Posts made by Seraphim73

So, a question for those on both sides of the Death Argument:

At what point does the story of one character trump that of another character?

Example: Sith Lord A is doing their thing, inspecting the troops. Sith Trooper B steps forward and starts mouthing off to Sith Lord A, insulting them and calling them weak. Should Sith Lord A be allowed to strike them down? Throw them in the brig for a week? A month? Or should they have to accept the IC abuse, because to inflict appropriate punishment on Sith Trooper B would be rendering Sith Trooper B unplayable?

So basically, how far do I have to OOCly manipulate the IC actions of my character to keep from making your character unplayable?

I think I know my answer, but I'm curious as to the answers of others.

@Roz I thought of that, and weekly would totally work, but I wanted a little more interaction than that. I think you could totally go with monthly, biweekly, weekly, every-other-daily, daily, or twice-daily, depending on how much button-pushing you wanted and how much you wanted each roll to matter.

@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).

On topic: I'm getting RP as often as I can manage (which isn't very often with my current schedule) on Fires of Hope, and occasionally on Battlestar Galactica: Unification.

Off topic: I don't necessarily want character death in a game, but I want the honest and very real risk of character death in a game. Without risk, there's no real reward, in my opinion. Even if characters don't die, as long as we're scrabbling and scrambling to keep them from dying then I'm good. On most games these days, however, people are more concerned about the story of their own characters, rather than their character's part in the larger game story. So they get upset when anything happens to their character that they didn't plan to happen.

And when those folks became the majority, that's when MUSHing got less fun for me, because the excitement and risk of the unknown is what kept me so engaged through high school and college.

@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.

@Auspice and @Warlander
It's actually even more liberal than that. There are several PCs on the grid with the Force Training Feat, so I presume that Hssiss is allowing it. Just the Jedi class, previous Jedi, Skill Focus: UtF, and lightsabers which are currently restricted.

Otherwise, @Auspice has it dead on.

Tucker Case awoke to find himself hanging from a breadfruit tree by a coconut fiber rope. And then the murders began.

There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart's Desire. And then the murders began.

"Please, Tavi," wheedled the girl in the predawn darkness outside the steadholt's kitchen. "Just this one little favor?" And then the murders began.

"We should startback," Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them. And then the murders began. (really)

I'm going to cheat a little on this one:
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning. And then the murders began.

@Jennkryst said in We Need a Game Set In the Roman Empire.:

Any thoughts on a game set in Alera?

I've actually been working on a game system for Alera on and off for a couple of years. @Avarice coded up the basic levels of dice rolling, @GirlCalledBlu built a small grid... but there never seemed to be much interest from the folks we talked to.

I log scenes because the games that I play on use wikis with logs, and because I like reading back over the logs even years later.

I will go back and retroactively log (copy-and-paste) OOC communications if a problem has occurred, or I will proactively log communications if I'm starting up a conversation that I think might need it.

I came from the same RP MUD that @Arkandel did... 20-odd years ago. I remember a time when two-line poses were awesomely wordy, and RP through socials was the norm. Thankfully, my style (and that of most people I interact with) has improved since then.

After that, there was a character-limit (350ish, I think) on poses. That was interesting. But really, I think that a pose should be as long as it needs to be in order to get across the words, the actions, the emotions behind them, and the character behind them.

Yes, that's a wishy-washy answer, I don't care. I like to make sure that all of my characters pose differently, at least to some degree. Whether it's an accent (don't kill me, I haven't really done it in years now), particular word choices, different curses, this is easy to do with what the character says, but I think it's equally important that the rest of the pose be unique to the character also.

For example, my character Gray from The 100 was a bit of an asshole, and frequently made bad choices and assumptions, so I snarked like hell at him in my poses. Dog, from Generations of Darkness, was so loyal that it hurt (what do you expect, he was a clone trooper), and so I did like to mention when he was being naive or flat-out wrong in my poses, but I didn't snark as much. Termiane, from Cuendillar, was more of a wish fulfillment character (I'll admit it this much later), so I was a lot more serious with his poses.

I have definitely come to prefer either a single paragraph of text in a pose, or just single carriage returns between paragraphs if you've really got to be wordy or are NPCing multiple people, but I prefer not to have multiple line breaks in someone else's pose, because I think it looks messy in a log. I very much prefer it when people put wikicode in their poses--makes things a lot easier on me, since I usually take care of the log.

As several people mentioned: god please don't pose in the second person, it's creepy. Also, please pose present tense, not past or future.

As for providing a look into my character's head, I agree with several of the other posters -- I want to make sure that my character's intentions are clear (if they're supposed to be clear), but I also don't like putting too much of my character's mind into my poses, because I would prefer to put in gestures and expressions.

Most importantly, however, I want the people I'm RPing with to respond to the hooks I put out there, and to offer hooks for me to respond to in turn.

I voted for medium with temp-rooms.

I think that the most important thing with a grid, however, is that all of the rooms have a purpose--and not just to get from Point A to Point B. There should be at least one solid roleplaying hook in each room, and the room should tell the players something about the area that it's in and the people who live there.

Example time!
If, for instance, there is a dive bar on the street, and the dive bar's pool table is torn to hell, and the dartboard has deep punctures in it, and there are peanut shells all over the floor, catching on sticky spots, that tells you something about the neighborhood (it's not a high-class one), the bar (there is (probably) violence here rather frequently, and they don't care much for cleanliness), and the clientele (they're strong and/or not very coordinated). Who this group of strong, violent, uncouth people are might be an interesting RP hook for players on a macro sense (and in a micro-sense, they can comment about the crappy dartboard, or run their fingers along tears in the surface of the pool table, or complain about it ruining their shots, or their steps can crunch on peanut shells).

I do, however, like a grid that is relatively compact (20-30 rooms, in 3-4 areas) so that RP doesn't get spread out too far--on the other hand, I don't want all scenes to take place in the same 3 rooms.

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

I do know she's also been helping with the grid? At least based on things she herself has said.

But still, that doesn't mean anything in the realm of plot crafting/dominance. I just want to mention it since, well, you sometimes get people on these here forums who would find out and go 'omg why didn't you mention this what else are you hiding?!'

Oh yeah... right. We both also helped lay out and describe the grid so that Hssiss could focus on getting the code on point again and work on story. That will likely continue as the grid expands.

Both Blu and I play on Fires of Hope, and Blu is indeed wiki-staff, but that is her only role on Staff (and she only has a Staffbit so that she can get +requests regarding the wiki), and I have no role at all on Staff.

Delightfully enough (because I agree that non-combat skills are way underutilized on most games--not just most Star Wars games or most Saga games), the first plot-scene on Fires of Hope had absolutely zero attack rolls in it, and a great many skill and attribute checks. I feel that I can brag about this because I was not involved in any way, shape, or form.

I do agree that there should be more scenes where PCs fail--I would love to see PCs fail about 15-25% of the time and get a neutral result another 15-20% of the time.

Edited from Fires of Heaven to Fires of Hope, because I do that way too often and Faceless is a jerk.

@Ganymede With the base rules, a Force User with Skill Focus: UtF and Deflect at level 1 is very nearly functionally immune to blaster fire from a single person. If the Force User takes Force Training at level 1 instead, then at level 2, they are very nearly functionally immune to blaster fire, and can use their Force Powers to attack Defenses with what is effectively +8-10 higher "attack roll" than anyone else can at that level (since they're using a skill with Skill Focus). At level 3, when they take Block too, they become functionally immune to melee attacks from a single person too.

Sure, they're still vulnerable to grenades, flamethrowers, and a few other options (assuming they never took Force Shield, then they're pretty set there too), but until level 9ish, when Attacks and Defenses start to catch up with Skill Focused skills, they're still well ahead of non-FUs. (Oops, @Tempest covered a lot of this, but I'll add to say that I don't believe that it should require multiple opponents to take down a single same-level character--that's pretty much the definition of OP.)

I believe that the restrictions on FUs on Fires of Hope are not because of OPness (the Skill Focus house rule fixes that for Jedi, pilots, political folks, and just about anyone who can "attack" with a skill), but because of theme--a few years before A New Hope, I certainly don't think there should be many Force Users around, and even fewer trained Jedi.

@KDraygo Just wanted to tack on one bit here. Staff has stated that there will be no Feature Character PCs, and that they will only serve as quest-givers and the like.

...and I just realized that you meant Force Character. Wow.

I think it would be very interesting to basically have a roster of minor Force Characters who could be used by players for short periods of time based on the needs of plots they're running. It does, however, have all the downsides of a roster system in that there has to be -meticulous- note-taking to ensure that all relationships and RP remains constant from player to player.

@ixokai I very much hope that you're right. It would, based on my experience, be a great step forward for players as a whole. Best of luck finding those players and encouraging them.

@ixokai said in Star Wars: Insurgency:

FCs come prepackaged with guaranteed roleplay opportunities and "main character" time in plots. FCs are automatically roped into game metaplot, whereas OCs need to find their own roleplay and means to being roped into (and more importantly, relevance in) metaplot

This is not correct. FC's are not given special access to plot: no one is going to start an event and reserve a slot for Luke. They are not positioned as 'main characters' in plots.
...
In the canon SW Universe, Luke is a special snowflake who solves the metaplot. In SW:I universe, he does not have this destiny. He might play a significent role, but it is not written to be so: it will be on Luke's player to make it happen.

I think that you're ignoring the mentality of players here, and it's something you're very much going to have to look out for. In general, if players check a Where list looking for RP and see that Luke Skywalker is in one room, and Abist Trass is in another, unless they've RPed with Abist before, they're going to be heading for the room Luke is in. I honestly don't know what the solution to this is (besides no FCs except as quest-givers, but I understand why you don't want to go that route), if I did, I would happily suggest it. It's definitely something you're going to have to be aware of, however, as FCs will generally get more RP, more weight behind their RP, and thus more position in the metaplot simply due to the OOC weight behind their names.

@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.

@Goldfish You're totally right. Positive reinforcement is the best.