Best posts made by Roz

Am I the only one who doesn't really care about Mandalorians?

Gimme Jedi and Sith.

@arkandel said in Staff and ethics:

@roz said in Staff and ethics:

I actually find your expansion on this a little odd. When I think of staff professionalism, I don't equate that with whether or not staff chats with their players.

Other than my pre-edit wording which... ugh, it's not that odd if you consider I've been on games (mind you, early in my MU* 'career') where we were warned to not 'fraternize with the players' a lot since it might paint us a certain way, and also to maintain the illusion of... I dunno, authority I guess.

I'm just saying, it's a thing for some MU* so I included it.

My opinion of that is that that sounds like a dumb thing of them. I mean, that's not even a good attitude to have in an actual workplace.

@kanye-qwest said in Staff and ethics:

@roz If your friendship can't survive one or the other of you saying "Hey, I think you are overreacting" or "can you please stop doing X because y?" then it's not much of a friendship, imo. And if they aren't really your friend, then why care about how they'll take it?! FREEEEEDOM! Ok the last part is silly but the first part, I mean.

Eh, it's not really about friendship surviving or not. It's about COI and also the appearance of COI. Which can be separate but related. If you're in a situation where you have enough staff that someone could reasonably recuse from a rough situation with a close friend, better to just do it. If you're on a small game with a small staff, that might not be an option, so you just try to be as above the board with it as possible.

But I think my feelings on the term "professionalism" are well documented. I don't like it for the sole reason that I think a lot of people take it to imply obsequiousness or being servile. I'm not about that life, and I'm definitely not down for the expectation that I will treat game obligations like a job.

I think that's just outright an incorrect understanding of the word (the obsequiousness aspect), so I kind of just refuse to treat it like it means that, because that's not what it means.

The playing on their own game bullet point is a tough one. I think it would definitely be better if most staffers didn't, but then no one would staff games. I like being in on the lore-writing. The creation of setting, and history, and plot. That's super fun for me. Lots of games don't even have that stuff. I think at the very least you should not be playing in any 'sphere' or 'faction' or whatever that you are staffing for. I don't care about staff alts being transparent or not. If you can't trust staffers enough to let them play quietly, idk. What are you doing there?

There are lots of games with only one or two factions and very little in the way of secret lore. I very much understand why staff Arx overall doesn't really play PCs. It's just a very, very different setting than plenty of other games. It's just very game-dependent. Most of my staffing has happened on one-faction, PVE games with a huge amount of transparency in terms of log posting, etc.

@thenomain said in Earning stuff:

@roz said in Earning stuff:

I think it's still important to note that while books often have more space to spread out than an episode of television, every scene in a book should still serve a specific purpose.

I still quite enjoy a lot of the Douglas Adams tangents that had, effectively, nothing to do with the story. Most of them were about Arthur Dent. (Arthur Dent and Fenchurch having sex while flying serves zero plot elements, and don't tell us much about the character, but it's still a fun story because it links to something later on.)

What I'm saying is that I think you and @faraday are over-analyzing this, and that I respectfully disagree with your position that specific plot-driven story is important as all that.

You're misunderstanding my point. Note that I didn't say the purpose needs to be about plot. I'm not saying that every social scene needs to delve into whatever plot is happening on the game. I'm saying that, in good writing, every word has some sort of purpose. Sometimes that purpose is plot, but sometimes it's about character, sometimes it's building something to call back to later, sometimes it's about revealing something -- maybe it's small, maybe it's insignificant, but it's still relevant and interesting in some way. Good writing has a point. I was actually specifically stating that the character growth in between plot is where I find a large bulk of my interest, and I specifically said before that when I said good writing has a purpose, I listed things other than moving plot forward. There are multiple kinds of purpose that are important to build in something like, say, a novel.

The problem is that bad social RP can end up without any purpose, without any point. You never manage to find something interesting in it anywhere. And when people have limited time to RP, they may not want to risk ending up in a total dud of a scene, even if there's also the possibility that they'll get something brilliant.

I keep having this serious problem where every time I see this topic come up on the unread list I just think of

@sparks said in Automated Adventure System:

On healing, one thought I had was that you could heal more often than the limit (which I might reduce to 30 minutes in Shardhavens), but it would cost you an amount of AP equal to the minutes remaining. I.e., if there was a 30 minute timer and you heal someone and ten minutes later they desperately need healing again, you could wait for the half-hour to tick over or pay 20 AP to skip the 20 minutes remaining.

One thing I'd keep in mind is that it puts a lot of pressure on healers to shell out extra AP to help save someone while that person doesn't share any of the burden. It makes sense from an AP perspective where AP=time, but maybe if there was a good way to share the cost with the person they're healing?

@kanye-qwest said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

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

has someone who wants to win at everything

sure, but that's not at all what @roz was describing.

I don't want to win at everything, just at the Info channel.

Vorkosigan Saga
Heralds of Valdemar

I will say this re: the Nox'alfar and the Nox treaty. Once we finally got to the point where it was officially happening, it did end up going pretty swiftly. But that was at least half a year, probably more, after our initial contact with the Nox'alfar happened. There were social rolls to even convince the Nox'alfar to come treat with the Compact. When they came the first time, there were some major diplomatic disasters that had the Nox'alfar walking away from the table and taking their potential special weapons with them. It was good social skills that managed to get some of those weapons at all, and they didn't go into the hands of the noble leaders who had been treating with them before. We had a whole war, and then the Nox'alfar started playing games (killing folks in the forest for fun) and there was a whole diplomatic process to bring them back to the negotiating table. And then there was the actual treaty negotiations which were, granted, pretty short. (Because the new treaty largely followed the old one.)

So there's also a perception issue here. But it's a situation in which there were consequences for flubbing the social/diplomatic stuff, and then victories earned by socially-focused PCs. It happened over the course of many months, and different people were involved in different parts of it. But the PCs who did the best in the situation were the socially-focused ones.

As to the systems: I know that prestige decay is definitely going to be a big thing.

Setting it before Korra would also make having a centralized and diverse location for play pretty difficult. Sure, you could set it in Ba Sing Se, which is a huge city, but it means that anyone who wants to play someone from outside the Earth Kingdom has to jump through mental hoops, and I feel like you'd end up with a constant sort of "is this a super weird, inexplicable number of other nation benders to be living here."

@kitteh I mean, I wasn't placing it up there as a gold standard, I was going through it because I think you were kind of making a claim that the diplomatic efforts there were over in the blink of an eye when actually it has been an ongoing process from back in Alpha. I was explaining it to object to the inaccuracy that seems to be a part of your concerns, because if people have concerns we should all make sure we're on the same page of accuracy so that the most constructive form of the conversation can happen.

Honestly the impression I'm getting is that you have a limited window of experience and you're kind of making extrapolations based on that. Like, a lot of the baddies out there aren't actually super black and white like you mentioned before. All of these things aren't clear cut with only combat as the option. So maybe folks need to dig sometimes to get at the truth, but there are lots and lots of options here. There are probably also a lot of socially- and diplomatically-weighted actions that have been taken that don't necessarily become public. So like, when I read you're stuff, it feels a bit like you're saying "Diplomacy doesn't have a big place on the game right now because of X and Y reasons" and I'm like "But X and Y aren't actually true/accurate?"

Also you say that it doesn't hurt to ask, but most of the time you're not asking questions about the new proposed stuff, you seem to be kind of making worst case assumptions about a bad way of doing it and say you don't want that. I mean, I'm not on staff, but it does frustrate me a little just to witness.

I have a half-baked idea but it involves -- if there's gonna be sheets, and stats for bending expertise, it would also be cool if people could spend XP on the other bending styles (other than their own) as an indicator of how well they've studied those styles to counter. (I thought of this after being reminded of a scene early in S1 on TLA where Aang is chatting with the Fire Nation guards while captured and is all "Huh you guys have probably never fought an Air Bender, huh." A big part of Aang's effectiveness in the series ended up just being that people had totally lost the experience of studying the styles of air bending.)

@botulism said in Diceless/Stats Optional:

@thatguythere said in Diceless/Stats Optional:

@botulism said in Diceless/Stats Optional:

@seraphim73 No, more PERMANENT Story Points. Temporary points come and go. Permanent is what you refresh to after a story ends.

So you start with 12 permanent story points (let's call them PST). A few Traits in cgen can cost PST, but not many. So say you start the game with 12. This means you start each story with 12 temporary, spendable points.

Things IC can give more, and you can go over that 12 - there's no max. At the end of a story, though, you reset to your PST (12).

Inexperienced lets you start with a higher PST.

My question on this would be how on a mush do you decide when the story points refresh? Every scene? Every week as x time? Etc, because not everyone involved will be on the same story track so refresh at the end of a story is kind of meaningless and can be contradictory. For example in the last week I was in two PRPs they were run by different people, PrP A started scene ended final scene scheduled, PrP B started and finished before the final scene from PrP A. Under the story point thing at which point would Story points refresh?

I'd have to have it on a set time. Every two weeks or something.

@ganymede said in Diceless/Stats Optional:

@botulism said in Diceless/Stats Optional:

No stats at all, then? That loses some people, too.

It seems to work okay for a lot of superhero games.

...True. But there ARE good players who won't do statless/consent RP.

And there are good players who won't do statted/non-consent RP. So you kind of just pick your audience.

I fucking hate the "Rey is a Mary Sue" bullshit I can't even.

Luke is a Mary Sue.

Anakin is a Mary Sue.

Star Wars is populated with super special heroic characters. The only reason we're having this conversation is because she's a woman.

Edit: in fact

@jennkryst said in Dark Ages Vampire -- Terra Mariana:

@the-sands So... I just have to make Sally's concept 'Unbeatable swordswoman who can never be killed,' thus making losing physical combat or death a violation of my concept! Easy peasy.

Yeah you're not going to be able to have any sort of reasonable discussion about the nature of social systems when you just say things like this.

For many years of my young life, I thought "albeit" was pronounced "all-bay" as if it were French. Who the fuck knows why.

@lithium said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

@bobotron I think it's the fact that people don't really care about how someone poses a punch, and then rolls dice, to get the effect, but people seem to care /fucking mightily/ about how a social thing is posed and how it conveys to dice.

So in essence, Dice are Dice, they convey what the pose cannot, so why is there such resistance to social dice?

Most RPers don't know much about actual combat. They don't have RL experience with it. (And, IME, RPers who do have RL experience with it do get annoyed at people posing things in a wildly inaccurate sort of way.)

Every RPer has RL experience with negotiation. Manipulation. Persuasion. It's an everyday aspect of everyone's lives. A lot of RPers are generally bothered by things they find to be improbable. It's just that the knowledge of what's improbable in certain areas varies drastically.

@Coin said in Things We Should Have Learned Sooner:

@Roz said in Things We Should Have Learned Sooner:

For many years of my young life, I thought "albeit" was pronounced "all-bay" as if it were French. Who the fuck knows why.

In some places, it's actually pronounced 'al-bait'. [shrugs]

@the-sands said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

@thenomain said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

There's a reason people who take the the Crafts skill push staff to let them use it to make cool stuff, because that's why they took the bloody Crafts skill to begin with.

My character has Crafts-5, good attributes, and Professional Training with Crafts as an asset skill (along with several other related merits) and I've never 'pushed' staff to let me make cool stuff. I have actually made two swords for my character that have increased Durability and a couple of cold-iron weapons for other characters who wanted them, but I have never tried to push for anything I would consider extraordinary (I did ask at one point if I could increase the Durability of a cold iron weapon by requiring more successes but when I was told no that was it).

I took Crafts because it was appropriate for the character, not because I wanted to 'make cool things' (he's a Professor of Medieval History who is focused on medieval techniques of construction and manufacturing).

The real thing that causes min-maxing is people wanting to be 'better' than everyone else, so they search for the best way to shave points to get some kind of advantage over the other players (and while my skills might look like that's what I'm trying to do with Crafts I don't think so. Yes, I have an outrageously good roll to Craft mundane items, but if I really wanted to be 'the guy' everyone came to to make swords I would be taking merits that allow you to make better than normal weapons such as Relic Maker).

There are also people who just want to be really good at the thing their PC is focused on. I feel like there's an implication of disdain in your words for people who would take Crafts and then want to use Crafts to do cool things, but why? That sounds really normal to me. People get excited for the areas their PCs are focused in, and there's nothing wrong with that. It is, in fact, good. It's good for people to find niches that they can creatively shine in. People like feeling like their PCs have value in the game. That's a sentiment that should be encouraged and balanced around.

@the-sands said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

@faraday said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

That now means I'm now 2 dots "behind" someone else who comes along and ignores the skill descriptions and plays a driver without the Drive skill. It creates a situation that is inherently unfair between those who follow the rules and those who don't.

Wait a second. We've already established that the skill description is nonsense. This isn't a case that they aren't following the rules. This is a case of you not understanding the game system well enough to realize that something was poorly described.

In other words, it isn't that they are cheating and have gained a 2 die advantage over you. It's that you have made a mistake.

If the game itself literally describes the skills in a way that is contrary to how the game is being played, it's not a newcomer building a sheet who has made the mistake. It's whoever came up with the skill descriptions or the staff/playerbase for playing against how the skills are written to be used.

I feel like GGK haunted my childhood in the best sense of the phrase.

@the-sands said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

@faraday said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

New players can't be expected to psychically know which rules to follow and which rules not to follow. It's a game designer's mistake for writing the rules that way and a staff mistake for not saying in their house rules "this rule as written is stupid and we're ignoring it" but in no way, shape or form is it a player mistake.

What you're talking about isn't a rule. You can keep saying it is, but it isn't. It's badly written fluff.

It's badly written fluff in the rulebook. If people new to the system should be disregarding the descriptions of skill levels, then I reiterate that it should be documented somewhere in a game's chargen helpfiles. The fact that every WoD veteran knows to disregard these descriptions is not helpful for someone new to a system. The idea that it's a beginner's own fault for not understanding where the contradictions or misleading text is in a sourcebook is a wildly unwelcoming attitude.

It seems like you want to complain people aren't following the rules but what you really want is for people to follow rules that don't exist and I'm sorry, but I can't "be expected to psychically know" to follow rules that don't exist anywhere.

The complaints are about the idea that newbies should know which text in a sourcebook to take to heart and which to disregard without any guidance from a game's staff or veterans. We're saying that it's a bad attitude to have and that it's unwelcoming to newcomers.

@the-sands said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

@roz said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

Yeah, I very much like systems where your stat/attribute and skill have different weights in the roll. And I like skill being the one that has more weight. It feels more accurate to life.

Agreed, but that is not the system being discussed. There are quite a few things I don't like about the WoD/CoD system and one of them is the relative cost and balance between skills and attributes. However, it's the system in use in most places.

Uh, as Faraday said, WoD is not the only system we're allowed to discuss in this thread. This is not a WoD thread.