to run around trying to get support for some nebulous thing that, for some reason, gives you lots of resources. You could also add some fun intra-House stuff where the heads of houses can tweak the incomes of individual members, including putting that dissolute, useless second cousin on a silver income (so he can carouse and drink all he wants) but no resources (because no one wants him making decisions anyway).

@surreality Ah ha! That makes sense, yes. I just don't generally think of those as Becomings, usually, so I was a bit confused.

It looks like an interesting game, although I have doubts about Yet Another Rural Setting.

Policies:

You have Hurt Locker twice on the wiki.

You have two consent-related entries that talk about "consent topics", but don't list them. Those topics are given in detail later on in the wiki, but I think it would be reader-friendly to at least have them listed in the entries that talk about consent topics in general.

You also have a policy about Becomings, but it seems that Becomings aren't things that could happen anyway, since it's mortal/mortal+ only? Unless it's just meant to refer to NPCs?

I notice that one of your themes is "underdogs". Are there any specific house rules or policies that will actively support that theme? Like restrictions or local scaling of Resources, or other stats?

Honestly, I think it's important to spoil a little bit (LITTLE BIT) of the plot in order to let players self-select whether their character would/could be involved. And I encourage offloading some of the burden of this TO the players. Like, "This plot is going to be action and investigation oriented, focusing on the Black Forest and negotiation with spirits. Characters will hear about the plot from either Old Man Trebond in the Guild, or through gossip among local wind spirits. Let me know if you're interested, and if you are, what angle your character might have taken to get on the trail."

That, and I try to do that backstory stuff before the actual scene starts. I'll often have a bit of OOC before we get started just saying, "Okay, Jones and Jessica - you've said you're with the Guild, so we can say that Old Man Trebond pulled you aside to say that the Guild leadership doesn't believe him, but he knows that there's been an evil locked up in the Forest for a hundred years, and the time for its bondage to be over is coming. He wants you to go check it out, and he's willing to pay you for your time. Meanwhile, Lex, you're a shaman, right? Well, for the past few days, the spirits have been getting mighty restless - they don't want to name names, but they've been throwing up images of the Black Forest whenever you try to ask about it. Everyone good with those ideas?" And if someone ISN'T, then it's their job to come up with a plausible "in" to the scene. (I try to be flexible about that, but I'm increasingly less happy with "oh, just happened to be walking by" and similar justifications.)

@skew Awesome! I should be around a fair amount tomorrow, so we should talk!

Updating: Hadrian at Angel's Legacy. (Also, would be delighted to have character ties if anyone's thinking of apping there - 600+ years of life is a lot of opportunity for old rivalries or friendships!)

@Arkandel Oh, I completely agree. I despise the culture of perving on celebrities of any stripe, like it's some sort of sacred right to know the detailed romantic relationships of that guy who pretended to be that character you liked that one time. I'm just saying, more, that there's no reasonable logical path from "decided to play video games on YouTube" that ends up in "expects strangers to drop by his house with schoolchildren".

@Insomnia said in Fanbase entitlement:

And seriously, why do these people think this is in any way okay?

The thing that really freaks me out is the responses to the article, far too many of which have some variation on, "What did he expect when he chose to be famous?"

Dude plays video games. I'm PRETTY DAMNED SURE he did not foresee this leading to people bringing tour groups to his house. Because that's a crazy thing.

@Cobaltasaurus said in No Man's Sky Thread:

Does anyone else have the problem where you'll go to lift off on the planet's surface, and instead of just going up a little it jettisons you right off of the planet? It's super frustrating when I'm just trying to fly to a new location that's too far to walk. >.<

This happens to me as well, although not very often.

@Jaded said in No Man's Sky Thread:

Has anyone tried being a trader or pirate yet? Right now the survival explorer aspect of the game does not seem all that appealing to me after a couple of days doing it.

I remember reading that it should be almost entirely possible to play the game without doing planetfall.

I have done some trading! Mostly when I had a specific goal (like, I just need 3Mil to be able to buy a better ship, etc.), but doing it full time is very possible, especially if you stake out a system or two with lucrative goods. You have two major vectors for trade: space stations and planetary trading posts. Both of these have Galactic Market kiosks that have a certain selection of goods. However, both of these also have ship travel, which is where trading is better - each NPC in their ship has certain random goods that they will buy and sell, at different prices. Prices that are starred are especially good deals when they're in your favor (and exceptionally bad deals when they're not). Given patience and a good memory for prices, it's possible to earn a tidy bit. You will earn MORE if you're supplementing that with goods you collect on your own, though.

I have not done pirating, although I have fought off pirates more than once (and died more than once). There is a bounty system, too, if you want to space fight but don't want to do so on "innocent" targets. much like everything else, though, bounties are random, so it's not possible to set out after a bounty, you just have to take them as they come.

Vectorized is my favorite. That, and when an alien with massive teeth and claws pops up, with its diet reading "plants".

Yeah, right.