Posts made by Salty Secrets

I've always considered that science fiction is fiction about science, in the simplest of terms. It needs to be a fictional story predominantly about something born of science that isn't real yet though often it can be based on something that's currently real. The plot needs to be driven by or unable to exist without whatever fictional science is introduced but doesn't have to remain solely about that science once it's introduced. Alien can't happen without space exploration but as a movie it quickly becomes about the Xenomorph, not about the science of the stars, even if there's a message warning against the dangers of space exploration in there.

So to me it's not about "vs. science" or even "shock" but rather "something happens because of fictional science" whether or not that "something" remains the core of the story.

@Bobotron I have to suggest to please not steal your players's ideas unless they're on-board with it. Most people if you page them and ask "can I use that idea" will say yes but you don't want to mark yourself a content thief either. If you absolutely must use a player's idea without their consent at least try to put your unique spin on it so it's harder for you to look bad as a result. The best way to avoid that is still to just not steal ideas and to ask permission first.

Edit: at least don't use the word steal, whatever you do.

There is one final piece of advice I can think of and it's to make your players comfortable with your game, your plot and your setting. This doesn't mean pandering to them and it doesn't mean letting them get the better of you. It means creating an environment where you don't require story-tellers and plot staff to move things forward. You can and should still have them but don't build a game that only your chosen ones can run RP on confidently and safely.

Your players should be comfortable enough to drive your RP forward for you, to create RP on a daily basis, to take chances and run RP. If people either refuse to RP outside scheduled events or even worse won't RP outside of official RP run by staff then that's basically no good to you.

I can certainly vouch that @Z-01 is right that evening the playing field means more interesting or secondary concepts end up played more often. While there will always be those players who go for what's interesting over what's powerful, most people prefer and in fact desire to be at the very least competitive. Very few people go for basic mortals on the games where the average is either a Vampire, a Werewolf or a Mage. Hunters tend to be popular but aren't what I'd qualify as basic mortals anymore.

In the interest of having your secondary roles filled, consider a perfectly even playing field. You already mentioned villain status being a thing, and that will make up for every hero being even. If you have advancement, then make sure that every predetermined period of time, every character who is below the played average gets bumped up to that number. Set a cap, too, and raise the cap only when you normalize the population using the played, again very important, played, average.

@SunnyJ covered most of it. The most important advice I can give you is that you can't please everyone. No one has ever been able to, no one is currently able to, and no one will ever be able to. Therefore, whatever you do, it's important to keep to your vision and to your target audience. Don't try to needlessly widen the game's scope to appeal to every genre of role-player. Have an experience that's as pure to what you want to do as you can make it; if you dilute it too much, it'll do more harm than good.

It's better to bring joy to twenty-five people than to bring a so-so experience to fifty.

@HelloProject I like it.

I've seen two WoD games, can't recall which ones of the hundred clearly, do something like that. There was a small selection of non-combat poses and you had to pick the one that spoke to you the most and reply to it.

@HelloProject I think your intent to lower the entry barrier is a good design philosophy.

I don't think that someone's RP history is all that informative. It's too easy to lie. Unless you have encyclopedic knowledge of every role-player running around every role-playing circuit you can't do much with a list of roles someone has played or even a list of games someone has played on. I also feel that it might be unfair to newer role-players to use role-playing history as a metric.

You're also correct that it's easy for someone to take information off a wiki, or even another game, and put it in an application. That's why I recommend that your history requirements, for OC characters, and personality requirements, for FC characters, be simplified lists, not paragraphs or essays. Far too many games that require applications encourage you to pad them with purple prose to meet certain word minimums or quality checks. What you really want is to get to the facts right away.

I really, really like the idea of asking "why do you want to play this character" and it may be the most interesting thing you've touched on. Not enough people put thought into that.

Are you fishing for feedback or just stating plans?

I'd recommend keeping personality for FC and eliminating it for OC.

You see, an OC's personality is in the long run pointless to have. Players of OC characters will often take turns and departures from their plans or adapt them to events and plots. Their background is on the reverse very important, as you don't want someone's OC to have done crazy things in the past. Key points and important events only. No one cares what high school your OC went to.

It is naturally the other way around for FC characters. You already know their background, what you want to know is whether the player has a good idea of what he's signing up to play. If someone applies for Vegeta you want to be sure they understand who Vegeta is, because maybe they're just after the prestigious position, and power boost, of being Vegeta. At the same time you don't want an essay. Like backgrounds for OC characters, key points and important events only. No one cares what Vegeta's favorite food is, even if it's interesting trivia.

@Ganymede said in Social Combat: Reusing Physical Combat System?:

Powers in WoD are an exception because they are super-powers.

Of course. I was talking about using standard social rolls on those WoD places, not the assorted powers that exist to mentally dominate others. I remember one particular nut-job I ran into used an appearance + performance roll to seduce my character through a lap-dance. Trying to appeal that my character and player weren't interested in any kind of love affair only got me called out for not role-playing the results of a roll.

I think we're in complete agreement here on where the line should be drawn.

@Lisse24 That's a pretty interesting middle-ground. Personal preference will always be that I'd rather role-play social attempts against my character than leave how they react to things to a dice roll, but what you propose sounds like a good middle of the road where your personality does matter without the code needing to be overly complex.

Social combat outside of mind control-like effects should just be role-play, not system-backed. On every WoD game I've been that included the ability to wield your social stats like a bludgeon it was always misused, and a social combat system usually can't account for personality traits.

To give a very simple example, sexual orientation. A character who has no interest in a particular gender simply shouldn't be able to be seduced by that gender's appearance stat. The only way to account for this is to have a skill or multiple skills that grant immunity to certain stats, and just like that you need to, in order to be fair, have the possibility of being immune to the other social stats too.

I do however like @Ganymede's idea of using such a system for storytelling, not player-versus-player scenarios. I think for such circumstances it could work very well, and using a standard combat system as the skeleton would be fine, possibly preferred.

To be honest a database has too much potential for abuse. Databases are often presented as fact. You can't discuss with a database, you can't argue with a database, and you can't appeal to a database. You have to take what's in it as-is.

While there are flaws to having a forum for this purpose, at least a forum provides significantly more context as to why someone should be earmarked. You can tell how many people back the decision, you can see the discussion that's been caused by the thread, and you can even sometimes see the culprits show up to dig themselves a deeper hole or apologize. You can, sometimes, even read the tone the accusations are being made with and determine from that whether they should be taken at face value or not.

A fifty pages thread about Elsa or VASpider is highly preferable to a collection of logs without context or story. It may be less efficient, but does the hobby really have so many rotten apples as to require efficient and organized cataloging of them?

I've seen it happen a few times that particularly spiteful staff or players used a player's email or IP to stalk them or ruin their reputation on other games. A WoD game I used to play on once had the single most inhumanly angry gamemaster I've ever met. He collected the emails and IPs of about a dozen players whose behaviors he didn't appreciate in his plotlines, and sent scalding emails to a couple of other games trying to warn them about those players.

I've also witnessed a close friend of mine get banned from Multiverse MUSH and have logs, his email and his IP sent to a couple of other places which got him prebanned from several of them with only one side of the story provided.

And my personal favorite, I made the mistake of making my email public on Brave New World. Big mistake. I got a lot of angry emails when I left from one of Elsa's friends.

While these are unusual and rare circumstances, being only three examples out of the fifty or so games I've played on, I can understand why someone would want to keep their email private. That having been said, since pretty much all MUSH admins can see your IP address, unless you use a VPN to MUSH you're not ever truly safe from stalking and someone who's determined to come after you can find a way. Your email address being visible is the least of your concerns if you're paranoid about being stalked across games.

Making a throw-away email takes thirty seconds with gmail, anyway, so if your email being visible to anyone at all is that concerning to you simply make a new email for every RP place you apply at.

Enforced positivity has to be one of the worst concepts I've ever run across, both in mushing and in real life, to address and comment on something said a few posts back.

No good can come from making people store their real feelings away. You either end up with an oppressive atmosphere where everyone is smiling and it just feels wrong, as was described, or you end up with people frequently bursting open when their emotional containers are full. Since everyone has a different-sized bottle, the larger the user-base the more likely you are to see one of those explosions daily and chain-reactions can be devastating.

... but that's not to say that everyone always saying exactly what they think is good, either. Many read the authorization to be honest as the authorization to be an asshole.