Posts made by Seraphim73

@Admiral Yup, we did run The Fifth World. Happy to have gotten a chance to RP with those players and their characters. Sorry that our life situation forced us to close the place down.

Oh, I don't know that either of us was trying to refute your points, @Admiral, except that PCs can die even if they don't want to. Just not from a single die roll (unless it follows PC decision).

@Warma-Sheen, I totally agree. It's been a worry of Staff from Day 1. We've been pleasantly surprised to see that although there are some cliques forming (there are on every game, no matter what Staff says), /thus far/, they seem quite willing to cross clique lines to RP, and there isn't a single one that's gaining power over the others thus far.

There are definitely some players who have grabbed the story by the reins and are directing it, but that's mostly due to them being very proactive, and those who have tend to be scattered across a couple of the loose cliques.

@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.

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.

@acceleration
I have many of the same enduring questions that you do about social skills on MU*s. I don't pretend to have all of the answers... or even any of them.

Your example of Bluff vs Perception is actually one that I don't mind at all, despite my stated preference for not influencing the mind of the character. But that's because it's a concrete example, and it doesn't change the character's thoughts. It just means that they failed to notice/question something. Sure, your character can look foolish if the Bluff is posed badly, but you the player still have control over their thoughts. More problematic to me is Persuasion, trying to convince a character to change their mind. It's probably going to take a whole lot more than a single Persuasion check to make a Paladin break their vows.

The question of torture vs seduction and which is rolled and which isn't is particularly troublesome, because there is a LARGE segment of the MU* population that would decide that their character would never break. And that's stupid. And yet I certainly don't want my characters (or at least not most of them, I've played some idiots in my time) falling for the line "So, bae, what's happening? I heard there's this top secret project going on, you should tell me about it" just because someone rolled high on their Interrogation/Seduction/Persuasion/Deception/Whatever check. To me it's a question of immersion.

There's also the creeper factor that you bring up: what about a total creeper player who rolls up a pornomancer character (maxed social/seduction skills, attributes, and bonuses) and goes around "seducing" characters whose players have no interest in such a thing? Yes, reducing the impact of such characters does reduce the impact of social-power characters. Absolutely. And that's unfortunate. But if there are plentiful NPCs to still influence (and to influence into providing physical protection for the social character), that impact can be minimized, in my opinion.

@Derp said in What do RPGs *never* handle in mu*'s? What *should* they handle?:

But then that brings us back to the age-old question of which matters more, the xp that the player has put into their dice pools (vs. your character's resistance pool) or the player's actual social skills? It's a debate that we've gone back and forth on before on a MU.

Heck, it's a debate I've gone back and forth on inside my head. Repeatedly. I think that I've come down on the side of "Social skills are for influencing NPCs, and RP is for influencing PCs." But that's far from perfect too. It certainly doesn't line up with combat skills at all, which can generally "influence" both NPCs and PCs (unless you're on a consent-based game). But I'm one of those people who thinks that you can change a PC's body if you've got the stats (it may be FTBed), but you should never be able to change the PC's thoughts unless the player chooses to allow it. I realize it's an odd line to draw, and I think it comes from the point of view of a writer.

That line has also frustrated the hell out of me. There is very little that infuriates me more than static characters, where it doesn't matter what you do, they're never going to change their view on the world. I realize that this is at odds with my belief that only the player should be allowed to change a character's thoughts, but... I've never claimed to be perfect.

Tabletop RPGs also assume (and this gets a little into what @Thenomain was talking about) that there is a single game-runner who can put a ton of exclusive attention onto a small group of players (1-10), and that the game-runner will be involved in 100% of the scenes. On a MU*, that's really not practical.

It's hard to keep a lid on "what fits" when you can't watch 100% of the scenes that players are involved in, so game-runners tend to have to keep a much looser rein on theme, just because some of their players will have a very different idea of the theme, and they'll be playing "unsupervised." This means that consequences are up to the players themselves--some players are great with this, and others are not, which tends to unbalance the world (why do the cops care that /this/ Level 18 Mage nuked a street gang, but not /that/ one?).

I also think that the point @Arkandel made about social systems is a good one too. No one (very few people) wants someone +rolling Persuasion at them, posing shouting something about 'beer-flavored nipples' and then expecting your character to suddenly love them. But schmoozing an NPC? That's fine, NPCs don't have (the same) rights, and on a MU*, you're dealing with other PCs, especially in a non-teamwork manner, a lot more often than your standard tabletop game.

Finally, the eternal progression issue that @Pyrephox brought up. This isn't so bad early on in a game, but when XP totals get bloated and you have characters who are literally good at /everything/ it becomes a problem. Even Epic Level PCs in tabletop games aren't good at /everything/. I like the idea of capping development at a certain level, and at that point, allowing PCs to shift points around for XP, but not to gain new points. It allows continued development and change in the character, but doesn't keep piling points onto a +sheet.

I tend to think that +jobs are great for tracking long-term research/construction/repair jobs that will likely take a couple of rounds of rolls. They're also great for things that multiple Staffers will have to look at (plot requests, information that bridges multiple plotlines, etc), and for things that need a delay before they're enacted, like a research request that gets a near-immediate response of "This will take some time to research. In 1 RL week, we'll do the +roll to find out what you've discovered. If you don't hear anything back in 9 days, please contact X Staffer via pages to remind them."

As for +requests sitting forever... I know that Staffers are busy running things, reading apps, and with their RL, but I don't generally think there's any excuse for a +request sitting in the queue for more than a couple of days. After that amount of time, you should at least get a response back of "We're discussing this, we should have a resolution by X time."

Anything less... is uncivilized.

I think that for a tabletop system, Use-it-to-Gain-it works great. But from my (brief) experience with Pendragon, mostly it meant that people were rolling things as often as they could remember to do it, hoping for crits. So you have those people who are just throwing skill rolls into everything, and those who only rolled when it was important, and got fewer chances for crits.

I like a Justified Increase system, but it involves a good amount of Staff monitoring. You have to check logs and be the nexus of all improvement (and let's face it, players like to see their numbers go up, because, to quote Calvin, if your numbers go up, you're having more fun).

I think that FS3 (with a little Staff oversight at higher skill levels--I want to know when someone is going form 10 to 11, and 11 to 12) has a really nice system in that, as @faraday mentioned, you have slow automatic gain... and you can control how slow it is. If you're moving at increased time ratio, you can increase XP gain. You can also set the costs for various levels of skill so that your XP costs are flat, linear, or logarithmic, however you prefer.
The thing I really like about FS3's system is that there are actually two resources: XP and Luck. You get XP at a steady rate every week, and Luck (which boosts skills and keeps you fighting in +combat) is based on votes. It encourages interaction to get votes, without letting you boost your combat skills for tea party RP.

In my mind, it's not as good as "Submit logs and mention your training in RP to see if your skill increases," but it's a whole lot easier on Staff.

@Kestrel
Totally not a problem to come in later. We'll absolutely let people app in "I was here all along" Delinquents--we're keeping a Timeline on the wiki and updates for what's going on in the camp on the Rumors board specifically to allow this.

As for concepts, so long as it's not one of the overdone ones listed on the Wanted page on the wiki (currently children of MedTechs and ex-Guard-Cadets), we're happy to have whatever concept works for the player and the theme, we don't mind duplication of concept here and there (we fully believe that the personalities will set the characters apart).

MSB does indeed have messaging, it's the little talk-bubble up in the upper right-hand corner, but I figured that the answers might be useful to others as well.

I don't know that it's always as clear-cut as either/or. I think it's definitely a continuum. For instance, I usually have 1-2 "main" characters that I will play as my PCs, but so long as the theme/metaplot interests me, I enjoy having guest-stars here and there, in the vein of a particularly entertaining/characterful clone trooper accompanying Jedi into the field to handle the stuff that Jedi never know how to do.

If those guest-stars can elicit emotional responses from the PCs, then I usually enjoy myself in the scene even if I'm not playing one of "my" characters.

In some ways, I think this divide emphasizes the difference between personal stories or game stories. Are you more interested in seeing the personal story of your own character advance, or the overarching story of the game advance. Of course, on a well-run game, both can happen at once, but folks still have preferences: do they like to see sweeping political/military/social changes across the landscape of the game, or do they like to see their own characters create/build/destroy relationships with other characters and advance toward (or in the vague and general direction of) their personal goals?

And we're back up.

I am saddened that there is now more on this thread about the server downtime than about the game. Bah.

@EmmahSue
As someone who likes to keep a little more control over things when he Staffs, and who always checks with Staff before running something that could shift a balance of power on the game (something more than 'random fight with baddies' -- although I usually check before running my -first- one of them on a game too)... I think that the question should -actually- come down to how much impact do you intend your scene to have on the game's theme/status quo?

It's less about the player to me (although there are definitely some players I trust more than others when I'm a Staffer, just because they've proven they can play within a theme) and more about how big a bang they want to make. If the major impact is just on the characters involved, then I have no problems with players running whatever they want without coming to Staff at all. If the major impact is on a faction as a whole, or the couple upset some balance of power that Staff has created, then I think it should definitely be run by Staff.

I say this knowing that I am the type who holds on too tightly to theme (whether I'm Staff or a player) and gets frustrated when people -don't- check in before running something, and that something ends up disrupting Staff plans or not fitting in with established theme because the plot-runner didn't check with Staff first.

Just passing along what has been told to me. I'm at third-hand information about an assumption made by someone remotely. Still waiting on the Server Admin for the server to come back up.

Okay, not just lagging. Having an issue with the server itself (as opposed to the game). We've contacted the server admin and will have it up again asap. We'll keep the wiki front-page updated.

Edit: Server Admin is saying it's a bad stick of RAM in the remote server. Someone has been sent to fix it.

Just lagging REALLY badly. Draco is looking into it.

I would even differentiate between "a Player-run Plot" and "a player GMing a pick-up scene." To me, the former is something that is likely to run more than one scene, and has the potential to really shake things up (beyond however far getting hurt or fighting things shakes things up), while the latter is a random exploration/combat/social scene that just happens to have one or two players playing the NPCs.

On games I run, I like to have PrPs (using the definition above) run by Staff. I want to make sure that it fits the behind-the-scenes stuff that players may not know about yet. So I like to have them submitted for approval. Impromptu player-run fights or social scenes or what-have-you? Please, please, please run them. I would love players to run them. Any time they want to. Without checking with Staff. Just do it.

@Arkandel I sometimes use RP-Seeking tools, but most games I've played on recently have pretty much ignored them, and just gone by the "page someone if you want to RP with them," or if you're desperate "ask on Public channel or in the OOC lounge." They're not the most efficient way to find RP, but they sometimes work.

I do remember back on A Moment in Tyme, however, we used the RP Seeking code extensively, it was how people usually advertised for scenes... so maybe it's just a community preference sort of thing.

In my view, running PrPs isn't about pushing your own character's storyline forward, it's about adding to the game's overarching storyline. On some games, Storytellers are available to run scenes to push personal storylines forward, on others, you have to just do it yourself in a sort of sub-PrP scene (that is to say, just getting together with interested parties and RPing, without it being an official PrP). Either way works... I love having someone else to run those scenes so I can just focus on my character, but that's generally impractical unless you have a person or small group of people whom you RP with regularly who all tie their characters' stories together.

Generally, I try to just thread my character's personal storyline into the game's storyline... get interested in something that matters to the game, and you can push your personal storyline forward while participating in plot-scenes. Then you can draw in other players to prep/moderate fallout from those plot-scenes, and that can help develop your character's story too.

@somasatori said in The 100: The Mush:

Having seen the first bit of this show, I can safely say it'd work well on a MUSH.

"Hey guys, let's go do all this constructive stuff and make sure that we're safe and have shelter, and collect food and supp-"

"NO LET'S ALL FIGHT AND FUUUUUUCK~"

Isn't that like... every MUSH ever? Just trying to find the right theme for MUSH players (I jest, it's one that I rather like).