Posts made by Roz

@wildbaboons Nice try, Danny, New Yorkers don't make eye contact with strangers.

@faraday People in general can. I've yet to see Nemesis be able to, unfortunately. Everyone who disagrees with him gets the "lying troll" line. It's honestly weird.

@nemesis said in What's your identity worth to you?:

5: I've always held the opinion that anyone who wants or needs to hide who their alts are is up to no good. Whenever I have a wizbit or access to the shell, I will also siteban or lock out via iptables any IP Address which turns out to belong to a relay/proxy agency for the same reason.

How do you feel about players who keep their alts private due to being stalked?

@arkandel said in What's your identity worth to you?:

1. Your real world identity - meaning anything past your first name, including your general geographical location (city, State, etc). Please remember if you e-mail or share documents using your e-mail accounts those often include that name!

I'm pretty free with my general geographic location. Like, I live in MA outside of Boston and I'll say as such. When I used to live in NYC, I said that, too.

I have a separate Google account with my online alias that I tend to use for documents to share with folks on games that don't know my real name, because my name is very distinctive and I'm pretty sure I'm the only one in the world with my first name + last name combo. But there are also people I've played with I've shared my name with.

2. This is a subset of the above but I wanted to isolate it... what about your gender, family status, religion, etc? That is, stuff about your social status.

I'm pretty free with that. I play a lot of male PCs, but I inevitably indicate fairly freely that I'm a woman IRL. And other social status stuff I'm generally fairly open about, including what I do for a living.

4. Your 'physical' digintal footprint; for example sharing pictures of yourself, but also even being on a voicechat with others; do you only do it with trusted few or go on general channels?

I don't tend to share pics of myself publicly on games, but I'll share stuff with more trusted friends. I'm not concerned about my voice.

5. Your e-mail address or other online traces of your identity outside of gaming.

I guess there are a few gamerunners who know my email! I don't generally give it out to others, though.

6. Your identity on games - are you at all concerned about people figuring out your alts, or who you play on other games, including non-MU*? What about the room you are in, or who you are RPing with?

I sometimes try to keep an alt quiet just to explore without folks being predisposed in some way. I'm not concerned with people knowing who I play on other games, which is why I've got a posted playlist.

I might be concerned with people seeing who I'm RPing with under very specific circumstances (like doing secret stuff on a game where stuff is also OOCly secret), but not in general.

@insomnia Yeah, it was 75 GB without (I think) the DLC

I'm very behind the times but Final Fantasy XV is now out for PC and I have a problem and it's called being on this roadtrip 24/7 while listening to old Final Fantasy soundtracks. Haha jk it's not a problem it's great

@ganymede If you use Chrome: View Image extension

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

The main reason to using, say, nWoD 1.0 is that people are already familiar with it. You don't need to explain how it works too much, you can just point out which books your MUSH will use and... that's it. You can then count on veteran players to guide others right from the moment you open your doors, something home-grown systems don't have - no one's a veteran. But open a nWoD 1.0 game and you'll get a bunch right up front.

Speaking as someone who went through the process of trying to learn nWoD stuff in the past year, I actually find this to be a bit of a damaging assumption to make. My experience is more that you can count on veterans to not actually have a great handle on how to talk about the system to someone who's just started to learn it.

@d-bone said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

But like.. I'm not advocating for fast advancement, I never advocated for that, I advocated for a realistically time frame for advancement to occur. If your game has 4 to 1 time dilation, 2 IG years seems pretty adequate amount of time to acquire a level of mastery that should be feasible... and not just 'expert', especially if that character is participating in .adventures or situations that test their mettle a lot. A game with a multiplicative system really makes such advancement infeasible.

If a game using FS3 were on 4:1 time, I imagine they'd adjust the amount of weekly XP that went out. (Because, like, you can adjust all of that?) But games running 4:1 seem super uncommon. Like, I hear that Firan used 4:1 at least at some point, but I've never come across it in the wild of any game I've checked out.

But the larger point is that game runners could adjust the amount of weekly XP super easily if they were running a super-fast game like that.

@wildbaboons @Packrat Roll Stat + Skill, Keep Skill + (Stat/2) + 1.

@surreality I'm sure. My big objection in this particular argument isn't really about the system. It's about the attitude of "blame the newbie for not knowing the 'common sense knowledge' that WoD vets have."

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

@saosmash Actually, I'm not sure these arguments (assuming you mean the whole Drive thing) are a good reason to avoid WoD/CoD. There are plenty of good reasons to maybe look at something else (many listed just above) but the fact that people argue over a stat like Drive and fluff is probably endemic to most systems.

Note that she said attitudes, not arguments.

@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.

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

@seraphim73 said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

Because as you say, someone with 5 Reflexes and 1 Sword is just as skilled as someone with 1 Reflexes and 5 Sword.

That was always my biggest beef with WOD though.

Someone with Medicine 2 (First Aid) + Int 4 SHOULD NOT IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM have equivalent skill to someone with Medicine 4 + Int 2. I don't care what the dice say - some skills have knowledge attached.

</petpeeve>

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.

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

This does not mean I agree with The Sands, though. I don't put the blame on the Newbie; I put the blame on the stupid people at White Wolf that came up with the idea of skill descriptions. As a veteran, I will tell you that they are patently misleading; all you need to know is: (1) having a 0 in a skill will result in a penalty to such rolls, either -1 or -3; (2) 4 is the supposed average for a person considered "skilled"; and (3) look at the total pool.

Yeah, and the concern would be pretty much solved by just having that last sentence of yours on a chargen helpfile somewhere.

@the-sands My experience of being a newbie going through WoD chargen is that people who have been playing games with the system for years consider almost everything to be "common sense knowledge." "The system doesn't play in practice on our game like the book describes" is 100% not "common sense knowledge." "Common sense knowledge" doesn't include "knowledge that veteran WoD players have accumulated over years."

@the-sands If the descriptions in the source material aren't applicable to the game, it's the responsibility of the game runners to document that somewhere easily accessible in their chargen process.

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

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

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.

If a make itself literally describes the skills in a way that is unsupported by the mechanism then it is whoever can up with the skill description that is at fault. That is the simple case with WoD.

Now if you need to assign any blame further than that is it fair to put it on the people who realize that the description is nonsenese? Because that is exactly what is being implied. Do I feel a little bit bad with saying 'it's the newbie's fault for not realizing that what was written was wrong'? Yes, I actually do. However, if you ask me to chose between blaming them and blaming the other people who realized that what was written makes absolutely no sense then I'm going to chose the newbie.

If somewhere in the book was written the description 'the ultimate weapon known to man' for the light pistol do you blame the other players for looking at the stats and saying 'no, I'm going to chose this other gun instead'? While it is understandable how the new player made the mistake of thinking that the light pistol would be the best weapon possible they still should have looked at its stats are realized such a description simply made no sense.

I think that blaming the newbie for trying to follow the direction of the source material is incredibly shitty and really indicative of some of the attitude that comes out of WoD games that makes so many of them so incredibly unfriendly to newbies.

@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.

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

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

make every part of the system important

So then you want Pastry Making to be important?

That's actually a semi-serious question. The point of asking is to illustrate that you simply can't make everything important, nor do I think should you. If I want to make a character who isn't particularly good at combat I should be able to. In fact, that's the whole reason some people argue for social combat. My character should not be badly disadvantaged by the fact I didn't chose to spend points on Pastry Making. If I want to make a character who is good at combat I shouldn't be completely ineffective because I didn't take social skills. I shouldn't be any good at social activities, certainly, but I shouldn't be in the situation of 'this character is worthless' because I am not good at social.

I think you're misunderstanding what "make every part of the system important" means. It means that if you have standard stats/skills that everyone is taking points in, there should be places for all of those skills to be important in the game. If you have social skills, there should be places in the game to use them mechanically. Don't make standard skills and let people put XP into them and then refuse to let them ever be useful in a situation. This comes up a lot in discussions of social combat/systems, because it's fair to say that a game shouldn't make social skills part of the overall package of what you can buy into if you can't actually use those skills mechanically in the game. (Of course, things like Background Skills in FS3 are freeform/user-generated, so there shouldn't be a guarantee of their mechanical importance. They're often about PC color. But, in FS3 terms, the Action Skills the GMs choose to include in their game should all be skills that are going to be used in the course of the game.)

Maybe a better way to think of it is "every part of the system should have places to be used/effective."

I have only played 5e but I've now played it with a wide mix of experience levels and all of the beginners (including me) seem to be on the same page about how accessible it is to learn. I really love it.