Best posts made by Seraphim73

@faraday I would say that -combat- magic works fine. I would even say that non-combat magic outside of combat works fine too -- it's usually just a skill roll. What doesn't work very well is non-combat magic in combat. We had several hacks in for it on The Fifth World, but they weren't great, and weren't often used because you had to look at a Compendium on the wiki to use them, rather than just setting a combat action. It's definitely possible to do non-attack/defense magic this way in combat, but it's clunky, and gets back toward the WoD/Saga method of doing combat, which involves a good deal more back-and-forth between player and GM, plus more waiting for rolls and for the GM to resolve them.

@lithium said in FCs on Comic MUs:

No MU is ran entirely by one person, unless it /is/ a game intended to be a sandbox for a few people and if so there is /nothing wrong with that/.

Unless you're @faraday and you're running BSU without any additional Staffers, and keeping things humming along nicely at that.

I think a policy of FC's needing to /lose/ more might help.

This I think should be a policy for everyone everywhere. I would love to see PCs in general lose 20-30% of the time. Yes, that includes mine. Without some chance of failure, you don't have a story, you have posturing. I also agree with you that encouraging goals for characters is a must. Nothing like being reminded of your character's goal(s) to drag you out of an uninspired moment.

@the-tree-of-woe said in FCs on Comic MUs:

Check for intent first and foremost and treat knowledge as the secondary concern, and encourage players to learn more about their FC as they play if there are gaps in their knowledge.

Totally agree with this. It seems to me that most apps for FCs should be about what you want to do with the character, not what you know about the character.

It is indeed standard FS3 Code as far as consequences go. +combat code can KO you, but only RP can kill you.

As for consequences, they absolutely will come. The 100 MUSH is non-consent. If your player does something terminally stupid like walk up to the Grounder Commander and try to kill her in the midst of all of her warriors, your character is likely to die.

That said, we prefer non-death consequences like temporary incarceration, wounding, loss of status/face, and even loss of limbs to death.

We've had 8 NPC Delinquent deaths thus far (and had a couple more NPCs saved by rather good Medicine rolls), which honestly feels a little low to me, but the PCs have been acting to ameliorate the dangers of the nearest Grounder village rather than confront them head-on. We've also had a couple of PCs get badly injured.

The Senate is an IC decision. It's a leadership form that has been mentioned ICly and caught traction. We as Staff always want to be open to the desires of our players. Alongside that, there are only a few PCs who might have even the slightest chance of grasping for sole leadership of the group, and given that one of them is my /own/ PC, I didn't want to even consider that. I never want my PC to get a position/goodie that no one else on grid can get or has already gotten.

@faraday said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

@Ghost That arms race you talk about isn't unique to MUSHes either.

Heck, it goes beyond even video games: CCGs and CMGs work off similar systems. The company wants you to buy the new product, so it has to be better/more useful than the old product. Stat Creep is a real and horrible thing.

@faraday Yup!

I have now decided that any time a named NPC from my PC's unit is introduced into a scene (wherever I play), I'm going to immediately come up with one connection between my PC and that NPC. Maybe my PC owes them $5 from a poker game, maybe they once accidentally saw each others' junk while taking a leak, maybe it wasn't accidentally... I don't know... but there'll be some connection there.

And yes, I do know that I basically just challenged you to load up any scene I'm in with NPCs...

@TNP said in The 100: The Mush:

Staff said death can't happen by dice roll so it sounds like it's standard.

I should clarify this, by the way (and on the game too). Death /can/ happen by dice roll, but it can't happen /just/ by dice roll. So a single bad die roll won't kill a character (it may cause serious consequences, but not death), but player/character choices plus bad die rolls certainly can.

@Kestrel said in Does size matter? What about duration?:

I have a personal preference which I think makes me pretty weird, and is the opposite of how most MU*ers think: I dislike emotes containing too much dialogue. Spare me your character waxing poetics and serving up all their philosophical and political views on a platter; rants and rambles feel inorganic and unrealistic to me. I would so much rather read a paragraph detailing your character's body-language, the way they move, the way they meet my character's eyes, the tone of their voice, and for this to breathe life into their one-sentence, even one word verbal retort. I wish more people loved writing body-language and actions as much as I do, as it's so much more immersive than reading a screenplay. C'est la vie.

For a wordy-as-hell person, I agree completely. I would rather see a character screw their eyes shut, clench their fists and jaws, and then snarl "No" than scream for three paragraphs about how angry they are and how they won't take the evil high lord up on their evil offer.

@auspice Right. I don't think that every NPC death (especially if they were just introduced for the one scene) needs to be a tragedy, but there should be some acknowledgement. I mean, yes, many units in WW2 took 200% casualties over a short period of time, so the guy who just caught a bullet next to you might be someone you'd never spoken more than 2 words to, and you probably don't care much, but they were still someone who was supposed to be providing covering fire for you.

The people who have been your character's ECO for a dozen missions obviously matter more than the guy who owned you $5 from the poker game, and the two deaths should totally be treated differently. I'm just suggesting that more ties to the setting (including the NPCs) are better.

@GangOfDolls We absolutely expect people to group up with other players of like style/play time/etc. So long as these groups are inclusive rather than exclusive (play groups rather than cliques, as Blu laid it out earlier in the thread), we don't have a problem with that at all. If the requirements of providing and resolving RP hooks for these various groups begin to overwhelm our capabilities as Staffers, we'll look to bring on additional Storytellers.

Our current plan (subject to change based on the actions of the PCs, of course) is that we will open up Ark Adults for PCs as soon as they come down and are in the same physical location as the Delinquents and Grounders. Whether we add Floukru (Boat People), Azgeda (Ice Nation), or Mountain Men into the game as PC-able factions will depend on whether or not it makes sense for them to be interacting with the Skaikru frequently. Our intention is, and always has been, for the Skaikru to be the focus of the game. We even require Grounder PCs to come through with an explicit reason to interact with the Skaikru (whether it's honest interest, suspicion, an urge for tech knowledge, or whatever).

We don't have any current plans to restrict the number of apps into any given faction (besides the fact that there can never be more than 100 Delinquents, including dead ones), but with any outside groups we open up to application being required to have the tie-in to the Skaikru like we do with Grounders, it's our hope that we can keep tugging along on a coherent storyline involving the place of the Skaikru and those who have connected themselves with the Skaikru in the "new" world. We have a couple of story tricks up our sleeve to continue to tie in the themes of survival, exploration, and unity that we've been using to drive RP thus far, but if those storylines end up splintering the playerbase rather than forging it together, we'll just have to do our best to roll with it.

I don't know if that exactly answered your question, but hopefully it got somewhere in the neighborhood.

@Hexagon said in XP Tax:

@Ganymede Is this not somewhat similar to reducing the auto-gain XP (you're just subtracting it off the front end, before the player gets a chance to pay it later as "tax")?
"Tax" may be an ugly word. I have started to think of it as "stat decay" the more we've all talked about this.

The key difference, which you touched on later in your post, is that stat decay is taking away something they have (reducing a skill), while reduced XP is taking away something they never had (the XP was never in their pocket, they just earned less of it). It's human nature to be less comfortable with losing something you already have than losing something you never had, it feels like you're being punished.

@auspice Yeah. Deck of Many Things is just too awesome. A fellow PC once convinced my character to play five-card stud with the Deck. He made it 4 cards, then Death came for him.

We have opened Ark Adult (and non-Delinquent teen) apps, as well as apps for (N)PC Mountain Men. The Mountain Men will generally be short-term characters for the purpose of providing RP for those who have chosen to have their Delinquent characters captured by Mount Weather, although if IC circumstances lead to a way for them to survive and integrate into the rest of the playerbase, they can certainly become long-term characters. If you were waiting to check the game out because you didn't want to play a teenage criminal or a Grounder, now's the time to stop by.

A couple of the Talents actually don't do -anything- without house rules. Expert Pilot: Elusive Dogfighter, for instance, adds a penalty to attacks that... can't happen, because the person with the Talent won the Pilot check in the dogfight already. It's not the only one. Some Talents/Feats are just bad.

This doesn't excuse shaming someone for it on public channels. If you -have- to comment on it, drop them a page asking if they want +sheet advice, then handle it in pages -- if they want the input at all, otherwise, let it go. I mean... common courtesy.

@thenomain Not just back in the day... there are a few of us who still have a love of multi-descers. I've been known to create a dozen or so descs for a character, because I'm a nut-job I also know that most people don't read any of them. So I do tend to pose something about what my character is wearing, because no one is going to read the desc.

@Miss-Demeanor said in The 100: The Mush:

So its rather disingenuous of you to say that you never have characters in positions of power/leadership.

Gideon was about as far from a position of power/leadership as possible. She was disgraced, and ended up leaving her clan entirely to start at the bottom again with the Skaikru. I wonder if perhaps there might be some misunderstanding (on your part or on ours -- I'm not discounting the possibility that we have been defining things differently from others) as to what a position of power or leadership is. I would definitely say that Gideon was in the spotlight early on (along with Wren), and that could have been too much or done poorly -- that's entirely possible. But she was definitely not in a position of power or leadership. Also, asking others before making decisions... isn't that exactly what's been suggested? As I remember, while there were some suggestions about how the character was going to be handled -- but no one said it would be a bad thing. (Side note... did we rush Grounder PCs? Yes... we absolutely did, it's one of the errors we definitely made early in the game.)

Doubly so since your husband put his first character into a position where he was very loud and opinionated and strong enough that few people really wanted to challenge him outright, which put him into a leadership position even if he's protesting that he doesn't want to be.

Strong enough and opinionated enough that no one wanted to challenge Grey... except Cameron, Morgan, Fiona, Faolan, Cole, and others. As for my wishes with the character, I didn't want him to be in a sole position of power. It's my belief that no Staffer should ever have a position that a) another character has not already held, or b) another character does not also hold. I don't believe that I've broken that rule -- I try to be very careful not to. Grey was in the spotlight too much early in the game, but thanks to feedback here and on-game, that's a problem that I corrected, and Grey was significantly quieter the rest of the game, and only in a leadership position for a single scene later on in the game -- and that because no higher-ranked Guard showed up for the pre-scheduled scene.

Also.. that you and a handful of your friends had started playing the game weeks before it was open to everyone, and thus were guaranteed to have more xp/higher stats that nobody else was privy to?

This was what... 2 weeks? That's 2 XP. Some players are always going to be on a game first. Do you think that no XP should be given during early Beta period? When should XP start being given, two weeks in? What about the people who join the game four weeks in?

You set yourselves up as players to have every advantage, to be at the front of every new thing, every major decision... and then claim that you don't do that.

Gideon was one of two of the first Grounders, yes. Grey co-led one early decision with Faolan and Fiona, and was one of several ex-Guard Cadets in favor of restricting firearms, but other than that... no, none of our characters were any more influential in decisions than any other character.

I'm not saying you're a terrible person, you aren't. But you are definitely lying to yourself and others about what you do in a game.

This feels really condescending. In that vein, I think that this may be an issue of perception more than actuality. While our characters may not have massive advantages or be in positions that others cannot be in... if we're giving off the perception that they are, that's almost as big of a problem. And that's something we absolutely can and should work on if we ever Staff for someone else on another game.

I'm going to agree with a great many people on this thread and say, "It depends." And I'm going to agree with a lot of people on this thread and say, "It depends on what the group is trying to do." I played in a tabletop short campaign where everyone was min-maxed, high-Karma Shadowrunners going into the Renraku Arcology shortly after Shutdown. It was bloody and it was awesome. I have also seen both MUSHes and tabletop games screwed up because one portion of the players thought they were playing an RP game, and the other portion thought they were playing a Roll More Dice game. The problem here usually comes when the GMs/Staff allow the latter group to steamroller the former through the weight of their dice pools.

This is why I love the skill/scan command on FS3 games and the Skill Distribution/Skill Census/whatever you want to call it page on an FS3 game's web portal (I'm being specific here because I believe that both commands are only available on FS3 games, and not any Ares game, but I could be wrong). It's a fantastic way to see what type of game is being run. Are the 'badass fighters' running around with 7 Composure, 8 Ranged, and 8 Melee? Are the 'badass diplomats' running around with 8 Composure and 8 Influence? Or do people have a 5 or a 6 in their area of specialty? The distribution of action skills (and the background skills taken by people) can tell you a LOT about a game -- and help you fit in with whichever side of the scale the game falls on.

I enjoy playing characters with large dice pools. Some of this is because I love posing people doing awesome things, and some of it is because I have to make up for my generally horrid dice luck. But as long as my character is within the same range as other PCs at what they're supposed to be good at, that's plenty good for me. Because posing utter incompetence can be entertaining too, as long as you know that's what you're in for.

So yeah, I don't think that min-maxing is inherently bad, but I do think that you need to have everyone on the game on the same page as to how powerful the PCs are supposed to be. It's when they aren't, and the assholes with the high dice pools (or even the normally-considerate folks with high dice pools who get excited to be able to THEIR THING) suck the fun out of the scene because they're the only ones who can do everything or they can do everything all on their own, that you have problems.

@Kestrel

***Mostly Agree***

Like @SG and others, I start with a concept: rules-bound fighter pilot, foppish swashbuckler on an info-gathering mission, flirty mercenary out only for himself, defecting Imperial Army officer. This will usually also suggest what the character is going to do (the pilot is going to try to make sure others follow the rules and is going to fly, the swashbuckler will get involved in everything to get as much info as he can, the mercenary will flirt and will do most anything he's paid to do, the defector will join up with the Rebels and try to instill some professionalism into them), as well as their primary skill set. Alternatively, I could have a story that I want to tell (an honest Republic Senator seduced by the Empire), but in many ways that's a concept all on its own.

After that point, I start filling in some details in their background (the pilot's mom is a local politician so he grew up in relatively high society, the swashbuckler learned how to buckle swashes with the circus, the mercenary is hideously burned which makes it hard to flirt and makes him harder for it, the defector is a grav-ball nut and a closet geek with a tabletop wargame army he had to leave behind), which also lends itself to background skills if the system allows for them. This work also tends to inform a character's weaknesses (the pilot probably isn't much of a brawler, the swashbuckler probably doesn't go in for stealth, the mercenary isn't good at empathy, the defector isn't particularly doctrinially flexible). Some of these may be mechanical, some may be RP-only. This is also when quirks come up (the pilot is a stress smoker, the swashbuckler loves his hat, the mercenary has a gorgeous voice, the defector uses proper titles for everyone).

I like to leave the background relatively open-ended, because that's the best way to leave holes to fill with other players (get your minds out of the gutter). If you know exactly what your character has done in the past and why, not only do you get into the problem @Arkandel mentioned about having already done everything, but it's harder to mush around events you do know happened to arrange connections with other characters.

Sometimes I see the character's looks in my head immediately -- sometimes I even have a PB in mind while I'm designing them. Sometimes, however, I get to the end and have to think "What are the character's defining characteristics," like @ShelBeast was mentioning, and come up with a look based on that.

I will often re-use concepts, but the differences between games always make the character themselves different: I've used the flirty burned mercenary on what... 4 games now? 5? But on one, he was a hidden Seanchan agent infiltrating Andoran society as a Domani mercenary, on another he was a straight-up Seanchan warrior (who ended up a Rebel Warder, oddly enough), on another he was a simple Domani mercenary with no ties to the Seanchan, on another he was a Viking warrior traveling to England... I think that's it, just 4 versions.

There are a couple of tropes that my characters often fall into, because that's the sort of RP I like to get involved in. The plurality (maybe majority) of my characters are either a bombastic politician or a hardened soldier. That lets me get into either politics or combat storylines, and I enjoy playing those tropes. Luckily, they're pretty broad tropes, so the characters within them can be wildly different. I've also been known to go wildly outside them, like the naive would-be Aes Sedai, the sneak-thief, and the utter fop with no interest in combat and no skill in politics.

My characters also tend to talk a lot. I've played a few who don't, but I always have to struggle to cut words out of my poses and replace them with body language. Apparently, I like to communicate through text. Go figure.

As to @SG's comment on specialist vs well-rounded, I like to be "good" at one thing, and then 'not bad' at a bunch of others. This lets me be primary (or often secondary due to someone who really specialized) at one thing, and back people up at others without being useless. This is why I like open sheet games... it lets me see how specialized other characters are, and how well-rounded I can make my character while still being "good" at their specialty.

@TNP The Rebels clearly had a presence on Corellia in the EU--Garm bel Iblis was one of the original creators of the Rebel Alliance. And I agree with your statement that it was probably more of a fundraising/recruiting center. But the moment you start trying to incite a revolt in a Core World, you have to think about what the Empire just did to Alderaan a short while ago in your canon. They clearly aren't going to flinch from destroying a Core World that strongly supports the Rebellion. Sure, they don't have a Death Star anymore, but a (relatively small) fleet of Star Destroyers can still make a planet uninhabitable pretty quickly. And you -know- that Rebellion PCs are going to want to fight it out with Stormtroopers and TIE Fighters; it's happened on every Star Wars game I've ever been on. Once that happens, Corellia is at war with the Empire, isn't it?

@Ghost -- I would say that the concerns aren't so much with having FCs as a whole (from what I've been seeing), but having FCs as PCs. Having FCs as quest-givers is (in my opinion) awesome, as long as you can balance that role so that you're not actually in "general" RP.

Anyhow, just pointing out my own concerns with the game, but as @Apu said, it seems like this isn't the game for me, and that's totally fine. I wish the creators luck with it.

@Paris Also because you shouldn't be making someone else clean up a mess that's at least as easy for you to clean up.