Posts made by Seraphim73

As several people have noted, I find that the location doesn't matter so much as the hooks that are built into the room desc. It could be a simple laundromat, or a bar, or a park, or whatever... but as long as there are 2-4 hooks built into the description, I'm happy.

Like, does the laundromat have one washer that always turns whites pink? Is there one corner that's always colder than the others, even though it's right by a dryer? Are there posters up for bands -- and missing people -- on a bulletin board?

Each of these gives me something to have my characters do, and something that they can do obviously so that they can use these as hooks to draw in other characters. My character can be cursing at the Pink Machine as he pulls a load of dress shirts out, or kicking it, or warning another player about it. He could be stepping in and out of the cold spot, trying to figure out where it stops and starts and why it's there. He could be putting up a poster for his garage band, or sadly perusing missing kids on the board -- or taking down missing kid posters (very creepy or very sad).

@JinShei I would love Discworld, but I think that the number of people who can do Discworld humor is... one. In the whole world. And he's not with us anymore.

ETA: @Bobotron I love the Leverage RPG Flashback mechanic, think it's the best possible way to cut down planning sessions (which are fun in TT, but agonizing on a MU*) without shorting characters/players the opportunity to plan/have planned, and use the mechanic in just about every game I ever run.

@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.

@Ganymede I like the idea of benefiting "combos," it's very fitting for Mass Effect in particular (I assume you can set up your own "combos" by using, for instance, Warp one turn and then Pull or Throw the next). I've just given a ganged-up-on penalty which is effective but not fancy--I'm curious what you came up with.

I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

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.

@Tempest Dahan is the one who created the +map code used on Saga Edition MU*s.

And it is delightful.

@Bobotron Yeah... it really is. Both WoD and Saga Edition (two of the other "common" systems) just have too much "am I at point blank range," "can I use Potence," and "is there a circumstance modifier" stuff to have automated combat.

@HelloProject said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

But I don't really see where the pride is in not simplifying code syntax so that people can focus on doing things rather than how to do them.

You get literally the same result, except faster. What is the problem with this? There's no barrier, people simply choose not to code a game this way and people have been conditioned to believe that things can't be better.

I would actually say that FS3/Ares is an antidote to this, which may be where some of @Ganymede's early confusion is coming through... FS3 does exactly this, it does all the rolls for you, from initiative through KO, and covers it with a single line giving you the result of your attack and a single line saying whether or not your target was KOed. Yes, you can dig into the documentation and learn how the system itself works (to a degree), but most people don't bother, because they don't need to.

What I'm getting at is that I don't think this is so much a question of "why is nobody doing this," but more a question of "why aren't more people doing this, see, it can be done."

After the rage-inducing minutia (much of it useless for many short films) got to me... I started to wonder what sort of character you would get if you just answered "No" to all of those questions (and meant it).

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.

@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).

@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?

@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.

@Ominous I agree that it has a danger of abuse in the hands of an "over-competitive" player or group of players. That's part of why I don't think it will ever be used in a game (plus I don't think anyone is rushing to make a Codex of Alera game... the fanbase is too small). It's really just a game design challenge for myself.

@Salty-Secrets said in Social Combat: Reusing Physical Combat System?:

Social combat outside of mind control-like effects should just be role-play, not system-backed.

Is physical combat outside of executions just role-played, not system-backed? If not, but social combat should be, why should anyone invest points in social skills or defenses when they can pour them into physical ones?

I've had my own uncomfortable history with social combat... several years ago, I was wildly against it, because I thought that my immersion would be broken by someone with huge dice pools and crap-all RP skill rolling a ton of dice at me and basically posing, "You should tell me your big secret because you're dumb and I'm cool," and then expecting me to do so. In fact, when Blu and I opened up The Fifth World, we didn't have any social skills at all--that was all RP. I've come around to the fact that if you don't have social skills, all characters will be perfect (or near-perfect) liars, and you just can't really have people striving against one another in social spheres with any expectation of "fair play."

And so, like @Sparks, @Ganymede, and @Lisse24, I'm writing a social combat system for the Furystorm system that I'm working on. It's based on A Song of Ice and Fire's social combat system, but simplified a bit, and tweaked so that it has some slight chance of working in PvP, as well as PvE. My intention is to allow a system where you can get short-term results through the use of dice, but long-term results will require lots of RP, rather than a single social combat.

Example: I'm an agent of a rebel High Lord, and I want to convince a loyal Senator to act against the First Lord. With a single social combat, I might be able to convince him to speak out against a bill that the First Lord likes in front of the Senate, I might even be able to get him to vote against the bill, but I couldn't get him to rebel against the First Lord--that takes lots of RP.

More controversial example: I'm trying to seduce someone who has absolutely no interest in my gender. If I roll really well, I might be able to get them to flirty playfully with me if they were the type to do so, but I won't be able to get them into bed.

So, like aSoIaF, I use "armor" and "weapons" in social combat, and armor includes attitude (but also social standing and perhaps--I'm still pondering this--particularly strong beliefs on the subject), but I have weapons represent the relative effectiveness of the argument being used (as opposed to the persuasiveness with which the argument is being presented).

To facilitate this, I've added a step at the start of a given round where each side gives an overview of their argument, and the defender assigns it a "weapon" based on how effective that general argument might be. Granted, there's still room for ugliness if someone decides that all arguments they don't want their character to be swayed by are Ineffective, but those people are going to be assholes no matter the system.

If the rolls demonstrate some extreme results (an Ineffective argument cleaning up despite the penalties) there's another step in there asking the defender to talk with the attacker to come up with some suggestions on how the argument might be tweaked to better make sense of the roll.

Example 1: Agent of a Rebel High Lord wants to get loyalist Senator to vote against a bill that the First Lord likes. In the first round of social combat, the agent's player notes that he will be appealing to the Senator's open-mindedness. The Senator's player notes that this is likely to be Weak, since the Senator is not particularly open-minded. The rolls go predictably, and the agent makes no headway (and the Senator doesn't dissuade the agent from his goal either) and poses are duly made to that effect.
In the second round, the agent shifts his argument, stating that the character will instead emphasize a time that the First Lord didn't have the Senator's back and trying to call into doubt whether the Senator's loyalty is being returned. The Senator's player notes that this is true, and figures that the attack is Intriguing. The agent's player rolls very well (the bonus to damage and armor penetration helps), and so the Senator's player notes that there have actually been a couple of times that the First Lord didn't back the Senator that are public knowledge, so the agent could even bring up more than one. The agent's player adds this to the pose to help explain the particularly good roll.

Example 2: Player 1: "Tiberius is going to appeal to Aemulius's love for protecting innocents by claiming that the rebels Tiberius wants him to smuggle out of the city are actually innocents the First Lord is hunting." Player 2: "That's a good idea. I think that's probably Intriguing. It would be Strong if Tiberius had evidence that they were innocents. Aemulius's is just going to ask that Tiberius give up the operation, since there's a high risk of getting caught." Player 1: "Yeah, he's pretty much accepted that. I think that's Neutral." Player 1 rolls well, Player 2 rolls poorly. Player 1: "How about Tiberius noting that a couple of the 'innocents' are women, and one is a teenager?" Player 2: "Yeah, that sounds like a great way to explain the good roll."

I also allow the rules for Seeking Advantage, Multiple Attackers, Fighting Aggressively and Defensively, and Disengaging to be used in social combat just like in physical combat.

I'm currently looking into adding (thanks @Misadventure for the idea) the idea that some wins may require compromise, depending on the percentage of the winner's lost SocialPoints (the social equivalent of hitpoints).

@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 Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Social combat is one of those things that has always been a huge headache for games.
... Social Combat Details

Based off the A Song of Ice and Fire system, just like the social combat system that I'm working on (off and on). I like it, because it's detailed, but it still doesn't fix, as you note, the issue of crap poses or character-ending information.

@HelloProject said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

One of my big peeves about games is how staff need players to explicitly break some super well-defined rule in order for something to count as harassment or a big problem. Putting people's emotional well-being behind bureaocratic red tape is something I see as a problem

I'm totally behind the "kick out problem players the moment they become a problem, even if they haven't broken any specific rule" movement. And I fully support the right of game staff to decide what a problem player is.

Does this mean I might be kicked off a game for "nothing?" Yup.

Does this mean that those staffers might lose additional players due to "arbitrary" bans? Yup.

Does this mean that there will be bitchfests on MSB and elsewhere about how evil and wrong those staffers are? Yup.

Do I still think it's better for the hobby/game to do this? Yup.

@Auspice said in Good writin'.:

That's the key: visualize. (Yes even if it means imagining the many-tentacled-beast.)

This is something that goes beyond just writing within a pose (but I agree is very important within the pose too), but gets into creating characters that fit the theme too. One of the hardest things to remember for many players (myself included at times) is that your character is a product of the world they grew up in, not this world (unless you're on RLMU*, where there's nothing special about the world and it's this one). Did they grow up in austere conditions believing their enclave was the last of humanity on Earth? Then they're probably going to react pretty big to any proof that they're not the last of their kind. Did they grow up in Imperial space, swarmed by Imperial propaganda from age 5? It's probably going to take a big shock to get the to join the Rebel Alliance.

It feeds into good writing within a pose, but stretches beyond that... in order to interact with a world in a way that makes sense, your character has to be a product of that world, so visualize that world, and what sort of person it would create.

@A.-Meowley said in Identifying Major Issues:

@HelloProject: Wait, whaaaat? I'm going to hope you mean your PC, and not like, you know, your literal murder as a human.

I love (it's horrible, but it still amuses me) that this seems like a reasonable thing for VASpider to have done. Like, pretty much everyone else in MU*ing, you would assume they meant to kill someone's PC, but VASpider has been built up so far (and generally with good reason) that the question has to be asked.