Best posts made by Seraphim73

@surreality Absolutely makes sense. On FoH, you also get XP from noms and from events. Goals are intended to be the main way to advance, but not the only way.

Also, you can abandon a goal any time you want, or add one (assuming you aren't at your max already).

I do agree that you have to choose your goals carefully, but the ability to change them at need helps with that somewhat (so does not picking them to depend on specific other players).

To the point @HelloProject and @surreality are talking about, goals could easily be tied to explicit boosts, rather than to XP. Want to improve your character's social skills? Put together a goal where they get elected to the school board--if/when they succeed, they get +1 Bureaucracy and +1 Charisma. Want to improve your character's shooting skills? Put together a goal where they're recognized as one of the best gunfighters in this dusty town--if/when they succeed, they get +1 Pistols.

@faraday has put together a really nice XP-spending system for Ares--you apply XP to skills, and each skill has a cooldown, and when you get enough XP applied to a skill, that skill goes up. As a skill goes up, the amount of XP needed to increase it goes up, so overall learning time goes up too. Yes, it rewards/encourages broad skill bases rather than focused ones, but I generally think that's a good thing. If you didn't want to reward this quite so much, however, you could simply add in a caveat that for double the XP cost, you could halve the learning cooldown. I like the system because you can see XP applied to skills, so you still see progress, even when your skill rating hasn't actually changed.

@WTFE That's definitely not the experience that I've had using the system for... uh... 3 games now. In each one, players have run scenes using +combat. Given that it's simpler than most tabletop systems implemented into MU*s, I'm not surprised by that fact.

@faraday said in FS3:

Yeah, I have zero interest in doing that because it goes radically against the two core tenets of FS3: 1) Fast and easy chargen, and 2) You can start at good at what you do. I'm sick of systems that make you start at level 1 and work your way up.

Yup. I wasn't actually suggesting that you do make the change, because based on our conversations, I know that you don't see the difference as a problem with the system. Totally fine with that, it's your system, and it's one that I like to use. Just noting that there -is- a solution for those who think that it's a problem (from a game-design perspective, a game-runner actually making that change, as I noted, would have a ton of work to do).

And that again touches on a key component of FS3, which is that it's designed for cooperative PvE games. Letting characters start out at different power levels makes no sense if you're going to pit them against each other.

This is something that I think sometimes doesn't get emphasized enough, and sometimes gets emphasized too much. I think it bears repeating that FS3 is NOT designed for PvP games, because a lot of people forget that when they're looking at the "unbalance" in chargen versus XP or whatever else might be bugging them at the moment. I'm guilty of that myself. And there's enough randomness in 2.0 that a dice pool of 14 isn't that much better than a dice pool of 11 (lowering the target number for successes made results a little more predictable, but as recent events on BSU showed, not all that more predictable).

That said, I think that gamers are (to some degree) competitive by nature. We like our numbers to go up, we like our numbers to be at least in the same ball-park as those of our fellow players, and some of us like to brag about having bigger numbers (I try not to, and usually succeed, Van has an Expert Piloting and a Great Gunnery--there are certainly people with higher numbers in both of those skills). I think it's important edited to add: to know that even if characters aren't directly pitting their skills against one another (outside of friendly competition), they'll be comparing their skills, and some people will be disappointed when others come out of chargen with higher skills and they can't catch up to those folks.

Then again, that's part of FS3--skills take time to increase, and not everyone starts out at the same place... it's built as a closer reflection to reality (or at least Hollywood reality) than a game where absolute balance is king, and that's by design.

@The-Sands said in FS3:

One possible variation that would help with the balance between dinosaur and newbie characters

The issue that some people have (and that isn't an issue for Fara) isn't about dinosaurs versus newbies. In fact, I've seen games where the first wave of people to come in have "sane" stats, and then the next wave, people who don't know the game creator, come in min-maxed and outpace the original group, despite the original group's XP head start.

@TimmyZ I believe that Luck is +3 base, but yes, spending Luck really does help -- as long as the other guy doesn't spend Luck too.

As for the grizzled vet vs prodigy in sports... it depends on the sport. If you look at American football, for instance, the best players at a few positions (running back, flanker, outside linebacker, cornerback) tend to be younger players because they need super-fast-twitch reflexes. But the best quarterbacks? Barring a few true prodigies, the best quarterbacks (and offensive linemen, middle linebackers, safeties, slot receivers, and several other positions) are those who are still young enough to have quality reflexes, but who have put in several years at the pro level to learn the tricks of the trade.

It sounds like Conner McDavid is one of those prodigies (Russell Wilson would be my football example, but I'm a Seahawks fan) whose work ethic matches the veterans and who is also young enough that their reflexes are in better shape than the canny vets.

@kitteh Your ability to hit in combat can also depend wildly on what skill enemy your targeting (and the other PCs are targeting). Since we don't know how good the enemies are even after we attack them (they may have just rolled poorly/well) that's pretty much a crapshoot. (And I see that Fara already addressed this... whoops... that's what I get for typing up something so long.) It can indeed be very frustrating to see miss-miss-miss all through a combat... I totally agree. Sometimes (if it makes sense ICly) if I'm having a rough time of it, I'll switch off to a damaged enemy, just to get a danged hit.

@faraday said in FS3:

I don't disagree, but this is simply not something I see as a problem needing to be solved.

Yup! I completely understand, accept, and have no problem with the fact that this is a design choice that you made. Again, I'm not addressing it as something that needs to be changed, just talking from a theoretical game design standpoint of how it -could- be changed, because I'm a game design nerd.

@faraday said in FS3:

@Three-Eyed-Crow combat/log is still available for everyone. It wasn't in the first version @Seraphim73 graciously field-tested for me, but it's been added since at his recommendation.

WOO! I can nerd it up to my heart's content! (I actually love it mostly for exactly the reason @kitteh was getting at earlier, to know if I'm rolling crappily, my opponent is rolling well, or who is outclassed if anyone is).

I misspoke earlier. Suppression/stress doesn't make it easier to hit the target. But maybe it should. Will ponder.

It might complicate matters, but it would be nice to be able to make enemies easier for others to hit. Whether this would be an integral part of suppression (maybe Suppression but not Stress, so only with the Suppress action?) or another action altogether doesn't much matter to me -- I suppose I have a slight preference to it being a separate action, because that allows more options in combat, but it -would- be nice for ECOs be able to help their pilots hit their targets more easily (since that seemed to be the main purpose of Raptors in the miniseries at least -- guiding Vipers to their targets).

For some idea about how quick @faraday is at implementing change, Ares (FS3 3.0) now has combat/distract and a difference between X Evades and X Evades Easily.

@faraday said in FS3:

Actually in 3rd Ed melee combat defends with the melee weapon skill of the defender.

Wonderful! I think that this was my number one complaint with FS3 (that you were even slightly likely to change). Between that, variable armor, and 'open' vehicles, it's suddenly much, much easier to make a fantasy game with FS3 3.0. I tend to agree on weapon skills though, back on t5W, we used Blades, Bludgeons, and Spears.

@Thenomain said in FS3:

I fucking love 1-3, but I love low fantasy.

I'm totally down for levels 1-3 so long as the expectation is schlubs. If the point of the game is "can I survive long enough to not suck at everything but my one trick," then I'm good with that. Most of the low-level games that I've played in have basically treated levels 1-5ish as painful prerequisites to epic fantasy. I totally understand that that is my own experience with the GMs that I've had, but... eh. Unless I knew the GM was going to be playing an "gritty, tense, survival" sort of low-level game, I probably wouldn't be particularly interested... or I'd see those levels as the painful prerequisites to an actual character with options.

@faraday said in FS3:

So where's the disconnect? Is it documentation? Expectation? I'm just being too nitpicky?

I think what @Ganymede said -- player understanding. I might suggest something in chargen that lays that out, as well as what's on the wiki. Oh... I also wonder about swapping Proficiency to Professional? It might make it more explicit? Like, the thinking is "I'm proficient in this skill, yeah... oh, wait, you mean, could I do it for my job? Oh no, not anywhere near that good, just... proficient."

@surreality The Hills to Die On were actually suggested to me by a player who was concerned about hard social combat having extreme results on a character. It might actually be a solid system for just that -- ensuring buy-in by players who are worried that someone is going to swing a bag of dice at them and suddenly their character is radically different (even if the system assures them that this will not happen). It does, however, need a better name. Maybe Principles?

@surreality I like linking abilities/attributes/whatever with similar ideas by alliteration. It's nice for a homebrew system.

I don't know what your attribute ranges are, and I'm probably only even focusing on this because mine go 1-10, but I'd be curious to know how many Ideals you'd be looking at for each character. I think that once you get higher than about 2-4 of them, you're going to have issues with people spreading them out to try and make them cover as many situations as possible (not most players, but most problem players).

I've been coming back to the Principles (Core Principles? I like single-word mechanics names, but Core Principles is more specific), thinking on it further. I think that I would suggest/require that they be in a general form for my own system:

My character will <always/never> <verb> <subject>.

I want them direct, specific, and precise, to leave as little wiggle-room as possible for problem players. Now, obviously, the Principles wouldn't just be those three things, they can have a little embellishment. For instance, I would consider the following to be acceptable Principles:

My character will always defend his family.
My character will never betray her Queen.
My character will never put someone ahead of himself.
My character will always uphold her oaths of office.
My character will never cheat on his significant other (of the moment).
My character will never harm a child.
My character will always get paid for work.

The idea being that you don't want anything too general or broad ("my character will never lie," "my character will always do what's right", or "my character is evil"), and that a format will help people be specific. It will still, of course, require a great deal of Staff oversight, not just at Chargen, but also in-game, to make sure they're not being over-applied. I'm mostly of the opinion that these Principles should be inviolate (barring player choice), simply because of dice--sooner or later the dice are going to make your character break one, and some players really, really, really don't like that.

I do very much like giving bonuses to social combat attacks that align with one of the Principles, however. I think that's a great idea, and will undoubtedly steal it if Principles make it into my system (please consider imitation the sincerest form of flattery).

I agree with everything @Pyrephox just said... but in particular I want to call out a couple of points that people seem to often forget:

@Pyrephox said in Good Political Game Design:

2. There must be some staging of the setting that incentivizes some level of cooperation, but at the same time incentivizes some level of competition between PCs.

Many political systems that I hear about people designing seem like they could be solved pretty easily by a group of players coming in and each specializing in one thing, and then joining forces (one player has an iron mine, one player has a merchant republic for lots of gold, and one player has super Sparta for great soldiers, they join forces and they have a well-funded army of badasses in awesome armor, and they can trump any single player who only has one of the three resources). There has to be incentives to hoarding, and there has to be incentives to sharing, so that sharing happens, but on a limited basis, and there is more incentive to share out to multiple people in small amounts rather than one person in large amounts.

3. The setting should be explained and concrete enough that players largely have similar conceptions of the worth of resources, the expectations of factional behavior, and the consequences of actions they can take.

So very, very, very much this. Your players need to understand the world well enough to be able to guess with some accuracy how the world will react to their actions (or inactions). Granted, there will always be the people who will think "My speech on how clone troopers are slaves is so awesome that the Emperor will see the light of reason," but so long as most of the rest of the game's population realizes "Hey, we're in the middle of a war to the death (relatively) against a massive droid army, and we've got this amazing resource of awesome warriors... we're not going to throw it away," then you're still winning. But the world/culture/setting has to be well enough realized and explained that this is clear to most people.

The system I'm working on, the Furystorm system, is for a specific universe, the Codex of Alera series by Jim Butcher. It's designed to represent a system in which great and terrible things can be done in the physical and social arenas, where furycrafting (magic) is a powerful force, but one that can (sometimes) be overcome through skill and luck.

I would love to take a look at other systems that folks are working on, give my opinions, and get the opinions of others on my own system (@Misadventure has actually been quite helpful with looking through social combat).

The system is housed on the system tab of the wiki: http://furystorm.wikidot.com/quick-reference

At its base, the system is an exploding multi-D10 system looking at the number of successes rolled. An automated combat system will (eventually) run combat through a menu of options each round, and then handle the rolls for you, so I went a little hog-wild on rolls and put a lot of them in there. As @Lithium noted, Attributes are mostly used for defaulting and for soft-capping skills (although they are also used as damage resistance).

I'd love to get some more eyes on it, just as I'd love to take a look at the systems of others (drop me a line, @Rook).

@Ganymede Your table is a little fascinating to me, comparing skills and then not rolling the difference or not allowing both sides to roll. Very much not what I'm used to, but kind of fascinating. I think that at first it will result in a lot of referencing the table, but after some practice, it could be a pretty dang quick system.

@Ghost I generally agree with your take on this: that without social combat most systems are pretty sorely imbalanced, and if everything else is rolled for, social probably should be too. I come at it from a slightly different tact, however. I think that if you want social competition to mean anything, there needs to be rules (to prevent Cops and Robbers issues), and if there are going to be rules, there should probably be stats and dice. If the game is focused on pew-pew-combat-all-the-time, you probably don't need social skills, however.

I do, however, also have issues with forcing changes to a character's thoughts. After all, even if you change a character's body (even up to removing a limb), the player still gets to decide how the character responds mentally, but if you change the character's mind (the dice say they really want to trust this person even though the character knows that they're untrustworthy), then the player may have a hard time rationalizing that change of their opinion.

@Rook I "solved" social combat spam for Furystorm by just saying you can only instigate one single social combat per scene.

I actually like the idea of setting it during the Aiel War, although you're going to have to figure out if you want to allow PC Aiel, and if so, can they "defect" to play with the rest of the playerbase.

I think that you're right about needing some flexible timelines, but I'm not entirely sure why you wouldn't let people start as Blademasters if you'd let them start as Aes Sedai--the power available to a Blademaster is minimal compared to that of an Aes Sedai.

There are a couple of ways that you could handle channeling under Ares, ranging from the simplest (Channeling skill and "weapons" based off weaves, everything else just RPed) to middle of the road (Saidar and Saidin skills, weapons based off weaves, and a compendium of rules for other weaves like we did on The Fifth World), to the more complex (Saidar and Saidin skills, weapons based off weaves, compendium of other weaves, and an added system for channeling weariness).

I agree with the idea that if you have Traveling, you can have grids all over the place, but I would definitely still focus things on a single city (or a single city plus Tar Valon, because you know that people will want to be Warders and Aes Sedai), just have micro-grids for the other cities.

Y'all start talking about another WoT MU*, and my brain goes, "Hmm, maybe I should re-read the books," and before you know it, I'm 100 pages into The Eye of the World. Damn it.

In my mind, metaplot is (or at least should be) the stories created by Staff and Players that other Players pick up on, woven together into a cohesive whole with the direction of Staff.

I think that it's important that these stories start not just with Staff (the top-down metaplot approach mentioned by @Lisse24), but with Players themselves. I also think that it's important that Staff be as flexible as possible with how these stories progress to allow Players to have significant impact on the outcome without breaking theme (as @Arkandel mentioned). The stories should allow for physical, social, or mental outcomes (so that players like @icanbeyourmuse and the many others who don't play combat characters can get involved), and should provide hooks to new stories with their endings.

In my opinion, it is the stories ending with additional hooks that turns them from stories into metaplot, because I believe that metaplot should be ongoing, the spine that ties all the stories on the game together, and that can't happen if there's an end to it.

@faraday You're quite right. And if the cues seem to get missed the first time or two I pose them at a player, I tend to get more blatant, leading up to something like your example. It's slower, and it's not perfect, but I prefer to go with the most detailed, least blatant example that the rest of the folks in the scene will pick up on. It's elitist of me, and I don't much care. grins

@Chet I would love to see a Crimson Skies game. It would combine my love of the '20s-'30s and crazy air combat action.

@SG I... have actually considered this. I decided against it in the end, but I did consider it, because I thought it would be a fun test (and then realized that it would be a nightmare to play, and would probably give @faraday hives at a distance to see FS3 being used for hard social combat).

@deadculture said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

My money would be on a city per 'season' more or less.

I would love to see more seasonal movement on MU*s. Shifting setting based on the metaplot. There are, however, a couple of problems with that: a) You have to have every group of players hooked into the metaplot, or give them a reason that they have to move (like being part of the crew of a single ship like on BSU), and b) shop owners or those who have progressed in local politics get kind of screwed--the seasonal approach inspires less connection with the setting (again, unless there's a part of the setting that always moves with you like a warship).

I think that the solution is to be very clear about the plan from the start, noting it in a mission statement several places, and enforce that plan through the app process. At the very least, make sure people who want to app in shopkeepers and the like know that the RP will be moving, and that they will have to come up with reasons to move with it.