Posts made by Seraphim73

The Weave:
<character names not remembered>

A Moment in Tyme (over 15 years, so yeah, there are a lot of characters there):
Angron Kirthak, Child of the Light
Njal, Queen's Guardman/Magistrate
Arbaal, noble's guard
Harkan Kirthak, Child of the Light, later Queen's Guard
Creon, Child of the Light
Agammon, Child of the Light
Mason, Warder Trainee
Daiyen, Aiel Spear
Keldane, Child of the Light
Termiane Koronel, Seanchan infiltrator
Gerrit Ajara, weapons trainer
Volkare Previn, Asha'man
Brienne, Aes Sedai
Liahm, Asha'man
Parol, Weaponmastery and War Staffer

Dragon's Fang
Harkan Kirthak, Child of the Light
Termiane Koronel, Seanchan-turned-Rebel Warder

Cuendillar
Termiane Koronel, Mercenary Blademaster
Sang, Warder Trainee
Raizo, Darkfriend Warder

Knights of the Old Republic
Volkare Previn, Sith Trooper
Rha Dun, Jedi Knight
Kieran "Key" Fel, Republic pilot
Salm, Feeorin mercenary
Shivas Anin, Jedi Knight
Kharss, Chistori mercenary
Bantha, Sith and War Staffer

Vampire Masquerade
Andrei, Russian Brujah

One of the Battlestar Games (Cerberus?)
Justinian, Tactical Officer

Dark Times
Victor Slade, Stormtrooper officer
Brodie Jaimes, Wroonian Mercenary
Sigil(?), Staffer

Chicago MUSH
Franklin, beat cop

Steel and Stone
Kamron Mallister, knight
Sterling, common knight
Darek Boldt, squire
Tyroan Nayland, steward

Game of Kings
Darrin Taniford (before the insanity)
Theme/Combat Staffer

The Fifth World
Nikomachos Sauveur of Cindravale, jouster and knight
Drake Danger, rocker
Victor Khournas, foot knight
Mars, HeadWiz

Generations of Darkness
CT-1231 "Dog", Stormtrooper
Brodie Jaimes, Human Mercenary/Rebel
Victor Slade, Republic Senator turned Rebel
Shivas Anin, Jedi Knight

Star Wars: Omens
Kajj'ik Previn, Dark Acolyte
Alpha-69 "Smoke," Alpha-class clone
Victor Slade, Republic Senator
Rockabilly, Combat Staffer

Realms Adventurous
Kamron de Dinton, worthy knight
Morlois de Willcot, unworthy knight

The 100 MUSH
Orion, Staffer
Grey, angry ex-Guard Cadet
Luther, veteran warrior

Arx
Gabriel Bisland, loyal duke (briefly)

BSU
Van, by-the-book Viper pilot
Gustavo, gentle giant Marine

Fires of Hope
Erskine Hylle, ex-CIS rebel
Devlin Cinn, Imperial deserter

The Eighth Sea
Leviathan, Staffer
Sebastien Achille, swashbuckler
Ebo, pirate revolutionary

CoMUX
Simon Green, OC SHIELD Agent
Frank Castle, The Punisher

Common Descent
Simon Green, OC SHIELD Agent
Frank Castle, The Punisher
Roy Harper, Arsenal
Barry Allen, The Flash

Spirit Lake
Diego Reyes, newly-hired Deputy
Etta Tuscano, sword-wielding glassblower

Gray Harbor
Kevin Walters, geeky journalist/conspiracy theorist
Marius Andersson, would-be Viking architecture student

The Savage Skies
Rome, Staff
Thomas "Flash" Bradshaw, American show-off pilot
Yao Sang, Chinese Shanghai Municipal Policeman
Jimmy Walker, American Marine
Stephane Idrissi, former French Foreign Legionnaire, “archaeologist”

The Network
Zack, Bruiser with a Heart of Gold
Roadspike, combat staffer

Crystal Springs
Oliver Webb, overachieving performer-geek
Marius Anderssen, geeky handyman

@mietze said:

Like, their PC has relationships with 13 other pcs? Or they create a bunch of alts to get involved with someone else's 1 PC?

Either/or.

And they usually are gaslighting the others, @deadculture, or at least just not telling them about the others.

@bored said:

Trying to build your game so it will punish people for the things you don't want them to do but they're definitely going to do anyway is head-to-wall level moronic.

I would Upvote that half a dozen times if I could.

The real issue is... why do you care if there's some Marriage and Baby drama going on, so long as people are still engaging with the plot/political maneuvering/adventuring that Staff is running?

@mietze said:

I don't know that you could call L&L marriage simulating "free love". Aren't they usually rather the opposite of that?

They're usually supposed to be the opposite of this, but there's a specific subset of players who like to get into multiple relationships on a single character, generally hiding these relationships OOCly as well as ICly.

@Apollonius said:

I am still bitter about 5th World because I had an amazing PC out there and the very IC mindset of the PC was more or less a banned concept (high technology mad scientist with an interest in outright destroying the planet where a major existential threat to humanity existed). Like, it wasn't even something I could talk about because it was inconceivable as a topic for any PC because the game was predicated on fighting the enemy with sharp pointy sticks and that was the only way.

I tend to subscribe to the runaway freight train model of staffing. Let things run off the cliff. No game is so sacrosanct that player decisions are trumped by staff fiat. My PC was pushing for the development of nuclear weapons and planet destroyers (both which were somehow banned technologies... against a foe that EXISTED TO MURDER YOUR SPECIES' ENTIRE EXISTENCE with no real reason why IC such weapons were not allowed against such an existential foe).

Not to totally derail the thread, but this was actually something we discussed on OOC channels (and which I admit that we as Staff did not handle all that well). What we were trying to get across was that these things had been tried, and had failed in the past, leading the military/scientific powers-that-be to look to other avenues that worked better (even if they were not generally 'final' solutions like a successful planet-killer would have been). What we as Staff -should- have done (I now see) rather than just shutting the idea down, was to explain the situation and then attempt to guide your interests in a related field that wouldn't totally /end/ the game designed to be a long-term fight against an implacable enemy.

So... to get back to the discussion at hand, be very, very clear about your theme. If your theme is, for instance, Space Knights Fighting BioEngineered Cyborgs With Knightly Weapons, be very clear about this somewhere, and let people know that that's the theme. On Fifth World, we had a few people who wanted to play a Hard Science Fiction Game, and we had a few people who wanted to play a Straight Up Fantasy Game, and it was a constant struggle to maintain the theme without introducing cognitive dissonance between the two outliers and the majority of people who were playing smack in the middle of the game's theme.

@ThatGuyThere
I often like to play the same sort of character, and while that character can still get involved in the marriage simulator--and even the political/empire-building game--I agree that the adventures/Knight Errant sort of play is the most entertaining. I think it's more a question of finding those who like the same sort of play that you do, and finding a niche to play it in (and usually a Staffer to help run those things), than of trying to change the whole genre of the game.

As several people have noted, the focus on LnL games becomes Marriage Simulators when Staff does not provide enough plot to interest the players, or when players are not empowered to run storylines of their own, or both. The best way to keep an LnL game from becoming nothing more than a Marriage Simulator (although I think that sort of by definition there will be Marriage Simulation within an LnL game) is to give people other things to do and keep those other things moving forward.

1. When you're in a scene and someone does something that catches you totally off-guard.
2. When 1. happens, and you don't even have to think about how your character would react, it just flows naturally.

@Apollonius said:

Elective monarchy.

I love it. A good excuse for the next leader-person jumping over someone who is more senior if that next leader-person is more active/well-liked ICly/skilled at playing the game.

Discourage marriages.

LnL players aren't going to go for this. If you want to discourage love-matches, don't advertise as a LnL game, because it will drive players batty. Don't get me wrong, I think that the loveless odd-couple match that turns into mutual respect (or mutual IC hatred) can be quite interesting. But if there's not an outlet for love-matches, you're going to drive many of your players crazy.

Organic game balancing. ... Let them march into that one faction that everyone is playing in. Know what happens when that happens? They start fighting within and the faction breaks apart into multiple factions.

If you can manage this... awesome. Especially the part about splitting a single faction into multiple factions. But be wary, there are a lot of carebear players out there who don't want to ever do anything (in public) that would even slightly annoy another player, and they tend to band together to play WhiteHat whenever someone stirs up factionalism/antagonism/villainy.

Did I mention, encourage assassinations?

The modern generation of MU*ers are extremely character-death-averse. They want to build the story that they want to build, and they don't want it to end until they're ready for it to end (ie, when they've "won"). There are outliers, and they are awesome. Encourage them, give them XP for their next characters when they are WhiteHatted to death, and keep encouraging them. But don't be surprised if either 1) barely anyone dies, or 2) people start leaving (or hiding in private rooms doing private RP) when characters start dying.

@secretfire said:

The minute you have anything like a giant mech, you can forget ever having people fight hand to hand, or any space-ship or fleet battles, or...anything approaching realism, ever. It would just juvenilize everything.

I agree that you don't need giant mechs, but if you think that just adding giant mechs removes the possibility of hand-to-hand combat, starship battles, or even tank/VTOL battles... you clearly haven't seen MechWarrior/BattleTech.

I'm not saying it's /realistic/, because anything that tall will soak up fire from everything on the battlefield, but simply adding (semi-rational) giant mechs does not necessarily remove the possibility of other sorts of combat.

@Packrat said:

• Make the game an actual sandbox, that does not mean staff should not introduce plot elements and run NPCs with agendas but they should be deciding 'Where do we want the story to go?' then railroading things. The meat of the game should be competition between player characters and the environment they find themselves in.

I don't think that many people would suggest that Story Staff decide where they want the story to go and then railroad it in that direction. In my opinion, storyline should always be a collaboration between Staff and players, with Staff dropping in story hooks and players following them (or not) as they please. Of course, not following a plot hook can have consequences as readily as following one can, but Staff should see what sort of stories -do- get interest from players, and tailor future stories in that direction.

My own favorite Story Staff style is dropping hooks, and then reacting to player actions to let them drive the story while Staff nudges it in a way that can keep it going.

@Thenomain "I want it to be a system, tho."

Here's the problem. FS3 isn't what you want it to be. So far as I know (and please, @faraday, correct me if I'm wrong), Faraday designed FS3 for use on a game that Faraday was running. The fact that other games use the code is because Faraday is nice enough to put it out there for free and run installs for other games (and because they like +combat, or the simple chargen).

You want a professionally-released, purchased game system balanced for all genres and for all people. But that's not what Faraday put together. Faraday put together a codeset that--when run by Faraday--promotes the type of game that Faraday wants to play on.

The fact that other people use it (the way Faraday intended or not) is a testament to 1) the quality of FS3 and 2) the lack of quality coders out there with time to design custom code.

Now, does FS3 (without strong Approval Staff oversight) encourage min-maxing at chargen? Absolutely. Does it mean that someone who creates a more rounded, less specialized character at chargen will never catch up to a more specialized, less rounded character in play? Absolutely.

Does that mean that it's bad game design? Only if the Approvals Staff allows it to go bad, and if the Game Staff intends for all characters to come out of chargen on an even footing with one another. But since the design of FS3 pre-supposes Approvals Staff that will be watching for min-maxed characters whose backgrounds don't match their sheets, that's a failure on the part of the Approvals Staff for letting the imbalance get through, or on the Game Staff for choosing the wrong codebase for the game they want to run.

If you don't like FS3, don't use it. It's not about what you want it to be, it's about what the creator, Faraday, wants it to be.

@lordbelh
I tend to agree with that Staff should always enforce theme, but I've always been on the theme-strict side of the equation. In fact, I can recognize that my theme-strictness as Staff has helped cause the dwindling or death of a couple of games in the past (Dark Times and The Fifth World if anyone's curious).

There is definitely such a thing as holding on to theme too tight, and not letting players push the boundaries. That much I have learned. Players don't like to be constrained, or told that they're wrongfunning. It tends to make them less likely to try to be proactive in the future. And proactive (non-idiot) players are a treasure.

On the other hand, you need some way to gently nudge people back into theme when they go haring off into some wild-eyed version of what they want to do.

Say they're in the early Dark Times and they want to steal a full-stocked Imperial-class Star Destroyer from its crew with a half-dozen non-Force Sensitives by shooting their way to the bridge, and then go marauding around blowing up Imperial bases. If this is a good player and you want to guide them into a way to pull something like that off, maybe run a planning scene that a Staffer attends as an ex-Imperial Navy officer, where you can guide them into something a little less insane (pick a Victory-class or a frigate instead of an ISD, arrange for the Stormtroopers and Naval Troopers to be dropped planet-side for some purpose, suborn the Captain to relay your orders to the remaining crew, etc).

I've become a big fan of "No, but" and "Yes, if" for enforcing theme. Either the general goal works, but the plan needs some changing, or the plan works, but the goals need to be shifted, or something like that. Even if you're shutting down part of the player's idea (or even most of it), there definitely still has to be something that you can encourage them with. This is, of course, barring people drinking Coca-Cola in ancient Egypt or flirting with the Prince at Court in your Crinos form and expecting hit to flirt back.

On original theme games, this becomes even trickier, because you have to be able to express the theme clearly, lead players to the expression of that theme, and guide their exuberance for exploring that theme. To use an example from The Fifth World, when players started talking about using a weapon of mass destruction on the Hostiles (invaders from another world within the planetary system), I pretty much just straight-up shot them down on OOC channels. I clearly shouldn't have done it, despite our emphasis on a blending of fantasy and sci-fi, rather than straight-up sci-fi. It drove off a couple of players and made several others grumbly for a while. Looking back, I would have very much preferred to see how they were thinking about using the WMDs, how it could build RP rather than shutting down the war, and if there was a plotline to develop that made sense within the theme. Channeling the enthusiasm while retaining theme.

@Thenomain
What gets people excited is how easy it is to run +combat. All you have to do is set up your armor, weapon, and target, and then just about everything after that is automatic.

That's what gets people excited. No more fumbling around with rules, no more questioning addition, just automatic combat that works smoothly and easily.

I'd say that what we have here is a problem that game designers find in any medium: what happens when the dirty, no good players get their hands on a game. It's the reason that any good game company has external playtests as well as internal playtests.

See, the game designer -knows- how the game is supposed to be played, and designs the game toward that end. And Faraday has done a very good job in designing a game that is balanced for what it was designed to do: start from a non-min-maxed perspective and have it be increasingly more difficult to raise skills.

The problem comes when the people running the game using that system do not ensure point 1: starting from a non-min-maxed perspective. In a commercially-available game, you would put further restraints on chargen (or use XP to do chargen as @bored (I believe) suggested). For a free-to-use game, however, Faraday can simply tell game owners/chargen staffers to watch out for min-maxed characters, and leave it at that... so long as they do so (or don't care about the results), it's all good.

@faraday
Working on a Clone Wars game... wanted to see how many B1s I could throw at people before I went insane or the system broke. I'm not sure which actually happened first, but around 28-29 participants (PCs, NPCs, all inclusive) it usually hangs 1-3 rounds in. At 25 participants, it seems to work just fine, even with grenades and fullauto and all sorts of crazy things.

The randomness of the multiple, independent d100 rolls may drive me insane (give me bell curves!), but the system itself is robust, and wonderful for running many players through combat very quickly, while keeping it characterful.

Before using FS3, I couldn't imagine a combat scene with more than about 8 players. With FS3, if you have players who know what they're doing, I would feel comfortable running a combat for 20 players without much of a problem (and regularly ran combat scenes with 10-15 players on tFW).*

I'm generally against +places code (because I love to see what everyone is doing, no matter how spammy things get), but I do like the idea of places code that was just a colorized notation of where in the room things were occurring tagged onto the start of the pose. What would be really cool would be code that allowed such places to be created on the fly by players. This would let them create "places" like "Around <name>" or "in front of the stage" or whatever. One other solution that I've seen work really well is "arena" code, which made all poses and emits from one room show up in the second room, allowing people to watch gladiatorial matches, melees, or whatever without their non-combat poses spamming the combatants.

I totally agree with the suggestions to summarize anything that isn't interactive (wedding ceremonies, NPC trials that the PCs aren't interacting with, etc). You don't want several rounds of people posing sitting still and watching (or perhaps worse, getting into a major argument ICly and disrupting the scene).

Modified 3-pose-rule is absolutely critical. You absolutely cannot keep strict pose order, but you also have to keep from leaving people behind, because it's really easy to get lost in a big scene. I like to go with "3-pose-rule, so long as everyone in your immediate group who isn't afk has posed too."

For a court scene, a living agenda doc is a spectacular idea, keeping people up to date and moving. Having a designated "catch up" person to bring latecomers up to date is awesome too.

*I've noticed, however, at least with the set of code being used on Omens, that anything more than about 28-29 combatants tends to make +combat hang.

@Ghost I assure you that the locking of the wiki was just to retain the Staff-created setting information. I can also assure you that I will make every attempt to keep anything driven by other players out of anything written.

Tropes being tropes, and Staff having laid out some details of the family backgrounds, some similarities will undoubtedly remain, but I will definitely be trying to keep anything created by non-Staff PCs out of any finished product.

On a side-note, I mentioned several times on public channels that I hoped to write a book or books set in the world, although I'll admit that we probably should have put together some agreement or disclaimer on the wiki.

@Ghost No player-provided content will make it into the book(s). The setting and a few Staff-created characters will be used, but to the best of my ability, no others will be.

@Cirno Actually, you were never banned from The Fifth World. We found your arrival and commentary amusing. And the interaction upon your arrival was a good deal longer than that--in fact, I believe that I jokingly suggested you play a pretty-pretty-space-princess, since you had commented about something to that fact on WORA.