Posts made by Pyrephox

I wish I could. Work conference. BLEH.

I am not on that list, but I would be interested.

@Olsson Yeah, that's my general rule of thumb. I've found any time that my PC becomes dependent on another PC (or them on mine) my enjoyment plummets.

@Three-Eyed-Crow I do that as well. Usually, I explicitly put the ball in their court at this point. Like, "That's cool. Let me know if your schedule frees up and you still want to RP," and then I go ahead and move on with my character's life.

@Ninjakitten Yes, yes, yes.

I have moved away from demanding the player tell me Exactly How they're doing something for this reason. I'll happily take an explanation if they want to offer it, but I'm far more interested in clarifying /what/ information they're hoping to find, rather than /how/. Especially since, in my MU* experience, "how" is often used to shut down actions rather than facilitate them, because far too many GMs have this very rigid idea in their head of the "right" way to gather information on a particular thing, and if the player doesn't read their mind and do that thing, it doesn't matter how well their character rolls.

Personally, I've been steadily moving towards a more cinematic form of storytelling, where the whole idea is that you don't keep the PC away from the plot, but instead, failures add risk/complication/reversals. So, if a PC tells me that they want to investigate a murder but doesn't have an idea on how to do that, I first check their sheet to see what their relevant skills are, and then offer a suggestion that's in line with their character's skill. They roll, and a success gives them vital + bonus information, and doesn't alert their enemies. A failure gives them vital info, but creates some sort of threat or complication - why yes, you discover a witness to the crime, but as you arrive, a black car with tinted windows shows up and starts trying to murder you and the witness. Question the witness if you can get them out alive!

It's much more fun, in my opinion, than, "You found nothing. Sorry."

@Arkandel said:

@Pyrephox I think a good way to look at rolls as a Storyteller is to consider them hooks tying the players to your story.

Everyone wants to be useful in a plot; to come in and have an impact. Some players are proactive enough to do so no matter their stats but not everyone is, so giving them an entry point into the story ("roll wits+composure please") so you can hand-feed them some information perhaps unique to them achieves at least that much - they are now relevant.

Rolls are also an opportunity to highlight character aspects which are not often useful to them. A combat PC is never going to be out of fashion but how often does a locksmith, med student or car mechanic get to do their thing? Perhaps less often, so give them that nice fat exceptional success to go with the rest of the scene. I've specifically add elements to the story before to let the spotlight be shared.

Especially in systems like GMC where failure is actually rewarded it's even neater.

Yes, absolutely. Of course, the flipside of that is the frustration that can come of just having a run of bad luck, and your character not being able to do things that they really /should/ be competent at because the dice just hate you one night. A certain amount of failure can be fun (especially with a GM that lets failure add complications, rather than just shut down an action), but if it starts to feel like you can never succeed at a roll just because your dice have forgotten that high numbers exist, that stops being fun.

It's a balance.

@Arkandel said:

If I don't want to adhere to a roll's result I won't ask for it.

This is something I've had to get better at, and part of that has meant /calling for fewer rolls/. I've had to remind myself that I should not be calling for a roll for the expert investigator to pick up the basic clues at the crime scene that will give them a few ideas of where to go next. That's their /job/, and it should not necessarily be trusted to the whims of dice. Now, if they're a rank amateur, or they've snuck in and are trying to get the same information while avoiding people who want to kill them, that's enough tension and stakes that a roll is warranted.

I fudge sometimes, but usually to correct my own errors in designing an encounter or adventure, or when the random number generator has become actively unfun for players. So, if I've accidentally created an NPC that is murdering the PCs, I will quietly tone it down, or have them not use some power or ability that I know would finish off one or more PCs (as always - this is based on the type of game it is...if this is an old school dungeon crawl, then I'm much less inclined to 'pull blows'). Likewise, if the PCs are just /killing the hell/ out of a villain that I'd planned to be the Big Bad, I usually won't give it a get-out-of-death-free card (because that's annoying), but it WILL turn out that the villain was a henchman all along or will leave a clue hinting at a bigger, badder conspiracy. I try very hard, though, not to cut short PCs victories, or invalidate them, or give people powers/abilities that it's flat out unrealistic that they should have. Random nameless gangbangers are not going to have 10-dice pools for combat, or Willpower to spend against the PCs - if the PCs are going to plow through them, /that's okay/, because the PCs are usually better trained/more powerful than your average teenager with a street-bought pistol.

Another thing I will do that might qualify as fudging is completely change the outcome of the adventure when the PCs come up with a more interesting idea than I had, or when the PCs clearly /like/ their idea better than they would like mine. I might write up the adventure involving a human trafficking ring that's simply selling human victims to a mad scientist who is trying to perfect immortality by creating people-shoggoths, but if the PCs start putting together the clues and come up with, "The smugglers are worshipping a Thing in the sewers that is giving them monstrous flesh minions in return for regular human sacrifices, and that's so cool!' then...yeah, sure. That is exactly what is happening, and the lone mad scientist gets quickly rewritten as the high priest of the Thing-worshipping cult. Why not?

But extemporaneous GMing is one of my strong points, so rewriting an adventure on the fly (or writing one in the first place - it's not uncommon for me to start a plot with the idea of a single scene, and then just build everything from there based on what the PCs want to do) isn't a burden for me.

@Cobaltasaurus Fire. Fire works on JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING, and if it's not working, that's probably because you're not using ENOUGH.

@Cobaltasaurus Thank you! I really appreciate that offer, and have infinite sympathy for being filled with code-overload. I wish I liked Fate better. I don't like the Storyteller system all that much (although CoD is so much better than nWoD, which was much better in my mind than oWoD), but I just...I cannot be inspired by Fate or its derivatives. BAH.

@Lithium said:

@Pyrephox I know the appeal for the game I am building right now will be limited, but you know what? I'm still gonna build it and just hope that others enjoy it as much as I hope to.

Good! More people should do that - honestly, I'd rather see a bunch of smaller, healthy, and unique games than a few large games that try to appeal to everyone ever.

If the full Changeling 2.0 rules ever, ever come out, and I like them as much as I think I will, I would be open to trying something, although I suspect its appeal would be limited.

I desperately want someone to play the other half of a mortal/supernatural They Fight Crime paring. Yes, yes, it is cliched as all hell. I don't give a fuck. I want to have terrifying occult adventures with a supernatural and a mortal who are both regularly in over their heads in various ways, and having that delicious tension of the supernatural still feeling the urge to hide some things, or trying to protect the mortal from all the crap that will kill them out of hand, while the mortal is both competent and dedicated and not up for being protected or being shut out of things they need to know to survive in the crawling darkness of the CoD streets. I am happy to play either side (which is why I only designate "the other half"), so long as there is equal measures supernatural-failing-at-normal amusement and pants-on-head terror.

@Arkandel I can dig that. In CoD, I'd probably put conditions for every awesome use of artifact. Want to hulk out from that alchemical potion you found? First, break something precious that belongs to a close friend or ally to get the Essence of Loss that is the potion's active ingredient. I'd always have it be something that the player has to CHOOSE to have their character do, rather than something that was imposed on them, but power should cost. And, in a horror game, it should never be "enough" - the PC should always wonder, "Could I do more, could I protect more people if I were just willing to sacrifice more?"

@Arkandel said:

One of the things I'd like to see for BITN (and any Hunter game out there) is to have the monsters be on the winning side. It should never be that Hunters are actually pushing them out, where they are a factor to be reckoned with - the city should never be clean other than for the occasional, quickly dispatched horror who manages to get in only to become slaughtered.

Agree completely with this. It's hard to be a horror game when you can own the mayor, when your posse of unstoppable bros patrol the streets, etc. Horror typically comes from a feeling of helplessness, of isolation, of having to violate your deeply held principles for survival, or from something vastly important to you being at stake. Your life can be one of those things, but there's more variety than that.

Much better for a horror setting for the mayor to be owned by horrible things that demand blood sacrifice and protection in exchange for his continued political success, for example.

Which isn't to say characters should be all-powerless all-the-time. That's no fun. But the focus should be on, you know, "You can't save the world, but you might be able to save the neighborhood TONIGHT. Tomorrow is another day."

@Misadventure said:

I thought this was going to be American Horror style, where the players may be the same, but there are new characters for each major theme rotation.

I think you mean a different game? There's a horror game that was just advertised here that has exactly that premise, but it wasn't my read of Bump in the Night. I could be wrong, though!

@Coin said:

@skew @tragedyjones @Pyrephox

One thing I think would be great for BITN is for each Faction to have a basic reason for people to leave. Maybe they get sent on a mission or whatever. Just give people who want an out for their character that isn't death a reason to disappear for a while. And maybe write in that if a character doesn't log in for an amount of time--say a week straight--they are automatically assumed to have been sent on a brief mission somewhere--until they come back.

That all makes sense to me. I've always thought that incentivizing retirement of some sort would be a good idea for a MU*. Give people a reason to let an old character's story END, rather than them just hanging around forever, getting progressively more powerful, and having increasingly little to do with the setting. (In general, I'd like to see more positive reinforcement of desired behaviors, rather than punishment of undesired behaviors.)

@Thenomain said:

@Pyrephox

I must stress because I know it's going to be lost, the glamour/turn reduction now also applies to the amount you can gain per turn.

Dropping Mask now means something.

There's a lot to like in this update.

Yes! I like that very well. The Dropping Mask is quite cool - I'm not sure I really like the new Lunacy-alike thing they've got going on, but I can roll with it. And I love that it opens doors to the Hedge and puts a giant HUNT ME sign on your back, as well as the bonuses it gives. There's a lot of potential fun there.

@Arkandel said:

@Coin said:

I think high character death/turnover would help a lot with the last bit.

Do we have an example of a high death/turnover MU* which worked? And I define 'work' as in 'retained an active playerbase of more than a handful of people'.

It's not a rhetorical question, I don't know if we do. The successful games I can think of in this context were all ones the same characters were often played for more than a RL year each and involuntary PC death was infrequent.

The Greatest Generation seems to have been healthy and well-regarded for its time, although I never played there, so don't know anything other than the reputation.

@tragedyjones said:

@Pyrephox I'm not saying BITN has a built in self destruct time limit, but I am also not saying I am a man who has never flaked out on a game.

There is that. And let's be perfectly honest: I'm not sure I've ever played on a game for 18 months straight. I am easily distracted.

So easily distracted.