Best posts made by Seraphim73

@Ganymede said in Fires of Hope: A Star Wars Story:

@Warlander said in Fires of Hope: A Star Wars Story:

So plan carefully and do lots of system research if you want to play a Force User. Or anything else, really, since the system seems to demand great attention to detail.

This is what sort of put me off of SAGA. I literally spent hours and hours to make a PC, and, in the end, still overlooked some parts of her.

There are also a number of people who are very knowledgeable about Saga who are quite happy to help out with Chargen, from doing a sanity check at the end to building an example of what the character might look like based on what you've described to them and then providing it for you to tweak as you like.

One anti-twink benefit of Fires of Hope is that there are no rolled scores. All ability scores for all PCs are done with a 30-point build, so you don't have to worry about running into someone who rolled a 55-point build (as happened back on KotOR, and probably Dark Times too).

There is definitely some twinkery, but honestly, knowing that you don't have to compete with a min-maxed Jedi actually takes some of the edge off--when you don't have to squeeze in every +1 to try to get past a Block or Deflect lets you actually spread your character out a little and breathe. Like I said, there's definitely some twinkery--there are a couple of melee folks who absolutely murder any low-level competition in particular.

@Warlander It sounds like you've had problems with myself and my wife (Bantha and Twirrl on KotOR), but that you've also conflated us with other people. I can assure you that while we both play on Fires of Hope, I am not a Staffer, and she is only in charge of the Wiki and building, as noted earlier in the thread. I don't want to distract too far from discussion of Fires of Hope, but many of your accusations are simply untrue (there was a single PK by her on KotOR, for instance (edit: Sorry, two, I was just reminded, one was pretty unavoidable with a non-Force User threatening her Sith Lord and refusing ICly and OOCly to be imprisoned)), while others may be a matter of point of view. Additionally, neither of us has ever been on Unsung Heroes, and Generations of Darkness was certainly not our game (that would have been Kitty and Ataru)--I staffed there briefly before leaving the game amicably.

@theznar Augh. I get going with the code base that you have easy access to, but I honestly don’t know that I can easily give up the features of AresMush.

@faraday Interestingly enough... A Song of Ice and Fire has done nicely with several "Main Character" deaths. It may not be your cup of tea (I honestly don't know), and it's definitely gotten "softer" on permadeath (silly Red God), but I think it's a very interesting example of a novel where the (arguably) main characters die with some regularity.

@Arkandel and @Alamias I think the only possible excuse for a telenuke is if the target player is actively (OOCly) avoiding conflict RP. Otherwise, I think that the attacker's player should contact Staff, have a GM contact the target player (if Staff decides that there's valid reasons for the attack, not like the BS "never met before" telenuke you mentioned), and arrange a scene.

Also, I agree with you on "Big Enemies =/= Hardcore." While I sometimes do enjoy a little competition with the PCs while I'm GMing, I don't consider it a win if I kill (any of) them--I consider it a win if I force them to use every IC trick and tactic they know, and force them to make hard IC choices (which may include retreating, surrendering, using one of their own as bait, or whatever).

On the case of an economic system, @Ganymede and @WTFE (I quite agree with your list, by the way), it sounds like the idea economic system would:

1. Require no more than 1-2 inputs every 24 hours at most.
2. Be based more on character stats than player actions/time.
3. Have some element of risk/reward, some element of character/player choice, and some element of randomness.
4. Only be a way to get extra money, not the primary way to get money.

I would suggest something like: choose which type of "job" you want to do that day from a menu list (con job, card games, day trading, smuggling, teaching, etc), choose how risky you want it to be (con job: shell game for pennies, 3-card-monte for dollars, reselling a "diamond" ring for a couple hundred), roll some virtual dice based on the appropriate skill (Deception in this case), see if you gain money or lose a little (based on how well you rolled, your skill, and how much risk you took), your "job" goes on cooldown for 24 hours.

So, you absolutely could just have a timer set up so that at 9PM every day, you went in and took the easiest, least risky job for your best skill and did it... and you've got the boring option for minimal payout every day, but at least you're getting some money--heck the system could give you that option every 24 hours if you didn't want the player to have to type in the commands/forget, then everyone would get a default amount of money if they didn't want to risk anything else.

Or, you could go in every day, decide how much you wanted to risk based on what you needed and when, and gamble a bit. There probably wouldn't be any consequences beyond losing a bit of cash, but maybe if you rolled really poorly (or well), a GM could be notified and could bring it up in your future RP (or post about it on an appropriate board, if it was exceptionally spectacular).

Yeah, @faraday and I talked about how it would be great not to go right back to Canceron, but it would be kind of a waste to "use up" another Colony on a mini-campaign instead of a full one. It wasn't ideal, but it was definitely better than the alternative.

Yeah, we're definitely serving as a sort of beta-test, especially since Faraday hasn't had to work with an Admin team previously, so some things that are coming up for us never came up for her (admin-only comments to requests telling the player who submitted the request that there is new activity when they can't see anything). And yes, we've had some broken-ness that we've had to deal with in being that beta-test, which Fara and Kraken have both been really good about cleaning up as quickly as possible. Definitely worth the trouble, but it has been trouble working with pre-release code (thank you very much to Fara for allowing it).

@Ganymede I agree completely that risk (and accompanying that, loss) is more important that death in making a game with consequences. You can lose territory, belongings, political influence, time, limbs, life... whatever it is, but without loss and risks of said loss commensurate with the rewards you're trying to gain, I think things tend to come off flat.

Sounds like most of us are actually pretty much on the same page though, just some are at the top of the page and some are at the bottom.

A scene that would take 6-8 hours on a Saga Edition or WoD game (pretty standard tough but not exceptional fight) will usually take 2-3 hours in FS3 because all the rolls are done behind the curtain. It's delightful.

And, because I'm insane, it means that I can run huge combat scenes in FS3 that would normally take days in Saga/WoD, and they take 4-5 hours in FS3. I adore huge, swirling battles, so this makes me gleefully happy.

@auspice said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

I also think it may be time to officially made the Ad thread ads only. No discussion whatsoever. Want to discuss a game? Put up a Hog Pit thread (for the down'n'dirty) or a Constructive thread (for the random chatter). Keep the ad thread for details (the ad, any updates such as big events, opening of new spheres or OCs etc) only.
How's that sound?

Eh. I kind of like having general-overview sort of comments about the game from others. I also think that it's valuable to have Staff answer some questions about the game there in the ad thread (system, CvC or CvE focus, Can I Have A Gold, etc). I agree that it's really easy for them to get derailed, and it may be more effort moderating them than it's worth, but I think it's definitely worth something.

@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:

And what are the up-sides? @Seraphim73 could make a custom multi-descer instead of the built-in one for all the descs that nobody's going to read Someone else could make a custom notepad instead of the built-in one.

Now why would I do that? No one's going to read them anyway. Heh.

Also, I totally can't code. I should get on that though, just to build my own custom multi-descer in every system known to MU*kind.

@Arkandel said in Hobby Glossary:

"Emote fighting" for example is what we used to call purely posed combat in a MUD I played, but I've not seen the term picked up anywhere else since.

And boy do I wish it would be picked up elsewhere. I haven't had a good emote fight in... years. Way, way, way too many years. Dice ruin everything (while at the same time making things SO much easier).

I'm just curious what people play most here. Not what they want to play, not what they like playing most, what they are playing and have played the most.

In reading other topics, I think it becomes pretty clear that people have significantly different experiences based on where (and often what theme) they play most, so I was curious about how things shook out.

@Ghost said in PC antagonism done right:

some of the my story society tends to avoid difficult characters on an OOC level, which bleeds into IC.

• Disclaim. If someone pages you to ask, explain that it's all part of the show.
• FOR FUCKS SAKE, BE WILLING TO ICLY SUFFER NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES.
  If you're making a character designed to generate conflict, it is a MUST that you are willing to give the people you're antagonizing a victory.
  If one player refuses to roleplay their character as having lost at all (I.e. despite being fuck-pummeled in a fistfight, the loser laughs and walks it off), then not only is it poor rp, but it's cheesy and shows a lack of ethics.
• Be realistic. No one is 100% antagonist.

I agreed with so much of this so much... and then you got to this point:

• Keep it IC. Always.

I think that this is the one thing that you CANNOT do when playing an antagonist (either a "bad guy" or a "person with opposing goals"). I absolutely think that you have to make it clear that you are NOT your character, and the easiest way to do that is to be a joy to be around OOCly, even if your character is a pain in the ass ICly. All too often, people tend to assume that you believe your character's beliefs (usually because they're playing an expy of themselves, but with more rock-hard muscles/lithe curves)--if this happens to someone playing an antagonist (especially a "bad guy"), then you get OOC conflict.

I agree with @Lisse24 and @Arkandel that "antagonist" doesn't have to mean someone who is a bad guy, it can simply be someone who... I don't know... wants the new city council decision giving the job of making sidewalks to Company A, because they have ties to Company B. That person will be an opponent of anyone supporting the decision, but they could be perfectly pleasant to be around and certainly wouldn't be an antagonist.

I also love the suggestion that @Lisse24 made about designating rivals. This would really only work on a political game where votes/decisions/influence attempts could be tracked, because that extra XP would be tied to times where they came down on opposite sides of an issue.

A slightly more subtle nudge to encourage both opposition and losing might be the idea that any time someone loses a fight (especially a political one) they get a little boost from NPC opposition as well (a plot hook, some information, something like that) because they've demonstrated that they're willing to stand up to "those in power" (or that they're aligned with those in power for those not-nearly-rare-enough times when PCs bloc together to vote in something wildly against the interests of the masses of NPCs).

To @Arkandel 's question about how to "Make sure conflict is driven by character motivations..." one of the coolest little innovations that I like on Fires of Hope is that there is a +goals system--each character has to have 1-3 (I think, it might be 2+, or 2-4) goals. They assign logs toward achieving those goals (one per week max), and when they accomplish those goals, they can turn in the +goal for XP based on the number of logs they put toward the +goal (each +goal also has a minimum, mostly to keep really huge goals harder to attain). I think a system like this helps to ensure that players are constantly reminded of their goals for their characters, and it's also--in a political game rather than an almost-entirely-PvE one like FoH--a great way to put people in conflict based on their characters' goals. A player could even have a +goal to -fail- at something (I might just take myself up on that, now that I'm thinking about it).

I absolutely agree with the idea that choices need to have consequences--it's not just "which shiny do I want right now," it should (almost) always be, "What shiny do I want now, accepting that it will hinder me in some other way." You have no action without tension, and there is no tension without consequences to choices.

I think that @Three-Eyed-Crow really hit things on the head though... Staff has to encourage the culture that they want in their game.

To the question of what an opponent brings to the game that @Misadventure brought up... they provide friction. We all know by now (whether it's true on a particular game or not) that NPC opposition is just there to be a speedbump, but when there is another PC pushing back on us, we don't know how things will turn out, and everything the opponent does provides us with something to react to--the world is only really fun (to me, at least) when it pushes back in response to your pushes, giving you something to work with in the process.

Edited to add: @Kestrel did make a spectacular opponent-player on The 100, and I think one of the best things she did, besides just being nice OOCly, was a good bit of journaling/vignette writing. When you see why someone is doing something that you think is "bad," you can understand the choice and the character a lot better, and you're (usually) less likely to have an issue with it.

@ThatGuyThere Oh, I've seen a few scenes where the NPC opposition was resolute, powerful, and a real threat. But often it seems (at least to me) like the player expectation is that the NPC opposition be a speedbump--when the PCs start to get pushed around in a scene, their players tend to panic from what I've seen, and many get grumbly if they get too beat up (physically or politically) or fail to accomplish something. It's one of my least favorite trends in "modern" MU*ing.

For me, it's a combination of Escapism, Curiosity, Creativity, Collaboration (and occasionally Challenge).

I like to get into the heads of people who are very different from me--I usually consider a few parts of their psyche "better than me," but for the most part, I wouldn't actually want to be any of my characters, I like to torment them too much.

I also like to get away from the troubles and concerns of the real world to explore different ones, especially if I can find a place where every choice you make has a possibility to change the world around you (escapism from powerlessness, I suppose?).

I like to write with others, I like to spar (verbally/textually) with others... but most of all, most of all, I like to push the world and watch it react (and to be pushed by the world and watch how my character reacts). Whether this means other PCs reacting to the actions of my character, NPCs reacting to it, the grid reacting to it ("hey look, my actions caused that bar to get burned down...") or any other way. But the reason I play MU*s rather than writing stories or playing video games is that I like the give and take between my character and the rest of the world I'm playing in.

@Jennkryst I tried Denver... a long time ago. I did not have a good experience. I basically came to the conclusion that a theme where you are all criminals who are generally closer to competition than allies... doesn't work so well in an open-world setting like a MUSH. In TT, you're all part of a single team, so you have a reason to work together. On a MUSH... not so much. It also takes a TON of Staff oversight to keep people "interested" by providing them with 'Runs.

I was more thinking the SR3 system being used for something modern/future (I've used it for Aliens, WWZ, and a few other things).

@Ghost Yup, exactly. That's why I integrated the basic ideas into my Alera system.

@surreality Ookay, that Octopus-woman is pretty dang cool, I have to admit, even as someone who wasn't on-board with the tentacle-y thing to start with. I'm curious how her people would interact with shore-dwellers, but I know that octopi can crawl across land and you mentioned shapeshifting magic earlier, so I suppose that's not a big stumbling block.

Not really on-topic, just a note that I take back some of my earlier 'meh'ness about tentacle-people, and wish I had better suggestions for names for your crustaceans.

@tragedyjones said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):

• Grid Design

I feel like every room on the grid should have an explicit purpose--and an appropriate purpose is not "to expand the distance between here and there." In my opinion, if there aren't at least 1-2 hooks in the description to explain why someone might be RPing in the room, the room shouldn't be there. I've also seen several systems that allow PCs to add on gridrooms and give them temp-descs ("Need an alleyway for a scene? Add one!"), which I think is a great step between a grid and a roleplay room.

• An End to Bar-P

I don't see a problem with Bar-P... so long as it's just there to re-establish status quo or to discuss how crazily the status quo has been shifted. I feel like slice of life RP is how you make sure that Going Out And Saving The World (or whatever you do on your MUSH) feels different, and not like... Tuesday. But if there aren't enough things going on that the characters have new things to talk about ("Holy crap, did you see the kaiju eat the schoolbus the other day?" "No, that was last week, this week the Cylons attacked, and I'm scared of them!"), then yes, Bar-P gets boring as heck. This ties into Making Things Matter below, however, because it needs a metaplot to constantly reset the status quo, and that, as you and @Arkandel mentioned, requires player buy-in.

• Homework

I've been loving on Fires of Hope's +goals system, and I always think that it's good to have some background approved to make sure that the player understands the theme, current situation, and general power-level of the game. So I'm pro-some-homework. I also rather liked Arx's journal system, because it encouraged providing Staff with general ideas on what your character was up to, which is always nice, and it did so by rewarding you for putting in those reports. (Making some of these +goals public would really help with the PC Storyteller problem @Arkandel mentioned too.)

I think that logging objects are a nice addition to assist with making sure that all of the logs make it up onto the wiki (or at least all of the logs that anyone wants to see), I wonder about tossing in a tiny advancement bonus for consistent logging? An XP every 5-10 logs posted on an FS3 scale, 50-odd XP per log posted on a Saga Edition scale, that sort of thing.

As many people here have said, you have to incentivize the things that you want people to do. If player-homework is helpful to you, give them a reason to do it (besides "you have to").

• Making things matter

This right here is the biggest one for me. If the scene from two weeks ago doesn't matter for what's going on right now... what was the point of the scene from two weeks ago? This also ties in to the reason I MUSH--I want to see the game world react to me and to be forced to react to the game world. Continuity has to be maintained if you want players to buy in to your metaplot/stories, and if you want to have something pushing the game forward and keeping it from disintegrating into a morass of sexy sandboxes.

So I think there are a couple of vitally important points to this:

1. Active bboards. If something happens in a neighborhood, you really have to either mail everyone living/working/whatever in that neighborhood, or (more easily) you have to be sure to post something on a bboard to let people know it happened. Just a summary and a link to the log should be fine--some people will read the log, some won't, but at least the summary will give them something new to talk about next time they're at the bar.

2. An NPC Dramatis Personae with updates. This is actually one of my favorite parts of starting up a game--creating all the NPCs that fill out the ranks of the PCs' unit/ship/whatever. Not all of them, of course, but the Captain, the XO, the heads of the departments, that sort of thing. A name, a rank, a gender, a species, a general personality--that's usually all that's needed. But when I was last doing this regularly, the game I was doing it on didn't have a wiki. Now we can have a wiki page for NPCs, and provide updates as to what they've been doing on the grid. And they should definitely be doing things on the grid, because you should trust your players to use them in scenes (even if it's just griping or raving about something they're doing off-screen) to enrich the world. Seeing NPC1 get shot down in a scene doesn't have nearly as much impact as seeing Natalya "Sweetpea" Latuni, the hardass pilot who chewed out my character for screwing up a landing, and who saved my character's ass three dogfights ago, get shot down.

3. An evolving grid. I forget which codebase I saw it in, but there was a commonly-used-codebase that allowed tempdescs to be added to rooms. It didn't change the description of the room itself, but any player could add a temporary desc to the end of the description. So... having a party? Desc up what's happening and in what areas. Had a firefight? Desc up the bullet holes, cops patrolling, crime scene tape. Big fire? Desc up that one of the buildings is burned down. I think these reset automatically after two midnights, but they could be submitted for addition to the permanent desc if players wanted. Obviously, Staff has to trust players not to go overboard (don't burn down the Elysium every week), but that's part of what all of these require:

4. Trust each other. Players have to trust Staff and go all-in on what they're doing. Staff has to trust Players and support what they're doing, let them do (some of) what they want to, tie it in, make it part of the story. Without both of those, you get stagnation.

@Bobotron and @Arkandel
I think this is why you need a Dramatis Personae/wiki page for them. Describe their personality, outlooks on various people/places/things (like the dreaded "Relationships" section, but describe their outlook on Technology, young people, and "whitey" instead), and a link to all of their logs. It has to be kept updated, and curated by Staff to make sure that no one adds in "Likes: fiesty young Brujah who spit in his face" unless it fits, but it should help with consistency. Because I agree with the concern that if one player is playing the "Feature," then what happens if they go idle, or get busy on their PC, or... whatever.

@surreality said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

I do not believe in considering downtime between formally organized PrPs, plots, or even pickup GM'd scenes to be 'lesser'. ... This includes scenes like dressing wounds after a battle, discussing how some things worked and others didn't in IC terms, going off drinking to celebrate a particular victory, reuniting with a long-lost family member that finally arrived in the area, and so on -- all of these scenes can have a major impact on the characters involved.

Oh god yes. I agree 100%. I wish very much that more people would keep RPing after the "end" of a GM'd scene rather than just being like, "Welp, we killed the bad guy, and even though we're at the bottom of a collapsing mine, knee-deep in acid, with wounded to carry out and prisoners to rescue, we're gonna log out for the night and not worry about it." (I exaggerate, of course, but you know what I mean.)

I've said it before, I'll say it again, I think that downtime scenes are immensely important for setting and resetting the status quo with your character, because it's only when the status quo is changed that you really find out about your character (if the status quo is "office work and beers after," how do they handle having to save the world? But also, if the status quo is "always out saving the world," how do they handle downtime?)

Totally agree, and I love your emphasis on these sorts of scenes, and the idea of rewarding for them.

• The log applies to one or more game themes (checkboxes for which apply; these will be linked on that theme's info page so people can see what is going on in game related to that theme in play and how people are interpreting it)

Ooooh, linking logs to themes/storylines via checkbox rather than having to put in a link by hand is awesome. Autopopulating the theme/storyline page with linked logs rather than having to put in a link by hand is awesome too.

provided both PCs, the donkey, and the cheese log are all consenting adults

If you've got an 18-year-old cheese log, I don't want to be in the same county as it, let alone the same room.