Best posts made by Seraphim73

This is one of the reasons that I think games having a Mission Statement is so important: it tells players what Staff is interested in focusing on and what they should (generally) build their characters around. It sets expectations right off the bat, and lets people decide if it's the game for them. For example, here's our Mission Statement from The Savage Skies:

Fly the unfriendly skies in airplanes that never were, casting spells, dodging dragons, and fighting fascism in the late 1930s. Characters will be members of a "free" militia, The Sky Guard, secretly serving the interests of the French and British governments from an airship base. They will crisscross the Continent finding high adventure.

The Savage Skies MUSH is a game of dieselpunk adventure and modern fantasy. Players might be flying against air pirates one week, gathering information on Nationalist Spanish movements the next, trading spells with minions of the Drachenordnung another, and then treating with a great dragon to convince it to join the cause at the end of the month.

All characters will be explicitly tied to the militia group at the heart of the game, either as a fighting member or one of the smugglers, informants, and hangers-on that work directly with them. From there, you'll work together with other players to create your own adventures within the setting and metaplot provided by Staff.

It tells players that we're going to be focusing on action, adventure, and spy-work, that they all have to be part of the militia, and that they'll be at least partially responsible for creating fun (although Staff will be providing metaplot). It also gives Staff something to go back to for all their major decisions and ask, "Are we fulfilling our Mission Statement with this choice?"

To @Devrex's actual question though, I play for pretty much the exact same reasons as @Pyrephox -- I want to have cinematic action and drama, and to contribute to the plot of the game. I want to see the game world change because of the actions of my character. It doesn't have to be a -big- way, if my character contributes some lasting slang or creates a location that people use, that's enough. I want my character to succeed against NPCs about 2/3 - 3/4 of the time (more or less) and about 51% of the time against PCs (or more truthfully, I want outcomes between PCs that make sense ICly), and I OOCly want to be told when something is simply impossible -- I may have my character keep trying it anyhow, but at least then I know they'll never succeed.

@jennkryst said in Testing the Waters for Battletech Interest:

As for setting... I dunno. Everyone hates the Dark Ages but that is also when everyone had mechs armed with giant chainsaws, so there is some appeal. I hear good things about ilClan era, which is the newest. We'll see if Comstar is back to being space wizards or not.

As someone who worked on the Dark Ages CMG, I love the Dark Ages timeline. Not just because of the AgroMechs and the like, but they're pretty awesome. I also have a soft spot for the Republic of the Sphere in that era. I also enjoy the Clan Wars era, and the FedCom Civil War and... look, I just like giant Mechs, okay? But I'm with you in liking the Dark Ages.

@ghost said in Testing the Waters for Battletech Interest:

The modern MUer seems to prefer roleplay that doesn't involve technical systems, doesn't include risky pass/fail combat, and always seems to default to relationship/TS roleplay involving coffee or bar roleplay. Combat and PVP are avoided and the whole point behind Battletech is combat and pvp.

I think you're conflating two things that are not always the same. There are a fair number of "modern MUers" who enjoy combat and risky actions, but who have no interest in PvP. It's perfectly possible to have a playerbase intensely interested in PvE combat, but not interested at all in PvP combat (beyond sparring).

I agree with @faraday that there's a lot of room for a L&L-style BattleTech game (although I would include significant combat elements, rather than light ones -- that may just be me though).

Yeah, it took a long while to post, and then once it did post, it's now gone for me again.

@Cirno Actually, you were never banned from The Fifth World. We found your arrival and commentary amusing. And the interaction upon your arrival was a good deal longer than that--in fact, I believe that I jokingly suggested you play a pretty-pretty-space-princess, since you had commented about something to that fact on WORA.

@mietze said:

Like, their PC has relationships with 13 other pcs? Or they create a bunch of alts to get involved with someone else's 1 PC?

Either/or.

And they usually are gaslighting the others, @deadculture, or at least just not telling them about the others.

@bored said:

Trying to build your game so it will punish people for the things you don't want them to do but they're definitely going to do anyway is head-to-wall level moronic.

I would Upvote that half a dozen times if I could.

The real issue is... why do you care if there's some Marriage and Baby drama going on, so long as people are still engaging with the plot/political maneuvering/adventuring that Staff is running?

@Ghost said:

I don't care what the game is or what setting it is, and I'm doing my best to not sound like some bitter Grampa type when I say this, but I've come to realize that a grand majority of the MU habit is roleplaying relationship simulation.

Yeah, you're dead on with this. It's a trend I've noticed too, and it's become particularly prevalent (or at least obvious to me) in the last 8-10 years. Risk has become something to be avoided, because the player has put "too much time and effort" into building the character. That giant list of characters on my playlist from A Moment in Tyme? About 1/3 to 1/2 of them died violent deaths that weren't by my choice. It was just part of the game back then, just how it went. Now, players are way more risk averse, and it's more about everyone telling their stories (and no one getting in the way of the stories of others) and less about telling a single overarching story that is larger than the characters.

So...you have to reinvent the wheel.

I agree that non-consent is the way to go, but what if instead of incentivizing dying, you just removed some of the penalties. This works particularly well for Space Lords and Ladies--what I'm picturing is a universe like Altered Carbon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon), where "people" are thought processes, and bodies are just sleeves to be changed or discarded at will (so long as you have the money and the facilities). So if your character "dies," all that they lose is some money, some time (until they can get resleeved again), and maybe some memory (if their memory core was wasted and they have a backup to go back to).

This also neatly gives you the genetic nobility: those rich and connected enough to be resleeved if they die. It also takes some of the emphasis away from babymaking, since such things would likely be done outside of "normal" biological methods.

Everything from @Pyrephox and @GangOfDolls is great, but this, This, a thousand times THIS:

@GangOfDolls said:

It's okay to limit participation.

Start small, build up the number of characters you're comfortable with, and then stick to that limit.

I think that for a tabletop system, Use-it-to-Gain-it works great. But from my (brief) experience with Pendragon, mostly it meant that people were rolling things as often as they could remember to do it, hoping for crits. So you have those people who are just throwing skill rolls into everything, and those who only rolled when it was important, and got fewer chances for crits.

I like a Justified Increase system, but it involves a good amount of Staff monitoring. You have to check logs and be the nexus of all improvement (and let's face it, players like to see their numbers go up, because, to quote Calvin, if your numbers go up, you're having more fun).

I think that FS3 (with a little Staff oversight at higher skill levels--I want to know when someone is going form 10 to 11, and 11 to 12) has a really nice system in that, as @faraday mentioned, you have slow automatic gain... and you can control how slow it is. If you're moving at increased time ratio, you can increase XP gain. You can also set the costs for various levels of skill so that your XP costs are flat, linear, or logarithmic, however you prefer.
The thing I really like about FS3's system is that there are actually two resources: XP and Luck. You get XP at a steady rate every week, and Luck (which boosts skills and keeps you fighting in +combat) is based on votes. It encourages interaction to get votes, without letting you boost your combat skills for tea party RP.

In my mind, it's not as good as "Submit logs and mention your training in RP to see if your skill increases," but it's a whole lot easier on Staff.

I tend to think that +jobs are great for tracking long-term research/construction/repair jobs that will likely take a couple of rounds of rolls. They're also great for things that multiple Staffers will have to look at (plot requests, information that bridges multiple plotlines, etc), and for things that need a delay before they're enacted, like a research request that gets a near-immediate response of "This will take some time to research. In 1 RL week, we'll do the +roll to find out what you've discovered. If you don't hear anything back in 9 days, please contact X Staffer via pages to remind them."

As for +requests sitting forever... I know that Staffers are busy running things, reading apps, and with their RL, but I don't generally think there's any excuse for a +request sitting in the queue for more than a couple of days. After that amount of time, you should at least get a response back of "We're discussing this, we should have a resolution by X time."

Anything less... is uncivilized.

In general, I want a couple of things out of a system:

1. Representation of my hard work. This can be simply benefits from the hard work put into building skills through RP/XP/etc, but by preference, there should be some benefit for any good planning/preparation done ahead of the conflict.

2. Choices. I don't want to just drop X of my dice against Y of their dice. I want to be able to flank the enemy, investigate their weaknesses and take advantage of them, get to the higher ground, attack all-out, or whatever.

3. More than just a single die roll. Dice are really, really random. I generally like to see a couple of successive dice rolls made, none generally more important than others, but all building up on top of each other, so that probability can assert itself.

@faraday Have you ever tried to make a Rigger with a custom vehicle? Or a Decker with a custom deck? Those two areas in the game get very, very, very crunchy. Cyberware/bioware is a little fiddly, foci/initiation is a tiny bit fiddly, all the modifiers (SR3) are a little fiddly, but in general, Shadowrun is a pretty light-crunch game... until you bring in Riggers and Deckers.

I came from the same RP MUD that @Arkandel did... 20-odd years ago. I remember a time when two-line poses were awesomely wordy, and RP through socials was the norm. Thankfully, my style (and that of most people I interact with) has improved since then.

After that, there was a character-limit (350ish, I think) on poses. That was interesting. But really, I think that a pose should be as long as it needs to be in order to get across the words, the actions, the emotions behind them, and the character behind them.

Yes, that's a wishy-washy answer, I don't care. I like to make sure that all of my characters pose differently, at least to some degree. Whether it's an accent (don't kill me, I haven't really done it in years now), particular word choices, different curses, this is easy to do with what the character says, but I think it's equally important that the rest of the pose be unique to the character also.

For example, my character Gray from The 100 was a bit of an asshole, and frequently made bad choices and assumptions, so I snarked like hell at him in my poses. Dog, from Generations of Darkness, was so loyal that it hurt (what do you expect, he was a clone trooper), and so I did like to mention when he was being naive or flat-out wrong in my poses, but I didn't snark as much. Termiane, from Cuendillar, was more of a wish fulfillment character (I'll admit it this much later), so I was a lot more serious with his poses.

I have definitely come to prefer either a single paragraph of text in a pose, or just single carriage returns between paragraphs if you've really got to be wordy or are NPCing multiple people, but I prefer not to have multiple line breaks in someone else's pose, because I think it looks messy in a log. I very much prefer it when people put wikicode in their poses--makes things a lot easier on me, since I usually take care of the log.

As several people mentioned: god please don't pose in the second person, it's creepy. Also, please pose present tense, not past or future.

As for providing a look into my character's head, I agree with several of the other posters -- I want to make sure that my character's intentions are clear (if they're supposed to be clear), but I also don't like putting too much of my character's mind into my poses, because I would prefer to put in gestures and expressions.

Most importantly, however, I want the people I'm RPing with to respond to the hooks I put out there, and to offer hooks for me to respond to in turn.

So, a question for those on both sides of the Death Argument:

At what point does the story of one character trump that of another character?

Example: Sith Lord A is doing their thing, inspecting the troops. Sith Trooper B steps forward and starts mouthing off to Sith Lord A, insulting them and calling them weak. Should Sith Lord A be allowed to strike them down? Throw them in the brig for a week? A month? Or should they have to accept the IC abuse, because to inflict appropriate punishment on Sith Trooper B would be rendering Sith Trooper B unplayable?

So basically, how far do I have to OOCly manipulate the IC actions of my character to keep from making your character unplayable?

I think I know my answer, but I'm curious as to the answers of others.

@Autumn said in What do you WANT to play most?:

Use of existing media for themes also has some advantages, and "better-written and more engaging material than an original theme is likely to have" is one of them.

I think the biggest thing that 'known themes' have going for them as settings is that all of the players have a similar (if not exactly the same) view on theme. The theme doesn't "belong to" a group of players (usually Staff) and everyone else is learning it for the first time.

@lordbelh & @mietze Ugh. Yes. White Knight Syndrome drives me batty and insane. Especially when it goes as far as "You were mean to <person>, so you must be punished!" "Yeah! I agree!" "Me too!"

This is especially bad when the White Knights are espousing some modern belief that flies completely contrary to the theme of the setting.

What the White Knights don't seem to realize is that when they do this, THEY become the antagonists--and not (usually) good ones, either.

@Derp The All-Aboard-the-Murderboat situation you describe is the next step along the path of the White Knight (after "getting in peoples' faces for being meany-pants"). It's definitely a problem, but it can also be just fine, so long as Staff is willing to back up the threat from the antagonist to a level that gives the fifteen (or thirty) people something to do against it... just in order to hold it off, not to annihilate it (as you yourself mentioned).

@Arkandel Exactly. Until the consequences for bringing anachronistic modern societal views into a different setting are actually codified and applied, people will keep White Knighting because they get to feel good, they get to act as their player would, they get to be part of the popular group, and there aren't any penalties for acting wildly out of theme.

As to the point @Arkandel made about PC demographics versus NPC demographics... that's always problematic, and, in my opinion, tied in to the White Knight Blight. A ton of players want to be cool and hip and forward-thinking, and they forget that EVERYONE ELSE on the game wants to do the same thing. Often the best way to stand out and to be "different" is to represent the majority NPC viewpoint. I've had a ton of success playing Stormtroopers, Clone Troopers, Imperial Officers, patriotic (toward the Republic, then Empire) Senators, uptight knights, dogmatic Children of the Light, and other "generic" character viewpoints, because everyone wants to RP with them because they ground the other PCs in the world by representing that majority NPC viewpoint. Unfortunately, they also rather require Staff to be willing to back up that majority NPC viewpoint with... you know... majority NPCs... or else you get actions taken because of PC population, not universe population.

@Ghost said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

• Green Ronin's Song of Fire and Ice: because if one must Lord&Lady, then a proper system for social dueling with winners and loses will help.

Yes. This. Any game that focuses on politics should have concrete rules for political "combat."

@Roz Oh, I totally get it, and usually fall victim to it along with everyone else. Just... I want that "everyone coming down off an adrenaline high together" moment ICly as well as OOCly. It's so rich for relationship building (and I don't just mean sexual relationships, I've seen Speed, I know "relationships based on intense experiences never work").

I guess it's more a whine on my part that I want more of this sort of RP, and a thumbs-up for @surreality for putting together a way to reward it.

@Thenomain People seem to be more resistant to death-by-talking. Also, there's the issue that you can get someone else killed in your own social situation, which is harder to do in a physical situation. I started out in a very "social combat needs to be held to a higher standard" viewpoint, and I've come around quite a bit over the last half-dozen years. I don't think they should be held differently, I just think it takes a bit of work to get past some issues (like not wanting to be the guy/gal who let slip information that got someone else's character killed, and not wanting to have someone convince you to do so with a huge roll and a pose that is effectively, "You know you wanna...").

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

See, I think there are several different things that are starting to get conflated a bit in the thread.
[really good list]
I don't know that point #3 needs to be addressed; I think there are scenarios where it's utterly unreasonable for social combat to completely deviate a character from their norm.

I agree that the actual combat system of social combat can only address points 1 and 2. I think that point 4 has to be addressed by game culture. If your game simply has the default that social combat is a thing, and is used on NPCs and PCs alike... well... you kind of have to get over #4 if you're going to play there.

Point #3 is an interesting one, and I struggled to find a solution to it with my own system. I never really succeeded. I tried and discarded a couple of methods, each of which had their own problems (although they were interesting):

First I poked around at a system like @surreality mentioned, allowing PCs to have 1-3 Hills to Die On--things that were immutable about their character (ie, "No Mistreating Pets," "No Killing Kids," and "No Betraying the King" or something like that). These were then things that could not be changed with social combat. But I decided that it would be nearly impossible to police from a chargen perspective, and that many players would try to make these too broad ("Paragon of Virtue" or "Good Person" or "Never Cheats" or something like that) to give themselves as much defense as possible against social combat without investing in the appropriate stats. I do like the idea of them being modifiers rather than inviolate points.

Next I looked at requiring each player to state their character's goal before combat (physical and social alike), and for their opponent to agree that it was reasonable. It was nice because then each player knew the stakes, but again, requiring the two players to agree on what was reasonable -- while nice, was also a little utopian considering many MU* players.

To @Arkandel's concern about requiring all of the different social skills while being able to specialize with a single weapon skill, I went with just two social skills in my system: Persuasion and Deception. You use Persuasion when you're using the truth, and Deception when you're using a falsehood. You can absolutely just specialize in one or the other and try to use it almost all the time. Sure, you might get into a situation when you have to use the other one, but you might also get into a situation where there aren't any spears around and you just have to use a sword or an axe.