Best posts made by Seraphim73

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

@seraphim73 Yup. (And at some point I am going to try to borrow you and @faraday or something because y'all and math are friends and math's mean to me, she won't let me sit at the cool kids' table. )

Any time, I'm happy to talk game design, even if most of what I do is by feel and brute force, rather than crunching the numbers super-hard.

"Oh, honey. That's why you don't play with people that stupid, it's not good for you."

Observe the complete lack of any actual clarification in this answer, and... <clink> ...cheers.

Yeah, that's not just a bad game designer, that's a bad listener and a bad person. Cheers. And yes, bottoms up.

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

It is really hard to balance both character generation and system though to make a non specialist viable without turning everyone into some kind of omnicompetent demigod.

It shouldn't be hard though, should it? Just use XP in Chargen. Everyone is on the same footing. You can make a Specialist, but they won't have the same supporting skills as the Generalist. But since chargen uses the same system as in-game advancement, if the Generalist wants to match the Specialist, they can, right about the same time the Specialist matches them.

Then it's just a question of whether you want to do that, or you want to enable different starting points so that people can tell different stories.

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

Make the system you like and then never share it with anyone.

Noooooo!

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

Incidentally the system imposes no special restrictions on the transition from Good to Great. If T8S does so, that’s a house rule I have no control over.

T8S doesn't have a particular house rule on this. Staff does look a little closer at skills at Great and above in Chargen. I can't speak to the particular situation, because I don't honestly remember who @kitteh apped, but we usually suggest ways to tweak the BG if we don't think that it justifies having a Great or higher. Occasionally someone will come in with a particularly young character looking to have several skills at Great or above and we ask them to lower one or two.

As @Ganymede said, it's trivially easy for even a non-coder like myself to tweak the XP costs, XP rate, and cooldown time on skill raises. This is one of the awesome things about Ares--very configurable with limited code knowledge.

@kitteh has a very good point though that the mechanical success of a character can have a major impact on the happiness of the player, particularly if the player sees them as having a level of skill that the dice don't seem to agree with (whether due to sheeted skills or just how the dice fall). I tend to be of a similar type of player--if I've got a character who is "supposed" to be exceptionally good at something, I feel the failures a lot harder than I feel the successes. That's just game theory though... we as humans remember and fear failure a lot more than we remember and celebrate success.

That being said, I think my character got a single on-screen kill in like... the last 6 missions he was on, and he has pretty good stats. It was totally frustrating, especially watching other characters soar ahead of him. But it totally happens. Not just a "low skills" thing, just a luck-of-the-dice thing. Which doesn't, of course, make it any easier.

Change "Seduce" to "Beguile" or "Entice." Then it's less likely (especially with Entice) that people try to use it to roll people into bed. Sure, some people will still do it, because there are assholes everywhere, but fewer people will do it.

@faraday said in FS3:

@tat said in FS3:

I did use the saved NPCs fairly often, but the ability to just 'goon' and 'henchman' NPCs in Ares might serve the purpose they mostly did. I suspect that for recurring big bads, I'll create a character object to use.

Yeah that's what I was thinking. You can even create additional NPC types beyond goon/henchman/miniboss/boss if you want to have more fine-tuned pre-set NPC types.

I used saved NPCs pretty regularly in the past edition, but I just figured I was a nutter, like usual. With Ares, we've used the ability to create additional NPC levels to provide set stats for various critters and beasties on T8S, without having to set them individually or anything like that. It's quite handy.

@arkandel said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):

Here are some things I consider essential to a WoT game. By its nature, the list is of course subjective.
...
I'd personally either place a MU's timeline in the period of the books or basically right afterwards while the dust has yet to settle.

Agreed on all points, although I would add one more option to the timeline: a decade or two before the books. The Aiel War would be interesting, as would some of the False Dragons that pop up in the years before Rand. In many ways, running a WoT MU has the exact same problems as running a Star Wars MU: you need something familiar to get people readily involved, which means close to the media timelines, but the feature characters have the absolute potential to overwhelm all possible PC actions.

I agree with @Three-Eyed-Crow and @Arkandel that channelers in general have to be unrestricted... I think that WoT without channelers is even more odd than Star Wars without Force Users, and that's saying a lot. I think that most people who regularly play non-channelers have reconciled themselves to the fact that only ambush or poison is going to win a battle against a channeler--they can't play harder, they have to play smarter if they want to take one down (or go to Far Madding, but that's the same thing in many ways). I also agree that better-than-average combat and channeling power should effectively be mutually exclusive. This is actually one of the things that FS3 does well with its limit on "high" skills.

However, I think that (unless you're in an Age of Legends or Asha'man-ready timeline), I think that you should definitely limit male channelers. Madness is something that is (from what I've seen and experienced) very, very hard to pull off. All too often people just take it as an excuse to blow shit up.

@bad-at-lurking I think that there are benefits and downsides to both choices, but if you're just going to slap a label on it and not build what people would actually expect from a franchise, I wouldn't go with a franchise.

This does mean that you'll have to be explicitly clear about the world that you're creating (probably both what's available on the colony and what life was like back wherever they came from, so that people know who their characters were before they went into cold storage, and why they went into it). Daily tech, limits of tech, state of the world around them, all that's going to be very important to write out clearly and concisely.

@arkandel said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):

Since I've no idea how this went over on Cuendillar, what was well done about it? Did 'enough' people choose to play male channelers anyway? Would you call it a successful experiment?

There were 2-4 male channelers (that I knew of) at any given time. Some were well-done, others were not. Most were ICly secret except for a few confidants, most were NOT OOCly secret. I thought in general it was a good way to handle male channelers in a non-Asha'man timeline.

@WildBaboons I would totally dig on a "The Folks Who Make It So The Big Names Can Win" game. But I know that very, very, very few others would, so I've been making alternative suggestions.

As far as Black Ajah goes... it would be really nice if recruitment into it could happen ICly, but I know that would draw all sorts of claims of (and likely actual examples of too) favoritism and clique-ism. But that's the one way to "make sure" it doesn't get out of hand. But yeah... Black Ajah a) takes out the restraint of the Three Oaths, upsetting the balance of the game again, and b) is usually played terribly (yes, I know, that's judge-y of me).

@bobotron said in What Is Missing For You?:

@mr-johnson
Corrolary to this: Star Wars that is a single faction. Everyone is Rebels. Everyone is Empire. Everyone is in the Bounty Hunter Guild. Something that makes people WORK WITH EACH OTHER.

Totally agree on this (despite knowing that it will cut out some players entirely who only want to play Indies/Rebels/Empire/Jedi/Sith/Whatever). Fires of Hope tried to do this, but wasn't tightly-controlled enough in Chargen.

@ganymede said in What Is Missing For You?:

For example, when you do a melee attack, the attacker basically rolls Attribute + Weapon Skill, and that result is checked against the target's Attribute + Dodge Skill. For a fire spell, that could be adjusted to Attribute + Fire Skill against the target's Attribute + Resistance Skill. Basically, instead of "+combat/attack <target>" against a target, you do "+combat/fire <target>". Basically.

You don't even have to make this a different command. All you have to do is have a Fireball weapon--each weapon is already set up to use a particular skill. You might need a little tweaking for the default defenses, but it shouldn't be -that- hard. But yes, you could absolutely create a "combat/spell <target>" system that laid alongside weapons in combat. Then your weapons list wouldn't be as long (although you'd have a whole other list).

@cupcake said in What Is Missing For You?:

Lovecraft in the Roaring 20's
World War 1 such and such

Yeah, talk dirty to me. Either of those would totally be my thing. Almost as much as anything set in the 40s would be. My dream-game is set in the '40s.

+1 Finesse.

But you could also go with just straight up "Weaving."

My last three were word-of-mouth (casual invite during discussion of the game), word-of-mouth (same), and I Created It.

I have, however, discovered my next two games on MSB (KotOR-era Saga Edition and WoT), they're just not open yet.

@ganymede said in The best I've ever...:

(props also to Ashen-Shugar's (I think?) code for Star Wars SAGA games).

Dahan. Dahan is the mad genius behind most of the Saga Edition game code.

@prototart The comparison between superheroes and Olympic athletes is actually really fascinating to me, especially in this context (and the context of how much sex happens at an Olympic village). For some, their body type is (unnaturally) natural -- they don't have to work at it, but for someone like Daredevil or Batman? I could see them appreciating a nicely-cut body very much, since it's their ideal for themselves as well. Interesting (to me, at least).

@surreality I've wanted to do this for a while. I actually was thinking of making it The TV Game, where the same general archetypes moved from show to show as plotlines wrapped up. Personal storylines could be continued (with minor tweaks), but the genre and setting would change every 5-8 months.

I was pondering a single system that would work for everything, something like Savage Worlds where the skills are highly generic (today's Wizard becomes tomorrow's Hacker, with Magic being the same as Computer somehow).

I wanted a name un-associated with my usual Internet Identity when I first joined WORA because I was embarrassed to be associated with you lot. So I snagged the name of the Cross Applied Technologies SpecOps group from Shadowrun and added two random numbers to the end of it.

@botulism Just thinking that if you only have fewer than 10 left, they may not be ones that people particularly want to play.

@thenomain said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

There are some other RPGs where the stakes and rules for social combat are clear. If you want to use social stats with characters as a valid target, use one of them.

Green Ronin's A Song of Ice and Fire, for instance. Different tactics with different effects, the ability to specialize in each of those effects, social hit points, social armor... all of that. It still doesn't handle issues of agency very well, so it will never be for some people. For people who aren't as concerned about player agency, it might work very well.

Even then, however, there are limits on what social skills can force upon the target. As @Sunny mentioned on another thread, I believe, it's about influencing the target's position on a subject, not about changing their mind directly.

But yes, I'm sure we've all experienced something like the situation @Ziggurat is referencing, and it's frustrating as hell. However, I bet we've also all had a situation where someone makes a big huge speech that they think is awesome, but they were making a huge play to your character's honor... which they don't have (or something like that).

@pyrephox said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

[Good description of cooperative, rolled social combat.]

This is pretty much what I've used for my Furystorm system, but I think that it could become part of any game's culture alongside whatever system of social rolls you were using (WoD, whatever).

Given the collaborative nature of our medium, I think that a Discuss, Modify, Roll, Discuss, Pose system works best. First the "attacker" describes what their character is trying to do and the methods their character is going to do, then the "defender" applies appropriate mods based on how applicable the argument is to their character, rolls are made, the two discuss the results to come up with a plausible argument, and then the poses are written.

This prevents people from writing a "lame" pose (or one that would be offensive to the target character) and winning on dice alone, helps keep some agency for the target (they get to weight the strongly-held beliefs of their character, and to help come up with how the attacker gets past them), while still allowing social stats to weigh into place. It even helps those who come up with good arguments (by providing them with positive modifiers to their roll).

Unfortunately, it also requires reasonable players, because the defender is providing modifiers for the attacker's roll based on how the argument would affect their character, so it's all too easy for a bad actor to say, "That argument would be totally useless against my character, even though they have a soft spot for kittens on their sheet and you're arguing that we should save kittens" (yes, that's hyperbole). The solution to that, in my opinion, is to remove bad actors from the game.

If you're not going to have a collaborative system, I think you need to do as others have suggested (@Ganymede, I think?) and make social skills/stats only work on NPCs, probably discount their XP costs, and make sure they have some serious bite against NPCs.

@tinuviel I agree completely. I also think that NPC influence should be more readily used on most games, both as a way to drive friction (conflict-lite) and as a way to theme-correct.

@mietze said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

Granted, this works a lot better one on one rather than in one vs. many (like a speech to a crowded room).

Absolutely, but if it was a crowd of PCs, the speech isn't likely to be tailored to each of them individually anyhow, and is likely to affect each of them differently (this is actually where each "target" getting different modifiers due to the tactic chosen would come in). Now, if it was a host of NPCs being spoken to, I could definitely see the PC stating their tactic, getting a modifier from the GM, rolling, and then talking to the GM about what would work well for the crowd.

@faraday said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

So what you and @Seraphim73 are suggesting is a hybrid of the two approaches. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's a big departure from what folks are used to. And I think there's resistance from both sides because it lacks the core elements that appeal to each (puzzle / consent).

I agree with almost all of what you just said, and think that the connection to the Discuss method (or whatever we're calling it) being a strong departure from tabletop RPG-playing is a good one (although I have definitely done a little bit of the latter point with my players, especially my less-socially-inclined players, in tabletop).

The one (minor) point that I disagree with is that the Discuss method doesn't support consent. I mean, it certainly isn't full consent, but it allows you to tailor the encounter to your preferences for your character.

The issue of the wide variety of uses for social skills that @surreality brings up is a good one, and one where I think modifiers should come into play. I admit I don't know WoD/CoD well enough to even know how prevalent or useful modifiers are, but it seems to me that 'buy me a coffee' probably doesn't have a modifier unless the target hates the character asking, while 'push the shiny candy-red button on the suicide vest' probably does... unless the target is a fanatic (turning them into that fanatic would be a longer social skill play... months at least, maybe years, and include a lot of Discuss method use and modifiers and RP).

The one thing that I've noticed is that despite some claims to the contrary, there doesn't really seem to be anyone really objecting to the idea of working with another person to learn how to frame things. I may have missed something, but like... is anyone saying that?

@faraday said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

Nobody's successfully done that for social combat. Such a hypothetical system needs to include some concept of armor for deeply-held beliefs, and some way of reflecting personality and things in our backgrounds that shape how we respond to things. It would need to reflect the fact that social manipulation is usually a long-term endeavor. It would need to reflect social relationships - you're far more likely to buy a lie from someone you trust than your most hated enemy.

All things Furystorm tries to model, from setting ratings for Character Values (Community vs Self, Status Quo vs Change, etc) that provide modifiers for social rolls as appropriate; to armor for relative position in society, evidence contrary to what you're being told, and relationship with the person; to "weapons" dependent on the arguments being used; to the ability to play for advantage, fight aggressively, fight defensively, or gang up on someone just like in physical combat. It's not done, it'll probably never be used (because I'm not likely to run a game again), and it's certainly not perfect, but it's taking most of those points into account (mostly because you and I have talked about them quite a lot).