Posts made by Pyrephox

@Arkandel said:

It sounds like a Dresden Files MUSH might be up your alley then. But the go-to themes for urban MU* are usually intended to be bleak rather than the opposite.

Dresden isn't really what I'm looking for, either. Probably because the books are tightly focused on one /amazing/ character and his collection of Colorful Sidekicks with ever-escalating power and drama, it's hard to imagine that being a fun MU* on a long term basis (and yes, I know about Dark Spires, but it never attracted me).

I'd really like to see something NEW. Not even very new. But something where the cosmology and canon isn't already established, and the setting and game can grow into unexpected directions, with actual revelations and game-changers along the way.

Right now, I'm desperately craving an urban fantasy MU* that /isn't/ bleak, depressing, or fated for ultimate destruction, and where humans aren't just pawns and playthings in their own world.

I want more fictional cities, to be honest. With neighborhoods and cultures that tie strongly into the theme of the game they're hosting. If it's a horror game, then I want at least one Detroit-like abandoned district filled with dark, crumbling commercial buildings and a murder-house or five. If it's an urban fantasy game, I want weird geography and architecture that's designed to take advantage of ley lines, summon ancient gods, or imprison demons. If it's a political game, I want strong divisions of neighborhoods by class/heritage/political affiliation, as well as a few leisure districts where all types mingle, scheme, and get in trouble with each other. If it's high fantasy, there had better be some dungeons and ancient ruins involved.

I tend to feel like creating a setting that highlights and supports the type of play that the game is about is better, although not easier, than trying to shoehorn a real place into games that - often - are not ABOUT real places. Exceptions exist, of course. I mean, if you want to play a game about gang wars in the 30s (even if the gangsters are also wizards) then setting the game in a real city that had a lot of gang activity in the 30s makes absolute sense, and there are a lot of resources available to allow you to highlight the gangliness of the setting. But even there, you wouldn't spend much grid space on the places of the city where the 'action' isn't likely to happen.

Interactions with other characters that make me want to know what happens next, and feeling that my character is useful within the context of the game. Not central or vital necessarily, but USEFUL. If I have someone who focuses on politics, and that's either nonexistent or not a viable way of solving SOME challenges, then I get frustrated. If my character can't form any interesting relationships with a variety of other PCs, I get bored.

@Sunny said:

Has seriously no one ever played in an experience limited campaign in tabletop?

I'm totally on board for an experience limited game, especially if it keeps things street level. But I do think the suggestions to limit cap or spending, but not both, have merit - every restriction is going to cramp people's fun to some extent - you want to make the fewest restrictions possible, while still crafting the game that you want to run. A low rate of XP gain, and a cap on XP acquisition, would seem to be enough - a med-to-high rate of gain THAT YOU CAN'T SPEND is just going to be frustrating, without a trade off of fun.

@Ganymede said:

I've said it before, but RfK's system is now my preference. It rewarded people for "doing shit," even coffee/bar RP. What you got from that kind of RP got capped at 7 beats per week, so you needed to go and do other kinds of scenes (thematic, events, etc.) or resolve conditions and aspirations to get more beats.

The most substantial part was being responsible for claiming your own beats. You felt like you had control, and that was important too. I wrote my beat-claims up like they were journal entries, which amused staff more than once. The beat-claims also served as a good way to figure out what the fuck happened last week.

Yeah, it was like report-writing -- except it wasn't. You could do whatever you want, as long as staff had some idea that your claim was legit and that the RP actually happened.

I really miss that part about RfK. I probably miss it the most.

I loved RfK's experience system. It was fantastic, even when I didn't claim all the beats that I was technically entitled to some weeks. And I also wasn't a particularly funny writer, but I could use the +beats as kind of a quick tracker of what my character and done, who they'd met, what happened, when I might otherwise forget it.

**Do/did you play in a tabletop game now or in the past? **

Yes! Both, although right now my tabletopping has been limited to virtual realms.

What games(s) do/did you play as tabletop?
AD&D
D&D 3/3.5/Pathfinder
D&D 4th
D&D 5th
Call of Cthulhu
13th Age
Unknown Armies
Little Fears
GURPS
Changeling: The Lost
Champions
BESM
HERO
Shadowrun (3rd and 5th)
In Nomine
Blue Rose
Edge of Empire
Rifts
Dark Heresy

Are/were you the GM/ST/DM at your tabletop?

Many, many times. I've GMed most of the above games.

Would you tabletop if you had the opportunity?

Yessss.

Do you have the opportunity but choose NOT to tabletop?

Only if I found the people unfun to be with, or the timing didn't work out to my needs. I would LOVE to get back into a RL tabletop game, especially with the right group.

@Cobaltasaurus said:

How do you make the metaplot open to any PC? Not contingent upon one PC? And at the same time make PCs feel like they have a special part in the metaplot?

I know that in games where there was a metaplot, I've often felt like the actual PCs involved didn't matter. It often felt more like the staff just needed someone to stand here and do this at this particular time, and it could have been ANYONE. This is partially, I think, because the metaplot was...too plotted, and often very oriented in the past. "This really cool stuff all happened a long time ago, and the job of the PCs is to uncover it at Dramatic Moments, not to /change/ anything." A consequence of the attempt to coordinate 50+ characters, I think.

To specifically address your question - what about front-loading things and being willing to step outside the linear plot box (which doesn't work all that well for long-term MU* plots anyway). Basically, ask every player upfront if they want their PC to be a part of the metaplot. Some people are not going to want to be. But for those that do, their character gets Something Special that's related to the plot. Or, preferably, PLOTS. Make those plots a lot more If...Then... than MU* plots often are. Something like:

Setting: Brass City By Night

Long Term Plot 1: Descendants of an ancient coven are being drawn, all unaware, back to places of power where their ancestors sealed away horrors from the material world. When the descendants enter those places of power, monsters will be unleashed to stalk the city, and must be destroyed or resealed.
How many PCs directly affected?: Up to 13.
What PCs do: By virtue of their blood, the PC Descendants are living keys that will automatically unseal the prisons of certain horrors. However, their blood also gives them the power to rebind those horrors, although it will take three, five, or seven of them working in conjunction to do so. PCs who start chargen with, or acquire during play, Occult of *** or more get an automatic Int+Occult roll to know (at chargen) or stumble across their heritage and the connection to the Horrors. All players will be informed of the particular site or sites that will trigger an event for their PC, and that this will be a dangerous event. It's their choice whether their PC seeks that out or not. Rituals to reseal the horrors will be teamwork actions of Presence+Occult, extended, requiring 5 successes + a number of successes equal to how many weeks the Horror has been free, with each roll taking five minutes. While the horror's minions attempt to murder them, of course. Horrors are ephemeral beings and have banes and bans that can be researched to make it easier to lure them to a suitable sealing place and keep them there during the ritual.
Places of Power, the Seals, and the Horrors: (1) An intricately inlaid tile seal in the front hall of the first Brass City Police Station. It holds Marik, Lord of Chains. Passive effect: while Marik is bound in the Police Station, rolls to resist the impulse to act violently there are at a -2. Be sure to put up frequent news posts about Yet Another Accusation of Police Brutality at least every two weeks, and that cop and criminal PCs know about the penalty. Give them a Beat for playing out a scene where they indulge the impulse to be violent and it hurts them professionally or personally. (PC: Jane Doe. Let Jane know that when she enters the police station, she needs to call for staff. When Marik's seal breaks, Jane will receive a +2 bonus on all attempts to break or open locks while he's free. Once free, Marik will trigger a panic, and flee into the nearest weak-willed host - his priority will be to create an enslaved cult, and eliminate the Descendents as he can identify them. He has a 2 dice pool to start with to identify them, but it grows by 1 every week as he becomes more familiar with the modern world and gathers followers. See Cultist character sheet and Marik character sheet for powers and other stats.), (2) The Old Hanging Tree in Center Park. It holds Cassandra, the Soul-Stealer. Blah blah blah...

Long-Term Plot #2: The God-Machine is attempting to use certain people to bring certain pieces of far-flung infrastructure together, hoping to piece together a bit of itself for one of its infinitely complex, mad experiments. When the pieces meet one another, they join, which has direct effects both on their couriers, and gradually, on the whole city. However, the person who possesses the WHOLE piece of Infrastructure could have unprecedented power...at the cost of giving over their soul to the Machine.
PCs Directly Affected: up to 6.
What PCs do: PCs start the game out with a gift, heirloom, or stolen item (as appropriate to PC background) that resembles a piece of character-appropriate jewelry or accessory. It is, however, distinctive, and the character has a +1 to a certain skill as long as they have it in their possession (and gains the Bereft Condition if it is not in their possession, gaining a Beat if they take negative personal or professional consequences because they are trying to reclaim it). PCs also know a list of people who, should they meet them in a scene, Something Will Happen - in this case, the two items that each carry will attempt to fling themselves at each other, and will bind together, creating something new. The new item (see the list of proto-Infrastructures) can only be held by ONE PC, but will have boosted bonuses for having it in their possession. Not having the item still subjects the PC to the Bereft Condition (which fades after a week, provided the PC does not gain a Beat from pursuing the object). Once completed, the bearer gains a significant occult ability (powered by Willpower). HOWEVER, the bearer no longer generates Willpower normally, and if the bearer runs out of Willpower, it is as if they are affected by the Soulless condition until they find another of the city's pieces of Infrastructure and 'recharge'...or until they destroy the item, or it is taken from them (at which point they gain the Bereft condition instead). (This item, if not destroyed, may also be used as a Significant Item in later plots.)
List of PCs and Items: PC1 - silver choker (+1 Crafts), blah blah blah.

So on and so forth - you can have varying levels of staff involvement, or (as with the items) staff can serve mostly as "kick off" points, while PCs can do most of the actual "plotting" themselves, once they figure out that there's Something Special. You can hold off introducing the "last pieces" of a plot you don't want to "fire" just yet by adjusting the rate of people with specific Special Backgrounds hitting the grid, and you can always introduce another plot that deals with 6-10 people as the game grows, without damaging the specialness of the earlier PCs.

Man. That list is pretty much a wish list of what I've wanted in a game for a while. Awesome!

@Arkandel said:

I'll bite.

Doors. How would you use them in everyday RP with other PCs?

I am not @tragedyjones but I'll take a stab at this one, with the caveat that this is only my experience/take on it.

With PCs, Doors, I find, are best used as a framework for OOC conversation about what would have the best chance of getting a PC to sign on to an idea or attempt at manipulation. They're great for a framework, because the initiating player has to develop a /concrete/ end goal. "My PC would like to convince your PC to support her in the upcoming election, and I'd like to work from the Doors system to do so." Assuming the other player is cool with that, you both now have a frame of reference, and can work out the answers to the following questions:

What's the targeted PC's initial disposition? Does My PC know something that might improve it if they accepted it ? (Soft leverage, or a scene/roll made to improve the initial disposition.)

How many Doors does the targeted PC have? Would (action of my PC) be something that has a chance of opening a Door? Would you like to scene this out, or should tickets to the Very Exclusive Event just arrive in your mailbox with a "Hope you like this," note from My PC? If my PC wanted to turn you against the other candidate, would you be comfortable with, perhaps, a contested and extended action while we scene debating the relative merits of the candidates?

Basically, I try to give the Target PC ultimate control over what has a chance of working (and if the desired goal is feasible at all), and then use the dice and the Doors mechanic to decide if it DOES work. Doors make a great framework for discussing social actions so that no one (unless they're just completely opposed to dicing social actions at all) feels railroaded or like the goalposts are being changed on them. Caveat: I haven't ever moved to Hard Leverage or Forcing Doors, so can't speak to that.

I've always liked the "you create an alternate universe when you go back in time" solution, where the AU starts from the baseline assumption that it's the same as it was in the prime universe, but you can send it completely off the rails by dicking around with it, without invoking any particular paradox. But once you hop to an AU, you're stuck there, so if you go "forward" in time, it's going to reflect the new reality, not your old one (which still exists, but in another universe).

@FoxStevenson Single sphere Changeling seems to be a real struggle of a game to keep up and running. The only one I've seen that lasted any appreciable amount of time was the first iteration of Darkwater, so don't feel badly. I was enjoying it, although I had to disappear for RL stuff, and then just couldn't get back into the swing of things. I think it's doubly hard to take over something for a friend - MU*s really seem to need to be a project of passion, because they're pretty thankless otherwise.

But it was a great setting, and a fun game, while it lasted.

Even if you're not using GMC, something like character breaking points might be a good idea for staff to have, if your focus is on horror. Unknown Armies uses "stimuli" (What will make your character rage, what makes them scared, and what makes them be better than they usually are.) that serve much the same purpose.

Keep plot scenes small and intimate - the more PCs, the harder it is to hold the right atmosphere. I think some of the /best/ horror I ever ran was a solo campaign in CoC, but probably my most successful game (in terms of people being actively creeped out and talking about it years later) had four PCs, and I deliberately split them up at times, and used the MU* tools to ensure people were receiving, in some cases, personalized emits and pages that isolated them emotionally, if not "physically".

Slow burn is also a part of it, as is the unknown factor. WoD, in some ways, buffers horror by making it known - oh, these are the werewolves, these are the vampires, and the PLAYER knows what they can do, even if the character has never heard of them before. If you want to really run a horror game, throw that crap out the window, or have your monsters deliberately violate expectations. Furry murder-machine is a physical threat, sure, but it's more of an action piece than a horror. Watching your ten-year-old foster kid scream and convulse on the floor, her skin splitting open and /something awful/ clawing its way out to focus on you with three pairs of eyes the color of blood moons?

Horror tends to also be as /personal/ as possible. Even more than having your foster child turn into a monster, having someone focus on something horrible that is happening to them, bit by bit, can really bring the horror home. Describing to someone how they can /feel/ something underneath their skin, scrabbling and scratching as if looking for a weak spot to tear its way out can evoke more tension and invested feeling than describing someone else's pain or injury.

Also, I would suggest that really effective horror involves choice. There's an appeal in the "helpless" sort of horror, but if you really want players to get /involved/? I always recommend putting them in situations where they have to make choices. One of the most effective horror scenes I ever ran involved a PC having to decide to cut off his own arm...and because he was the only one of the group who had the tech knowhow, having to /talk another PC through how to cut off off his arm without killing him/. I didn't make him do that. I didn't even tell him, "If you don't get rid of that arm, it's going to kill you." I just made sure that the world around them showed the consequences enough so that when his arm was infected, he had the information he needed to make that choice and follow through on it.

I think, first, you have to define what you mean by "dark", because there's a lot of things that can entail. Supernatural horror is one kind of dark. Bleak, existential nihilism is another. Let's-be-bad-guys id-exploration can be another form of dark. However, how you'd run those three games would look very different from one another.

The "blind rolling" thing can sometimes be an effective tool for ramping up player tension - although tension is, again, something different from a dark theme. However, it relies on a certain amount of trust between player and GM, and if that trust isn't there, then it tends to just cause irritation.

For me, being able to play or run a dark theme relies on explicit player buy in (wanting to have a dark experience and everyone being on the same page about what that means - so, communication), stakes that make the PCs invest themselves in fighting against the darkness (in my experience, PCs in a dark game need to care /even more/ about something in the world than players in a bright game, because something has to keep them going when everything goes to hell), and just enough ongoing success to keep the players invested even when everything falls to pieces (relentless failure and loss breeds apathy and emotional distance - if you want to keep players engaged, they have to have enough successes that the failures REALLY matter). And enough trust in the GM that while horrible things will happen to the PCs, the GM's first priority is making sure that those horrible things are fun for the /players/.

@Lithium said:

@Pyrephox

Larp rules are horrid.

They're even worse than pure consent imho.

Way to easy to cheat at rock paper scissors.

Which proves that it's hard, I guess. But at least they are trying to match the system to the environment, so the process might still have value, even if we have different resources (such as code) to help promote a more robust outcome.

@Thenomain said:

@Groth said:

One way would be to take the popular RPG and liberally rewrite all the mechanics to better work on MUSH.

Thereby alienating everyone who knows that popular RPG.

Mind you, this is out-of-the-box thinking, so I shouldn't naysay it out of the box.

It seems to work reasonably well for Mind's Eye, and probably a lot better than trying to LARP with a whole bunch of dice in your pocket. I suspect it'd be a good idea to take a look at LARP (not just WoD) mechanics and systems when looking at MU*s, since they have the exact same design problem, although a different set of conditions to accommodate.

@surreality Of course, then you run into those folk who say, "My character doesn't back down when intimidated, they go crazy and fight with every bit of combat dice they have." Which means that you get people walking around with all RAR I'M TOUGH because they put all their dice in combat, and none in social skills or resistance abilities. Because they know that if it comes to a social test, they can just move things to a combat footing, where no one doubts the effectiveness of their skills.

Basically, there are always assholes. You can't define a system by how assholes will use it, because every system just privileges a /different set/ of assholes. A system also can't stop assholes from being assholes - that job needs to fall to staff, and trying to offload basic game management skills to the system is one of the reasons why game cultures BECOME toxic. If, when someone skeeves on you by trying to dice-force you (and this kind of abuse is often really aimed at getting the /player/ to do something sexual) into TSing with them, then if you don't feel supported to say, "I don't feel comfortable with that kind of play with you. I don't mind if they get seduced, but we're not going to play it out, and my character will feel guilty in the morning, not fall in love with yours." and know that the staff has your back, then that's something wrong with the /game culture/. Because that sort of situation is not what any social resolution skill system is meant for. For that matter, you should be able to go to staff if someone is stalking you around the grid and /constantly/ rolling combat dice at you. "What my character would do," is not an excuse to be an asshole. "What the rules will technically let me do," is not an excuse to be an asshole. But as long as we keep trying to build and run games with the design goal of "not having to confront assholes with their asshole behavior", then game cultures are going to continue to be toxic, no matter what system is used.

@Bobotron said:

@Pyrephox
Yup. I theorized about doing the combat for various RPG-based MU*s (an NWoD MUSH I was thinking about back when NWoD first came out, and for TheatreMUSH where it's a lot simpler, and allowing for Retests in that manner) but ran up against the problem I always run up against: the fact that, in WoD at least, the target can do things like spend WP to boost defense or blood and such to boost physicals, and how to reasonably account for that. You can do it (you can save everything and send it to the other player to react to appropriately, and give all the output and stuff when the target uses the appropriate command to process), but you have to have players who are paying attention to what the fuck is going on around them, which seems to be another separate problem.

Otherwise, things can be coded up as commands that set stats that later affect combat. Turning on/off a forcefield, turning on/off homing on a weapon, adding automatic status debuffs when someone is struck, etc. That's all really simple to code up.

Yesss, I like that. Would definitely lean towards automated modifiers of that sort. Although I would also support there only being a small number of them - I think one reason people tend to "tune out" during combat is because it can get incredibly complex in most tabletop systems, especially when you have, like, 10 PCs in a combat scene who all want to bust out their big guns in the climactic conflict.

@Bobotron said:

@Pyrephox
As far as #2, this is why so many games have automated, coded combat systems, particularly if they do not use an existing RPG property for their system. If the system says you are hit, it does everything -- proccs status effects, assigns damage, and if you're KOed it sets you KOed. The expectation is that you'll roleplay around the combat system output dynamically. It's an ingrained thing in one line of MU*s and their culture, and allows people to freeform the results if they want to do so.

Yeah, and I do like that. It SHOULD make combat smoother, and faster. The problem with a lot of tabletop systems on MU* is that tabletop systems tend to have a lot of corner cases and weird interactions between different rules and powers (especially once supplements are added) which then negates the benefit of coding, since people have to stop and work out "Well, okay, but if I have this power, it says X, so I shouldn't even be able to be hit by that guy, because he doesn't have power Y. But he does have power Z, that doesn't SPECIFICALLY say it overrules power X, but logically it would seem to..."

So, I guess, to my further note of design challenges for a MU* RPG system, it'd be "Must be a clean system, where the code can resolve 99 percent of opposed contests without intervention."

So, what sort of design challenges would we have in designing a game FOR MU*s, system wise? For the moment, let's assume a "generic" system that could be theoretically used for several different genres of play. A couple I can think of:

1. Character Growth. Most tabletop RPGs are designed around one of two philosophies of character growth. Either the event-based cinematic style, where it tends to model that movie trope where after a short period of intense training and challenges, the student will become the master, and characters advance quite rapidly because they're assumed to be embroiled in life-changing circumstances. (WoD tends to fall into this, IMO.) Or the style where it's expected where there will be a lot of timeskips and background growth involved - sometimes trainers and "level up costs" are involved in this philosophy. Neither of these really works well for a MU*, where much the RP isn't action based, but there aren't a lot of timeskips, either, so you can't brush off the "month spent in training". What would the ideal character growth philosophy look like for a MU*? It would have to be geared towards long-term play, assuming at least a year of "life" for a given character with play multiple times a week. It would need to be balanced towards experienced and inexperienced characters being on the same game, with each being able to meaningfully contribute. But, at the same time, growth has to MEAN something real for PC at any point in the life span, in order to get that sweet, sweet positive reinforcement.

I don't know that I have an answer for this one, but I do kinda like the idea of some sort of tagged skill-based system. Stats would be fairly static and set at chargen, providing a bonus (or penality) to skills. You could tag certain skills for "my character is practicing this" (maybe with a set "tagged boost" to rolls using those skills), and those skills will gain XP as you play, without you having to attend to it much (I like the idea of building a system that takes into account code and automation). Maybe with an aspect of other players being able to +witness that you've used certain skills in scenes, and if you have those skills tagged (or tag them before the +witness decays), you get a slight boost to XP gain for them. Slow, gradual XP gain, BUT with something like "perks" that can be chosen that give meaningful boosts and rewards for raising skills and abilities. So, for example, you might have - Player A has decided her PC is honing their investigative skills. So they've tagged Forensics (Base: 45, Bonus from Int: +10, priority 1), Interviewing (Base: 56, Bonus from Charisma: -10, priority 2), and Searching (Base: 48 Bonus from Awareness: +10, priority 3). Those skills being tagged means that she automatically gets a +10 to rolls using them (so they're now effectively 65, 56, and 68), and she has 2 Forensics Perks (Did You Just TASTE That? and Empathic Recreation), 3 Interviewing Perks (Good Cop, Respected By The Mob, and Columbo Questions), and 2 Searching Perks (Show Me the Blueprints, and City Tracker). She participates in a few scenes, earning 10 XP that's divided by priority - so Forensics gets 4, Interviewing gets 3, Searching gets 3. When she hits Searching 50, she gets the opportunity to add a new perk - in this case, she goes for Sherlock Scan, giving her the ability to make a reflexive Searching check when meeting a new person to determine important characteristics about them (occupation, recent history, etc.).

Throughout all of this, the only thing the character has to deal with, bookeeping wise, is choosing the tag skills and then choosing the perk. And if these are automated commands, staff doesn't have to process any of this, although it DOES mean work up front in defining the skills and perks appropriate to the genre of play. You can use the skill+perk system for Resources and magical powers/gun-fu/specific social connections, too. If you want to slow down (or speed up) character growth, you just tweak the rate of XP. Start Perk choice at, say, a base score of 20, add a Perk every 10 points, have 10 Perks per skill, and no one will ever have ALL the Perks in a given skill, allowing for even top level characters to retain some differentiation.

2. Self-resolution. A lot of scenes on a MU* won't have a GM or an "uninterested party" arbitrating the action. So whatever system is in place, it shouldn't rely a lot on judgement calls or GM fiat, although it probably should give a "handwavium" version if players DO want to simply agree on something OOC and move on - players are going to do this anyway, so might as well enshrine it into the design philosophy.